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#322 Willemin Machines Are Awesome!
303 Plays2 years ago
TOPICS
- Willemin machines are awesome!
- Yates precision IG link
- Kern needs a new spindle
- Saunders had to fix a Helicoil
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Importance of Mentorship
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning welcome to the business of machining episode number three hundred and twenty two my name is john saunters and my name is john grimsmo every entrepreneur needs mentors advisors in the peer group and john i've been doing this for years just talking every friday off the record about the joy we have for machine.
00:00:18
Speaker
Yeah. It's like we're mentors to each other on a very similar path and growing together. It's really cool to see actually. We're rooting for each other and we're helping each other out with all the little pitfalls and struggles. Yes. I love that we're not in any way in competing spaces because I like not going head to head with you on products, but in an unspoken way, it never feels like a competition, but it is like this.
Friendly Competition and Machinery Talk
00:00:43
Speaker
You know, because we're both super technical, we're super detail oriented. We want to make the perfect product for our audience. And yeah, we're not competing, but we do have little competitions like I got a Wilman, you got a Wilman, who got a running first, like you've probably made more parts than I have so far. You know, it's like fun stuff like that.
00:01:03
Speaker
The getting it to run all readily of it was an unspoken, you know, yeah, grabbing each other. But by no means have I ever made a cap, a compromised preparatory purchase just to compete. No, of course. You know what I mean? Like, that's just like, and I, I'll tell you that I love that machine. Yeah. Well, we can, in this sense, we can learn from each other.
00:01:25
Speaker
And when one person makes a good decision, the other person like, I need to do that. Like it makes sense for a business because you've proven it and I could just take that. And then the other person doesn't have to like, uh, play the field and like spend a lot of money to test all the options if the one person has already done it. So that's cool. But I'm glad to hear your love in the Willaman.
00:01:44
Speaker
It still blows me away that there isn't more awareness around that space of a bar-fed automation, B-axis capable mill, turned mill that has advice up. It's such a great platform. Yeah. And they've been making them for 30 years? Yeah.
00:02:03
Speaker
But I think, I mean, new, they're so expensive, and because of that, they find themselves into very specific markets that have the money to sustain that, like medical and dental and things like that, right? So us, you know, bootstrappers, we didn't even hear about them until one of the IMTSs. Like, I didn't even know they existed.
00:02:27
Speaker
I think the first version I saw was the BumaTech followed by Chiron from IMTS from Friends. My buddy over at Reynolds, they had a Chiron. Look, maybe I'm thinking about it wrong. Rewind 15 years or even 10 years. The ability to program and safely run that machine was probably a different landscape. I don't even know enough. I know what that's like.
00:02:52
Speaker
I'm not doing this. It's a huge undertaking to bring a machine tool to market, but like why somebody isn't coming out with the Haas or Tormach or like kind of, I think you could deliver that platform for a, without the same accuracy. But yeah, a fraction of the price. And that would be fine for certain applications that don't need the medical tolerances or, you know, ours has 2 million tool changes on it. That's not necessarily what the benchmark would be for that kind of a machine at a lower.
00:03:21
Speaker
Value and offering like some of our buddies have been like Brother speedio needs to make the Wilhelmin version of the speedio, right? That
Automation Concerns and Efficiency
00:03:30
Speaker
would be sick Somebody's hacked a brother with barf a bar like a really DIY bar feeder. Yeah into a rx No, and that what's the four plus one the m? Something in 150 m 450 or something. Yeah
00:03:49
Speaker
Yeah. Cool. Well, you said you've got a list, so that's awesome. I'll kick it off quickly and then hand it over to you by saying what I left last week's nail or nail clipper of a podcast with. So I get palette tools and drink the Kool-Aid, subscribe to them. It's been wonderful on our horizontal. I know you love your arrow on the current.
00:04:13
Speaker
And it was a no brainer to get the 10 pallet pool for the UMC 500 from Haas. And I still believe that to this day that like how that lets us leave setups in place for R&D or prototyping or run light production all holds true. But
00:04:31
Speaker
I started to solve the light going the other way, which is if you have 10 pallets, the Haas APL is not particularly fast. So to sit there and pull 10 pallets out one at a time and reload them is quite a bit of time, which is starting to kind of smack in the face of what's the point of automation when the reloading process is so slow. Like you think about if you could like climb into the APC, you could open and close 10 vices in
00:04:58
Speaker
seconds, whereas you're talking half an hour, probably to pull each one out and put it back in. Does it have, do you have to like give me a pallet too? And it breaks, fix it up, gives it to you in a loading station. Then you do it. Yeah.
