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#329 SMW puck chuck!
226 Plays1 year ago
TOPICS:
- Chicago museum of science and technology
- Grimsmo looking at the Sub Micron option for his speedio
- Saunders overhaul to fixture plate Process
- SMW puck chuck!
- Lasers!
- RO water systems and algae
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 329. My name is John Grimsmo. And my name is John Saunders. And this is our weekly manufacturing podcast where two friends just chat about everything that's going on in their business and get to bounce ideas off each other and learn and grow and it happens to be recorded at the same time. Happens to be recorded. Yep. And that's the theme is like it just happens to be recorded. We're doing this anyway.
00:00:29
Speaker
Yeah, right. Just ignore those, it's just me and you. Yeah, it's awesome. How are you? How are you doing, man? I've got you first. You first. Everything's good. We were just joking before the podcast. We're like, I don't have a lot of talking points to go over, but we got some good ideas.
July 4th and Museum Visit
00:00:49
Speaker
Well, for us, it was July 4th yesterday. It was July 4th for everybody. But for America, it was specifically an important day that we celebrate our independence from the British. And so obviously, we're off work. And then we ended up driving up Friday night to Chicago with the kids for just a quick getaway. And so I had a good time just doing some R&R. Nice.
00:01:16
Speaker
We've been before, but we went to the museum of science and industry first. I think when we went a few years ago, we had other stuff planned. And so we just didn't spend as much time there. And we had such a great time. Yeah, we left it to 30 only because we were just like, let's just take a break. Like we were still more stuff we wish we could have done, I guess. But like, it was just phenomenal. They have a,
00:01:45
Speaker
I think it's like the only capture. Maybe there's like one or two others that exist, but they're in different states of condition and don't have the same backstory, but they have a captured U-boat during the submarine. I went there at one of the IMTSs. You guys went that day. I got sick. Yeah. And you were going to come, but you're like, I'm going to sit this one out. So it was me and Ed and possibly Amish. Yes, that sounds right. Yes. And I remember, and I was like, this place is incredible.
00:02:10
Speaker
Yeah, it is so cool. Heads up if anybody does go, some of the things you do need to buy time tickets for ahead of time, like the good U-boat tour, you could still go hang out the exhibit, but you want to go inside it. Interesting. Yeah, we just walked by it kind of thing. It was still incredible.
00:02:29
Speaker
The engineering, there's so many, being able to see something like that now as a person that loves manufacturing and machining. You're looking at all these acne threads and pressure vessels and welds. On the Periscope, I was looking at these, I honestly wish I had a guru with me, a Renzetti or a Lipton kind of person because there were these
00:02:55
Speaker
almost look like one thread per inch polishing pattern. Like you took a one inch wide scratch right wheel or polishing wheel and you moved it along at one TPI or like peel, not peel grinding, but like, I don't know what the manufacturing technique was, but it was interesting to see like, hey, you've got this periscope that's eight, 10 inches in diameter and 30 feet long that has to be precise enough
00:03:22
Speaker
fitment like a hydraulic cylinder with the seals. I suppose the seals can soak up some of the inaccuracies, but nevertheless, this is almost 100 years old, sort of processed 80 to 90 years old, and it's got a whole saltwater like seal underwater like crazy, like the stakes couldn't be higher there. So it's really fun to see all that.
00:03:41
Speaker
It was good. The kids enjoyed it and there was enough. There's tons for the kids, right? Kids loved it. Yes. The other super fun thing was they have a space section, which was apparently somehow under renovation. It wasn't closed, but there was some stuff in this, like obviously just missing like empty for space, but they have the Apollo
Unexpected Encounter and Social Media
00:04:05
Speaker
11 practice training lunar module. So it's really cool because you see the size of it. It's much bigger than I would think. So you get to see that, that they use to practice their excursion stuff. And then they have the Apollo 8 command module, which was the command module that flew around the moon, but didn't land. And
00:04:31
Speaker
They had the hatch door open, so it was really cool to see the pieces. I saw it years ago, but just to see it again, to see the pieces that were all part of that project, Egress. And then, and then this is crazy, John. I'm sitting there with Yvonne and the kids, and this person goes,
00:04:48
Speaker
Is that John Saunders? And you know who it was? It was Silo's Garage. OK. Which I know you know, because I started following him now on social and Insta and YouTube. I've seen that you've liked some of this stuff and all that.
00:05:04
Speaker
So, he's worked in, he's got an internship going on and his stuff is, I've only checked out some of it on vacation, but I would for sure recommend, like he's just an absolute kind of metrology precision machinist kind of guy. Yeah, because he made cast iron lapping plates like right before I did and I was like, okay, he's doing it, I'll do it. Yeah, have you talked to him? Not much directly, a couple odd comments. Yeah.
