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#278 - Not Getting Enough Done & The Hill We Die On
249 Plays3 years ago
Topics:
- Task Lists and Being Overwhelmed
- Hiring Employees, Time Management, Efficiencies
- Priority List: Dump & Triage Tasks
- Okuma Fixture Offset Calibration
- Horizontals with Intrinsic 4th Axis: No rotation around center line!?
- Tool Orientation in Fusion 360 doesn't seem to work for Saunders
- Ultrasonic Cleaning Systems
- Internal Conflict Between Nerd & Entrepreneur: A 15 Year Debate
- Robots. Saunders gets random call from a guy at Tormach. Use for demagging material?
- Horizontal Fixture Overhaul
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Weekly Updates
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining episode 278. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough. John and I talk every week about machining and what's on our mind.
Task Overwhelm & Need for Hiring
00:00:12
Speaker
My note from last week, I'm not sure I exactly remember where this was, was concept colon not getting enough done. Yeah, I've got notes for that too. What were we talking about?
00:00:24
Speaker
Last week, I was, let's say, overwhelmed with the amount of things that are on my direct plate to do that is not getting done. It feels like that list is growing, not shrinking like it should or managing or whatever.
Prioritizing & Tackling Tasks Efficiently
00:00:37
Speaker
It's all rolling around my head and it just feels overwhelming is the best word for it. Not stressed out. Just like, oh man, there's so much to do and I'm just not doing it. I'm not doing enough.
00:00:47
Speaker
And I've realized now as we've hired more people, there's a legitimate point in that process where you do need to hire people to fill that void. There's definitely efficiencies and time management and all that stuff and focus and things. And I've been working on that for years. I understand that. But there is a point when you need to add manpower, person power, to be able to get more done.
00:01:11
Speaker
But more importantly, or more immediately, what I did is my wife suggested, she's like, all those things rolling around your head, write them all down and prioritize them. And I'm very good about doing that on a short term, like daily basis, but not on the bigger picture, like all the things that are going on in the next few months kind of process. So I did open up a spreadsheet, wrote them all down, color coded them with the value and the effort that they'll take.
00:01:36
Speaker
you know, how important they are and how much effort they're going to take and then sort of the wall. And then that just, it made it so much more clear to me that if, if I'm not doing the top two things on my list, I shouldn't be doing anything else right now. You know what I mean? Get those most important ones off the list. First, I will feel productive and then I can start picking away everything else. And yeah, so it was a little stressed out the end of a podcast last week, but the past week has been flying pretty good.
Managing Impulsive Tasks & Effective Scheduling
00:02:01
Speaker
Interesting. Feeling pretty, pretty productive about that.
00:02:04
Speaker
You found that sort of a dump and triage. Yeah. Good. Because I've been using the Trello app for years to dump, to brain dump ideas, put them in there, track them. But there's a little part of me that my subconscious, when I write it down, my brain thinks I've done it already.
00:02:20
Speaker
It's like it's, it's in, you know? So I think my deep subconscious likes to roll around all the to-dos and all the ideas and all the cool stuff, um, and feel like I'm productive managing it because I'm busy, right? It's, it's such a sham and I'm not even aware of it sometimes, but this really helped. So I made a list. I had like 35 items that are all, I looked at it all. I'm like, yes, all of this has to get done in the next ideally few weeks. Okay. Let's get it done. You know what I mean?
00:02:50
Speaker
because I'm very, um, impulsive is the wrong word, but like, you know, somebody brings me a little project or a task or to do that. I'll like jump at it. I'll be like, okay, I can do that right now. No problem. You want to make this part? Yep. Got it. No problem. Um,
00:03:04
Speaker
But Monday, one of our guys came up to us and said, can you make more Delrin etching plugs for when we acid etch the blades? They protect all the bearing surfaces and all that stuff. And I'm like, yeah, that's five minutes. Put a piece of Delrin in the vise on the current and hit go or schedule it for later, whatever. And within an hour, he had parts in his hand.
