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#218 Willemin, Area 419's NEW SHOP, Cashflow, Post Covid Economics, & More
189 Plays4 years ago
TOPICS:
- Area 419 Tour will be premiered on YouTube Monday April 19th, 2021 at 1:30 PM EDT!
- Cashflow, Loans, and Post Covid Economic Impacts
- Grimsmo's purchased a used Willemin
- Neodymium Magnets
- Swiss Miss - Saunders Decides Against Swiss for Reversible Inserts
- CNC Lathe Probing & Tooling Options
- Business Mindset - The Shift from Preparer to Reviewer
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Hosts
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 218. My name is John Grimsmough. And my name is John Tudders. And this is a podcast where every week John and I just sit down and chat and kind of catch up and decompress and chat about work and business and life and machining and all the cool stuff. Things that make me happy.
00:00:20
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. Today's Friday. Well, not really today's Wednesday, but today's Friday for everybody else.
Premiere of Area 419 Video
00:00:28
Speaker
On Monday, we are doing, we're going to do it as a premiere release of the area four one nine video.
00:00:37
Speaker
So I asked the guys at Area 419 if they'd be willing to do it as a premiere, which I'm not so much interested in the YouTube fanfare of it. But what I like is it means me or I, and I think John or someone from Area 419 will be watching kind of along. So it'll give us a chance to kind of interact with folks watching.
00:00:57
Speaker
Um, answer questions, just talk about it. Uh, it's, we kind of, um, Julie did an awesome job of getting the footage in, you know, it was like, you know, terabyte of footage. Uh, we, John and I in a, it's not a single take because they had to replace the battery, but effectively a single take did a two hour and 20 minute tour. It felt like 10 minutes. Yeah.
00:01:21
Speaker
And Julie, who's, it's funny because Julie's so good at editing as a machine shop video person now that like she knows what to do. Like, you know, when they're talking about something, she knows the tool or the reference or the accessory, you know, it's like things that we take for granted like bar feeder or, or tombstone or HSK.
00:01:40
Speaker
And so I didn't have to watch it until it was basically done. And I watched it last night and it's awesome. I can't wait. I literally rewatch the whole thing. And it's everything that stands for why I do what I do in manufacturing of passion, interest, learning, knowledge, the chance to kind of lift up the curtain and see inside of somebody else's shop and workflow.
00:02:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's wonderful. I can wait. Yes, I'm pretty sure it'll be at 1 30 p.m. Eastern time and we'll post that on social and I think they will as well but I and of course if you don't watch it live it'll be up on YouTube period and
Rethinking Business Practices and Equipment
00:02:22
Speaker
Um, but two things I thought I'd bring up, um, because they're good anecdotes that I don't often hear, which is kind of what raises the flag of like, okay, what's the stuff that pushes me outside of my comfort zone or make sure I continue to rethink, um, what's important to me or how people do stuff. The first one was.
00:02:43
Speaker
You know, inevitably a big part of that, this tour with them was their new shop and all their new machines, most of which are DMG, Maury. Uh, and then they have a grove, uh, they grew up in traditionally worry house shop. So I think a lot of people would look at that meat as well and say, okay, they've, they've kind of taken that next step.
00:03:04
Speaker
The comment that I love, which is just so to me awesome is John was not joking, but just saying it in a jovial tone that Justin, their operations manager, his favorite machine is still their Haas DT1. Really?
00:03:21
Speaker
And it's legitimate. It's because it takes up a tiny amount of room and it prints money. Yeah. The speed, the consistency, the workflow. And look, the point isn't to be a Haas fanboy. The same comment could very well apply to any small drill tap style machine. But I give Haas some credit on just how easy they make things. And that was the other part was the difficulties of moving to new platforms, new controllers, stuff that doesn't have stuff that's fully well baked.
00:03:50
Speaker
It's like, look, do what makes you happy. Do what fits your story.
Creating a Desirable Workplace
00:03:54
Speaker
But at the end of the day, from a business standpoint, things like ROI matter, things like your big shops talk about a metric per square foot, like revenue per square foot or parts per square foot. And I just thought, that's awesome. Here's an example of where there's still a role. It's just good.
00:04:12
Speaker
Yep. Yep. Yeah. I saw a comment on Instagram where, um, area four one nine, uh, posted about, I forget their new machines or something. And somebody's like, Oh, you're going to sell your, your Haas UMC. And they're like, no, that thing still runs every day. Like I'm keeping that. Yeah, right. The other comment, which is absolutely top-notch was we, we ended the, I don't know. I guess I'm spoiling a little bit of it where we ended the tour in, you want to guess where we ended the tour? It was one of the most impactful.
00:04:42
Speaker
Parts of the shop. Areas of the shop? Are you going to say cleaning or shipping? Close, sort of close. The kitchen. Okay. And it just summarizes everything about John's approach of investing in the company.
