The companies that produce the high quality EDM supplies and precision tooling, such as System 3R and Erowa, have developed some very good products for the EDM machine.
It is a shame that some tool and die and mold making shops do not use the tooling as it was designed to be used. The repeatability of an electrode holder is critical to the success of the EDM operation, that is what the tooling is made to do, very well.
Unfortunately, some shops bypass the precision locating features and revert to the old fashioned method of individually locating the electrode with a dial indicator. This certainly works, but is very time-consuming and costly. It is much more efficient to use the tooling as it was designed to be used.
With some experimentation you can easily determine whether or not the tooling system performs as claimed. If it does not, contact the salesman or manufacturer and get a refund. This beats just living with a faulty system and working around it.
The coins, mini blocks, macro blocks and so on are guaranteed to be accurate within a given tolerance. If it fails to live up to it’s promise, find out why and get some satisfaction.
Randy Hough writes about using the electrical discharge machine at <a href=http://CompleteEDM.com>http://CompleteEDM.com</a>