00:03:24
Speaker
But that's not five minutes. He even said to me, well, five minutes of my time. It was five to 10 probably, five minutes of my time. But he said to me, if I can have them by the end of the week, no problem. But here I'm justifying in my head going, if I don't do this right now, it's not going to get done. I'm going to forget about it. Let me just cut that piece of delrin. I went to the bandsaw, chopped a bunch of pieces, loaded them up in the curtain. It was easy, but it totally distracted me for that period of time.
00:03:55
Speaker
And I could have done it later. You have a bandsaw now? It's the same little porta band on it. Oh, that's right. Swag off road stand that I've had for years. Right, right.
00:04:05
Speaker
Yeah, look, I'm guilty of this. I think you and I, we're very comfortable now with this idea that like to-do lists, although necessary sometimes to purge and for sure the value of getting stuff out of your head, they really can be quite terrible things and they aren't. They aren't. It's hit and miss. And the days that I feel personally fulfilled and rewarded is when you sit down and say, hey, I want to go.
00:04:28
Speaker
work on this in a very calm and focused way, not focused from an intensity standpoint. Like if you're having to spend effort pushing away outside things, then that's not the place I want to be in. But rather just, it's kind of like that idea of, man, if I don't like the way 3D contour is working, what I want in my life is to be able to sit down for three hours and work on 3D contour. I got to reconcile that with like, we have to
Task Categorization & Time Estimation Challenges
00:04:59
Speaker
We have to keep the wheels on the bus. Yes. I'm guilty too. A piece of paperwork showed up in the mail from the state with like an updated tax form or something. I have the same mentality of, yeah, it has a one week or two week deadline, but what I used to think was
00:05:17
Speaker
a good attribute of like, I'll just get that done ends up with this whack-a-mole approach. Yeah. You just always let yourself be interrupted. Yeah. When that happens too much, I feel like I'm out of control. And I'm a person who likes to be in control. Not that I'm a control freak, I'm very nice about it. But still, I like to know what's going on. And I like to be kind of the puppet master a little bit.
00:05:39
Speaker
And I'm learning that that's just who I am. And we're building this business in a way that allows me to do that while still being... So all the work is getting done and I get to like pull the strings and you know, plan and it's working for me. But yeah, when I'm constantly just saying yes immediately to all the tasks that are coming at me, then I don't get the critical things done when in reality, like a lot of stuff doesn't have to get done or doesn't have to get done by me.
00:06:09
Speaker
or it doesn't have to get done right now. And I'm learning actively, you know, practicing that of like how and when, but yeah, making the big list. Let me just look at it and kind of like you said, it let me go. I'm going to work on that right now and I'm going to feel accomplished because I know that's important. Yeah. So how are you? How are you breaking down this multi-week task list into
00:06:35
Speaker
Yeah. At the moment, I've got them color coded into one, two, three, four categories, like super important, pretty important, or a lot of value. And then down to like not super important, but still has to get done. And every day I kind of look at it and I go, okay, which ones am I doing today? I have some time. I need to do this. I need to fill my day with some cool stuff. And then I pick them away like that.
00:07:00
Speaker
Okay. I'll be curious to see how that works out. I've never done it quite like this before. So specifically like basically saying all of these items have to be done in the next two weeks. Let's pick them off one by one.
00:07:14
Speaker
Yeah. Well, for the fun of being honest with ourselves, you and I both massively often underestimate how long these take. 100%. That list is obviously not comprehensive of every distraction in your life, work, or otherwise.
00:07:32
Speaker
Again, making big assumptions here are probably sounding a bit like a turd. You're not going to get all that stuff done, period. If I get the critical things done from that list and the non-important things are the ones that not get done, then that's better than doing non-important things.
00:07:50
Speaker
and not getting your critical things done because I know that there's a couple programming challenges, a couple machining things that if I do now, they will solve problems immediately. Whether it's production flow or financial or anything, they need to get done now.
