i went ahead and got started on the other touchplate and ordered some parts for the circuit just in case the moving touchplate goes south
i got the touchplate in today and wired it in.. trammed the mill ...and measured the setter at the point that the plate was triggered...and entered that distance in the dro...i used the nose of the spindle and 0 in the dro to set it up... and was pleased to find that if i set it to only touch in the center of the plate it was not the exact same measurement every time but the repeatability after doing 50 measurements was plus or minus .0002 ... it never swung more than that... pretty darn good
unfortunately when i activated the random area touch feature the swing was quite a bit more... plus or minus .0013 depending on where on the plate the tool touched down///the farther from center of the plate it touched the wider the swing was ... but even at this amount i can live with it because i dont think my machine is accurate enough to worry about this amount... the good thing is that all of my toolholders are RH ... so the only time ill be measuring will be when replacing worn or broken tools or when using drill bits in the chuck..
im going to run it this way and see if anything goes wrong but all looks good.. msm is flexible enough as is to let me get away with it looks like... but i started building the circuit for the other touchplate anyway.. its so freaking cool doing measurements and watching it update PTLs and offsets ... now i just need to mount the setter, get an accurate measurment for the probe...add the airblast feature ...and build my tool table
youve done an amazing job with this dave... again I cannot thank you enough...
rick