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#346 Critical projects DONE
276 Plays1 year ago
TOPICS:
- Grimsmo's Kern had toolchanger errors
- Procedures and process bins
- Power consumption on CNC machines - $0.05/hr for Haas to be on.
- Air compressor maintenance
- selling machines
- DNS settings to make sure e-mails get to customers, thanks Joe F
- DKIM add freshdesks to SPF records
- custom endmills from deboer
- Nakamura lathe issues
- Oil skimmers
- Critical projects DONE
LINKS: https://saundersmachineworks.com/pages/equipment-for-sale
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Purpose
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining episode number 346. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough. John and I talk each week about what's going on in life as entrepreneurs and leaders of our small manufacturing companies. That indeed we do.
Managing Business Challenges
00:00:17
Speaker
How you doing? As I confided in our 50 seconds pre-recording, I'm good. Just like lots of little things that I think will get to any business owner because it's a funnel where little and I was told you, I was like, I'm not gonna let this like ruin my day. Cause it's, you gotta have that strength to not let it. But like one of our vendors has systems down. So the guys texting me personally to be like, Hey, our systems are down. And then other invoices and getting paid. And then one,
00:00:46
Speaker
There's a glitch happening somewhere else and I actually am good and love handling all these things except that means I can't be anything else other than put her out of fires and that's not good. Yeah, and sometimes you just have to be the firefighter and sometimes you can delegate the fires but otherwise sometimes it's only up to you to dig in and take care of it. Nobody's coming to save you.
00:01:09
Speaker
Maybe that's what's kind of raw about this morning why it's getting to me a little bit is that most of these things are things that I've offloaded, but they're still coming back to me. You
Vendor Relationship Dynamics
00:01:24
Speaker
know, like to be a little bit specific, the vendor that texted me is a very nice individual with whom I have the relationship, like very nice person, but like we're not friends outside of work, like we're not,
00:01:37
Speaker
period. We have no relationship outside of work. The best person chooses to be very friendly with me, which is great. I'm making myself sound like a turnaround when I explain this. Basically, I don't need text from you ever. I don't handle this relationship anymore. It's been offloaded to somebody else. I'm not going to block the person. They have their best of intentions. They're just trying to do their part. How are you?
00:02:07
Speaker
Pretty
Machinery Maintenance Issues
00:02:08
Speaker
good. Came into the shop last night around 11 o'clock because the current was stuck on a tool change. And this has been happening past couple days a little bit more and more. And usually because I have the current remote monitored through VNC so I can check it from home and Angelo can also check it from home. So he texts me at 10 o'clock at night and he's like the current stuck on a tool change. So I hit the retry button.
00:02:32
Speaker
Can you do that remotely? You can do that remotely. It's pretty sick. It's awesome. This is an error we know. It's like if you didn't install a tool in the tool rack and the gripper goes to grab a tool that's not there, there's a little laser beam that says if there's a tool or not there, which is great because if you forget to put it in, it just says tool slot empty.
00:02:55
Speaker
And you can hit retry, and it'll grab nothing, and it'll still error out. But the past couple of days, there's been a tool there, and it's just not seeing it properly. So it won't even go forward, because it just thinks there's no tool. And that LED laser sensor, whatever it is, is either malfunctioning or misaligned or erroring or something. So I emailed Tina at Kern, and she sent me a recalibration procedure. Super simple.
00:03:22
Speaker
And so I came in last night because the retry button was not working. And I just was able to realign it. They have a little procedure, align it towards this little spot. And it was crooked off to the side to the point where if I just touch the side of the sensor, it would trigger on or off. And it was like right at the limit of
00:03:42
Speaker
even just with the vibration of the machine or whatever. So no wonder why I was airing out. So anyway, so I got it super centered. And there's a button on the side of that sensor that you do this like with a tool in place, you hold the button for three seconds, let go, and then remove the tool and then hold the button for one second, and then let go. And that teaches the difference between light and dark of there being a tool or not being a tool. And once I did that perfectly fine now, now it's like factory spec, like back to normal.
00:04:08
Speaker
So awesome. Super cool. I mean, after four years, I'm not complaining too much. It's uh, it was easy to fix that. Is that part of a PM schedule? I mean, I don't know, because she was here four months ago. And I don't think she touched that. But yeah, right. It's kind of like, well, no big deal. They just happened. And then
00:04:30
Speaker
Yeah, or it's one of those things maybe like it usually doesn't go bad, but if it does, here's how you fix it kind of thing. Yeah, right. But I added the procedure and the fixed document and my notes and what happened to our GURP system so that if you ever see that error again, you just look it up in the procedures and there's the solution, pictures, everything. That's great. Yeah, really happy about that.
