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Business of Machining - Episode 89
192 Plays7 years ago
Grimsmo is putting pens write back into the game! He and Angelo had a nice long meeting where they made A TON of changes to the internal workings of the pens.
Curious about what changed? Watch out for new Saga Saturday videos coming again soon on Grimsmo’s YouTube channel!
Learning is great, and it’s even better if knowledge can be used right away! Saunders learns what a “living hinge” is (keep listening to find out), and he bought a Skyhook crane (which is also new territory for him).
Which would YOU choose? Red or Blue? And no, we’re not talking about pills.
“Welcome to the Loctite Episode!” - Grimsmo
The Johns discuss loctite, different variations you can get, and how its versatility makes it so AMAZING!
What does loctite do? Fills in all the gaps and gives you 100 percent thread. It prevents the start of the reverse rotation.
The Balance of Risk and Reward
There’s always a risk when you sit down with a mentor or someone in the field, but from Saunders’ experience, the good always outweighs the bad.
Saunders talks about his trip to New York. He did SO MUCH in the two days he was there, but especially enjoyed his tour of the VAHL shop. There will be a video of that, so keep an eye out on Saunders’ YouTube channel for the shop tour!
Take away from the trip? Saunders says it’s always great to get a little out of his comfort zone, but he has to reflect a little more before he knows exactly what lessons he's learned.
How do you measure lean?
Saunders and Grimsmo discuss what goals that have when they implement lean strategies into their workflow.
“Better results at the end of the day is all the matters” - Grimsmo
The machines Saunders has makes him: “parts , money and happy”
Workflow improvements?
Grimsmo uses UpWork a lot to get results, and now the shop is also considering a fine grinding machine that would cut down on lapping time.
Grimsmo is going to visit Saunders this weekend! It’s a great time for them to just hang out, and be dads together.
Recommended
Transcript
Restarting Pen Production
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning, and welcome to the business of machining episode number 89. My name is John Grimsmough. My name is John Saunders. Good morning, buddy. Good morning. How are you? I'm fantastic. Good. What's been going on? Pens. Oh, come on, really? Bringing back the saga pen. It's been like five months since we made the first batch. Yeah.
00:00:21
Speaker
It's good. I'm super excited to bring it back. So I've been making a couple of parts and tweaks, um, past couple of days. So very, very exciting.
Pen Design Challenges
00:00:29
Speaker
Yeah. So that's all laid. Yes. Yep. It is a hundred percent.
00:00:35
Speaker
Is it really 100%? There's nothing on the... Nothing on the mill. Dura, that's funny. What part are you starting with? I am working on the button retainer right now. Okay, the thing at the top, the... Sorry. The clicky button at the top, this is a screw at the bottom that keeps that from flying out.
00:00:56
Speaker
The thing we talked about, they can unthread. Exactly. So it used to be a threaded thing, like a little screw. But I wanted to change that because it unthreads even with Loctite and things like that. And if it does come apart, then you've got three ball bearings flying everywhere and that's a bad thing. So I wanted to make it like this click in, you know, one time click and fit where the two little fingers, you know, bend in and then pop out into the hole and just stay, stay stuck.
00:01:24
Speaker
So I have done that. I designed it. It was all theoretical, but you probably can't even see it on the screen. It's tiny. A couple little tweaks. Angelo and I did this yesterday and then we got it dialed and we made 200 of them.
00:01:39
Speaker
That's awesome. That reminds me of when I was at this Autodesk like advisory meeting with these for the CAD sort of side of fusion. And there were these guys talking about some really cool industrial design. And I didn't even know that industrial design is just a fancy word for people that design stuff like treadmills or, you know, products like industrial designer to me had this ring of like,
00:02:06
Speaker
I don't know. You're building elevator shaft drive mechanisms. But no, it's just like consumer products. Anyway, they were like, well, so do you have a way in Fusion 360 of implementing a living hinge?
00:02:18
Speaker
And there's a room of like 15, 20 people. Do you know what a living hinge is? No, I can't say that I do. That makes me feel a smidge better. Actually, I don't really care. But my point is I wasn't embarrassed. I literally raised my hand when the next appropriate time was to raise your hand. And I was like asking for a friend, what's a living hinge? And a living hinge is the flap on the top of a tic-tac box.
00:02:40
Speaker
Oh yeah. I would have never guessed that. I'm like a knee joint. I don't know. So it's a hinge that's injection molded or made in place. Got it. Actually that's probably not a correct definition, but that's the box works perfect. Yeah. So that reminds me of your thing because you're making a, and there's probably a technical term, but like a split mandrel, expanding flange, one never removable insert press device.
00:03:05
Speaker
Exactly. And we wanted it, you know, soft enough that it can bend in and pop in place, but strong enough to keep its shape and not like deform. And they are deforming a little bit. So we're measuring the deflection and the memory deflection. It's totally working out perfectly. And basically, I want it never ever ever to come apart during normal circumstances, even the customer never really has to take this section apart. But with a set of pliers, you can pop it apart.
00:03:32
Speaker
Okay. I was going to say, like, could you drill it out or do a destructive removal? No, it shouldn't need that. Pliers should be able to pop it apart. And we did one test where we did like 10 or 20 removals and it still worked, but I think we'll probably keep a policy of if we do have to take it apart because of bad assembly or something, we'll just toss it and put a new one in.
00:03:51
Speaker
Yeah, right. Not a big deal.
Importance of Fasteners and Adhesives
00:03:52
Speaker
I will say this, and I say this humbly, but when we were dealing with strike mark, which it's awesome to like, I've been kind of reliving more of that lately and like looking back and we were trying to bring our first product to market ever. And it was a rifle target that was being shot and abused with high powered rifles. I got to see it at your shop. It was amazing. We'll shoot one this weekend if you're here.
