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#264 - "I love you but there's an Okuma MB-4000H out there."
197 Plays3 years ago
Topics:
- Okuma MB-4000H Arrives at SMW
- 3 Tombstones Loaded
- Training on Collision Avoidance to Begin
- Delayed Chip Conveyor Appears
- Important PSA about Buying CNC Machines & Paying Invoices
- Zeiss DuraMax CMM for Grimsmo Knives
- Active VS Passive Scanning: Zeiss Tour
- Part Deviation
- Fixturing/ Work Holding
- Bourn & Koch Tour
- Occam's Razor & Eliminating Setups
- Air Quality Meters
- Leadership & Management
- At least we're not THAT person!
COMING SOON
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- Manager Meetings at SMW
- Creations Unlimited Tour with Dennis Rathi
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Greetings
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining episode number 264. My name is John Saunders. My name is John Grimsmo.
Setting Up New Machines
00:00:08
Speaker
I'm a brand new horizontal that I'm stepping away from. I love you, John. I really love you, but if there was ever a time where I'm like, I'll be right back. I'm going to go for it. Super, super
00:00:24
Speaker
more exciting than I even thought, to be honest. They weren't joking. It's actually technically not done. They're still here today, which is literally two weeks from the delivery date, and they've been here a team of two every day. That's no good things to say. It's just that's the scope of
00:00:44
Speaker
Wow. Work versus a vertical where you drop it off, take the grease, you hook up a few things. It's one of those, you could do it in four hours if you had a Formula One pit stop style team approach. But they're doing a great job last night. Yesterday about 2.30, they said, okay, we're about done. We're going to come back tomorrow to do some final electrical stuff and the probe, but they handed it over to me.
00:01:09
Speaker
We have three tombstones already and we went ahead, we loaded them up into the load station, precision flat ground, touched the top of the pallet and the bottom of the tombstone. Both were perfect. I mean, there was not a single spec of high spot anywhere. Put some RP on them, bolted them down just so that I could move them around. They're not aligned yet.
00:01:35
Speaker
And then this morning, I had about 20 or 30 minutes before they showed up. I'm putting some never seize on the bolts and then was about to start dialing in the tombstone and then they showed up and I handed it back to them.
Challenges with Alignment and Probing
00:01:50
Speaker
But that's the question is going to be,
00:01:52
Speaker
Those tombstones are supposed to be pretty good. They're machined to a certain spec as is, but am I going to be able to get it aligned good enough? Like quite good or do I need to get it as close as I can and then still kiss the tombstone with the machine? I'd rather not. So that's the question. We'll find out.
00:02:12
Speaker
kind of where I was at with the Kern too because the Aroa pallets, they're very nicely made but they have these screw on feet, the locating pads basically that I'm sure they make it to the best tolerances that they possibly can but my question was am I going to have to skim everyone before I start bolting tombstones and vices and stuff on top. I probed a whole bunch of them and they were within
00:02:35
Speaker
Several tenths of each other so I'm like it's fine. You know I could go and do them all but I don't want to
00:02:43
Speaker
So I just left them. Yes, right. It depends on the kind of work you're doing and how you're probing and how you're creating geometry. I'll never forget when you and I were walking through K1, the current job shop and they sort of said, we make our own fixtures and the fixtures are only ever made on the same machine that the part will be running because we're just not going to introduce extra
00:03:12
Speaker
a couple tenths across a six inch face isn't bad at all, but it also means it's short of changing things or tweaking. It's never going to be better than that either. I forgot about that. That is a good fact to remember, yeah. Right. It's cool.
Viewer Questions and Probing Software Goals
00:03:28
Speaker
Yeah. So the one thing, I actually have a couple of viewer questions today. We start training on Monday. I have no idea. I don't really even know how to load a tool into it. I mean, I could load it through the spindle. I think you can load it through the tool matrix. I'm certain you can.
00:03:46
Speaker
Don't know how to do that yet. Don't know how to use the tool probe. Don't know how to make sure I don't crash the machine. We have the collision avoidance software, but I need to learn that. My big question, though, is we want to do some probing on a part that'll be on two sides of a four-sided tombstone, and there's going to be eight parts on each side, so 16 parts total. We want to probe the two points on each of the parts.
00:04:07
Speaker
to do the, I call it the G68, but it's the coordinate plane rotation. Just so if the material is loaded in one or two thou twisted for this one critical feature, it shouldn't matter because we'll just use a probe to detect that.