Optimizing Shopify Processes
00:04:56
Speaker
I think as our systems develop, I want to keep switching, swapping notes because there's pride of success, but there's no pride of like, I'll happily switch and borrow your techniques.
00:05:14
Speaker
whatever's best, period. We just created a process for Shopify and it's a simple thing where, and Alex says most of our Shopify programming, if you will, but we create flows that can allow us to do certain action events when certain items are purchased. Super helpful. We have two, I think, VF
00:05:36
Speaker
five and a VF3YT are actually the exact same plate, like same table. They're not the same machine, but same table. And so it creates this quirk inventory situation where we don't want to say, let's say we have quantity two in stock. It could be purchased as two VF5s, two VF3YTs, one each, whatever. We don't want to represent on Shopify that we have two of each in stock.
00:06:01
Speaker
Because that would show that we have four and under a really, really bad, wonderful, really bad scenario, somebody could end up buying all over the right at once. So we create flows around certain things like that where we have a note that's like, hey, somebody bought this plate. By the way, we also need to manually adjust image around this other product because they're the same Lex skew.
00:06:23
Speaker
There's marketing reasons we don't want to consolidate the inventory because we don't want people to be confused thinking, wait, I want it to be a five plate. Why is it showing me a three IT? When certain products are purchased that need special packaging requirements, like super, super unusual, but super important. We can create a flow now. It just gets an email to our shipping person. It's like, hey, this product was purchased. Remember to use this box.
00:06:45
Speaker
Those are great. It's sustainable tribalism. But we realized we needed a Shopify process bin where we just print out a quick note of like, hey, we have a flow around this product being purchased. We leave FedEx overnight disabled on Shopify because we generally don't want people thinking that we can ship a product via next day.
00:07:13
Speaker
because we just don't. I don't want to have somebody buy something at 4.15. Everybody's left, and they are like, wait, I needed it tomorrow. I spent so many dollars. But we can enable it. And we have folks maybe once or twice a month that will email us. And so there's a process around going in and enabling that and then re-disabled it. Yes. That's like our physical wiki, I guess, which you're doing a little interesting.
00:07:37
Speaker
Yeah, through digital. You have a bin, you have printed pieces of paper, and you have them stored in a location that you go grab, right? Yeah. I think we talked about this before. The Shopify stuff is actually all digital, of course. We just want a physical manifestation because it's so nice sometimes. You must also have a Google Doc digital version in Google Drive. What I've found is I'm exaggerating, but 400 spreadsheets and documents
00:08:08
Speaker
of all kinds of stuff and knowing where they are and what to look for and what to search for and what does what is confusing, frankly. The person that created them has their head wrapped around all of them, but the rest of the team gets super lost having too many distant documents.
00:08:24
Speaker
whether it is a physical printed location with all the documents or whether it's like a digital dashboard, kind of like Wikipedia has menus and things like that. The ability to sort and organize that information is critical. And I think we're both learning that
00:08:41
Speaker
While the processes might be fairly straightforward, making them dummy proof, whether it's digital or paper or whatever is the key. It's just like having a process, a procedure for everything is something I want to spend a lot of time on.
00:08:59
Speaker
subconsciously struggled with the wiki side of like Google Docs and shared folders is when we have them, we use them is that you end up with massive amounts of stale information. You didn't realize it's needed updated. It's just old. You don't really want to go delete a bunch of stuff. And the process bins are
00:09:19
Speaker
They're intrinsically linear because you can just flip through it and be like, okay, that's no longer relevant. Interesting. You feel bad about it? If we throw away process bin instruction sheet on, say, creating a bill of waiting for anodizing, well, maybe the Google Doc is still up there in the cloud, but I don't really care. Interesting. You can obviously see the time stamps on the digital file. I like it actually, but the paper is the king. It's the active process.
00:09:49
Speaker
Yeah. I like that. Yeah. All right.
Electricity Usage Insights
00:09:56
Speaker
What else you up to? Okay. I got some updates on electricity.
00:10:03
Speaker
Good and bad news. The good news for sure is a pretty quick like spent 20-30 minutes test of our Haas machines is pretty awesome on how little power they use. So that's a win. This is a regular old amp meter that where you put the clamp around a cable. This is on a VF2 YT. I did a quick spot check on one other Haas just to make sure it wasn't
00:10:32
Speaker
totally different, but basically spend all the time on a VF2 IT. When the machine is powered on, but just idle, just like chilling out there, like let's say you just finished a cycle at Holmes and just stops, that sort of idle. It was running 1.8 amps.