00:04:16
Speaker
And so it had, I mean, everything. It had sheet metal, water jet, laser, welded, machined parts, batteries, motors, sensors. I mean, it was a soup to nuts complicated product. Although in essence, it was so simple. Anyway, I digress. Loctite and thread retainer or thread locker was a huge part for some of the things. And we ended up
00:04:41
Speaker
balancing it out with using castellated nuts or castle nuts with cross drilled holes with cotter pins on some of them but what I learned was I found a Henkel has great customer service the folks that make Loctite
00:04:56
Speaker
And the guy was really nice, but basically most people don't appreciate how good Loctite is, how many types there are and how to correctly use it. Sure. So one of the case studies or something is, I think Caterpillar, one of the big truck companies has Loctite for like grade nine bolts that are one inch diameter that are constantly shaking that are in a like life critical or something scenario. I don't know.
00:05:25
Speaker
I just say this, I don't think you're necessarily in the wrong for changing the design, but I've heard so many people sort of say, oh, Loctite didn't do the trick. And I just want to think like it can, if you buy the right version, you do the right application. Sometimes you've got to use a primer. Sometimes you've got to use the cleaner. Sometimes it needs different metals, depending on what you're doing to cure. Sometimes it needs, I don't know, there's lots of little quirks to it.
00:05:51
Speaker
So it's amazing stuff. Yeah, there's probably a hundred different kinds. Yet we all use probably the same kind. Like we're using blue Loctite 242. Yeah. At least you said the number. Some people are like, I'm using the red and I'm like, Oh my God, there's like 65 different reds. I think there is like a standard red though, but.
00:06:10
Speaker
Like when you go to the auto parts store and you buy red Loctite, basically. It's one kind. For our knives, we started using a Loctite glue stick. It's like a paste. Cool. It looks like a glue stick for real. And so Eric shoves a little tiny little screwdriver in there, takes a little dab out and puts it on the knife pivot. And what we noticed with that is it literally takes two days to cure.
00:06:35
Speaker
Because, you know, regular Loctite cures pretty quickly. But if I check the knives that he finishes the night before and I have to take off the pivot, I'm like, this thing's still loose. What's up with that? But if it's over the weekend, they firm up and they get tight. So I'm like, okay. At the very least, they're going to firm up in shipping to the customer. So it should be fine. They sell accelerators. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
00:06:58
Speaker
It's kind of cool like they sell activators they sell accelerators they sell a cleaner I'm trying to think what else they sell like a two-part lock tight type of thing It's like to me. It's just fascinating. I love I respect how
00:07:13
Speaker
They sell wicking types that will actually wick their way down. They give you thread specs, like certain lock tights are good for really fine pitch threads where your clearances are 1 to 3,000. They have lock tights that are better for bigger clearances. They have a totally separate type of lock tight that's, what is it called? Like shaft? It's the Sierra one. It's green. Yes. 638.
00:07:39
Speaker
I actually think I found out about it from Renzetti, but basically if you have a loose fitting shaft inside of a bore, not loose, I mean like a few thou or something, this stuff will take too smooth a round part male and female and secure them together. It's incredible. I think this is what we used to put the bearings in our spinners.
00:07:59
Speaker
because we tolerance it to be like a tight slip fit. So it just pops right in. But we needed the Loctite to hold it in place. And I think it worked, except we found that it actually expands overnight. So the bearing would actually rise up like 5,000 or something. So we ended up having to put a weight on it while it cured. Oh, and that did the trick. It did the trick, yeah. It was just like a heavy steel ball bearing is all it took. The other thing about Loctite that I realized is Angelo was telling me,
00:08:29
Speaker
You know, you think of it as a glue, you think of it as gluing these two metals together. But the way he explained it is it just it just fills in all the gaps and gives you 100% thread.
00:08:39
Speaker
Correct. So the way, oh man, I used to be smarter on this. So we were talking about threaded, what is it called? Thread retaining compound. So threads are just two triangles wedged together along a helical spiral. So what Loctite does is prevents the, it prevents the start of the reverse rotation kind of thing. Like it keeps it under,
00:09:06
Speaker
There's so many problems with screws when you actually dig into it. Like every time you correctly torque a screw down, you're literally stretching, you're plasticizing or elongating the screw. And that gives you the opportunity to rotate.
00:09:23
Speaker
So lock tight, man, there was an, there's an, there's an elegant way of explaining it, but you're Angelo's right. Like it's helping prevent that initial. It's not, it's not the same at all as putting like a really high strength two-part epoxy in there. That's yeah. I guess he said, what do you think of it as, you know? Yeah.
00:09:41
Speaker
Anyway, I have a lot of respect. I would probably say it's, I'm thinking back to that like life critical scenario. It's definitely not the same as what we did, which was a mechanical castellated nut or what you see in aerospace where they'd got the tie wires. Yeah, exactly.
00:09:58
Speaker
Cool. Yeah. It's fun stuff. Welcome to the lock tight episode. Yeah. That's awesome though. I love it. Yeah, it is fun. What? Um, okay. So the, I was gonna ask you about the pen. Um, okay. So here's a question on something like the pen, you know, how many machine parts are there? I think there's, I lost count. I think that was 12 or 15 total parts, seven or eight of which are machined.
00:10:23
Speaker
Okay. So of the eight, let's say there's eight that are machine. I'm assuming that a couple are kind of relatively cake, you know, not that hard. The tube, we buy it as tube, it's finished on the outside and the inside.
Machining and Precision
00:10:36
Speaker
So we just have to, you know, turn it to length and turn each face and then thread each face. And so that's pretty cakewalk. And then they get tumbled.
