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Business of Machining - Episode 102
240 Plays7 years ago
Spoke Too Soon.
Last week's episode featured Great Mood Grimsmo. He was in high spirits only to find Norseman fixture alignment issues that would plague the team for the remainder of the week. He and Angelo wade through the GD&T lake to find the variance and formulate a possible solution that involves changing the probe tip from 6mm to 2mm.
Click the Photo to View Post!
For Saunders, Monday morning bestows some thorn-in-your-side gifts. A letter from the bank creates strained relations, a Fusion 360 glitch causes Manual NC to malfunction, and an RFQ response from a vendor that results in a purchase, except they left out one TINY detail.
TELL ME SOMETHIN' GOOD!
As more machinists open their shops to viewers via social media and YouTube, big name companies recognize the potential benefits. The landscape of the machining industry is evolving. While proprietary information is still kept confidential, more businesses are warming up to visitors and sharing. To boot, long gone are the days when the idea of having 2 Renishaw probes on the same machine seemed cray-cray.
What makes the BEST WEEK EVER? Hint: It includes the National Tooling and Machining Association and ZEISS.
Processing Post Processing If you want to get started on Post Processing, check out the videos on the NYC CNC page HERE.
Spooky Sounds and Stethoscopes: Solved. The strange noise emitted from the VF-2SS in episode 100 has disappeared. Was it a major issue or a simple fix?
You know what really GRINDS my gears? Quality Control. Quality and lead time issues with outside vendors provoke questions. Saunders has reservations about bringing a particular process in-house but keeps an open mind to solutions. Don'tcha wish you had a Bourdelais around the corner?
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Transcript
Introduction & Schedule Changes
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining, Episode 102. My name is John Grimsmough. My name is John Saunders. This is an odd Monday episode. Sorry. No, it's fine.
00:00:14
Speaker
It's nice to be flexible so that, you know, when life gets in the way, we just tweak and change. That's fine. Yeah. My wife is traveling somewhat last minute. I've got to watch the kids and that cuts into our otherwise sacrilege or what is it? A sacred sank bomb time. How are you?
00:00:34
Speaker
I'm doing really good. I'm excited for the week. It's a good Monday.
Fusion 360 Glitch & Machine Stress
00:00:40
Speaker
Good. You are not stressed like I am now about this fusion glitch. Yeah, you just told me this morning. So explain it. Well, right now it seems like manual NC is just not working with the latest update.
00:01:01
Speaker
I suspect I'm hoping that they'll get that fixed pretty darn quickly. And if you haven't done the update, you'll be okay. And I've already heard there's been conversations about allowing folks to roll back versions in times like this. But for me,
00:01:19
Speaker
I get, that stuff stresses me out. Like I walk into the shop and I've got to deal with the fact that we can't run machines now or we've got to get super creative or go find a computer that maybe hadn't been updated or risk making bad parts because part of what we use manual and C4 is Renishaw probing tweaks. So the approach would still run, but it wouldn't run correctly. You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. You'd be missing the cool stuff that you put into manual NC. Um, I mean, I live off of manual NC. I have so many.
00:01:49
Speaker
so many routines in my production code that I would still survive, but I would just be hacking an old code with new operations posted out of fusion. Yeah. And then I, yeah, like I know how to do that. I'm fine doing that. It would be a headache for a couple of days until this got fixed, but yeah. So I'm not stressed about yet, but you told me like four minutes ago, so I haven't even let it sunk in yet.
00:02:18
Speaker
Oh, I'm just, I had the best week of my life last week. Yes.
Chase Bank Frustrations
00:02:26
Speaker
Like I just did. And I'll tell you about it, but now it's been on that roller coaster back to Monday morning. I'm stressed about, I'm actually pretty ticked it.
00:02:37
Speaker
Chase Bank, they're just, and every bank I know has its weaknesses, but I started a new account and worked with my local business relationship manager person to grow this relationship, new company, new account.
