Stick-Out - Touch sense

buy a wire trimmer. Stop the robot, advance the wire, trim the wire and it's always the same distance.

Wire feed speed must be set very low for this to even remotely work, otherwise by the time it stops feeding the wire it is already pushed hard against the surface and when the robot moves away from that position the wire under tension moves further out resulting in more stick out. I've tried this method ages ago, it's not constant enough. Wire cutter is the way to go. If you need to have the wire cut in different lengths then you can use a variable combined with a tool frame shift in the cutter to get the desired length.

wire brake wouldn't hurt either

Invest in a torch that has a wire brake if you can. I always recommend doing the wire cut, turning on the wire brake and then doing all your touch sensing, then turning off the brake and doing the welding. That way you are only using the wire cutter once.

Interesting. I'm using a lot of wire searches and only cut it once before the searches. Never used a wire brake. Why would one need to cut the wire multiple times when not using wire brake?

If it's because the stick-out changes too much during searching then using a step thinner spiral liner than the wire calls for helps a lot.

The wire brake guarantees that the wire does not move when the robot is going from one touch sense location to another. Older systems did not have a wire brake but newer systems usually use it to give more accuracy.