That $220 touch probe I bought off eBay finally paid for itself

Picked up a used Renishaw style probe for $220 back in March, mostly on a gamble. Last week I was setting up a repeat job with 14 bores and I was dreading the edge finder dance. Ran the probe cycle on all of them in about 20 minutes and zero crashes. The old way would've eaten half my afternoon, plus the anxiety of a wrong touch on a $4k fixture. Has anyone else had luck with used probes, or did I just get a unicorn?

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taylor_moore12d ago

That 20 minute run sounds like the exact moment the gamble paid off, no doubt. I grabbed a used one from a shop that was closing down a couple years back, paid $180 and it had a cracked stylus I had to replace for another 40 bucks. Still, the first time I let it run on a part with 8 critical depths I knew I wasn’t going back to manual. The real win for me is how it catches a bad fixture setup before I make chips, that alone saves my butt more than the time it saves. You might’ve got a unicorn, but I think these things are way more reliable than people give them credit for, especially when they’re just sitting in a drawer somewhere.