Building a New Shop and Economic Considerations
00:04:59
Speaker
Sure. They've got like 20 people there, right? So the kitchen's a big part. Yes. I like it.
00:05:05
Speaker
and watch it if if anything it will julial time stamp everything so you can jump forward and skip around which is god bless you too that's a great feature but um he said something that's awesome we don't have a problem finding and keeping people
00:05:22
Speaker
And of all the shop tours I've done, of all the anecdotes you hear from people who are either frustrated or frankly complaining about, Oh, it's so hard to find good people. It's so hard to keep people. Um, go look at the shops that don't have that problem and see what they're doing and why they're doing it the right way. And that's, that's it. That's fantastic. Yeah. I love, love me a good kitchen, right? Yeah. Uh, he's got a design aesthetic. That's awesome. And frankly, you know, they got to start from a clean slate, which, so they designed and built that building.
00:05:52
Speaker
They did. Yeah. And that takes time. Yeah. We talk about that. Good. Sure. It takes time. It takes a vision and it takes a lot of money. Yeah, it does. Yeah. And look, we don't, yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's on.
00:06:09
Speaker
It's one thing to finance new machines and be like, okay, it's time to big boy up and let's buy all the machines we want, but also to design and build a building and to plan out the vision and to say, we are taking our company from here to way the heck down there. That's just insane. I love it.
00:06:27
Speaker
Well, and I look, I struggle because I don't know how relevant that is, is as advice for folks that are entrepreneurs, whether they're in early year stages, the likelihood that you are going to go build a building or Oh, it's happening. Oh, really? Within the next however many years, but yeah, good for you.
00:06:49
Speaker
There's a whole another conversation about the world that we're in. Construction costs are incredibly high right now. I believe everything I've heard is a lot of that's just COVID related, supply chain related. But also just in the US, the government has just opened up the floodgates, dumping money into the economy. And I don't hear enough people
00:07:13
Speaker
Uh, I don't hear it. It's like you and I were talking offline before the podcast about controversial COVID topics. You know, I don't hear enough people talking about
00:07:21
Speaker
Maybe there's some consequences or bad things about this. It feels good when the drinks are flowing. But when you wake up hungover in the morning, when the money stops flowing, is that sustainable and good? Yeah, exactly. It's like around here, house prices are getting ridiculous. And we bought a house almost two years ago. Fantastic. And apparently, our house price has gone up like everybody else's. But I'm not thinking about it. Because if you move, you just have to buy another super expensive place.
00:07:50
Speaker
That's, you're not up. Well, and there's real issues to this, John, which is for people that bought a house now, and it's unfortunate that it's quite easy to put high leverage on a single family home, which arguably is the safest place to borrow money because it's such a huge market that everybody, it's kind of one of those, you can't shut that market down because the world stops.
Asset Management and Real Estate Investments
00:08:13
Speaker
But if you finance a house at 80%, 90%,
00:08:17
Speaker
Or even 80%, which is considered reasonable. And house pricing dropped. The lender's not going to refinance your house if you have a short-term mortgage. And that's kind of a replay of what happened to the world in 2009.
00:08:32
Speaker
There's a fascinating it's it look it's I don't know if we're ever off topic here or not, but it's the single reason I went into finance after graduating college was I had heard that stat that so many businesses fail because of cash flow Okay, and and there's some there's some like street smart ways of thinking about that and then there's some pretty sophisticated Financial analysis and one of the more sophisticated sides. It's not really sophisticated but matching Durations with assets. So if you're gonna borrow money
00:09:02
Speaker
for a long-term asset, make sure you have a long-term revenue stream to justify it. The silly easy example was if Boeing gave you a 10-year contract to make parts that was profitable and was ironclad contract, good grief, go borrow money to buy the equipment you need to make that contract so long as you can get the equipment paid off in 10 years. It matches the term of the contract.
00:09:24
Speaker
Don't get caught with your pants down. My advice sounds irrelevant because, frankly, it's been 12 years since there was any day of reckoning. Long-term cycles don't work that way. Now, I'm wrong. I thought there would be more of a reckoning earlier. There hasn't been, but that doesn't mean- Does it mean it's coming? Yeah, right? Yeah, yeah.
00:09:47
Speaker
Yeah, I heard the stat. I don't know if it's, I think it's true, but like every 10 years there's a big market shift or something and we're going on 12, 14 or something like that. I was just thinking like, I guess you can't really compare like house prices versus machinery prices. Like the housing market goes up and down in weird ways, but like the retail costs of a machine is kind of
00:10:12
Speaker
even though it's hundreds of thousands of dollars, it doesn't really shift other than supplier issues and cost of rubber goes up or whatever. Right. There's input costs to a machine tool. Steel has gone up. And for a while, it was very difficult to get linear guideways because there was a run on them because of the global demand, frankly. So there's those elements of it. And I think we've heard of now six-month plus lead times for machines that normally are easy to get.
