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Warning: Your T1 tool number is probably not the one you think if you mix up offsets and turret positions
I ran a Mazak lathe for 6 months at a job in Rochester before I figured this out the hard way, and it cost me a $340 piece of 4140 that went straight in the scrap bin. Here's the thing people keep getting wrong: the tool number on the turret and the tool number in your offset page are two different things, and a lot of new guys just assume they line up 1 to 1. I did, and for weeks it worked fine, so I never questioned it. Then my lead walked by while I was setting up a job and asked why my T5 was pulling the offset for T7, and I had no answer. I had been dialing in the wrong numbers the whole time and just getting lucky because the tools were close enough in size. It matters because the second you grab a boring bar that's 0.200 off from your last one, you're crashing or scrapping, and it happens fast. We set our turret so the odd positions are OD tools and the even ones are ID, but the offsets get programmed in whatever order the setup guy feels like. So now I always dry run at rapid height with the offset page open, every single setup, no matter how simple it looks. Anyone else get burned by this early on, or did your shop actually label things so it made sense?
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faith_chen728d ago
Wait, you ran it for six months before someone caught that? That is wild to me. The lead just walked by one day and went "hey why is T5 pulling T7's offset" like it was nothing, and you had been doing it the whole time? I would have been sick to my stomach right there at the machine. The part that gets me is the luck factor, because tools being close in size means you get zero feedback that anything is wrong until suddenly you grab that boring bar and it all falls apart on a $340 slug of 4140. That's the kind of thing that makes you trust nothing on the offset page ever again.
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