00:10:44
Speaker
And then yeah, and then the tip is pretty easy. This part's easy now that I got it dialed the retainer. Um, and some of the parts after that, it starts getting really complicated with like ID boring and tolerances of a 10th total, or I mean, um, you know, many 10ths, but it's still tight. Even insert where becomes an issue, um, with boring bars and things like that. So.
00:11:10
Speaker
Yeah. And last time, like I'm reading my notes that I took last time and we were chipping boring inserts. I've got this tiny little boring bar, Kyocera one, and it just kept chipping inserts and losing our ID tolerances. Like, I don't know what's going on. Fine. I'll deal with it next time, which is now. Right. Right. So do you have a mindset behind this idea of like, well, let me bang out.
00:11:35
Speaker
a quantity of the easy parts and get those done or do you just say no I'm going to tackle the hard first and then once the hards are done? I like doing the hard parts first because I like the challenge but also then it's off my plate. Whereas also in this case since we're redesigning some of the mechanism parts and dialing and the tolerances I kind of want the mechanism done first.
00:11:58
Speaker
right, you know, like I can't just make I can make it 200 of these, but I can't just make 200 of everything else in sequence because I don't know if they'll fit together.
00:12:06
Speaker
Right. Right. Okay. That's fair. I almost need to make like 10 of everything and then put it together. Make sure everything's good. Find your min and max. And I mean, last week, Angelo and I had like a three hour sit down session with drawings and fusion. And we just went over every single tolerance and every single min and max and, and, uh, surface finish requirement and all this stuff. And it was, it was great. That's cool.
00:12:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's actually I've one of my just Favorite moments was sitting down at your kitchen table and talking about that What do you call it the retainer? Which one are we talking about the part you're making the part you just change from a thread to a split? Yeah, the button retainer Yeah, and just like
00:12:54
Speaker
I guess of all the times I've ever had the chance to sit down and share with a mentor or with a fellow engineer or a fellow maker, there's always the risk of either wasting time or the risk of maybe, quote unquote, someone stealing your idea. There's some risk of the bad outcome. But every single time I've done that, the good has by far outweighed the bad, right? Wait. Was this your idea? I was just thinking back. Because we did talk about this, didn't we?
00:13:24
Speaker
Yeah, my idea was to... Was it like an insert and twist thing?
00:13:32
Speaker
I thought my idea was to make it a single piece, but that would have involved changing something else that it fits in there. Or a press we didn't like, though. We had some really good, like, I don't know, it was really good, like, back and forth about all you need. It was really all you. You just needed somebody else to push you to think about it. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Right. That's awesome. That's cool.
00:13:57
Speaker
Yeah, so it's coming together. So I've got this kind of aggressive goal of having at least everything done by the end of the month, like ready to produce. And I think we can. We just started getting our material in yesterday and the rest of it's in limbo, you know, coming soon.
00:14:14
Speaker
So the thing, the button retainer, I'm thinking of it's like one of those, I don't know if you've ever seen like how like the car bumpers go on nowadays where you have a little button and you push the button. Yep. So how are you splitting the center line of that on your lathe?
00:14:30
Speaker
So we started with a 1.16 flat end mill, four flute flat end mill. And the thing is titanium. Titanium's got some good spring to it. And I could use the exact same speeds and feeds as I use on our knives. Because when we cut out the lock bar slot, I'm slotting titanium with the same tools, same feeds and speeds. So I just did it on the lathe and it works great. But then we realized a square
00:14:57
Speaker
square corners in that slot are going to cause stress risers and things like that. So Angela was like, why don't we just try a ball? Okay, let's try a ball. Boom, done. So much better, so much stronger. And then we adjusted the depth of that slot to give our spring. Right. Perfect. So I thought it would be 100. And now we made it 80,000 with the ball and it's just perfect.
00:15:20
Speaker
Got it. So you already had an axial live tool ready to rock. That's awesome. Okay. I was thinking like, Oh, slitting saw, but then that makes so much more sense. Yeah. But then you got to buy a slitting saw and maybe long-term that's a better choice. But for now I'm like, Oh, no, this start with an animal. Like, yeah. And I made 200 out of breaking the tools. So why not?
00:15:39
Speaker
What you're doing there is a really good example of where I feel like the confluence of my skills and Fusion 360's workflow interface is, which is not usable for me. But I wish somebody like me or you could take that part and put it into the simulation, which is their FEA, and just be like, help me understand how much this is going to deflect if I change the depth of that slot by 10,000 at a time. Yep.
00:16:08
Speaker
I don't know how to do that. I wish I did. Yeah, I don't either. Angelo was asking, I wonder if Fusion has FEA? And I'm like, yeah, it totally does. I've played with it, but I have no idea what I'm doing.
00:16:18
Speaker
I'm like, it's going to take one of us 10 hours to just sit there and bang it out and play with it to like wrap our heads around it. I should actually book if there's an FEA class at AU because that would be a worthwhile thing. Part of the problem is I feel like FEA is so siloed. I don't feel like people use FEA except people that use FEA all the time. It hasn't been brought to that outside world, right?
00:16:45
Speaker
Like my problem with it is, okay, so now you have a measurement, but what does it mean to you? Like, what are you going to do with? Okay, so it's got a modulus of elasticity of so much. And like, I don't know what the right number is supposed to be. You know what I mean? Well, so yeah, like how much spring gives me what I want. For me, it's a feel when I pull with the pliers. It's got to be perfect.
00:17:09
Speaker
Well, but so one thing that, okay, I agree. So the problem there is that you don't have a good sense of unit, but you could probably figure out a way to do some sort of a pinch, like how much poundage of force does it take to pinch it or move it? But the other thing you could do is that would have showed you stress risers and it would have shown you, hey, if you start to lower that really far, they'll all of a sudden collapse totally. Like it would give you this band of range. Sure. That's very true.