00:04:24
Speaker
What I wanted to do with the Okuma software is take the probe in probe so it's your 16 parts two points 32 points I want to probe all 32 points at once store them and then do the Renishaw
00:04:39
Speaker
math to set the angle when we are at that feature. I am not scared or intimidated. I'm sure I will figure it out, but if anybody wants to help jumpstart that process or has anything to share, I would be open to suggestions. I'm new to Akuma macro programming, which I know is quite powerful in this idea of pulling a probe in, querying a bunch of values, and then grabbing them later.
00:05:03
Speaker
The guy we chatted with, Harrison Henry, I feel bad. I don't remember exactly his name, but he knew a lot about Okuma and actually mentioned this kind of stuff. That's a good point. I know I still have Harrison Hartley. If you're listening to Harrison and you have any thoughts on that, by all means,
00:05:24
Speaker
I guess I'm not nervous about it. I know I could brute force it. I'm wondering if there's an elegant way of storing stuff in an array or how you wipe values when
Control Systems and Setup Transition
00:05:33
Speaker
you're done. I just want to be smart about it. From what you've seen so far, you've poked around the control. Have you jogged it?
00:05:39
Speaker
Yes, I can jog it. It's the same as our Geno. Oh, of course. Yeah. So you're not brand new to Okuma, but you're very new. I'm very new. Yes. But I can jog it. I know how to get tombstones in and out of the APC and how to do the APC Lazy Susan rotation.
00:05:57
Speaker
Yeah, like it was just a two pallet machine. It still works like that. You just flip it around. Is there a load station where it presents the tombstone to a little room? There is, and that's where we loaded the tombstones onto the pallets.
00:06:12
Speaker
Yep. So next steps are, I've got the cam done. We've got the fixturing done. I literally just have to drill and tap the cast iron tombstones to put our fixturing on it. Our fixturing is done. And then the biggest thing is going to be I got to load up, you know, 20 or 30 tools, touch them off and do the collision stuff. But then like, we're not messing around here. We're going to be running this machine next
Machine Operation and Purchases
00:06:39
Speaker
week. Yeah. Yeah. That's sick.
00:06:42
Speaker
Oh, and then the other crazy thing, while I was on vacation last week, the chip conveyor showed up like six weeks, eight weeks early. We are grateful that that happened because it means we can run the machine. It means we don't have to go try to get creative with complicated solutions. Also question, the other thing to be blunt is, do I pay this invoice? I should have been a little bit more conscious of, especially given the cost of the machine and the scope of
00:07:08
Speaker
time it takes. I didn't even go reread the paperwork, but I guess the PSA, if you're out there, would be look at what the contract paperwork says about, I would say the obligation should be to pay for it once it's delivered and working, not just dropped off. Because in this case, the conveyor was a relatively small percentage of the overall machine cost, but effectively made it unusable. That's a competition you want to have ahead of time and not when you're backed up against a wall, I guess.
00:07:36
Speaker
Yup. And sometimes reading through those contracts, there's a lot and you don't know what you're looking for and you don't know this situation if it's going to happen, right? So you might read it all and you're like, yeah, I guess that makes sense. But yeah, having the experience helps. All right. Do tell.
00:07:51
Speaker
So on my end, all this talk about buying a speedio and delaying it and installing and all that stuff. And then I go out and buy a CMM machine. That's awesome. So I went last week on Thursday. I went to Elliott Matsura, my local dealer. That's where I got my Nakamura. That's where I got my Tornos and our Zeiss microscope that we have. And I spent the afternoon in their metrology lab with a Zeiss Duramax.
00:08:18
Speaker
and my mind was blown. I brought a bunch of parts and we measured, scanned.
Capabilities and Insights from CMM Machines
00:08:25
Speaker
I didn't know that the scanning heads were fairly standard for the Zeiss machines. Was that right? I thought a lot of them were the touch, beep, beep, beep,
00:08:35
Speaker
like the Renaissance probe on our machines. But I don't know if it's absolutely standard, but I think all of the Zeiss machines come with the scanning head where it'll drag along the part and measure a complete contour. There's two kinds of scanning heads. There's the passive scanning and then the active scanning, which is a lot more expensive. Active scanning is what you showed in your video. It's got motors in the head and everything that will follow your fingers and follow the curve as it's driving. So the passive probe has just a much shorter range of followability.
00:09:05
Speaker
So if you give it a cam sketch and say, follow this curve, it'll do it within 30,000 or something like that. Whereas the active scanning head will just follow anything. Can I interrupt? Yeah. Yeah. If you guys are, anyone listening is in any way interested in what the state of art metrology looks like. That's a nice video, which is probably a year or two old. I laid my hand down and they just jogged up to it and started scanning, which what that means is that that probe has no idea where to move next.