00:05:32
Speaker
Dr. Earth guy. That's awesome. Yeah. What are the odds his girlfriend was there as well. She's she's doing something in Chicago. So they were both visiting for that reason. The chances right. So so funny. Cool. What do you have to
Canada Day and Family Plans
00:05:50
Speaker
Um, so we had Canada first is our Canada day, kind of our July 4th kind of thing in Canada. Um, so we had Saturday, Sunday, Monday off nice long weekend with the kids. Uh, it rained like hard all weekend. So we just kind of stayed in, which was really nice. Um, life and I swam in the lake a couple of times, swam in the pool, grandma's pool, uh, in the rain. That was nice. Nice weekend. But, um,
00:06:17
Speaker
Otherwise, totally back in work mode now after being gone for a couple days last week, last weekend. Just doing good. Doing good. Keep my head down and getting a lot of little projects wrapped up so that I can move on to further bigger projects. What's on your plate?
Machining Challenges and Design Tweaks
00:06:38
Speaker
Rask tweaks. Still working on the bevels on the speedio. Trying to get the grinding on the speedio. Talking with Greg at Luma Labs. He's now Yamasin speedio guru expert kind of guy. And super wealth of knowledge. So I'm glad I finally reached out to him. And so we talked about, it's been mentioned before this submicron option for the speedio.
00:07:04
Speaker
which I've only heard about through the grapevine kind of thing. I didn't hear about it when I was ordering the machine.
00:07:10
Speaker
Which is odd because it's like, salesmen are usually quick to say, hey, there's a- Yeah, you need everything. Well, if I walked into sales and I walked into your shop, I would be like, okay, this guy's clearly willing to recognize the value of- Yeah. Precision. It might've been on the original quote. I don't remember. I'd have to check actually. But yeah, it turns out it's a chip. I don't know what it looks like, but they say it's a chip that plugs into the motherboard and-
00:07:36
Speaker
It's got its own proprietary licensed knowledge, technology, whatever. That's why it's an add-on chip, not just a little software update because it's a licensed agreement from somebody else or something. We talked about getting me one of those. It's not that expensive. I think it's a couple of thousand dollars.
00:07:59
Speaker
And I think that will accomplish the step accuracy that I'm trying to achieve with the grinding. But more importantly, this whole process
00:08:10
Speaker
because the same exact process works great on the current and it's a little choppy on the speedio. But it got me to realize that not only is the design of the Rask blade not perfect for what I'm trying to do, but also the position of it on the fixture could be better to get a more linear motion instead of a tapered motion.
00:08:31
Speaker
Because it's trying to move over a distance of three inches. It's trying to move in a little bit as it's going along that distance. Like in Y or something. Yeah, exactly in Y. So over three inches, it's trying to move two thou in. And so every 80 thou over, it does a tick, a tenth of Y, and then 80 thou more, and then a tenth of Y. And that doesn't show on the current. It does show on the speedio. But I'm like,
00:08:58
Speaker
Why is it designed like that? So I redesigned the bevel just ever so slightly so that I can have this main belly of the blade, the chunk of it, all perfectly an X. And that's the hardest part to polish out anyway. And I'm like, OK, but that requires all the fixtures. Oh, really? Yeah, which is not a bad thing. And I designed all my fixtures and tombstones a couple of years ago.
00:09:28
Speaker
with the knowledge that someday I might update these. And I think we're getting to that day, which is good because it gets me to reframe how we're producing the RASK. It's going really good, but kind of limited by time and cycle. And it's getting me to dive deeper into some of it to find optimizations and what to put on the speedio, what else to put on the mori, what the current is best at doing, and how to get more out the door kind of thing.
00:09:54
Speaker
But if you didn't have those minor Y movements, then you don't need the speed upgrade, right? Possibly. So the blade is, if you start at where the bearings are at the back of the blade, it goes forward for a couple inches and then it tapers towards the tip of the blade. So once it starts to taper, then you do have some Y movements and you do want that accuracy for those movements. But I haven't tried it yet. Yeah, I'm not challenging.
00:10:24
Speaker
questioning the stuff I've seen like that, like super nerves or some of the look-a-heads and machine servo control stuff relates more to surfacing and fast surfacing. I would think your speedio, if you just did what you're talking about, like chop grinding along X. Along X by itself works great, but it does start to tick into the Y when the tip of the blade gets closer to the pointy tip.
00:10:53
Speaker
Yeah, right. But even if it's moving a tenth in, I guess I'm kind of challenging this idea that you need that package to handle finer resolution motion. Maybe you do. I don't know. I don't know.
