9 Ways to Crash Your Machine

There are plenty of ways to crash your machine, but you have to remember: CNC machines don't crash, operators crash them!

Here are nine of the most common reasons we see people crash their CNC machines, and what you can do to prevent a CNC crash.

  1. Not resetting Feed Rate Override
  2. Transpose your tool height value
  3. Putting the tool height in wrong field
  4. Swap a tool out, forget to update height
  5. Putting the wrong tool in the machine
  6. Load the wrong program
  7. Forget to load the latest version of your Program
  8. Setting the wrong work coordinate system in CAM
  9. Not updating your current tool (e.g. tool 99) in PathPilot when touching off your Z height!

Read: Workholding of the Month: Double-Sided Tape

John Saunders is the author of the NYC CNC YouTube channel and runs Saunders Machine Works, a machine shop in Zanesville, OH.