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#273 - The Importance Of Education
225 Plays3 years ago
TOPICS:
- Saunders talks about his origin story.
- The boys chat about the importance of education, wether school or investing in yourself.
- Grimsmo is dialing in the issues they are having with the swiss lathe pump.
- Saunders gives updates on the ever changing LEX ERP system.
- The boys talk about the movie "The Founder" about the origin story of Mc Donalds.
- Saunders has 2 new hires starting next week!
- Grimsmo crashes the tool changer on the Willemin.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 273. My name is John Grimsmough. And my name is John Saunders. And this is the weekly podcast where John and John talk about growing their manufacturing businesses from the garage days. That's what we literally call it is like the garage days to kind of where we are now and where we're going in the future and you know kind of every step in between.
00:00:23
Speaker
It was fun
Journey to Suburbs and Manufacturing Passion
00:00:24
Speaker
having met some new folks last week in Kansas who were genuinely interested in about my story and didn't know us. I haven't really told our story in a while about like, hey,
00:00:40
Speaker
bringing a product to market, a tag in New York City, hence why the YouTube channel's got that name, and then literally convincing my wife to move out to the suburbs, which nobody does until you have a kid. I didn't have a kid. I didn't have a kid for like two more years. I just wanted a garage and a basement to get a tormach. It was fun. It was fun. That's funny because we actually moved from Vancouver, the city, to Ontario, the country.
00:01:09
Speaker
for the same reasons that I could have a garage to do stuff. Oh, really? Yeah. Because I know you only in your Toronto life. Exactly. I guess I thought Vancouver was- 2007 is when we moved to the East coast. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. Huh. Yeah, so Meg and I were together for five plus years over there. Yeah. A whole life.
00:01:33
Speaker
Yeah, we moved to Ontario because we got a sweet family deal on a country rental property with a garage and land and just freedom. We had chickens and it was nice. Yes, it was total country life for five plus years. Is it?
00:01:53
Speaker
similar to like the US where there's, I don't want to say there's beef, but like there's opinions about like, oh, nobody could move from Seattle to Boston. Yeah. Nobody moves East. Everybody moves towards the West. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But whatever. Hashtag Phil. Although that's like West to more West, I guess. Yeah, exactly. Interesting. So did you have a machine in Vancouver? No.
00:02:18
Speaker
No, I was a car guy at that point. So I wanted a garage to work on my cars and to build more things. Ah, OK. Got it. I was certainly building things for my car, like welding and chop saw and things like that. But yeah. Interesting. Yeah, it's weird kind of living your business life. And then, like you said, you go to an event where you get to share this story, like the updated version of the story, and you kind of get to reminisce on what it was like.
Trade Schools' Role in Manufacturing
00:02:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:48
Speaker
I'll tell you, the takeaway for me was wonderfully impactful. It transcends just the events of Project MFG, which was basically the four finalists of these trade schools from
00:03:08
Speaker
Alabama, Florida, California, and Illinois that came to this event, having made it good for them, and that's great. And there's more to that in the semifinals and regionals that involved
00:03:21
Speaker
this competition that I didn't have proximity to, but it's still somewhat limited in its scope, at least right now, of how many people it can touch. There's a lot of complicating factors around curriculum at trade schools, access to machines, teachers, facilities. It makes me excited about our ability to try to play a small role in that.
00:03:44
Speaker
through something that is consumable by everybody, which is YouTube and education inspiring to hopefully lead people in good grief. Something I never thought of preaching, but I will now is if you are interested in this stuff, I would absolutely encourage you to consider even relocating if you have to, to go to a good trade school that's going to lead to the right program, the right curriculum, the right teachers. That's a huge part of it. And then that's going to lead directly into
00:04:12
Speaker
feeding into jobs because if it's, I guess it's not something that students may realize, but the major
00:04:21
Speaker
aerospace companies out there, the major manufacturing companies out there, they are, I won't say desperate, they are very in tune with where they can find the next generation of talent, very much so. In fact, all employers are. It's something you don't necessarily appreciate when you're on the other side, when you're just that student, how important that is to the leaders of these companies, the hiring departments, the, whatever you wanna call it, the machinists, like everyone cares greatly about that.
00:04:48
Speaker
And so when you end up at the right school with the right curriculum and teacher, these household name aerospace companies, these major manufacturer companies are looking to those schools to recruit out of.
Manufacturing and National Security
00:05:01
Speaker
It's no different in sports, right? If you want to go play.
00:05:03
Speaker
in the NFL, you want to end up at a high school that has the right coach, the right facilities, that the recruiters are the scouts, right? The scouts are showing up at, I mean, there are quote unquote scouts in the manufacturing world that are in tune with what's happening in the manufacturing space. But the reason I brought all this up was that the leader of this whole project is actually from the US Department of Defense. They're kind of the brainchild of trying to pull this all together. And she gave a speech
00:05:31
Speaker
about how manufacturing is truly a matter of national security. I hesitate because it's a little bit awkward because you're Canadian and I don't feel like you're our adversary, but I recognize this comes off as pro-US. It's not so much pro-US as a pro-West, if that makes sense. Local.