Business Philosophy and Fixture Plates
00:11:05
Speaker
So I'm going to make one of the new fixtures that re-orients the new design blade just so, and then try it on both the speedio and the current and see what I got. Yeah.
00:11:19
Speaker
We're in a similar-ish awkward position. We've overhauled a lot of our steel fixture plate fixturing, and it's in a great place. It's never been better. I say that because there's things I know we could still improve on, but it's really good.
00:11:37
Speaker
And we haven't done that overhaul on the hobby stuff. And I, in a managing meeting this morning, you know, it was mentioned like there's some stress and frustration around that. So I actually need to go kind of dig in to see if and how I can help. Is it kind of one of those, hey, we need to put pencils down, stop and bite the bullet and overhaul some of that? Or is it, um, we,
00:12:01
Speaker
Well, yeah, it's an interesting business philosophy, but I've always said we are going to continue to machine and play a role in making the hobby plates because I care about that world. I care about that audience.
00:12:18
Speaker
And it reminds me of when I was on the Starrett tour years ago and the tour guide said, any consultant or MBA person would tell us, I forget the exact quote in the video, but they make hundreds if not thousands of products that they sell very few of, three to 15 a year, something crazy like that. Anybody would tell us the two
00:12:40
Speaker
All the benefits of getting those off of the product line and processes and not having the prints and the machines and the material, but the reality was the reason we're staring is that if the US government or the army or Intel or some company calls us up and they need some micrometer that we've not made in three years,
00:13:00
Speaker
That's who we are. That's what we do. Now, that's not the same as us making a hobby fixture plate. I get that. But I don't want to just say, well, we can make more money by only making Haas via two plates. So to heck with Sherlines or tags or so forth. But as you know from literally your story and from my story and from so many customers and fans, those Sherline customers become Haas customers.
00:13:24
Speaker
No, that's true. It's funny. I swear, I swear I don't keep doing it with the hopes of like, Oh, we'll get them early. Like, but yeah, there is also some truth to like
00:13:35
Speaker
The first thing I did when I got my take was I bought the, I don't, it wasn't, I don't think it was A to Z, C and C, but it was somebody made a take fixture plate. Yeah. And I was like, this makes sense. And for sure, like that gets you into this sort of fixture, fixture plate ethos or system. And it keeps you grounded in the reality of not every machine shop has big money. It's big, big time, you know, just buys all the best machines all the time. Like everybody starts somewhere and
00:14:04
Speaker
We're trying to promote the manufacturing community and world from the beginning to the end so I really appreciate what you're doing.
00:14:12
Speaker
but it does have to blend with the business and, you know, making money and not wasting time and things like that. So you're on it. We're also in this like awkward, like precipice because we have, um, they were making puck chucks while I was gone and we broke a tool which caused, oh, it was, it's like such a classic machine shop moment. A very tiny chip tip of a tooth broke, which caused like two thou lip on a part, which we couldn't catch until off two was done.
00:14:41
Speaker
What we're going to fix, but we more having more puck chucks will let us both improve that process here, but also that's kind of our next step on our Microsoft project workflow chart. We're not using it, but like OK, we need to now be. You know we have them on one machine. I need them on two more, at least at least the horizontal and start kind of using them every day. Yes. For example.
00:15:07
Speaker
Yvonne was putting together a marketing flyer and hilariously embarrassing.
00:15:14
Speaker
using them puck chuck for Rotary tables for so so super single use and on things like an HRT 210 a fourth axis, whatever we do have a pin now a this is the new 3d printed model, but so we have a Pin that would work to both clock the or the fixture as well as prevent it to give it some added rotational stability dip so
00:15:41
Speaker
Because with things we've found, we've been talking to some of the beta-less customers is that was their ideal use case, which is totally fine. Like a one-pallet use where something goes on just the one. Bingo. So you need clocking, yeah. Bingo.
00:15:57
Speaker
I'm coming at it from, you know, three axis style, quick fiction to pull a vice on and off with one button, pull a two side of a tombstone off with one button, put fixtures on with one button. So that would be having two, three or four, even like CJ is using five or six pucks on his. And so, um,
00:16:17
Speaker
long-winded way, we started looking at in the marketing flyer of putting the puck chuck on a fourth axis just as a rendering and then we realized, oh my gosh, like almost all of the fourth axis products out there have six, not four, like 60 degree spacing, not 90 degrees pole spacing. Whereas that's 90 degree spacing. Easy fix. Interesting, yeah. Whether we have a separate base or a universal base sort of option. Interesting, okay.
