Went from eyeballing offsets to a $40 presetter, big difference

For 8 years I used to touch off every tool by hand on the spindle, wasting 10 minutes per setup and crashing once a month. Last Tuesday I finally mounted an offline presetter on my bench, now I set all 12 tools in 5 minutes flat. Anyone else make that switch, or still trust the old way?

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holly_brown10d ago

My shop foreman bitched for years that I was wasting money even looking at presetters, so I feel your pain on that switch. Twelve tools in five minutes sounds like a damn dream compared to the old tap-and-hope routine I used to pull. I remember one bad month where I snapped three end mills because I misjudged the offset by a hair, and that shut the whole job down for a day. Once I finally got one, the first thing I noticed was how much calmer my mornings got, no more rushing to beat the clock before the machine was warm. I still do a quick touch-off on the first part just to double check, but that presetter has saved my back and my blood pressure more times than I can count.