00:05:11
Speaker
Yeah, we're spoiled on the Aroa because you just open the door, you have access to all of them. Which is fairly unusual. Yeah, and ours are small enough and light enough. We just pick them up, put them on the bench, and then reload. But I even remember the military guy saying this years ago when they had a Matsura, like an LX or something, like a man that has
00:05:30
Speaker
30, 40, 50 pallets in a vertical thing. And they're like, it's great. It runs unattended, but you're going to have a guy there almost all day just reloading it. Again, compared to the ability to open a door and just walk in and start pulling parts out. Yeah, that's a good point. Now with Miltara, they also had like four minutes cycle times on their turbo impellers. Not good for that. Yeah, I know. So my point is the guy is there because there's so much throughput.
00:05:56
Speaker
Yeah, you're almost better off with a two-state palette thing where you're just, well, whatever, you get the point. So punchline is, would I have considered the Haas APL? I think it's a little janky. If you've seen there like 80-20... What do you mean? They call it the APL, the automatic parts loader.
00:06:14
Speaker
Different than, oh, you're talking a robot parts loader? Yeah, I would say robot. Robot arm? It's an 8020 pneumatic slot. Oh, OK. I don't think I've seen this. I think like a 3D printer or something that moves back and forth. Yeah.
00:06:29
Speaker
Very coincidentally, it kind of looks like what Yates Precision just put up for his automated, looks super cool, sandblasting system. I haven't seen that yet. Check out Instagram this morning. It looks pretty snazzy. I will. But if you think about a bridge design with 8020 where it can just move a gripper over and forth, it's kind of a dumb system. Not critically dumb. It could be genius that it's that simple and dumb, but it just seems a little janky.
00:06:55
Speaker
What you could then do is set up a stack of 50 pieces of raw material on. Now we're moving into the very standard robot world of like when you have. Yeah. And then replacing the parts could be done while you hold your breath. I mean, literally pick up 40 parts, put new ones in, you're done.
00:07:12
Speaker
Oh, correct. You don't have to buy the same number of vices, whereas with the power pool, obviously you do, which again, I was like, oh man, I have a product I'd like to run a bunch of now. I'm not willing to buy 10 acts of the work holding setups for it. Yeah. Yeah. Like the chunk vices we use are almost two grand Canadian. Right. To get 10 of those, that's hooch. That's a lot of money. Yeah. To be clear, you cannot do both.
00:07:38
Speaker
on most machines, including the Haas, where you can't have both a powerful and a APL. The only machine I know that has, quote unquote, both is the Hermely like RS or like HSFlex2, which is like a multi-million dollar automation platform that you can just do everything.
00:07:55
Speaker
It all depends on how you're using the machine, how you're running parts. Say you have a million parts to make out of a block of aluminum, like part loading
Dealing with Spindle Failure
00:08:06
Speaker
makes sense because you're just constantly doing the same thing. Whereas we do everything from fixtures. Parts are water jet cut, they're bolted down to the fixture, so we're loading a fixture offline, put it into the machine. So part loading in that sense doesn't work for us because it has to be clamped extremely well.
00:08:26
Speaker
Yeah, sure, sure. Done in a way. I do very little vice work at all every now and then, but yeah. If anybody has the Haas APL, because they make it for VF2, they make it for the lathe, and they make it for the UPC, I actually would love to hear first hand experience how that's worked out. So that's my stick. Cool. You said you've got a bunch of good stuff. So I'll hit the big one. The current needs a new spindle.
00:08:58
Speaker
Yeah. So as of yesterday, I mean, it runs 120 hours a week of there's 168 hours in a total seven to seven week. So it runs 120 average every week. We run the crap out of that thing. Um, so 3am yesterday, like a day and a half ago, uh, it stopped running. So we come in, notice this not running. It was mid cut. No big deal.
00:09:27
Speaker
doing an engraving pass at 40,000 RPM, which it does. And there was a weird alarm that we've never seen before. And I forget exactly what it said. But eventually talking with current and trying to figure out what this alarm means, it means that the rear spindle bearing is overheating. And the lower spindle bearing is fine. So we, you know, jog at safety, try to do the warm up. And it does the warm up for about two minutes.
00:09:54
Speaker
until the upper spindle bearing temperature reaches 50 degrees Celsius. It's supposed to be 20 constantly. Once it reaches 50, it just stops. It kept doing that and doing that and doing that. We're like, restart the machine. Let's try it. Is the chiller not flowing? Is it out of chilling fluid, antifreeze? We check that. Everything looks good.
00:10:16
Speaker
they say you're supposed to clean and flush the chiller every year. And it's been three years and we haven't yet. So like that's on us. So we're like, is that is that? I don't know. I don't know. And is the spindle not getting lubrication? You know, and there's this machine that sensors everywhere when you're
00:10:35
Speaker
Anything goes wrong. It alarms out in census, which is generally wonderful. But anyway, talking with Tina from Kern and Tony from Kern, um, basically all day yesterday, trying to debug it remotely, um, trying different things. I tested run out. There's two and a half tenths of spindle run out on the calibration tool that I have, which is not normal. It's usually like zero. Yeah. So she's like, I'm wondering if your upper spindle bearing is just, uh, not happy anymore. Um,
00:11:06
Speaker
And they said, if you run it at high RPM a lot through its life, it generally does live a shorter life to a degree. And I go up to 40,000 RPM. It goes up to 42. I've never taken it that high. But I do some 40,000 RPM every single day, probably a combined total of 10 or 20 minutes a day. But it's not staying at that straight.
