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#213 - Fusion 360 Tool Library & Swiss Lathe 101
208 Plays4 years ago
TOPICS:
- Saunders' makes something awesome that went to the bottom of the ocean!
- Machining titanium
- Fusion 360 Tool Library issues and fixes
- Catching up on backorders.
- Shipping delays and organizing.
- Playing catch-up.
- Grimsmo gives a deep dive into swiss lathes and purchasing info for Saunders
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of a machining episode 213. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. John and I talk every Friday and we trade and swap knowledge and are that sounding board you need as an entrepreneur? It's super helpful.
Teaser and Exciting News
00:00:17
Speaker
I've got some updates, but I've got a doozy of a question for you. Okay. And it's actually really good that you're sitting down because you're going to need to be sitting down for this question. But first, a really fun, exciting share.
Mariana Trench Expedition
00:00:36
Speaker
This week we were able to release a frantically made Wednesday widget video
00:00:42
Speaker
which is I got a call from a friend who had the opportunity to be, I want to say fewer than 20 people have done this in the world, which is to hop into a titanium machine sphere bubble off of the coast of Guam, quite a ways off the coast in the Challenger Deep area.
00:01:05
Speaker
of the Mariana's trench and sink in this submarine, if they call it, that's fancier than a submarine, but it's a submarine, and sink for over four hours until he and the pilot, there's only enough room in this thing for two people, reach the very bottom of the earth. Yeah, 35, 36,000 feet. Oh my God. Like below sea level? Yeah.
00:01:33
Speaker
Holy cow. So if the Mount Everest is obviously not at sea level, but if Mount Everest were at sea level up to 28, you could put Mount Everest underwater there in the tip, the summit would still be a mile, more than a mile underwater.
Trivia and Historical Insight
00:01:47
Speaker
Whoa. It's not, almost not possible to comprehend that you're in a little, you're in a little dingy boat waiting to get into the submarine and below you is a six mile column of water.
00:01:58
Speaker
That's insane. You know what's funny is less than two weeks ago, we have a globe in our house for the kids. And it's an old one. There's some outdated stuff. But I looked for the Mariana's Trench just for fun. I'm like, where exactly is this? I don't really know where it is. It took me a few minutes to actually find it. But it was fun. And it's like, oh, that's where it is. It's like, I don't know how to explain it, somewhere between India and Australia.
00:02:23
Speaker
Yeah. I feel like it just glossed over in grade school geography because it's just this vastness of the Pacific, but totally random. My other favorite trivia is that general area of the world is where a number of atoll and islands are, including the Bikini Atoll. The sole reason
00:02:44
Speaker
This is amazing. The sole reason a two piece bathing suit is called a bikini is that because they happen to become super popular the same like summer that the United States was unfortunately testing nuclear bombs on the bikini atoll. What? There's like no other reason other than they were in the headlines. And so it's called a bikini for that reason. Love it.
00:03:07
Speaker
back on track.
Titanium Plaque Project
00:03:08
Speaker
You might be wondering why I'm bringing up this. Super awesome. They were there for scientific reasons, but they got to have a little bit of fun and they geocached. What? Yup. They geocached the Mariana's Trench. Now, it's a little tongue-in-cheek because
00:03:25
Speaker
The Mariana's trench section of the Challenger Deep, which is the deepest part of the Challenger Deep, which is the deepest part of the ocean, it's still hundreds of miles long and obviously very few people have gone down there. But in the name of science and exploring and just being fun and awesome, the task was something that would work. They kind of came to us with the spec and the design. So it's a six by six by one inch titanium plaque.
00:03:52
Speaker
that we machined with the, what did we put on it? Like a kind of a Challenger deep comment, the geocache term, and then there's a password, which is the kind of way you claim the geocache, which we obviously can't share. And then attached to that titanium block with a special type of
00:04:11
Speaker
rope or synthetic rope, I don't know if there's fancier words for it, is a syntactic foam. And this is this really cool foam stuff that floats that was designed specifically for this type of stuff because at that depth you have substantial PSI or pressure just from the water column.
00:04:32
Speaker
This stuff floats, not microscopic, but very small glass beads in it, but it just looks like a hard foam. The foam we machined into an arrow and it's tethered like five, six feet above this titanium plaque. The titanium plaque sits on the ocean floor and the arrow points down toward it. How long have you been working on this? Did it take a while?
00:04:59
Speaker
Yeah, we got the call less than a month ago. I think we machined it in like three days and FedExed it off to them. And then they actually literally just did their dive a week ago. And I'm happy to report everyone was safe. Two different people went down on two separate dives. And they were able to place the geocache, went well, crazy. So something you've made is at the bottom of the earth. Yes. That is insane.
00:05:28
Speaker
And the I was going to say the.
00:05:33
Speaker
Oh, so the video we did, uh, which aired this week on our channel is, is honestly a bit more about just, Hey, we have to make a titanium plaque with small engravings and letters in two days. And we took mostly, actually it was a lot of lakeshore, regular steel tools, kept the current service footage down. Um, and then use progressively smaller end mills for the text, I think starting at three 30 seconds and then one 16th. And then I think maybe even one smaller and.