00:10:39
Speaker
The big difference between a machine tool and a house is that housing is constrained by the physical element of real estate, which is the availability of dirt and the availability of a dirt lot in a place where you want it.
00:10:57
Speaker
There's also an intrinsic lag in real estate of more so in the commercial side, but you can't justify building new houses or new commercial office buildings until the rents justify building it. So like right now in Zanesville, what you could rent industrial space for from a yield standpoint doesn't come close to justifying replacement costs to build a new building. So like make a number up. If a space leases for a thousand dollars a month,
00:11:28
Speaker
to build that building costs $100,000. If you're the landlord, you would never spend $100,000 to build a building where you only get $1,000 a year. Sorry, make that up. It's a 1% return on your money. I'd be better off putting the money in the stock market or a bond deal or something.
00:11:45
Speaker
That's the boom-bust nature of real estate. It takes a long time to build a building. I would guess the case is still true in even Toronto, where even if the industrial market is quite hot or difficult, to build a building is probably north of $100 a square foot and rents are probably
00:12:02
Speaker
I'm going to guess well under 10% or $10 per square foot. Yeah, there's something like 10, yeah. Yeah, so it's maybe justifiable, but with the construction costs going up, if it's $130 a square foot to build a building, as a landlord, it's like I wouldn't invest in something super risky like real estate when I can get a reasonable return with no hassle from buying corporate bonds or treasuries. Sure, so as an investment standpoint,
00:12:28
Speaker
because I see like that. I see that. I mean, it's is a different logic. If you're building your own building for your own company for your own reasons, do you think about it differently and try to
00:12:39
Speaker
Justify it. Yeah. So the other way of thinking about that is could you Can you get a bill to suit situation which does happen where a credit tenant not not you and me or even area four one nine, but a pick up huge national company and Amazon or somebody would be I don't know if Amazon owns their buildings or not, but I
00:13:03
Speaker
They could go to a pro logist or a big industrial company and say, hey, we want to have a distribution facility in Toronto. You're in the real estate business in the construction business. You go build it and then just let me know what the rent needs to be. And the rent may be actually quite high. Now, if it's a long-term lease, there's all sorts of ways of kind of helping that.
00:13:21
Speaker
The other thing of what you're saying about building your own building is just like housing.
Action Over Analysis
00:13:25
Speaker
People will often buy or build a house or build a shop because it satisfies their needs. It's because they want to. Yep. You know, houses here, if you build one and then you had to fire sale it or sell it quickly until recently when there has been a little bit of a housing shortage, but until recently you would lose 30 or 40% immediately.
00:13:49
Speaker
Hmm so much to think about but don't I mean look I I was thinking about we're doing a live stream today on starting a manufacturing company and I'm actually working on a video on pricing products and Yeah, it's fun to think about stuff. Go do it. Go don't over analyze it. Don't you know?
00:14:07
Speaker
Yeah, you put enough effort into the thought process that you're comfortable with your decisions and can sleep at night on those decisions. You're not just jumping into the latest idea that runs into your head. Big idea, I mean. But yeah, there's a point where you just have to say, am I over analyzing this? Do I really want this? Do I need to do this? Then you just go do it. Yeah. Yeah.
00:14:35
Speaker
It's like me buying a Willyman. I just did it. Dude. It happened? Yeah. So they accepted my offer. I got it for a little bit under asking. I'm really happy with the deal. And yeah, we're just working on getting money to them right now. And then apparently the machine's running until
00:14:51
Speaker
They get payment and then they'll… That's actually great. It is. It's good news. Can I ask, are you willing to share? It was a machine broker. It was listed. You put an offer in under. Did they counter or just accept?
00:15:06
Speaker
They countered because I wanted to offer just a little bit under, so I'm not insulting them, but I'm still bartering a little bit. I'm like, you've got wiggle room. I've got wiggle room. Let's whatever. So we came just over halfway between my offer and their original asking. And apparently, it was listed for five grand more originally. I didn't know that. They'd already discounted it.
00:15:30
Speaker
to the price that I saw. So to them, they're like, we've already cut the price. And to me, I'm like, I didn't know that. Or it's also like, so sold either. Exactly, exactly. So yeah, I'm stoked. This is all over email? Yes. It's so funny. Yeah. Yeah, I've never worked with a machine broker before. This guy's been great.
00:15:51
Speaker
And so far, so good. They're going to handle, they're going to coordinate the rigging and shipping and loading the machine. I have to broker it across the border when it gets here. And then now I'm just trying to figure out other logistics that I got to deal with. Dude, awesome. Yeah. It's on the West Coast? It's in Ohio, I think. No. Yeah.
