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Business of Machining - Episode 138
223 Plays6 years ago
SHUT IT DOWN FOR CMTS!
Grimsmo and the gang are shutting down the shop and heading to CMTS to learn! Everyone has an eye out for things that could improve GK processes AND now that Grimsmo's in a 5-axis mindset, he's ready to absorb as much as possible.
TIME SUCK/DISTRACTION?
Although trade shows are fun and full of information, they can also steal time from your business. Attending a trade show can feel productive; however, it can also be a cleverly disguised distraction preventing more important, dreaded tasks from completion.
Gearing Up for a Trade Show Visit? Click Here for some tips to make the most of your time there!
THE PURGE Saunders gets Marie Condo Points for unloading the Bridgeport, which hasn't been used in over a year---except when Ed's using it as a Broachport. Making decisions to pare down can be difficult because we think our stuff is more valuable than it actually is. The good news is that determining ROI can help!
DOMO ARIGATO, MR. ROBOTO (If you sang this, you get 5 bonus points) Ahhh, the FANUC Robodrill has arrived but it's lonely and J5 is sizing it up.A sub panel has to be added to feed the Robodrill and and another "evil" machine.
Is it Big Plus? There are a few clues here and there but nothing definitive. Once the wiring is finished, the SMW team will determine the automated workflow for a new mod vise product!
Ready Robotics - Possible Solution to FANUC woes? During a fireside entrepreneurial chat with FlexArm, they bring up a company based out of Columbus, Ohio (50 minutes from SMW). Turns out, they have an OS that lives on top of FANUC to control FANCUC and other robots. Does this mean that SMW won't have to learn FANUC?
SHOP LAYOUT & RIGGERS Having 3D printed models of your machines DOES help immensely but they are also limited. After being presented with an abnormally large moving bill for the TM3-P and the UMC-750, SMW finds it valuable to have skates to avoid being at the complete mercy of the riggers.
THE P.O. PLUNGE - Who are you and what have you done with JOHN!? Saunders signs the P.O. for the lathe (pretty sure the real John has been swapped with a lathe-loving cloned version). He even ENJOYED making a part on the Slant Pro recently....
Since the Robodrill needs to be bolted down, he decides to wait until the lathe and bar feeder arrive before determining its semi-permanent placement.
Not only does SMW have plans for a few new products for this machine, they also plan to add turning recipes to ProvenCut!
YES OR NO? Grimsmo finally speaks to the elusive guy he's been texting for the last 3 months about the 26,000 sq ft shop.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and CMTS Excitement
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining, Episode 138. My name is John Grimsmo. My name is John Saunders. Good morning. How are you? I'm excited. Yeah? It is that magical time of year again, time of every other year. CMTS is today. Awesome. I think I saw a few things on Instagram and I thought, oh, I wonder if John's going or not. Oh, yeah. We're shutting down the shop. We're taking everybody and we're going to learn. Cool.
00:00:29
Speaker
Yeah, I'm excited, super excited. It's close, right? Yeah, it's like 45 minutes away. That's awesome. Yep. And remind, how big is that show? It's like, from memory last year, it's many times smaller than IMTS, like maybe five to 10 times smaller. But it's still a very sizable show, like they've got everything. Yeah, that's still for sure legit. Yeah, exactly.
Trade Show Strategies and Insights
00:00:54
Speaker
So then I guess emo is the 10 times IMTS kind of size.
00:00:59
Speaker
Yeah, look, is bigger better? I think maybe some people bring out, pull out all the stops. They bring more equipment, more machines, more staff, but I think a lot of emo from my two-year-old memory now was also just
00:01:15
Speaker
people that wouldn't come to small shows. And I always, I'll never forget the like when Amish and I poked our head into the building that we hadn't seen yet. And literally it's just rows of radial arm drills, like manual machines. I'm like, well, that's an easy turnaround. Yeah. Hard pass. Yeah, exactly.
00:01:35
Speaker
But that's cool. I'm kind of jealous actually. That's cool to see. I feel like maybe because I haven't been to a trade show since IMTS over a year ago. And honestly, we've grown in knowledge and machines that that would be useful to be going to right now.
00:01:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. Sky asked me yesterday, he's been to the Elliott Matsura joint open house, which is kind of like a mini, mini, mini CMTS. So that's kind of been his only show, but he's a nerd for manufacturing, just like all of us. And he's very excited to go. So he asked me, he's like, so what exactly are you looking for? Like anything in particular? And I go, I don't know. I guess I hadn't thought about it, really. I'm just excited to go. You're breaking my trade show rule, though.
