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Old timer at the shop told me my tool offsets were all wrong and it clicked after 3 years
I've been running this Haas VF-2 for about 3 years now, mostly production parts. I always set my tool offsets by touching off and then messing with them if stuff looked off. This retired guy named Frank came by to help out on a rush job. He watched me set up for maybe 2 minutes and goes "You're fighting the machine. Use the indicator to find your Z surface first, then touch off." I thought he was just old school. But I tried it on a part with tight tolerances. My scrap rate dropped from like 1 in 10 parts to maybe 1 in 50 after a week. I was so used to just tweaking offsets mid-run. Never thought about how the whole setup starts with that reference plane. Has anyone else had a simple tip from a veteran that just made everything easier?
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morgan_butler3mo ago
You ever have one of those moments where the old guy is right and it makes you feel a little dumb? Reminds me of when I was learning to weld and this crusty old welder told me to stop cleaning my metal so much. I was grinding everything down to shiny bare steel and he said just hit the rust off and send it. Took me a while to realize he meant for the kind of work we were doing, a little mill scale actually helped the weld puddle wet in better. Now I only clean it to bare metal if it's something real critical. Funny how the simple stuff turns out to be the real secret.
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ellis.robert3mo ago
Frank's right for an old clapped out mill but on a newer machine your method works fine if you know your tooling offsets and spindle growth.
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