I am involved in developing a new probing technology for CNC machines for tool setting. It will work with both lathe and mill, and for example in the lathe can be used to calibrate tool offsets very quickly, and routinely to set the Z reference to the end of a bar in the chuck. At the moment it is limited to rather slow axis movements but we are working on an improvement that should make it considerably faster.
So to my question for those of you who use probes: what axis speed to you feed at when moving the probe towards the material, whether using touch-trigger style probes or other sorts?
The feed rate for your G31 movement is not so much governed by the probe as by the control. If the interface is making use of High Speed Skip, and how fast it really is.
The feedrate used for Renishaw macros is determined during probe cal/setup. Not set by user.
Half the story, GD - the probe needs to be able to overtravel by however far the machine will take to decelerate to a stop when it receives the signal. A design that allows more overtravel without the probe breaking will allow faster probing.
On my DIY 3 ball pair style probe I generally run in at X and Y at around 1000mm/min with maybe 30mm overshoot, then back off and come in again at around 30mm/min. On Z it's more like 100 then 30.