00:06:00
Speaker
I kid you not, and I say this as a pure light of comedy, not in any way to brag, we didn't break a single tool. Yes. It never happens. I was fully expecting to just be like, get another tool chucked up. Yeah, you guys don't cut a lot of titanium other than playing, right?
00:06:21
Speaker
Prove and cut, and the occasional widget-y thing. Yeah. Yeah, you get your surface footage right, and don't push it too fast with a feed per tooth, and it cuts like butter. Well, that's what we've learned. Even on the small tools is we kept the chip load per tooth shockingly high to form a chip and let the ... I mean, I'm not sure how much heat is evacuated. Titanium just doesn't like heat period, or doesn't conduct it, I guess.
00:06:49
Speaker
we knew we didn't want to rub. So even on the smaller tools where I would normally, without hesitation, step down to say five thou, excuse me, five tenths or under a thousandth of an inch deeper. We were actually staying between one and two, I think that per tooth on these small tools. That's interesting. I don't usually go that high on the small tools in titanium, but yeah, glad it worked. It's awesome. Yeah. So that was fun. That's so cool. Yeah. What have you been up to?
Grimsmo's Achievements
00:07:16
Speaker
kerning, all kinds of things, all things. Yeah, I'm putting, what am I doing? I'm putting Norseman handles and blades, parts of them on the kern. So I've been making the tombstones for that. They're turning out phenomenal. Yesterday,
00:07:35
Speaker
I was able to, I needed to make a clamp for the Norseman blade. So I designed the clamp, I machined the clamp, four of them on the same day, and I programmed and I made the tombstone on the same day, and I tested the first soft blade also yesterday. And I was like, man, yesterday was a win. That was good. That's awesome.
00:07:59
Speaker
Yeah, aside from some chamfers that I have to tweak and some undercut chamfers that I have to tweak the height on, it turned out fantastic. So the next one will be great. Yeah, so I'm pumped for that. That's good.
00:08:12
Speaker
Do you have a solid Kern fusion master library, or do you just rob from the most recent CART CAM files? Regarding toolpaths or tooling? I meant tooling, but either one, I guess. Yeah, I do have a master tooling library in Fusion that I keep for the Kern, which is great. And I keep it updated, and everything's there, which is fantastic.
00:08:37
Speaker
And then I also have the same tool library in a Google spreadsheet that I keep live, which helps. And then the same on the machine, obviously. But I'm kind of maintaining three tool libraries, but it works super well and it lets me see it all, which is great.
00:08:55
Speaker
I haven't followed the chatter about the tool library roadmap for fusion, but I'm not happy about this idea that if you have a master library and then you have like, let's say your main Rask file, if in that main Rask cam file, you decide to change a stick out or a feed there, I wish there was a way to choose or force a. Yeah. Yeah. Either to the library or to like, you don't want to push to every file because that gets dangerous, but
00:09:25
Speaker
at least back to your main library could be nice. Yeah, there's got to be because it's not although I mean, a library implies, you know, the idea of a library is I check out a book, I know that's that book, and then I put it back. This is not a library. It's a yard sale. Yeah.
00:09:39
Speaker
Every time you take a tool out, it's gone. It has nothing to do with the main library anymore. True. The library just becomes the starting repository that says, these are all the tools you have. If you want one, you take it out and you don't put it back. You take it out, you change it, you modify it, but the main library stays the same. So if you make a tweak, like you said, with a stick out or with a radius or something, then even breakage control. Now that I'm doing breakage control on the current, I had to go back to the library in
00:10:07
Speaker
in the main library and in every cam file that I'm using on the current and add breakage control to every tool that I want. So it is what it is. That's fine. But it's something you got to keep in mind.
Inventory Management Challenges
00:10:19
Speaker
It's almost like
00:10:21
Speaker
The tool library should be, every field should be duplicated and there should be like a right and left arrow between the two fields so that you can always see your current file, that you can always see the latest version of the true library, the master. And then you could say, nope, I want to pull or push.
00:10:38
Speaker
And that way, because a lot of times it's just a minor tweak, but if we're in a different file that uses the same tool, boy, right there being able to see, hey, you change this from seven tenths to eight tenths feet per tooth, do you want to inherit that master update or rather, do you want to push it back to the, you know what I mean? I think so. Yeah, I think that'd be helpful. This brings flashbacks back to IMPS 2016. Was it when we had the group of us and other people at Autodesk doing
00:11:08
Speaker
learning about Fuse 360 and giving feedback and stuff. And I think we talked about Tool Library for like 45 minutes straight. And everybody's like, are we still talking about Tool Library? Yeah.
00:11:18
Speaker
I love fusion and what it does for us, but I do at this point disagree with the philosophy of what that development represents is not something I endeavor for Saunders Machine Works. Look, I'm sympathetic because it's difficult. I think people underestimate how big fusion is, how many hundreds of people and processes, but darn it, being small and nimble is the way to live life.