00:10:52
Speaker
at 400 volts or whatever you're at, 230. So we're 208 volts in our shop. So 1.8 amps at 208 volts is 375 watts. And that is 0.37 kilowatt hours. Assuming, this is the point we'll come back to, assuming
00:11:08
Speaker
14 cents per kilowatt hour, which I think I Google it as the Ohio average. Obviously, that will vary greatly around the country or world. 14 cents a kilowatt hour. That means at 1.8 amps at 208 volt, it costs me a nickel per hour for my hostages idle. That's fantastic. Yeah. Oh, that's so cool to know.
00:11:30
Speaker
Yeah. When you turn the setting on, so if you go to your Haas settings or current commands, I think it's settings, power, savings, they have some nice little options. One of them is hydraulics and servos off. So I thought this would be more impactful, but I guess when you're only pulling 1.8 amps, that's pretty low. When those kick off,
00:11:53
Speaker
When that feature kicks on, that's turning off the servos, turning off the hydraulic pumps, it only dropped from 1.8 to 1.2. So your nickel per hour goes down to three cents an hour. I thought there might be more savings there, but I'm guessing some of that is just, it's still got a lot of things to power for circuitry, monitors, lights, and probably the Z-axis servo to keep the Z-axis up, et cetera.
00:12:20
Speaker
And then I did a quick test, jogging the machine pretty far away, hitting the rapid home where you're going to have X, Y, and Z all move at the same time. And that was
00:12:34
Speaker
10 amps, 2000 watts, two kilowatt hours. So that would cost 30 cents an hour to do that consistently, basically to run 10 amps. So all these numbers were pretty small, I thought. Yeah.
00:12:51
Speaker
I didn't do testing. Now that I'm talking a lot, I'm curious to go test what's the Akuma horizontal pulling when the spindle's at 30%. I don't know. Even turning on. It's hard to momentarily grab that, hey? No, you do the max setting on the amp meter. If it peaks at 60 amps for 200 milliseconds, I don't really care. Yeah, exactly.
00:13:17
Speaker
I took that as all good news. The bad news is this actually caused me to pay attention to my power bill. We have American Electric Power in Ohio. I'll just share it because I don't really care. Our power bill for the month of October was $2,531.
00:13:37
Speaker
Of that, $13.77 was supply, so just barely over half. $1,500 was delivery charge. And if you're like me, when it comes to Ticketmaster or a cable bill or a power bill, it's pretty easy to get annoyed with all of the service fees, customers fees, convenience fees, tack on fees. And this has a lot of those. The punchline, though, is the
00:14:03
Speaker
We used 12,720 kilowatt hours, which $2,500 divided by that many kilowatt hours is 20 cents a kilowatt hour, which is a horrible, horrible electric rate.
00:14:21
Speaker
This is kind of on my list to check out. There's been some news in Ohio that I haven't paid close enough attention to about POCO, which is the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, where there's an amendment and a rate and a rider and a pretty big... Well, basically, I'm not getting good power rates. I don't know if there's anything I can do about it. I don't know more about the details between the service
00:14:47
Speaker
portion of the charges versus the, what I assume, what they call it, you know, of that. So yeah, half of it was actual supply. 500 bucks was transmission. $640 was distribution. And then $9 is a customer charge, whatever that means. So yeah. Hmm. I'm looking at mine right now. There's a lot of data to look through, but basically,
00:15:15
Speaker
Because we have two buildings, we have two separate meters, basically. OK. Last month, the front shop cost $400 and the machine shop cost $2,600. Pretty similar. Yeah. Actually, the machine shop's almost identical. Right? Canadian, so a bit cheaper. Forgive me. It says, on peak, $0.18 per kilowatt hour. Off peak is $0.08 per kilowatt hour.
00:15:45
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah, so eight is good. For sure. 2018 is not. Luckily, we were on the current at night offbeat. Yeah, right. Well, I assume that's what that means. But I would want to get clarification around that. Right. It looks like I can't tell what this is saying. But yeah,
00:16:13
Speaker
Yeah, maybe I'm wrong. I mean, googling average kilowatt hour costs, Ohio should be 15 cents. Average nationally is 18 cents in what would be like an energy friendly state, maybe Texas 15 cents per kilowatt hour. So maybe I'm wrong. California.
00:16:30
Speaker
Oh, that's going to be high. $0.29 per kilowatt hour. Now, some of this may be residential stuff. Right. I suspect we're not big enough to be a true industrial user. For example, an acquaintance in a large Ohio factory sent me a fund screenshot of their monthly utility bills, which their monthly bills are well into the six figures. Whoa. Obviously, that's where you're spending more time and effort on
00:17:00
Speaker
your rates. Like I said last week, aside from wasting power, it's a good thing if a machine shop uses power because it means machines are running and you're making parts.