00:02:51
Speaker
And this is a few months back. And then they sent me this kind of letter that said, and they've sent a couple of them that said, we need more information. Please call this number. And my attitude was, you know what? You've got my number. You could reach out to me, or we can help handle this through my business relationship manager. And I politely mentioned to him over emails, like, hey, can you help me resolve this? And he's like, you should just call the number on the letter.
00:03:15
Speaker
And I'm tired of, do I have a relationship with you or do I have a relationship with the 1-800 number? Because I'm tired of you thinking it's okay for me to have to call a 1-800 number, go through a calling tree, wait on hold, validate my info at least once, if not two or three times to get through to you. I'm tired of it. And maybe that's me getting bitter or cynical or just demanding, but that's not, again, call me or deal with it through there. So part of me,
00:03:45
Speaker
knows you're better off in life not picking those battles. Just call the number, wait on hold, deal with it, go through all that account validation and my security number and mother's maiden name and all that crap. Just deal with it and get over it. Then part of me is like, no, I'm tired of these companies thinking that that's
00:04:02
Speaker
They only allow those things to be in place because customers allow it to happen, period. Yeah, they tolerate it. They put up with it. Nobody picks that fight, basically. Or if they do, then they're the odd man out kind of thing. Right. Yeah, we absolutely have the same problems with RBC Bank in Canada, QuickBooks, PayPal, even. We'll be on hold for an hour sometimes.
00:04:26
Speaker
usually Barry doesn't, just puts his headphones in and does other stuff while waiting for the thing to pick up.
00:04:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's absolutely a pain in the butt. And it's when you have that established business relationship with your manager, which we have that too now for about a year and a half now, we've had a, you know, business banking client manager person. Um, and she's been amazing, uh, but still doesn't solve everything. You still got to call in. You still got to go through these channels, just like everybody else, even though you have this like personal relationship with this person. Um,
00:05:02
Speaker
However, she's handled a lot of this stuff for us. A lot of it is that it's the gesture of that person saying, hey, let me get in front of this for you. I may still have to have you on the phone, but let me help figure this out or something versus what I'm getting now, which is when that guy literally just tells me, oh, you should probably read the letter and find that 1-800 number and just call in on that.
00:05:22
Speaker
Kind of like, I'm sorry, is your job just to basically sell an account and then run away? Like you waste your time on hold, buddy. You deal with the fact that you understaff call centers because again, you could just make people wait on hold. Do you think they would find loopholes so much faster if they did that? What do you mean? Like bottlenecks, I mean, you know, like waiting on hold, like a bank staff person
00:05:51
Speaker
isn't the one we don't hold anymore than you do. So they'll be like, well, we got to fix this. Yeah, right. Well, that's my point. It's like you spend your time. I mean, I will happily, I don't know, just absurd, like the way they handle these things. I want to send like a letter back to them to the address the letter came from and been like, I've received your inquiry just to let you know you're able to reach us at the contact information you have. And then send them a survey to see how they felt the customer service was when I sent them a letter about their letter back. It's like, yeah.
European Factory Tour Excitement
00:06:18
Speaker
Great week last week. Super excited. There's a, who is it? I want to look up the name of it so I don't miss the NTMA, National, I don't want to mistake what that stands for, National Tool Machining Association or something. It's a US group of manufacturers, machine shop owners, job shop owners, et cetera.
00:06:45
Speaker
Anyways, the guy that I got to know at that trade show at Emo from Big Kaiser is involved in it, and he sent us this invitation. All I've got to do is get myself over there, and then they take care of the rest, but we get to go tour. We start in Munich, Germany, and end in Milan, Italy, touring Heidenhein, Grob, Big Kaiser, Blaser, Swiss Lube, and Speroni tool presetters.
00:07:12
Speaker
What? Yeah. Right? So I'm going to go over the end of March and do a week of freaking awesome factory tours. And he said they're going to let us film at the, for sure, at Big Kaiser in Spironi. And he's checking with the rest of them to see how much we might be able to film. Epic. Oh, that's going to be so good. I'm super excited. Yeah, you better be.
00:07:42
Speaker
I feel like I haven't done a factory tour in a while.