00:16:13
Speaker
John, I don't know if the machine, I know the machine dealer is in Ohio. I don't know if the machine itself is like, I don't know exactly where it is, but I was talking with the, um, our friend CJ hooked me up with the Willeman salesman on the West coast guy. And I had a huge chat with him and I showed him the pictures from the listing of this machine. He's like, Oh, I know that shop. They run a clean operation.
00:16:36
Speaker
That's awesome. That's cool. So he knows what the shop is. I didn't get the name. But yeah, I'm stoked.
00:16:44
Speaker
So what's that look like after it hits your floor? Like, do you process wise, do you hire them to come in? I'm going to have to hook it up. I mean, it's, it's a running machine. Kind of just plug everything in, get the electricity into wired up. Um, it's running oil right now. And apparently we have the option to change it over to coolant if we want or keep it running oil. I'm on the fence. I don't know yet. Um, I might just keep it oil. Cause it comes with a missed collector as well. That's already like saturated with the oil and
Purchasing and Setting Up New Machinery
00:17:12
Speaker
everything. So might just keep it oil.
00:17:15
Speaker
Um, but yeah, I'm not too worried about us commissioning it and like putting it in and leveling it. And I got a fancy stare at level the whatever thousand dollar one. Yeah. Um, and, uh,
00:17:30
Speaker
And then I'm coordinating with the LNS right now to get a used bar loader for it. Um, Oh, it doesn't have a bar feeder. No, they're not running it with one maximum bar length. It's 18 inches without the bar loader. So that's like a foot and a half. That's nothing. Interesting. Yeah. What do they make on it? Like super short parts? Yes. Super short medical little things, I guess. Seems good. And I guess the pulling bar at that point, um,
00:17:58
Speaker
But yeah, if you have a one hour long part that's only a quarter inch or six millimeters long, I could see that. But otherwise, good grief, a brand new machine that costs 800 grand, why wouldn't you have a $30,000 bar loader on it to automate it? I know. Space? I don't know. It depends on the parts. Apparently, they have a bunch of Willemins and not maybe they have bar loaders on some of them. I don't know. Does it come with any holders?
00:18:22
Speaker
No, unfortunately. And they took off the Renesha OMP4D probe, because they're like, we need it on another machine. I'm like, no. So there's no spindle probe on it. I might add that. We have one on the Nakamura that we don't fully use anymore. I might, if I want to, pull it off of that and put it on the Willy. Oh, your turret probe? Yep. That was a huge thing for you back in the knock days. But all those parts are on the Swiss now.
00:18:50
Speaker
Interesting. Maybe we're using it. I'm not sure. Is that thing an OMP40? Yep. I didn't realize it was that. That's funny. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. It's mid-April. You think you'll have it in a month? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Dude. Yeah, it's exciting. I got to buy holders for it. I got to buy their special holders for turning that have drive dogs.
00:19:21
Speaker
get that are different and weird and they kind of lock into the spindle so it doesn't rotate. I did get them to include one turning holder and a slitting saw arbor. Because I'm like, you got this kicking around. Like I need them, you know, throw them in. They're like, yeah, I got those.
00:19:37
Speaker
Sweet. So that's cool. And it comes with a bloom laser toolsetter on the machine. Got it. And yeah, it was a contentious point, because they're like, it doesn't come with any probes. And I'm like, but in the picture, the table sensor, the toolsetter is there. Is it coming with that, or did you pull it off? And there's a couple back and forths to get the answer to that proper. And they're like, good news. It comes with the bloom. And I'm like, OK. I'm happy about that.
00:20:02
Speaker
It's funny, because now I'm thinking, do you really need, I mean, it is a lathe, like in the lathe in the sense that your work, it will always be held in a rotating chuck that has a constant, is it still an X, Y, center line, right? Yeah, you might not use the probe so much on the main side, but when you transfer to the vice, the sub, you might want to use the probe to pick up a center line or something. Got it. I could see that happening a lot.
00:20:31
Speaker
I assume it has a, where you could set a work system, because when the vice, it doesn't pivot down 90 degrees, like, okay. So when it's in slow position, you could even use a dumb edge finder to once set your G55 or whatever it is. What is the control on it actually? It's FANUC. Oh, okay. Yep. Crazy. Okay. Yeah. So depending on the repeatability of everything, um,
00:20:56
Speaker
you could probably get away without the probe and we'll see. We'll probably try to run it without and then just see if we need it or not. It's like on the Swiss, there's no probe. You just tweak offsets as you're running parts.
00:21:10
Speaker
Yes, right, right. So we're, one of the parts that we thought maybe we could move to a Swiss is just doesn't make sense. And we realized that, but we kind of wanted to keep making sure we weren't being closed-minded, but it does. It's like, okay, call it. And so we're looking at ways we can better, it's the reversible insert for the mod vice. And so it really is a decent milling part. It's just, you've got to do it in two ops and,
00:21:37
Speaker
Anytime I could move something to a late automations, I got, I'm in love with that. But, um, we are also trying to just design a smarter fixture so that opt to locates correctly, repeatedly without the need to probe it because frankly, if we have.
