Held it through a 25 minute finish pass and learned something about myself

I did actually hit pause once in a similar spot and regretted it. Was about 40 minutes into a 90 minute carve on a maple serving board when the coffee from that morning caught up with me. Paused it, figured the machine would just sit there and wait like the manual said. Problem is my spindle keeps spinning during a pause, and where it sat parked in the wood for a good five minutes it left a little burn ring you can still see if the light hits it right. Board was for my sister so she laughed it off, but I learned my lesson about pausing during a finish pass. Now if I'm running anything long I plan my coffee timing around the job, not the other way around. Drink the coffee after cycle start, not before. Sounds dumb but it works.

Also worth knowing your own machine's pause behavior, beacuse they're not all the same. Mine retracts the Z a bit when you pause and drops back down on resume, which is fine on most cuts but I could see it being tense on somthing delicate. Whatever you do, test it on scrap sometime when you don't need it, so you're not reading the manual while doing the dance.

My solution has been to stop fighting my own schedule and just split long jobs into shorter ones. That sign job of mine last month, a 2 hour carve on some oak, I broke into three runs with gcode sections I could run back to back. Between each one I got to walk away, stretch, use the bathroom, grab a drink, whatever. Worst case a run ends and I restart the next file when I'm ready, and the machine homes itself first anyway so there's no risk of it losing position.

The tradeoff is you get a tiny witness mark where each section starts if your zeroing is off by even a hair, so I spend an extra minute double checking X and Y before each restart. On painted or stained work it's invisible, on raw wood it's barely there. I also learned the hard way that coffee and cycle start don't mix. Two coffees before a morning carve and I'm doing the same dance you described by minute twenty. Now it's one cup, then the run, then the second cup while the machine works. My wife thinks I'm ridiculous for timing my coffee around a hobby, but she also hasn't scrapped a blank in a year, so I'll take it.

This thread takes me back. Ran a manual tracer lathe for years before any of this computer stuff, and there was no pause button on that thing at all. You either finished the pass or you wore it. Taught me real quick to handle business before the first chip flew, and forty years later I still hit the bathroom out of pure habit before I touch the start button even on a ten minute job. Only thing I'd add is don't trust the resume height on any machine untill you've watched it do it once with your hand on the stop. Seen a controller lose a step or two coming back and drop right into the part.

Funny angle for me is the opposite, I babysat jobs way too long before I trusted the machine at all. Sat thru a two hour run once because I figured something woud crash if I blinked. Nothing ever did. Now I look at the estimated run time before I start, and anything short I just hold it out. Longer stuff I've got a folding chair and a little fridge out in the shop now, makes the whole problem mostly disappear.