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Vent: I would eyeball my Z zero for 2 months, now I probe it every part
When I ran my little Tormach in the garage I used to touch off with a piece of paper and call it good, that was 2 months of scrapping about 1 in 8 parts on the second op. A guy at the tooling counter in Wichita asked if I was still paper shimming and I admitted it, he laughed and sold me a $90 probe setup that plugs right into the controller. Now every part gets probed and my scrap rate dropped to almost nothing, but it adds about 40 seconds per cycle. Curious if you guys probe every single part or only the first one of a batch?
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faith_carter8d ago
Probe every part. That 40 seconds is nothing compared to scrapping 1 in 8 parts on the second op, especially once you add up the material and the time you already sunk into the first op. Heat and chips shift the zero between parts more than people want to admit, and on a small machine the spindle grows as it warms up. Paper shimming works fine until it doesn't, and you never know which part it's going to bite you on. Batch probing saves a little time but it only takes one bad one to wipe out the savings.
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