00:05:55
Speaker
It's unbelievably important to play the long game on building that next generation. That reminds me a lot of when we were working on that project, egress with the Smithsonian and Adam Savage.
00:06:10
Speaker
reminiscing on the Apollo mission and how you just can't take any amount of money, even billions of dollars, and end up with a Saturn five. You need mom and pops in random towns in all over America who are experts in metrology, are experts in metallurgy, are experts in returning, are experts in grinding, and multi-generational experts, not just- Yeah, you can't throw money to teach that quickly. Yeah. Yeah, get that.
Debunking Manufacturing Stereotypes
00:06:36
Speaker
What I think is really interesting in the long game aspect of this is a program and desire to try to redevelop this beyond just chasing profits for this month or next month or next year to lay that groundwork. It sounds silly, but it's a few times in my life where I've said, I want on that train, I want involved in that, I want to help with that and I care
00:07:01
Speaker
greatly about it, not from a national standpoint of only the US, but as a citizen of the US who cares a lot about the country and the next generation and rewarding careers. I'll end it there, but I think that come across, makes sense. It's beautiful. Absolutely. I mean, you've been involved in education with your training classes and just in general with the YouTube channel for the past 12 years.
00:07:22
Speaker
It is definitely a part of who you are. And I respect that greatly, but it's great to hear you go to a university with a legit event and like get to talk to teachers, talk to students. Like it's that next level for you of experience. And I think, yeah, amazing, opens your eyes to your future, you know?
00:07:43
Speaker
It gets me excited. One of the takeaways was figuring out ways to encourage teachers. We need more folks that are willing because that's a huge part of the success here is having people that are willing to play that role in it. The other thing, which I'm going to do a video on, this gets me so excited because I have
00:08:06
Speaker
100% conviction, no hesitation about doing a video for the parents. If you're watching this and you're the student, please forward this video to your parents and talk to the parents who don't know what modern manufacturing is like.
00:08:22
Speaker
You and I have talked about this, so I don't have to tell you, but it is post processors or it is KAM. You have 50 shop tours that you can take a two second clip from to show this is modern manufacturing. Seriously. That's a good idea. Because a monologue is wonderful. You and I do them. But to splice in relevant content that's not your own just adds so much dynamic attention to that kind of video. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome.
00:08:52
Speaker
It's not canned footage from a stock footage site. It's like you were there. It just came over me because you realize how unaware people are for justifiable reasons. I don't know a lot about other industries or careers and so forth. You hear the stigma of is manufacturing unsafe. Is it dirty? Is it a dead end career? All those things legitimately couldn't be further from the truth.
00:09:17
Speaker
Well, because we are so deep into it, so entrenched that you hear that and you're like, that's that's hilarious. I can't believe you think that. But we think that of other industries that we have nothing that we know nothing about. You know what I mean? It's you just based on the stigma and the word of mouth of that industry. You know, it's like Mike Rowe back in the day doing dirty jobs. He was like, what was it? Roadkill picker uppers are the happiest people he's ever met. Something like that. It was really? Yeah.
00:09:47
Speaker
And he, it was a wonderful show back in the day. Um, but yeah, yeah. How are you doing? Wonderful.
00:09:57
Speaker
Yeah? Yeah. No, things are going really good in the shop. I feel like we're getting back into a nice little flow of production. We've had a lot of stumbles lately. The Swiss is running fairly steady right now, which is great. So it's all put back together, which is good. It's still foaming and bubbling the oil, which at this point, I think it's the oil's fault. Because the pump is fine. We've replaced the pump. Both pumps are fine.
00:10:25
Speaker
Place a lot of hoses, talk to every pump supplier, talk to LNS, talk to MP Systems, talk to everybody. I literally brought the pump to a, do you know what hydronics? You know what hydronics means? No. It's like there's hydraulics, that's the act of pumping the, or pressurizing the fluid, but hydronics is pumping. So a hydronics store buys pumps or sells pumps.
00:10:49
Speaker
Okay. There's just a weird little thing I didn't know. I never heard the word hydronics. So I went to a hydronic store with the pump from the tornos and I just laid it on the counter. I already took it apart in pieces and I was like, what's wrong with this? And we looked and we looked and we looked and they said nothing. Yeah.
00:11:08
Speaker
Yeah, and they actually had, the first one did crack one of the carbon seals in the back and they had a stock one on the shelf, which was perfect. Serious? The seal? Exactly. Oh my God. Is this like a store in your local mall? I can't believe- Yeah, like downtown Hamilton, 20 minutes away. No kidding. And they were a pump specialist.