00:21:53
Speaker
We're going to move this to a, probably be like a 20 position fixture for OP2. I do not want to probe 40 edges, even if you can store them in an array. So you only have to call the probe up once. It's just way too slow for something that's relatively simple and you should, you know,
00:22:11
Speaker
Uh, an idiot can design something complex. It takes a genius design, something simple, like build a simple system that works and doesn't require that. Yeah. Love it. Yeah. And so it's a two op milling part. Uh, could you make the fixture like 10 op ones, 10 up twos?
00:22:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's what it'll be. In fact, we'll probably do it as instead of like one larger monolithic fixture, it'll be, um, for independence. Well, or we're debating right now, is it better to build
00:22:44
Speaker
identical fixtures and hotswap them, but for a larger fixture that ends up itself taking some time to pull it on and off and there's some weight to it. Yeah. I think the better thing is going to be to do a more intelligent clamping system, whether it's fewer screws with built in, like a easy to use, um,
00:23:03
Speaker
impact gun or something that just a zip zip zip and then you can swap them to y'all or Or I think we're at that point now. We need to start getting smarter on either hydraulic or pneumatic auto fixtures So you hit a button and all the clamps lift up? Oh, yeah And now you're loading your two up ones again up ones good up to they okay repeat like that's When you start thinking that through you're like that's the kind of stuff we need to be
00:23:28
Speaker
Yeah, I always worry about the clamping pressure of the small little cylinders, especially pneumatic. Because I mean, a one inch cylinder, you get 100 pounds, 100 PSI. Too much or too little? I don't know. Oh. Right? Yeah. We're not worried about this case, because we're not, there's nothing to put a collapse on or...
00:23:49
Speaker
I think the- Is it holding rigid enough is the question? Is it not moving? Yeah, it'll be rigid enough. I also think there's some interesting points of going with hydraulic because it's capable of more pressure and I don't really, to your point, I don't really want it tied to the shop air system.
Innovations in Shop Operations
00:24:08
Speaker
I want it kind of its own standalone hydraulic system or whatever.
00:24:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's certainly fun to think about those more complicated, you know, valves and pistons and things like that. I've designed several of those. And it's it gets complex pretty quick. Like a lot of ports and a lot of, you know, channels going together and deep long drills and depending on how you make it. But it is cool. Yeah, like a lot of our fixtures are top clamps or screws or little things that that hold the top of the parts.
00:24:41
Speaker
So we're making lots and lots of clamps, especially on the current I've been making a lot lately. And we just use a drill like an impact to loosen and a clicking drill, like a torque drill to tighten or sometimes like lately, since we torque everything with a torque wrench, we just use the impact to lower all the screws until they kind of touch and then come in with the torque wrench. Wait for the area for when I tour. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.
00:25:07
Speaker
Yeah, it's going to be expensive video. Yeah. Well, he made a post about how he put a McMaster sells these neodymium magnets that are encased in rubber.
00:25:18
Speaker
Exactly, right? So I started buying them. They're fantastic. Get them from the... Oh shoot, KJ... No, who is it? Magnetix? Okay. They're like a quarter of the price. Oh geez. Because McMaster, they're like $15 to $23 each and they're great. But if you want to buy a lot of them, that adds up fast. Yeah, K and J Magnetix. Okay. Spell it out.
00:25:43
Speaker
KJ like Katie, John magnetics.com. Um, I'll tell you the part numbers. If I can pull it up quickly or not. Um, and we bought the split collars from McMaster. We also printed some of the split collars. Um, but yeah, I've been using the McMaster ones around the shop and the rubber on the magnet is the answer because I've got some powerful magnets, but they still slip on metal. You need like rubber.
00:26:10
Speaker
I have a love hate relationship with magnets, mostly hate because over time they just tend to attract chips and are very difficult to clean and they're just yucky. But first off, John, I hold his opinion in pretty high regard, although they're new to him too. So we'll see if he keeps using them, but it was worth a shot because it does solve some of the magnet drawbacks. So we're going to play with them as well. Yeah. Okay. Swiss questions.
00:26:36
Speaker
Does your tornos have sub live tooling for the backside? Yes, only axial So straight against the spindle like pointing each other. Okay, so it have to be polar. There's no y-axis. There is y-axis
00:26:57
Speaker
Oh, I'm sorry, only pointing at, okay, I see, only axial. Yeah, so no radial tools facing the outer perimeter. Is the Y axis in the holder block or in the whole sub? The tools move in X and Y. Okay. No, sorry, the tools just move in Y. The spindle, the sub spindle moves in X and Z. Yeah, yeah, right. Okay. So Y is in the holder block. Yeah. And it's fantastic.