00:11:30
Speaker
I don't know, tan maybe. I might have to check my toolpaths. Anyway, so that could theoretically reduce the spend of life. And then also, I have certainly bumped it at least five times to varying degrees, which they said over time can compound and add up and not necessarily fail immediately, but eventually cause that bearing to just get hotter than it's supposed to be. And I was thinking about 50 degrees Celsius. That's a hot tub temperature. That's hot, but it's not hot, hot.
00:12:01
Speaker
I would have said that that doesn't seem crazy at all. Right. But they're trying to keep it at 20 degrees Celsius. And if it goes to whatever, 50 is their max, obviously. But even watching it, you ramp up to high RPM, it'll spike up from 20 to 25 or whatever, but then settle back down.
00:12:19
Speaker
Anyway, long story short, I think it needs a new spindle. I'm waiting for them to get back to me on pricing and lead time, basically. They got to send the service deck up, and they got to tear it all apart, and they got to put it in. It's a perfect time to do a full maintenance on the machine anyway.
00:12:37
Speaker
waves of emotions yesterday. Let's just say that. I think you are taking like a champ. Yeah. I mean, I've had a day to think it through. Generally, I'm pretty cool. Business is strong right now. We got the cash for it. That's not really the issue. I don't want to spend many tens of thousands of dollars. I don't know how much it's going to be yet. I'd rather not spend that money, but whatever. It's got to be done.
00:12:59
Speaker
Um, the downtime is going to really suck because we rely like on that machine, like crazy. So my bigger stress other than scheduling the replacement of the spindle is how do we get that work done? Can we put it on another machine? Like I'm used to doing it with four axis, five axis now. So do I have to like dumb down my programming to just do it on three axis? Um, our speedio is relatively unutilized right now. So I'm like, okay.
00:13:25
Speaker
Time to crank up that video and get to start making nice parts on it so we can totally do that but involves making pictures and ordering a metric ton of tool holders from Mary tool.
00:13:38
Speaker
John, can I interrupt? Yeah. I mean, you know your business better than me. And this is, of course, a private conversation that no one else listens to. Nobody. Take the time to improve other things in your shop that you've been neglecting or could use some TLC. I have more and more conviction as I achieve some modicum of wisdom in my young age of 40 that
00:14:01
Speaker
redoing toolpaths, making new fixtures, moving stuff to new machines. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to have frustration, stress, money tied up. You're going to be distracted. And hopefully the current is going to get that done in a week or something or 10 days or something. You know what I mean? At this point, I don't have a lead time, so I'm contingency planning. If it's a week, then you're right. If it's three weeks, we need a solution. Absolutely.
00:14:30
Speaker
Respectfully, man, I don't know your parts. The point is we've got 13 people and if we run out of parts, they'll have nothing to do. No, for sure. I don't mean to be cavalier about that whatsoever.
00:14:45
Speaker
That's what you want the reality. I just think about what we've learned when we make a mistake. It's so often that the going out of your way to correct the mistake or to do the rework or you end up just creating so many more things that don't have a process. We don't have that experience with you. I'm craving tolerances. God forbid you crash the speedio or the Maury or you. True. Buying new tools, setting them up to a life like John.
00:15:15
Speaker
Yeah, it's a lot of work. And most of the high-end machine tool builders are, look, spindles get replaced. Yes, absolutely. When you go to a grove, they're like, so one of the things we pride ourselves on is we have 42 spindles in stock at Ohio. And of course, that sounds like, why do you need 42 spindles of stock? Well, because people, these are industrial machines. This stuff happens. They get used up a ton. Yeah, yeah.
00:15:37
Speaker
I don't know if my spindle, yeah, my spindle was replaced, I think. Was it? Mine was right before I bought it, which is great, but that's the Wilhelmin is a $30,000 spindle replacement. So I lucked out getting a machine that just had it done. Yeah. Well, at the end of the day, I'm also sorry, John. That really does.
00:15:56
Speaker
But yeah, I'll keep that in mind. It all depends on lead time. And I will weigh the actions accordingly. But it's also a nice little kick in the pants because I've been very underutilizing that speedio. And I'm like, we can actually make parts on it. Like, quickly. I'm pretty sure I can turn around usable parts, like great parts, very quickly, which is good because I've been meaning to increase our production. I've been meaning to utilize more of our machine tools.
00:16:24
Speaker
Part of it's kind of a blessing in disguise. Now it's to kick in the pants to get everybody together and make some progress on projects that haven't had progress in a long time. I love that idea. I remember a mentor saying, you've been in some hard places in a manufacturing journey and sometimes the best thing about being backed up against a wall is the only way you can go this forward. I know you're not in that scenario right now in that sense.