00:17:34
Speaker
Yep. And I didn't, you know, I assumed I would maybe use, um, a key seat cutter, like a slaughter with slightly radius corners. Cause I knew the radius would be a little bit better. I hadn't thought about the full ball until Angela mentioned, I was like, Oh, that's a great idea. And obviously that's the best for stress risers and things like that. So.
00:17:52
Speaker
The other thing I noticed is if the slot is even ever so slightly off center, one will be thicker than the other. The weak one bends fully. It was the only one that bends, so you don't have an even spring force.
00:18:07
Speaker
Uh, probably no, I don't know if that's true because once it snaps in it's pushing against the other one you've actually I think you probably could have one be Fixed and the other the spring and then once they're snapped in they're both ledges because you have a little lip ledge, right? That is what prevents it from backing out. Yeah, so you just do on the Female piece you have a shelved id groove. Yes, right. All right
00:18:31
Speaker
which was very fun to get Fusion to use my threading tool to make that ID groove. Like, why won't you work? Right, right, right. That's critical. So there you don't want a rad on that because you want it to have a sharp crisp. Exactly. This is fun. Yeah. That's where I've been harping on them. And a part of me is, it's not that I'm frustrated because I have a lot of respect, but there's things I just want to happen in Fusion. And one of the things is, darn it, I want section views in cam. Ooh.
00:19:01
Speaker
I need to be able to look at a toolpath where the model is sectioned out so I can see, especially for ID, lathe work. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I ended up just hiding the model and then you see the stock simulation background, whatever. That's a good point. We have section view in CAD. Why can't we have it in CAM? Those are those things where I'm like, how is this? Yeah. Were you cut it in half and look inside? Because I do that all the time too, especially for lathe work. Right. Right.
00:19:31
Speaker
You've got a hole in the middle of a complex part, and I just want to look at the toolpath as it works its way down that hole. I don't want to see everything else. That's a good point. Add that to the list. Yeah, exactly. That's cool, though. That's exciting. Yeah. I
New York Trip and Insights
00:19:54
Speaker
had a great time in New York. It was so much fun to go back.
00:19:59
Speaker
We went back my wife and I went back maybe a year ago and I think we had a reason to go I can't remember to be honest, but um It was kind of a quick trip and it was just fine. This was different This I think is probably because of where I feel like we're in a much more
00:20:15
Speaker
I feel like, I don't know how to say it. I feel like a year or two ago, it was still very, very much a hustle, hustle, hustle. And don't get me wrong, I'm still fired up. But now it feels good to go back with a little bit more under your belt, right? Yes. So anyways, just it was.
00:20:31
Speaker
awesome to be back the energy seeing people hanging out got to see some friends got to hang out with a guy who I met through owning a tormach but he has an awesome background he is like just such an energetic passionate guy and he he knows everybody so literally we were joking about something NASA related and we just started texting with an actual astronaut at the dinner table and
00:20:57
Speaker
which was surreal. And he's super smart and he combines like making stuff with programming. He made this sand table that every morning it picks a random object and it automatically vectorizes the trace outline of the object. And then it uses an XY grid plot with a magnet to drag a stainless steel ball bearing type marble through a coffee table in their living room to trace the outline in a sand
00:21:27
Speaker
in a sand table that's below the glass and every morning they wake up to a different object.
00:21:33
Speaker
Oh my gosh. That's amazing. Yeah. And so we were playing with, he's making another version right now. So he had like a second one in his basement and he was like, what do you want it to draw? And I was just like, R2D2. So he typed in R2D2. It scoured the internet, found an object, I assume a suitable one, and then automatically vectorized it and then started programming it all. This all happened within 20 seconds. And all he did was type R2D2 go. What?
00:22:00
Speaker
He wrote all of this. Dude. Right? So cool. So that was fun. Wow. And it was awesome. Actually, we got to talking about science and astronaut stuff, because earlier that day, I spent the day in New Jersey touring a shop called Vol, VAHL. It's actually a guy I met on that Sandvik trip, and they are
00:22:26
Speaker
They are American as apple pie, man. They started the shop in 1938 in bro in Brooklyn. And then the current owner started there in 1958, maybe a little earlier.
00:22:43
Speaker
They left Brooklyn in 2008 or nine, moved out to New Jersey to kind of grow and expand. And, you know, Brooklyn is not where it used to be in terms of manufacturing. So, um, awesome 60,000 square foot shop. And I got to, this is coolest moment of my life. One of the coolest, I got to hold one of the Apollo lunar module feet.
00:23:07
Speaker
Really? Yep. They made a lot of the parts for Grumman or the lunar module. And this was one of the feet that they rejected. It had a little goof on it. And so it obviously did not go in space, but it was the same material. It was made on the same machine and it was just a blend part. And we got it on video and it was amazing. The surfacing and the contours and the threading and the detail, all manual.
00:23:34
Speaker
Back in the 50s, 60s, whatever it is. Yeah, this would have been probably like 65. Yeah. Yeah. All annual. I mean, just amazing. So cool. What was the material?
00:23:47
Speaker
You know, it's a good question. I actually think a lot of it was aluminum. I don't want to misspeak. I don't think much of it was titanium. And the lunar module itself was not particularly light. I think the whole thing was like 20,000 or 30,000 pounds, partly because the lack of the lower gravity in the moon area meant they didn't have to worry. You still got to launch it off the Saturn V. And I don't know if that's the right answer or not in terms of why they
00:24:17
Speaker
Didn't but um, I don't think you like I got to hold another part that was kind of one of those like The struts on the four legs and it was 99% sure that was aluminum
00:24:32
Speaker
Yeah, it was cool. So they now make landing gear. They make landing gear for like F-22s, F-35s, F-18s, C-17s, 747s. And so all these like forgings, some is built, but a lot is forgings and seeing the setups and the operations and really cool. That's awesome.