Delegation & Efficient Business Growth
00:08:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:08
Speaker
It's been scenarios like this that have helped me pushing myself outside of my comfort zone and realize, it's so cliche, but I wish you could feel what it's like to live it where you're like, wait, I'm here. No, this person can do that. They probably don't have the full skill sets to bring it.
00:08:26
Speaker
from home, but my gosh, they could do so much of the work and then you can kind of hop in and review it and you end up parallel tracking a bunch of these things. And it's phenomenal. It's incredible. So that's the way to grow business. And I still very much struggle with that. Um, but in my list here, I added a column that says who can do it without John. And there's one, two, three, four, there's six things on there that I know can be done, um, without me, but
00:08:53
Speaker
That's good. Yeah. I've really enjoyed this focus of we can only do one thing at a time. And my daily list is, it's more of a don't forget type of list than it is a to-do list. So today, I actually need to call four different people for random reasons. That's not normal. But I don't want to have to stress about that. So it's just they're right there. I'll get through them in the car or whenever.
00:09:20
Speaker
Got to get back to a couple of people on quotes and a fixture idea. But that list is kind of one of those where it gets wiped every day. It's not this like, you need to redesign this fixture or some massive like to-do list, honeydew or shop. Longer project. Yeah. Because that list is to the right of it and it is like the joke of all to-do lists of like, you feel great about it, you put it on there and it just lives there forever. Yes. I hate that. I want that to die. I want that to stop in my life.
00:09:50
Speaker
So look, my response is there is no such thing as a to-do list. There's a to-do item. So you look at this color coded thing and you just pick one thing.
00:10:03
Speaker
That's the only thing that John Grinsville exists on this world for, for the next amount of time. And if it takes 20 minutes, it takes 20 minutes. If it takes two days, it takes two days, but, um, you want to do it, you want to do well. And look, to some extent you want to enjoy doing it. Um, I actually like enjoy doing oil replacements on random mechanical components when I'm not feeling like all I'm trying to do is get this off my list. Right. It's kind of fun. Yeah. Yeah. I could see that.
00:10:32
Speaker
Because when you think of the list as a list, it's very daunting. And it's like, man, even when I could do this, when I finish this task, it's still going to be like, there's still 99% of the list left.
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't even matter. We are trying to... Actually, kind of a fun change of conversation later, but we're trying to get the fixture offset calibration done on the Akuma report axis. I'll talk about this in a minute. It requires probing at different locations, plotting the points, creating a sketch infusion. It's the sort of thing where
00:11:06
Speaker
I can hit cycle start, let a different part run for 20 minutes. I'm testing something out or five minutes is better. Really short period of time. During that time, I could try to switch back and create more work and progress on it. Again, whether it's because I'm not as young as I used to be or I'm better than I used to be, I found that not trying to do both and bouncing between them
00:11:30
Speaker
is better than, sorry, just doing one at a time. Just let the parts run. And while they're running, I can do something else like use the restroom, get a cup of coffee, just relax a little. And then when I want to go into, hey, let's get this B-axis out in, stop everything else. Don't worry about the machine running. Don't run it. Just sit down and do the sketch thing.
00:11:49
Speaker
Yep. And I've been there too with exactly that probing fixture offsets. There is a level of I have to be at the machine and the machine has to be mine for the next hour because I'm going to type in a number and I'm going to run the program and I'm going to watch the probe and see what happens and like know if it's in the right
Technical Challenges & Solutions in Machining
00:12:06
Speaker
spot and know if the logic and the math works and all that. So I'll do the same thing. Luckily for us,
00:12:13
Speaker
Since we have so much work lined up on the current, and a lot of which is 20-minute cycles, I am able to be like, OK, I tested that. Now I need an hour on the computer to do that. So I'll run a couple of parts. And it's not brain power for me to run parts on the current now to schedule it and run it. But yeah, I totally understand. There's focus mode where it's like, no, please. I'm not here right now. And the machine is mine. Yeah.
00:12:42
Speaker
I like that idea of being our own internal R&D, but we are in some respects. A lot of what I'm doing, bringing the horizontal line is development more so than research.