00:11:28
Speaker
And I've bought a few things from them before. And just with how helpful they were, literally a mom and pop shop. Do you realize what you're saying is a complete validation of what I said seven minutes ago? Absolutely. We need hydroponics. Not hydroponics. I can't pick hydronics. Exactly. And this guy was probably 65, 70 years old and just knew his stuff. And it was great. And they rebuild pumps and everything. And because L&S sold us a new pump,
00:11:57
Speaker
because they didn't have the seal kits in stock. Whereas this pump store, $26 gets me a new carbon seal. Oh my god. Oh, John, I'm sorry. No, it's fine. So now we have two functioning pumps, which is hilarious. What are we going to do with the other one? But we'll find the use for it eventually. It moves a lot of fluid. So if we ever need a pumping application that moves like, I don't know,
00:12:22
Speaker
100 gallons a minute or whatever it is. That's great. It's still aerating the coolant, but our machinist Pierre has been able to, on the machine, make parts. He says it's alarming the high pressure coolant pump sometimes, but it's not enough to be impossible.
00:12:43
Speaker
Okay. So he's doing that. We're looking at getting a thinner
Mentorship in Manufacturing Education
00:12:47
Speaker
oil, either cutting our current 35 weight oil, which is what they suggested. And now everybody's telling us that's way too thick. We're talking about cutting it with a thinner oil so that it becomes like half seas or replacing it entirely with thinner oil.
00:13:02
Speaker
John, that oil needs to be gone. Yeah, I agree. That's what occurred to me when you mentioned this in the WhatsApp chat. I know nothing about oil science, but is there a way of if that pump that had the crack seal that was causing aerations, could you permanently muck up
00:13:20
Speaker
the molecular structure of that oil. Even when you fix the pump, that oil is always going to be compromised. It doesn't seem like you should be able to because you would think it would just go back to its homeostasis. I don't know. For two grand, whatever that oil cost, gone. Yeah, about 2,400 bucks for a drum. I think this machine actually takes a drum in a bit, so we'd have to buy two drums. Got it.
00:13:47
Speaker
But like solution, right? So we're almost making that decision right now. We reached out to Blaser, see if they can, you know, do something for us to fix this new batch of oil that is not performing. Take it from there. Yeah. It's nice to be able to make pens again.
00:14:09
Speaker
That's great. Pierre has a nice steady backlog of parts to keep him busy for the next while, which is good. But the good thing about the Tournos is once it's tooled up and running parts, it just runs and runs and runs and runs and runs. It can make hundreds and hundreds of parts a day easily and then switch to the next part. You mentally go, okay, am I making four weeks of inventory or am I making six months of inventory?
00:14:37
Speaker
Yeah. And when you have a lot of different components to make, it's the short term. And then you're just doing more setups, but so what? You get caught up. Right. No point having six months of everything except for the thing you need. Bingo. I tell you, we've really improved our internal operations based on Lex. And honestly, right now, still some manual reporting work out of Lex. I want to integrate it
00:15:06
Speaker
to avoid the manual calculation type stuff. But what Julie has done with help from, I mean, from everybody, but Julie's really taken the lead is, so we have, it's not really a partnership, but we're making fixture plates and so forth for the Langmuir CNC machine that came out. And so it's a new hobby sized granite or epoxy based
00:15:30
Speaker
machine. Is that the, um, I've been seeing Instagram ads for that. Yeah. Okay. And they are behind the out of the blue. This Instagram ad comes up and I'm like, that looks amazing. What is this? No, they are killing it. Um, they are behind the, I think it's called crossfire plasma.
00:15:47
Speaker
stuff. So they're a pretty legit company, but in more in the fab plasma world, this is their first foray, I think it's called the MR1. And so we have a Saunders machine works fixture. It's not really a fixture plate. It's more like a fixture strip that works in conjunction with the mod vice. So we've been working with them on a relatively large order, an order where we're pacing it out over time.
00:16:08
Speaker
And so what we've done is pulled in really three things, that plus, uh, inventory plus sales. And we now have kind of a report where it's like, okay, we're on, like even this morning, we had a manager's meeting and Julia was like, okay, we need 36 more by the 20th. That was our target, but we're on pace for that. And in a funny way, we don't really want to outperform it. We just want to make what we need, uh, to get through this, I hate the word marathon because
00:16:34
Speaker
I don't like running. But it's a schedule. And when we get that much done, we can switch over and do other stuff. And it's this wonderful orchestra. That's awesome. Yeah, it's planning and executing, right? Back in the days, we knew we had stuff to make, so we made it. But now it's a lot more
00:16:56
Speaker
a bit of theory behind it, right? Oh, yeah. There's so many aspects to both of our businesses, dozens and dozens of features that's like, in order for it all to happen and all to work out, it has to be spread amongst multiple people. And there has to be clear lines of communication so that everybody knows that everything's happening. Nobody's stepping on each other's toes and everything just kind of, it's like an orchestra, like watching The Founder, you know that McDonald's movie? Yeah, yeah. Where they're like literally the conductor.