00:24:55
Speaker
Yeah. So Julie's actually editing that right now. I think she already has a rough cut done, which is really fast. Yeah. We just released the IMTS video. Um, so she's, I think she's been working on that. Um, and then the next day I headed up to hang out with a fellow named Evan who runs another really cool shop, been in the family long time, New York city called Alton instruments and checked out the, um, Maury SL one a two axis lathe.
00:25:22
Speaker
Nice. And it was awesome. It really was. You said it still runs like every day making tight parts. Oh, yeah. He's using it all the time. It's one of those machines. It kind of reminds me of your DER vertical. No one has been like, oh, that machine doesn't do this very well. They're just like, those are solid machines. It's in cherry. It's in such good condition.
00:25:47
Speaker
and you know look at the two axis lathe it's not the same as a your Nakamura live tool dual spindle etc but um it holds insanely good tolerances it's in great condition and it's uh it's you know it's only a i don't know what the exact travels are but maybe like four inches in x and 10 inches in z so it's pretty small
00:26:09
Speaker
Work envelope, but it's heavy as could be. And it's just like we were turning 12 L 14 and it was the finishes were spectacular just because it's rigid and heavy. Right. So is there a tail stock of any sort? Uh, there is. And he's never used it, but we pushed the button and it worked. So, um, I don't know if I would ever use that or not. It depends long parts or whatever.
00:26:31
Speaker
Yeah. So the plan is he is purchasing a brand new, I think he's going to go with a Japanese brand. I don't want to, it's his news to share. I guess I don't want to spoil it, but a multi-axis live tool, sub-spindle type lathe. So when that comes in, his offer is to, he really appreciates what we've done and paying it forward and so forth. So his offer is, I got to get rid of these machines. They're not worth that much commercially anymore.
00:27:01
Speaker
Look, it's a 1986 machine. There's absolute huge risk that this
00:27:07
Speaker
could be dead on arrival here because of a wire breaking in transit and so forth. But it's in great condition and so forth. So his offer is, it's ours to run with any use and so forth. I'd like to throw something his way because that's just, that's too nice of an offer. I mean, I very much appreciate it. But anyways, it's probably not going to be for a few months anyways, because he's got to get that new machine in.
00:27:32
Speaker
I like it because because it's like the same year that short circuit came out and making Johnny five parts on it. And I actually want to have an older use machine for some of the speeds and feeds work we're doing. So actually, yes, ironically, kind of works out well. Perfect. And look, we'll still end up, I'm pretty sure getting a modern turning center at some point. Yeah. But that's the plan.
00:27:57
Speaker
So that's awesome. I can't wait to see a comment. Welcome to the Morrie family. Yeah, right. Yeah. Not how I, it has a, it's in such good condition. It has a tape reader still attached. So Ed is like, we are going to laser cut our own tapes and get this thing working that way, but you can get close to it via a USB cable and it has memory. You don't even have to trip. So it does not have USB serial converter works fine. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. That's good to know. Yeah. That's the plan.
00:28:25
Speaker
And shout out to Alton in heaven. That's a solid, you know, it's a cool move. Nice.
00:28:32
Speaker
But he's got an awesome shop. He's got a Robo drill. They make really good, really tight parts. Um, does some stuff for medical, does some stuff for energy, like these, um, um, recovery devices that are made out of AL. You ever heard of this, like AL six XN or something, but it's super high nickel, high Chrome or high nickel. I don't know. It's, it's nasty stuff to work with. And he was, he was on a great job on it. Nice. Anyway, as always, it's fun to hang out and talk shop with other guys and see shops and all that.
00:29:03
Speaker
Are there any other, any advice you brought back that you're going to use in your shop that you learned from them, even you saw something? Oh, that's a great question. You know, I don't.
00:29:15
Speaker
Hmm. Not necessarily, but what I do find is I have to get outside of my comfort zone. I have to get outside of my own shop to see just what other people doing and how do you think about, you know, moving forward and, um, yeah, nothing. Hmm. That's a good question to actually do some thinking about that. Yeah.
00:29:39
Speaker
Yeah, like when we went up, when you and I went up to Milterra and saw how they run things, you know, where everything's scheduled and everything's dialed. And it was, it was very cool, very eyeopening. You know, I'm like, I want more of that in my life. Like, yes, they're, they were, it's interesting. The two shops were very different. You know, vol is a long,
00:30:00
Speaker
Tenured shop that has very much procedures in place ERP processes as 9100 and so They are procedure base whereas Alton is kind of a one-man band Family shop and sure it's very different. I will say the one thing I sort of take away is I would I would argue while
00:30:23
Speaker
Both of those shops were very cost-conscious in terms of, hey, there's not unlimited capital. I would say both of them didn't hesitate to make investments in tooling and metrology and stuff where needed. And so just kind of continuing to build out on that kind of stuff. And I say that as I move away from, we're certainly not hobbyists anymore. I recognize that. But nevertheless, it's kind of like, think about your business as if
00:30:51
Speaker
as if you, the owner, are investing into another business and saying, hey, what are the tools you need to make great parts to do stuff right? It's not a hesitation anymore. If you need this, you buy. Sorry, evident, Alton Instruments.
00:31:11
Speaker
Oh, bought the Sandik A80 drill because it was the one they told me to need. And then I tried this Walter tool here because it was the right thing to do. These are not cheap tools. And it was like, there's just no hesitation. Like, I'm going to get the tools in to run these parts correctly and make phenomenal parts.
