Send Hurco to home position during tool change

[Marshal]

Is there a setting in MCam somewhere so that the mill sends the part to the machine home before doing a tool change? We've got a part that's too high for the tool changer to work, and I need to find a way to send the part to the back left corner (or at least off to the side somewhere) before doing a tool change.

 

edit: at the moment, we're using a Hurco VM1, and using the "Generic Fanuc 3X control", on MCam X4, most recent MU

[Fred @ Slate Industries]

It's in the Hurco control

"Send home during a toolchange" or something close to it.

It however DOES NOT send it home at the 1st tool change of the program (But thats usually a centerdrill etc.)

Tall tool's that scare me or will bust the toolchanger plexiglass shield Leave as a "Manual tool" in hurcos tool set up..

[Dave Ball]

If it is just for one part use a few manual entries and put in the g code to send it where you want.

[Stan_z]

try using the home REF points in your parameter page

[K2csq7]

+1 Stan

 

G80

Z20.

X50. Y-30.

M05

G91 G28 Z0. M09

M01

 

This is what ref. pts. will do for you. But Tony is right, unless you do some post modification, you will not get this on the first toolchange.

[Marshal]

We just did what Tony said, and changed the setting at the machine itself. Found that little setting 5 minutes after quitting time lol.

 

I'd much rather have the thing get out of the way every time than ever take the chance of messing up a piece we've been working on for a week.

[Marshal]

Except that now we're losing our Part z-value every time we start a program, and as far as I can tell we didn't change anything in the programming side.

 

If I'm not mistaken (and I very well could be), if we set our part zero (in this case, it's at the machine's -4.05 or something along those lines), it should stay even when starting to run the program. Right now, it's changing the part zero to a value of 12.27. The tool still seems to stop in the correct place and start machining, but the part z values are way off. They used to always show the distance below our part z-zero, so if we were cutting a 0.01" below the part zero, the z-value would read -0.0100", but now it reads something along the lines of 12.27". We've tried resetting the zero on the machine, but still every time we start running the program it changes back to that 12" mark. I'm no expert, but there's nothing in the parameters or the code that says anything about 12".

 

This job is going to give me grey hair pretty soon

[Fred @ Slate Industries]

Your readout on the control is set to Machine

"From Home or something like that there are a few options"

Change it to Full So you can see "Distance to go"

Tht will show you where your tool is in Z and how far it has to go according to the program..

IT WILL SAVE YOUR BUTT one day

 

 

(You have to do this every program as it sets itself back to a default screen)

[Marshal]

Tony, that's how we usually do this, and in one of the cases yesterday morning, it said DTG was over 12".

 

We figured it out though. We (mostly our old machinist) were setting the tool's up wrong because we couldn't use the probe. Learn something every day I suppose