00:13:02
Speaker
So this is, I don't understand this well enough to discuss it in an educational manner, it's more an inquisitive manner, but apparently, sorry, if I'm wrong on this, forgive me, the ocumas don't come, the fourth axis, the horizontals that have an intrinsic fourth axis, don't come ready to use with a rotation around center line. What do you mean? So if you're cutting apart at,
00:13:31
Speaker
B0, so the part's just normally facing the spindle, which is in the kite. Is this a tombstone part, like four sides, or a part in a small vise in the middle of the thing? Assume it's a part in a vise on a tombstone, but it's just you're machining your one, two, three block, and it's facing the spindle like you would normally see a part being machined.
00:13:50
Speaker
in the most normal way. Then if you want to rotate it to B90, which we could do that in Fusion with tool orientation, so we're not switching to a new offset at the machine control with a new datum and so forth. We're using, again, tool orientation. That doesn't work.
00:14:09
Speaker
Really? Unless, number one, you have to purchase an option with the machine, which we knew about and did. But even with that option, which is not just a software unlock, you have to basically tell them you have to do a calculation with a test bar and then an indicator or this tooling ball method to figure out how far off the machine is. And I'm in the middle of doing it. I believe the answer is going to be microns or tenths. It's a pretty small amount.
00:14:35
Speaker
So if you for some reason had super sloppy parts to do, maybe you don't even need it because it's close enough. But I don't, I'm still struggling to understand why it's not that way out the door. You would never get a five-axis, even our HOSUMC and have it work at a BZ or CZ, but like anytime you tipped off offline, you got to go through a quirky process.
00:14:55
Speaker
Well, in the current, whenever you tilt, it does change your fixture offset in a weird way. It's called plane spatial. Yeah. And the numbers don't make sense anymore. Sure. Like, you know, it just X, Y, Z turn into weird values because everything's now like different. Right. But at the beginning of every operation, there's a line that says plane spatial, B, negative 90, C, zero, whatever.
00:15:22
Speaker
After that, you kind of don't care because the code exactly, but I can rotate the part a bunch of times. I can machine features all over. I can flip it around all with tool orientation and fusion. And I guess I don't know what you're, you're struggling with. You know what I mean? Cause it just works.
00:15:40
Speaker
Oh, so in this case, assume you're just going to, obviously it's fourth axis, not five axis. And you obviously are tilting it 27.2 degrees for random parts and pictures. You don't care. Like you're using the orientation with the new view angle and fusion delights. Which is so cool. Right.
00:15:57
Speaker
I'm a little bit more clunky old school on this horizontal. So I'm basically saying, hey, some of the parts works done at B zero, some of it's done at B 90. But to date, the parts that we've been making when we're at B 90, we actually have a whole different setup infusion and we probe that location. That wasn't
00:16:14
Speaker
done because of this hassle or quirk with the Okuma. It was done because it was just how I wanted to program the parts at least to start. Got it. Now I'm realizing, wait, it's going to be so much easier to do a couple of things we want to do by having then the one coordinate system with two orientation. But basically, it would be like your kern when you tipped your kern over. Is it an A or a B on a kern? B. B. If you tipped it over to B90, it's like you're not actually at B90. You don't trust it anymore kind of thing?
00:16:43
Speaker
No, it's not even you don't trust it. It's like it doesn't come. It doesn't. It's not at perfectly at B 90 basically the because your center line of rotations aren't quote unquote perfect. I should stop talking with this because I need to like finish out what I'm doing here. Understand because I believe the offsets are incredibly small. But as you know, let's say it's four tenths. Well four tenths of center line could be five foul at
00:17:05
Speaker
20 inches off center or something. Interesting. So I'm working on that. Yeah. The Gossiger and Okuma folks have a way of doing it with a test bar. Chris Fox said he has a way of doing it that he likes better with a tooling ball, which is what I'm doing this morning. Okay. And so you probe the tooling ball.
