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#325 Saunders went to Germany
277 Plays2 years ago
TOPICS
- Saunders went to Germany
- Grimsmo Kern spindle fix update!
- Chat GPT student
- PFG Live youtube channel
- Deutch science museum in Munich
- Buying new equipment and growing a company
- shop floods
- coolant foaming
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Business of Machining
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome back to the Business of Machining, Episode 325. My name is John Grimsmough. My name is John Saunders. And this is the podcast where every week, except for the odd week like last week, we chat about our manufacturing businesses and the growth of our companies and the future and the past and the present and everything that's kind of going on. Little touch base, private conversation between two friends.
00:00:24
Speaker
Exactly. Never breaking that, acknowledging that there's actually some listeners here. Yeah, no, just you and me. Yeah, which I like it that way because I do. Yeah.
00:00:36
Speaker
Cool. So how you doing, man? Uh, great. Honestly, great.
Personal Travels and Insights
00:00:41
Speaker
Um, it's, it's, uh, we were off for eight days and, um, uh, for my 40th birthday, Yvonne sort of said, what do you want to do? And I said, I want to go to Germany and I, this time I want to take the kids. So we took our, uh, six year old and nine year old and just had an absolute great time.
00:01:00
Speaker
That's fantastic. Yes. All family stuff. No like, will a work trip snuck in there? Correct. And if I'm being totally honest, I absolutely thought, I mean, there's like, it's pretty cool to be like, okay, I could hook up with all these different shops or people or factory tours or the ups. And I actually just said, no, we're just gonna
00:01:22
Speaker
enjoy the time. The hilarious thing, I promise you it was not planned is we're driving from Munich to the town of Fusen where Neuschwanstein is. And so we're driving on this German Autobahn A10 maybe or something. And I knew we were in about the right area, but
00:01:41
Speaker
it didn't even occur to me that we would literally drive past Kern, as they say it. And it actually, but also shockingly was our exit. And so I was like, Oh my God, no, we got to stop. And it's, it's, it's 5 30 on a Friday, uh, on a holiday weekend. So of course no one's
00:01:59
Speaker
There actually were some cars in the parking lot, but they were closed. So we stopped in the same parking lot where you, me and Lawrence and Marv hung out and snapped a selfie and just thought, this is hilarious. Jane was actually asleep in the car. So it was just me playing with Yvonne. But then what's even funnier is when we drove then on these back roads that the GPS took us to get from this
00:02:24
Speaker
exit to the castle or the town where the castle is. It took us through that town of Myrna where K2 is, or K1, whatever. Yeah, yeah. We actually passed the job shop as well. I'm like, oh my God, this is surreal. Yeah. That's awesome. Good time. That's cool, man. Good for you. Yeah. How you been?
Machine Maintenance Challenges
00:02:45
Speaker
Good, been busy. Head down focus. The big news on our end is Tina is here this week. The current spindle has been pulled out. The new one is in. She's calibrating it. She's done a spindle warm-up. Everything looks good. She just informed me this morning in these three minutes that I saw her that the X-axis ball screw has a bit of
00:03:07
Speaker
questionable thing on the oscilloscope. She's like, maybe we should put new X-axis ball in because Y and Z look perfect, but then she showed me the chart of X and it's like zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
00:03:29
Speaker
And they weren't actually ridiculously expensive. I think it was $1,800 for a ball screw. Oh, really? It's a lot of money, but it's like whatever. Oh, Jon, respectfully, no. I mean, what? There's these- Higher low.
00:03:45
Speaker
I mean, that's borderline free. Sorry. I'm not willy-nilly at all. But there's these weird things that stand out in my business career of like what was expensive and what was not expensive. I used to even help going way back. I used to think that my boss buying Starbucks every day was, you know, I was a saver. I just saved my money. And that's like, oh my gosh, you could be saving so much money if you didn't buy a Starbucks.
00:04:08
Speaker
I'll put it this way, he didn't need to worry about the cost of Starbucks. And now I remember the first time we bought a drum of quality cam, I just remember thinking like, man, I'm really gonna have to think about spending I think at the time, it was like $1,400 or something $1,500. And that was that just that hurt. That was a lot of money. And at this point, look, it's not emotional, I guess is a proud thing to say, like, if we order two barrels of coolant, I don't even
00:04:35
Speaker
care. I mean, I care because I care, but like, no, it doesn't emotionally affect me. Exactly. And that's kind of where I'm at with the current upgrades and stuff. I mean, she's here to make sure that the machine is perfect or as good as it needs to be. And
00:04:53
Speaker
this stood out and they have the parts and it's like, yeah, kind of a no brainer. Like it's not even a question. And the fact that they can use the oscilloscope readings to visually see that the X has a lag in this one area. I don't know. I got to learn more, but it's cool. It's really cool. Yeah. The thing I would say is how like putting, I know this is real time. You're just getting a separation of like how much what, you know, what is,
00:05:17
Speaker
perfect or not perfect, how far out and then yeah, if it's in error in a certain area, maybe worth looking at how you program. I mean, exactly. All your part, I'll put all your work on that machine happens within like two inches of the same x area.
