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tuyere
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Just thought I'd share a little tool I cooked up to reduce our reject rate for (very expensive) Straumann premills- a stepped height gauge that tells technicians if they've actually got the blank fully seated or not. Hate the Medentika design, it does not inherently seat blanks like a Dess holder does, nothing pulls it into the fixture, it's just clamping around the edge. The design also loosens up in a non-repairable way over time, but that's a separate gripe.
If technicians don't triple-check their setups it's very easy to partially seat a blank and tighten the locking screw and then run a bad part. The design is awkward to verify with Vernier calipers, and I don't assume all techs can use the vernier correctly, because they often don't. So: I cook up an aid that's simple and obvious and intuitive to double-check their setups.
The feet of the gauge have to fully touch the fixture wall for the blank to be fully seated; in the above example, it wasn't quite there, so the gauge doubles as a pusher to get it all the way down. I'll replace them periodically, every few months or so, to deal with any wear from being used to seat the blanks.
The gauge has a 0.1mm allowance past nominal "fully seated", but I could get away with 0.15 or 0.2, I'm pretty sure. Tried printing it in resin first, but there was more distortion than I was happy with, so I ran it in a glass-filled filament instead on the Bambu FDM printer, should have much better dimensional stability in the long term. There are two heights I've put into production, that standard one plus a shorter WB gauge.
If technicians don't triple-check their setups it's very easy to partially seat a blank and tighten the locking screw and then run a bad part. The design is awkward to verify with Vernier calipers, and I don't assume all techs can use the vernier correctly, because they often don't. So: I cook up an aid that's simple and obvious and intuitive to double-check their setups.
The feet of the gauge have to fully touch the fixture wall for the blank to be fully seated; in the above example, it wasn't quite there, so the gauge doubles as a pusher to get it all the way down. I'll replace them periodically, every few months or so, to deal with any wear from being used to seat the blanks.
The gauge has a 0.1mm allowance past nominal "fully seated", but I could get away with 0.15 or 0.2, I'm pretty sure. Tried printing it in resin first, but there was more distortion than I was happy with, so I ran it in a glass-filled filament instead on the Bambu FDM printer, should have much better dimensional stability in the long term. There are two heights I've put into production, that standard one plus a shorter WB gauge.
