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#312 Cast Iron lapping plates
138 Plays1 year ago
Topics:
- Willemin updates!
- Cutting wood in Grimsmo's router to clean endmills
- Lasers!!!
- Saunders had a huge win on the Horizontal
- Cast Iron lapping plates
- Visit to Borne and Co
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Weekly Conversations
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining episode of 312. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. And John and I talk every week about what life is like running a small machine shop and manufacturing business. How you do? Good, you? Yeah, wonderful. Yeah? Yeah. You are always chipper. Sometimes, and not almost annoyingly. Yeah, almost annoyingly. Yeah, it's a life is pretty good. Yeah.
00:00:29
Speaker
Really? Yeah.
FANUC Update Issues and Solutions
00:00:32
Speaker
Um, so I think last week we talked about, I was going to text Marcus at Willowman and, you know, figure some stuff out. So I literally did right after we hung up the podcast, he got back to me right away and I'm like, okay, that's what I'm doing today. It's working with him on, you know, fixing that last little issue on the Willowman and it was wonderful. Um, turns out there was a parameter wrong when we did the last FANUC update, um, that.
00:00:58
Speaker
The U axis, which is the vice side to side, every time you turn the machine on, it would default to incremental motion, not absolute origin or something. If the vice was over one and a half inches, that wasn't the new home. Got it. That's wrong. That's totally wrong. You want to turn on the machine and home is always to the right or whatever. That one little bit change in the parameter table,
00:01:23
Speaker
is all it took to totally make sense of the U-axis, which it was making no sense before. It would just be different every time. I don't know. Anyway, it took us a couple hours, but we totally figured that out. And now, I'm pretty sure everything just works. Everything makes sense now. I'm either dumb or crazy or something. I've been months, I've been worried about this. No, it's just the machine's wrong. So you guys did a FanX software update?
00:01:50
Speaker
Yeah, I did it with him on the phone when we made it to inch basically. Got it. Okay. Well, I've got great news for you. Yeah. I am completely caught up with you.
00:02:05
Speaker
And by that, I mean we also updated our wilderness FANUC software and it also broke the machine. Marcus fixing it. But this is crazy. Two nights ago, Marcus texts me. I've never met Marcus. I've only talked to him on the phone a few times. They and everyone there seem like solid folks. And Marcus, who I believe lives in the Bay Area or California or somewhere.
00:02:29
Speaker
He texts and goes... So, sorry, the quick backstory is that they came, they delivered the machine, they installed it, and then the A-axis stopped rotating after they updated the FANUC software. So, to me, it was...
00:02:45
Speaker
felt good because what is the access is it works just a software or whatever they call the table table. So they could figure it out and then. I'm driving from west virginia to indianapolis no tomorrow morning can i come by your shop and says.
00:03:08
Speaker
And I'm like, Oh my gosh. Uh, first off, like, what are you doing in? I don't know. I love, I have good friends. Westford need me, but in Ohio, some folks will sometimes, um, I'm not even gonna say that I was.
00:03:21
Speaker
beyond excited that he was driving through West Virginia. If there's shops in West Virginia that have wellness, I want to know about them because that's freaking awesome. I'll say that. And so he stopped by. I unfortunately am on the road, which I was, I mean, obviously, selfishly bummed that because I wanted to meet him and see him and all that. But yeah, he spent
Data Server Setup and Machine Networking
00:03:40
Speaker
some time with the machine and with Grant and they figured out the ladder change or the table change.
00:03:48
Speaker
And then they're like, so you can turn the machine off, but if you do, it'll break again until we re I guess you have to reflash the whole firmware, the software with the correct or they just leave it on. It'll be okay. It's not like we really need to do anything, but it doesn't really hurt to leave it on either. So yeah, sure. Yeah. And it's not, it's not hard to do the, um,
00:04:12
Speaker
FANUC update, whatever you call it, but it takes some time and you got to have CF cards and there's like this magic, you got to push four buttons on the control while you turn it off and on again, so you need two people and that lets you access these files, et cetera. You know how Netflix does all these like drive to survive about F1 and now they have the golf one and the tennis one. There's like these really intense personal reality shows on these things. I want one unlike what it's like to work at FANUC or hide and hide.
