Hey guys,

I'm new to this forum but not new in machining. 15 years of experience at boring mills and vmc's.

However, we recently got ourselves a new horizontal boring mill with a heidenhain 640 control. But I don't like it very much.
On our other machines we have the 530 controller and it's much easier to program. And it has to do with the following problem.

The machines has standard x y axis (left right and up down). Z axis is the column and W for the spindle. When setting a new workpiece on the machine I would normally move the column towards the table and from there on move the spindle. So drilling, boring, bore milling everything would be done with that spindle but for some reason I can't set tool lengths from the w axis. Only by using Z.
Which makes things very hard to program our OEM said to use the paraxcomp but that doesn't work very well either. When doing a bore through multiple plates each with a 200mm space between them it only does the first one correct and the second one it starts way before where it should. (using q203 = - 200 and then the cycle call)

Why can't I set tool lengths with w axis?
Is there something wrong with my kynimatics?

Thanks in advance!