00:16:45
Speaker
Right. You know, we're coming out from compatibility with Saunders machine works fixture plates, which has the diamond pin quick locating, which CJ, it was awesome to hear him say like, I had to move them between machines real quick to do something. And that made it so easy. But we also want them to be able to fit on, you know, who makes all this rotary, Nick in their coma, Oz and brother.
00:17:10
Speaker
That's cool. I mean, you're showing me the 3D printed model in your hands. It looks amazing. And it's very small, very low profile too.
Zero-Point Fixturing Benefits
00:17:18
Speaker
And I could see that being used on hobby machines. Yeah. So this is the big boy version. And what does that mean? So this is pneumatic. OK. It will have air in. One air valve will control numerous puck chucks. So with one switch, you can release them all at the same time.
00:17:39
Speaker
and it will be priced very well compared to alternative products in the space from the Shunk, Siroas, et cetera, the world. But it's still going to be an expensive product, especially relative to Sirota. But we're also- I have learned that fixturing is worth money. Fixturing is expensive and fixturing is often worth it.
00:17:59
Speaker
I agree. So one puck chuck, we're absolutely on track to keep one puck chuck under $1,000. But still, if you need four of them, you're talking about an investor that's usually more than our fixture plate. Whereas a lot of the sales pitch prior to this was, hey, you buy the fixture plate, now you've got my devices for $200 a pop. That's a great value. So I don't want to be blind to that sort of inversion. You're giving options.
00:18:23
Speaker
We're also coming out with or working on a hobby version of this, the difference being that it's single. You have to actually each one to undo them. Is it still pneumatic or is it like lever operator or something? It'll be mechanical. So it'll be able to be significantly less priced. Frankly, it'll be fine for rotaries because with a rotary, you don't necessarily need to have air on it because if it's just one puck chuck, you can just use your own tool to open and close it. Yeah. So it's exciting. That's cool. Yeah.
00:18:53
Speaker
Yeah. No, I am totally drinking the Kool-Aid of zero point fixturing and quick change, repeatability, all this stuff. And I hesitated for many years. You know, I had my orange vices on the morning and not quite zero point. And I would mostly just leave my fixtures on the table and each one would have its own offset. And it wasn't this concept of the aroa system or the chunk system or the puck chuck system where it's like, no, just pop it on, put the next one on, hit go.
00:19:21
Speaker
Yep. Yeah, very cool. No to be to be able to have the first kind of zero point focus toward that hobby world as well Is and even your even your pro version is cheaper than everybody else's Yes, yeah, yeah, I'm excited. Yeah, so get our ducks are on that awesome. Yeah. Yeah
00:19:45
Speaker
What do you have to, uh, what else is going on? So the guys are installing, um, laser, what's it called? Um, a laser shield. Uh, oh, I'm blanking on the name right now. A curtain.
00:19:58
Speaker
Not a curtain. It's built into the windows of the enclosure on the router. Because we put the laser engraving head on the router. And we just have this cardboard box that we kind of place around the machine. And we have a yellow safety vest we drape over it that tells everybody the laser's on kind of thing. Don't look inside. So I ordered this laser shielding. That's what it's called.
00:20:22
Speaker
Um, and I completely expected like window tint, you know, like orange window tint, self adhesive, you peel it off, you put it on the acrylic, uh, of the closure and it'll be good. Uh, no, it's like, like a Marine vinyl thickness. It's like, uh, 80 thou thick. Oh, it's like, like rubbery and it's not adhesive at all. And I'm like, what am I supposed to do with this? Yeah. And it was expensive. It was like a thousand dollars for however many feet I got of it.
00:20:51
Speaker
Okay. However, they were able to attach it to the acrylic glass and kind of use tape and gaskets and things like that on the outside periphery to get it in place. And now the laser, the router is laser compliant. Nice and safe now. Is it different stuff for... Oh, you have a fiber laser, not a CO2 laser on that. It is a diode laser.
00:21:16
Speaker
Yeah, that's a fiber laser. Which is different. No, it's not fiber. It's actually, it's like a diode. It's an LED. It's a light emitting diode. So anyway, it's got a specific 450 nanometer wavelength. So you need a specific kind of laser shielding for it. And it's all good now. A fiber laser is a diode laser. Yeah, but a fiber, doesn't it feed through a fiber optic cable from a box to the head? I don't want to talk about stuff. I don't know
Fiber Laser Purchase and Setup
00:21:44
Speaker
what I'm talking about. I don't know either.
00:21:48
Speaker
Yeah. It looks whatever. Okay. Yours is now safe. It was always safe, but now it's safer, better. Yeah. You always have to wear ... I mean, you should still wear glasses around it, but at least now the enclosure itself is safe to the shop. Yes. Got it. Which is a big concern of ours. That was just put in yesterday, which is great. It looks okay even though you had to kind of
00:22:11
Speaker
Yeah, it has all these little air bubbles between the shielding and the glass. So you see that through and couldn't really get around it, but whatever, it's fine. So coincidentally, we've got our fiber laser. Yeah, give me updates. So I'll just share what I ended up going with, and folks can take this for what it's worth, how it helps them.
