Touching off on manual tool change?

if your using pcb drills etc , they usually come with plastic collars , you can slide the collars to give you the same length
of tooling for each drill or mill bit ,
for such a simple operation for pcb milling that's the fast way , you can use the auto probe , but without a toolchanger your making matters over complicated .

once you have set your x & y in the touch off , so long as you don't switch off the machine , these points will remain
unless you change them . z is usually set to the top surface of the material , so this varies in use , each value can be set separately .

spinnaker wrote: I need to make manual tool changes. LinuxCNC is promoting me for the changes as I expect but during the tool change, how can I be certain I set the tool in place in the exact height of the previous tool?.

One way is to add an automatic tool-length measurement to the tool change routine.

This is quite an advanced topic, but it is possible, and has been done.

I think the general consensus is to keep things simple as Kornphlake suggests above. However, if you want to get into measuring automatically, I did a writeup here:
forum.linuxcnc.org/forum/38-general-linu...rements?limitstart=0
/Chris

I have a pneumatic drawbar and repeatable-length tools (BT30) all measured off into a tool table.
I still tend to put each toolpath into separate files even though I don't need to.

It makes it easier to re-do a part with a modified toolpath. It means that you can switch parts rather than tools, which sometimes ends up making more sense (ie do 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 rather than 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3)
Most CAM systems make this very easy. In fact with Fusion and HSM I often do it by accident

If I need to be there to swap the tool then it's no big deal to select the next programme at the same time.

cncbasher wrote: if your using pcb drills etc , they usually come with plastic collars , you can slide the collars to give you the same length
of tooling for each drill or mill bit ,
for such a simple operation for pcb milling that's the fast way , you can use the auto probe , but without a toolchanger your making matters over complicated .

once you have set your x & y in the touch off , so long as you don't switch off the machine , these points will remain
unless you change them . z is usually set to the top surface of the material , so this varies in use , each value can be set separately .

That is exactly where my problem is coming from is drill bits. I have read you should not snug up the collar to the collet. Is that true? What I try to do when changing bits is to keep the collar close to the same distance \. But is it OK to just snug it up? It would mean a more accurate placement.