00:11:46
Speaker
Yeah. On that note, we have continued to do, I'd say, a good job. I think that self-hesitated, self-declared good job. But even in this past week, I found
00:12:01
Speaker
a local supply company that just does supplies for restaurants, small companies, et cetera, because I was still the one running to like Sam's Club to buy toilet paper and paper towels and stuff. So they came by. I mean, this is what they do. They kind of looked at everything we have and they're going to send us over a pricing sheet, but going forward, somebody else, not even me, can basically say, we need this, this, and this, and it just shows up. That's fantastic. Right?
00:12:30
Speaker
Because right now, we do big orders from, let's say, Costco for food and stuff, paper towels, Uline for stuff, and I don't know, the odd hardware store stuff that either I or Barry am going out to get. What kind of stuff do you have in mind for the supply company? All of our paper towels for our dispenser, paper towel dispensers, all of our
00:12:55
Speaker
Soaps, all of our mops, cleaning supplies. They don't do food. They're probably a little bit better organized or set up for a restaurant where you need disposable forks and high-volume cups and paper plates. But nevertheless,
00:13:13
Speaker
It's just unintelligent use of time for frankly anybody here to go and spend, you know, it's probably an hour and a half to drive to a place like Santa Club, walk around, shop, check out, come back, when this will just, the stuff will just show up. Yeah, and it sucks to run out of paper towels. Right. Something like that. It's so simple, but so critical.
00:13:34
Speaker
Then the other even bigger step is we are darn near there. I didn't check an inventory report this morning, but almost all of our back orders are caught up.
00:13:49
Speaker
our goal, you know, even talking to you two weeks ago, three weeks ago, our goal was just like, hey, we really want to try to catch up on the back orders. No, our mindset completely changed. It was back orders are a disease that needed to be eradicated with a vengeance. And not only that,
00:14:06
Speaker
solving that problem is not the goal. That's just remedying a bad thing. The goal is inventory. And in fact, to be able to say on our website, something like, I don't know how we're going to phrase it, but 95% of products ship are in stock and ship. We can't say same day, because then you get to the complication of when the order comes in, but ships next day are just marketing and pride around how we're structured, how we have inventory, how we communicate. And
00:14:34
Speaker
I think I mentioned this maybe last week, but we realized so many of our problems were coming from the hassles of not having inventory. The stress of needing to get something sent out for a service or a raw material or set up a changeover, or if something came back from anodizing, we didn't like it. Now we can just say, okay, we'll just make more or fix it. It's not affecting a customer. It's probably one of the biggest and best
00:15:03
Speaker
changes, we're not quite there yet, but with the business. Yeah, it's like a mindset shift. I really like the phrase, most orders ship within 24 hours. I mean, it doesn't work on a Friday night, but yeah. Right.
00:15:20
Speaker
The customer then, they get their tracking quickly because we had some customers who call us like a week later and they're like, I never even got an order confirmation. Well, it ends up that went to their spam, which I don't know what I can do about their spam. Exactly. We get that too. Right.
00:15:35
Speaker
It's hard to go back to them when the reality is their plates in process and it hasn't shipped yet. It'd be better to say, oh, nope, you did get it. It was in your spam, like kind of on you to check your spam. And by the way, it already shipped. The tracking also went to your spam and it's supposed to be delivered tomorrow. That's what I want. That's the best. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah, sometimes guys will type in their email address wrong so they don't get it and then they send an inquiry and blah, blah, blah. It happens. But yeah, if you're in a position of
00:16:04
Speaker
being ahead of the game and being able to say, yeah, no problem. It shipped like six days ago. It should be there any day. Then everybody's happy. It gets excited. We found that shipping from Canada to the US has gotten dog slow over the past few months, like since Christmas, basically. Yeah. And it's not fun for our customers. Have you heard any more specifics as
Shipping Delays Discussion
00:16:28
Speaker
to why? No.
00:16:31
Speaker
Yeah, we've had some major problems too with domestic and international, both post office and FedEx and freight. I don't think it's staff levels like personnel. I don't think people are really getting contact rates quarantined as much as they were two, three months ago. I actually honestly think it's partly just how much volume people are ordering and shipping these days.
00:16:59
Speaker
But I can't imagine it's any different now than six months ago. I don't know. Well, look, in the US, if these stimulus checks hit, which I think they are, that's going to be more online. I don't know. We've had some bad delays. We've had two packages lost with FedEx. And I don't think we ever had FedEx lose a package in four years. And then we've had two in the last six weeks. What do you ship most? What's your most common career?
00:17:27
Speaker
Ooh, probably FedEx. I mean, FedEx is your neighbor, right? Like, they are next door. But when I say FedEx, it's all FedEx Ground. OK, meaning? Not Express. Oh, so there's a FedEx Express next to you guys? So yeah, when I was growing up, I don't think FedEx had Ground. In fact, I think FedEx Ground was a separate company. And they bought it. I can't remember the name of it. But FedEx Ground is kind of sort of a separate thing in the US. And like here, the
00:17:56
Speaker
The FedEx that we have in our area here on industrial park next door is technically FedEx Express, but they'll accept FedEx ground. Really, it's just like a Staples or Walmart that accepts FedEx ground because the FedEx ground truck then comes by once a day and takes all those packages about 30 miles away to the FedEx ground hub.