00:02:19
Speaker
of what, knowing like- Number one, you've got to print out your bingo scorecard, but no, yeah, you got to- Oh, yes. I find that once you walk in the door, you're just overwhelmed. That's their job, is to overstimulate you. Right. I think it's better to pick, for you, is it RegoFix alternatives? Because sometimes it's talking to the quote unquote competitor who can educate you on things you may not consider. Because nobody, no one's ever going to sell against their own product.
00:02:48
Speaker
almost everything has some sort of a compromise or trade off, whether it's price, cost, functionality, longevity, et cetera. And so being able to hear somebody say, hey, just think about XYZ brand, can't do this, we can, and then you can sort of decide, okay, is that a real? Yep, exactly.
00:03:08
Speaker
Yeah, and I realized, I was thinking about it last night, and I'm like, oh, 5-axis, of course. There'll be lots of 5-axis, just both machines, workholding, fixturing, tooling, software methodology, demos going on. Yes, yes. Now, the last big trade show I went to, I wasn't nearly as interested in 5-axis as I am at this point in time. So I'm very excited to see that with a fresh mindset and actual potential happening in a few months.
Focus on 5-Axis Machines and Equipment Evaluation
00:03:38
Speaker
How do you load and unload the aroa that you got? I believe there are doors on the front and the back. But you have to call a pallet up to a single load-unload station? Nope, I don't think so. It's a bookshelf. So you can open the door and just pull out any one that you want? I believe so, yeah. Interesting, okay. I'm almost positive. And you're not doing any fixturing inside the actual current micro on the right-hand side like we saw at the factory?
00:04:06
Speaker
Right. This tiny little, uh, tool changer mounted pallets. No, they're too small. They're like 52 millimeter. Um, and you lose a whole bunch of tools because of it. So I was like, eh, I'm getting the Aroa anyway. So yeah, it's, it adds a quite a bit of cost. I mean, it's cheaper than the Aroa, but it's adds another 30 grand or something like that. And what does
00:04:30
Speaker
The internal tool changer or pallet changer. Really? It's the same... There's an extra robot. No, it's the same one. I thought there was an extra arm. Well, I guess it has to reach out into the machine. You're right. Yeah, so it's not the tool changer arm, it's a different arm. Got it. Makes sense. Okay.
00:04:51
Speaker
You were debating, maybe four episodes ago, you were debating whether to go two different sizes because that's how the aro was getting prepped for emo? Yeah, and I'm keeping it as the two different sized palettes. Got it. And I'm excited about that. Okay, what were the sizes?
00:05:11
Speaker
There'll be 25 large six inch pallets. There'll be big and sturdy and whatever I want to do on those. Then there'll be up to 55, what, 74 mil pallets, I think they are. Is that the, okay, 74 millimeters, three inches? Yeah, just under 2.9. Yeah, that's the little hockey puck size thing. Exactly. Interesting. Okay.
00:05:37
Speaker
The idea there is smaller one offs. Yeah, cool. Yeah, I'll probably be putting like dovetail clamp holding vise thingies on that side. Yeah, right, right. Is there any flexibility in the future to change that mix? Yes. Okay, it's not locked set in stone. No, exactly. It's just buying or making your own new shelf for the bigger palettes and teaching the robot the new positions. So it's super flexible. That's awesome. Yeah, that's really cool.
00:06:08
Speaker
So what else for CMTS? I don't know. We're good as far as big stuff right now. There'll be certainly a lot of tooling and well, tooling and new technologies we haven't thought about yet. I don't know. I surprisingly haven't put a lot of thought into it.
00:06:34
Speaker
I'm actually shocked saying it out loud because I'm like, normally I'm excited and planned for weeks and weeks, but this sort of jumped up on me. Well, the boring, potentially not fun friend is going to tell you, you're running a business. Yes, there's some element of inspiration to being at a trade show or just having fun and that's great, but you're running a business. So if you're not going for a reason, don't go.
00:06:59
Speaker
do what you need to do, which is make nice product, money, et cetera. Spend a day, you could argue, and this would be blasphemous, but to think about shutting down the shop, figuratively so, for a day and only working on lean improvements, cleaning, reorganizing, getting rid of junk, trash, that's funny. You and I would never
00:07:20
Speaker
I think consciously choose to do that, but that actually probably, if you did that and you look back, would you say, Oh man, that was stupid. We should have walked around a trade show and looked at machines. We're not going to buy or whatever. Yep. Yep. Interesting. We continue here to, it's been a,
00:07:38
Speaker
going on for a year and a half at this point, but calling down the list of things we do and stuff we own, it is phenomenal. I actually never thought we would sell our Bridgeport because it's just one of those Swiss Army knives, nice to have around. Yeah. Ed said to me two weeks ago, he's like, John, he's like, I haven't used the Bridgeport in over a year other than really to use it as a
00:08:03
Speaker
to push a brooch through a part, which is not a, you know, we have other ways to do that and not a good use of a bridge port regardless. And I was like, really? And I don't use it. We don't even use it as a glorified drill press anymore.