Improving Compressor Efficiency
00:17:13
Speaker
The other thing we did was some really, really good, just feels great TLC on our compressors.
00:17:23
Speaker
So like I'd mentioned, we replaced the 10 horsepower with a brand new seven and a half. That's great. So we have sort of sister compressors, same size that, um, we had already used Amazon Alexa's with 110 volt Alexa plugs, excuse me, smart plugs with 110 volt bulb outs. So they shut, they shut the output.
00:17:47
Speaker
line of the compressor at a Alexa scheduled time. So basically the compressor can stay powered on, but it can't, there's nowhere for air to go because the bulb out shuts. The flaw in that to date was we also weren't doing anything with the drain lines, the auto drains. So over a night or especially over the weekend, the drains were happening regularly. So I just bought more plugs. That's even easier to just plug the auto drain. We use
00:18:17
Speaker
Actually, I don't think the compressors come with it. We've retrofitted them with all have this little button timer, two little potentiometers, one for the delay, one for the time on. Okay. You know what I'm talking about for auto drains? Yeah. No. Oh, how do you auto drain your tanks?
00:18:33
Speaker
I think the Kaiser just has it automatic settings in there. Just does it. Okay. Got it. Many compressors or even screws don't or ours haven't. I actually don't even know how that would be happening other than manually, which is atrocious to think about. We have these pretty common and expensive little black box. The left dial is how long you want it to wait between purges. The right dial is how long the purge is. Every 45 minutes it purges for 10 seconds.
00:19:02
Speaker
No, just constant always. Interesting.
00:19:05
Speaker
No, every 45 minutes. Yeah, but perpetually. Correct. OK. But that thing is just a 110 cord. And we'll put that on a smart plug. So then over the weekend, if it shuts the bulb out to the tank and it turns off the drain, in theory, that compressor will stay at the same PSI without the target for weeks. Shouldn't need to pump at all unless it loses itself. So you don't need the auto drain in that scenario, right?
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah, but the only thing we did is I realized one of our compressors was the way it was leveled was tipped slightly away from the drain.
00:19:47
Speaker
Our tanks have our compressors have tanks that are laid down, if you will. So they're longer left to right. I think some of the Kaisers are vertical, which is better this way. And I realized that the auto drain was not going to be able to drain as all the moisture when the when the tank was tipped a little bit the other way. So I put 3d printed some shims that gave me just the perfect ever so slight, like one degree angle, tipping the compressor toward the drink. So that felt really good. Nice.
00:20:16
Speaker
Are they levelable? Are they feed adjustable? They have steel cleats kind of welded to the tank that have holes in them. I think they have rubber pads, but there's no built-in adjustment to them themselves. So I didn't want to overthink it like it was just, yeah. Interesting. Yeah.
00:20:42
Speaker
That felt good. You wrap that project up and you're like, great, compressors are now not wasting energy. The drains are going to work better. Yeah, it's good. It's awesome. Yeah, we got last summer, our Kaiser had a problem and it died, so we just bought a second one. Then eventually we got the first one fixed, but it still hasn't been plumbed into the system. It's sitting right next to it, works, everything works, but it's not plugged into our airlines.
00:21:11
Speaker
I think we're still waiting for us to decide whatever for guys to come back and sync them together so that they lead lag kind of thing. But at the very least, we have a backup that we could manually switch over if a problem happened. But it's one of those things I shouldn't let it go for too long before I have another issue. Because air is one of those things. Like a machine shop cannot run without air. It's absolutely useless. And do you guys run an airline to the finishing shop?
00:21:40
Speaker
They have their own small compressor. They have a seven and a half horsepower, like the first one we got eight hours ago, nine years ago.
00:21:47
Speaker
When the Kaiser guy came in to do maintenance on our big ones, um, we now have two SM 10, 10 horsepower units. And he's like, the front shop doesn't even hardly ever use air. Like you're not cycling the front compressor enough. Like, why don't you just run an air hose from the machine shop to the, like, no, that's, that's too much work. That's, you know, their compressor works. Leave it alone. Just make sure it has oil and like, yeah, it's fine. But.
00:22:16
Speaker
One of the things we need to do, and it's actually going to be more, I thought it was going to be a lot of work, it's going to be more work than I realized, is disposing, selling some of this stuff.