00:31:24
Speaker
Yep. That's kind of the dream is to get the business to that point where those decisions become no brainers because they mean forward progress. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yep. So yeah, that, that was a trip. It was good to, it was good to, uh, good to get out and see that. Yeah. You packed a lot of stuff into a couple of days. That's awesome. That was quick. It was, uh, yeah, the New York pace. So it's always, yeah, yeah, exactly. Right.
00:31:50
Speaker
The last thing I wanted to throw out is something that's Jay Pearson, I think somebody asked Jay Pearson back at the mhub event, but kind of how do you measure lean?
00:32:03
Speaker
I think it's a good topic because I think taking into account data and performance and metrics is Something we should be continue to be conscious of and certainly you're setting yourself up for it with pro shops we just got it's coming Friday a Digital toolbox like one of the iPad toolboxes to do automatic ordering
00:32:25
Speaker
Okay.
Lean Manufacturing and Machine Tool Critiques
00:32:26
Speaker
So awesome. It'll let us store anything from consumables to tooling to actually some of our expensive, we have a lot of mighty bites on our inventory racks because of, um, the mod vices selling them. And so putting those into a lock toolbox is quite appropriate for fulfillment and all that. Cool. And so I started to log in to create the account for and everything, but basically it'll automatically trigger reorders. When we hit minimums, it'll tell you who, who opened up
00:32:55
Speaker
what box to get what tool out and what job it was for so you can allocate costing to it. And then the big thing for me is just we don't have to guess on where stuff is, how many we have left. We got a lot more to learn. I'm very hopeful it's going to do everything I think it's going to do, but I want to get it implemented and then we'll talk about it. What's it called?
00:33:21
Speaker
It's the spin-off from smart supply, which is part of Alting, which is the A-L-L-T-I-N-G, which is that group that is not
00:33:36
Speaker
they're not branding themselves with Sandvik but it got spun out of Sandvik like I'm sort of looking ahead about digital factory solutions so they're sweet the pitch is like they've got quoting stuff and can't actually have cam and I don't know what they call it digital factories what I think of
00:33:54
Speaker
Sweet. Yeah. Metrology actually would be interesting. If I understand it correctly, they're going to come out with some platforms that could help lay on top of some of the otherwise crummy CMM and metrology software, which would be interesting.
00:34:11
Speaker
Yeah, cool. Oh, anyway, so I mean, the point was Jay's response, which I love, which is that I implement it. I kind of, it's kind of a, it's kind of a good answer. And it's kind of a, I don't care answer in a good way, which is like,
00:34:27
Speaker
We implement meaning to see the results to make things work fluidly and smoothly and we know that we don't measure everything because when you measure stuff sometimes you're measuring to make sure you're doing it right sometimes you're measuring just to show the boss or the corporate overlords or the quarterly reporting stuff and
00:34:45
Speaker
And the latter is something that as a solopreneur or small shop, Jay's answer was basically like, I want to go hang out with my kids. I want to go hang out with my family. I know when it's running well. I don't need certain things like inventory days on hand, time on shelf. And I'm not sure how scalable that is. So I think there's probably still some value and some easy data and metrics. But I also like the ability to push back and say, lean is on the,
00:35:12
Speaker
operation side is important, not necessarily on the reporting side. Does that make sense? Sure. Yeah. It all depends on how you look at it and how you want to quantify your efforts. I mean, data collection is a black hole because you can collect everything, everything about everything and dump it into spreadsheets and math it till your eyes are blue. But what matters at the end of the day, like
00:35:39
Speaker
better results basically is all that matters. Yeah. Somebody was trolling me on the IMTS video and they were commenting on a machine tool brand. I'm going to be going to say which one. And they're like, oh, that's not a good machine. And I'm just like, look, we've got machines in our shop of all different price ranges and brands and sizes. And we're looking
Pen Production and Packaging Excitement
00:35:59
Speaker
at it even more. And the reality is all of them
00:36:01
Speaker
make me number one, they make me parts. Number two, they make me money. And number three, they make me happy. I don't know what else you need in life, but I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm pretty good. Yeah, exactly. I love that. Yeah. Um, so what's going on this week? We have to depends question. Question for you. Can you hear my coalescer bubbling in the background? Very, very slightly.
00:36:26
Speaker
I'm wondering if it's a bad audio. Okay. Cause like, should I go plug unplug it? I've been wondering that for a while. Um, it's the, the coalescer, the next gen coolant skimmer thingy on my lathe. Yeah. It's just like flowing water and bubbling. Um, all right. So if you guys are hearing that, then whatever, that's what it is. Um, yeah. Pens this week.
00:36:49
Speaker
Crank it on Norseman. We've got a sweet pen box design and shipping solution. We've been working with that a lot and we're filming the process of that too, which is super thrilled. I want these pens to be everybody needs one kind of thing. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Basically everybody we've shown this to, even just the packaging, they're like, I'll buy one for my husband right now.
00:37:16
Speaker
Are you trying to satisfy the Christmas market? Not going to get there. Well, yes and no. We're going to have them for sale before then, for sure, but not in droves. So yeah, we kind of have that in our minds for sure that Christmas is coming up and people like to buy around Christmas. But regardless, I just want to get these out.
00:37:37
Speaker
I'm excited. I'm super excited. It's yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, cause I use my knife, I don't know between two and 10 times a day, but a pan I'm using every 10 minutes. Yep. Yep. And then flashlight as well is something I use every day for more than my knife. Yeah, that's probably so long-term goals, but yeah.
00:38:01
Speaker
i was ran a soap in the shower yesterday and i william was playing in the room and i was like william i need some soap and so he opens the drawer and it was a brand new of course we buy the so from sam's club so it's like seven hundred and fifty two so bars in a giant saran wrap.