00:18:17
Speaker
Nice. But it still works great. Okay. Do you, I remember I was just telling Fraser yesterday, do you still have that area in your shop where you have like, it's the outgoing mail. You have the UPS section, the FedEx section, the whatever. So we're seeing that a long time ago.
00:18:35
Speaker
We have a table right now for basically just post office because FedEx, we take over next door at the end of the day, so no big deal. What I want to switch to is a rack that will have inbound and outbound labeled by Carrier because we do have DHL and we do have UPS every once in a while.
00:18:54
Speaker
So just having a rolling cart that has inbound, I think it's going to be better to have separate inbound outbounds because otherwise it's, I don't know. It seems too confusing, but you do have to make it, I'm willing to ask or convey a request of saying, hey, can you guys try to make sure you put the inbounds here and take up the outbounds here? But it's difficult. Those people are very focused on their efficiency and you get drivers changing all the time. The bigger the sign, the better.
00:19:23
Speaker
Yeah, right. Like more than one piece of paper kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, just make it obvious. Yeah, I know that Kelvin from Urban Survival Gear was talking about his outgoing, and he uses trash cans with big outgoing sign on it. Okay.
00:19:39
Speaker
And he puts them right by the door so the mail guy comes and looks. And if there's, I think he used to actually garbage bags. And the guy will just pick up the garbage bag with 100 packages in it and just leave. The whole garbage bag? Yeah. That's hilarious. Because he's shipping small, like, pens. Yeah, yeah. Pens and in bulk in batches, too.
00:19:59
Speaker
It kind of works. And we're thinking about it because up until now, Barry's been taking packages to the post office every night. We haven't had a regular pickup. And exactly, you're shaking your head. Yeah, it's time for that to end. So they're looking into it. And do you pay for that, for pickup service?
00:20:17
Speaker
USPS, you do not, but you also don't control it. I just basically say we need a package to pick up every day of the week. There is some option to pay for it, which you can specify the window of time, which we don't care about. When they drop off our mail, they pick up. FedEx is irrelevant because we walk it over. Technically, FedEx and UPS generally will make you pay. If you do enough volume, it's negotiable though.
00:20:46
Speaker
The minimum was like 150 packages a month for Canada Post to pick up and we're doing like 250 or something. So we're fine. But I think it was, I forget what they said, 30 bucks a month or something, which is still no brainer. Don't you get Canada Post mail every day? Yeah, we do. But I think pickup is a separate thing because delivery is usually around noon-ish, but their pickup's usually in the evening.
00:21:11
Speaker
Sure. I mean, the benefit of evening pickup is more time to get packages ready, but still, we just- That's two trucks coming to the shop. That's weird, but whatever. It's their system. But even if you have something personal to return, don't you just
00:21:27
Speaker
If it's Canada Post, don't you just leave it for when they drop off your mail, they'll grab it? I don't think so. Oh, weird. It's not that easy here. Or I'm doing something wrong. My favorite hack, we don't get UPS pickups, and we don't get UPS drop-offs all the time. So if I need to send something out UPS, they charge like 10 or 15 bucks for a one-off pickup.
00:21:48
Speaker
I just order something from McMaster car, which for us usually comes UPS and the shipping is like six bucks and then the guy magically shows up and then outbound passes goes, go bye-bye. That's magical. Yeah. It's a great trick for residential to where the carriers hate or penalize you for scheduling pickups, but not for drop-offs. Okay.
00:22:13
Speaker
Yeah, it still feels like shipping is a struggle. I mean, we're getting faster and efficient, but things like that, pickups and organizing. Every time I go to UPS to ship a package, it's just a cluster. It's not a fun experience. And I haven't found the right way to do it. I don't ship a lot through UPS, like a couple of years. But I would like to offer different shipping options
00:22:37
Speaker
But so our products, they're $900 US starting price. I think there's a limit. Because when I ship, say I ship a knife to you, Canada Post, which turns into USPS, you don't pay any brokerage, any duty, any tax, anything when you receive it. That's great for you. I think if I ship at UPS, you'll be stuck with the UPS brokerage fee and tax. Yes, that sounds right. And stuff. So you might be left with $100 bill at the door. And that's not fun.
00:23:07
Speaker
I mean, it is what it is, but Canada Post doesn't do that. Yeah, we've seen that similarly with the federal versions of the respective countries' carriers. It's not clear to me whether that's an accepted exclusion or whether it's just like they don't happen to enforce it like the private carriers do.
00:23:26
Speaker
I don't know. And we have that with foreign countries like Germany and other places. That's just accepted. That's normal. But 90 plus percent of our customer is US-based. And currently, they're not paying duty and tax. So for us to switch to UPS, and you might get three-day shipping, but if everybody's going to be left with $100 bill on top of that, that's not going to work either.
