Loading…
4
Rant: My first shop in 2008 ran everything off paper travelers, now the new guys can't read a print without a screen
I started running a Haas VF-2 back in 2008 at a small shop outside Cleveland, and back then your whole day lived on a clipboard. You had a paper traveler with the op sheet, a print with red pen marks from the lead guy, and a set of gauge blocks on the bench. If you wanted to know what tool was in station 7, you walked over and read the sticker on the carousel. Now I'm at a shop in Akron and the setup sheet is a PDF on a tablet bolted to the machine, tool data loads straight from the CAM file, and the probe finds the stock on its own. The thing that got me was last month a new hire stood at the control for 20 minutes because he couldn't find the Z zero, and it was right there in the offset page the whole time, he just never learned to touch off by hand. I'm not saying the old way was better, the probe is faster and I don't miss cranking an edge finder at 6 am, but there's something about knowing where the numbers come from that you lose when it's all automatic. Any of you old guys notice the young operators can run the machine but freeze up when the network goes down and they have to do it the hard way?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
craig.max1d ago
The "knowing where the numbers come from" part hits hard. I saw a video from a machinist on youtube saying the same thing, that guys can load a program but can't tell you why the tool offset is what it is. Network goes down and it's like the machine forgot how to cut metal.
6