has anyone resurfaced their onefinity touch probe? if so what bit and settings did you use? I have only done wood so not sure what to use for this.
I don’t understand why you would need to do this.
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I second what @PaulC said. Why do you feel that it needs to be resurfaced? Assuming you have small poke marks in the surface where you’ve probed various V bits. I’ve seen that in my old probe plate.
If anything, I wouldn’t recommend doing anything more than laying a piece of fine sandpaper or emery cloth on a hard, flat surface, apply light oil or WD-40, and using that to clean up the probe surface. Optionally, you could use a fine FLAT file, keeping the file absolutely flat on the probe surface. I would not recommend machining it, as that will remove more material than is necessary and require recalibrating it.
But again, with normal touch marks, it’s really not necessary to do anything with it at all.
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I agree 100% with Bill, there is really no reason to resurface your TP block. Even if you do the safer of the 2 methods and put on a flat surface with sandpaper your hand will apply different pressure across the plate thereby bring it out of square.
Using the OF to resurface it would require your OF be 100% dead on tramming wise, any variance at all will again bring your TP out of square.
If you have a few pits or scratches, what I do is just bring the bit down just to the side of them so it hits clean surface. If your block is totally jacked up I would reach out to @charleyntexas to see if he can sell you a new stand alone block. He’s a great guy and I’m sure he can help.
-Alex
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My view is resurfacing that plate would strictly be a job for a milling machine. It needs to be absolutely flat.
If you don’t have access to one or a local machine shop, use it as is and simply avoid the divots in it. Otherwise a new one may be in the cards for you. By the time you pay someone to mill it the cost will justify buying a new one.
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All of the replies are spot on when it comes to attempting to resurface, especially the one concerning tramming. If your machine is out of tram just a tiny bit then you will end up with a very rough surface which will likely be worse than what you may have now. Most machine shops will charge you at least $75 or more per hour and have a two hour minimum fee. Attempting to do it by hand is definitely out of the question. There is virtually no way you will have a uniform thickness by the time you get rid of the divots and scratches. This will prevent a repeatable Z axis zeroing capability. Fortunately, there is a solution. Imagine a cheesy drum roll here… Triquetra CNC to the rescue…
At Triquetra CNC we make the touch plates for OneFinity. We have the proper equipment to put a pretty new. scratch and divot free surface finish on a battle tested touch plate, complete with re-engraving the logo and target circle. We use a $4000.00 custom Jig for work holding when we do a production run and can re run the same part to fix any flaws. With a single pass on the Milling Machine I can take off as much as 0.1800 inches with a 2.75 inch face fill leaving a flawless finish. Then come back on the second pass and add the OneFinity Logo and target circle or re trace it to clean it up.
What’s the catch?? there is only one… You pay the shipping to get it here and back and understand that after the restoration it will be a tiny bit thinner and require you to update the measurements in the OneFinity Controller software. Simple as that. Turn around time will be as little as one day if I receive it on Monday through Thursday. If it arrives on a Friday it will be shipped back the following Monday.
Send me a PM or email me at charleyntexas@gmail.com to make arrangements if you want to take me up on this offer. This offer will be good for anyone else as well unless I get swamped with requests at which time I will be need to start charging a small fee.
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