00:17:26
Speaker
conducting the orchestra of the staff. If you're listening and you have not watched the founder, number one, go watch it. Number two, they get a ladder, a step ladder and go to a tennis court and tape off the restaurant layout and start
00:17:44
Speaker
thinking through the flow. Yeah. And they like move equipment around on the tennis court as a, no, that everybody's bumping into that. Let's move it over there. Okay. You go first. No, stop doing that. It's just, it's like a montage scene, but it's just, it's beautiful. And then by the end, they're all smiling and they're like, yeah, this is the right flow and all the staff is happy. And they're like, this feels better. You know, it's a spaghetti map minus the a hundred thousand dollar MBA degree.
00:18:10
Speaker
But again, that's like they were, you know, mom and pop, you know, brother, brother, restaurateurs that just started from nothing. And if it evolved the method that they created, they didn't learn it in school. Yeah. There's a takeaway there that I'm guilty of not always doing a good enough job of following, which is they had this instinct of how important it was to have their operation styled. Yeah.
00:18:38
Speaker
It was so contrarian that's counterintuitive because restaurants aren't new. Fast food isn't even new, but they didn't. They were the first, minus perhaps some odd moral excuses. They were the first people to popularize no silverware, a limited menu, fast turnaround. People couldn't believe that you could walk up, ask for a burger, and then seven seconds later, somebody hand you your burger. What?
00:19:00
Speaker
And in that movie, they'd nail those scenes. Michael Keaton gets his burger seven seconds later and he's like, no, it must be wrong. It was a mistake. He's like, no, sir. You're good to go. Yeah. If you don't know why, because there's someone behind you. Exactly. It's just so contrary.
00:19:19
Speaker
think this is the goal for us, but like it would be like, okay, we could build a robotic FMS automation system with all of our pre sized fixture plate materials and you place an order right now at 1025. And that we always have extra capacity and that gets loaded into a machine with automatic fixturing. And it's machined automatically, it's QC and a cell with a
00:19:37
Speaker
with a gauge, with a report that you can download, and then it gets dropped into a box and picked like, that's not really what we're going to do. But you have to think like that to realize, if somebody came along and did that, they could smoke us. Right. But there's a lot more to running a business than just automation. True. True.
00:19:58
Speaker
It's more like automation solves the problem, but the issue of the business is still creating market share, customer's demand, quality product. Automation just makes that easier. It just makes it sustainable.
00:20:11
Speaker
Well, now you're getting into the touchy point of that movie, which was the brothers just wanted to run a burger shack. Yeah. Ray Kroc, who most people think of as the founder of McDonald's, realized, huh-uh, we're taking this sucker national. Yeah, exactly. And they almost didn't want to be part of it. Oh, yeah. That did not end well. Seriously, if you haven't watched them, it's brilliant. It's very enjoyable. It is a business movie, but it could be watched by anybody.
00:20:38
Speaker
Oh, I would argue it's spouse approved. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, my wife watched it too and it was great. On that note, we have actually for the first time ever two employees starting today and one of them is handling a lot of our orders, operations, shipping, receiving. Part of it is we need to do a better job at
00:20:59
Speaker
what I just said, like, hey, when the material gets inbound, where is it put? How do we rack stuff? If we're double-racking stuff, making sure that the item that's harder to get to is the infrequently used item. And so it's actually great to have that
00:21:15
Speaker
It's great to have
Hiring and Intern Experience
00:21:16
Speaker
that now start. The other is a summer intern who's between his two-year associates moving into a four-year engineering, spending the summer here, who's going to learn about manufacturing, machining. I think he built his own 3D printer a number of years ago, which is kind of checking the boxes of... Yeah, that's like the box. That's amazing.
00:21:38
Speaker
With the interns, I guess it's for one seasonal, you've gone through several years of interns, right? Like between summer. We had over 20. Holy cow. Good for you. Right.
00:21:50
Speaker
Yeah, we only had, I mean, Sky went through the, it wasn't an apprentice program, it was a co-op student program from the local university, which I could probably see if I looked out the window of this shop. And he's just been on ever since, four years now. Yeah. Full time. Yeah, which is great. Yeah, it's great. So, okay, so you kind of know how to run interns now.
00:22:13
Speaker
I think so. I mean, I don't brag about 20 is like a churn factor. I mean, it's great to have somebody who's just here for summer and that's okay. We've had a number of them, Garrett, Alex, others sort of, actually Ed was technically an intern at one point, convert into full-time. But it's different now because we have that sort of second layer. So the engineering student is spending the day with
00:22:39
Speaker
Vince learning. He already did some fusion work ahead of time, so he's now learning on running parts of the Tormock. He's going to shadow, add, start helping on setups. Those feel things around, hey, here's loading a fixture. I genuinely believe this will make him a better engineer when he understands how MightyBite works, how the mod vice works, how torque wrenches work in application, not just ... I mean, everybody
00:23:01
Speaker
Anybody who's a nerd knows what torque wrench does, but when you've used one, you start to understand the behavior of it, and you get that feel. I know for sure, if a part's not seated right, when you torque it, it feels different. I have a quick sidebar on that exact topic. I've been using torque wrenches for 10, 15 years, especially in the car days, but now in manufacturing, I bought a really nice Wira torque wrench. It goes up to 75 foot pounds. I made a steel 4140 fixture with an MA thread in it.