00:08:17
Speaker
It's funny, and we threw it up on Instagram, and it's generated quite a bit of controversy. But number one, I think I probably didn't do a good job in the photo. It was in a dump truck, trash truck, it looks like almost, and that was just because the guy who bought it runs a car shop, starting up a side machine shop business, super good guy. The trailer truck he was going to bring literally broke down the afternoon he was coming to pick it up, and he grabbed another truck to come over.
00:08:46
Speaker
I'm excited. It's going to be in better hands, good hands going to be used. That's a win-win. That passes the test. It sat there for over a year and was not used. Do you find that there's more stuff like that in the shop that just does not get used, like your plasma table or whatever? Plasma doesn't get used. I've gone back and forth on selling it. I love that as a machine, but we don't do those
00:09:11
Speaker
the products that we used to make on it, we don't do anymore. I now have relationships with places like Alrow. Alrow is the only one I've really used. Or other job shops, frankly, that will do plasma cut work that are using their plasma every day. They're maintaining their consumables, their water table. They know the software.
00:09:31
Speaker
The thing with the plasma that stinks is it's not that much money. Those machines are just so inexpensive relative to what we're trying to do now that it's kind of like, if I do use it a few times,
00:09:42
Speaker
I'm not out to throw everything out, period. It's more of a, does it make us money? Does it make me happy? Does it help us do stuff in-house that we'd like doing in-house that we don't want to outsource? PlasmaWorks pretty easy to outsource. Two-axis, low-tolerancing, and frankly, the folks that we outsource it to, in that case, would probably do a better job than we would on it.
Shop Layout Changes and Self-Rigging
00:10:03
Speaker
We sold our ironworker. We sold some welding machines. It's good. What was the ironworker again?
00:10:10
Speaker
That's this hydraulic press unit thing that can shear, punch, break. I remember when you were excited to get that originally. It wasn't that long ago, two, three years? Three years ago, yeah. Yeah. First of all, we used to do a lot more fabrication work. We used to use it for a couple of products. One of those products
00:10:32
Speaker
It's like such a good example of just taking a step back. We used to buy strips, cut them down to, it's the mod vice, parallels. Yeah, we used to cut them down to size or slightly oversized and then fixture them individually. We now built new fixtures that hold, I don't know, 24 inch or 30 inch strips and we just slot them in the machine.
00:10:56
Speaker
So you actually get a better set up time, less hassle factor, better process reliability. And when you shear material, it does deform the edge. So you actually have to give yourself a little bit extra to cut off. So it was a machine that you have to maintain in its capital. Think about 10% as being a reasonable ROI
00:11:20
Speaker
number in the world, meaning if you go put money in US Treasuries, you should earn 3%. So if you're going to invest money in your business, you ought to be earning a lot more than 3% on it because you could earn 3% with taking no risk, no effort. Just give it to the government. So if you think about 10% as an ROI number, it's a bit arbitrary, but again, just use it as something. If I had a $10,000 machine sitting in the shop, that machine costs me $1,000 a year to keep.
00:11:50
Speaker
Makes sense? I think so. Well, it's just simple. I should be able to earn $1,000 on a $10,000 investment or a $10,000 machine. Right. And if you're not, then it's costing you that potential. Yeah. Move it over to the lathe or move it over to new piece of equipment or pay down debt. If you have debt, there is a cost to letting things sit there.
00:12:17
Speaker
Yeah, as you're saying that I'm mentally looking around my shop thinking what we haven't used in quite a while and what's certainly lots of little stuff that's just on the shelves.
00:12:29
Speaker
But things like our surface grinder, we don't use it daily in our current production flow, but we will use it for damasteel. We need to use it for certain things, just not for day-to-day stuff. Oh, absolutely. Keep it. That's OK. Right. Keep it. Yeah, totally. Absolutely. But yeah, just things like that.
00:12:50
Speaker
You forget that it's an option to even get rid of it. Right. All humans fall in love with their stuff. They think it's worth more than we think it's worth. It's always hard to sell stuff because you think, oh man, it's worth more than that. It's okay. It's a good thing. Cool.