00:27:24
Speaker
Tornos called me the other day, and they're trying to sell me on their new DT26, I think, which is kind of the same thing, just option down a little bit. And there's no y-axis on the sub. And I'm like, unsubscribe. Yeah, right. No, no. Well, they were, I mean, look, the less money the machine got, going back to the R2, the better the ROI, the more of a no-brainer. But
00:27:48
Speaker
I want a machine that's going to rock and roll. If you have a business that makes money, that can make money, and you have parts and you have work lined up and it's like you know you're going to make money, then get the machine you need. I don't like being handicapped with not having a probe or not having a y-axis or a sub-spindle or etc. There's money to consider and don't waste all your money and don't buy options you don't need. Think long and hard about these things.
00:28:19
Speaker
Yeah. I'm pretty happy with almost all of our machinery purchases, you know, because I thought a lot about it and you use those things and you're like, Oh, I'm so glad I got that. Yeah.
00:28:30
Speaker
do you would you have ever wished earth plan on getting the swiss where the sub spindle has the angular programmable the um the b axis yeah yeah it's like a 40 000 option i forget how much um and it's cool but i don't have the work for it i don't need it i could put fancy like angles on the parts and make it look shiny but
00:28:55
Speaker
it's great for medical where you have to drill a 37.2 degree hole. And yeah, that's that's when it's awesome. But you lose a couple tool spots. And it's really expensive. And I don't question the rigidity of the whole system, and etc, etc.
00:29:11
Speaker
Are they, is it a simultaneous B or is it just positional? There's both. Some of them are like Kelvin from herbal urban survival gear. Uh, he got the B, but it's manual. So he has to like reach in there, click, click, click, tighten it down. And then he can drill at 42 degrees. Um,
00:29:30
Speaker
And I saw even one of his stories, just a brief, like three second. He's like, I didn't realize this was manual. Oh, no. What brand is that? Citizen on his. Got it. Yeah. And then do you have, like Citizen was talking about their LFV, the low frequency vibration. It looks legit. Yeah. Do you have that? I do. They call it ACB active chip breaker. Okay.
00:29:58
Speaker
And it's, I think, I don't know what citizens doing different, but I think their pulse rate is way faster. Okay. Their vibration.
00:30:09
Speaker
Because we use it. And you set the, you're basically breaking the chip. You're retracting and cutting again and again and again via a macro. And it only works on straight line moves. You can do a taper, but it has to be a straight line taper. So if you want to do like a multi-faced part, you have to break up the chunks of code on the straight lines. Not a big deal. We use it. It's not the,
00:30:35
Speaker
With from our experience and we're probably need to use it better. It's not the holy grail. Like we still have chip wrap problems. We still have birds nests. Um, even when using ACB, even when using it. Yeah. Interesting. So maybe, like I said, maybe our settings are wrong and we've played with a couple, but we need to play with more. Um, but yeah, it's, it's still a minor. It's so minor that you can't see it with the naked eyes. That correct?
00:31:02
Speaker
I mean, on ours, you can program 15 thou retract and you can see it and depends on how fast you're feeding as well. We tend to feed pretty slow, but yeah, I don't know if I can see it. I mean, there's oil everywhere. You can't see anything.
00:31:19
Speaker
The, the classic dilemma that most of the content out there is, is either from citizen or manufacturer or distributor. So it's of course, only going to be representative of what they want to show you, but like a nylon or, or some other stringing materials working. I mean, like you can literally set how long you want your ship to be, which is great from a process reliability and chip evacuation process. Yeah.
00:31:45
Speaker
I know our buddy Danny Rudolph has a bunch of citizens and he has LFE on his newest machine or something and he loves it. I mean, theoretically, you should be able to hold the pile of chips afterwards and it looks like rice, like tiny little things, not long stringy chips. We're still seeing long stringy chips. Maybe we need to pulse it faster or retract different. I fully admit, we haven't tested every option.
00:32:16
Speaker
The tooling nerd in me would love to talk to somebody like Danny who has used it extensively and see what the effect is on tool life. Because from a drilling, it's very well known that the highest wear point of a drill is the start of the hole, also the end. But the start, so like, peck drilling is...
00:32:38
Speaker
drilling multiple holes and I wonder as you thin that chip out cause it to break and then reenter in that has to be having an effect on edge the edge and it becomes
00:32:50
Speaker
a trade-off. Is it worth it? Maybe it is. Maybe it totally is. You get chip management for 40% reduced tool life, and you're like, I still feel great about it. Whatever. Or like nylon. Yeah, you're in search glass in the years, right? I would think. But you can create a blob of molten nylon, I'm sure, pretty quickly.