00:23:30
Speaker
So like five sixteenths for freedom units. Thank you. And I install the shunk vice, the topper on it, or not vice, the pneumatic pallet changer thingy anyway. So I'm threading in this M6 bolt, and I got to torque it to about 30 foot pounds, and I torque one, and it feels kind of squishy at the end. And I'm like, this should be getting rock hard, and 30 foot pounds is not very strong for a
00:24:00
Speaker
foot and a half breaker bar kind of thing, torque wrench. And it just feels kind of squishy at the end. So I'm like, okay, let me stop that one. Let me go to the next one. Next one's kind of squishy too. And I'm like, there's something wrong. Either I'm compressing something or I'm stripping the bolt out or something. So then the third one, I take it all the way tight and it just feels squishy, feels squishy until it pops. And then I pull it out and the bolt is fine, but the threads of my fixture
00:24:26
Speaker
broke off. And there's like a coil, like a heli-coil on the screw that came out. And so I'm like, okay, so I just ruined that hole, but it's on my fixture, so whatever, I'll make a new one if I have to. So I tried to figure out what it was, and it's definitely possible that my thread tolerance in the hole is not up to snuff. Hole's too big, thread pitch is whatever. I didn't gauge it that tight.
00:24:49
Speaker
I just have a default template for making an M8 thread infusion with the same thread mill that I just keep running. Really, I used one size too short of a bolt. I used a 35 millimeter instead of a 40 millimeter long. Did you just pull out the tip? Yeah, it was like a good quarter inch, almost probably one diameter of thread anyway.
00:25:14
Speaker
That was a shame, but I learned a lesson there. And again, that's like the hand feel of like this does not feel right, whereas somebody totally inexperienced would just send it and like break them all.
00:25:26
Speaker
You're giving me flashbacks to when I did the 944 Porsche water pump repair and I was torquing the water pump bolt. It's a pretty low torque spec. I had the Haynes manual for sure following the rules.
00:25:45
Speaker
And I and I felt what should have been the torque click and it's not there and it just kept getting spongy. At that point, you just kind of close your eyes and you're like, better sit down and have a cup of coffee because we're going to be we're going to be helicoiling here in a minute. Something is wrong. And you just pull those threads out. Yeah. It's all good.
00:26:07
Speaker
That's how we learn. That's how we learn. So with shadowing, because we had an employee, Grayson, start about a month ago. And he's been shadowing, you know, Angelo Pierre, Steven, and Sky for anodizing and lots of stuff. It's been really good. I've been fairly hands off on the whole process, which is nice, but I get to observe. But when you shadow people, is it literally just like, I'm going to do my normal working day, and I'm just going to explain while I'm working.
00:26:36
Speaker
Sure. Your working day is going to be affected by it, period. It's very easy for me to step into the hole, like just watch me instead of letting them do it. So like literally this morning, I was actually told you a story right before we hit record, but we installed
00:26:57
Speaker
We machined nine riser pucks offline and they were all slightly different heights because I didn't care about it because I installed them on a tombstone on the horizontal and once they were installed, I was just going to deck them in place so that they're all coplanar.
00:27:12
Speaker
And so I had installed them last night, didn't quite get around to decking them. So I thought, well, I'll just do it tomorrow morning. But we have two employees starting. There's a paperwork process. So I get here 20 minutes early to try to just jog the machine to deck those off. And wonderful problem to have, but everyone's already here 20 minutes early. And so I showed them, actually, I don't think they saw me when I was jogging the machine to deck them, but then we were installing some threaded inserts in those pucks that we made.
00:27:39
Speaker
And, you know, look, what do I need to do? I need to deburr them and I need to look at the flatness of them with either a one, two, three block, like making sure there isn't a raised, uh, partial of them, or you could stone them, flat stone them, or you can, um,
00:27:55
Speaker
wipe all the dust off. So there isn't any sort of amount of chips. So it sounds silly, but there's a lot of little things in that lesson right there. And then we ended up putting some Loctite in there. Um, honestly, I should have used a Loctite accelerator because it's steel screw and aluminum and Loctite doesn't really work that well that way, unless you have the.
00:28:12
Speaker
primer anyway. Really? Yeah. I didn't know that. Those are the little things that just you're not going to think to make a YouTube video about Loctite Accelerator. But if it comes out, then people are going to remember it. Yeah.