00:16:52
Speaker
you'll come out of this better, respectfully, I think if you take the time to, I mean, give me two weeks off of the shop with no ability to use my machines. And I'm going to be annoyed and uncomfortable and panicky. But then it's also like, no, this is like, remember COVID? How great that was when I was like, no one was here. I just came in and got played for the first week. Totally. Yeah. And I've had waves of those thoughts too. Um, I even texted the guys this morning before I came in. I was like, um,
00:17:18
Speaker
Okay, if you have time, let's focus on this project and this project and this project because they've been stalling for weeks and weeks and you're going to have time because the current is turned off right now. So the two hours you normally spend on that is now available. So let's get these two projects caught up. And what do you know, the second I came in this morning, those two projects, we're visibly on the go. Why isn't Kern, this happened over 24 hours ago?
00:17:45
Speaker
less than 24 hours ago. I called Tony like 4 p.m. last night. Oh, wow. Okay, so that's very sweet. Yeah, the end of his day kind of thing, so I'm cool, but I'm going to say I'm a little antsy, like waiting for a response, more lead time than price, because the price is the price. It's going to be what it is, right? Right. Why aren't they freighting the spindle right now? I don't know.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah. When we got goofed on a tool height last fall and wrecked the DT to 30 taper spindle, we just pushed the end mill onto the side. What stinks is it would have been okay, but it was a
00:18:30
Speaker
45 degree insert, like an SCKT cutter. So the way it hit coincidentally caused the tool to pull out and break the pull stud. And by breaking the pull stud, that's what caused the holder to bounce around in the spindle. Honestly, the spindle might have otherwise fared. The bearings and everything, but yeah. Yeah. But it was the inside of the spindle that got chowdered up and I saw it happen and within five minutes, I was just like, we just rolled the spindle and I call it hostile. Like, well, we'd like to send a tech out to look at it. I was like, no, like,
00:18:57
Speaker
Just send the new spindle when it gets here, send the tech out. And they didn't push back hard, but it was, I was like, I don't need to have three days plus $500 of travel costs just to help you to come out and tell me, oh, we should replace a pillow. That spindle, we're not grinding that out. Well, if you're a Frank and Mary tool, you'll grind it yourself. I'm not Frank and Mary tool. Yeah, exactly. He's a legend. Yeah. But can we come back? I mean, two tents ran out, John. That's going to be affecting
00:19:25
Speaker
stuff you do too. Yes. You've been chasing some inconsistencies around. Yeah, maybe. And I've definitely checked run out in the past. I don't have, I don't remember exactly what it was, but two and a half tenths kind of stands out as like, no, I wouldn't under normal circumstances. I don't think I'd be okay with that. Which kind of leads led the tech to kind of think like, well, maybe something's up with that upper bearing.
00:19:53
Speaker
Yeah. Were you getting that when you, cause your laser measures diameter. So if you put a time, it would measure two tents, make her like whatever. Okay. Which would be wrong in the sense of the cutting tool. And then you'd be cutting a little bit more on two flutes or one flute or whatever than the other flutes, but, uh, you wouldn't know really. You can do, I just get less to a life. Yeah. So.
00:20:18
Speaker
Okay. But yeah, interesting. I'm sorry, John. So I mean, part of me is like, okay, so that's been three years of me learning and crashing it, unfortunately, making a couple mistakes that I won't make again. And we've gotten a ton of production out of it. And a lot of hours, ton of hours on it. And like, okay, you know, stuff happens.
00:20:42
Speaker
And then going forward, I will not make so many mistakes, obviously, because I'm perfect now. But more specifically, maybe I will not push so much higher RPM engraving, because I bet you I can get the exact same results at 30 RPM as I do at 40,000 RPM. You know what I mean?
00:20:59
Speaker
Yeah, I know. I'm not an expert. But from what I've heard from the folks like in our WhatsApp chat that have had experiences with high RPM spindles or spindles going bad is, and it depends on whether it's grease pack or air mist. Arrow oil, air over oil or whatever, which is with minus. Okay. But it's not that you can't run high RPMs, but you need to do it for short periods of time, which is, is that 30 seconds or is that five minutes? Right.
00:21:22
Speaker
The other kind of related thing that I remember hearing from, I can't remember if it was current or hermala folks, but they had machines that were doing insane, small surfacing work, like back and forth in thousands of inch increments, left, right, left, left, left, left, right. I think it was hermala.
00:21:40
Speaker
I feel like it was Herma, but I feel like Marvin was telling us. Regardless, what they learned is that after a certain period of time, you actually need to have the tool like retract out of the future and move the axis a further amount because otherwise you can starve that section of the mechanical components. I guess that wouldn't apply if it's a hydrostatic machine, but if it's a ball screw machine, you can end up starving it of oil because it doesn't move enough to get re-oiled.
