Gentlemen,

I start up my machine cold at around 16 degrees Celsius and over the course of eight hours, the temperature of my shop (and the machine) rises to 23C. Needless to say, this results in thermal growth that I must compensate for. I do not have the luxury of running the machine continuously. I originally solved this by setting a variable equal to whatever offset I felt is needed and added that to certain critical cuts, but I'm running many more parts now and the drift is being noticed in other cuts.

So I've decided to write a macro that iterates over all 32 tool wear offsets to set an X wear offset to adjust for the thermal growth. I don't use wear offsets otherwise, so it's more convenient than adjusting the tool offsets.

Before I go about doing this though, I wonder if anyone else has done this, and if so, how did you do it?

Another possibility is to use the X workshift offset, but the Hardinge manual STRONGLY advises leaving X set to ZERO. Using one variable (X offset) seems like an ideal way of compensating for the overall X thermal growth, but I'm not sure if this would screw anything else up.

Suggestions?


Torin...