My spindle load meter lied to me for 6 months and I lost a $900 cutter

Running a Haas VF-2 at a job shop outside Cleveland. Last Tuesday I was roughing 4140 and the load meter showed 60 percent on a 1 inch indexable end mill. Trusted it and pushed the feed up. Ten minutes later the machine sounded like a rock crusher. The insert pockets were wiped out and the body was cracked. Turns out the previous operator had the spindle load override set to 80 percent for some odd reason. So the meter was reading 60 but the actual load was way higher. Nobody caught it because everyone just checked the screen. Now I teach every new guy to look at the torque curve and the chip color before trusting any number on that display. Has anyone else been burned by a hidden override setting like that? What do you do to check the machine state before pushing feeds?

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brookef7319d ago

That load override got me too once, check it first thing every shift now lol.