00:22:05
Speaker
Yep. And I've heard that for a jig grinding as well, because if you're constantly oscillating these, the axis up and down in this one inch period for a very, very, very long time, um, fast, you could start the ball screw of oil. Um, again, wouldn't matter on a linear motor machine, but, uh, yeah. So that's fun. Can you make pens though? Yep. Pens are still good. We don't mail anything on the pens. Uh,
00:22:35
Speaker
And we still use. That's huge. It's huge. And we continue doing that, but that's a third of our business, not three thirds of our business. So that's good. We're OK. We're OK for money, but still the, yeah, it's that kind of fight or flight mode right now where I want to fight to keep everything running to a degree because you've got to mitigate your losses as much as you can. And yeah, just a lot of thoughts.
00:23:04
Speaker
The worst part is now because you don't know. Yes. I don't know what the time will be and the time and the effort required are the worst aspects right now. I would think Kern is going to tell you within hours of where the spindle is and how they're going to get it to you. You can air freight ship stuff from Germany, which is the cost of that's going to be negligible in the current scheme of this.
00:23:28
Speaker
They do keep spindles in the US, but I know the current US team is a relatively small team. Only a few service techs that travel around often. They're scheduling a service tech to come in to install the thing or you might have to fly out a guy from Germany too if that's an option. I don't know what the deal is. If I don't hear back in a couple of hours, I will definitely be calling them, just checking in. I bet you they take care of you, John. Yeah, I don't doubt it. I have a very good relationship with them.
00:23:58
Speaker
I mean, they take care of their customers in any regard, but I have a very good relationship with them. Yeah. So yeah, they liked me and I like them. But still going to be a lot of money. Yes. Whatever. So here's how I deal with that stuff because I don't – actually, I am good at handling it now. I didn't used to be.
00:24:19
Speaker
some day, John, you and I are going to be watching, hopefully, like what our grandkids play a hockey game or, you know, whatever. And we're going to be retired, I hope. And I love what I do, but you know what I mean? And we're going to be looking back and.
00:24:33
Speaker
Money is just a number, John. Yes, totally. How much you got, how much you don't have. You're running a good business, you'll get through this, and it's annoying, and it stinks, and you don't want it to happen again. But your bumps, I'm assuming your bumps were earlier on in the life of Coney? Even I probably had one a couple months ago.
00:24:52
Speaker
Did you? Yeah. I keep notes of everyone so that I know not to repeat it or I learned my lesson or I at least have a service history, a bump history of each one. But yeah, more in the beginning for sure.
00:25:08
Speaker
But I think the general point is honestly within two months, this will be a small footnote in the history of my, you know, memory. And I probably won't think about it very much after that. Yeah. But right now I'm in the thick of it, you know, so it's like, it's like every issue, every stress, every problem, you're like, Oh, it's the biggest thing ever. And then once it's over, you're like, what do you talk about? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
00:25:33
Speaker
I'm in a good place, but I do have a lot on my mind, a lot to think about. I wouldn't say I'm stressed about it. I've been far more stressed about far smaller things.
00:25:42
Speaker
Really? Yeah. It's different. You know, some things affect you emotionally, some things affect you. This is this is a technical problem, not really an emotional problem. And I like technical problems. It's also nice that you at least know like, like it was anything with a DT to crash, it stinks, but it was immediately clear. There was no like, Ah, we should do a bunch of testing. Yeah, vibration and see how it goes. And then we don't know. Just like, Oh, that's trash. We're done. Well, that was our yesterday was
00:26:11
Speaker
Testing and cook coolant and temperature and try to warm up again and maybe it'll go away and i mean. Every time you were on the spindle warm up it's got a temperature display where you can watch the lower bearing the upper bearing the coolant temperature the everything temperature and that upper bearing temperature just goes like twenty three degrees twenty four degrees twenty five degrees twenty six up to fifty and then just stops. Even at lower up yeah i'm at low that's a good point.
00:26:39
Speaker
At lower RPM, it's probably fine. Well, John. That's a good point. Run the machine at 10K, dude. Because almost all of my toolpaths are under 30,000 RPM. I mean, if we're going to replace it anyway. Yeah. I will talk to Kern about this.
00:26:58
Speaker
What? And they can't replace the bearing because it's a sealed, like it's an assembly. Yeah, it's a cartridge. And I'm sure it could get rebuilt at some point. And I don't know what the future of that spindle holds, but yeah, it's whatever. Yeah, totally.
00:27:14
Speaker
So the current is such a sealed system, it makes you do the spindle warmup if it's been more than six hours. And the spindle warmup takes it up to probably 42,000 RPM to run it through the full range of things. So the default setup is like it has to go through the warmup before Pasco. However, I could probably change that warmup routine and make it happy with less RPM.