00:04:44
Speaker
Yeah, there's a group of people probably have more than we think that are like seeing they're designing this internal, you know, ladder logic and PLC and server control on these machine tools. And it's freaking cool. Yeah. Yeah. So where's your willing at it? If you don't turn it off, it works like
00:05:04
Speaker
Yeah, so again, today's Wednesday. They just fixed it yesterday. And I was on the road. I'm back tomorrow. But on Monday, our PCMCIA card with our 512 megabyte compact flashcard arrived. We've got that. Although, I forgot that I don't have a compact flashcard reader, so I ordered one of those. We do have the data server, though. So I'm going to spend some time
00:05:32
Speaker
It looks like, have you spent time on yours? Yep. So I've got mine hooked up. We hooked it up a long time ago. So it's as if the machine has kind of two memory spots. So your onboard memory is your tool touch off programs, your warm up routine, all your basic small core programs, and then any large machining file I put on the data server, which is like a bigger second hard drive.
00:05:59
Speaker
You can't view them at the same time. You got to like change a quick parameter to be able to see each one. And then I have the machine plugged in with Ethernet to our network. And then I use FileZilla on my computer to basically transfer a file directly to it. And so it looked like I spent a minute in the parameter that looks like
00:06:21
Speaker
the Willemin has an area where I would set its static IP and I exclude that IP on my server and then that hopefully will just work. And you just have to use files all to just FTP address and drop the file over. Yep. Yep. And if you want, um, I'd be happy to share your screenshots of my, uh,
00:06:46
Speaker
FTP page on the on the Wilhelmin. Oh, yeah, that'd be awesome. Because I've networked all of my machines and every time it takes me like way too long because I miss a setting or something. Yeah, sure. Well, even on the woman, it looked like there were two different pages that had seemingly identical. Exactly. There's at least two. OK, that's funny. Yeah. Oh, man. But it is cool. So basically I and then so what do I do? I do.
00:07:15
Speaker
Every machining program I drop into the machine is just labeled 0001. I only have one file on the data server at one time for now. That way, whenever I repost, it's just always one. And then on the Wilhelmin, I have a master program that just types M98 P1. And that calls the subroutine from the data server to run the program. Is that literally the command M98 P1, where one is
00:07:43
Speaker
Is it really one dot NC or is it zero zero zero one? It's just one P1, but it calls file name one dot NC or the Wilhelmin doesn't like dot NC. It just needs to be zero zero zero one. Okay. Yeah, it's got some picky rules. I forget if it needs the O or if it doesn't like the O. I think it needs the O before. So O zero zero zero one. Oh, extension. Got it. It's really picky. Okay, that's really good enough.
00:08:09
Speaker
But yeah, this is all the little stuff that over the past year I've figured out. But you just don't know going in and it takes a while to figure out. And
Tool Setup and Machine Configuration
00:08:18
Speaker
Fanuc memory jokes aside, how much memory is there on the non-data server side? I don't know.
00:08:28
Speaker
I don't know. I'm sure you can, I wouldn't be surprised if you could not load like a surfacing operation or a longer. Yeah. Look, could you load a part that just does 2D contours and drill? Probably, totally. Okay. Yeah. But yeah, anything 3D surfacing is going to get into the many megabytes of file size and ain't going to fit.
00:08:47
Speaker
And no issues. I remember I'm digging deep here, but like you did that AU presentation on macro variable things and talking about on what you lose on the morey when you try to go past things back and forth, but you lose. Oh, is that an issue here? I don't know.
00:09:11
Speaker
I don't know. You can't eight variables because you're you're just basically dripping it from the data server. No, you should be able to. I don't know. I guess I haven't tried that much that hard on the Wilhelmin. Like it just works. OK. But you can update macros, tool offsets while it's running. Whenever you mess with stuff on the tool table, you have to click store.
