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Workpiece Offset Machine Coordinate vs Manual Alignment

Nicholas Norton

Hey all, 

We've got some bright Machinists here that are tired of having the CMM programmer manual align their parts every few months. We get a few repeat jobs once every 6 months or so, and by that time either probe calibration, machine settling or by some other factor I'm not aware of our programs will need a new manual alignment. Afterwards, we unmark these features and let the job run in DCC mode. (sidenote, my hunch is that the manual alignment feature's measured coordinates are married to the previous probe alignment, so after a new alignment they don't 'match' the expected coordinates for DCC mode)


Anyways here is my question/discussion; What are the pros/cons of using a manual alignment vs a know x,y,z position for part programs?
I don't have a good answer for rebuttal to our machinists, and I'm starting to wonder if some of our programs would be better off with hard-coded workpiece offsets. We use an Erowa chuck with custom fixturing for 70% of our jobs, so these parts are highly repeatable. 

What are your thoughts?

  • in reply to Nicholas Norton

    well, if you do mount a tooling ball to that base to use as an external alignment feature, all you need to do is:

    Run whatever program you have for a part.  Once it is done, map out the tooling ball location (you would need to do this for every part)

    Create an alignment program that aligns to that tooling ball as X0Y0Z0, then save that alignment as an external alignment

    In each part program, delete all MANUAL alignment stuff, recall the external alignment, then simply offset by the mapped out values for the tooling ball.

    The program then should run your DCC alignment (you DO have DCC alignments for the parts, right?) correctly, every time, as long as the correct part/program combo are being attempted.

    This would allow you do periodically (once a week?) run the fixture alignment, and you should not have this issue any more.

  • in reply to Nicholas Norton

    Once I mastered read point alignments I never looked back. I pull up older programs I wrote and if it's a manual alignment I change it. Only new tooling inspection I manual align because I might never see it again and it's not worth the time.

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