00:23:49
Speaker
Yeah, I would avoid that because you're going to end up getting customer emails in or what we've found and we just don't tolerate it is people being like, I need you to lie on the forums too. Yeah, of course. And it's just like, no, we have an automated system and it's also unethical. Exactly. But there's a somewhat ethical way of avoiding the whole thing by just shipping it to Canada Post. Exactly, but it's slow. We have USPS priority mail.
00:24:17
Speaker
There's layers, but we're doing the faster one with shipping or with tracking. And we don't charge extra for shipping either. Shipping is included in the price. Everybody gets free shipping. So for us to choose a faster shipping option just costs us more money.
00:24:41
Speaker
Got it. Well, offer that is not free ground and 30 bucks for... Yeah. And people would do that. But even the faster shipping seems to still take a week or two these days. And it's like...
00:24:56
Speaker
I don't know. You order stuff through UPS, and even across the border, it comes next day. Yeah. We've had stuff get in sucking customs as well, which makes you think about, again, what's going on with lately. Yeah. Our packages kind of get, air quote, lost in customs for up to a week, and tracking just kind of goes dumb for that time. And then customers are freaking out, and I get it.
00:25:21
Speaker
Can I drop my question on you? Yeah.
Considering a Swiss Lathe
00:25:25
Speaker
Okay. So I was having a sit down with a good buddy. He has a good outside perspective on the business and just walking him through the last few months of catching up on inventory and the processes and so forth. And he's just like,
00:25:38
Speaker
And it's great, because he just knows nothing about manufacturing. So he has this outside perspective. He's like, it just seems like, John, you're always playing catch-up. He's like, why don't you stop thinking that way? And why don't you start thinking about the people or equipment that you need to be one step ahead? And it all of a sudden was like a license for me to be like, yeah, why are we? So fast forward.
00:26:06
Speaker
There's a million stuff that I'm thinking about that that's if I know how to think about the Machine that I realized it totally makes sense We're not we don't need it yet. But that's the whole spirit of this conversation is is a Swiss late. Yeah
00:26:21
Speaker
mainly for our diamond pins, which we make in, for us, relatively high volumes. It's incredibly tight tolerances. Now, I've been super happy with how our ST20Y does it, but it's the wrong style machine for a half-inch diameter, high-tolerance part, and it does require the warm-up, which we've got nailed down, and we do 100% inspection, and you're kind of sitting there running batches of 10. It seems like from talking to you about your Tornos
00:26:49
Speaker
It's a, I wouldn't say set and forget, but the thermal nature of it, the style of it, just these parts scream Swiss to me. Yeah. You're basically making, I wouldn't say a gauge pin, but a dowel pin and you're trying to hold 10ths and consistency across the batch too. Which we do. It's awesome. Yeah.
00:27:13
Speaker
I reached out to a distributor. I want to have them come in and start to understand the specifics. The other thing is we have another product we'd like to release that would be absolutely designed for this. Can you give me the Swiss 101 machine configuration, bind, process thoughts, all that?
00:27:32
Speaker
Yeah, I have the thought every now and then of buying a second Swiss. Ever since Pierre started, three months ago, it's run literally every day. And the reason it didn't before was because I didn't have time to devote to it and get it set up and stuff. So it's been fantastic.
00:27:57
Speaker
Especially if you're looking at new machine, I guess even for used machine. But let's use new machines as an example. It would be most likely new. Yeah, yeah. What to get is largely dependent on what you're planning on making and how you're trying to plan for the future. You can get all the bells and whistles and all the fancy B-axis, milling, tilts, blah, blah, blah.
00:28:20
Speaker
There's high pressure coolant. There's bar feeder. There's all this stuff. And most of which is super valuable. But different lathes have different amounts of live tooling as well. And how many tools face this way and how many tools face that way.
00:28:35
Speaker
Unlike your Haas turret lathe, where you can just add a live tool to any one of the turret positions, you can't on a Swiss. They're built that way, with so many live tools this way, and so many stick tools this way, and so many drills this way. And you're kind of stuck with what you got. So I got the Tornos, and it's super tooled up with available spots, plenty. I don't even use all of them. OK.
00:29:01
Speaker
What diameter is your tornos? It's a GT13, so 13 millimeter. So that's half, just over half an inch. Everything over three-eighths, you have to do what's called a bar prep, which I was super confused about until I actually did it. And you basically have to turn the end of a half inch bar down to three-eighths so that the bar feeder collet will fit onto it.
00:29:28
Speaker
Where do you do that? In the machine. So I manually load a half inch bar and I push it through the guide bushing. And then I run this simple program and then I manually pull it out. And now I have a bar prepped or you could do it on any lathe. So you endo it in the three eighths and goes to the left or whatever. Yep. Yep. Yep. And that works. Fun fact about Swiss layouts is a lot of them are backwards.