00:17:25
Speaker
B zeros head on and then you rotate 90 degrees one way and you probe the ball and you rotate, then you rotate 90 the other way or 180 from it. And then, so what I have now is a,
00:17:36
Speaker
tooling ball probed in three locations. And then you sketch a fusion sketch based on those work coordinate values. And three points lets you create a three point arc and a three point arc shows you the center line. And that's going to be slightly off. And then he's saying actually go and update the encoder values versus. So that's where I'm at. That's fascinating.
00:18:00
Speaker
Like I know the current calibration routine, you put a pallet in with a tooling ball sticking up and then the probe comes in and touches it. It takes like five minutes, this probing routine. It tilts it, it does everything. It does it from every orientation and the Willimon does the same thing. You put a tooling ball up at an angle in the turning spindle and then the tool head, the tool changer head comes in and probes and then tilts over and then probes again and tilts over and probes again and you get all your,
00:18:28
Speaker
volume of movement, accuracy or whatever, and then that just goes into the machine brain and works. Right. That's actually the much better way of ... I think this is a ... like Haas calls it MRZP. I think this is basically that. Even the Kern does it and makes probably minor adjustments periodically. Yeah, exactly.
00:18:50
Speaker
Yeah. And the current actually gives you a printout like on screen of your deviation in XYZ rotation, kinematic, blah, blah, blah, and a history of all them too. So whenever I run it, I look back to a week or a month or six months ago to last time I ran it and I'm like, okay, last time it was off by a couple of microns. This time it's off by five microns or 10 or whatever the number is. Yeah. And then every now and then it'll be kind of more than normal.
00:19:15
Speaker
And you're like, some happen. But for the most part, they're all relatively low values. So I'm like, okay,
Exploring Cleaning Systems & Robotic Automation
00:19:22
Speaker
yeah, that works. Right.
00:19:24
Speaker
How long do you run on a schedule? I don't. I should. I basically run it whenever I think about it, which is every few months. I remember Lockwood said that he had it programmed like every Monday morning. It just calls that pallet and runs that program. And I'm like, that's, I need to get there. Right now the program has a hard pause in the logic of the program that says like,
00:19:49
Speaker
the, you know, it moves the probe an inch above the ball and says, are we good here? And you go, yes, I could remove that because it should be consistent, but still.
00:20:01
Speaker
That's something I wish machine tools had was the ability to create G code or M code feed rate and rapid overrides. Cause there's sometimes where I'm like, Hey, I want to go run this program, especially now with automation in the middle of the night, but this one I want to run at 10% rapids.
00:20:20
Speaker
Yeah. Can you control rapid? It's all G0, right? Unless you turn every rapid into a feed rate move. That's not the point. I guess you sort of could do that, although there's still going to be G0 moves. It's just not going to work that way. I guess the worry is you don't want to smack the machine due to a dumb move at full rapids.
00:20:42
Speaker
Because the bigger our machines get, the more powerful they are, and the more they're going to break themselves. Yes, for sure. Basically. Like the tormac, you can bump it into itself. It doesn't care. And a 10% bump is a very different than a 100% bump. Yeah, because the overload sensors in the machine will trigger at the same overload anyway. But yeah, the speed makes a big difference. Yeah. Yeah, I could see that. But for the most part, we just prove everything here, and then we send it all night.
00:21:12
Speaker
Yeah, love that. What else has been going on? Been looking into more ultrasonic cleaning systems. Oh yeah? Having some fun with that. We have a lot of the little benchtop ones, like the little small box sized ones, both the Amazon ones and also the Crest ultrasonics and they all work really good. I'm thinking about
00:21:33
Speaker
one of the actual automated cells with like five tanks and the robot arm that like drops it into the next tank, times it, 10 minutes, whatever, and then puts it into a hot air blow dry in the last stage so that the parts are just haven't been touched and you put them in and then an hour later they're done done. So I'm feeling out some pricing, Crest, Kemet in the UK, also has a really nice looking system so just kind of picking away at that, seeing what's out there, what it costs.