00:27:40
Speaker
Because I watching the temperature and thinking about it yesterday, it ramps up like rightly. I think the first stage is 21,000 RPM, which is hilarious. Yeah. Like let's do a spin a warm up. So lowest you use 5,000 probably, maybe less. Can it tap at like 700 RPMs? Yeah, probably. Interesting. Yeah. But that's a really interesting concept. So the big problems are run out and temperature. And if temperature can be managed,
00:28:11
Speaker
And runout can be accepted. Run it? Like, who cares? Well, I would take a couple of tools that you think are less likely to have diameter changes from where or something and then go re-bloom them. Because if every other one of them is growing, then you know that the bearings had a catastrophic change. And that could just make things worse. If you'd start ruining fixtures and parts and chasing the tail. Sweet idea. Yeah.
00:28:42
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Cause like I said, 50 degrees Celsius is a hot tub temperature. And I'd say most spindles in the world run at that temperature or hotter, you know, like, Oh yeah. Like that's not hot. I think that's right around. There's some like poor man's guideline of like the safety temp of like, you should, can you flip spot a bad idea to like try this, but if you can put your hand on something for 10 seconds, then it's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, no. What do you mean? Okay.
00:29:13
Speaker
And we've all felt electric motors that are hotter than you can touch. Like, I don't know. Dude, if you could, not to get too much of a thing here, but if you could run it while they're getting the new spindle in. That helps a lot. Bee's knees. Okay. I will figure that out today. You want to go on the podcast or you want to run, bud? No, we'll finish up. Okay. Yeah.
00:29:41
Speaker
It is not hard for me to change all the high RPM toolpaths just down to whatever the limit is or the machine. I can test it. I can say M3S30,000 and just watch it. You know, just turn the spindle on and watch it run. I wouldn't run any more high RPM stuff period though. Yeah, we grind our Rask blades at 30,500. So if I can get away with that, I'll be good. Maybe turn it down a little bit, but there's going to be a limit where it can keep its own temperature.
00:30:11
Speaker
Maybe it's 20,000 RPM, maybe it's less, I don't know. That may not be true because if a bearing is compromised, it's not linear. Well, I think we have to look at this as it's a problem that has gotten slightly worse over time. I haven't been tracking or watching the spindle temperature until now, and it finally hit the limit of it's not happy at 40,000 RPM at this
00:30:40
Speaker
wear rate. So you can look at the historical mug spindle temps? I don't think I can. Oh, okay. But if I were able to, I think we'd see a little bit of something. I don't know. Interesting. What was I going to say? Do you make Norseman parts on it? Yeah, we make the inside of the handles and the soft blade and the lock bar insert on the Kern.
00:31:07
Speaker
So ditch rasks for now and just make Norsemen. And if I were to, um, if I were to use the speedio, that, that was my plan was to just start with the Norseman, keep making Norseman. Um, but with using the Kern, yeah, maybe your parts, they, some of them get made on the Maury. Yeah. And maybe there's less RPM used on the Norseman. I'd have to check probably. Um, okay.
00:31:33
Speaker
I would have to get, I got to bypass the warmup routine somehow to make this work. Cause three years at a hundred hours a week is 5,000 hours. Wait, you, you haven't been running a hundred hours a week or more for all three years though. No, it's got, uh, almost 9,000 spindle hours on it. Okay. Which isn't tons like the more he has 13,000, but due to it's a very delicate spindle just is high RPM crashes. Like.
00:32:04
Speaker
Kern guys were like, yeah, it's I'm not surprised. Oh, well, yeah, but we are. I feel like we are surprised, like nobody. Yeah, I'm surprised. They're not surprised. Right. I wonder what diameter is that grinding wheel? One inch. Yeah. I know it's so light passes, but. Yeah, there's no force with grinding. I'm taking off tenths. Okay. Interesting.
00:32:30
Speaker
But yeah,
Fixture Maintenance and Process Improvements
00:32:31
Speaker
and coincidentally, I'll add this to the file. When it's done machining, and it retracts up, turns the spindle off, does a tool change, tool breakage, whatever. When it decelerates from a whatever high RPM, it's been making a noise, just a little bit of a noise. Interesting. And Angela didn't notice it, but I noticed it. And I'm like, that noise wasn't there a couple weeks ago. It's like just a little whoop, or something. I forget exactly what it was.
00:32:59
Speaker
Because there's the spindle break that slows it down quickly, right? Yeah. So maybe I should have paid more attention to that. Oh, that's tough to say, John. Yeah, right. I know. But don't beat yourself up. No. Move on. Well, my problems are
00:33:16
Speaker
are insignificant compared to that, but it was still valued. I was late to today's podcast, which is something I don't enjoy doing. I apologize, Sean, because we were trying to fix a fixture that needs a helicoil. No big deal, but it's just like helicoils are, you want to have your A game on and do those the right way.