00:05:33
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And we are getting a weird surface finish on grinding our rask blades, which has only happened in the past year or so. But it seems to be getting worse-ish. Comes and goes? I don't know. I've asked her about it before, and she's like, I'm looking forward to coming up and inspecting everything.
00:05:51
Speaker
And it's happening I believe in the x-axis so this might start to add up to like something you know we have results and she has results and something so we got some digging to do today that'd be really fun. Got it. That's exciting then. Yeah it's great about the spindle.
00:06:12
Speaker
out and in. No big deal. The old one goes back. It's basically current property now. I paid for the rebuild, and then they take the old one back as a core, and then they send it back to Fisher. She said a few weeks. They rebuild it. They get it back for their inventory, and they have a couple spindles in rotation so that whenever a customer needs it, there's one available, which is good because things happen.
00:06:34
Speaker
Was that an option presented to you to purchase a brand new Fisher versus the? Wasn't even an option though. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think it's necessary. Fisher refurbishes to like spec, you know? Yeah. Right. And they don't do any post-mortem that you get made aware of or anything. That's a good question. I don't know.
00:06:55
Speaker
But Tony kind of alluded that the, the shocking price that I ended up paying like the high price for a rebuilt spindle. I'm like, how much is a new one? And he's like a lot more. Really? Like, okay, cool. Yeah.
00:07:12
Speaker
The channel, the picture you posted of looking, or is that a little insta short of the, you shoved the camera kind of up the empty spindle cavity? Yeah, yeah. That was crazy. It's like ribbed, welded aluminum? I'm not sure. This channel, this ribbed assembly for rigidity and all this stuff, because most of the main components on the machine are either cast granite epoxy, whatever, or aluminum.
00:07:41
Speaker
Yeah, it looked like almost looks like a skyscraper with elevator shaft without the elevator in it. Like it was just cool. Just a tunnel. Yeah. And Tina was telling me that the new current, the HD actually has water cooling channels in that cavity as well to add further cooling. Like the spindle core itself is cooled, but the spindle housing on the HD is now also cooled. That's really cool.
00:08:08
Speaker
Well, that's great. Let's tell you, it's Wednesday. She was there. By the way, I didn't know. I for some reason thought that Tony was female, but I don't know why I would have thought that, but it's really cool to see top-notch female rock and roll in here. It's not your typical
00:08:32
Speaker
Yeah, Tina is a total rock star, like she's extremely smart. And I've been chatting with her, I mean, all the, whether it's service or whether it's application support, I mean, she's been my go to for the past three years. Go give that to Alex, please have an answer right now. Sorry about that.
00:08:55
Speaker
She says she only do this sort of work? I don't know what her exact title is, but she's like head of service department for current precision USA. She's got several service texts that I believe work under her and she's the leader of the team. I asked her, do you spend more time traveling or do you spend more time at the shop? She says almost all travel.
00:09:19
Speaker
Oh, really? She just goes to locations, current, current, current, current, and just like fixes machines or helps people or whatever. Why am I blanking on where is current USA look? Chicago. Do they have an office? Yeah. Showroom? I'm just like totally blanking on this. Yeah. They have a small showroom now and then they're building their new mega showroom. They just, Tony bought a building and a nice big size and he's totally renovating it and everything. It's awesome. That's cool.
00:09:49
Speaker
That's cool. Do you think they'll be done this week? Yeah, yeah. She flies out on Friday evening. And I don't know. Everything's happening pretty quickly. Sweet. She's like, I don't know how deep we'll go, how much needs to be done. But for the most part, she's going to wrap up. There's a Festo air valve that's kind of sticking and being weird and causing her to question things. So she's like, I'm going to overnight one from Kern.
00:10:17
Speaker
And it's going to be here at 10 a.m. tomorrow. Nice. Like, which is now, basically. So that should fix that problem too. But it's good because there's only so many things that we as users can like maintain and fix and clean and keep it running and stuff. And then someone like her comes in and it's like.
00:10:35
Speaker
Oh, she just knows. She's cool, right? Yeah, it is really cool. So we're trying to learn as much as we can from her, you know, right? Yeah. We just replaced the Okuma wear item. I believe it's carbide. It looks like a dowel pin with a hole through it and has a little gasket on the end. And it is what is pushed up against the.
00:10:59
Speaker
through spindle coolant stud, pull stud on a 20 tool. And so it's a wear item because when it wears out, it would leak coolant. So it lasts, depends on how much you use your machine in terms of hours or tool changes, but it's six to nine months, I think, for us. But it's a $400 part, so it's not like you're, it's not a $10 replacement part. So is that something that every owner is very aware of, or is that like most people forget about it?