00:09:37
Speaker
And it'll say, memorization complete. So you make a change, and you have to tell it to save. It's the same thing on this video. Otherwise, it won't. I don't actually mind that. I don't think. True. But just all the other machines are instant. You tweak it to tool offset, and it's just done.
00:09:55
Speaker
Well, so I had my second Okuma panic. First one was in December. This one, last one was last week where I'm on my offset screen on like offset 189 and I want to set the B axis from 0 to 180. This is a big deal. And I hit 180, enter or whatever you hit and
00:10:15
Speaker
that 180 disappears like it accepted it, but the value is still zero. And I had this panic moment where I'm like, oh my gosh, did I just accidentally update some different offset within the 200 offsets I have, which will absolutely result in a machine crash. Yeah. Not only is it a bad machine crash, you're not even going to know when it's going to crash because it's going to happen to run that next year.
00:10:37
Speaker
So, my buddy at Metal Quest helped me figure out there's like a key logger screen in the Okuba. That's cool. And then it was pretty simple. I just went to a new offset that I didn't care about that I knew what I was doing and I updated it again there and then it shows you how it kind of keystrokes and then it's almost like an array when you write to an offset. So, I was able to replicate what happened.
00:11:00
Speaker
And it ends up I just hit somehow I just hit like 180 enter into like no man's land instead of actually entering it into one of the coordinate system fields. But I guess I do kind of value that ability to say. You know, funny, I hate like the whole like, do you want to save? Are you sure you want to save? Do you want to save one more time? I don't always love those, but I also like the idea of being able to undo something. Well, that's the thing with these machines is there's no undo. It's just if you type an offset wrong and you forget what it was supposed to be,
00:11:31
Speaker
Like, or if you don't know that you erased it, there's no undo. Yeah. Yeah. What's going on with yours? It works. So it works. I tried to make a couple of parts. Um, I think I might've actually, I gotta ask Marcus about this. I think I might've actually bumped the U axis in a way that made it slip because all of a sudden it shifted. And then my G 55 was wrong and my,
00:12:01
Speaker
Something else was wrong. Part transfer, distance, I don't know, something. So I just retouched it off again. Like I laid it down, put a circle in there, probed the bore, and just kind of started over again. And I think it works. So I don't know. But otherwise, I think it is at the point where it's absolutely ready to just start and run apart. And like a couple of days ago when I was last messing with it,
00:12:30
Speaker
I think everything was working but I had like five more minutes to probe this last hole and then get out there and I haven't finished it. I think it's good to go. I think it's going to make a good part. I started to tweak tool wear offsets to get the diameter that I want.
00:12:47
Speaker
So yeah, I think it's done. That's awesome. Yeah. Florian was explaining how they have kind of hacked the FANUC tool table and I think this is, I love this. So there's 48 tools in the weleman, up to five different tool height values per tool because of the way any tool can be used as a, well, different ways to use tools at different angles.
00:13:11
Speaker
You think about it, you would need about 200 tool offsets, which apparently costs a lot of money to buy from FANUC. Really? And so the Willman only has...
00:13:21
Speaker
Is it one or is it five? Tool offsets, period. Yeah, it's like 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, right? Yes, it has those five. That's it. And Willem, it has their own tool database on the control that's kind of behind the scenes. And that's what you write to. And then every time you call up a tool, it just overwrites the current H11 or whatever it is.
00:13:44
Speaker
in the way the post should work. I haven't actually looked at this myself. Obviously, this is just me having fun talking. I'll use this as post advice. But for tool 31, it would be T31. And then normally, it would be like what, G43, H31? All the height for 31, but it's always H11. It's weird. What tool you call? Isn't that funny? Yeah. So the post always does H11. And I guess if you want to get fancy and make it H12, H13,
00:14:12
Speaker
I don't know if the post could ever do that, but at least currently, but you could like hand code it or whatever. If you have some weird reason to do that. Um, but yeah, every tool gets posted as H11 and it feels weird when you're typing in, you know, like calling a tool and typing in the offside, make sure it's right. And you're calling up a tool basically just to see it to type, you know, tool five H11. It's weird, but it's a neat machine. It's super neat. And well,
00:14:40
Speaker
When I have played with it and tried to hit a perfect diameter, one time I was manually jogging, turn a diameter, move it down like two tenths, turn another diameter, see a little whisper come off and you measure it, it's two tenths. It's an extremely accurate machine. Yes. Oh, that's awesome.