00:09:33
Speaker
I guess it would just be an X and Y. It's not doing any motivation in Z there, but it's literally moving forward some incredibly small amount, microns or tenths or something. Then it's detecting where to go next to do its best ability to maintain constant pressure. It's tracing my hand and it's moving quick. Which one did you get? I got the passive one, the cheaper one. I don't need that feature.
00:09:55
Speaker
Yeah. But I brought my laptop, so I gave it some cam sketches, and we were able to follow the profile. And oh, the data that comes back is amazing. Yeah. And there's definitely some critical features on our knife blades and even the handles that I don't know about. I don't know how to measure. I can probe a hole in a bore and reference two locations and stuff, but measuring items on the current is time consuming and
00:10:23
Speaker
Not easy per se, but having a dedicated machine that his job is to measure and qualify the parts we're making is awesome. I don't think I've ever made such a quick machine tool purchase decision as I did there because I go to there and I was like, yeah, maybe we'll get one one day. Then by the next day, I was like, crap, we really need one. Yeah, I want that.
00:10:47
Speaker
So, did you go into the visit more focused on just learning about your parts? Did you go in thinking, let's figure out whether this is a machine we need to add? Both. Those are my two questions going in. Okay. Yeah. I wanted to know if there's any deviation or variation between the six blades that I brought and there was, and I can see where it is, and then I can further analyze how to fix it from there.
00:11:10
Speaker
But I saw data that I've never seen with current probed data, because you can only probe certain features. But when you can scan a whole arc and see that it's not a perfect arc, and then it deviates in this corner because the material is flexing or whatever, we're cutting hardened stainless steel that moves during heat treat. And pre-heat treated and post-heat treat, they will be different sized features. And now we can measure that on the fly.
00:11:35
Speaker
So, it's one thing to bring parts to a CMM shop and say, can you measure this? But to have it on your floor daily is going to be a game changer for us.
CMM Machine Decision-Making and Setup
00:11:44
Speaker
And I'm quite confident that the payments we'll be making on this will be less than the scrap or reduced potential of finished knives every month. That's a great way to think about it. It looks like a no-brainer. Yeah.
00:11:58
Speaker
So I think the Zeiss Duramax retails for around 75,000 US and then plus a couple options but not too many. So I mean 75,000 is fine. I thought CMMs were like 150, 200 for the really, really nice ones but I don't need a big huge one and I don't have a room to put it in anyway. You got a Duramax? I got a Duramax which is the shop floor rated one. So it doesn't even have a granite table, it has a cast iron scraped table.
00:12:26
Speaker
But the guy, Jim said something really interesting. He says, do you think that that table is perfectly square to the machine? And I said, yeah, probably. And he goes, it might be, but it might not be. And the machine doesn't really care. Because he said, don't measure a surface that you're not shipping to the customer. OK.
00:12:44
Speaker
So if you're assuming that the table is perfectly square and you lay your part straight on the table and you start measuring everything, you're making assumptions. So he says, when you can try to stick it up on fingers or posts or risers or whatever, scan underneath the part with the star probe and the top. So then you get everything you get your feel. The star probe is the kind of like key to stop thinking like a machinist. Yes. Because you realize, Oh, I can access
00:13:10
Speaker
occluded features easily. Yep. Underneath the part, to the sides of the part. Yeah. Yeah. The Born and Co. tour video we did last year was a great tour, like an awesome story of American manufacturing meets modern
American Manufacturing and Technology
00:13:26
Speaker
technology. And they were showing how they rebuild these old gear cutting machines, which are 100 years old, iron, or maybe not quite that old, but old. And then they will turn and grind these parts. And they put this
00:13:39
Speaker
I believe it was a spindle up on their, I think it was his ICMM and they were doing the same trace method along multiple points. And it was the same thing you just said there. Like we don't really care how perpendicular the shaft is to the table or the CMM axis because it's figures all that out on its own. Yep. Self-compensate.
00:14:00
Speaker
So like you put a, we just used a magnetic V block to slap a blade on top. Yeah. And then you probe the blade on three points and it establishes a flat plane. And then you probe a hole to reference itself to locate two holes, I think it was. Right. So now it knows XY tilt rotation.
00:14:20
Speaker
It has its, you know, CAD model is now referenced to the machine table. And then it's almost like a CAM software, the Calypso software. You're like, take that hole, measure the bore, take that feature, scan it, take that 3D surface, scan the contour with this much step over and this much whatever and this much resolution, and then hit go. And it was like a two and a half minute cycle.