00:38:17
Speaker
And William couldn't get it open. So I'm like, William, my knife is in my jeans pocket. And so I'm thinking he's just going to go get the knife and hand it to me. No, he gets my Norseman out of my jeans pocket, opens it up and starts to go into town. I'm like, no, William, you are, no, he's four. You're not qualified for that yet. Do not tell your mother. Anyways, no problem opening the Norseman. That is whole curious.
00:38:42
Speaker
That's awesome. So good segue. Uh, Leif and I are coming to visit you this weekend. Awesome. I'm super excited. He is super excited to hang out with William again. Yes, that's going to be fun.
00:38:53
Speaker
Do you want to do shop machine stuff or do you want to just go enjoy life, go to the farm, hang out? Yeah, a little bit of shop machine stuff, but let's be dads together. Let's spend some time together. Let the kids hang out and play. You and I can chat about life and business and everything like that, too. I definitely want to see the shop. Right. The kids probably aren't going to ... Yeah, the kids will be self-entertaining once they get together. I don't feel like four and five, they're on their own now. There's a couple of good pumpkin patch
00:39:19
Speaker
you know, kind of fall off that sort of things here if you're, if Leif said that, which is, which is fun. Yeah, yeah. Sweet. It was funny this, this morning, I was in the shower and the girls are still sleeping. And then I come out and I hear, I hear somebody's on their, on their screen, like watching a kid's show. And then I see Leif sitting in the living room in the dark, watching his tablet, nobody else is awake. And I'm like, you up by yourself? And he goes, yeah, I snuck out. Hilarious. He's like, he showed me, he's like puts his hands up and he's like, I just tiptoed through the house and nobody knows I'm awake.
00:39:50
Speaker
Yeah, William was getting up way too early. And, uh, I was kind of like, William, you may need to sleep in like, just, it's good to sleep. And then I was like, if you really get up, though, you can go downstairs and play on your own. And the other night, Yvonne got up and like, at like four, 30 or five or something. And William was downstairs alone in the dark playing with his toys. He was like, I'm sad. I'm like, Oh my God. Now I feel terrible.
00:40:14
Speaker
Yeah,
Outsourcing for Business Efficiency
00:40:15
Speaker
that's awesome. Oh, cool. Yeah, I can't wait. Um, last thing is I just, cause it's, I have to reiterate this cause it's so freaking awesome is somebody else had a, um, outsourcing Upwork breakthrough moment.
00:40:29
Speaker
And they were just like, yeah, I'm just trying to get my business started. I think they were using WooCommerce e-platform with trying to integrate it with Square for payments. And they were like, couldn't figure it out. And I was super frustrated. I was spending all this time. And then I just realized, no, the Johns talk about this. Let's just find an Upwork account, create one or whatever. And they were so excited with how it worked. And it just made me happy because even I don't use it enough sometimes. Right, me too.
00:40:59
Speaker
I had a bad experience, actually I'm having a really hard time right now getting our FedEx LTL Freight integrated. So not every story is peaches and cream, but darn it, it is still such a great force multiplier and tool for entrepreneurs.
00:41:14
Speaker
Absolutely it's it's solutions when like you and i don't have skills in a lot of things but everybody on upwork does you can easily easily find a person and pay them i mean you pay them well but it's not a lot of money to like solve these problems you know ten bucks fifty bucks two hundred bucks it's
00:41:32
Speaker
It's not a lot of money for these small solutions. And I've been using it more and more. I want to use it more. I guess I'm still a little hesitant because it does take time to organize your project and to manage them and to feed back and forth. But it's better than doing it yourself, especially if you don't know what you're doing. So
Production Enhancements with New Machinery
00:41:50
Speaker
I've done some programming work with a bunch of guys there. And I've got two jobs on the go right now. Two on Upwork? With regards to like. That's awesome. It's funny.
00:42:00
Speaker
With regards to basically Google Sheets, we call it script. Oh, really? To automatically integrate Shopify information with my Google Sheets so that I can parse data. Cool. Figure stuff out. Yeah, it's cool. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, so I'm having a lot of fun with that. All right. Awesome. Anything else? How's that? That's what it is. We're going to crank. How's the mill running? The mill's running solid. No problem.
00:42:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's great. We just need more lap parts. Oh, did the machine come yet? No, the lapping machine is apparently set to ship the week of October 22nd, which is next week. So we'll probably see it in November, realistically. Does stuff get stuck in customs like that? Free? Not really. It usually gets stuck at the brokerage house and then they call you and then you got to like set up an account and broker it through. And I've actually had some guys reach out to me like, I'm a broker. Let's.
00:42:58
Speaker
I'll hook you up, but anyway, um, it shouldn't be a big problem with that machine. And then I was talking about the fine grinding machine last week as well. So we sent them, we sent them a hundred knives worth of stuff, which costs us $500 to ship down there. Um, but that's the guy was like, yeah, the guy was like, I've never really ground titanium before, but I'm totally willing to try. And then we had a phone call yesterday.
00:43:24
Speaker
And he's like, all right, so I just ground 100 of your handles in two hours. What? Both sides done. Where I'm just like, are you kidding me? Seriously? That is so fast. Oh my god. Like in two hours, we could probably do both sides of 10 handles. On the lapping machine? 12. On the lapping machine. And this would replace, or it is, double disk.
00:43:50
Speaker
Yeah, John. And apparently it gives, he measured the finish and it was like eight to 10 RA, which is good. And it should go on the lapping machine and take like three minutes to make a mirror. Yeah. So literally that's perfect. Somebody was just asking me about your workflow there. And I was like, I'm pretty sure the new workflow will be double disc better flatter. And then the lapping is just a kiss, like just a yes. Yeah, exactly.
