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Business of Machining - Episode 4
380 Plays8 years ago
Welcome to the John Grimsmo & John Saunders Business of Machining Podcast! We (John and John) have talked every Friday morning for the past year and we realized how helpful it has been to share our successes, struggles and stories with each other! So helpful that we have decided to record our conversations and share as this podcast!
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Theme
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Good morning. I suppose we should say welcome to the business of machining. Yeah, we should get into like a real intro. Like I'm john. And I'm john. Oh, so I was laughing because I said should we talk about business? Should we talk about machining? But the first thing I was thinking was holy cow. Grim's Mo tops.
Innovation in Product Line
00:00:19
Speaker
Yes, we have launched our newest first non knife product. High precision spinning tops.
00:00:28
Speaker
The handle, I don't know if you call it a knurling, I'm sure it's a cut process, but it's beautiful, the thimble.
00:00:35
Speaker
Yeah, they turned out really good. I sent you one a while ago and I don't think it had that grilling on it. It did not. I may have to remedy that. Yeah, and actually the grippiness makes an enormous difference. Like the one that you have doesn't spin very well because you just can't get any traction on it. But yeah. Yeah, got it. Yeah, so the tops are pretty awesome. They've been selling really good. It's really fantastic to be able to ship a product immediately.
00:01:01
Speaker
Like, we have them in stock, and we can just order, ship. They just go, right. A lot different than building up a knife, huh? Exactly, yeah. But we've had a lot of really, really positive feedback. Guys are loving that we've come up with a sub $600 product. And again, it has that Grimsmo perfection to it, huh?
00:01:20
Speaker
Yeah, so we're really, really happy. Do you have any idea how what the RPMs are when you spin a top? I tried. Like I have a little RPM, laser sensor, whatever it's called. So I drew a sharpie mark on it. Maybe that wasn't reflective enough, but I couldn't pick up any reading, but I would love to know. Maybe I need to black out the whole thing and then put a little reflective piece on it.
00:01:41
Speaker
You might be able to get a camera that records in like 120 frames a second or something. Yeah, my GoPro. I think that's 240 or that's good. Yeah, that ought to let you slow. I mean, maybe not exact precise, but I have no idea. Is it 400 or 4000? Yeah, I really don't know. 4000. But I would love to know. It is really cool. Yeah. That's awesome. Good for you, man. Thank you.
00:02:04
Speaker
So how do tops fit into
Inventory and Cash Flow Management
00:02:06
Speaker
grooms with knives as a whole? As a whole, it's the kind of product that I would like to keep in stock so that people can buy it anytime. You know, the knives will always be the pinnacle. They'll always be the holy grail. We probably won't make very, very many of them. So they're probably always going to be hard to get. I'd love to remedy that situation, but the fact is they just take so long.
00:02:27
Speaker
they're so precise. But yeah, things like the tops and we've got some other products we're working on and hopefully to come out with in the next three to six months. Yeah, just be able to have this kind of stuff in stock that, you know, generates cash flow and revenue and keeps customers happy too, because they can get something instead of just a sticker. And
Shipping Challenges and Solutions
00:02:43
Speaker
this is made solely on the Nakamura AS200L? Yes.
00:02:48
Speaker
that's awesome that's really cool yeah there are a lot of far-fed yeah yeah yeah it's it's the it's three pieces two pieces well yeah the ball is the third it's the ball yeah right right very that's really cool yeah it's funny because i i really am a big to talk about the business side of it i am really a big advocate of you
00:03:08
Speaker
And it goes back to your personality and being honest with yourself. But I think it's so much easier to be to make good decisions to like invest time into products and fixtures and to do all that when you don't have as much pressure on keeping your business afloat and sometimes keeping your business afloat means some side. I kind of call these things like these tops like passive income. Like you built this brand. You've done a really good job. You're going to sell these things. And it's not the whole story, but it's a key part of helping you make really good
00:03:38
Speaker
It's kind of a weird side thing, but sometimes you need these side projects to fund other things. The machinery payments are really adding up now.
Job Shop Business Dynamics
00:03:51
Speaker
A business needs cash flow. That's the number one reason businesses fail, so things like this will help us out immensely.
