That one aluminum part that took me 6 hours to tram in

I had this job last month for a local medical device company. The print called for +/- 0.0005 on a 5 inch pocket and I figured it'd be a quick setup. Three hours later I kept getting chatter on the finish pass and couldn't figure out why. Turns out my vise jaws had a tiny burr on them from the last job I did, and the part was sitting just a hair crooked. Swapped jaws and it cut perfect in 20 minutes. Anyone else chase a problem for hours only to find it was something dumb like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

rileyl674d ago

That burr under the part got me good once too, spent four hours chasing a .0003 taper before I found it. Its always the stupid little things that steal your whole day.

martinez.karen4d ago

Oh man, I feel your pain on that one! That exact burr on the jaws got me too a couple years back, except it was a 0.001 tolerance on a plastic part and I spent a whole Saturday chasing harmonics. Sometimes the dumbest things are what mess you up, like a tiny chip stuck under a parallels or a dirty indicator tip. My fix for that now is I always run a stone across the jaws and parallels before every critical setup, even if they look clean. It saves so much headache, trust me.