00:13:24
Speaker
So we ran out of panel space. We knew that was going to happen. So this was the machine that pushed us over the edge. And so we just ran the conduit. We just got the wire in. And it's actually great. We have one more main breaker spot on our main panel to add a subpanel. So we're pulling this 200 amp subpanel over to that side of the shop, which will feed the Robo
00:13:38
Speaker
the Japanese machine.
00:13:51
Speaker
and another evil machine, which we can talk about in a minute. I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out if the RoboDrill is big plus. For my research, it sounds like every RoboDrill for quite a few years has been big plus by default, but they are definitely available without big plus. The fact that this was an educational
00:14:15
Speaker
reseller channel thought, I thought, oh boy, that would be one of those examples. You could see that. It's not turned on, but we, with Lauren's help, pulled a tool. Oh, and the tools that came with it, there's a couple of Sandvik 930 Chucks, really nice tools holders, but they aren't big plus. But again, that doesn't necessarily tell you anything either. So we took the pull set off of one, pushed it into the spindle,
00:14:40
Speaker
and measured the gap, which I think was about one millimeter, which Lawrence was thinking that that logic means it is almost certainly big plus. But I think probably by next week, maybe the week thereafter, we'll have power done. We'll be able to turn it on and really start rocking and rolling. Nice. Yeah, one millimeter is not much. Usually it's more like three, like eighth of an inch.
00:15:03
Speaker
on a non-big plus? Right. Okay, great. Yeah, I feel like it's one of those things that you should just be able to know. The turret also says BBT on the tool changer turret, and I don't know what that means, but I do know that when you look up a Sandvik tool holder, the
00:15:22
Speaker
regular ones are called BT30 and the other ones are like BBT30 or something. So I was like, okay, that looks... Dangerous mistake if I'm wrong, but those look like that could be proof as well. Yeah, I've certainly seen the BBT and I can't remember. If anybody knows, let me know. I'll be curious. I'm sure that somebody does, yeah, for sure. Yeah, and so now we're starting to think about
00:15:48
Speaker
I'm starting to think about the process with it and it's the shunk, excuse me, the shunk hydraulic vice, well it's pneumatic actually, that's on the machine table. It's quite close to one of our mod vice products. And so I think what we'll do is start, we'll use that product as a, as the first one to build that workflow with a robot four.
00:16:16
Speaker
because the end effector on the LR mate and the table vice are already kind of set up for that. So that should be a good way to go. And did you say you had to bolt the robot to the floor? Oh yeah. Well, it needs some sort of a semi-permanent rigidity set up way more so than just putting it on something heavy. And I
00:16:43
Speaker
I need to talk to some people to see what I'm thinking maybe we do is bolt it down in two of the four spots just before we really triple check it. Otherwise, I mean, it's not a big deal. It's a permanent thing in a world that I like to have things on wheels or have them be flexible. Yeah, it'd be kind of sweet if you could just bolt it to the casting of the
Machine Placement and Efficiency
00:17:03
Speaker
Robo drill, like if there was a spot for it.
00:17:07
Speaker
Well, that's what's interesting is the robot is quite light as you saw when I, I mean, I can't believe these things weigh 50 pounds. I thought they were hundreds of pounds. So they need their own external stability by being bolted down, but then it also needs to be stable relative to the machine tool. So I thought, man, what if you just put a plate down and the plate was secured by the machine tool and then that kept its location there.
00:17:34
Speaker
I'm thinking about, here's the plant. We signed the PO on the lathe last Friday. It only has a three-week lead time. It's going to the left of the robo-drill with the bar feeder. I think maybe we'll let it get here before we do the final placement of the robo-drill because I care about how those ... We have the 3D printed model of the shop and it's been helpful, but
00:17:55
Speaker
It's still not the same as being able to see them. How much access do you need to open doors or look at the sides of machines or pull chip trays out, that kind of thing. Yeah, and when you get the lay of the bar feeder has to be bolted down as well. You got a plan, walk around room. Being able to walk around the machines is great. Right. I think they said it doesn't unless you're going to put it on these rail systems that let you slide it out of the way to not use it, but we'll see.
00:18:25
Speaker
Okay, I'm not arguing. I'm just curious. Well, okay, that's different because in you're getting a short bar feeder, I assume four feet. Yeah, well, that's longer. Because there's like spindle length bar feeders that
00:18:48
Speaker
When it feeds the bar, it's all the way in the spindle liner already. Nothing's sticking out. Interesting. Whereas on my Swiss, you've got a six foot bar, like two feet is in the machine and four feet's hanging out. So that needs to be bolted to the ground. But a spindle length bar feeder, maybe it doesn't need to be bolted down because all it's doing is pushing a new bar in the machine and then they're separate. They're not. It doesn't touch anymore. Well, that's what's interesting. I think there's probably over 30 inches of
00:19:18
Speaker
in the machine linear distance. So if it's a four foot bar, the majority would be in the liner in the machine. That's 48. My Nakamura is takes a 42 inch bar. My Nakamura takes a 42 inch bar. Okay. Yeah, that's great. Good grief.