00:15:00
Speaker
Yeah, the, I'm excited to, we got tool holders in. It was kind of a moment of shame though, because I was like, hey CG, did you buy an HSK 40 tightening fixture? And he just writes back with the picture of like the Rego fix set up. Yeah. I think I have his ER right now. So I need a HSK. It's like the weirdest thing. You don't have a way to hold the tool to tighten the collet. They don't exist. There's actually little red flats on the holder, but I still want something less. Exactly.
00:15:28
Speaker
I ended up machining soft jaws for an orange vice that I have mounted to my bench right now. Okay. So it's just got like cutouts, circular cutouts on the two jaws. I did buy Willamans tightening fixture, which is like a one-way bearing, one-way roller bearing. But we haven't mounted it to the table yet, so it's not very useful yet. You have an actual orange dual station vice just mounted to a bench? It's sitting there, but yes.
00:15:58
Speaker
I should mount it because it jiggles around when we use it. Yeah. And we also have the orange bench vice. Oh, you do. OK, that's all right. Yeah, we did want one a while ago. Got it. Cool. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm super excited. Just I got to make some time, turn that weld it on and make some parts because I've got these bushings that I've been trying to make for a long time.
00:16:25
Speaker
that don't have a lot of features, but they have a tight OD. And it just lets you see the whole process, you know, lets you transfer, lets you drop, lets you dial in all your tool offsets. It's like a nice simple starter part. Yes. You tool set up?
Laser Engraver Integration
00:16:40
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I've got seven tools in the machine already. Okay.
00:16:45
Speaker
I'll throw up a video on Insta right now of what Grae has sent me out of it just doing its thing. It's kind of like the five axis or the pallet pool. I've seen Willamans at trade shows and TJs and all that, but when you got one, oh my gosh, it is really cool.
00:17:04
Speaker
The warm-up program, the default warm-up program that they send with it is beautiful. There's no other word for it because the spindle dances. It like rotates and moves around and comes in and out and does all these moves. It goes up and down and the spindle goes up and up in RPM and then it just loops and does it again. It goes back to 500 RPM. I gotta watch that. I've not seen that one. Yeah, it's cool.
00:17:31
Speaker
Awesome. So yeah, that's cool. Other things this week is on our CNC router cutting that XLPE foam, loading up the end mills with the goo from the tools. Apparently everybody's dealing with this who's cutting that material. So a bunch of people suggested to mount like some sacrificial thing and do a zip cut on it in between.
00:17:55
Speaker
So I did, I put a little vice on the table and mounted a chunk of wood. One of our guys is a woodworker, so he brought in chunks of cherry and chunks of pine. And I'm like, I want them one inch by one inch by three inch. So he did it, brought in a box of both. And yesterday I mounted them up.
00:18:11
Speaker
wrote a program to cut like one row of foams and then move over to G55 where the vice is, take a zip cut, come back, do the next row of foam. And let me tell you, it's perfect. It just does exactly what I wanted it to do. The patterning in Fusion gets real messy where I have to have like pattern within pattern within pattern and a folder to do the three rows.
00:18:39
Speaker
and then a single folder above that pattern outside that pattern to go and do the touch up like the woodcut and then back to another row pattern. So that took longer than I expected and it was more convoluted than I expected to get the patterning to do what I want but totally works. It's awesome. You can't do that like mod
00:19:03
Speaker
mod thing where
CNC Router Foam Cutting
00:19:04
Speaker
it does a counter and then if it divisible by a certain integer, go run a subroutine or subprogram? I don't think there's macros on this machine. Okay. So, yeah. And I don't want to obviously pattern the vice cutting because that'll cut in a different spot, you know? Oh, yeah. No, totally. Okay. Well, you got it working. That's great.
