Is your tooling orthogonal to the robot's face plate? If so, you should be able to just make a point above your fixture's point (with a z user offset) and adjust the utool there without worrying about snapping off teeth from your tooling. Just adjust your utool until you can safely jog in and out of the fixture without binding.
This tool is, yes. This is how I've been doing so far, but carefully jogging it in place then -> touch up the actual point.
If you go the 6 point TCP method then you teach the TCP first, then touch up all of your points to work with the new TCP. Then if the tool changes you should be able to redo the 6 point method and be good again. But, this assumes you have a good, repeatable process to teach the 6 point tcp.
I'll have to touch them all up anyway. The original tool was machined but hand-assembled with 13 parts and was not even square, or straight. However the technician that taught the original points treated them as being straight (making all of them wrong now that my tool is actually straight) and used linear movements relative to the robot center J1 pivot. It's basically like a stadium:
Worse, the 100 stations were epoxied by hand so some are uneven and slightly rotated, causing audible 'tinks' and friction. I solved the problem by copy-pasting and offsetting all of them to give me more control and compensate the entry/exit orientation.
I'll forego fixing the tool frame. I know my tool is accurate to ±0.1mm so I'll rely on that and just get the center point from the CAD model and proceed to fix the whole thing.
My plan was to *never* have to touch them up again as it's such a pain in the *** and hoped I could create a simple procedure that other employees could easily follow, as I might not always be working for this company. Fortunately, touching up the small variations by eye in the future after a tool replacement shouldn't be that difficult.
But for now that means I have to spend a lot of quality time with that damn thing.
Again, thanks for your replies!