00:19:39
Speaker
That's the thought. What was I going to say about that? Oh, it's interesting. FANUC, the control doors on the back of the RoboDrill are double doors, like French doors, and it's nice because never even occurred to me until we were using it that with those double doors, you need much less clearance or distance behind it versus the Haas door that is a single pivot door where you need- Yeah, like every door. Yeah, right? I don't know. Do you have one or the other on your machines?
00:20:07
Speaker
I don't have any double doors. They're all these big honking three foot wide doors that arc hugely. Double doors are a great idea. Or even a hinge for a slider that goes straight up. Garage door, yeah. It'd be sweet. Yeah. That'd be brilliant. Whenever I go to the local trade shows, the RoboDrill salesmen are always telling me how even the socket head cap screws are not mounted from the side.
00:20:37
Speaker
so that the sides of the machine are totally flush. So you can mount them like shoulder to shoulder. All the access work is front and back for everything. Makes sense. So in very tight shops, yeah, they'll literally mount them like next to each other.
00:20:51
Speaker
Yeah, I love that anecdote, which it's an urban myth, but I suspect it could be true about these cell phone factories in Asia where there's allegedly a one factory that has a room of four or even five figures, like literally 10,000 mill drill machines.
00:21:11
Speaker
And she apparently when they go down for any reason, they literally have a little machine that just goes over there, pulls it out of the line, replaces it with a new one right away, and then they just deal with all the offline maintenance on it.
00:21:28
Speaker
That's pretty brilliant. Right. Just a little automated forklift comes in and just bloop. Yeah, I don't know if it's driven or automated, but the idea that like. It could be. Why not? If you have some sort of an E-stop alarm or like a low fluid alarm and you're just like, we should just pull that out guys. Let's get it offline. Quick disconnect for power and air and the machine is movable. I love it.
00:21:56
Speaker
What's funny, because we view setting a machine tool as such a big deal long-term, like power, rigging, lathe, steady leveling, but they do it all the time, like at trade shows in India, literally in minutes, if not maybe an hour. Yeah. It's funny what we're not used to, but other industries, it's like no big deal.
Insourcing Machine Setup Benefits
00:22:17
Speaker
It's big shops and stuff. We actually just bought.
00:22:21
Speaker
I was just going to say, I've heard of a lot of shops that will rig their own machines. Well, not a lot, but some. Funny. You mentioned that. Just because they have big forklifts. Well, I was pretty upset with our riggers last when they did the UMC TM3 delivery. They really frankly hosed me on that. They just did. That was really disappointing. We tried somebody else for the Robo drill and got along pretty well.
00:22:49
Speaker
What occurred to me was it'd be nice to be able to do more on our own safely and just little stuff. We had some smaller skates and we got along fine. We actually moved to the VF2 a while back on our own, totally,
00:23:04
Speaker
totally no big deal. Like you're able to do it safely with, we had four skates under the machine that could lift a total of 30,000 pounds and that machine weighs 6,000 pounds. So you've got a huge margin of safety so forth. But those skates did have a few drawbacks in terms of their stability of when you turn or the width of their overall platform. So we found Northern Tool has a version of the skates that our riggers use from Germany or something.
00:23:35
Speaker
I'm talking to the rigger right now about the lathe, but I think the plan is going to be they're going to pick it off the truck, drop it on our floor, on our skates, and then we'll just push it over. It's not a big deal to push these machines. We've done it ourselves. We've helped the riggers as we scoot them through. Then we've got a tow jack and the ability to lower it back down.
00:23:57
Speaker
And I like that because I like that kind of insourcing and the ability to make these decisions about where we want it, and we want to bump it, and so forth. Yeah, every time I get a machine delivered, the guy's like, okay, tell me now exactly where you want it, what angle. I can bump it now for you, but I'm leaving, so get it right. Right. So I'm always like measuring in angles and looking at it. Is that right? I kick the little corner a little bit, straighten it out.
00:24:24
Speaker
Yeah. I feel like I just share numbers, so it's not a conversation that's harder to follow. I mean, literally, the original invoice to move, to unload and set the UMC 750 and TM3P was $5,500, which is absurd.
