Overpaid for a fancy probe, my old edge finder still wins

Dropped $450 on a new touch probe last month for our Haas at the shop in Dayton, figured it would speed up my setups. But after 3 weeks of fighting with its software quirks and calibration drift, I grabbed my trusty mechanical edge finder and got the part dialed in faster than ever. Has anyone else spent big money on new tooling only to realize the old-school method was just as good, or am I the only one with a $450 paperweight?

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1 Comment

the_holly21d ago

That edge finder has ears and eyes that no probe will ever match. I did the same thing with a digital height gauge a few years back, spent a fortune, and it still couldn't tell me when a burr was throwing off the reading the way my old mechanical one does. Plus, there's something honest about the wiggle and feel of a spring-loaded edge finder. You know it's right because you can hear it, not because some display says it's within a micron. Technology is great until it needs a firmware update to do what a piece of brass and a spring did for fifty years. These fancy tools are for the guys who don't trust their own hands anymore.