00:33:09
Speaker
Right. Yeah, cool We also just threw for the first time ever we ran out of turret. We've done a really good job of Keeping our lathe well programs with cap toe and just we don't make that many parts on it so it's been simple but I finally was like look I want to add a 60 thou grooving tool and I want to add it permanently because it'll just be super useful to have a small grooving tool and so I
00:33:33
Speaker
already had, the machine came with a dual. I think it's a, I actually need to figure this out. It's a half index block, so we got the half index option, so it'll rotate the turret halfway. I think you can still use it from the original turret position, but with a Y offset on a Y axis lathe, but it has to change the angle at which the tool's presented to the material. It may not be enough that it's an issue, but
00:34:03
Speaker
They attach with set screws. They're smaller, I think three-quarter holders. And it works great. Only quirk affects how you touch off the tools. You've got to make sure one of them is longer so that the bottom tool doesn't hit your turret probe. And it would be awesome to have Kapto. I would have gone Kapto here, except the Kapto blocks that hold just two tools on the main spindle side, they're affordable. Unfortunately, at least on our machine,
00:34:31
Speaker
the capital block that would hold two on the main and two on the sub is a what do they call it non-stock special or whatever or stocking non-stock and they're not justifiable in price. Many thousands of dollars. Yeah. Yeah, we still haven't gotten any capital on the Nakamura. We've thought about it for a while. Sounds awesome. I got to take a side but the Nakamura goes bye-bye. Yeah, yeah.
00:35:00
Speaker
Which is OK. Which is OK. The current plan, as of right now, that might change later. But the Wilhelmin's coming. I'm going to put the brakes on the Swiss for just a tiny bit on the second Swiss. Let the Wilhelmin come in, plug it in, see how the workflow works. The NAC can still run two of the parts we need, and the Wilhelmin can run clips. And then let's see what fits. See if we're still need that Swiss. I know we will eventually.
00:35:28
Speaker
Sure. Sometimes it's nice to not spend a whole ton of money. And I'm like, there's actually a ton of little things, like five grand here, two grand there, that I'd really like to be able to do. Yeah. Totally. And the other thing is, I know you had shiny objects, flashlights, et cetera, in your mind. So maybe the knock is sitting on your floor, ready to roll into something else. Yep.
00:35:54
Speaker
Yeah, I've seen a market change in my ability to think about the business now that I have done what I didn't think I needed to do, which is really get a lot of the daily housekeeping so off my plate. And I say this out loud to share my own failures or short signings, which is to live what I've preached, which is,
00:36:20
Speaker
When you have the ability to review and think rather than just prepare, it makes you a better business leader and entrepreneur. And you know, it feels weird to say that you or I will ever get to the point where we need to have departments submit budgets, but like, yeah, like what you just said, like, oh, there's these things pop up here and there, we need this and we want to do that. And like, you can do it all now, you're making money, but should you? Are you thinking about the right way? Are you over analyzing?
00:36:47
Speaker
And to have the time and brain space to be able to sit back and think through those things is wonderful. I have that now because I mean, operations, I play on the current, but I don't touch anything else in the whole business operations wise. And, you know, I oversee and I help and I ask questions and answer questions. And it's fantastic. What I want to get to the point where it like you said, you have not a budget committee, but people like submit
00:37:16
Speaker
You know, like, like I've done my research. Can we get this machine or can we get this thing? Or, you know, um, I think this would really help us and I can review that and I could be like, you know, you put a long thought at this. I really like that. Like, yeah, it's like that on the email or chart thing, like sell yourself or have somebody else sell you on what it does. Good. Move forward. Hey, let's, let's like, I'm thinking now with the Swiss,
00:37:40
Speaker
there's a high probability whatever you want to assign to that that we we have swiss parts where we're growing those parts are going to get made out of swiss i want to do it in house draw your own conclusions we can't fit that one part on there the complications you know the machines get a lot more expensive as you change the sub spindle functionality
00:37:59
Speaker
And so I'd rather get the machine that's right for us. And if I don't know exactly what that is today, then okay, let's sit on it for a few months. Yeah, it's not the right time to make that decision. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Because that's how you jump into a bad machine purchase, like a super dedicated, you know, narrow minded, limited read machine. Yeah.
00:38:20
Speaker
So before you know it, you'll be at, like, an index. I can assure you that's, I mean, unless I find an index like you found your Wilhelmin. Yeah, exactly. They're out there.
Machine Learning in Manufacturing
00:38:30
Speaker
Well, it's funny, because I never troll the used machinery websites. But through this process, I was like, well, let's see what else you got. I'm like, dang, you've got some really neat machines listed on your site, like Nakamura and NTX. No, Maury NTX.
00:38:48
Speaker
Did it come out of an Oculus shop? Yeah, exactly. But like $100,000. Yeah. And a bunch of other stuff too. And I'm like, interesting. It's risky.
