VMC Tooling Advice Needed!

[Neale]

To unlock a tool, I would hold the spanner in place on the chuck nose and give it a tap with a rubber mallet. The inertia of the drive system means that most of the shock goes into undoing the locking part. Helps if you put the machine in lowest speed as well. Hopefully that's the last time you will need shock tactics, though!

My DRO lets me "find" an edge with a wiggler. I zero that axis, then pick up the opposite edge. Then there's a "halfway" button on the DRO that sets zero to halfway between the two settings. No arithmetic needed, don't need to know the diameter of the tip of the wiggler, even! Even if you want to zero on an edge, and are going to be using metric coordinates, say, you can pick up the edge with the wiggler, then set the coordinates to half the wiggler diameter (0.25" in my case), and zero is on the edge. Then switch to mm and away you go! So much easier than dials...