00:29:55
Speaker
like, citizen, Tsugami, star, they feed from right to left. I know. So it's another big reason I got the tornos. It's sort of dumb, but it feeds like my Nakamura, left to right. Like, you're reading a book. The material comes from the left. Yeah, all the citizens and stuff are backwards, and it creeps me out. They're fine, I'm sure, but I remember, what's his name? Christian was talking about,
00:30:23
Speaker
running a shop with a lot of lathes and having some left and some right. And he's like, if guys are jumping between them, they will crash. Is the code diff... No, your Z is... I don't know. But just jogging and moving and just the mental wraparound. If you're switching between... Yeah, totally. Yeah, he's like... So I like to have all one style and he's got all citizens and other stuff. But yeah, so that's a weird little thing. Keep in mind, it's fine, but it's different.
00:30:54
Speaker
So on a 13 millimeter tornos, could you have chosen different configuration levels of stick, live, drill, et cetera? You can choose the drill, call it the horn. It holds four drills left and four drills right. So you can add, I actually bought a second horn that I was totally planning on installing, but I never did.
00:31:16
Speaker
it swaps out or it adds a second true horn? It swaps out. I was going to add two on the machine at once. I'm kind of glad I didn't, but at the time I was like, oh yeah, I want all of the drills and all of the boring bars all of the time. I want to tool this lathe up to do all of my parts and never change the tool ever.
00:31:38
Speaker
and probably 60% like that. And we switch out the odd tool here and there. It's not a big deal. The other funny thing, there's no touch probes on the Swiss. So you're manually shimming and touching off every tool. And you make a part. And you're like, oh, that's a foul oversize offset. Bring it into place. And that's just the workflow. That's just what you do. It makes a part in between 30 seconds and a minute and a half. So you're like, who cares if?
00:32:05
Speaker
scrap rate is kind of a lot, but so what? You set it up and then it runs. Yeah, I was watching Danny Rudolph's got a good video from like four years ago where he just spends a half an hour walking through his shop. He had two at the time. I'm guessing he has gotten more sensitive. Yeah, he's showing the offsets table and you just kind of like the old school, like the Tormach lathe, you just turn apart, mic it and then adjust your value. Not a huge deal.
00:32:26
Speaker
which is fine. It works super well. And it actually gives you a really real sense of what the machine's doing between that and a microscope and a micrometer. And you just really get a sense of how the tools are reacting and if they're sharp or if they're dull. And if your guide bushing is loose, you got chatter, things like that.
00:32:46
Speaker
So why didn't you get a, or what is the downside of getting a larger, like instead of a 13 millimeter, getting a three quarter? Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Our Nakamura is a big lathe, but it has 5C collets. So it's a one inch cap on that machine. So I'm like, I have a lathe that does one inch and I almost never run more than half inch anyway.
00:33:08
Speaker
So, I don't need to get another lathe that goes up to a size that I don't use. If I need a one-inch part, I'll make it on the Nakamura. So, I looked at all my parts, I wrote them down in a spreadsheet, I wrote down the bar diameters, and I'm like, everything I make is three-eighths or quarter with our plastic bearings being half-inch, that's the only thing. And now pen parts, there's some half-inch parts in there.
00:33:32
Speaker
I was like, everything I need the Swiss for, our screws, our pivots, our stop pins, it's three eights or a quarter, and it just made total sense. Funny enough, the price difference between the two machines, the 13 millimeter with 26 millimeters, like five grand.
00:33:46
Speaker
Oh, but you can do, what's the downside? You can do a quarter inch work on a 26. It's just to change out the guide bushing and it's not like a five axis where you've got way too big of a machine. Yeah, I don't think there's any real downsides to having too big of a machine, but I just kind of looked at it and I was like, I don't need it. I just don't need the bigger machine. And physically, it had to fit in our old shop. That was a big consideration too.
00:34:14
Speaker
And now, I was thinking, if we were to get a second one, I'm not putting a lot of thought into it yet, but do I get another 13? Two of them are similar, probably one for stainless, one for titanium, or something like that. Or do I get the 26? And then I have the exercise. The price is not an issue between the two of them, and then still run the same parts on it. So I don't know. At that point, the second machine as a 26 might be a good idea.
00:34:39
Speaker
Um, for you probably would be a good idea to get like a 20 millimeter or 26 millimeter, just for some more variety. You know, you're not making little tiny screws like I am by the 10,000s. Right. Our smallest part would be a quarter inch. We would have a lot of half inch and honestly, probably some, I'm sorry, these are all inches, but five eighths, maybe three quarters. So I'm thinking
00:35:03
Speaker
three quarter machine would be okay, which is like, well, that's like 18, 19 millimeters 20 millimeter. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Like since it sells the L 20 20. Okay. Yep. Yeah. And like, and we're not, no plans on getting rid of the ST 20. So we've got that bigger machine. Yep. Um, so I need to look at the mix of stick and live and do, do, is it like, do all Swiss has come with a sub spindle?
00:35:34
Speaker
I'm going to say yes. Okay. That's not uncommon or it's not like a quote unquote option, like on a- Good point. Traditionally. Yep. On the Haas's and the Nakamura's, it's an option. It's an actually totally different machine even. Right. Right. Okay. You're right. Interesting question. But yeah, they're all-
00:35:57
Speaker
It's to the point where if you want to get the Swiss, you want not all of the features, but you want the live tools this way. You want the live tools that way. You want to do milling around the C-axis. You want to be able to have some fun with it. No, I wanted to make parts. I want to do both. No, I'm kidding. I want to put engravings in dumb places. The videos I was watching clearly showed radial live tooling.