00:39:01
Speaker
For sure, buying used machinery. But I know a lot of people that have done a lot of good with it, and I'm sure there's been some horror stories too. I'm reading through all the legal documentation for it, and they're like, this is sold as is where is with no implied warranty, and we will not be held liable for anything whatsoever, period, blah, blah, blah. Yeah.
00:39:20
Speaker
typical language, typical, but it's, it's nice to read through it and be like, okay, let's see what's going on here. The, um, I think it's great. Your used machine purchases range from you mocks that were like almost going to go in the scrap yard up to a Wilhelmin. Yeah. Nothing in between that.
00:39:41
Speaker
Yeah, that's cool. Both with 30,000 RPM HSK spindles. Hilarious. It's the only thing those things have in common. Pretty much. That's cool. How much does it weigh? The wheelie? 2,000 pounds? I feel like it's nothing. Probably. I don't even know. I thought I saw it once. Maybe 5,000 max. Got it. They're small machines. Yeah. It's smaller than Torno's. Yeah, I figured it was. I guess I'm just thinking about how small CJ's shop is. Yeah.
00:40:09
Speaker
Yeah, CJ said multiple times. He's like, I would buy that, but I have no room. Yeah, that's nice. But having, look, it's like that classic, you know, buying to use equipment, build a team around it. You know, you've talked to the world of people, you know, a guy that owns one. Not only the guy that owns one, but the guy that created the post for himself. And it's amazing. So like having a working post is a big purchasing decision.
00:40:34
Speaker
Oh, even though he has a newer control and so forth, do you think it'll be good to go? We haven't talked about the differences in age, but he seems very confident. And if there's an issue, we'll fix it. Like he's Mr. Post at Autodesk. So that's great. Thank you, CJ. Yeah. Dude, totally off topic, but.
00:40:52
Speaker
I was watching a Mark Rober video with the kids on like what he does with science and engineering. Yeah. Love it. And then he did a app that let him use machine learning to figure out when baseball, uh, what's it called? Line coaches or people are, are giving signals to steal the base. Okay. I haven't seen that one. That's really cool. I mean, all of this stuff is great. And I went on this, like.
00:41:16
Speaker
binge on machine learning and neural networks. Yeah. Oh, John, it is unbelievably cool. Cool. Unbelievably cool. Yeah.
00:41:28
Speaker
Just this idea that you can, it's quite difficult to summarize it, but it's kind of like you feed a bunch of inputs, and then you tell it what outputs resulted in what you want, and then it starts building control knobs that you can't see through different layers, and it figures out how to adjust these knobs internally to give different parameters and variables such that it builds predictable and correct.
00:41:53
Speaker
it's watch the rober video it's a really good explanation of a simple example where it's just hey let's figure out what of the coach's signs what signs were real and what signs were bogus and it's just basically cutting out all the noise so it's kind of a simple example but that takes it into when you hear about big data and um some of the waste technology works these days it's oh gets me fired up that's awesome yeah one of my buddies was playing with the idea of um
00:42:21
Speaker
basically attaching a camera, for example, in the Kern with the tool magazine, he attached a camera to the tool changer arm and took a picture of every end mill at every stage of production. And he said it as if it was nothing. He's like, yeah, you could build a neural network and predict a machine, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, whoa, buddy, that sounds awesome. But I don't know. That's a lot. Yes.
00:42:44
Speaker
There's so much, you know, so much cool things that can and will happen when it comes to ways of implementing technology that we don't even think about. It's really cool. It's neat to see when it when technology on a drastic scale hits your industry like this whole industry 4.0 is taking a slow foothold.
00:43:03
Speaker
That's a polite way of putting it. Exactly. It's cool and exciting, and everybody wants progress and technology. The fact that I can VNC into my current from my phone when I'm out for a walk and check if it's still running is amazing. It's really cool. Yeah.
00:43:23
Speaker
Yeah, but that's just a, there's a, that's just a step. It's not a change in the paradigm. Yes. You know, like the ability to throw a GoPro or camera in your machine and have it start on its own learning the behavior of a repeated palette and then itself start to propose situations where it thinks maybe it didn't like something. You give it feedback. It goes back to the whole ridiculousness that we've all been hoodwinked on.
00:43:48
Speaker
click all the traffic lights in this picture to proceed through the recapture. Well, that had a lot more to do with you training the neural network for Google to improve its own neural network than it did with early or not spam.
00:44:01
Speaker
Right. Wow. So it comes up with its own conclusions. You either validate it. It's assuming, I guess that you're going to do it correctly or it's knows enough or can have some audit level of a real person behind the scenes. But oh, so, so cool. That's awesome. We're Phil's driving around the parking lot. Yeah. Awesome dude. Yeah. Anything else? See you next week. Sounds good, bud. Take care. All right. Take care. Bye. Bye.