00:03:57
Speaker
And that's why and something I want to focus more on on some of our YouTube videos is I am not a job shop. I am actually trying to do even less job shop work than I've ever done before. Now, more work with certain customers. And it's kind of sad to me because when I started, I was that enthusiastic, you know, I will do anything for anybody because if I can make a part that pleases somebody, then that's proving that I've learned some ability to machine. And that's awesome.
00:04:23
Speaker
I'm also learning that it's really hard to grow a job shop, to scale it, to staff it up. It's feast or famine sometimes, and that's difficult. Again, for us, we've got the YouTube channel, we've got some of our own products, other income that tends to be actually more reliable that helps me handle the ebbs and flows of a job shop. Makes a lot of sense, yeah.
00:04:45
Speaker
How was your wood you get into this week? Was it all tops? The tops have been finished for a while. So it was boxing and shipping and figuring out a solid method for making that process easy. Printing off shipping labels through ShipStation is just a godsend. It's so awesome. It's nice to be able to see the printer just print off 20 labels in a row. Are you batching them? I've started to try to do that, yeah.
00:05:14
Speaker
Okay, got it. And it doesn't, like, we're in Canada, so some of the tops are going to Canada, some are going to US, some are going to UK, and it doesn't like batshipping to different countries.
00:05:25
Speaker
Yeah, I've noticed we don't get enough orders to really focus on that. But I had a couple of days where we did. And it's the same thing. Like, if you know they're all with the same service, like the post office or FedEx, and they're all to the same country, it does work well. But otherwise, I got to learn more. Yeah. I was going to ask you, since you're right next door to FedEx, do you just walk packages over and ship them from there all the time?
00:05:48
Speaker
Yes. Why would you go to the post office? Oh, no. Well, post office is much cheaper in the US. If something is the size of an iPhone or even a little bit bigger, you can ship it priority for $6. Whereas FedEx is really $9, $10 minimum. But some people refuse to use the post office. They don't have a good experience.
00:06:11
Speaker
The post office doesn't deliver as well. When we send parts to big buildings, the post office goes through mail rooms, whereas FedEx gets delivered right to the person. Interesting. Never thought about that. If you send something to New York City, I would actually highly discourage the post office. Nothing against the post office. It's because these buildings have mail sort rooms that sometimes I had two, three days.
00:06:31
Speaker
Interesting. House grooves and knives, machinery running.
Rask Knife Production Update
00:06:34
Speaker
Very well, yeah. So other than tops this week, we've been serious Rask production, finishing lots of knives, which is great. Eric finished up I think four full Timascus Damasteel. Nice. Like beautiful knives. That's awesome. That's awesome. Super nice to get those off our plate. And we've officially closed the Rask pre-order now, which is kind of a big deal.
00:06:54
Speaker
What do you mean? It's been open so people could continue to pre-order. Ah, I see. And now we have closed that officially to kind of give us a concrete like number of this is how many more we have to finish to catch up. It allows us to plan out you know strategy and goal and timeline and all that so otherwise it's just open-ended and you'll never catch up.
00:07:13
Speaker
Although I assume your rate of, I mean, your confidence and rate of output is getting better every day. Yep, it is. Are you still having setbacks? Always. Yeah. No, I mean, I don't mean to ask it. I only ask it as a friend because like we have them too. You know, like you forget the tools where you forget that you just had an offset. Just dialed it. I don't know. Things like that. Always. Yeah.
00:07:33
Speaker
you know you forget to uh we like to flatten the detent ball the little surround ball and there were two knives that were completely finished that didn't have a flattened ball for some reason and i figured out it was the tool off that issue no can you fix that i was able to fix it i think but they might not be perfectly flat like they normally would and it's just a big pain in the butt to go back and do stuff like that
00:07:54
Speaker
But sure. Oh, yeah. Sure. Hey, it's part of the game. Our Haas has the ability. It's probably it's a great example. It's probably really easy to do. But just the mental headache of thinking that I've got to open a manual or find a YouTube video to go figure out how to do this is usually that thought is worse than the actual work. Yes. Yeah. But there's a there's a way in Haas to when you pull up a program
00:08:20
Speaker
How does this work? Well, basically, there's a way to get the screen to show you a photo that you took. So basically, when I open a program called, you know, John for offset fixture, SMW 16 inch fixture, it will open a JPEG image that I took with my iPhone on the screen showing the work holding. No way.