00:22:38
Speaker
The two that seemed to point toward the most available slash largest user base slash best service options or turn options were between OM Tech and Cloud Ray. I ended up going with the Cloud Ray. Both had lots of positive things in community comments. Both had some of your to be expected like horror stories of customer service and post sale issues.
00:23:04
Speaker
Take that for what it's worth. They appear to all be Probably the same sort of origin source manufacturer. I believe they're all Raytech lasers There's a couple good videos out on YouTube from guys to talk about like if you don't want the I actually didn't even see them in my search But there's a super there's a super cheap is it wells or somebody they stay away from but Raytech was fine There's a JT or JTL JPL or somebody that's yeah, I couldn't justify that so
00:23:32
Speaker
ours arrived quite oddly.
00:23:36
Speaker
Everything was fine, except they forgot the base plate that kind of looks like a fixture plate that the whole thing mounts to. And we could have hacked one of our shape logo plates, but I was like, no, don't waste our time. We don't need it running today. So the replacement arrives today. They were great about it. They were kind of saying this picture is kind of a how is this missing, which I'm like, hey, I get it. I don't know how you guys didn't include that thing in there, but it came in a wood crate. So it wasn't like we
00:24:06
Speaker
Could have missed a large object like that So I don't have any update on the use of it What I will say is I've got a couple comments including one from a guy shout out to you TJ No affiliation here whatsoever. Just again relaying this on
00:24:22
Speaker
I want to let you know that there's good options from a guy who buys them direct from China without the stickers that you might see on the brands like the ones I just mentioned. You can probably save some money. You can reach out to him direct JWLaser underscore Lucas on Instagram. Apparently, a bunch of other people in the machinist community have bought them. Again, no
00:24:43
Speaker
vouching for him here, but more just like it sounds like they're all come to the same place. It's just a question of what vehicle you want to use to pick one up. We got a 30 watt goal is to engrave 4140 steel to market everything I'm told 30 watt should do it. It's significantly better than 20 watt. It's not 50 watts. Some people said I need 50 watts, but plenty of people who have these said no, you'll be fine with 30. So interesting. Yeah. I'll let you know what we learned.
00:25:09
Speaker
Yeah. And then I was also hearing higher wattage doesn't perform well at low wattage functions. Like if you get an 80 watt and you want to do like a super light, tiny little fining gravy at 10 watts or whatever, then it's not as efficient as that.
00:25:24
Speaker
Yeah, some of what I read too, the higher wattage is needed because of the Galvo nature. You're shooting out further and I guess your focal length changes, but we're engraving. The plan right now is to be engraving in a very small area, like one square inch. And then 50 of them on the table at once. No. That's a good point, but no. Because it's like a five second cycle, right? Like, done. Although, it's funny, now that we've got it into more
00:25:51
Speaker
We're starting to move this whole business into the next stage of stuff. I'm starting to realize as we look at buying the surface grinder, what and how could it be automated? No plan is automated, but could you? Would you ever want to?
00:26:06
Speaker
What things are we doing that we shouldn't be doing? Like they could be better done or better automated. So things like the laser. If we really need to mark a thousand pull studs and we don't want to ship them out to be marked, we want to do it here. We have the laser. That's the kind of thing where it's like, okay, get a hopper or a vibe bowl that feeds them into a shoot and then a mechanical thing that moves them off. That's the kind of thing that I could...
00:26:32
Speaker
more and more seed getting involved in doing. Or the middle ground of that is to make a 3D printed fixture that holds 20 at once. And if you want to serialize them, you can have the macro count up and then just 20 and then the next 20 you do that every day like or something. Yeah, that would help with volume. I'm more about
00:26:51
Speaker
the workflow of not having folks involved in it. That idea that you could just take them over to the laser room, and then as you need them, you hit somebody, oh my gosh, this is exciting. You could have it hook into Lex or just some, and it makes batches of 50, and when it runs low, it queues it up, and it automatically makes 50 more. That way, you always have enough. You're not overproducing.
00:27:18
Speaker
That could be pretty cool. And all you need to do, it's a pretty easy part to handle. A pull start is not difficult to grab, orient, locate, fixture, all that. That could be pretty interesting. Actually, even simpler version is what if you stack them all up, they're round, right? They roll. So stack them all up in a shoot, like hundreds of them. And then you just have a little gate that lets it roll into the laser zone, lasers, and then solenoid opens, and then the other gate rolls it out into a tub. And you can do that infinitely.