00:07:45
Speaker
It feels like you just went to Sandvik like last week, but that was almost a year ago, I guess. It was summer. So this will be, yeah, it'll be nine months on this one. But that was just like, it was exciting for me because I love that chance to do that in life. I love sharing it with the folks on YouTube. I love seeing these factories. I love that these are companies that a year or two ago probably wouldn't have been as willing to consider something like this. Right.
00:08:13
Speaker
It'd be cool to go on my own, but really what is exciting for me is to be able to share that with everybody else. That was awesome. Nice. As you grow in acknowledgement and you get more followers, more connections, more people watch you, more people understand your story and are willing to reach out like that big Kaiser guy.
00:08:38
Speaker
And it feels like also the greater industry like those bigger companies are now seeing not just people like you and me but the industry as a whole as like social marketing is a real thing and we should be bringing more people into the factory and we should be sharing more of what we do.
00:08:54
Speaker
And it feels like both things are growing at the same time. And it's awesome. I think that's a good thing, right? Yeah, I think so too. What a great time to be alive, especially for nerds like you and me that just love opportunities like this.
00:09:10
Speaker
And this is single-handedly why I love doing what I'm doing. It's just to do that. And I think one of the reasons that last week felt so good was there were a couple other things I'll tell you about, but they were all outcomes that resulted from trying to just to do the right thing and be the right person.
Authenticity vs. Business Needs
00:09:30
Speaker
And we've had some people
00:09:33
Speaker
It may actually may be in the same vein of what you're just saying about people recognizing socially We've had some people sort of really want to get more involved with us in a way that would be potentially sponsorship but also kind of boxing us in in my Conviction has become clearer about look. Yes, we have to make ends meet. We have to run a business. This is a business I'm going to Europe that costs money a time away from the shop I've got to figure out how to make some money out of that, but I also
00:09:59
Speaker
don't want to be like some of my quote unquote competitors, which is, uh, you know,
00:10:05
Speaker
selling out and I like to focus on paying it forward, focus on sharing my passion, having the chance to go around, meet people, do good things, focus on the positives, but do so in a wholesome manner that reflects what I'm interested in and not just the extreme of NASCAR where I'm able to sell pixels. You know what I mean? You will never be a walking billboard and that's great.
00:10:32
Speaker
I love it. That makes me smile. That makes me happy. And that's not to say we don't have some commercial elements of what we do, for sure. But yeah, that makes me smile. I'm so happy. Yeah. And you and I feel the same way. Being able to share what we do, where we go, why we do it, and why everybody else does it too.
00:10:53
Speaker
You go to Heidenhine, you go, why do you make what you make? Sit down with the CEO for two minutes and ask him that question or whatever, and then see what kind of response he gets because nobody else is really going to do that. So I am excited. Yes. Yeah.
00:11:09
Speaker
had a kind of a, actually kind of in the same vein had the folks from Zeiss reach out and say, Hey, what you're doing is really cool. And they literally just drove down the next day. And we just had a great conversation. And it's funny, because I told them, I was like, just so you know, I have been interested in a CFM, like, that's not something that's, you go listen to the business of machining, staying at first six months.
00:11:38
Speaker
Yeah. But it's also one of those things where I want to get a CMM because we need it and are able to purchase it or maybe there's a discount, I don't know, but I'm not going to
00:11:51
Speaker
all of a sudden wears this ice shirt and they didn't ask that. It makes me feel good about just saying to them and companies like that, hey, no, we're a standalone business and we're proud of what we do. We had this awesome conversation. I was talking to the guy about understanding, hey, when do you use a star pro? When do you use a tilting AB head?
00:12:13
Speaker
What is it about CMMs that I don't know in terms of clean air and maintenance and talking about the clips of software. We'll see if it goes anywhere or not. It was just fun. We just nerd it out on CMMs for two hours. That's amazing. You're in a place in your business where your business needs to buy one at some point.
00:12:36
Speaker
Well, you know what I mean? Yes, I want one. So it's not like they cold called you and said, hey, let me try to sell you on a CMM. You're like, I'm already sold on a CMM. I just need more information. Yeah.