00:14:41
Speaker
And it just did it. And then we slapped the next blade on, referenced it, and did it again. And I said, can you 3D print fixtures for these? And he goes, all day long. Oh my god. The location has to be just enough for the probe to get inside the hole and find the hole. It's not like your fixtures have to repeat within a thou, you know? Right. As long as the probe can find the hole and then reference itself, you're good. So yeah.
00:15:06
Speaker
So you showed up with a night apart, a simple V-block or something, and then a thumb drive with step files. My laptop with step files, and he had the V-block. Just slapped it on a measure. I mean, he's obviously an expert in Calypso. He's been doing it for 17 years.
Learning and Training for CMM Software
00:15:23
Speaker
So it was fast for him to make the programs and stuff.
00:15:28
Speaker
If I came up and I brought in my advice and the step file, how long do you think it would take you to teach me or show me, okay, import of the solid, set the orientation, jog here, that basic stuff to start taking some basic measurements? Once I know what I'm doing, I think we'd have the part measured in 20 minutes. I don't want to make it up. It's not hard.
00:15:48
Speaker
once you know what you're doing. I haven't touched the software myself yet. That's what I remember from that same video where we scanned my hand. I was asking what may have ended up being some pretty complicated questions about measuring relative on our fixture plates. We brought fixture plates up to measure them as well, which was super fun to legitimately learn how we're doing and measuring two probed holes and then the edge and then comparing the alignment and so forth.
00:16:15
Speaker
to be blunt, that did not look easy. That looked like a lot of, you need to understand menus, sub-menus, where to click, where to hide some, where to reveal stuff. Kind of one of those like, oh, this is not exciting.
00:16:27
Speaker
Yeah. So I'll be curious to see how you get along. Yeah, for sure. They offer four day in the Elliott training classes. Okay. And since we're 40 minutes away, probably take them up on that. I don't know if I will personally be the one to go sit in those classes for four days. And I kind of struggle with that because I'm like, yeah, I want to be the one that learns everything. But honestly, I'm not going to be the one running this machine every day. And
00:16:51
Speaker
I don't want to sit in the classroom for four days. I got other things to do. So I might send one of my guys, Angelo or Pierre to probably Angelo to go do that and learn it in depth. But I kind of want the machine to show up on the shop floor and I just want to poke at it until I measure something. What did I show up? I haven't like signed the purchase order yet, but I did send them a purchase order like the day after, two days after.
Purchase Orders and Fixture Considerations
00:17:17
Speaker
What do you mean you haven't signed it? Well, I sent them a purchase order just to kind of make it official, but I haven't sent I haven't signed their quote, their offer, their thing.
00:17:26
Speaker
Oh, that's weird to me. It's just like, PO's are still kind of new to me. I grew up as a great consumer. If I wanted to buy something, I had to pay for it. Or I don't know, just buying these Okumas or even the hospices, you just send a piece of paper, like a PDF or Word document that just says PO at the top and it's all of a sudden like,
00:17:47
Speaker
You know, kind of like that joke of like, if I want to go buy a $200 item at Home Depot or wherever, you better pay for that thing or else, you know, we need to see the money now. But if you want to go buy something that's literally 2000 times more expensive, it's like, yeah, we're docs fine. Yup. Yup. Exactly. So yeah, I just cut a PO from GURP and, um,
00:18:05
Speaker
I just kind of guessed the price and I just said, you know, put a couple of conditions on there like financing and wife approval was my big condition. And then, yeah, and then they came back Monday this week with the formal quote and the options and, you know, put this on, take this off kind of thing. So we're just going through the details, like trying to figure out what kind of fixturing kits I want to buy, if anything, because there's all those
00:18:30
Speaker
with the posts and the risers and the fixture plates and the threaded holes. I'm like, Sonders makes this stuff. It's not exactly a huge secret. CMM stuff is very much on our radar right now. It's really expensive. One of the reasons we have the horizontal. Fantastic. You're going to have to get a CMM. Let's just say if we can help you out there, let me know. Good to know.
00:18:53
Speaker
Yeah, I might not get anything at first. Yeah. Because if I get a kid from them, I can roll it into the financing and whatever, but it might be overkill. It might be too expensive. It might be not what I need. So I might just... I mean, we did it with a magnetic V-block for now. Yeah, exactly. Hashtag 3D print. And 3D print, exactly. So I think I'll do that. But anyway, it should show up once we finalize everything, they say 10 weeks or something or less. It could be way less. Oh, is it not in stock?