Efficient Use of Equipment
00:22:30
Speaker
Our 10-horsepower compressor, some machines, some other stuff. I don't want
00:22:36
Speaker
to spam people. I don't want to spam people on this podcast, on an Instagram. It's just not cool. So we're doing a better for sale page on our Shopify, like on songs.com. It'd be kind of like a sub page though. But we are
00:22:55
Speaker
going to be selling some stuff. We will gently nudge that page out. I'll probably try to put a link in this description as well. We've got a couple things up the sleeves that we might be repositioning. We might be selling some bigger stuff as well. Interesting. Yeah. More to come on that. The other thing, which is a good segue, is we're going to sell our EMCO. I'm not sad about this at all.
00:23:19
Speaker
Yeah, it was a good machine to us. Our Blue EMCO Maximat V13 manual lathe. I had this in my New York garage. It's been great. We are going to sell it because we don't need a 13-inch manual lathe anymore. Yeah. And the shipping area, once the space where it's at, I want to purchase a small
00:23:43
Speaker
benchtop or small period. I prefer 110 volt just for ease of use. Sort of chucker lay like one inch in smaller stuff. So I don't want to tag I want something beefier than that. But the work that we tend to do on it is like stuff like silly stuff like hey, I want to relieve a bolt head or trim something down or deep like just little easy stuff. I don't really want to buy a new grizzly like a
00:24:10
Speaker
kind of my goal. I sort of like Shaolin. It's kind of an open question either to you anyone listening. Is there a good, you know, call it $2,000 to $4,000?
00:24:23
Speaker
110 volt, one inch and under it. Don't need a tail stock, like a chucker style lathe that takes five C or similar color system that you could do that kind of work. Honestly, the two tools we'll probably use on it is a OD turning tool and a grooving parting tool. That's like all we really need. I'd like it to have a DRO, but then have to, but I'd like it to be decent quality.
Custom Tooling Solutions
00:24:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:44
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. It sounds like a used retrofitted machine. I don't know. In a similar boat, we have three fancy CNC lathes, and we have no manual lathe. So it's actually been frustrating for a couple of years. And I've been on the fence. I'm like, do I just want to buy a used old hard hinge or something? And there's guys out there that rebuild them and make them nice and stuff. But that's $10,000 or $20,000 to get a nice one decked out. And it's still tempting.
00:25:11
Speaker
But we had a little job yesterday that Angela had to do on our crappy drill press because we don't have a manual lathe. I was going to make this one from Willyman, but I didn't have time. And he's like, well, what if I just modify this piece of brown plastic and I'll just hack it together? And it worked fine. But yeah.
00:25:28
Speaker
Yeah, I don't want an HLV and they're great glaze, 10 double, like a modern 10 double year and a hardened HLV. Those are great, but like they're big machines, they're three glaze. Real power, yeah. I don't need that level of quality. I just, it's not, there's nothing exciting about buying a Grizz. I certainly don't want the seven by 14. Like that's like China junk. Yeah. But, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm.
00:25:57
Speaker
Keep us up to date if you find something. Yeah, I will do. I also have to give a shout out to a gentleman and a listener named Joe F who reached out. I don't even remember why we were discussing this, but he made us aware of some website or like DNS settings that will verify some of the emails that are coming from both Shopify and Freshdesks to basically minimize the chance that the rest of the internet thinks that those emails might be spam.
00:26:25
Speaker
We definitely had noticed that a decent percentage of emails that came from things like fresh desks were not getting to folks' inboxes. I just want to say thank you. I really appreciate that. It's one of those things that keeps you up at night. I'm like, man, why do I not know about what I'm doing with my business? Getting that stuff fixed was awesome. It feels really good. Interesting. Easy things?
00:26:50
Speaker
Uh, I actually asked Alex to do it. I, I've so wanted to like, you know, the old high school John computer days, wanted to like it in there and do, you know, the C name logs for the DNS and flush it and check it and then get into my command prompt and ping stuff. But, um, Alex, his boss just said to him, it was just to pay it forward here. Um, anybody else that wants to check this or look into it, it was, uh, um,
00:27:16
Speaker
On your domain, you need a set of DKIM and then add fresh desks to the SPF record for your domain. That should be enough for anybody that wants to check this themselves and Google it or look into it, whether it's for fresh desks or your own, you know, whatever third-party platform or software you're trying to use to send emails like through for us, saunterspeshimworks.com. Interesting. When we send our Maker's Choice emails, they go through SendGrid.
00:27:43
Speaker
which is the third party thing. Yep. And I haven't heard too many complaints about them going into spam, but maybe I should ask the team because maybe they know and haven't told me. Yeah. Yeah. And I look, I appreciate the wet internet doing stuff like this. The amount of spam that our Google picks up is just, you know, it's dozens of messages per hour, um, of spam folder. Oh yeah. I don't get them. I get dozens, a dozen a day or two, like not even a couple of day.