00:22:01
Speaker
Do they provide the robot? Yeah. And it's just a gantry like a downside side. Yeah. It's not complicated, but still the nerd inside me is like, dude, I could totally build that. And then the entrepreneur is like, you better not.
00:22:18
Speaker
It's an off-the-shelf system. Spend your energy developing things that don't exist and buy things that do exist and are already proven out because I don't have time to do it all. Yeah, I hear you. We're going to debate this for the next 15 years though, John. I know. It's pick and choose, but this is not the hill that I'm going to die on.
00:22:40
Speaker
building your own ultrasonic automated system? No. Come on. But it'd be so easy, John. I know. I know, right? No kidding. So speaking of robots, a buddy at Tormach called me kind of out of the blue. Have you seen the Tormach robot? The robot arm? Yes. It looks like the big, fan-ic ones, but smaller and. Yes. I wouldn't say it's smaller. I think it's actually pretty similar. It's pretty substantial. More reach than the LRV8 that we had.
00:23:10
Speaker
Part of me is like, not my, not the hill I'm going to die on to cook jungles. It's not my thing right now. So what they want to do is show people how you can use it to robotically weld.
00:23:26
Speaker
Okay. Now, again, fast forward to the next hill that I don't plan on dying on. I'm not a welder, we're not robot automation welding, but then they showed some examples of folks that are using it online. It's like if you run a company, again, not us, but a company where you have to weld a thousand little gussets, simple one inch, two inch of bead, MIG bead on these gusset type things, holy cow. In this day and age, with all of the things that we're all aware of, if you're listening to this about
00:23:57
Speaker
the work you want to be doing and the talent you want to have and the multiple shifts of work and blah, blah, blah. Like this totally makes sense. And I love it now from this, like kind of a, well, like I don't care about robotic welding, but from a interesting ways that helps small businesses innovate and succeed in micro factories and automation. It's kind of like waiting here. At what point is a robot going to
00:24:19
Speaker
be such that a fabrication shop, which broadly speaking seems to me from the outside to be a bit less technology-reliant than, say, a modern multi-axis machine shop where we're using CAM and post-processors. At what point does a robot make sense to be able to say, hey, we need to make 1,000 of these. This can be done with a robot.
00:24:41
Speaker
It's interesting to me enough there, but then what I thought about was, wait a minute. We have found that we need to use a demagnetizer on some of our raw material. It actually makes a huge difference. Right now, we've been doing that by hand. I'm not at the point where I would be making the $20,000 investment in a robot.
00:25:04
Speaker
for the Tormach one or more for you are. But for the sake of building reliability, not a job anybody really wants to do, kind of thing. It makes you think about to me where that is heading. Yep. In fact, that's easier than, you know, material loading in a machine or even welding. It's like, man, when it fails, it is going to stay. Whereas demaggy material, I guess I'll put it this way. If the robot was less expensive or
00:25:34
Speaker
just easier, I'm a little bit intimidated by it, then that would be a no-brainer. Holy cow. You just wheel the material underneath. I'd hang the robot. You'd wheel the material up to the robot on a cart. It's a fixed height cart that we have it on anyways. And then it just starts demagging it. Oh, so cool. Is it holding the material or the magnet? Robot would hold the magnet. It would hang from the ceiling. They weren't from above it. Yeah, that's cool. You just have one of the little electrical like plug-in demags that are like,
00:26:04
Speaker
that makes the noise. Yeah, the buzzes. I assume it's just like a transformer. It is just a transformer inside. Yeah. Back in the early days of knife making, I built, did I build my own? I don't know. If you tear apart a microwave, there's a big transformer inside. You can rewind it to do all kinds. I used to do that a lot back then. And so cheap that I was like, I couldn't afford or didn't want to buy a hundred dollar demagnetizer. So yeah, I built one and it worked, but then I ended up buying one anyway. And we still have that first one.