00:28:28
Speaker
So I had him, I handed him the deburring tool and had him wipe him down and install the Loctite and just little stuff that's just, let's go, let's do it. Yeah, it's like, I remember in our elementary school library, there was a poster on the wall of Garfield with a book on his head and he said, I'm learning by osmosis. And I still remember that, it's like,
Learning Through Workplace Experience
00:28:51
Speaker
You just, you learn by observing and by listening and by watching and by, you know, there's so many cues that you pick up just through osmosis, just by being there. And especially with somebody like yourself who's happy to talk about what they're doing and happy to explain things. And there's like various levels of opening up, you know, like, okay, I'm going to explain the full process or I'm just going to explain little bits and bits. Feel free to ask any questions, you know, stop me anytime sort of thing. Yeah.
00:29:18
Speaker
Yeah, and I say that it's so different to have somebody shadowing you because we all work kind of in isolation here in, I think, a good way. It's quite wonderful. But I sort of say, you don't need to be memorizing everything we do and tell you. This is just like drinking out of the fire hose. I think I get the same feeling is that the new person feels like they're supposed to remember everything, whereas I'm just throwing information at them.
00:29:47
Speaker
I want to get better at making that okay. Just like you said, you don't have to remember everything. Just be here. Just watch. Exactly. Just listen. I think the easy thing to do is, or the right thing to do is say that and then move on and just lead by example. Be like, look, we're going to do a lot today. This is for you to start absorbing. There's not going to be a quiz here. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
00:30:12
Speaker
That's great. What else is going on? Um, I was working on the Wilhelmin last night. I wanted to try, I wanted to install my new turning tools and I wanted to turn a feature, um, use, you know, post a code, post a turning tool path. Um, I've done some milling, some cam operated milling, like I posted.
00:30:33
Speaker
Two tools, a bunch of features, tilted work plane. It was actually very easy to do milling on that machine. That's what I haven't done any turning yet.
00:30:43
Speaker
you know, quote unquote, don't know how to do it yet until I've done it. Um, so I installed my two turning tools, the, the VCMT and the part off tool. And I put them in the right pockets and I roughly set the tool length and I figure I'll dial in the tool length, um, after making a part, you know, just as it gets made and, uh, the whole machine's in metric, which everything else in my life is inch for the most part. Um, so I'm still going to see if I can get them to convert the machine to met to inch, but maybe not. I don't know. It might be tricky.
00:31:15
Speaker
Anyway, so I call up one of the turning tools and the double arm that grabs the tool in the spindle and the next tool and switches them around crashed on the spindle and it got stuck. It's not a huge deal, but it's certainly like, what do I do now? I don't even know how to recover. Every machine has a tool changer recover sequence and they're all different.
00:31:42
Speaker
And on the Maury, you have to go into this weird FANUC menu, and you have to type 1234, which stage are you at? Is the pot up? Is it down? Is it rotated out? Is it clamped? On the current, it's super easy. You just hit E-stop and start the machine again, and it figures it out for you. That's amazing. Yes.
00:32:01
Speaker
But yeah, so I texted a picture to Marcus, my Willimon guy, and I was like, uh, that's literally what I said was just, uh, he said, I'm on the road. I'll get back to you soon. Um, so then later we figured it out, but you have to like, you have to go in the electrical cabinet and you have to jump or two wires to unclamp the, the clamp, like the break on that motor.
00:32:22
Speaker
And then you have to walk around and you have to put a short handled six millimeter Allen key on top of the motor for that arm and you have to manually rotate it clockwise. Oh my gosh. The whole arm is a cam driven thing. So like inside there's all these cam mechanisms that make it rotate and then go up.
00:32:42
Speaker
Then pause, dwell, and then down, and then rotate again. As you rotate the motor on the top, you're manually advancing it. It was really cool to watch. I'm going to make a video on this just because it's cool to see. It'll be good for us to have that logged of like, when this happens again, this is how you do it. That's as far as I got yesterday. Then Marcus told me it happened because we have not aligned the tool changer after moving the machine.
00:33:12
Speaker
Oh. We've just been getting lucky so far because you can do a fine adjust for where X or Y thinks the tool is going to be when the spindle goes down to grab it. Yeah. And in order to do that, he said, he told me a long time ago, you got to take an Itchescape 4D tool holder and you got to cut the taper off and use that to set your thing. Ew. And I'm like, I don't want to do that. Yeah.
00:33:40
Speaker
But he's like, it's easy, just take it to an EDM shop, get them sliced in half, good to go. So last night in a panic, I took a scrap one that I have that we don't need anymore, and I clamped it in an orange vice in the mori, and I literally machined the taper off, which worked really well, it was amazing. And then I sent him a picture, and he goes, ooh, you did it wrong. You're supposed to section it like a side view? Nope, like imagine.
00:34:06
Speaker
any tool holder like a Cat40 or an HSK or whatever. You know where the thick flange is? Because HSK is face contact and tapered contact. Where the thick flange is, you want to cut that thick flange in half radially.