00:19:25
Speaker
I can do subroutines though, so I did consider doing that. But still, to be able to post it out of Fusion cleanly, I found a way to make it work. Yeah, no, no, totally. Grant's been really doing a great job on the lathe where we now have different programs call up the touch off of the like the grooving tool or the parting tool. It's on.
00:19:52
Speaker
super slow. And it's for sure it runs unattended that way, which is great. But it's not fast. And we want, you know, the ST20Y, especially since we don't have the Wilhelmin online yet, it is busy. And so I don't want to add whatever that would be 10 or 20 seconds to every part. But we do want to check that. We do want to check that tool for brake detect. And so that that mod parameter to recall a subroutine has been great. And it just post radar fusion. There's no fuss. Nice.
00:20:22
Speaker
not through pass-through manual NC. Sorry. It is a past NC pass-through line. That's fair point, but it's, there's no hand editing. There's no real risk. I guess just calling a subroutine. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I'm unfortunately a huge fan of manual NC pass-throughs. I like it.
00:20:45
Speaker
So that's good. And then yesterday, our laser arrived for the router. Oh, yeah. The laser head. So it came like right before I went home for the day. So I'm like, I'm taking this home so I can unbox it at home with my kids and life's like, look, it's a laser. Yeah, but it really is. Yeah. And it's tiny. It's like the size of
New Fixture Setup Method
00:21:06
Speaker
I don't know, like two juice boxes put together. Crazy. It's not big. Um, and then it comes with cabling and wiring. It's the OPT laser, uh, brand and it was about just over a thousand bucks. Uh, six watt diode laser. And I'm pumped. It's going to be sweet. It's like 12 volt DC power. Yeah, pretty much. Did you plug it in at home and just like point it out? Oh my God. We've totally done it.
00:21:33
Speaker
Yeah, you need to control it somehow. It's got its own little controller and you got to give it a pulse with modulation signal to like fluctuate. I don't know. I don't know if you want to reduce the power John. Yeah, exactly. And I was trying to explain to the kids because it's not like a James Bond laser, you know, that like shoots forever and will cut anything in its path because they have a lens on it. It's focal length. So it's like, it's like, um,
00:22:00
Speaker
magnifying glass and the sun, you know, like burning leaves and stuff. There's that tiny, tiny, tiny little point where the beam, you know, crosses itself and that's the hottest point and that's how the lasers work too. The focal range is like nothing, tiny. The guy who's currently lasering our foam said that some of the foam, if there's a bow to it, it'll be out of focus, even though it'll run a whole cutting routine and even he was confused. He's like,
00:22:28
Speaker
It wasn't much bow at all, but it went out of focus and it did nothing. Yeah, that was crazy. Cool. Yeah, so hopefully I can get that mounted today. Just some wiring. It's got like five wires. You got to leave them somewhere and configure it in Maso. I downloaded the Lightburn software.
00:22:50
Speaker
So that's what everybody uses for laser engraving and I played with that a little bit. It's intuitive. It's fine. It looks easy. It's like a imaging software basically. You drag in your PNG or DXF or whatever and you just click, select this, cut this. You got your feed rate and your power rate and all that stuff. So I'm like,
00:23:11
Speaker
Pretty optimistic that I think the mounting and wiring will be the most time consuming spots, and then just like playing around with it will take some time. But I don't know. I might be able to cut something today. Yeah, it doesn't seem crazy. No, it doesn't seem too hard. Cool. That's awesome. The rest of the team is like, ah, it'll take like, knowing you, it'll take like a week to figure it out, a couple of weeks maybe. I'm like, I got to show you guys wrong. I'm going to cut some foam tonight. Awesome.