00:24:41
Speaker
And I talked to some other friends and folks that have rigged them or owned them or moved them, and that was over double of anybody else's, including somebody who had it delivered to the riggers, sat there, then they moved it to his shop a week later or something.
00:24:58
Speaker
Yeah, okay. What I don't want to do is anything that's not safe or anything that works really outside of our wheelhouse. We have them come and unload it off the truck, get it safely onto some skates that are really low to the ground, make sure it's stably on those skates. Then at that point, we should be good to go.
00:25:21
Speaker
Cool. So signing the PO for the lathe in a couple of weeks and then estimated delivery. What do you mean signing it? Is that what you said? No, no. I thought I was going to buy a lathe. That's now past tense. I bought it on Friday. Ah. Congratulations. Thank you. Very anticlimactic.
00:25:45
Speaker
That's not true. That's not true. I was debating a few really minor options. Interestingly, and shout out to Jodie mentioning, this is a really interesting point. Why would you buy a half index turret if you have y-axis? Any thought on that?
00:26:08
Speaker
I never used the half index. We talked about this a week or two ago. The fill bottle, right? Or not even. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And unnecessary. The Y-axis almost takes care of all that. Exactly.
Tooling Systems and Brand Comparisons
00:26:22
Speaker
And I can't keep track of all this stuff. There was a shout out to an Instagram fellow who sent over a video showing the difference between... So a Y-axis tool remains at a double station holder for two stick tools.
00:26:38
Speaker
using y-axis to separate which tool you're using, again, at a single turret position. Those are at the same angle, whereas a half index, they are fanned out at slightly different angles. I think he was mentioning the y-axis version
00:27:00
Speaker
you can't always use the tool Presetter to check the top one because when it checks the top one, the bottom one would hit your Presetter. Yeah, it's so I have some that are vertical like that. A couple I think and it I can totally check it with the Presetter. It's just a pain in the butt. Okay. In so much that the the second offset when you try to measure the lower one, it overwrites the first one.
00:27:29
Speaker
Oh, no, I'm talking about a physical interference. Yeah, on mine, I don't have physical interference. That would depend on your setup, pretty much. Yeah, so we, but yeah, as far as touching off the offset it, you just have to like touch off the one and then write the number down and then touch off the other and then, you know, input the number that you had written down. So it's a little bit of a jungle jumble, but we're fine.
00:27:57
Speaker
It's still pretty certain that we're going to go with the Capito system. That's the awesome thing is in that case, you could just remove the tool that's physically interfering because it's so repeatable. In fact, that's a substantial part of the point of it. That in and of itself gets me super fired up. I'll tell you, I made that part for Andrew Barth last week on the Slant Pro.
00:28:23
Speaker
I know we joke and I've kind of made it a thing about hating lays, but I'll tell you, it was absolutely wonderful. I really, really loved it. The OD turning is just so satisfying and so simplistic and so different than milling. Boring out that ID, tweaking the tool pass, I got some fusion to do some linking moves to control how I was trying to chase a tolerance on one little area of it. It was really fun. I love it.
00:28:53
Speaker
And it was neat seeing you make the bigger part because I only make teeny tiny parts. Yeah, it's only four inch diameter, four and a half inch.
00:29:04
Speaker
That's huge. So what chuck system bore size are you going to have? The machine can bar feed up to, I think slightly over two inch. I think it may be have like a two and a quarter inch actual through. I have to check on that. And we, it comes with hydraulic. So we have the finishing spindle, sub spindle.
00:29:29
Speaker
And we ended up, so again, it's kind of like, get the machine that you want, periods. So I wanted to make sure we had the hydraulic options for both because I do think that gives you some flexibility. But we ended up getting the Royal system as well. So we have, I think it's the same as you have. I have the 5C call-its. Oh, no, it's not. I'm sorry. We have the big one, the GQ65.
00:29:57
Speaker
Okay. You need the tool, the little gun tool to take them off. Yeah. Yeah. So I've never used it, but I know two people that have it, one of who has it on an SD20Y and it's just like CapDo. Everybody loves it. Everybody's like, Hey, it's going to cost you some money. But yes, like it's awesome. And we have... Yeah. The only downside that I've heard with it is
00:30:23
Speaker
because it's so big diameter, like the chucks are probably three, four inch, probably four inch diameter to get a milling tool down in there into a part that's close to the chuck, but small diameter, you need a lot of reach. That's a fair point, I guess. Yeah. Well, so we still have the hydraulic chuck and that's frankly pretty big as well. In fact, I think the profile of the Royal is better for access than the
00:30:53
Speaker
Then the ... Like a three-joke? Yeah, exactly. But yeah, if you're ever chucking up a six-inch diameter thing, you need the three-joke. Yeah, exactly. Oh, I'm totally wrong. This fiddle bore is, wow, three and a half inches. Sorry. Whoa. That's huge.
