Heard a guy at the tool crib say something that stuck with me

I was grabbing end mills this morning and this old timer told a new guy 'measure the tool, not the part'. I always chased the final dimension and adjusted offsets blind. Took me 20 minutes to check a 3/8 cutter and it ran true for the whole batch. Anyone else run into a simple phrase that just finally clicked for them?

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mason7984d ago

I spent the first three years of my apprenticeship doing it backwards, chasing the number on the print and wondering why my finish kept drifting halfway through a run. My old lead, a guy named Denny who smoked like a chimney and never wrote anything down, used to tell me "the part don't lie, but the cutter sure will." Took me way too long to figure out he meant check the tool first before you go blaming the part or the machine. I finally started touching off every cutter before a job and my scrap pile dropped to almost nothing. Now I feel like a genius for doing the thing I should have been doing from day one.

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