00:33:37
Speaker
classic of, you know, we weren't in a rush to fix it. We had inventory of this product. I had it all programmed. It was something we were going to do the next few days. Last night somebody bought six times the normal quantity of this item, which is a good problem to have. Like, okay, so we'll just get that dialed in. And it was no, no problems was going fine. I just was taking my time getting that going. And which is kind of like when it was like, Hey, you know, when you end up with a shop that has
00:34:04
Speaker
There's probably, with the horizontal, there's probably 60 fixtures that are currently in use in our shop, you know, between all the different machines and so forth. And so like, yeah, every week one of them is going to need some TLC. The other thing is we had a mistake where we accidentally left the all coolant off button turned on on the Okuma.
00:34:29
Speaker
And so we have the 3D printed magnet labels that work for, that are things like run, run option stop, chip pin out, feeds and speeds override, all these messages. They work great on the HOS machines because we're able to put them in places that trigger the operator or remind the operator. Nucuma has non-magnetic surfaces in areas that you would want to put them. And so I put them on my desk because it works for me when I'm running the horizontal that I just see it. But this one didn't get put in a place that was,
00:34:59
Speaker
did the job. And so the machine got started to run with it off. We caught it. So no big deal. But it's a process that's broken period. So we're actually just switching it to have a little dangly sounds kind of janky, but a little string with a 3d printed thing on it. And you just drape it gets on the control behind the control and you just pull it over to the front of the control. You see you can't miss that there's a red thing on there. But
00:35:24
Speaker
But to combine old
Exploring New Technology and Talent
00:35:26
Speaker
-school jankiness with some legit tech, I was talking to a buddy, shout out to you, Craig, over at Atokuma. I was like, hey, can I not query or understand what's going on on the control side when a button is illuminated? And sure enough, you can literally, in OSP, read the LED state of buttons on the control.
00:35:45
Speaker
Nice. In the code. So we're working on finding the hex address, but I can now, either for every toolpath or just for the TSC toolpaths, I can include a line in our post that will stop the machine if all coolant on is active when it tries to run a TSC toolpath, which is exactly how the world should work. Because I guess that's a physical button, an operator input, not an M code state or something.
00:36:12
Speaker
Yeah, the M code can still be successfully activated, but the control panel is kind of a... It's overwriting it. Yeah. Interesting. That's cool. That's really cool. Does that know how the current works? I don't know. I've never thought about reading the button states. No, but like, is there a cool off button on the control? Yes, but I'm pretty sure every M8 overrides it.
00:36:41
Speaker
Oh, actually, even though that's just cause of problems, I actually don't like that. Cause yeah. Well, on the more, it's the same way, but if you push and hold it for five seconds, lock would top me this, then it shuts it off. Like no more coolant ever. Um, on the current, I don't think there's a way to like force shut it off and keep it off. But if you hold it in, it turns out while you're holding it in, that would be okay. In the control panel, there's a couple of buttons on the touch screen where I think you can block it off for good, but I never do. Yeah.
00:37:11
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's certainly times where I'm machining. And I'm like, I want to see that end mill. So I push the button to turn the coolant off. But by the next tool change, it comes right back on again, which is great, because then I don't forget to leave it on or off. Right. Right. So I'm fine with that. Yeah. Well, tomorrow, Angelo and I are going on another field trip.
00:37:33
Speaker
Last week, we went to the Elliott Open House and our PVD coding place. Tomorrow, the local university, McMaster University, is having their McMaster Manufacturing Research Institute Open House. Murray. MMRI. And Eric and I went to that like 2017, probably. And it was really cool back then. They've got a bunch of machines. It's a university. They have their own PVD chamber. They have their own diamond turning lathe.
00:38:04
Speaker
This was then. I don't know what it's like now. They just built a 20,000 square foot facility and they want to show everybody. So that's going to be fun. So we're there in the afternoon tomorrow and it'll be cool to talk to the local manufacturing university professors and some students and things like that. And definitely I'll keep it in the back of my brain for hiring potential and future, you know, an in kind of thing. Because I know Mike at military uses
00:38:31
Speaker
local universities to like as a talent pool. So that'd be good to know. Awesome. That's okay. Cool. What else? Do you do you have anything with ClearPath motors at the moment? We
00:38:54
Speaker
to when we have ClearPass in the shop and our Tormach 1100 MX would have ClearPass on it. I am not currently using a home-built CSU. Yeah, not something you fiddle with. No, you have a problem with the router?
00:39:09
Speaker
Not a problem. Well, yes, a problem. But it's just a problem that hasn't been fixed yet. So it's like a dual Y axis. So there's two Y motors, because it's a gantry. And they jitter. And the machine shakes. We're making parts. We're making foam. We're laser engraving. But there's definitely some sort of a tuning issue. And I've tried to do their tuning routine and everything like that. And the next step, and I've talked to them about this, is I need to get on a video chat with the ClearPath guys.