00:28:13
Speaker
Yeah. Interesting. So it's all good. Good to know. What have you been up to? I'm having our local end mill manufacturer, Deboer Tool, make me custom micro high-feed end mills. Oh, that's the solution to Seeco? Yeah, exactly. Because we've been ordering from Seeco for a while through our local distributor, and they're not an official
00:28:40
Speaker
retailer, so it's harder for them to get, and they get super expensive by the time they get to us. And I'm like, why am I still doing that? I'm spending way too much money on each end mill. And then I just ordered the other week, and they're like, oh, it'll be like an eight-week lead time for that end mill. And I'm like, I need it in five days. Oh, OK. Not that having them custom-made is any faster, but it's a better long-term solution, I think. And they quoted them significantly cheaper.
00:29:09
Speaker
Custom made is cheaper. Custom made. Yeah. Batch of 10, um, cheaper. And I'm a huge fan of Deboer tools. I'm starting to use probably 50% of the current or more is Deboer now. And, uh, we use a lot of their other high feed end mills, their eighth inch and they're fantastic. They're just awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So yeah, they're making me a one millimeter high feed and a one 16th inch high feed with a fancy coating that should last better in titanium.
00:29:37
Speaker
And I'm super excited. It's cool. They sent like a print of their, their drawing. And as I redrew the print in fusion, so I could see it up close and, and it was cool. They had a little radii on there and I could see what their lead angles were. It's awesome. I wonder how easy it is for a tool, tool company A to like look at tool company B's grind and rake and profile and you call it and be like, I think it's fairly easy. Is it?
00:30:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think they can look at the picture and then also the drawing that, you know, Seiko publishes on their website. And Debord designed it differently and I called them on it and he said, well, you know, every manufacturer has their own flavor and we can't just rip them off kind of thing. We have to use our flavor for this tool.
00:30:23
Speaker
So whereas the Seaco tool has two little humps on the end with a dead spot in the middle, so like a bullnose and milk kind of thing where there is an empty or flat spot in the middle, the board tools tend to have a radius that meets almost a center point with a slight little dimple in the middle.
00:30:41
Speaker
Um, almost flat though. And that's our eighth inch tools from them work fantastic like that. And so like, whatever, just, they said they should perform great and I trust them and we shall see. That's awesome. Yeah. How long will it take them to get customs? I think three weeks. Oh, that's better than eight weeks. Yeah, totally. Right. Oh man. So I approved that the other day and, um, yeah, just let them run with it.
00:31:06
Speaker
Cool. I figured 10 of each will be, I mean, they last me two or three weeks per end mill. So that's 10 is going to last me a long time. And then we already have an established tool life. So with that, I should be able to prepare a bit better purchasing schedule to make sure I always have them.
In-house Maintenance Solutions
00:31:23
Speaker
Yeah, right. And I was like, you guys should just offer these on your website because you offer everything 8th engine above, like add these micro ones too because they're awesome.
00:31:34
Speaker
I could see how though, I don't know what the threshold is, but when tools go from, for us, it's under 3.16, it's definitely under an eighth of an inch. You've got to just change your approach. From a customer service standpoint, I could see why maybe it's like, we don't want people buying that unless they know what they're doing. Interesting, yeah. Yeah. What else is going on?
00:32:02
Speaker
the other day Pierre and I were chatting and we heard a noise come from the Nakamura and we both turn around and we go investigate and when it's making a saga pocket clip the sub spindle has an hardened ID expanding clamp that comes over and IDs the bore and then pulls it out the length of one part so it unclamps the main pulls it out
00:32:28
Speaker
Clamps the main is supposed to chop off the part with an end mill and then pull the finished machine part all the way over to the subside. Except this time, and it has happened before, it ended up pulling the
00:32:44
Speaker
The cutoff tool had broken on a previous step, didn't get caught. So it pulled the entire bar with the part over to the subside. And then that finished tool was broken. So then it did its finished machining. And then when it goes to eject the part, it now has a clamped bar with the sub spindle that it's trying to shove forward. And yeah, that made a noise. Nothing's bad. Nothing's bad. Nothing broken. But when we got over there and opened the door,
00:33:13
Speaker
sub spindles all the way out and the bar is also all the way out and like beside the sub spindle a little bit this five eight study. And Angela and I were talking about it and they got thinking like, why is
00:33:30
Speaker
the main spindle open when the part is retracting all the way over? Should it not be clamped? If it is clamped, why is the main spindle grip not 100 times more than your little ID expanding clamp? Wouldn't that just pop off instead? So I'm going to have to look through the code to see if for some reason the main collet is open when it's pulling the whole bar out and allowing this fiasco to happen.
