Tiny Probe Tip Tips and Tricks

[teddyg43t]

Hello,

We will be using a tiny probe tip to indicate in a gear rack that will need to be shifted twice in the machine. It is a VMC Haas VM6 The gear teeth are very small. We have Renishaw Probing on our Haas which has a OMP40 stock probe with the whips system. We will essentially be using a X-axis pocket/slot cycle to locate the center line between the teeth.

The probe tip is 1mm 

https://www.renishaw.com/shop/Product.aspx?Product=A-5000-7545

The main two questions I have are indicating in the probe? Should we do it the same way as the larger tip with a ten-thousandths indicator on the ball or can we use the tapered shank?

The second is if the feeds on the probing cycle need to be slowed down? We don't want to immediately break this tip.

I have tried contacting Renishaw and received zero feedback.

Thanks,

[LibertyMachine · Accepted solution]

You certainly want to be indicating on the ruby, not the shank. I find often there is several thousandths of runout between the two.

Also, yes, you want to turn down the feedrates and reduce the back-off distance. That can be modified by these parameters(copy/pasted from Renishaw documentation):

#117 Modal feedrate value used in the protected positioning macro (O9810).

#119 Fast feedrate value. This is set in macro O9724 at 5000 mm/min
(200 in/min) default value.

#506 Basic move control factor (see Figure H.1). This is used to control the
back-off distance in the basic move before the final gauge move. It should
be fine tuned on installation to suit the machine.
A default value of 0.5 is installed by the software. The actual factor should
normally be between 0 and 1.0. Reduce the value to reduce the back-off
distance.

The values come out of the Renishaw Probing Manual (I do have a pdf if you want, drop me a PM). They MAY not be the same for a Haas machine. Tread carefully...