00:44:12
Speaker
Yeah, it'll be water jet. And then we'll have thick material. We'll fine grind it down to 1255. And then the lapping machine will take it to 125. Awesome. Yeah, I can't wait. So we're all super excited.
Innovation in Packaging and Workflow Improvements
00:44:24
Speaker
So those 100 handles are in transit up to here. We should see them any day now. And then we'll lap them and tumble them and see how they go through. Can't wait. We're super excited. That's awesome. Yeah. It's so frustrating. I had like my click click breakthrough about
00:44:40
Speaker
our future direction right after IMTS, which would have darn it changed kind of what I had looked at at IMTS, but whatever. And it obviously ties back to fixture plates, but we have had some really good interest in actually sales on selling like the Haas Brother, like the larger format machines. And so how do you standardize that?
00:45:00
Speaker
We put up a really good Instagram post showing how we're nailing down our packaging. I tell you this, we're using Kaizen foam as our cushion because it's reasonably priced. And darn it, that way you get two sheets of free Kaizen foam. That's perfect.
00:45:16
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And a lot of these customers might have never touched Kaizen foam before, right? So it's like a free entry to this. Right. So I need to get on Upwork to have a little graphics card made up so that people realize what it is. Sure. But it's also nice because you're not throwing away large sheets of styrofoam packaging now. You're freaking reusing it. It's amazing.
00:45:37
Speaker
That's the best. Yeah. But stabilizing our workflow around material, around process, and we just got that sky hook crane in. I got to wait for the counterweights to come, but I didn't really realize, I guess, again, get outside your comfort zone. I didn't really realize how many people knew about them because
00:45:56
Speaker
I just have never, I don't know, I see a lot of shops and places and I've never heard anybody talk about them and lots of people know them, which is awesome. Um, but that's going to be just so nice to hand to work with. So let's come together, dude. Cool. So are you going to roll that up to like a machine and pull off a heavy thing and then
00:46:13
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So the normal use will be handling the all of the fixture plates, especially the new larger ones where right now we made we did some TIG welding on some studs or through screws. And then we remember the plastic dip. Do you ever play with that as a kid? Yeah.
00:46:31
Speaker
I probably shouldn't have been playing with it as a kid, but hey. So we have like handles so we can do two man lifts on the plates. And this crane is freaking awesome because it's got a really nice smooth action so it'll handle the weight just fine and it's got a really long reach.
00:46:52
Speaker
We'll use it for that on a daily basis, but even if we're going to pull off a really heavy vise or, uh, you know, have to do something with our lathe turret alignment, like it'll be there to, it's so awesome.
00:47:04
Speaker
So it's on wheels. It's on a rolling cart. What was the total cost? So it's expensive. So we went with the insanely overdone version. We bought the cart version, which is way more expensive than the static version. So in the future, I would probably just recommend buying the ones that they have that bolt into the ground, because they're like, I don't know.
00:47:29
Speaker
under $1,500, maybe even under $1,000. The cart gets expensive because the cart's expensive. We bought the one that has cantilevered reach. Because otherwise, you had like 17 inches of reach. And I really wanted like 20 because I don't want to mess with it. I don't want to have to like scoot the plate around or not have it be perfect. Right. It's got to be centered over the mill. And then you need 625 pounds of counterweight. So that costs money. So I think all in, we're going to do a video on it.
00:47:59
Speaker
put out all the costs, but I think it's going to be like 3,200 bucks. That's not that bad. I thought a lot meant like 567 or something. The cart, I think, was 2,800. And then the counterweight material is going to be 600 bucks, 700 bucks. Oh, plus the arm, though. So you're looking at more than 3,000. No, the cart included the arm. Sorry.
00:48:19
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. Um, okay. So like 3,500 bucks for the sky hook bill was 2,700. And then the material I bought yesterday was 652. I think saw cut delivered. You just, you just bought material. I called my steel box. I was like, what is the cheapest like steel or tire you got on inventory right now? Like it's just kind of right. Yeah. Yeah. Cause with, with the lapping machine or the, sorry, the new fine grinding machine,
00:48:47
Speaker
We're kind of trying to balance because we're grinding titanium and steel. And I think I got this right. Titanium likes a diamond wheel, but steel likes a CBN wheel.
00:48:58
Speaker
Maybe I'm backwards, but they do make a hybrid wheel that can apparently do both, but they don't have any for testing. So he's like, I know this works. So if you have two different wheel packs and you change out the wheels, then you just grind in batches and things like that. So we might kind of settle for that right now. But then we're changing these, I think they're like 70 pound plates, right? So like a Skyhook could actually be very beneficial for that.
00:49:23
Speaker
So interesting. I'm curious to see, I guess I'll see it this weekend. Right. The static one, I think is a much better value, but we just, I wanted to, but you can't move it like on wheels would be amazing. So what you would do, I think, and we, maybe we could have done this was just mounted the sky hook and then used a regular cart. So you lift it up, move it over to the cart. Um, sure. But then you have one hook per machine.
00:49:44
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah. I'm legit excited for this. And I was curious to see what the build quality would be like, because it's like, hey, I got to put 600 pounds of counterweight on a rolled cart. It looks great.
00:49:59
Speaker
Yeah, we already custom cut a top with like a Kaizen foam style cut out of HDP not Kaizen foam, but it's got a cut out for the magnet and It's kind of fun to see and I didn't even do all this like Jared and Ed did this and it's like It's but it's like the culture descending in on this product of like, okay. How do we make this thing work for us? I Love it. Cool Cool. I'll see you soon. It's easy in a couple days. Awesome. Take care of it. Okay. Take care. Have a great day