dylan463•8d agoProlific Poster

TIL my machine had been tapping wrong for 3 years. Checked 500 threaded holes and 480 were fine.

Was having a bad week with tap breakage on a stainless job. Decided to check my thread pitch with a gauge for the first time in forever. Turns out my machine was feeding at the wrong rate but the material was soft enough that it still formed threads anyway. The 20 bad ones were mostly on harder parts. Has anyone else found a setup error that old and just felt like an idiot for not catching it sooner?

3 comments

3 Comments

richard_young807d ago

2000 parts before realizing the feed rate was off" - holy crap, that's brutal. I thought my 500 was bad but 2000? That guy must have felt sick when he found out. I mean, you always hear about the one-off screwups but running that many parts before catching it... I don't know how you even come back from that mentally. Did he end up reworking them all or just eat the loss? That's the kind of thing that would make me double check every single setting for weeks after.

fionafoster8d agoMost Upvoted

Heard a similar story from a guy at a shop down the road who ran a batch of 2000 parts before realizing his feed rate was off the whole time. It happens more than people admit.

ericcraig7d ago

Get a piece of paper and tape it right on the machine with the job number and feed rate written in big numbers. That saved my bacon on a 500 piece run last month. I also make it a habit to check the first part with calipers before hitting cycle start on part two. And if the machine has been sitting for a couple days, I always run a test piece before committing to a batch. The extra ten minutes of setup time beats scrapping a whole lot of expensive material.