00:31:09
Speaker
Yeah. So we've got a couple of products that we're kind of ready to run and test out on it for sure. Um, and, and that I'm excited for. And then, uh, we're also working on the sort of technology side of adding the, um, it's really just changing to a few things on proven cut so that we can start adding and turning recipes to proven cut. Yeah, which would be awesome. Have you bought your, um, your call list yet for the Royal?
00:31:40
Speaker
No, it comes with two, and those we can get, it was the same price, and we can get them at any point in time, so I was not worried about those. You got the Royal on both sides, main and sub? Yeah, nice. Yeah, and did you get any spindle liners? I freaking love Haas. They just have a kit, it has all of them.
00:32:03
Speaker
Yeah. Nice. Yeah, it's funny. I got to say, I love this way of thinking, and I want to share it because you don't always hear it. And it was somebody who has bought one of the very strong brand German or Japanese machines, household name, machine tool brand, excellent machines. And in no way do I want to speak poorly about them, but rarely do you hear about
00:32:31
Speaker
them relative to Haas in a favorable way. And this person owned one. He wrote the check and he said, love our machine. It's phenomenal. But two things that I don't like. Number one is each one of these machines is basically a completely unique machine. So I can't get any help on anything until I get them the serial number and they pull up all the machine details and build because they're all one-offs in that sense.
00:32:57
Speaker
Oh, you mean like every individual one of that line? Yeah, exactly. I don't want to say the name because I don't like bad mouth. But it's a very, very, very prominent brand. And the second thing is he's like, for the price, we could have had two Haas plays. And for what we do, they are absolutely great. And I wish I had done that.
00:33:20
Speaker
He's had a great experience. It's a great machine. It's worked well. It's very productive. It's very accurate. But you buy the machine tool for the parts you're trying to do. Yeah, exactly. So that was just nice to hear that. But I'm curious to see how
Robotic Automation and Partnerships
00:33:36
Speaker
we're going to go. I mean, the goal here is to think about automation and just having that thing crank out parts. And it should be set up. I mean, you've done that, John. Your lights are totally automated, right? They just run. Yep.
00:33:51
Speaker
What does yours have in Sense of Parts Catch? It has a parts catcher that slides along the Z so it can catch out of the sub or the main. Like a bucket? It's like a ramp, kind of, so it's actually more of a parts slide. And then where do they go? That's a great question, John. I do not know. Point is, I've got a conveyor on the Tornos and I freaking love it. Oh, yeah.
00:34:19
Speaker
Yeah, the Nakamura does not have a conveyor, it's got like a door and a bucket. And I don't like it as much. Whereas the Doosan, the same version as my Nakamura but made by Doosan has a conveyor and like Jay Pearson has one and a bunch of other guys and I'm kind of jealous because I'm like, conveyor parts are excellent.
00:34:43
Speaker
So I was thinking about this with the robot, where this is where I'm totally excited about the possibility of either Arduino or a PLC type basic automation custom done. So we want to barf with the robot on the Robo drill, we want to put in the
00:35:01
Speaker
I've got to figure out what the industry name is, but I call it the PES dispenser. A stack of parts at an angle so that the robot is picking up from the same location each time as the parts just shift down in the stack.
00:35:15
Speaker
what do you do with them when they're done? Because the robot doesn't have that much reach. And if it's really going to run 50 of them, you can't have it crash into the pile of parts to drop the next one. And you don't want that to drop them any distance. So I'm thinking about what we can do to have it just every time it senses a part fall on a pad, it can rotate it out of the way. And then
00:35:38
Speaker
Once it gets out of the way, you can kind of push them out and pile them up. We don't need to be super space efficient. We just need to make sure that that system works. Because these are the parts, you know, the size of a deck of flame cards. They're not little like, like, you know, I'm assuming that your, your pivot pins can be dropped into a bucket without consequence. Yeah. Yep.
00:36:02
Speaker
Although in that sense, I've heard that if you have a part that you don't want to get dinged, but you still want to drop it into a bucket, fill the bucket with oil so that when it splashes, it drops slowly. Makes sense. So I always thought that was a good idea. For the robot unloading, you could drop it onto a ramp and then they could slide down like ever so slightly. The problem with that is that it's way too simple and elegant of a solution. I want to keep it complicated. That's a really good idea, John.
