A Shopmade CNC Z-Axis Indicator

Nov 5, 2011 // by page.lysupportadmin // Blog, Projects, Techniques // No Comments

I was surfing the web the other day, looking for something new to fixate on when I suddenly decided to go visit one of my old haunts: Home Model Engine Machinist. This is a great little board that is focused on building model engines. There are wonderful examples of craftsmanship at all levels to drool over, and while the site is mostly inhabited by manual machinists, there’s a growing amount of CNC information there too. Probably the best thing about the site is it values good comraderie and won’t tolerate the trolls that inhabit and get too much air time at a lot of other sites. These are all folks you’d love to go have a beer with and talk to about the art of machining. If you’ve never visited HMEM, and you have any desire at all to talk to a good audience about machining model engines, by all means check it out.

I happened to spot one thread in particular that had some great pictures of a really nice shopmade Z-axis indicator, so I wanted to pass some photos along here as a great example of what you can find without too much effort if you’ll take the time to go explore HMEM. Z-axis indicators are used to precisely touch off a tool in order to determine it’s exact Z position above the workpiece. This is typically done to capture the tool length offset or zero the Z for machining when you manually change tools. You can find more information on this in our article series on Tool Data Management. Suffice it to say that dealing with tool lengths is critical to successful CNC, and this is one way to approach the problem.

This beautiful shopmade Z-axis indicator was done by HMEM member “Maverick”:

Z-Axis Indicator