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An old toolmaker in Dayton asked why I check my first part twice and it made me rethink my whole setup
Last month I was running a batch of 400 aluminum brackets and an old toolmaker named Ray stopped by my machine. He watched me cut the first part, check it, run a second part, check it again, then said I was checking the parts but never checking my setup. He told me to indicate my vise and touch off my tools after the first part instead of trusting the numbers from the last run on a different job. Did that the next morning and found my vise was off by 8 thousandths, which explained a taper I had been blaming on the tool. Now I want to know, how many of you re-indicate between jobs or just trust your last setup?
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the_lee19h ago
Ray was right and I learned that same lesson the hard way on a 6061 job where my vise had walked about 5 thou from a crash I forgot about. Now I re-indicate the vise and touch off every tool at the start of every job, even if it was running fine yesterday. Takes maybe 10 minutes and has saved me way more scrap than that. Trusting the numbers from the last run is how you chase a taper all day and blame the wrong thing. Aluminum moves, vises move, and your memory of what you set last week is not a setup sheet.
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