00:36:31
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good idea.
00:36:35
Speaker
Because the ramp could go all the way to the ground, just make it a delrin sheet or something, and then stack a lot of parts. That's a good idea. So this is one of the most enjoyable calls I had in a while, which was the folks at FlexArm came down to fill in this fireside chat. It was really good to catch up with them. We're kind of in different worlds. They really are much more in the fabrication world. But nevertheless, it was cool to talk about entrepreneurship, and I really respect what their third generation
00:37:02
Speaker
owner who's 33 has done with the company. He was like, hey, do you know Ready Robotics? I was like, no, never heard of them. I checked them out. Anyways, they're out of Columbus, Ohio. They're clearly really super smart guys. I think they have PhDs from Johns Hopkins. They were started in Baltimore, moved to Columbus, and they have a
00:37:26
Speaker
operating system that lives on top of FANUC to control FANUC robots and other robot brands, I believe as well for automation. And so I called them up and I was like, Hey, you don't know me, but met you through flex arm and we just got a robo drill. And they were like,
00:37:43
Speaker
They're like, do we love your videos? This is amazing. We're going to have our sales guys reach out to you. But to me, it's like could be the perfect solution because it's exactly what I would want in terms of being able to control that robot without becoming, I don't know. I'm sure we can learn the FANUC system. I think we'd be able to do it, but this looks better. So we'll learn more. Awesome.
00:38:12
Speaker
Yeah, I've never integrated, like, I don't know how to operate a FANUC robot arm or any robot arm. I've seen the UR videos and seems fairly straightforward, but the, you know, the FANUC, the ABB, the, uh, all the other brands, like, I don't know how they can do it. Yeah. This has got a really cool WYSIWYG builder.
00:38:29
Speaker
and so forth. So I'm new, I'm green, I want to learn. If it doesn't make sense, I'm sure we will be able to work with what we have there, especially because we're only picking from the point, the goal will be at least to pick from a single location. But Fifth Access has those new little dovetailed vices that can be picked up by the same robot arm we have, if you saw that on Instagram. And I'm like, that's amazing because now I can build
00:38:58
Speaker
with ironically, the plasma that I haven't sold or outsourced. You could build a little mini Christmas tree, like an aroa system, just a shelf that has three or four rows high, 10 vices per station. I got to think about what you're doing with this because those vices, that cost adds up, but you get the process reliability of loading with work holding in place versus having to load raw material into a vice, which I am nervous
Shop Expansion and Future Plans
00:39:24
Speaker
about. Yeah. Very cool.
00:39:26
Speaker
Let me know if you see an IMTS that catches your eye around that world. I think for a while we'll go around as a group, but I'm going to encourage everybody to split up and bomb around on their own, learn something. I told everybody yesterday, I'm like, if you see anything that you think could be useful for the company, then
00:39:49
Speaker
shoot me a picture, text would get me over there and we'll take a closer look. But it'll be cool to bring everybody along and get them an input into whether they find something for their processes or something that I might like or open their eyes to the greater world of manufacturing past our doors.
00:40:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's totally, that's a great thing about the shows is to be able to see other stuff. Is it one room? Yeah, it's a couple rooms. It almost would be nice if it's one room, to be honest, even if that's a smaller show overall. Yeah, I think they're all connected. Any update on the shop?
00:40:31
Speaker
I did talk to the Mr. Illusive guy on the phone the other day for the first time ever after three months of texting. But yeah, it's looking good. There's a lot of people involved, corporations owning and planning.
00:40:48
Speaker
the plans that they had for the unit, but apparently that will be resolved to the point of either they're going to move forward with their plans or they're going to not move forward with their plans as of tomorrow. Sorry, if they move forward with their plans, then you don't get the building. Correct. Got it. Okay. So I should know shortly for that. And if they say no, they're not going to move forward, then we have a very good chance to do exactly what I want. Got it.
00:41:19
Speaker
Yeah, I'm super excited. The company that may move forward knows you're in the picture? They should, or at least they will tomorrow. Well, they're going to do everything they can to delay though, because they're not going to want to give up this option. It doesn't cost them anything to keep the option, you know what I mean? Just keep that in mind. Yeah, it sounds like they've been delaying for quite a long time. But I don't know, I got the impression that it was a hard yes or no tomorrow. Cool. Well, have fun at CMTS.
00:41:49
Speaker
I will. Anything else? Yep. Going to go into the shop for a few minutes, get eight hours of machining on it. That's awesome. And then it can machine. I love it. I love it. That's great. I'll see you next week. Sounds great. Have an awesome day.