My lead hand told me to run the new VF-2 at 80% feed for the first 50 parts, and I should have listened.

He said it was about letting the machine 'settle in' on a long aluminum job. I thought it was just old guy talk and ran it at 100% from the start. By part 30, we had a 0.003 inch taper on the bore from thermal growth. Had to stop, let it cool, and scrap the batch. That cost us about 4 hours and a chunk of material. Anyone else have a simple piece of setup advice they ignored and paid for?

3 comments

3 Comments

susan1301mo ago

Yeah, the "letting it settle in" talk gets me every time. I once thought a guy was just being fussy about cleaning chips off a vise before a second op. Ran the part, and a tiny chip made it sit just wrong. Wound up with ten pieces that were off by a few thou. Felt like a real genius that day.

white.nathan1mo ago

Ugh, that's the worst... reminds me of the time I didn't double-check a stop on the mill. Whole batch was scrap. Never skip the simple stuff.

nathan_shah1mo ago

Sometimes that extra fussiness just kills the flow. A tiny chip under a part might not even matter for a lot of jobs. If you stop to check every little thing, you'll never hit your numbers. I've seen guys waste more time cleaning than it would take to just run another part if one went bad.

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