00:36:26
Speaker
tooling would be like the horn drills. I didn't see any axial live tooling. Right. Does that exist? Of course, but it's weird. So on my tornos, the radial live tooling, the tool's hitting the diameter. So if you're engraving around the outside of the part or cutting flats or something, the main spindle has the radial live tools. The sub spindle has the axial live tools.
00:36:51
Speaker
Oh. And they don't mix and match. There's no option for axial live tooling on the main. Unless you put a speeder, like a little electric spindle in the horn. Oh, of course. But then that's error pneumatic driven. Like it's just basically like your horn where you drill. Yeah, mine's electric. But it would totally work. How does that in the horn? Obviously, does the horn move or does the spindle move? The horn attached to the xy axis.
00:37:21
Speaker
Okay, so you can do XY live. This is going to get confusing. You can do horn based axial XY live tool milling. Yes, absolutely. Okay. Okay. Where's your 60K thing mounted? In the sub spindle facing the spindle, like axially. So it could have been a regular live tool. You just wanted the higher RPMs, which is why you have that fancy electric thing. Okay.
00:37:47
Speaker
Got it. Do you want me to shoot a video, like a walkthrough? Sure would. Yeah. It would be awesome. Because, I mean, we're looking for video ideas too, especially kind of easy ones that are just walk around, talk about stuff. Yeah.
00:38:02
Speaker
It's so, it's so, there weren't that, there wasn't, I mean, I saw found Danny Rudolph's, there's some sales videos. And then there's some like 40 minute type figures. I want like the 15 minute, you know, look, here's how we hold the sick tools. It's interesting to see guys just so weird when you start really digesting a Swiss, because it's like, you don't really have the ability to take multiple passes. Because as soon as you turn that OD, it doesn't, it don't fit in that guy bushing anymore. So you can pull it back so far, maybe up to an inch, less than an inch, something like that.
00:38:31
Speaker
before it'll flop out of the guide bushing. Yeah. So you can do multiple passes, but you've got length, diameter, like you just do everything in one pass. Right. One and done. Which won't be an issue for our parts. It just makes you think about like, even on our ST, we've done long parts where I've had stick out and I needed to control tolerances or detail. So you'll like infusion, you'll chunk out your cam. So you'll turn the end, do the finish work with a different tool, then come back and then turn the rest of it.
00:39:00
Speaker
Cool. Posting code is fun. Yeah.
00:39:09
Speaker
Awkward pause. Awkward pause. I mean, you'd have the skills to do it no fine, no problem. You'd probably make the post work, actually. But I just post each operation and I paste it into my main file. I totally get it. Yeah. Our parts, I think, are way simpler than yours. Like OD turn, groove, thread, two live flats done. Like, it's not
00:39:33
Speaker
Pretty straightforward. And the cool thing is they use, especially these FANUC based machines, they use macros for everything. So my part off program is literally the same piece of code for every single part I make. It pulls the bar diameter from the top of the code from a variable. So I could make the part off a subroutine, and every code would call the exact same program. And it just always does the same thing. That's sweet. Yep.
00:40:00
Speaker
Are you using the quick change or is it the Sandvik QS or some other system for inserts? I tried. We did buy a Sandvik QS turning holder and it's fantastic but it chattered in one of our parts and I don't know why. We're going back with the force with that. I would highly, highly recommend it though because changing a regular top screw insert in a stick tool with a cooling hose sticking out the back of it is just annoying.
00:40:30
Speaker
Yeah, it looks like a nightmare to get in there. Yeah, so it's almost required to get like Santa QS or something. Do you know, I guess I don't know how to ask this, whether it's a citizen or a tornos or whatever, a little bit more basic 20 millimeter type machine. Do you know ballpark? I mean, blah, blah, blah options and all that, but what kind of ballpark number? I think my tornos decked out was around 250 US. Okay.
00:40:59
Speaker
And that's with everything, too much, actually. But that's like coolant pumps and spindles and all that? Yeah. Even the live spin, the extra air, not air, electric spindle, 60K one was like $5,000 or $8,000 or $10,000 or something like that, some dumb. OK. You could probably get one for $150,000-ish if you base it down in a various brand.
00:41:26
Speaker
But yeah, there's Sugami, there's Star Citizen, Ganesh, there's all kinds of weird ones that aren't as popular, but are still great. Do you know, are you familiar with the brand recognition or reputation? I hear about Citizen a lot. Yeah. But are they also, you hear about Haus a lot too, that doesn't necessarily convey whether they're... I mean, I see Citizen in places like Danny Rudolph, who seems phenomenal, what he does, or Hakko, which is obviously doing insane stuff.