00:23:40
Speaker
It's a balance. I was proud that I was making a part and I on the horizontal went great and then I needed to do a separate thing and I was like, you know what? Oh, it one of the
00:23:53
Speaker
And long story, one of the screws backed out, it was kind of a risk and I kind of knew it. And then it caused me to want to read just skim deck the fixture totally fine. Just took a little bit longer than I planned as it happened. And then I realized rather than finish that and go straight into the next thing, I was like, I need to go do something else for like a half an hour. And it was kind of one of those moments where John a year ago would have
00:24:14
Speaker
not been mature enough to just say, step back, you're fine. It all went fine. I'm really glad I did because I came back in an hour with a fresh perspective. That was a huge win.
00:24:25
Speaker
putting in a new fixture on the horizontal, normally what I would do is we machine or rough machine that fixture on another machine with leaving some of the lead leaving 20th hour or something to do the final facing of it in situ on the horizontal. But then I'd also then have to on the horizontal pre-cut the tombstone for whatever mounting holes there are and all that. This time I took
00:24:48
Speaker
a it's about a six inch wide by 20 inch long piece of aluminum one inch thick. I with the paint with the high temp powder coat tape I super glued the fixture on the tombstone vertically rough aligned with just sharpie points plenty close and then
00:25:04
Speaker
with it super glued on there, machined the bores, counterbores, and then through those drilled into the fixture, tapped into the fixture, added the set screws. So now the fixture is secured with both a lot of superglue and fasteners, and then went to town, you know, roughing out the whole fixture, finishing it in place, and it's done. It worked great. Huh.
00:25:31
Speaker
So then you remove it, take off the super glue. Absolutely not.
00:25:37
Speaker
I mean... No, it'd be fine. I actually... Interesting. Screws alone would hold it on, but I do think the Super Glue will help and last and I did add some RTV. This is like a six month fixture at most anyway. Okay, not forever. But I added some RTV silicone around where the bottom of the fixture meets the tombstone just to help minimize coolant seeping into the... Interesting.
00:26:04
Speaker
But that much super glue, again, plus faster, I'm going to say it's fine. Yeah, obviously, it's not going anywhere with screws for sure. Just feels weird to leave the tape in there, but the powder coating tape is hard and thin. It's not like blue painters tape that's going to disappear. That's cool. Yeah, why not? Yeah, I like it.
Lapping Plates and Processes
00:26:28
Speaker
And it's cool that you can you basically slapped a raw piece of aluminum and glued it to your fixture.
00:26:33
Speaker
Oh, yeah. It's great. Instead of one hopping it on another machine kind of thing. Yep. I like it. Yeah, that's cool. Good. I know we got to run. We're doing a weird time here. Thanks. Thank you for coming. Yeah, no worries. Yeah. Bit of a short podcast today, guys. Yes. What was I going to say?
00:26:56
Speaker
Oh, I'm done making cast iron on the speedio. Finally. Unlike you finish it or done like I'm not done, but I'm done. No, I'm done. Yeah, I finished everything. So I made all the cast iron lapping plates. I purposely bought too many and made too many because I'm like.
00:27:14
Speaker
I might want one in every grit size of diamond paste. So I'm like, I'm just, if I'm making them, I'm going to make too many so that I never have to touch these again. These are like for life, you know? Yeah. And they turned out great. They turned out really, really sweet. I saw your, and so you were filling paint filling. Yep. So I went with a nail polish to paint fill and it worked really, really well. Um, cause we've got the,
00:27:39
Speaker
our oil bottles for the knives, we bought all these like 1000 bottles with the needle tip and got them printed and everything. We got a whole bunch of extra ones. So I had all these needle filler bottles. I was like, sweet, just pour the nail polish into those. It worked amazing. Oh, yeah. To fill using a, you know, the brush and the nail polish, it would be way messier and not as fun. But yeah,
00:28:04
Speaker
turned out super, super good. So the next step is to surface grind them on the Okamoto, then change out the coolant on that, which it needs anyway. And, uh, and then they should be ready to rock, which is good because we've got parts we want to lap. We've got some, uh, fixture parts that I want to send to heat treat a two parts. So I want to get them up to 60 Rockwell, and then we're going to surface grind them and then hand lap them to a,
00:28:29
Speaker
light band mirror flat. Yes. It's going to be so cool. That's awesome. That's going to be cool. So yeah, so I'm planning on having like we already stock diamond lapping liquid in basically 30 to 3 micron for our lapping machine. We only use 15 micron on the lapping machine, but we have three, we have six, we have nine, we have 15, we have 30.