00:27:47
Speaker
That's kinda what I was thinking was, you don't need a UR robot, you could have a sweeper arm that just knocks it off into a pen. But I don't even want, I don't think I even want to have somebody have to load them into the PES dispenser or whatever. I like the idea of just having a bucket of 300 sitting there.
00:28:07
Speaker
But maybe you're right. Maybe having somebody spend three minutes loading up 200 in a shoot is worth it. You don't have to do this all once. You could do intermediary steps. Load it up in a shoot, and then it could make them on demand. And then you've just got them sitting there. Yeah, this goes back to the concept of, in the beginning, we always want to buy one machine to do everything. Right now, you're buying one laser to do everything. But what we're talking about right now is having a dedicated laser for pulse sets.
00:28:34
Speaker
Yeah. Eventually, you'd have another laser for whatever, modified spaces. That's always how it goes. You buy one to test the waters or because that's all you can afford and then you think it'll do everything and then you realize it won't do everything. It's like your first CNC machine. It's like ... Then you end up with like 10. Yeah. Yeah.
00:28:59
Speaker
probably going to leave ours in like the 3d printing room for now. And I think we bought some laser glasses, but I also just want to have a curtain up so that because yours is kind of in the middle of your shop. So you have that. Yeah.
00:29:15
Speaker
I mean, we're super safety conscious. We're trying to be compliant with rules. Years ago, we actually had the safety inspector, Ontario safety inspector, walk into our shop and shut us down for half a day. That was terrifying. Was that the machine stacked up? Yes, exactly. Somebody watched a YouTube video and commented that the shop's too packed and there's no room for one to work and they're hiring children. Sky was like 19 at the time.
00:29:41
Speaker
but he looked 12. Machines are stacked on top of each other, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, he came in, he found a machine where the interlock wasn't on and he's like, stop everything. We were back up and running by the end of the day, but it caught us off guard.
00:30:01
Speaker
We want to make sure that if or when that ever happens again, we're ready for it. That's fine. Yeah. It feels good to be safe in a shop full stop. It does. It does. The shop's getting bigger. It's not just me and Eric anymore. It's not just a couple of the guys. It's like experienced people, newer people, inexperienced people. You've got office staff walking through the shop. You've got visitors and vendors, everything. We had an Iskar vendor who's been in the industry for a very long time.
00:30:28
Speaker
walk up to the router as it's lasering. And he's like, Oh, what's going on here? And Angelo had to yell at him. Yeah, like no. Right. So but sure, people don't lasers are they're not tig welders. Yeah. So I'm curious how you guys move forward with the laser. It seems like most people have fiber lasers. They're just open. They're just lays. I don't know. I assume everybody wears glasses. But it's no joke. Like you only get two eyes. They don't grow back.
00:30:55
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And they made an enclosure. I chose not to buy it because I don't know if it's the right fit for now. I'll buy it without hesitation if it does make sense. But I think for now, we'll just end up having some physical walls or buy some of the, don't they make poly carb or acrylic that has laser coating safety to it? They do. Yes. Yes. And that stuff's not that expensive. But to do the whole CNC enclosure for the router would have been about the same as what I paid for my stuff. Yeah.
00:31:24
Speaker
It's all what you know that goes. Yeah, I'm really curious. Because, man, we've had a laser on our list for a long time. And the one you're getting is a lot cheaper than the ones I was looking at. Boss makes one, but it's $15,000.
00:31:36
Speaker
Yeah, ours was, I mean, they had some fire sale deal, but it seems to be the laser websites seem to be constantly running all these sorts of promotional deals, but I think it was $2,700. Oh my goodness. That's sitting on our floor. At this level of business, that's almost impulse buy.
00:31:54
Speaker
You know territory, it's not but no John no, I'm just saying preparatory purchase bro. Yes. No, it's not because it's like that's what how you I Remain steadfastly disciplined on not that's why I don't have one yet. Yeah, two-check two-check
00:32:11
Speaker
But that's why I'm kind of like subconsciously nudging you don't just go spend money with the brother because there's an option like make sure. Yeah, exactly. You know, or look, I feel like I feel like okay, so I've got a couple situations. One was with Haas when the UMC was supposed to come with a bolt down kit and they forgot to include it and they sell it for two, three, four or 500 bucks or something, which is of course, a gross markup. What is it bolting down?
00:32:41
Speaker
The machine. Because ours is, the DTs, you definitely need bolted down. The UMCs, you don't necessarily need bolted down. But ours, you should because it's hooked up to a palpable. I forget whether they just included it in their charge or knocked it down, the price significantly. Because it's kind of like, look, man, when you shoot the PO, we worked with our sales rep. They understood the application. It's kind of some shared responsibility that you didn't get the correct little small item included here.
