Hi All
Just had my Mini Mill delivered and took the days training with the Haas engineer. When it came time to look at tool offsets and work off sets I was left scratching my head somewhat. Granted this is a move up from a home built hobby machine running linuxCNC but the way they showed me to do it seemed convoluted and strange.
As I'm sure you all know I was shown to set all tools at a certain height. Let's call that height 'A' and 'A' is now a datum as such. That's set all the tool compensation lengths.
Moving to the work offsets X and Y seem to be normal but coming to the 'Z' I had to measure this as the difference between the above datum 'A' and the work top and offset it manually.
Now the problems with this is as follows:
When I set the datum: to remember it I would have to zero the operator read out - this however isn't remembered by the machine after a power down so in a morning I would have to measure a tool/haimer off this datum to then get the value again to be able to crack on. Seems strange to me. Having to do this all manually seems time consuming too.
The readout also didn't change as far as I could see but maybe this was to do with the coordinate system I used, maybe I hope that anyway. With linuxCNC I would touch off, set zero then the display read zero. MDI commands were then very easy....
Question:
Is there a way to do it where I measure a 'reference' tool (say the haimer) and then measure the difference between the length of the Haimer and the other tools I am using. Those values being stored as a positive or negative difference. Then I could just zero the Haimer from the top of the work piece when needed and all is done.
Next question:
What's the process you all use to set your heights. If there is no easier way than this are there any tricks to make it quicker.
Thanks
Jools
Just had my Mini Mill delivered and took the days training with the Haas engineer. When it came time to look at tool offsets and work off sets I was left scratching my head somewhat. Granted this is a move up from a home built hobby machine running linuxCNC but the way they showed me to do it seemed convoluted and strange.
As I'm sure you all know I was shown to set all tools at a certain height. Let's call that height 'A' and 'A' is now a datum as such. That's set all the tool compensation lengths.
Moving to the work offsets X and Y seem to be normal but coming to the 'Z' I had to measure this as the difference between the above datum 'A' and the work top and offset it manually.
Now the problems with this is as follows:
When I set the datum: to remember it I would have to zero the operator read out - this however isn't remembered by the machine after a power down so in a morning I would have to measure a tool/haimer off this datum to then get the value again to be able to crack on. Seems strange to me. Having to do this all manually seems time consuming too.
The readout also didn't change as far as I could see but maybe this was to do with the coordinate system I used, maybe I hope that anyway. With linuxCNC I would touch off, set zero then the display read zero. MDI commands were then very easy....
Question:
Is there a way to do it where I measure a 'reference' tool (say the haimer) and then measure the difference between the length of the Haimer and the other tools I am using. Those values being stored as a positive or negative difference. Then I could just zero the Haimer from the top of the work piece when needed and all is done.
Next question:
What's the process you all use to set your heights. If there is no easier way than this are there any tricks to make it quicker.
Thanks
Jools