00:28:54
Speaker
So I'm going to dedicate a pair of lapping plates to kind of each grit so that we can really, really progress our way down and both get some incredible flatness and also some good shininess. Yeah, those are great. Yeah. And I think it'll be really cool to actually surface finish some of our parts like the head of a pivot on the knife or the screw heads or something. Build a little fixture and lap them to a crazy finish. I think we're going to use it a bit more than we think we will.
00:29:24
Speaker
So also justifying my time spent on this project. That's fun.
00:29:30
Speaker
So real quick, I'm up here in Chicago, or that area.
Visit to Born and Co. and Industry Reflections
00:29:34
Speaker
And I swung by Born and Co. yesterday, where we filmed a year or two ago. They are this company that owns like Blanchard, Dev League, Acme, like all these different historical machine tool companies. And they still build new machines. They restore them. They do repair work, gear hoppers, shapers, gear shapers. And they built this new machine called the MT Cube, which is like a CNC Blanchard on steroids.
00:29:59
Speaker
I'm not really a blancher because it can do turning, milling, and grinding. The crazy thing is it has a FANUC robot behind the machine that lifts like 300 pounds or 400 pounds. The robot can change. It is the tool changer, so it changes out whatever's cutting or grinding or turning. It also
00:30:21
Speaker
can literally change the whole spindle out unattended so they could go from like an HSK 40 higher RPM spindle to a HSK 100 massive grinding spindle and they had a sample part that they were showing off and it's kind of hard to describe but think of it kind of like a
00:30:43
Speaker
two tubes, but big, like 20 inches tall, is wider than a cereal box. They were doing the ID, OD grinding, milling, lots of work on it. It's a big part. It looks good. It wasn't that it wasn't impressive, but it seemed like you could have done this some other ways and then they were like, oh no, it's like 60 Rockwell.
00:31:07
Speaker
You're like, oh, oh, wow. Wow. Like two, three inch diameter ID tube that's 20 inches long. And so they have these tools and it was just crazy to watch. You know, they could rough turn it, rough mill it, and then come in with these different grinding wheel packs and finish it. It was just, I was like, oh, and they were, I forget what the tolerance they were talking about, but like under a thou of taper across 20 inches or something like, like it was very respectable finishes.
00:31:37
Speaker
That's awesome. Yeah. And you've toured their factory before, right? Yeah.
00:31:43
Speaker
Yeah, different stuff, new stuff than before. We did like a quick 20 minute walkthrough just to see. Definitely, they've definitely improved their operation side of things and literally and figuratively kind of cleaned some stuff up around how they think about it. They've got all this, you know, they will. If somebody calls in with a 1942 gear harbor, they will help them source a replacement part. They'll make a replacement part. They'll like, there's just an unbelievable amount of
00:32:12
Speaker
of liability like around obligations of what you do, which I think is impressive. And then yeah, they're just keep doing it. They were making these new, they do
00:32:24
Speaker
um, reconditioning of like, they'll completely overhaul older machines. And then they also are building brand new ground up machines, like Blanchard's kind of cool. They said that there has been a bit of a resurgence around the demand for these. And I asked, you can listen to the video and we get it out to hear the explanation from Joe. But, um, I was like, Hey, is this a good thing? Like, is this reassuring research and manufacturing and so forth? So I was excited to talk about that topic. Um, yeah, it's cool. Nice. Yeah.
00:32:54
Speaker
It's cool. So you're back at the shop tomorrow then. Back at the shop tomorrow. Nice. Cool. All right. I will let you go. Thanks, bud. I'll see you. Sounds good. All right. Take care, man. Bye.