00:12:51
Speaker
That is really cool. Right? So it's just fun. It's just awesome. It feels good and makes me also want to do it in a way that is pay it forward for everybody and be proud of it and share it and nerd out on it. Yeah, exactly. They've got a big facility up in, I think, Brighton, Michigan. And that's the best place for them to go. It would be the best place for me to go. So I think I'm going to try to drive. It's like four or five hours, which is not bad.
00:13:21
Speaker
I was going to say the opposite. I was like, Oh, I wish it was closer. Anyway. Um, I think I want to go up there and just learn, take a plate fixture plate, you know, things like their CMMs do, what do they call it?
CMM Needs & Precision Measurement Challenges
00:13:34
Speaker
Continuous contact. So you could do, you know what I mean? Yeah. So you're like dragging the tip across the part and it measures it somehow.
00:13:42
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And I think there's still different levels of it. So I think the version I would look at could do continuous contact inside of a bore. So it could check circularity, for instance. But it's a software step up to do things like 3D servicing. Same hardware, but just software unlock, I guess.
00:14:04
Speaker
I don't, we bore our, we bore our board. So I'm not hyper concerned about circularity as much as I am other QC stuff, but I want to learn about how that could play a role in terms of the QC database and processing things through and all that stuff. Okay.
00:14:21
Speaker
funny on that is late last week was the first time I ever thought, man, I could use a CMM right now. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, it's funny because we talked last Wednesday morning and we talked about stress and I was like, oh, I'm in a good place. From that moment on, for the next three days, I was not in a happy place. Why? I was stressed and just I was stuck until late Friday.
00:14:49
Speaker
with the fixtures that we're doing. We've got our old fixture and then almost this new fixture and they're ever so slightly different. We're having this part where in the Norseman handle the pivot goes in and the head has to locate in a counterbore.
00:15:08
Speaker
And the whole and the head counterbore our machine from two different sides. So it's like a fixturing alignment issue and they're not aligning. So the pivot doesn't go in. So Eric's either throwing away pivots that are actually good or just sending handles back down to get reworked.
00:15:24
Speaker
So it's felt like a whole ton of rework and banging my head against the computer trying to figure out where the variance is. And I'm like, man, we should just take all of our fixtures and drive to Elliott Metz. I'm really good friends with them. I could probably sit on their CMM for an hour with their training guy and just have a CMM. They have a room full of CMMs because they sell sites.
00:15:44
Speaker
Oh, really? Yeah. They have like a climate controlled room and all this. And I'm like, I could probably hook that up and then measure the fixtures and see where the variance is and then know how to fix it from there. Right. So, yeah, I don't think I need to anymore, thankfully. Did you figure it out? I think I found some root causes, but.
00:16:05
Speaker
Yeah, it was really stressful because I'm like, man, I just I can't make parts because I know I'm making bad parts. I want to fix the issue so that we never have it again. You don't know where the issue is. Exactly. And the deeper we dove into it, you know, talking with Angelo and we learned a lot about GD and T, which is geometric dimensioning and tolerancing and tolerance stack up and, you know,
00:16:30
Speaker
there has to be a few tenths tolerance here or a thou or two or in here and then here and then here and they all stack up and you're like, you need like two tenths true position to actually get this to work. Like, so where do you build in the slop and how do you account for that and all that. So eventually I just figured out, let me just probe the hole, the pivot hole and reset the work origin based on that.
00:16:56
Speaker
that thing. Yeah. So it should be bang on. So then, hence my post about going to the two millimeter stylus instead of the six millimeter. So that I can actually get in that hole and, and do that. So I haven't actually swapped the probe tip yet, but I'm going to do that today. And it takes some code changes and some it's just been a headache. You know, stressful. I just wish it worked.
00:17:25
Speaker
But I found a very important variance as I was going through all the probe stuff. And there's all these variables in the machine that account for runout in the probe tip. So you're supposed to dial in the probes that it has no runout. But even if there is runout, you can calibrate the probe. And it'll be like, oh, I know where the center is, even if it's not on center.