00:33:58
Speaker
because that shouldn't be, you know? Yeah. I'd say it's happened a small handful of times in these 60 years we've been making this part, but that's way too many. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. And so it just bent the bar for a couple of tools, but okay. Otherwise. Yeah. I think it's totally fine. I mean, I didn't actually check in with them, but I know they were running parts within an hour. So got it. Yeah. I, uh, we do, I don't know how often grant,
00:34:26
Speaker
I don't know if it's every part or every 10 parts, but, um, I love, I love having the Haas tools that are armed to come in and touch off the, or do a break detect on the, uh, parting tool because it's bad days when there's a break. Um, yeah. Yeah. Our toolsetter is a manual install, which is lame, like good for precision, but whatever. No, that's like.
00:34:52
Speaker
I'm not trying to rag on you, but like, I remember you showed that to me. I was up there. I'm like, that's some, that you need to be taken out back and whipped for. Yeah, that's lame. That's like grief. What? Yeah. We had a nice quality of life fix about our skimpy oil skimmers. Do you use those skimpy things? Not skimpy. I had a Zebra one for a while.
00:35:17
Speaker
Okay, I don't know how we got turned on to skimpy, but we've been buying them for a while. They're like a belt fed. Yeah, little one inch rubber belt.
00:35:29
Speaker
but every once in a while they'll wear out. And it was never really clear to me, was it the gear or the belt stretching? So we bought some new belts on one of them and the new belts looked much nicer than what I thought was worn out belt, but the new belts were also loose. And then I started to look at replacing the gears and I was like, wait a minute, I don't wanna spend 70 bucks on replacement parts for a hundred and, I don't know what they cost, $2 skimmer. I was like, this doesn't make any sense to me.
00:35:55
Speaker
And the design, it's relatively simple, including a piece of aluminum, you know, six inches long, a little piece of aluminum bar stock, it's rectangular, but could be square, it doesn't matter. And on each end of that piece of bar stock is a hole that's been drilled for the pulleys that are plastic. I should think at one point, some of them look 3D printed, although maybe that was one that we had replaced ourselves.
00:36:22
Speaker
So I thought, wait a minute, all these need is a tensioner on them. And so I started thinking about a tensioner. And then quickly it was like, John, stop. This is now going to get into the more quality or more time than you should be spending on it. But then I thought, wait a minute, all we need to do is print a sleeve. So think like cardboard tube, 3D printed cardboard tube that fits over, it's a rectangular, not round, that fits over that piece of
00:36:49
Speaker
aluminum. It happened to be half inch by five eight. Super simple to measure in 3D print. And I took our little portable Milwaukee bandsaw, cut the
00:37:01
Speaker
extrusion in half or cut it and then with the 3D printed part it printed quarter twenty threads on each two halves of it printed a little hole it was a sight window which I didn't even need but could show okay I've lined the two up now they're touching back them off or put the belt on pull it backward tighten the two screws down and you now have a
00:37:24
Speaker
20 minute tensioner fix that we can use. I mean, we've got like 10 skimmers and the belts change over time. That was a totally. Love it. Acceptable in-house fix. Right, right. Yep. And I've been burned by a couple of those, you know, six hours later, you're like, why am I still spending time designing this 3D print and optimizing it? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was good. What are you up to today?
Hiring and Project Prioritization
00:37:52
Speaker
Today.
00:37:54
Speaker
wrapping up a hiring post because we are putting up a post to hire a precision machinist. So I think that's going up today. And I filmed a video to go along with it. It's actually really fun. I sifted through basically every video we've put up since being in this shop. And I did a screen grab just at home at night. OBS kind of screen recording of the little clips. And I want to put together a cool, super cool clip show of what it's like to work here.
00:38:21
Speaker
Yeah, that was super fun going through all the old videos. And we put out some some cool footage and some cool shots over the past four years. And so currently, Ryan is editing that together. And I did a little speaking narration over top of like what we're looking for and stuff. And that was fun. It's awesome. Super fun. Good. That's my that's my focus. And I realized last night I was thinking a lot about it. I was like, I'm like,
00:38:48
Speaker
Um, you know, the dog Doug from the movie up where he's like squirrel.
00:38:52
Speaker
It's like a uniform. Anyway, it's a dog that's like obsessed with squirrels. And every, every project is a squirrel to me. You know, every cool thing. Oh, I can 3d print that. Oh, I can make that. Oh, the website needs to change. I can do that. And oh, work on the willow. And yeah, I'll do that. And I forget the importance of some projects based on the excitement of other projects. And I am I am getting better at focusing on the
00:39:21
Speaker
finishing projects. I'm very good about finishing tasks, but actually wrapping a project is a struggle of mine. I'm putting a lot of focus on that and hiring this person is one of the biggest things for us right now, almost to the point of nothing else matters. You know what I mean?
