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Rant: the old toolmaker in Warren told me to stop checking my part with calipers after every pass, and he was right
I run a Haas VF-2 at a small shop outside Warren, Ohio, mostly short runs of hydraulic manifolds. When I started on the mill about 4 years back, I'd mic and caliper every feature after every pass, sometimes pulling the part out of the vise to check it, then fighting to get it dialed back in. An old toolmaker named Ray watched me do this for a week and finally said, "You're measuring your nerves, not the part." He told me to trust the offset, cut the first part, check it once, then adjust and let the machine do its job. I blew him off for a month because I was scared of scrapping a $200 block of 4140. Then one day I pulled a part mid-cycle to check it, bumped the Z, and gouged a finish face. That was the lesson. After that I started checking once after roughing and once at the end, maybe 3 total measurements a part, and my scrap rate went from about one in ten to almost nothing. The machine holds tenths better than I do with a caliper anyway. Anybody else get told to quit hovering over the part, and did it take a crash to believe it?
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jason_fisher45d ago
Took me scrapping a $400 chunk of aluminum to learn that one, pulled the part out to check a bore and never got it seated right again. My old lead guy said the same thing, "the DRO don't lie, your calipers might." Now I check after roughing and once at the end, saves me a ton of time and I'm not second guessing every pass.
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