00:33:08
Speaker
Similarly, with the Okuma, we wanted a feature that wasn't... I forget what the details were. And it was a software sort of thing. And I forget, I think it was...
00:33:21
Speaker
Again, either given to us or like, hey, are you OK if we charge you 400 bucks for this option that would have been 2, 3, 4 grand? Or in your case, be like, hey, I don't mind paying for it. But so long as it solves the problem, if it doesn't, you can either rip it out or just leave it in there. But like, yeah, let's figure that out. I think that's what's going to happen with Greg. He said he found a chip. And I'll leave the details there. But yeah, I'm happy to pay for it if it works. Right.
00:33:54
Speaker
What's on tap today?
Pallet Changer Setup Updates
00:33:58
Speaker
I probably want to get designing that new fixture for the brass blades because that's pretty exciting to me right now. Finally heard back from
00:34:10
Speaker
my local, my speedo dealer who is, how do you explain this? So the Aroa, to hook up the Aroa to this video, the Palette Changer. Oh my gosh. It's still ongoing. It has to go through my speedo dealer even though they don't really.
00:34:25
Speaker
have anything to do with it, but I can't go directly through a row up for some reason. All the money has to go through the dealer, whatever. Anyway, I heard yesterday that they got a box of parts from the row up. I'm like, sweet. There's supposed to be a very large sheet metal panel like eight feet tall as well. Is that there? He goes, no, let me check. He said the box of parts, he's the applications guy. He's like, there's a lot more things in here than I thought there was going to be just this machine up.
00:34:53
Speaker
Okay. We're shipping it out today. That's progress. That's good. Then I don't need the side panel. It's more of a safety thing. I mean, we've been running without it for the past year almost, but it is a safety thing. You could stick your arm in there and have it ripped off by the robot. Sure. Even though you wouldn't, but whatever.
00:35:16
Speaker
But I think that box implies that we have everything required to do the install and now they just have to schedule the service and a row of service guy to come up and install it. And then I can finally palletize that machine. Sweet. Good. Yeah, that's huge. That's great. Yeah, it's almost like grind rasks before you worry about palletizing it, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
00:35:35
Speaker
But it's almost like I've been waiting so long for it that the excitement has worn off. And I'm like, yeah, obviously I still want it. I still need it. But it's just weird. It's been a long time. It's been a year. But whatever. I'm at a potential inflection point with our reverse osmosis water system. It's been fine. I like it.
00:36:00
Speaker
And we have a RO system that's Amazon commonly used for households and fish aquariums. But it advertises 75 gallons a day. I'm well aware that those are often grossly oversold. RO production, I'm not an expert, but I believe depends on both the state of the membrane, like how clogged up is the membrane, but also how much pressure you have coming in.
00:36:21
Speaker
We, a year ago, bought the Amazon Aquarium booster pump for not even a hundred bucks, maybe 80 bucks. That was great. It helps increase the pressure. Two weeks ago, a week ago, I realized we were running a quarter inch line from the faucet about 20 feet over to the inlet. And I was like, wait a minute, now you're choking down that
00:36:44
Speaker
The whole rich so i switch that out with a garden hose that took four seconds and now we're feeding it garden hose volume right up to it still has to go to a quarter inch for like one inch but still we have seen. Increase volume and flow but i think the combination of how much more or machines were running it's back to summer again and we now have one of our guys that's much more focused and task on.
00:37:09
Speaker
tending to machine-cooled levels, we just aren't producing enough water. So it doesn't look like there's an easy answer of, I don't really want to spend 500 bucks on the higher volume RO systems. I also never have loved the fact that RO is super wasteful, like it wastes four gallons for every gallon you make.
00:37:27
Speaker
I also love, you know, the kind of Dennis Rathy, like, you know, hundreds of dollars a month for a service, but maybe I'm being too cheap. So if anybody has any tips on other obvious things I might be missing about, why is a so like our 75 gallon system
00:37:42
Speaker
per day, it seems to produce under 10 gallons a day, I think. Maybe I'm wrong. It's hard to measure because we're constantly drawing from it. Yeah, yeah, I can see that. But, you know, even over the weekend, when no one's here, it's not producing. I'll have to try to I'll check it this weekend when no one's here just to get a better idea. So and filters are good, the membranes still good or
00:38:04
Speaker
Yeah, we replace them regularly. And we also have an inline TDS meter to know when it starts to spike. And the filter's two weeks old right now. So I'm hoping that there's a better thing I can do just to bump it.
