Tool Offsets and Manual Tool Setters - Haas Tip of the Day

Our offset pages rest at the very heart of our CNC mills. They are how the machine knows exactly where our part is at on the table and it's how we let the control know exactly how long each tool is and where the top of our part is in the z-axis. Now we've made other videos that show us how to manually set our tools and more importantly how we can verify that we've set all of our tools correctly. We will link to those videos in the description. But right now today we're going to show you some alternative methods that might have some real benefits for you. So stick around. Everything for me begins with my setup sheet. So check this out. I've got a block loaded up. Now if you're tightening up those tools by hand. All of our z offsets are stored on two different offset pages. Our tool offset page and our work offset page. Our workpiece offset page. Now I never use the word workpiece outside of the machine shop. It's just not a common word for me. It comes from two different words. Work which is from the old English to work on something and the old French piece which just means a part. So our workpiece is just any type of part that we're working on in the machine. Now I'm being ridiculous with the definitions here because I just want to get the point across that our work offset page really could have been called our part offset page and our tool offset page is for our tools. Rather than touching off our tools right on top of our workpiece like we show you in other videos. We're going to use a different method. Setting all of our tools off of our machine table and then entering the distance from our table to the top of our workpiece. Our part as our work offset z values. These are a handful of tool height gauges. Tool setters from my box that we can use to set our tools manually. Let's start with this z-axis tool setter. Now it has been ground to exactly two inches thick and it has a spring-loaded center that's tied to this precision indicator. We will load up our tool. Jog it down onto the setter until our dial reads zero and then press the tool offset measure button while our tool offset is highlighted. Tool one, offset one. Now we've set our tool but we didn't set it on our machine table. We set it two inches above our table. That's the height of our tool setter and we need to subtract that value from our tool length offset but that can be done in a couple different ways. Our tool length offset is actually a combination of two different columns. Our length geometry and our length wear. So we can subtract two inches from our length geometry column. That's just fine. Or we can subtract two inches from our length wear column and that's the way I typically do it just because I like to see it visually just to make sure that we haven't skipped a step. Either way is fine. Our combined tool length offset is the distance from our machine Z zero to our machine table for this tool and we'll repeat this process for all of our tools. Tool two, tool offset measure. Subtract our height gauge distance. Tool three, tool offset measure and once again subtract our height gauge. Our machine knows where all of our tools are compared to their Z touch off location which was our machine table but it doesn't know where our workpiece is. So we're going to go ahead and set that now. Each workpiece, each part will have its own work offset like G54, G55 and so on. Now we have lots of work offsets available. We'll command these work offsets from within our G-code programs so the machine knows what part we're working on. Now with the method we are using today, our work offset is a distance from our machine table to the top of our workpiece. We will measure this distance with an indicator. I'm using a Heimer indicator in this case but a regular test indicator held in a mag base will work the same way. We will zero our indicator on our table and then jog up and over to the top of our part until our indicator once again reads zero. We can view our measured distance on our position screen as our Z distance to go value. When my indicator was resting on the table at zero, I left hand jog mode by pressing mem and then hand jog once again. This zeros out our distance to go value before we jog allowing us to keep track of that table to part distance easily without having to do any math at all. Now there are lots of ways we could have accomplished this. This is just my preferred method. We will call this first part G-54 and our second part G-55. So under G-54, we will enter the distance we measured as our Z-axis work offset. We'll repeat the process for our G-55 measuring the distance from our touch-off point to the top of our G-55 workpiece and entering that distance as our G-55 Z value. That is it. We have set our tool lengths and our work offset Z values. Now we could have used a tool setter instead of an indicator to find out the distance between our touch-off location and our workpiece Z. Now this tool presetter from Mitutoyo is one inch thick. So if we use it, we will need to subtract one inch from our tool offset. We want to consider our table as our tool touch-off point. Now these precision height gauges can be calibrated just by rolling a gauge pin across their ground faces while zeroing out our dial indicator. This tool setter from Edge Technology is four inches tall and can be calibrated with a few one, two, three blocks. When the dial reads zero, our tool is four inches from our table. So after we press tool offset measure, we can shift our offsets down by four inches. So our tool is effectively set right on the table. Now this digital setter is right at two inches tall. So we'll shift our tool offset by two inches. And if we don't have any tool setters, we can always use a precision one, two, three block to set our tools. I can jog my tool down just below the surface of our block and slowly move the tool up in the Z-axis while on a very small jog increment until our block just slides underneath the tool. At that point, we can press tool offset measure just like we did with the other setters and shift our tool offset down by the thickness of our block. Setting all of our tools off a single location like our machine table has some other benefits as well. One of those is when we're machining mold bases. If we have a tool break halfway through a mold cavity, we've lost our top surface to set our tools. It's gone completely. So where would we set our tools? That's one good reason to set our tools off the machine table. Beyond this, we can use our tool setter because it's more accurate than using paper in most cases. I tend to think that the simplest method, the method that requires the least amount of explanation is probably the best method. But we really want to hear how you are getting it done in your shop. So comment. Comment on this video. Explain your method and why you think it's working for you so well. Be sure to follow the links in the description of this video for more information on how to set your tools, how to verify your tools, how to set your X and Y locations, how to use the next tool button to speed things up. Well, that is it. Thanks for watching this Haas Tip of the Day.