00:39:39
Speaker
and have
Benefits of ERP Systems and Contingency Planning
00:39:40
Speaker
them show me what I'm doing wrong or how to fine tune this exact setup to get a square result. So it's like bugging me, but it's not affecting the quality of our work. We're making fine foam. It doesn't notice, but if I were to make even somewhat tight tolerance parts, it wouldn't be a square. Are you sure there isn't an actual mechanical issue with the coupler or the frame? I'm not sure.
00:40:09
Speaker
It's done this since we put together, so it's not like it got loose over time. But yeah, frame flexing or they're not square to each other, so they're something. It does it across the whole travel. It can do it in all three accesses too, so maybe I'm just tuned wrong. Or are you trying to just go too fast and hard? Maybe.
00:40:33
Speaker
Put it this way. If you put an indicator on the spindle with a dial test indicator and you jog it to try to see like tram or something, the needle jumps around like crazy because of the vibration on every click, every step. Is the whole thing bolted down and rigid enough? That could be. Maybe. But even a slow jog. I'd be surprised how much torque could be twisting that. Yeah, maybe. But I feel like the ClearPath guys
00:41:02
Speaker
would have answers to all of these questions, you know? Yeah. Hopefully. Okay. Is it possible to bolt the thing down to just isolate that variable? Maybe. I mean, it's, it's a lightweight router. Like two people can pick it up, you know, easily, uh, which is sitting on an 80, 20 table enclosure.
00:41:22
Speaker
Um, so the whole thing weighs a couple hundred pounds, but the router itself is like a hundred, I don't know, 200. Yeah. Even a couple of C clamps or temporary wood cleat screws, just to attach it to the a 20 base would rigidify it somewhat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just thought.
00:41:45
Speaker
From what I remember tuning this ClearPass, once you tell the software that two motors are on the same axis, dual screws, there's a bajillion settings, but it shouldn't be... Well, you can't tune the Y-axis at all because you can only tune one motor at a time and you can't just drive one motor on the Y-axis. So the trick is you tune the X-axis and you copy the settings to both the Y-motors.
00:42:15
Speaker
and just hope it's good. Some people will put a dumbbell on the x-axis so that it mimics the weight that the y-axis is seeing. There's a guy on YouTube that did a full calculation. He weighed every single component and figured out pretty much my same setup too. He's like, if you put 32 pounds on the spindle, it should mimic the weight that the y-axis is seeing. Put an indicator or two on the frame and then just jog it around and see how much those things bounce around.
00:42:46
Speaker
Interesting. Like from the base to the frame. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good idea. But we're using it. Yeah, fair enough. That's pretty good. This reminds me of the process been like red, yellow, green of like green is green as we're good. Yellow is like, no, there's things we could do better, but don't worry about it right now. Red is like, this needs to be fixed. Yeah. Double red is like out of production critical. You can do double red. I don't know. You ignite.
00:43:16
Speaker
in. Sweet. Little thing I added. We've been using the purchase order side of Gerp
00:43:26
Speaker
for a lot now. We just cut our 200th purchase order. Congrats. Very cool. And just the other day, I added an ETA field. Yes. So we know how long it's been waiting. So I can look at our purchase orders right now and know our DLC parts are seven days since we placed the order. That's Men Mills five days, eBay order five days ago, yada, yada. And longest one is 100 days. We're still waiting on something. So that's super cool. Super cool to just have that data, that feedback.
00:43:56
Speaker
That's great. I was literally going to ask you about group today and I thought maybe I'll sit on that one for next week. Yeah, for the most part, we're using it for POs exclusively. We have almost all of our materials and parts in it, but we're not actively tracking inventory quantities of things due to some backend technical issues in the system.
00:44:17
Speaker
All of our vendors are stored in there, which is super helpful to like, where do we get the thing from? Or what's their number? Or who's the contact there? Who's our contact there? That's been amazing. So stuff like that. It's just the central repository for how to run your business. And we've been adding more process guides into it too.
00:44:37
Speaker
everything from how to hire a new person to how to set up a new computer to the current's making a funny noise. What do I do? You know, like, so yeah, that's been great. Good. Good. All right. Keep me posted on the current. If there's any help, let me know. Yeah. You're the first outsider I've told. I'm sorry. I wanted to get your reaction and it was perfect.
00:45:03
Speaker
It's a good reminder. The horizontal is our Kern. Yeah, for sure. But at some point, we will have something go wrong with it. And that's a day I'm probably not doing enough to think about being prepared for. Yeah, exactly. And you can't have a duplicate for everything. When I called Tony at Kern, the first thing he says, that's why you need a second one. And I was like, dude, not the right time to sell me a second solution, but hilarious. You can have more
00:45:30
Speaker
You can have duplicates of some stuff, but you can't have a duplicate of everything. It's just not feasible. Well, okay. Let's talk about that next week because we're quote unquote out of time. Knowing if you had known the current was going to go down, would you have run it differently to build up on inventory or parts or something? Don't answer it next week. Same for next week. Sounds good, bud. All right. See you. Bye.