00:19:22
Speaker
probably in Chicago or something like that. Got it. The funny thing about the CNN fixture, it's not that it shouldn't be good and accurate and all that, but if you're really being honest, it doesn't have to be. I know, I know. The standard with which we hold ourselves to unconstrained fixture plates and so forth,
00:19:43
Speaker
The CMO stuff will be right up our alley. Yes. If you need something though, in the meantime, we make Shapeoko four plates and other hobby plates that have either quarter 20 or M6 hole patterns all over the place. Those are very inexpensive and frankly would work great as a band-aid John. We were talking, most of these plates are one to $300. Yeah. An anodized aluminum would be fine.
00:20:06
Speaker
Actually, those would probably be raw aluminum. Okay. And you can, no joke, just lay it on there, hot glue it on there. There probably are some studs in the- There's three balls. Yeah, exactly. So you could easily lightly clamp it down. Cool. Very cool.
00:20:21
Speaker
So Dennis, I just watched the first edits of touring Creations Unlimited, Dennis Rathi's shop. And he, man, he got, it's an incredible shop and his story is really impressive. But they have a guy working for them now who used to work at Zeiss for quite a while. So he was like a Calypso genius. And they pulled up a part that they were working on at the moment and they showed a, it was like kind of a compound arc.
00:20:48
Speaker
And I believe they came in with a different tool to do a finish pass on one certain area. And when they were at one X and five X, you kind of saw a bunch of circles that were within the green and red, like a racetrack kind of line.
Using Data for Tool Adjustments
00:21:01
Speaker
Like there's a center line and then there's an inside tolerance and outside tolerance. And it all would find, well, when they went into, was it 10 times or higher, you saw that that other tool on that other section of the arc was out by a visual substantial amount as you're zoomed in.
00:21:18
Speaker
But it kind of was the light bulb moment. It sounds like you went through as well where you're like, wait a minute here. Now all of a sudden I realize I need to adjust tool 22 in by three tenths to blend that in better. Yeah. And try it and check again on the next part. Yeah. Yup.
00:21:35
Speaker
Really cool. Yep, exactly. Our knives are adjustable in a way because the stop pin that controls the open and closed position of the knives, we make them in one thou increments in different sizes. So when we're assembling knives, the guys can choose which stop pin makes the knife function and feel the best. And sometimes they're fairly consistent. Sometimes they vary more than I would like. And I don't know where that variation is coming from. So in my theoretical perfect world, having the Kern and now the CMM,
00:22:01
Speaker
I want to send knives to the finishing department that are all the same. They go together and the guys have to think less. Do you track what size end up getting used? We do. I love you. That's awesome. Of course. I can have a customer from four years ago say, yeah, my life's getting a little sloppy. I might need a bigger pin and we have it on record.
00:22:27
Speaker
Oh, okay. That's really cool. I was asking the same question for a different reason, which is you then see a bell curve of like most of them end up using this size or something. Yep. Interesting. Cool. Can any thoughts on what's going on with part deviation?
00:22:45
Speaker
The thing with CMM results is you have to analyze them and you have to make your own conclusions.
Analyzing and Addressing Manufacturing Issues
00:22:50
Speaker
It can tell you that there's a problem, but it doesn't always tell you why or how to fix it or anything like that. I did this last year, I went to Milterra and they scanned a bunch of parts and were staring at the results going, okay, but now what?
00:23:01
Speaker
So I think having the measuring machine on the floor and measuring the flow of parts coming off will start to show deviations and like, oh, we changed the tool and now things are different. Or it's always position seven on the fixture or something like that. That's always the problem. So I think it comes down to something like that. Either it's clamping pressure on the fixture or specific tooling or blade having more
00:23:28
Speaker
moved during heat treat or something like that. I don't know. It's hard to say. I don't have the answer yet. Okay. Because I mean, look, it's a current. Like you can rule out, like if you just made a machine a square block, like current would be good. Not to be arrogant about closed mindedness of solutions, but like it's a great, you have the benefit most don't of being pretty comfortable that it's not the machine itself.
00:23:50
Speaker
Yes. We had a weird one. It actually resulted in a really cool story that we turned into a video that's coming out soon. We make those palettes that go on top of our fixture plates. They're an important product for us, but we don't make a ton of money on them because frankly, they're just aluminum plus some features. We need machines to be convenient for the customer to make their own fixture out of them.