00:34:22
Speaker
so that you have two pieces now. You have a top hat, which is your taper and the flange, the flat. And then you have a bottom half, which is the grippy part that can grip in the tool changer. And you want the taper to be in your spindle and the gripped part, the shank to be in the tool holder. And as they come together, you can align them X and Y. Oh, interesting. Like an edge finder. Exactly. But you've separated the edge finder pieces this way. So I didn't understand that concept when he's been telling me we have to align the tool changer for months and months now.
00:34:51
Speaker
So me cutting the taper off and making it chips is not helpful. Oh yeah, now I get it. Right? Yes. So it took me like half an hour to stop the mori and do that and get it set up, but I did it. Anyways, today I have another scrap tool holder. I'm going to take it to a local EDM shop and I'm going to get them just, I'll put a Sharpie line, just slice here please. And then I should have two pieces where I can edge find them together.
00:35:17
Speaker
Got it. And then once that's dialed, he said, it's an older machine, so things are a little bit sloppier. But once it's dialed, center it within the slop, basically, if there is any. And then it should tool change reliably after that. Because you've got some taper in the HSK 40, which means if there's slop, plus taper, it should self-curve. Yeah, it should, yeah. Interesting. Yeah, so that was my last night fun session and a bit of my task for today.
00:35:44
Speaker
The tool changer Cam reminds me of the time we toured the Haas factory in California and it really was incredible. And they had some of their, I think they were their four or five axis horizontals. I want to say they were
00:35:58
Speaker
machines that weren't made anymore. They remember they were noteworthy at the time, for me at least. And I saw these parts that looked beautiful. And they kind of look like a 10 inch tire, where if you had like a tread around the tire, but instead of it being just a normal tread, it was this really funny shaped track, like a racetrack around the where the tire tread would be. And I'm kind of like, what is that? And he was like, this is the tool changer cam.
00:36:24
Speaker
What? And that's how most sidearm tool changers work, where as that servo rotates it, it's driving a cam, which is what controls, and it's just so cool to me as a non-engineer to see, it controls the downfeed, the rotation, the speed of the rotation, and you can all control that with a cam. Yep, yep. So cool. It sounds so old school, but it's reliable, right? It's like, yeah. That's awesome. Cool. What's going on today?
00:36:51
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm going to do that, find the EDM shop. It's a place we've used several times before, but not in a couple of years, so it'll be nice to go there again. I'm buying a vacuum pump, fancy bush vacuum pump for the CNC router we're building. OK. So I'm getting a nice beefy vacuum pump. It should be the same version, possibly one size bigger than what you guys had in your Datron. Oh, I think that's great. Yeah.
00:37:18
Speaker
Yeah, Bush seems to be the company that makes vacuum pumps. So yeah, that's kind of exciting. Trying to figure out, they have a couple of different styles and a couple of different voltages and a couple of different suction abilities. So I'm trying to go through and figure out which one. Decided on the one I want, emailed the guy last night and said, yeah, let's get it. Because yeah, the router should start coming together
00:37:45
Speaker
next month hopefully. Start getting everything in. Great. Yeah.
00:37:49
Speaker
Have you seen the hack that Vince figured out? I think Vince figured
Building CNC Router: Vacuum Pump Significance
00:37:53
Speaker
it out. The Home Depot heavy, thick, it's like drop cloth paper cardboard rolls that works basically as good as the Datron vacuum card for directionality that has porosity. No. Okay, it's on our, I can send you the link. It's a Google NYC CNC vacuum. It'll come up, but we buy this stuff. It's like 36 inch roll. It's, I don't know how many hundreds of yards long for like 20 bucks or something.
00:38:18
Speaker
And it's that similar properties of the vacuum card from Datron where it has almost like the pores in the cardboard are aligned vertically so that if you pierce through a hole, you lose a relatively small portion of your vacuum, but by no means is it binary, like a traditional gasket vacuum system where once you poke through the parts gone, it's flying off. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, because I was planning on buying Datron's vacuum card as like a regular consumable item for this machine.
00:38:48
Speaker
Do you have Home Depots in Canada? Every five miles it seems.
00:38:54
Speaker
Got it. I was worried because I don't think Canadian. What's it called, Canada Tire? Canadian Tire. Canadian Tire. I think it's just a weird, I don't know why. It's like we don't have Ace Hardware here, but Canadian Tire is our big Ace Hardware. We don't really have Ace Hardware here either. Really? I feel like the big boxes have dominated. Yeah, probably. Well, yeah, Canadian Tire became the big box. That's true. Yeah, it's the Walmart of home stuff, like house, I don't know, DIY stuff.
00:39:21
Speaker
Next time I visit, I want to go to a Canada tire. Let's go. Good. And they do actually sell tires. They have a big automotive section in most of them. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. What are you up to today?
00:39:34
Speaker
We have the two new folks starting, so making sure that inevitable housekeeping, like computer setup, tasks to do, that kind of stuff. We're getting ready to do the pour on the epoxy tombstone. We've been throwing up a few things on Instagram. It looks awesome. Yeah, you posted the picture the other day or last week or whatever of what it actually looks like. It makes so much more sense now, like the visual. Ah, I got it. Now I know what he's talking about.