00:26:34
Speaker
I had the conversation with my eight year old, the dinner table the other night, uh, about, first off, we, he willingly put a nine volt on his tongue. Cause I'm like, you gotta see what that feels like. You're kidding. We all did this. Yeah. Right. Well, but the reason was that somehow one 10 AC came up. I'm like, William, you're probably going to, like, if you're anything like me, you're us, you're going to get hit by this at some point in your life. It's no joke. Like it's not funny. You gotta be really careful. Um, and so, uh, it was just, I don't know.
00:27:05
Speaker
Does that make me a bad parent? I don't know. It's amazing the things that we realize kids don't know and we get to be the ones to tell them. And I do it with Leif all the time because he's a very curious person when he's interested, when I have his attention. And especially when we're driving to school and stuff, I just get to tell him about stuff. It's amazing. So any chance I get, I just gush about, you know,
00:27:28
Speaker
energy flow and AC versus DC and, you know, how battery works. All this stuff, like it's cool. Yes, totally agree. What's prompting the ultrasonic? Cleaning parts either before anodizing them, titanium anodizing or pulling them out of the tumbler. The guys are spending hours a day cleaning parts. Got it. And I'm like, that time's not going anywhere. You can't just dump them in your current ultrasonic or that's what you are doing.
00:27:55
Speaker
The Crest one, that's what we are doing and it's not good enough. You need more education, you need more time, you need scrubbing. So I'm talking with Crest, talking with Cam, like, why is this not good enough? You know, you think it should just put parts in there and it'd be clean. And the solution makes a difference, temperature, all that stuff. So, but it's not,
Focusing on Efficiency Improvements
00:28:15
Speaker
it's not good enough. And the guys are spending a lot of time and there's the whole cost value benefit ratio, like, you know, the,
00:28:23
Speaker
The employee makes so much versus spending $10,000, $20,000 on its system, like when's the payoff. Part of me doesn't care because I'm like, my guys need to be focused on productive work, not just wasted work. I don't know. Yes. We run Sandvik 245 and there's a YG equivalent we use to do a lot of our steel roughing. Ed has found the best recipe is dry.
00:28:51
Speaker
So no coolant on that. And so I have, and I think he's run that for one or two years. It's newish to me because I've been using it in the horizontal. And what happens is that since it's dry, you do get a fair amount of almost like a dust, even though it's steel, it's almost like
00:29:09
Speaker
what you would see with a cast iron, like this powdery residue on the face mill. And those insert screws are on the small, they're not the smallest ones, but they're annoyingly small. And if you have residue inside the torques, I think those are torques, then your tool won't see it all the way in there and you can strip it out, especially if
00:29:34
Speaker
somebody didn't apply some anti-seize, which itself I do, but it takes more time. You can see why it doesn't happen. The tool is just disgusting anyway. There's no way to touch the tool to pick it out without getting your hand turning into a coal miner. What I realized is we have a little cheapo ultrasonic right next to the horizontal. When we need to rotate inserts, we take the whole
00:29:55
Speaker
holder and tool out of the spindle, and we just put it in the ultrasonic for 60 seconds, and it comes out totally good to go. Nice. All that stuff is gone, and you can get the tool in there to change or rotate inserts without the mess and hassle. Perfect. Yeah, ultrasonic's amazing. I know some people that ultrasonic, like the collets and the tool holder and everything between every tool change, and I'm like, I don't got time for that, but I expect it. Yeah, that seems crazy.
00:30:26
Speaker
I just want to get the stuff off there. Yup. What are you up to today? I'm going to stare at that to the list and pick a few things and get them done. No, just pick one, like take eight seconds. Ignore the rest. Yup. Okay. What do you do?
00:30:42
Speaker
Actually, we should talk about it next week. I overhauled a whole fixture process. I'm ecstatic. I'm beyond excited about it. And I made a temporary opt-to fixture, which works fine, but I'm realizing I want to make it better. And I'm looking at hardened inserts and pads. I say I've never done this. I know exactly what I want, but I want to talk about it next week with you. Get your thoughts on it. Sound good? Sounds great. I'll see you. All right, man. Take care. Thanks. Bye.