This is probably not original but worth commenting on. I have a tooling plate on the bed of my Tormach PCNC440. This has a matrix of M8 holes on 25mm spacing together with intermediate 3.7mm tooling pin holes.
Quite often I have a need to set up my work CNC coordinate system (WCS) such that it is centred on one of the M8 holes.
If I want to do a quick and dirty centre on one of these holes then I use the Laser Centring tool as mentioned elsewhere on my blog.
If I need to be a bit more precise then I have a mushroom/top hat shaped disc with shank that is a tight fit in the tapped M8 holes. PathPilot has a number of probing routines and these include finding the centre of a circular object. Simply push the top hat into the desired hole and then probe the disc for centre. You can use an active probe such as the Hallmark ITTP.
If you haven’t got an active probe you can use a Haimer. Simply align the Haimer tip somewhere close to a maximum point on the disc circumference and advance the axis to show a reading on the Haimer. Rock the opposite axis back and forth and watch the Haimer reading to find the high point on the circumference. Zero the axis. Go to the opposite side of the disc and repeat this process and divide the measured diameter by 2 for the disc centre. Repeat on the opposite axis.
(You can use this Haimer rocking back and forth method to find the diameter high point when cross drilling a circular item to fit grub screws etc).
The mushrooms are made with a silver steel shank that is skimmed to be a non wobble (how technical is that ..) fit in M8 (~6.8mm) and an aluminium top hat that is superglued in place on the shank. Once the glue has set the top hat is squared up while held in a collet in the lathe. This ensures concentricity with the shank. The disc will now sit flat to the tooling table when the shank is pressed home and perpendicular in the hole.
Clearly the larger the disc diameter the less centring error there will be.
I now have a ‘mushroom farm’ of discs for all manner of hole sizes. It’s not rocket science but as you well know, I am all for a simple (aka lazy) approach. Apologies to all the Grannies out there.
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