00:41:55
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, top of the food chain is probably Citizen and Tornos. I don't know if Tornos sells as many. I don't know. But you hear way more about Citizen. They're like the popular one. And they're great, great, great, great. I was so on the fence. And one of the big turning points was the left to right orientation. Yeah. And I was like, I just feel more comfortable with the Tornos. And my distributor up here, they sold me the Nakamura. They also sold the Tornos. And I have a super great reputation with them.
00:42:25
Speaker
and blah, blah, blah. What's Taunus' fan against? Citizen is its own controls, right? It's too peachy sometimes. I think the fanic ones, I don't know. It's different, but... Yeah. Is there a... Maybe a bad analogy, but is there a value or player in that space that everyone recognizes is good, but not the same as Citizen for Taunus?
00:42:48
Speaker
Mike might, I don't know. Okay. I don't know the prices of Sugami and star, but I think they're cheaper than citizen. Okay. Good to know. Or well, just try. It's like that awkward thing where you're just trying to figure out like, what's the lay of the land? Yeah, for sure. You know, how does Makino compare against Hermely and Akuma and Grove and you know, Doosan and, and you hear all these names and you see all the, you know, I see them at the shows and stuff, but you don't really internalize it until you're like,
00:43:14
Speaker
thinking about putting your money on the line. You're like, wait, I actually don't know anything about these things. Every salesman told me he could hold tents all day long.
00:43:24
Speaker
I'm just super excited because like you think about the, when we're making these relatively small parts on this giant 10 inch machine that's got a huge turret that's moving two feet to do a turret change and then coming back in and gosh, I think is so freaking stable when it's warmed up. I'm super honestly blown. Like if you took our mid to a quantum mic, went over to the egg crate, which has 30 parts in it and you miked them.
00:43:50
Speaker
they are all phenomenal, plus a tenth. We've really got that nailed down, but that's John Saunders doing it after we wait an hour to warm up, check stuff, and I think a better, again, looking forward,
00:44:06
Speaker
I don't necessarily think Swiss is the first dollars that we should spend toward this next step, but in the spirit of getting ahead, it's absolutely something I want to get smart on. Yeah, you got to wrap your head around it for sure. I mean, Swiss benefits to volume, you can make hundreds of parts, thousands of parts. We made 2,000 bearing cages the other week. It's amazing. I mean, that's going to last us for what, six months, which is good, but we're still going to have to do it again.
00:44:31
Speaker
Yeah, that's awesome. And then just two days ago, Pierre was able to set up a part, have it running by the night, ran it all night, came back in the morning, and there were hundreds of parts there, and that's all we need. Love it. Love it. Sweet. That's really good. But yeah, tooling it up, it's super simple. You need a turning tool. You need a threading tool. You need a part off. We've got a couple duplicates of those. We've got a little grooving tool, smaller.
00:45:01
Speaker
I was thinking your grooving tool would just be your part off? You could if you wanted to, yeah. We have to stick our parting tool out really far because the two spindles are so big. When it does the part pick on a small part, you've got these two giant things in the way. The Swiss, I assume it's all just better situated for that stuff. Yeah, and it's so rigid. You're parting off right next to the thing. It's fully supported and it's cool. Good.
00:45:26
Speaker
What's up today? What do you have to do today? Well, apparently I'm filming a Swiss video. Love it. Maybe not today, but soon. Okay. Awesome. Do it like casual. I don't care if it's just, yeah. I'm going to totally mention you and be like, just like the bomb version of just, you know, just go up. Yeah. Awesome. Continuation of, that'd be helpful. God, which yeah. Okay. Good. Thank you. Absolutely. What do you have to do today?
00:45:54
Speaker
got to do a little bit of cleaning in the back of the shop. It's been on my to-do list of just cranking through that and then programming up a new part, which is pretty quick. What else? Some housekeeping stuff. We finally set up more of our systems like our accounting system. We now have multi-user access for other people to create quotes and invoices. I'm not joking. We're really
00:46:22
Speaker
It's so funny how that area 419 visit ended up being an unexpected kick in the butt on, it's time to rock and roll. Do we have a realistic ETA on when that video might drop?
00:46:34
Speaker
I don't think Julie's even, I mean, it was awesome. So this was not, ironically, not even the shop tour video. We're gonna wait until after their open house to do like the new shop tour. We just went up there to film, when to quit your day job and what else did we film? When to quit your day job and I'm totally blanking on the video we just filmed, the second one with them. But yeah, we'll get that stuff cranked soon.
00:47:03
Speaker
Oh, other random thing that we bought is a, um, we bought a new palette Jack that has a built in digital scale. What are you talking about?
00:47:14
Speaker
Yes, that just happened. Is it one of those skinny ones or is it a wide one? It had to be the wide one. Yeah. Well, I guess I didn't look for a skinny one, but we need to know freight shipments either to customers or to vendors. Our ERP could tell us the weight, but it's just clunky. We just need to know, I didn't want to take up the floor space of a permanent floor scale because we are conscious of space now. It's a power jack that has a scale built-in.
00:47:41
Speaker
That is so integrated. I love that so much. Good for you. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Have a good week. You do. I'll see you. Take care. Bye.