00:39:44
Speaker
especially dumb little stuff. I'm definitely trying to pull back and realize what has to happen, what has to get complete and that's one of them.
00:39:54
Speaker
Good. That's awesome. The spirit, I think, of this podcast and talking from day one. I mean, good grief. I'm not going to go listen back to the first episode. I'm not, and I would ask nobody else to do that either. We were very different points in our lives, for sure. Very. We have no employees.
00:40:16
Speaker
Is that true? I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Wow. That's crazy. Why would I have a part-time? Because I had a part-time, like the day I moved to Ohio. Sure. Yeah. Very different. Right. And Eric's been working with me. But like, that's not where we're at. I didn't have payroll obligation that is what it is today.
00:40:39
Speaker
But what
Business Growth Reflection
00:40:40
Speaker
you just said about your ability to squirrel reminds me of the wonderful spousal phrase, a phrase to use with your spouse of do you want support or do you want solutions? Yup. Are you asking me? Yes. That is a wonderful spousal phrase and I've used that one.
00:41:10
Speaker
I don't know. I think I'm at a good place right now where I know what I need to do and I don't necessarily need motivation, push, help, stern, whatever, but I'm always open to the ideas. Cool. It reminds me of what I want.
00:41:32
Speaker
You know, I want to have my, I'm going to just be totally blatantly honest here for the last few minutes. I want to have my cake and eat it too. I want awesome products with strong sales, with a sustainable business, with a team that understands the right culture. And we are well capitalized and I can afford from a time standpoint, more so than a financial standpoint, I can afford to do what I want to do because we have everything in place. I think that's probably why this morning kind of got to me a little bit.
00:42:00
Speaker
you know, all these things kept coming back to me, even though I had swatted them away by delegating them. And it's a manifestation that I failed if these things are still falling back on to me, but on the flip side.
00:42:13
Speaker
Um, we have come a very long way in so many respects. And then I remind myself of the, uh, I gotta be careful. I'll get emotional here. The, uh, the book, my wife bought for me about once you're over 40 Arthur Brooks. Oh man. Um,
00:42:32
Speaker
I'll look up here while we're talking, but this idea that like there's never enough the way we're kind of wired and talk about the source of happiness and from strength to strength. It is a spiritual book, which is not my normal cup of tea, but dealing with success at life after 40 years of age and what you want out of stuff. And as we're coming into the holiday season, I find myself reflecting on
00:43:00
Speaker
What a great year it's been and having children, both of whom kind of crazy, but both of whom still are rocking and rolling about Christmas, if you get my gist. I suspect we should appreciate that right now. Again, trying to speak in code here for any family listening. A gentle reminder to not forget too much about Christmas.
00:43:22
Speaker
Yeah, and but also like remind ourselves of what what makes you happy. And I don't, if anything, I find myself kind of trying to lean toward disposing of stuff and not acquiring more stuff. Yeah. And in in in having a hunger to grow a lot of ways about being a better leader, a better person and a better friend. I'm not always a good listener. And I have sometimes too many opinions, but also recognizing I'm good. I've there's an aspect of
00:43:51
Speaker
pride of having reached some pretty major milestones here that this is good. Yep. And we're in the same way. I flip back and forth all the time because I'm like, on one hand, we're crushing, we're doing great. I was thinking we've actually accomplished what I set out to do at one point where it's like have reliable processes to be able to make
00:44:16
Speaker
Excellent products continuously without major issues constant and we do that we have just repeat production i've got. Codes on our later on or more or something that haven't changed in years and years because they just work is that a good thing or bad thing i don't know i think it's mostly good thing but it's. You know stifling change in development growth and stuff but.
00:44:35
Speaker
For the most part, the guys can come in. They can make parts. They're great parts. Knives go together. We sell knives. Everything's great. That was my previous goal. It's like I've achieved that now for a while. I'm both hungry and frustrated with not getting to the next goals yet, like setting them and figuring out what the next steps are. I do want to grow the business. I do want to release more products. I do want to hire more people.
00:45:04
Speaker
wrapping my head around that on top of all the day to day of running a company. Yeah, you know, yeah. So it's it's that mental firestorm of, you know, thoughts back and forth. But it's good. We've got a great team and continue to lean on them more and more and, you know, push people towards greatness. Awesome. Yeah, fun. Good. See you next week. Yeah, man. All right. Have an awesome day. Take care.