Hey everyone,

We have a number of machines in our shop that use the Renishaw OTS touch setter probe for setting tool length offsets. Up until I started, they were never used for in-cycle broken tool detection (BTD). Our operators have wasted huge amounts of machine time running back and forth between machines which have stopped with an M00 to check the tool and continue. I started playing around with BTD and got it working pretty well, but there is one behavior that doesn't make sense to me. I'm not sure how to change it, or if I even should since I might be missing some bigger picture. Lets say I touch a tool off using the OTS and it is exactly 6.0000" on the offsets page. Then I program a BTD cycle using G65P9858B1.T1.H.005 to make sure it isn't broken (without making chips at all). As long as the combination of the tools geometry height offset and wear height offset are within the .005 tolerance in the BTD cycle, all is well. If I add .0051" to the wear offset, it will alarm out every time. So as the wear offset increases, the functional tolerance of the BTD cycle decreases. I don't understand why the BTD cycle takes the wear offset into consideration at all since I don't want to know if my offset is growing or shrinking, I want to know if my tool is physically getting longer or shorter. The Macro is using parameter #4120 as the current tool's offset, but from there I get lost. Renishaw's Macro's are horribly documented. Has anyone ever dealt with this problem or have any insight as to how to correct the issue (or my way of thinking)?