Chased a tool offset glitch for 7 hours and it was just a decimal point

I was running some 304 stainless parts yesterday on a Haas VF-2 and my finish pass kept cutting 0.015 deep instead of 0.005. Checked geometry, wear, even re-zeroed the part. After pulling my hair out from 2pm till 9pm I realized the operator before me had typed 1.015 instead of 1.0150 in the tool length offset. That extra zero at the end was messing with the machine memory or something. Has anyone else had a weird decimal issue like this on a Haas control?

2 comments

2 Comments

robert_hayes1d ago

That Haas control quirk with trailing zeros is real, I've seen it myself on a VF-3. The machine treats 1.015 and 1.0150 as different numbers because of how it reads the decimal precision in the offset table. It's not just your imagination, the control will round or shift the value internally. I always tell my guys to type offsets with exactly four decimal places, no more no less. Drove me nuts for a whole Saturday once on a similar issue. Once you learn to treat the offset page like a strict teacher it stops happening.

grant8261d ago

And it's not just Haas either, some older Fanuc controls do the same thing with offset entries if you don't match the decimal places exactly. I've learned to always type the full four digits even if it's a round number like 1.0000 just to be safe.