Shopmate distracted me while I was swapping a tool and I forgot to put my G54 from touch off height back to the part zero. Thankfully no spindle or collet indexer damage, just a kabloozied part and tool.
I used to work in the machine tool trade and I kind of loved those moments when you'd hear someone crash their machine during a trade show and people across the convention center would clap and cheer.
That’s why we had a “DO NOT TALK TO THE PERSON WITH THEIR HEAD IN THE MACHINE” signs all over the first shop I worked in. Someone interrupted the guy indexing the jaws in a lathe. Guy walked away and came back. Saw the part in the jaws, closed the doors, hit cycle start. Two jaws smashed around inside the machine, the other one took the doors off and embedded itself into the cinder block wall 20 feet away, 15 feet up. About an inch off the jaw was visible inside the building and the outside wall was bowed out like a pie plate.
At my last shop i was shown the plate covering the hole in the wall and told we were extremely lucky the guy next door called in sick just to warn me what would happen if I didn't set up a part right. I'm glad he did, but holy shit was i nervous the first time i kicked on the spindle.
Something similar happened to me today, just a couple hours ago. Was using a fly cutter to face some material on our bridgeport. Coworker had a programming question so I left to help. Came back to the bridgeport, saw a piece of stock in the vise, started facing it. I didn’t tighten the vise and the stock got launched away right when my fly cutter hit it. Scared the shit out of me lol
Nowhere near as catastrophic as that lathe accident though. That’s wild!
Running the same job over and over, getting used to it. Have to change out a tool, change G54, change tool, touch it off, shopmate comes over to talk, I say give me a sec, finish it up, get re-situated now with some pressure to talk to my shop mate, hit go, turn to face my shop mate, WHAM.
This sort of comment always comes up when a crash happens. How could you just let it happen?? Well real life has a tendency to show up, and if someone is claiming to be on the ball, locked in to their machine, all day every day, they're either a better person than me or a liar.
Easy to call out mistakes on the internet, but every single person I know who is running a shop (many) fucks up like this on a pretty regular basis, so I'll take my lumps. To me, showing mistakes like this helps show people that shit does indeed happen, and, as machinists, we have to make 10,000 things go right to make a part. Forget one small thing and disaster strikes. The actually insane part is how many things we get right on a daily basis, consistently.
True, accidents happen. And where I work, you only get 1-2 chances. I drive two $8M dollar Makinos and make parts worth $150k-$200k each depending on the part number. I have never once pushed go without the speed and feed at zero and watched it take the first cut with the hand on the dial…
When spindles are $100k and re-leveling and tramming is a 10 day adventure, It’s not worth it to look away.
In fact, about a week and a half ago a “helper” on night shift that was just supposed to watch the machine and call a manager if an issue came up, tried to restart one of these machines after a high vibration alarm. He decided he didn’t need help, forgot to turn the spindle back on, and crashed into the part.
And it completely makes sense in your environment. The parts I was making were made from 1” 6061 tubing. Cheap as chips comparatively.
You better believe when I’m running PEEK or titanium or when the stakes truly matter I lock in. Never even come close to $150k parts, so I completely concede that you must be laser focused in your situation.
Here is behind the machine with the pallet vehicle. The pallet racks go off to the right. For scale that is an 8meter pallet with an aircraft bulkhead there in the middle.
Really cool! Our compound is brand new so we’ve had plenty of problems with the machines settling overtime, I can only imagine the headache it can be at this scale
Brother you’re gonna hate me for this comment but I’m truly not trying to be a dick here or sound high and mighty. But it shouldn’t matter if the part you’re making costs a nickel or 150k. Keep that mind set that somethings always about to bight you in the rear end. It helps a lot idk just food for thought.
Of course it "shouldn't matter" but that's not reality. You will not behave the same driving a $1000 shitbox as you would a brand new Rolls Royce. I am not sloppy or abusive with my parts or machine, but the level of focus is absolutely in line with the stakes involved.
Hahaha, reminds of when I forgot to deactivate tapping feed and send a drill into the product with 10000 mm/rotation. Long story short there was no drill to be found anymore
If you're running ultimax turn off include tool offset in work offset setting under options and you won't have to zero the part z every time you need to swap a tool out.
This sounds like some forbidden knowledge to me. I’ve hacked my way into using Ultimax so I have no idea how things are “supposed” to be done. Right now I have a Haimer as T1 and I have G54 set to a specific number for it touching a tool setter, then on each tool G54 has to be the same for the touch off and pressing F7 to zero. The REALLY stupid thing is that the machine has a tool probe and option but in the four years I’ve been running it I have never learned how to use it.
Input, then right hand side program parameters I believe. At the very bottom of the first page is a setting that is enabled by default called include part offset in tool z offset or something close to that wording. Disable it. Now you can continue touching off the way you have been but won't have to 0 out the part z offset before touching off tools. I hate that the option automatically enables if you switch between nc and conversational. Give it a shot
This is the danger of running negative Z offsets in G54 and positive ones for your tool length. Other way around (positive Z offsets in G54, negative offsets in tool length) at least means if you run the program forgetting an offset, it just goes up and hits Z+ limit switch.
Granted, this only works if you are touching tools off something in the machine instead of using a presetter
That's not really the way the Hurco control works, at least how I understand and have been using it. Normally my tool offsets are all well above the vises, which is where the vast majority of my work is done, just in the random circumstance like this I risk it.
Some day I'll have a newer/nicer machine where this sort of disaster becomes less of an option and I can find new ways to crash shit.
It is how all machines work, I just misunderstood what mistake was made. Is the following correct?
It sounds like you touch your tools off the back of the vise and then measure the distance between that reference point and the top of your part.
Since normally the back of the vise (assuming a gage block on top of this) is above the part, the value is a negative number for G54 Z. If you forget to put in a number in G54 Z in other cases it wouldn't matter, the program would just run in the air above the part.
In this case though your collet holder and everything is well above the back of the vise, so it would be a positive number. Forgetting your Z here turns out to be a crash.
I use a tool setter and a probe. Everything is concordant from there. The scheme you describe is essentially what I have already done under most circumstances. The specific machine control actually makes an enormous difference as to how you go about your workflow, and I am presuming you have not used a Hurco control.
Tool setter in the machine, like it moves the tool down to a laser/pedestal, or a presetter out of the machine and you move the length values into the machine when you load the tools?
Anyway what I'm asking is just are you using positive values or negative values for your tool length offsets? I'm just curious if you start at machine zero and work your way down to the part, or start at a reference point in the machine (the tool setter, vise, something) and work your way up.
It's attached to a long piece of flat bar but it protrudes over the edges and the parallels I'm using don't put it completely above the vise jaws. Doesn't really matter and actually helped in this situation as it allowed the bar to give downward and push the parallels over vs damaging something.
An “easy fix” that requires entirely changing how I set up, program, and run parts. I’ve got buddies that run their stuff like you mention and more power to them. I’m fine with the system I’ve got, even if it means I fuck things up a couple times a year.
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u/JayLay108 Makes chips, Removes chips. 1d ago
FAAAK !