00:24:16
Speaker
So all the more reason I really wanna be dialed in on how we make these. And we do the backside first, and then we used to flip them over and do the top side. Well, the top side required an OP2A and an OP2B to move fixturing because you had to get access to features that were otherwise blocked by the clamping. And I realized, wait a minute here, we can ditch the split 2A, 2B by machining a counter bore
00:24:46
Speaker
from the other side in Op1. I started looking for Woodruff key tools. There's nothing out there that was going to work. There was one thing that was close from Harvey, but they didn't love it. I remember an AB tool, downloaded their PDF, sent them a form for what you want out of a custom Woodruff, sent it to them. That afternoon, they got back to me.
00:25:09
Speaker
that looked friggin' perfect, ordered one of them, they sent it to me, and so we now, what's hard about this is we're cutting a .77 inch counter bore through a .5 inch hole. So if you do the math,
00:25:25
Speaker
You have very little wiggle room there because you need the shank to be as big as you can, but still fit through. Anyways, we got the tool and we programmed it up. Programming it was a fun journey. We ended up using a threading operation, which we show in the video. The reason I brought this up is when we were doing Op 2a and Op 2b, every once in a while we would have
00:25:46
Speaker
some chamfers come out wrong and we kind of sat down and looked at, okay, the probe's not wrong, the machine's not wrong, what's going on? And we kind of had some internal debate as to what could this be. And I was very much like Occam's razor. Look, we are moving clamps during a setup. That is by far the most likely that a part is somehow shifting on us, period. And we were about to start using indicators to
00:26:15
Speaker
do the obvious of checking type stuff. What would, didn't make sense though. And the reason I was getting some pushback is that we were also still probing after we moved the clamps to do comp for any potential movement, but it still was happening inconsistently. Anyway, long story short, once we started doing the counterbores from the, uh, front side, the backside of the counterbores from the front side, and thus op two was happening in one fell swoop. The parts are just perfect. So to your point, things move in fixturing.
00:26:45
Speaker
Yeah, in fixturing these blades, there's two clamps that kind of clamp around the pivot hole of the blade to squish the blade down. One clamp has two bolts, and it secures nicely. And then the other clamp, one end of the clamp hits the blade nicely, and the other end is kind of floating in the air, just because that's how I made it. And I think tightening that side will shift the blade ever so slightly.
00:27:10
Speaker
Even though the probe comes in and recenters it and measures it, it's like, eliminate all of your variables here.
Improving Manufacturing Consistency
00:27:16
Speaker
Something's happening. Have you put indicators on it while you're tightening?
00:27:21
Speaker
We haven't actually, we should know what we do is we have a gauge pin that goes through the pivot hole into the fixture that kind of pretty rough aligns it while we're clamping it down. And then if we clamp it and the pin still comes out nice, then it's good. It hasn't moved, but sometimes the pin gets stuck and you got to pull it out. And this is 10ths we're talking here, but an indicator on the side is a great idea. Yeah. That's obvious.
00:27:46
Speaker
Yeah, but you know better than that. A pin, you're literally creating a rotation joint infusion. There's plenty of abilities for that thing to still move. That's true. It's only going to show so much. Yeah. And a tenth of a pin fit could be six thou at the tip of a blade. I guess I don't know where your deviation is, but. Exactly. Well, I'm trying to machine all of the critical features hard in one setup. So even if the blade rotates a little bit, it shouldn't matter.
00:28:16
Speaker
for what I'm seeing, because all the machine features are the same, but something's happening. Yeah. We have two, maybe three indicators that are kind of the setup indicators now on Nogas that makes it quick to just drop them on. And as you pull something down, you can watch it move. Do that. We certainly have done that for other things. I just haven't thought to apply it to this yet. It's perfect. We shall do that.
00:28:38
Speaker
Yeah, the first part, we're going to run on the horizontal. I'm curious to see if my thesis works. I mean, these are parts we already make in vertical, so we know how to make them. But I'm going to go from making them out of single, these are our top jaws, from single saw cut blanks to a strip of four. So we'll be slotting them out. But inevitably, when we go from 1.2, I'm testing to see
00:29:00
Speaker
kind of the same thing of like, okay, I'm going to rough everything out, but leave five now, it should probe in and align in perfectly. But nevertheless, I'd rather take that final spring cleanup pass on op two, because it's free. Like it just establishes that final datum at the last chance possible.
Air Quality in the Shop
00:29:18
Speaker
Cool. I bought a air quality meter, just for fun.
00:29:24
Speaker
John, stop. What? I literally have the page open right now. This is unbelievable. The 10 pad 2000 or something? It's a X tech makes the thing, but it's actually from... Oh, is it on my laptop? I don't have it in front of me right here, but it monitors the moisture level.
