Tooling a Little Help?

[Cartierusm]

Ger, do you think V3.041 will be fine or will I experience any problems as I'm using a lockdown version now, 2.63? Thanks, have a good 4th.

[ger21]

I don't really know.

[Cartierusm]

That's not true, I'm pretty sure you know everything? Anyway, I guess my real question is besides maybe some weird bugs they haven't figure out yet it should at least cut the correct coordinates and stuff, right?

[ger21]

A LOT of people are using it, but I don't want to recommend it and have it not work for you. Back up your .xml file, and if you have trouble with the new version, you can always uninstall and reinstall 2.63. Just make sure you download a copy of 2.63 and keep it just in case.

[Cartierusm]

Thanks. Ger, I think you work in a professional shop, so how do you setup a wood piece for cutting. Meaning how do you line up critical parts. For example if it was a metal piece you could use an edge finder (wiggler) or a touch probe with a light (bring it to the edge until it lights up and then offset to the center of the probe ( for me .2")). For wood cutting I use a Laser Edge Finder, which is pretty accurate and I just traverse down the pencil line making sure it plumb, parallel or whatever to the router. So just wondering how a pro does it? Also how do you realign parts if you take them off and they need to go back on? (location pins?). Thanks.

[ger21]

Our machine has pins that pop up to locate the part. The pins are at 0,0. When you start the cycle, the pins drop down out of the way. The parts are held down with vacuum pods. Our machine is pretty simple. 0,0 is where the pins are, and can't be changed. I believe there is a gcode to offset the origin, but we don't use it. We always align to 3 pins, so as long as we don't cut the edges off, we can replace it on the machine pretty close to where it was, if we're careful. If we route the edges off, and have to rerun it, then we need to get creative sometimes. But we rarely need to do that.
We turn on the machine, home it, throw on the parts and go.