00:08:39
Speaker
Yeah, which makes so much sense because I'm always like, which soft shawls did I use and how did I have them oriented or just all those. I do. We do so much stuff that you can't possibly remember and putting the picture on your phone means I'm scrolling through all these other pictures to look for it. And I got to figure that out. That is super cool. I've never heard of that before. Wow. What a huge props to to Haas for doing stuff like that. Like on my mori with the fanic, I write little notes to myself in the G code, but that's about the best I can do.
00:09:06
Speaker
Oh, we're doing a webinar today on the HSM weekly free Friday webinar on getting started with, I think it's called setting up a machine, but I'm going to kind of do it as what I've learned about buying a VMC, about setting it up, about running it and how that react, everything from buying it to the installation, to learning on it, to fusion with it and how we're running it as production machine and as a job shop machine.
Anodizing Fixture Plates
00:09:30
Speaker
And it's little things like that that have been, well, haven't been doing that picture thing yet, but really helping us learn and get going on it. Yeah, that'll be awesome. Well, what are you up to for today? Today I, oh, actually, this is exciting. We sent off our first batch of Beta Tormach 1100 fixture plates to anodize. So I got them all, I got eight of them machined. I have material for another 12, but I, you know, it's tough because part of me,
00:10:00
Speaker
I just, I feel like I know that they're great. I just, you know, we've got these things so dialed in, the recipes down and part of me has a pretty high level of confidence and the part of me thinks that's when you get foolish. And so I thought, well, do I make eight and send eight to anodize or do I send 20 to anodize?
00:10:18
Speaker
And I realize the only thing I'm doing is really just saving on some shipping costs and maybe the anodized price is probably a little cheaper if I send 20 versus eight. But that's totally the wrong way to do it. Send eight, get eight back, know that they're good, get them off to customers, and I'll go make the rest of them. Yeah, and then you have a baseline like you know it's not a big wondering thing.
00:10:41
Speaker
Right. The dilemma is basically how much thickness the anodize adds, which it does add thickness. And I just learned in talking to the anodizer and researching this on Google that when anodizers talk about thickness, half of that thickness is in the material, because anodizing affects the top layer, and half of it is actually truly additive. So when an anodizer says one thou, it's really five tenths in the part, five tenths additive. So that's per wall, then, of a hole.
00:11:10
Speaker
Well, that's what's funny. Then you've got to remember holes have two sides. So we spent a lot of time dialing in our bore diameters to make sure that after anodize, it's got the right fit for dowel pins. But then also, we had to go buy a higher H value tap.
00:11:27
Speaker
So those are taps that have additional thick, they're oversized taps to ensure that after the hole is anodized, the threads faster still fits in there. Because apparently, anodizing is so hard that if you try to chase anodized holes with taps, first of all, you'll be cutting your anodize off, which is no good. But also, it's really like breaks taps. It's really hard. Is this hard anodized then? Yes. OK. Truly type three. Right. See, I've never worked with that. Interesting.
00:11:54
Speaker
It's what you want for this because of the wear and the long term use. So that's going for black.
00:12:01
Speaker
For now, yeah. I mean, yeah. I guess they could do gray as well. What do you think about that? Or clear coat? Well, yeah, like a clear, hard anodized will be gray. It'll change the aluminum? I think so. Oh, yeah, it does. It does matter a little. You're right. I've seen that before. Oh, so actually, on that note, the last time I saw a hard gray anodized part was this week. A month ago, Mitsu Toyu America emailed us out of the blue and said, we love what you do. Can we come down to your shop and film together?
00:12:28
Speaker
And so I said, absolutely, what do we want to film? And Amish from SS CAD CAM, who I know you know, and I were looking at height gauges at IMTS, height gauges being those sort of combination between a traditional
00:12:43
Speaker
What do you call a height gauge like with something that sits on a granite block and just measures like a caliper and CMM being like CNC machines that just measure these height gauges that they make that are sort of like mid to high four figures will do more things that like they'll do whole diameters and they'll do more complicated measuring. In addition, you can set up programs to QC parts with them.