00:17:48
Speaker
Really? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I didn't know that. So you can have it five thou out and the calibration routine will offset the machine so that it'll probe on center. The problem is my probe has zero run out because I broke it like a year ago and I had to replace it, except the calibration values are like 2.8 thou in X and 1,000 Y. So it thinks it has run out. So all your stuff is wrong on the right amount? Exactly.
00:18:18
Speaker
Oh my god. So I mean, it's not that I've been making bad parts except for this one little variable. It's just that all my parts have been too though off in relationship to each other from where I thought they would be. So this kind of speaks to some issues that I've been having.
00:18:35
Speaker
flipping parts and doing all this stuff. And it's like, Oh my gosh, how did I not catch this? Like, wow. So I'm, I'm glad I went through it. Cause now I learned this very important thing that the probe should be calibrated whenever, you know, the tip is replaced or set those values to zero and just have the probe with no run out. That should work. Um, right.
00:19:00
Speaker
So it's not that hard to dial in to like two tenths, which is not good for just is. And I checked mine. It's been I haven't touched it for probably six months. It has less than a tenth of run out still.
Probe Calibration & ID Measurement Challenges
00:19:15
Speaker
So I need to buy a ring gauge with a precision.
00:19:21
Speaker
like class X or XX tolerance hole on the inside, which is much less than a thou of tolerance. So if it's like a one inch ring gauge, it'll be 1.0000 something. Sure. And then calibrate to that. And then then I should be good. But I think if I measure the tip, and I know it's two millimeter exactly, and then I put no compensation value, and it's got no run out, it should just work. Yeah.
00:19:52
Speaker
Sure, but don't create more problems here by making assumptions. True. Yeah, but I don't have a ring gauge right now. I need to buy one. Do you have board gauges or anything? Do you have a way to accurately measure IDs? Not really. Pins. Pins are a bit small. You could turn a ring gauge on your dock.
00:20:14
Speaker
Not that I encourage you to do that. But again, then you don't know the exact, you don't know the exact diameter if you're actually going to do this properly. So you just pick up a ring gauge locally. I'm going to call around today. Yeah. Yeah. I figured they're like, I mean, they can be one to $200. Yeah. But I'll need it. I've heard of some guys mounting it rigidly to the table. You just leave it there all the time. But I'm like, won't that get with chips and coolant and grossness? Yeah.
00:20:44
Speaker
or some guys will mount a ball, like a test bar with a ball or something. It's like a ball on a shaft. You just mount it to the table and then the probe can come in and do a bunch of 3D measurements on that ball. Yeah, that you need for four and five axis calibration. We bought the SPI ring gauge off of MSC, which is plenty good.
00:21:06
Speaker
And all you've got to do is lightly, you honestly probably don't even need to clamp it down of here. If it's dry surface, when you calibrate, you should lightly strap. As long as it doesn't move, yeah. But I haven't looked at MSC. It was, I want to say, a hundred and some dollars. And it's a two inch, I think, 1.99996. It's like four millions or 40 million under two inches. Yeah, yeah.
00:21:33
Speaker
I'm sorry. That stinks, dude. It stinks. But once I figured that out Friday night, I was like, oh, well, I wish I could fix it. But at least I know the problem. And it will allow me to be a better machinist now because I'll trust it better. I'll know it better. I have found a problem, a variance. So I'm kind of happy about that, even though it was very difficult and stressful.
00:21:58
Speaker
Yeah. The three or four times I've had in-depth fixturing conversations with folks that I look up to or respect that have really made a lot of parts. They talk about the issues you're having right now, which is each fixture is going to be different. It's going to have characteristics. It's going to have characteristics that change over the life of it.
00:22:16
Speaker
It, this last came up when I was thinking about horizontals and there's a look, don't get me wrong, horizontals have their place and they can be great. And they are used successfully, but it's also the case where not every fixture is going to be the same. And if you start thinking about putting thousands of dollars of fixturing hardware on a tombstone and thinking that you're going to go from zero to a hundred successfully without glitches or problems. And you can't always over probe everything, especially if you're in a production environment where you're buying a horizontal to gain efficiency. Right.