00:11:29
Speaker
The nice thing about the OSP control is it tells you in certain maintenance items, don't know there's different alarm levels. I don't think this would stop the machine and you can run it past the warning date if you want to. And I've heard of some folks that will run it significantly past because they've got decades of experience and they know what to look for. But for me, there's no way I'm risking that right now.
00:11:53
Speaker
but it's easy to, it's one of those classic things. It's super easy to do when you know how to do it, but it's easy to do it wrong. And I found a YouTube video that's like eight year olds. I actually think it was from Okuma. And it's like the example of the worst kind of video because the person does the work. And then every time there's like a critical part, they just skipped like, okay, now that the thing is out, what do you want to do? I'm like, no, I need to see like, you know, how did you do that part? Yeah.
00:12:21
Speaker
And so I did a little iPhone video and edited it. And it's a three minute video that's already up on the maintenance log tied to that with the notes on it. And it felt good to know that we did that, did it successfully and left us all in a better place to where anybody else could do that with a pretty high degree of confidence. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. The other crazy thing, just changing subject is
00:12:50
Speaker
Vince, we're in the middle of a training class, the three axis class and Vince came in this morning and just looked at me and I looked at him. You ready for this?
The Role of AI in Education and Industry
00:12:59
Speaker
Yeah. I almost can't believe this, but I'm just repeating what he told me. There's a student right now attending our three axis CNC training class because chat GPT told him to come here.
00:13:11
Speaker
What? Yeah. So, I mean, fill in the blanks. I'm guessing that he asked Chachukupi something about how to learn CNC. Apparently, I've tried this. Vincent said he's going to try to replicate it and see what happens. But apparently, it was like, you should go take this class in Zanesville, Ohio. John. That's insane. What? What?
00:13:34
Speaker
I mean, I'm inclined to not talk about chat GTPD because it's just so pervasive and I think everybody kind of gets it. But I guess what I will say is I don't know that people are realizing how disruptive and how revolutionary these various types of artificial intelligence are going to be.
00:13:55
Speaker
quicker than we think. I've always admired the hypocrisy with which we look at history like, oh, it's so obvious that this shouldn't have happened. The Revolutionary War and the British soldiers war, bright uniforms and march through the field. It's like, well, of course it was easy to shoot you. You are wearing bright, bright uniforms with a drummer marching through, blah, blah, blah.
00:14:19
Speaker
And it's kind of like nowhere in the middle of like we realize just how frightening this is, but we don't. No one's unplugging the computer. Yeah, it's not stopping. Yeah. Okay. I just asked chat GPT. I said, what classes can I take to learn CNC machining? And it gave me six generic community college, technical college, online courses, apprenticeships, workshops, manufacturer training, nothing specific. Actually, maybe I'm not reading close enough.
00:14:49
Speaker
I don't see you. I'm happy to hear that you clearly have it like locked up, loaded, logged in all that. Uh, what did I see? Yeah. For online courses, it says websites like Udemy, Corsa, LinkedIn, learning, offer both. So it's a little bit of specific stuff. I don't see any other specific like references, but maybe he asked a slightly different question, you know? Sure.
00:15:09
Speaker
There's another AI, I don't believe this was strategy EPT, but another AI example that came up this week that I think is just frightening. Paraphrasing that the US Air Force Army asked it to help do some artificial intelligence around SAM sites like surface to air missiles.
AI in Military and Manufacturing: Future Perspectives
00:15:27
Speaker
And then they didn't like how good it was. So they're like, we want to shut you down. And so the AI tried to shut down the communications towers to stop the people who were saved to shut it down from shutting it down.
00:15:39
Speaker
Like that's SkyNet. So crazy.
00:15:44
Speaker
bringing it back full circle, there's been some chatter and talk about how it's going to play into cam programming parts. Frankly, if you look at the capabilities of what it can already do with language models and creating photographs, the idea of it just taking your fusion model, looking at what you or others have used to program parts, looking at machines that you have and realizing, wait a minute, I'm going to orient the stock with a new setup in this thing, with this speeds and fees, with these common operations. This is
00:16:13
Speaker
This is like... Within however many years, this is totally happening. This happened in like two days. This is like a joke for what it is going to pull up. I think you probably just need to do some finessing around the API or the integration. From a raw capability standpoint, this is cakewalk. Yeah. It's crazy. Crazy, right? Oh, no. Robots are going to take our jobs away. It's weird, John. It's going to be weird. Yeah, we'll figure it out.
00:16:43
Speaker
Do you clearly use it? Play with it? I play with it. I don't use it much. I'll ask it dumb. Like, how do I phrase this question or, you know, uh, ideas for things to do with the kids on the weekend? Usually terrible answers, but yeah, dumb things. Um, I've used it for some things, nothing shocking, but there was, um, part of me that wanted to start using it for YouTube for thumbnails and descriptions and titles. I got spammed with a AI.
00:17:13
Speaker
subscription service that does all this stuff for you. And you know, it's funny because that's the exact opposite of, you know, the game I'm playing these