00:29:44
Speaker
Okay. And you can rent one for a hundred bucks. Oh, I ordered already. That's what I did. It was 700 bucks to buy it or a hundred bucks to rent it for a week. It's called a tsunami rental air monitoring equipment air survey kit measures relative humidity in air temp and dew point. Those are three features mine does not measure. Oh, what's yours measure? Mine's from Amazon. It's the Temtop M2000 air quality monitor. Temtop M2000. Oh, okay. Are you talking about compressed air or shop air?
00:30:13
Speaker
shop, like air quality, like the stuff you breathe. I'm sorry. We're talking different things. That's okay. Well, I'll do mine first. Yes, an air quality meter. So it measures both CO2 and also parts per million of 2.5 micron and 10 micron stuff in the air, as well as formaldehyde, which apparently comes from like VOCs and paint and weird stuff like that.
00:30:35
Speaker
And are you involving people at Grimsby? Yeah, exactly. I'm like, people measure form aldehyde? That's weird. But yeah, it's a thing. But what we're most concerned about, like,
00:30:46
Speaker
I just want to measure the air at home. I want to measure the air next to my furnace. I want to measure the air at the shop, the air in the front shop, if pet hair makes a difference, what the offices are like. It's been really fascinating just walking around the shop and seeing the air quality. Does it change through the shop? Oh yeah. No kidding. Yeah, depending on where you are, what machine you're next to, which miscollector is working better than the others.
00:31:11
Speaker
And so my air quality at home was like 15, 14 parts per million or parts per liter, I don't know, whatever the thing is.
00:31:21
Speaker
And then I have a little air filter at home, just a standalone floor model one. And I put it on top and it goes from 15 down to eight. So I'm like, okay, that thing functions. That's good. And then I brought it to the shop and the shop was 30 something 40. And then you go to next to other machines and it's like 45 and you go outside and it gets down to 20 something and it does change around. And then next to our lapping machine, which has a really cheesy air filter on it right now.
00:31:49
Speaker
It went extremely high like into the hundreds on the other end of that filter because the diamond paste or the diamond slurry and the particular lubricant that's being used and atomized and sprayed in that machine plus all the grinding dust from the machine itself It's yeah, we need way better filtration on that machine. That's awesome. It's super helpful. So
00:32:12
Speaker
It's great. And actually the front shop where we do all the finishing work is almost as clean air quality as my house. I'm assuming your house is clean. So yeah, we don't have forced air. So we have like the radiators, the hot water radiators to eat that. So we don't have the first filter to kind of circulate and clean the air. So it's dusty, but whatever. Um, but we don't have any pets or anything. So.
00:32:39
Speaker
Yeah. That's really interesting. Garrett was like, Hey, John, those drains, this is exactly why we switched to those clear air compressor drains so that we can see the levels and just makes it easier to know
Compressed Air and Shop Conditions
00:32:53
Speaker
what's going on. And he was like, Hey, our old compressor puts out five or six times more water than our new one. And I honestly don't know
00:33:00
Speaker
why that would be. They're both wet tanks. So the air goes through the screw. It gets compressed. When it gets compressed, it has the ability to then, I may be saying this wrong, retain moisture. Don't jump all over me if you're an air expert here.
00:33:17
Speaker
It goes through to the tank and then after the tank it leaves the tank and goes to the air dryer on its way out to the machine. Some bigger compressors will do a dry tank where it goes from the screws to the dryer to the
00:33:34
Speaker
Tank I think the reason that that's That is better except it's a lot harder for the dryer to dry the air when it's hot from having just been compressed I think that's the reason that on the lower size and lower cost machines It's easier to let it go to the tank cool off and then get dried later Yes, and so your tank just drains out with an auto drain so why would our old compressor be putting out tons more water and
00:33:59
Speaker
than our new one, they're in different areas of the shop, but it's only a 4,000 square foot shop bay. So I don't know. And it bothered me because I care a lot about our air. And so I found this air thing I just mentioned, we'll put a link in the description, but this company rents them and I thought, eh, 700 bucks to buy it or a hundred bucks to rent it. Honestly, it wasn't a no brainer. I kind of wasn't sure.
00:34:25
Speaker
Um, where I wanted to go. And I thought, wait here, a hundred bucks gets me this thing, gets me answers I need, um, and done. So it's, it comes Friday. Sweet. But I'm curious to see how much water is in our air simply. Yeah. Yeah. Data. Yeah. Yeah. I totally looked, I went down the rabbit hole of looking into like raspberry pie solutions and DIY, like air quality meters and sensors and all this stuff. It's very possible, but, and then I just saw this one for 300 bucks Canadian. And I'm like, I'm just buying that. Yeah, that's awesome.
