Hi everyone

Can anyone please shed some light on tool offsets for me. I have a boxford slant bed lathe with a 8 station tool turret. I have finally got the tool change operation working right thanks to a lot of help from "Hood". My machine has a home switch on all three axis. What I am struggling to understand is the Z offset. With most tools on the X axis you can slowly Jog down to a work piece and touch off to get the offset. With the Z axis how do you position it to be 100% accurate. With some tools it's easy to touch the face of a work piece but with a lot of tools EG (Left and right hand tools, threading tools, tools with large radius) I can't see how you would do this accurately.

Please excuse me if this is a silly question but I am new to cnc and learning all the time. I would really appreciate any help.

Cheers
Mick     

See if this vid helps, it was initially meant to be one of a two I was going to do but have never got round to the other. This is without limits on the machine but the principal is basically the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWnfioI3G0E

Hood

Hi Hood
Cheers for that just got back from having a curry and some beer so will have a look in the morning!

Cheers
Mick