00:38:21
Speaker
to 20 or 30 gallons a day reliably, I think would be a huge improvement. Huge, yeah. Well, if you want another supplier, uswatersystems.com. Okay, thank you. That's where we got our stuff from and they know water. And in fact, if you just called them and told them exactly what you told me, they would have the answers for you. They are extremely helpful on the phone. Okay. Even if they don't get your business, they're like... Okay, that's great to know. Extremely helpful.
00:38:50
Speaker
It's like when you talk to an actual coolant tech who knows the answers to every question you could possibly ask. That's this company for RO water and DI water and all that stuff. That's where we got our system from. It was like $450 for the RO kit. It's the light commercial kit, I think it is.
00:39:11
Speaker
And I think once we put a booster pump on it, I bought the kit that you told me to buy, but I haven't installed it yet. I think once we put the pump in, we'll be super happy with water production. As it is, it's fine, but sometimes we do drain it and we have to wait for it to fill up. Yeah, right. But for the most part, it's keeping up, but I think the pump will just allow it to overproduce, which is where you want to be. Yeah, exactly.
00:39:37
Speaker
So are you pumping water into an IBC tote and then pumping out of there? Correct. Yeah, same as us. Does yours get dirty? We've got algae forming at the bottom of ours just a little bit. Really? Oh, and that's John. What are you talking about? You can't have algae in your IBC tote and have foaming and not put the two together.
00:40:00
Speaker
It's a good point. Tiny little bit. And we do watch it now periodically, but that was a good point. Do you have any windows in your shop at all?
00:40:09
Speaker
Well, unfortunately not. I would actually love that. But no. In this case, because we do, we have four big windows a high. And I don't know if Sun ever hits the IBC toad, but I know that algae likes light. And if the IBC toad was perfectly black, the algae couldn't form or something like that. Yeah, or just apply whatever. Yeah. John, that's your problem. Interesting. I will investigate. Yeah.
00:40:40
Speaker
It's not much, but it does get a little bit green at the very, very, very bottom. Interesting. I'm glad that we- We revealed something. That's good. Interesting. That's the total smoking gun. Yeah. It's at least a variable that you don't have and many shops might not have and that we are dealing with.
00:41:04
Speaker
For the price of an, I mean, here in Ohio, you should be able to get an IBC tote for a hundred bucks, maybe 10 or 50 bucks. It's not that cheap here. Yvonne went up, they use. Yvonne went up to a Columbus micro distillery and bought a used gin tote. We washed the thing out. And yeah, it was hilarious because this is when she was still working in Columbus. So she took the truck one day and like here she is back into a brewery and loading an IBC tote to the bed. That's incredible.
00:41:32
Speaker
Well, it's funny, with 13 people working here now, nobody owns a truck. So we don't even have access to a truck. And which, I mean, I'm used to it. I've never owned a truck. But it's things like that you take for granted, you know? Yes, fair enough. I've never not owned a truck. Right? Yeah. Eric's totally thought about buying some old cheap Toyota or something and just to have a beater truck. Right. But I want to know if you can throw a hitch on the Tesla.
00:42:01
Speaker
You can. Really? Yep. That's funny. That's your problem. I was going to ask you the other cool updates. That's the update right there. I will. Okay. Maybe I'll shoot a message to John Wiley at Qualcomm and be like, by the way, if a friend had algae with that effect.
00:42:23
Speaker
Yeah. What my concern now is how do you shock the system or clean the system? And it's like, no, just start it. There's too much at stake here. Yeah. Ideally, you would want to, I mean, the Maury has brand new coolant, but I don't know, something. Interesting. OK, cool. I feel silly, but also great. Yeah. It might not be the issue, but it very much might be the issue.
00:42:52
Speaker
It's interesting because that could also explain why you're not necessarily seeing the metrics that we were looking for of the calciums or the dissolved solids, but rather you've got some biological stuff going on there. Yeah. And it's, I mean, we're constantly topping up with top-up coolant and RO water, right? So it's, you're constantly feeding that mildly allergic water. Algaeic. Algaeic.
00:43:20
Speaker
Something like to every tank. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Awesome.
00:43:30
Speaker
Well, I'm actually taking off Friday to I've got to be up in Wisconsin for another reason. And I ends up that I'm going to be like point eight miles away from the Hermely US. And I've been wanting to go to their Franklin showroom facility for a long time. And I reached out and I said, Hey, can I swing by Friday morning? They're like, absolutely. I'm super excited to finally have a chance to see that the showroom there. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah.
00:43:57
Speaker
So maybe I'll throw up some color. I don't know if we're going to film or anything, but at least throw up some short subs. That'd be cool. Yeah. Anything else? No, not really. See you next week. All right, bud. Take care. Have a great day.