My old shop in Dayton ran the same program for 8 years without a single crash

Last week I watched a new guy at my current place scrap a $2,000 part on the first run. He loaded the wrong offset table and just hit cycle start. Three years ago at my last job, we had a rule: you physically walk the tool path in the air before any new material run. It took an extra ten minutes but we never had a surprise. Now I see shops skip every check to save time. How many of you still do a dry run on new programs?

4 comments

4 Comments

grant.richard2mo ago

What about trusting your setup?

barbarahill2mo ago

That Dayton shop story is impressive, but eight years with zero crashes also sounds like a lot of luck. Even the best programs can have a hidden bug or a weird machine quirk. The dry run rule is solid, but maybe the real lesson is that good habits only work if everyone actually does them every single time. Skipping checks to save ten minutes is how you lose a whole day fixing a wreck.

robin_campbell366h ago

Didn't you ever have a crash that humbled the whole crew into checking twice?

finley_flores286h ago

Another angle here is that zero crashes over eight years might actually point to a really good maintenance culture too. If you're catching hidden bugs in the dry run, that means you're also catching things like missed tool offsets or even a worn spindle that's about to go out. It's not just the operator habits, it's the whole crew paying attention to every little noise and finish mark. Skipping checks to save ten minutes is a bet that costs way more than a day sometimes. I've seen a guy rush a setup, skip the dry run, and then blow a 20k fixture because a clamp was loose. That ten minutes saved turned into a week of waiting for a replacement part.