00:13:06
Speaker
I realize this is what I would like to have for the parts coming off the Haas. Bigger parts, because I don't have any big measuring tools, and things like our fixture plates, I can set them on here. I can measure flatness across the whole plate, and then I can measure two holes that are really far apart. I can measure their diameters and their distance between centers, which will help me confirm that I don't have any twists or problems in the plates. That makes sense?
00:13:30
Speaker
So I was like, I really need one of these, a little expensive. So I asked Mr. Toy, I was like, hey, will you cut us a little deal and we'll come film? And they said, for sure. So they brought us down a bunch of tools to play with. And we filmed a video called Job Shop Metrology Do's and Don'ts, kind of like just tips and tricks on using the tools that most of us have, things we should and shouldn't do, which was super cool.
Collaboration with Mitutoyo
00:13:53
Speaker
And then they trained me up on that LH600, I think it is, height gauge. Wow. It was really cool.
00:13:58
Speaker
That's awesome. Yeah, I know Amish has a height gauge in his shop. Yes. And it's funny, because that's one of the things that I want to talk more about. I'll probably talk about it in today's webinar, is when you buy things like Hazas, and Moris, and Nakamura's, everything else gets more expensive. You're work holding, you're measuring, you're tooling, right? Yeah. We've got some regular Mitutoyo calipers, just a six-inch caliper. And then we've got two or three sets of cheap Harbor Freight ones that are $20, not $160.
00:14:28
Speaker
And so we've got one set of nice calipers and now Eric keeps stealing it and like borrow, you know, leaving it up at his desk. And he's like, I need a set for myself. I don't want to use the cheap ones. Well, it doesn't do you any good. Like I was trying to work on these board diameters and I have a set of gauge pins that are in thousandths of an inch. But I'm like, that's totally worthless because I'm measuring tenths. Yes. Nobody. I couldn't even come close to affording a set of tenths gauge pins. Welcome to my world.
00:14:55
Speaker
Right? Oh my, what do you do? I've machine my own gauge fits. Now that I have the lathe, I can machine them and measure them to tenths. With a, do you have one good micrometer? Yeah. Okay. That's what I need to buy, which is embarrassing. But for mill stuff, I mean, yeah, if you're measuring thickness and things like that, like I use my mid to toe micrometer all the time.
00:15:16
Speaker
But I put it up next to my Char's micrometer, like a $45 one. They read a few tenths different, but the range, like the comparative range is really similar. No, that's fair. I'm starting to, for a long time I was really good, and I use those absolute Digimatics from Mutatoyo every day. I love the feel of them.
00:15:35
Speaker
And you're right, for most stuff it's good, but then all of a sudden I realized it goes just crazy bonkers where like when I pick up a micrometer. Well, so this was the funny thing. We had two different sets of Mitutoyu micrometers and we had our height gauge. All three should be stupidly good accurate. And we were getting different measurements between all three.
00:15:54
Speaker
A couple tenths, but I was like that matters and how do I know which one's right and wrong and how would I know that if I didn't have three devices to check each other against. And so we went through and we cleaned off the pads and we made sure we were doing the torque of the thimble correctly and then all of a sudden when you started really paying attention you got the same numbers across all three.
00:16:14
Speaker
Yeah, at that level, that's where you like you need a temperature controlled room. Well, but it's yeah, but I mean, tense isn't crazy. You try to do stupid things achieving tense all the time, right? No, really, really cool stuff. So that was Mitzvah was here this week, which is cool. And today running that webinar, we're running some really fun job shop projects. I'm actually enjoying them because they're going well and we're doing a better job of making really good fixtures that just work off
00:16:41
Speaker
basically acknowledging you need to put a little bit more time into the upfront planning and fixture work and then knowing that the job is just going to run perfect versus that kind of, let me see if I can build a fixture that should work a little bit quicker and then you kind of fight it. Yeah, I'm no stranger to fixtures. I spent two hours this morning from 5 a.m. Further improving my my rask fixture. I've just got one right now and I'm planning on making another four. Oh, wow. Yeah. OK, so that I can they need to be identical, right? Because you want to hot swap them.
