-
Posts
-
George,
I have gone down to 1/16” and it is all about the feed speed and the amount of material your cutting. If you go too fast or cut too much you will know right away, I am just glad those small bits don’t cost too much.
Shane
George,
Same here as with Shane.
We have used bits down to a 16th, but setting the depth is tough at first. If the bit even touches the material while setting surface you lose the bit.
Have plenty on hand.
Tom
I never tried this when touching off tools, but here is a thought. Start your tool touch-off cycle with no tool in the collet and the collet nut loose enough that you can get a tool up in. Make sure your touch off cycle is set at 0RPM. Put the desired tool up into the collet. Adjust the z-axis until the tool is touching the table and the collet is where you want it on the tool. Snugly tighten up the collet nut. Enter tool height compensation into the control. Finish cycle to bring the tool up off of the spoilboard. Remove the toolholder and finish tightening the collet nut. Place the toolholder back in the spindle.
I know it seems like a long way around, but it would be better than breaking off tools.
Have a good one,
Seth
Seth,
That is an excellent idea. Time consuming but it would work great. I have tried to touch off 1/16″ bit and it just crushes the bit down into the pad.
Thanks Andy. The touch-off probe sounds cool Shane. How do you recalibrate it when you put on a new spoilboard?
Have a nice day,
Seth
Seth,
No need to recalibrate, just put the probe on the table and touch off your tools. It is pretty cool.
I have a question for you,
I have a problem with one of my knowledge drawings. It comes up with “Failure in NC Base!” I have had this before but I can’t remember how they said to fix it. I think they had me go to a drawing and delete everything on it, I guess it gets built up with a bunch of crap after a while. But I can’t remember if it was for this or not. Have you ever run into this before?
Shane
Shane,
the AXYZ we have uses a “hockey puck” with a metal sensor to establish surface. Is this what your talking about?
Tom
Yeah…I guess. It has a spring loaded sensor that the tool comes down on to detect the height. I don’t think you could break a tool with it because it automatically comes down and slightly touches it.
Shane
Tom M wrote
Shane,
the AXYZ we have uses a “hockey puck” with a metal sensor to establish surface. Is this what your talking about?
Tom
We don’t have that puck. A couple of users told us that it is not that accurate. Not sure, never used it.
We have to “touch off” by hand. It takes like 10 minutes to go through all the tools. Throw a sheet of darker colored scrap up there, use manual Z toggling, when you get close to the material, change to “incremental” (by the thousandth) spin the spindle by hand, as soon as you see a hint of a white shaving, hit enter. There is your tool length. You just run through F25.XX for each tool you use regularly, then do an F84, all settings are updated. Not too time consuming.
I guess it would cool to have an automated touch off on a fancy KOMO or something, but we get along fine with our method, Never have broken a 1/16″ bit doing it that way either. Has to be pretty damned accurate too.
Matt,
I found it to be very accurate.
If you have to reset each tool, do you keep the power on for the unit all the time?
Tom
Tom M wrote
Matt,
I found it to be very accurate.
If you have to reset each tool, do you keep the power on for the unit all the time?
Tom
Yeah, we never power off the machine. Since we don’t have a constant for depth to set all the tools to, anytime you change a bit, we do all the tools. We usually try to coordinate that with a resurface of the spoil board, since you have to set a new F84 at that time anyway. Its not that big of a deal, we use insert bits on our trim bit, so that one can be changed with resetting F25s.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.