Hello all, newbie here so this could very well be user error.
I’m trying to round and end of bar stock and its not cutting consistently, Which ever side I prob off of, it will removed more product than the opposite side. If you flip the bar stock you can really see how off-center it is cutting.
I’ve ran the dial indicator down the Y and X axis a for travel compensation a hand full of times to make sure its set correctly. Everything looks spot on.
I have used a edge finder instead of the probe to set my zero to rule out that the probe was reading off and and i have the same results.
On programming, running a 2D contour on end only, I ran one wrapping around the part and it removed a strip along the back of the stock side. (0.0015)
Drawing are set to the actually size of the bar stock as I only want to round the end. Ive tried to change the size of the part to offset it and no luck.
It appears that you are not dead center of the stock you are cutting. The question is what is causing this to happen? Can you tell which radius is being cut correctly , the side you probed or the opposite side? When I use the probe to determine the center, I touch both sides and divide that number by 2 , then move my probe to that coordinate and zero the DRO. I’ve had good results using that method, even when flipping parts over. Also the strip the cutter removed from the side of the part appears to be me to be greater than one and a half thou, but might just be the camera angle or my aging eyesight.
I’ve had the same issue in the past. I assume you’re using the touch probe Langmuir supplied with the machines, which is your problem to begin with unfortunately. I’ve gotten a replacement touch probe from them before and it would give me homing locations that were ±0.01 inches if I rotated the probe around. Now, I did make sure that it was calibrated before using it, with a runout of less then ±0.0005. My recommendation is that you buy yourself a wiggler or an edge finder and use that instead. I haven’t had a single issue with CAM being misaligned since.
I hope that Langmuir can fix the issue of unreliable repeatability with their touch probe as using a wiggler is very time consuming and if not paying attention, you can have human error and forget to set the offsets of the radius of the wiggler.
I would use just slightly thicker stock and than it would clean up on both sides even if you’re off a tiny bit on your origin. stock material thickness in is not consistent. Even if you get it dialed in on this run the next time you buy stock it could be .015" different on the thickness. Than once again your features will end up not symmetrical again.
You could also design your parts .03" to .06" less than nominal material stock thickness if you want to clean up all the sides without machining off and 1/8" or 1/4" of material.