00:17:09
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm going to make them all at four at the same time, and they're going to have hardened steel liners for the fixture. And this should be hopefully really good. Do you ever use your Renishaw to QC or, you know, sort of poor man CMM things a little bit?
00:17:26
Speaker
but not a lot. I would think the quality of your machine is good enough that that should be a pretty good machine to check the parts with. If it had a smaller ball tip on it, the one on there is like a quarter inch, then I think I'd use it more for like hole diameters and stuff.
00:17:41
Speaker
Yeah. So have you heard
Exploring Aftermarket Components
00:17:43
Speaker
of Qmark? No. It's Q-M-A-R-K. Awesome company. One of those companies, kind of like Meritool, they're just awesome. A small group of guys, I found out about them through Monkey Like Shiny. So they make aftermarket probe tips. And I was kind of like, is there really enough
00:17:58
Speaker
demand for that. It actually ends up that there is, because lots of people need different lengths and sizes. One of those funny world coincidences, two days later, I found out that Qmark was helping a Detroit diesel remand facility in the next town over with these 18-inch long Renishaw probe tips.
00:18:15
Speaker
And you've got so much to deal with there because of the sag and flex and gravity and all this stuff. Anyways, we bought a Q Mark probe tip that's got like a one millimeter ball, and it wasn't even that expensive. Nice. And it just plugs in. Yeah, because I don't need the bigness of this one. If I had a small one, I'd still use it for everything.
00:18:34
Speaker
Yeah, you only need the big one if you're... Actually, it's funny. I did find out having a big one helps us because there's one part that I flip and I deck it, but there's still a pretty big burr from how it gets flipped. And that burr goes away when I chamfer it, but I can't chamfer it until I do a location of midstream coordinate probing routine.
00:18:57
Speaker
I can't do a midstream probing routine if the probing ball is hitting the bird. So you need a bigger ball to basically reach around the bird. Yeah, first world problems.
00:19:07
Speaker
Right, but it's good stuff, right? No, I was just thinking, as you were saying that, I'm like, imagine you telling yourself that six years ago. Yeah, that is funny. That is crazy. And you're just saying it like it's normal another day in the park, using my rent-a-shop probe to just, yeah, it's awesome. I think we talked about that in the last Friday when we talked about how it doesn't feel any different, because it's just John and John. I don't feel any different than I did a year or two ago.
00:19:33
Speaker
It is different. It's just growth. You become smarter and it becomes the new normal and you still want to get smarter. Like you and I still want to learn the world and we still want to get different equipment and we like the growth mindset is still there. You know, we're still hungry.
00:19:49
Speaker
Yeah, I'm hungry than I've ever been. It's funny, on my Wednesday morning coffee session, I actually had a really low week in terms of, it's weird, I'd never get in spats with my wife at the risk of oversharing publicly on a podcast. We didn't get along this week. It was silly and stupid like it usually is, although again, we don't really fight that much.
00:20:14
Speaker
That stunk because I guess I'm just so used to having a great home life that when that was not good and I was struggling with a couple things at work, it was frustrating. So that's actually one reason why on Wednesday I had some good, I hit on some good stuff when I was thinking of myself a coffee and it made me want to go film that chip break where we kind of, it was a pretty raw chip break where we talked about like growth. Anyway, what I was realizing was what do I want to do? What do I care about? And I, and I,
00:20:42
Speaker
I think sometimes taglines and mottos are a little bit cheesy, but these three words just popped into my head. I haven't been able to get them out, which is learn, make, and inspire. That's the definition of John Saunders. That's everything I do, whether it's the training or job shop or business topic. That's all me. I want to keep learning. I want to keep making. And I really want to keep inspiring other people to do it. Wow. Yeah, that suits me very well, too. I like it.
00:21:08
Speaker
Yeah. Right? Yeah. Although you need to get back into doing more YouTube videos. I know. Mr. Grimsmo. That falls back into the inspire. You need to push yourself harder. Yeah. I just got to work harder, man.
