Thanks for your response. I can't recall the exact error code it displayed. All I know is it was operating perfectly Saturday night when I left, and Sunday night third shift couldn't get it to run. An unfamiliar, but competent, employee shut it down for me and the regular user started it up. The machine goes to its home position, but when we try to home the probe head it spins 180+ degrees and indexes to 105+ degrees and that's all she wrote! 99% of the time we use a set-up that is approximately 9 inches long from shaft to tip. For the most part, we collect flatness and TP data in position 1. Occasionally we run programs with minimal indexing. We frequently manually interchange different styli depending upon the part we measure. We are using Tutor for Windows on a Pentium 200 machine with 32 meg of RAM. I think there is some sort of CAD accelerator as well. The machine was built by Brown & Sharpe and replaced our ancient Tutor software about a year ago. The CMM is a DEA GAMMA 1203 using a Tutor P(?) controller and a PH9A head. The machine is in a relatively controlled environment and, while used by many employees regularly, is treated with care. Forgive me for rambling on! Let me know if you need any thing else.
DF