Machsupport Forum

Mach Discussion => General Mach Discussion => Topic started by: kregan on August 25, 2012, 09:17:27 PM

Title: Mill as Lathe tool offest question
Post by: kregan on August 25, 2012, 09:17:27 PM
I have my mill working as a lathe. I copied my milling screen and renamed it as a .lset file so I could get the Y axis DRO.

I want to set up 6 tools and need to figure out if I can use the tool table by some how adding in the Y axis offset or if I have to
program the tool offsets in each gcode file I make?

Thank you for the help.

Title: Re: Mill as Lathe tool offest question
Post by: HimyKabibble on August 26, 2012, 02:36:34 AM
You should REALLY look at the screenset Calypso Ventures offers for doing turning with a mill (www.calypsoventures.com).  It solves this problem for you very elegantly.  It allows you to run unmodified lathe G-code on a mill WITH support for multiple tools using Y offsets.

Regards,
Ray L.
Title: Re: Mill as Lathe tool offest question
Post by: kregan on August 26, 2012, 08:04:11 PM
I installed the demo and while it is nice I wasn't fond of it.  In the tools screen the numbers were pretty small/hard to read.  The numbers overlapped into the border of the window at the bottom and right side of some of the boxes making it hard to read.

The demo also overwrote my tool table, and messed up my m6start scripts.  Maybe I did something wrong but after playing with it for 2 days I uninstalled it and spent a good amount of time resetting my machine.  I still have to redo all my tools in the tool table.

So after thinking about this and realizing I already had a quick change tool post on my manual lathe I decided to build a fixture to hold that tool post on the mill.  I can adapt the tool change script I have set up for the mill for the lathe ops. and the QC tool holders will handle the Y axis alignment.

Here is the QC tool post holder for the mill.