Need Help!- tangential knife / router control

[heliski989]

I am just starting to retrofit a 1993 vintage glass cutter, i have decided on steppers drives and a bob from machmotion.com.

now i need some help with control. I know that mach 3 runs a tangential knife, but how? do i need to have a cam program that controls a knife as well? or will anything work? I also want to put a router head on the machine for other projects, so i dont want a plotter system.

I am G code illiterate, at this point i am learning as much as i can, however there is a lot of info being blasted my way. any help will be awesome.

[benjamint76]

Mach 3 controls the knife, as it stays tangent to the line being cut. I basically just create a profile toolpath with no offset, and 9 times out of 10 it works very well. In mach 3 just select the Settings tab at the top of the screen and then highlight the tangential cutter.

It appears a few of us are having problems with the knife doing circles on its own. For me it just happens with certain files and I don't know why.