Homing switches & 'methods of working' (Mach3)

[John S]

One thing with CNC is there are no real right or wrong ways, just different ways of doing things

Some people use limit switches as homing switches and then use G54 to go to the work zero.
Homing switches take you to MACHINE CO-ORDINATES then using G54 this takes you to WORK CO-ORDINATES which is usually the corner of the work or vise. Many newbies have a lot of trouble with differentiating between the two.

A simple way to start is to use the corner of the work / vise and set both co-ordinates to this point and not use homing, a ref all or goto home will then use this same point.

It's purely personnel choice.

One final note when drawing parts to be used in a vise, The normal way of drawing which dates back from the old manual drawing board days is to use the bottom left corner as 0,0. This then makes all dimensions / moves positive but a CNC doesn't have to worry about this.

If you make this point 0,0 then it puts, on a normal setup, the origin point on the edge of the moving jaw. Any differences in blank size will make all the parts different from it's true 0,0

If you use the top left as origin it then puts 0,0 at the end of the fixed jaw and every part will be identical regardless of blank size. Most CAD systems give you the option to move origins so no matter how you draw on the last save you can set this to top left.

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