00:34:58
Speaker
What was I going to say? Oh, I had a carryover.
00:35:00
Speaker
from last week, it feels perhaps a smidge out of context now, but it's never the worst part to bring it up, because you and I are talking a lot about what were we talking, I think we were talking about like leadership management teams, expectations, goals, and I feel like I put a pressure on myself about how we do, like I'm comfortable teaching a class on CNC machining, and in fact we do, and we're starting them again, but like I'm comfortable putting my reputation on the line for our ability to teach somebody how to do machine.
Teaching and Leadership Reflections
00:35:29
Speaker
As much as I do think I'm a decent business person, I would never, I don't mind teaching business. Yeah. I don't mind sharing candidly about where we've done well and where we haven't. And so inevitably talking a little bit about that, but I would never be like, oh no, I know how to teach you management leadership. No way. I'm much more interested in learning than I am professing my
00:35:51
Speaker
answers and wisdom and the case history studies and what other companies have done well, blah, blah, blah. I love reading books about it. Long story short, I kind of had this moment of joy when we were out to dinner with some friends and this person has a boss and it wasn't Michael Scott from the office, but it sounds like it's almost as bad as just an absolutely horrible boss. And they're not a bad person. The person is actually quite amicable and enjoyable to be around, but a complete
00:36:19
Speaker
a complete lack of self-confidence, a complete lack of direction, a complete lack of communication, no ability to recognize when things need to be dealt with responsibly or tasked out to people. I think it's important to live life in a way where you're measuring your own success, not just comparing yourself to others, but darn it, if it wasn't nice to hear about, oh, wait a minute here. I don't have all the answers, but let me tell you something. I am not that person. And that kind of felt good, John.
00:36:45
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. That makes perfect sense. And I'm in the same boat. I follow and read business leaders who are happy to talk about this as the way to do business. And I'm not that person. I'm not the guy that's going to like stand on my high horse and tell everybody how to do business. But you and I are both in the boat of, I'm happy to share my experiences and I'm happy to share the story and the journey.
00:37:09
Speaker
And that's what we're doing on the podcast right now. We're just sharing stories. We're not telling anybody how to do anything. We're just like, yeah, this is what's going on. And I'm comfortable doing that. And yet.
00:37:20
Speaker
Both of us are also still growing and learning, learning from our mistakes, learning from each other's mistakes, from our friends and growing our skillset and our abilities to handle these problems. Yeah. And that's great. Yeah, exactly. So it was a unexpected confirmation. Sometimes you need to see what other people are doing wrong to realize, okay, I'm going to get better at this, but I'm doing okay for now.
00:37:42
Speaker
Yep, yep, yep, yep. Every now and then I hear about it from our staff who have had previous jobs at other places and they're like, yeah, my old job, this, it was not like it is here. I like it here.
00:37:54
Speaker
But I think what I feel the need to clarify with a statement like that is that it doesn't just mean you like it here because it's easy or because there's not as much structure or expectations. I want to be somewhere where I'm challenged and people are challenged and it doesn't mean it's stressful, but I have seen other people who like jobs just because they're lazy and they don't have to do anything.
00:38:13
Speaker
I mean, I guess good for you. To me, that's not going to lead to a fulfilling personal life and expectations of growth and what we can do. And we were talking this morning at our kind of manager's meeting and we've had some really cool, we had another customer, kind of a household name customer buy a plate this morning. It feels really cool to know the list of folks that are using our stuff. That's awesome.
00:38:38
Speaker
So you just said something. That's the first time you've said we just had a manager's meeting. Yeah. Yeah. You want to talk about that for a second? Can I rain check it to next week? Yeah, absolutely. Believe it or not, we're actually at our strictly scheduled 44 minute mark. Exactly. I have to call a credit card company because it's got weird. Yeah, what are you up to today?
00:39:00
Speaker
So I was out for two different trips, which were a little bit of work and, frankly, a lot of time off, which is great. Honestly, it went great. It really went great, but between catching up on a few things and
00:39:14
Speaker
really wanting to carve out some time on the horizontal. Very much ironically as well, John, my credit card got frauded twice. So I don't know if that's what you're dealing with, but that's frustrating. So just kind of a list of housekeeping stuff. Right. Sometimes those are the days, you know? Exactly. Awesome. Good. Thanks, bud. Take care. Bye.