From the course: G-Code Programming for CNC Foundations

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Understand tool offsets

Understand tool offsets - G-Code Tutorial

From the course: G-Code Programming for CNC Foundations

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Understand tool offsets

- Any time you set up a tool in a CNC machine, we need to tell the machine exactly how far it is from the tip of the tool down to the top of our part. Now, if you're using a probe, a lot of times a lot of this happens behind the scenes, and it does a little bit different algorithm to figure this out, but in this case we're going to assume we're going to be manually touching off our tools, and let me show you how that works. So right over here on the screen, you can see I have this red cylinder right here. And that is representing the distance from the tip of the tool down to the top of my part. So that value, or that length of that rod, will be the value that you store in the machine. This is not stored in your G-code or your CNC code at all. Right, the machine needs to know where it is and how far it is down to the top of your part. That is what we call a Z0 plane on the top of your part, and we're going to be figuring out that exact value for every one of the tools that we're going…

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