00:21:25
Speaker
Yeah, quit being a slacker. No, seriously. Do the GoPro thing again. Just film a five minute. Every time I tell you to film a five minute video, it ends up being 20 minutes. Yeah. Well, it's not fear of starting, but just you put it off, put it off. I'd rather do something else. Yeah. What are you into today? Today, more rasp production. I ran the Maury last night when I went home, which was great. That's amazing. I love doing that. And it's like, I almost didn't do it. And then I'm like, it's going to take me 10 minutes to set it up.
00:21:54
Speaker
And then it's gonna run for two and a half hours when I'm gone. That's incredible. Of course I'm gonna do that. Recently I casted a new... You know how I used the smooth on stuff and I casted the relief for the blade? Yep. On the one side of the fixture is that it supports the blade. I casted a new one because I think I told you last week we were playing with this grinding wheel in the mori. Yes! To grind the blades. And we're getting really good results but it's still burning the blades every now and then.
00:22:23
Speaker
Huh. It's just kind of annoying. Are you? Yeah. Did you start redressing it in the machine? Yes. Yeah, we're doing every trick imaginable. I talked to Alfred Lion. Yeah. Yeah. And he put me on to somebody else. Nice lady, Linda, who knows everything about everything. So I'm using all the tricks that both of them are telling me. I'm getting pretty good results. I think I can get it without burning new. So that's good. OK. But yes, I had to cast a new
00:22:51
Speaker
Thingy which it says it takes 90 minutes to cure, but it really takes 24 hours to cure So it just kind of sucks to have the machine sitting cold for 24 hours. Oh, oh you have to let it sit. Okay. Yeah, that stinks Yeah, so but that's good We went through I've got to do a video on this because I'm actually proud of it and it might be relevant But we built we just start finishing our whole water system for delivering storing creating storing and delivering reverse osmosis water to our machines which ends up
Implementing Reverse Osmosis Water System
00:23:21
Speaker
ends up being really important. It wasn't expensive, but oh my gosh, I talked to plumbers and plumbing supply companies, and there were a lot of confusion about how to do something. I won't bore you now with it, but it'll be a good video. That's fantastic. I'm looking at the putting filters onto the Maury. Oh, right, because you're grinding now? Because I'm grinding, and it's mostly from the dressing that is spinning all the dust into the machine, but I definitely want to filter that coolant, so it's not just spraying everywhere again.
00:23:48
Speaker
How, I saw a picture that you increased your coolant size in the lathe, right? Yes. That going okay? It is going okay. I actually haven't run the lathe all that much to really test that thing yet, but something I need to do probably today, if not definitely next week.
00:24:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's keeping the temperature down which is good I mean the tank on there before was just so small when it's spinning 300 psi coolant It's just kind of circulating and circulating and circulating right so yeah You know we we cut our temperature growth by half almost I think yeah, I just have to run it more and do do more testing Yeah, that was the first thing I thought when I saw that photo that top the one I've got doesn't have the Grimsman knives double balanced engraving on the face of it. Yep
00:24:30
Speaker
And I was just like, God, that's a beautiful machine to do that kind of work in a lane. Yeah, using the C axis for rotation. So it's bang on center every time. That's awesome,
Documenting the Production Process
00:24:41
Speaker
dude. I'm looking forward to taking videos of how we make the tops because I was going to I didn't want to put you on the spot. Are you going to share some of that? Yeah, absolutely. Awesome to share it all eventually.
00:24:54
Speaker
Sweet. I was going through some stuff getting some cleaning done and I found a picture of a block of machinable wax that I bought with my first ever Enco order 10 years ago because I was so scared to cut aluminum or even wood.
Encouragement for Aspiring Machinists
00:25:09
Speaker
I thought I'll try this wax stuff and I never cut it. It's sitting here in its exact same form. So I thought maybe we'd leave with the words of encouragement of folks, just do it.
00:25:19
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I remember having the same feeling back when I first got started. I never bought the wax, but I almost did. It was so, I was so scared. I mean, cutting aluminum was mortified. Oh yeah, I totally remember. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, have a good Friday. Go crush it. You too. All right. Have a great day. See you later. Bye.