00:40:02
Speaker
Some people were saying it's way bigger than they thought. I guess I never realized I needed to explain. It's 20 inches by 20 inches by 30 inches. It's large. You can bear hug it, but it's going to weigh too much to pick up once it's done.
00:40:17
Speaker
Alex did a test pour when I was in Kansas, so he's really happy with how that turned out. We'll definitely video it, the good and the bad to show what we learned. Yeah. Well, because the horizontal is you got the 400 millimeter, right? Correct. The scale of the tombstones and the tombstone changer and everything is so much bigger than the VMC mindset. All the guys like us from Tormax and even most of my machines run small parts. Your tombstones are big.
00:40:45
Speaker
Yeah, I don't disagree. But I'll tell you that for the capability of that machine and Akuma is not really unique here. I don't think in the having an automation style 400 millimeter machine. It's a pretty big bang per square foot. Oh, I don't doubt it at all.
00:41:02
Speaker
It's funny, the actual machine tool is tiny. The horizontal side of it is smaller. It's bigger than a VF2, but it's not that big. The tool changer adds on to it, the miss unit and all that stuff. Yeah, exactly. I guess the difference from my thinking is up until now, we can pick up every one of our fixtures with basically one hand, put it in the machine. You know what I mean? Whereas the tombstone is just a different way to think about it. You're never touching that because you let the automation do it. Yeah.
00:41:32
Speaker
It's cool, though. It's been great. I just filmed a video. It'll be out in a few weeks on just how a game changer it's been. And I kind of start off by saying, look, if you watch one of our videos, watch this one. And I would encourage you to watch it. And it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be with a horizontal. But the takeaways that we've had from that machine, and I kind of make fun of myself because it's like, OK, John Saunders finally realizes the automation
00:41:58
Speaker
It's pretty cool, but there's more to it than around what it's been like to bring that machine online. It's really cool. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I am all for automated machine. Like I was just looking this morning, the current is still rocking on a 50 hour run.
00:42:16
Speaker
It's insane. It's still going. We just load it. Keep going. Load it. Keep going. Yeah. It'd be funny to see a temperature graph of that spindle across a year because it's going to be like every so often it drops a few degrees. It took barely cool off, but not really. Yeah, like Sunday. It stops running, but the machine's still on, so it's still temperature controlled. Touché.
00:42:40
Speaker
All right, so it never actually turns off unless there's enough of an error that we need a reboot. That's pretty rare. Were the Kern guys the ones telling us this when we were in Germany?
00:42:54
Speaker
I think it was IBM, and this could be like urban legend stuff here, but they bought a machine and they ran it for years. And the way they ran that machine, they never turned the spindle off. Like it was never off. It seems crazy, like not possible, but... Cool. Yeah, anyway. Yeah, that's all I got.
00:43:17
Speaker
I was running the Maury last night cutting the taper off that tool holder. It's been a while since I've actually run that machine yet alone like posted code to it.
00:43:27
Speaker
And so I was thinking about it and I was reminiscing and it's like, yeah, we've had this machine for six years. We own it out right now, which is really nice. Um, you know, do I want to keep it forever? Like I've always thought, do I want to sell it? Like the speedio is coming in a couple of weeks. So am I going to be like, Oh, the morning needs to disappear and I need two more speedios here. Like it's just, I was going through all the stock process of what, you know, what could happen and stuff. Um, and then I just keep thinking about.
00:43:51
Speaker
Not only automation, but being able to replace a tool while the machine is running, like I can do on the current, is life changing. And almost no machines allow that to happen. The Okuma does. Horizontals do. A lot of five axis machines do, not all of them.
00:44:08
Speaker
Yeah. But anything in like the more speedio price range, like for a three axis machine, except for the Okuma, it like doesn't let you do that. Yeah. And it's frustrating, you know, because it's like if I want to invest more money into machinery that we're going to have and utilize on a day to day basis, like I want to be able to change a tool that's running so that I can automate that tool change process, like tool replacement process, and the machine never stops running.
00:44:33
Speaker
Well, I think the other way to do that is kind of reminds you how Lauren's old shop 3D tech draw handled their turret stuff in the lathe, which is, you know, it was cap toe all the things that when a CNMG insert needed rotated, you had a near cap toe
00:44:49
Speaker
Tool holder like the whole thing. Yeah, so it was one torque wrench one turn pull it out next one in retork, which is I mean literally maybe a 12 second type process and then the Tool you just pulled out is able to be inspected offline, right? I guess the question though is touching off which means you need a pre-setter and
00:45:08
Speaker
Mm-hmm, but again, that's part of the investment is like if that's the mindset we're doing capital the things preset or all the things Know your kind of tips and tricks with how to get it dialed out perfectly first time every time Yeah, then it's very doable. Yeah, agree Cool cool. I'll see you next week urban ticker. Have a great day