[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc-9gTFj-y4&hl=en]
I was considering a laser cross-hair for my mill and found this video of some great setup hacks that [Greolt] put on his mill. The video is pretty short, but I’ll fill you in just in case you don’t want to play/load it. A laser cross-hair is mounted at a known offset to align the X and Y axis. A PC board is wired to a sensor to zero in the Z axis. When the bit makes contact, the machine knows that it’s at 0 + the PCB thickness. A shuttle pro controller adds jog controls and a macro takes care of moving the bit to the zero that was measured with the laser cross-hair. You can find more details on his zero touch setup here.
5 thoughts on “Quick And Easy CNC Setup Tricks”
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I wish I had something like that when I was using the CNC machine at my school. Zeroing by eye/shim is a pain to do.
i will be making this z axis reference right away this morning! this is a great trick. it would be nice if he showed more where the input was used in the cnc software, but i am sure i will figure it out.
Jason
am I the only one who cringed while watching his hands in around where the machine was moving?
Jason more detail on the Z zero device can be found here
http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36099
The same thing can be accomplished with a 5 dollar edge finder and a scrap piece of paper.