00:22:46
Speaker
And, um, and yeah, I mean, even if you ditched your old fixture and just use the Amish ones, so they're all the same, at least, how does that, does that work going forward? I don't know. Yeah. So we're using one of the Amish fixtures. We have another one kind of set up with pins and we, we started to kind of gauge, you know, measure the location of the pins and stuff, but we didn't really dive deep enough into it to get a good answer. Um,
00:23:12
Speaker
You know, I have a lot of faith that Amish made them all the same. Like you probably just ran the same program over and over and they're all going to be within tenths, I would assume. But you never know.
00:23:24
Speaker
And for me to assume that everything's just going to line up and work and we're now going to make, you know, four times as many knives in the same amount of time, blah, blah, blah, then that's making too many assumptions. Just like you said, like, I love the concept of a horizontal and like, Oh, you can get five pallets and four sides of each tombstone and I could just load a pallet on each four side and we'd make knives 24 seven, no problem. And I'm like,
00:23:48
Speaker
there's those problems involved with that. I don't like having so much stuff tied on on one machine, which is what I've spent kind of the evening and morning diving deep into is when I get a palletized five axis, I'm thinking smaller pallets with less parts on them so they can flow through and actually be checked sooner. Yeah, I like that idea. I don't like having 20 knives tied up in a tombstone that I don't get to see till they're done.
00:24:18
Speaker
Oh my God. Right. Well, or the idea of it's okay to make something complex as long as like for instance, a lot of complexity to a fixture, but perhaps there's something or some version of
00:24:33
Speaker
You know, instead of having, you already kind of do this, right? Like you have the inserts on the fixture. So those, those inserts, you know that they're actually going to move relative to the overall location of the pallet fixture, but that's okay because that way they're replaceable or you can have pins in them or wear items and then you probe
00:24:51
Speaker
smaller features on one little insert in the relative locations there are good. And if you have damage one or you crash one or strip a thread out, it's okay. No big deal. I'll just swap that out. And I've got process reliability to actually just keep going rather than worry about this investment piece of this 20 inch aluminum, beautiful five axis machine
00:25:10
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And then it was a great experience for me and Angelo to go through and kind of hack through how I made the fixture, how Amish made the fixture and how we would make fixtures in the future. So instead of pressing like boring one five six two hole and then pressing in a pin, that's one six to let's press in a bigger pin and then machine it to size in location.
00:25:38
Speaker
Sure. Based on the location of that fixture of the datum, the origin of that fixture, so that everything's kind of done on the same machine and the same op, same setup within tolerance of the machine is, you know, guaranteed to be where it's supposed to be. Cause even when you press in a dowel pin, it might go in crooked. It might not be happy, you know? Yeah.
00:25:59
Speaker
Huh. So what's the next step on fixing that or moving forward? I'm just about ready to actually probe that pivot hole. Um, but I will need manual NC to be able to do that. Oh yeah. Gosh, good grief. As long as they don't close for years and I should be good. But you've also got to swap out your probe tip dial it in and then get rid of that thing, which is, oh, that's so scary. Again, it's like, as soon as you change,
00:26:27
Speaker
One thing, it's like backups never work like they think they're going to, people think they're going to work like. I can't remember, we got bit last week on it. Oh yeah, it was the thing I think I mentioned on the bomb, but we didn't like how something was going. So we decided to go to kind of a backup safer version and that was bit us on the cutter comp, not having the thing set.
00:26:48
Speaker
Here, you think you're taking the smarter, slower risk adverse path and in reality, you're introducing new risks that come to bite you. Well, and then I realized like, okay, if I'm going to change the probe tip from six down to two millimeter, I have to think about every time I use that probe, where it's touching, how it's touching, and will the smaller diameter effect
00:27:14
Speaker
how I do it. So like right now, I'm probing the head of a screw to see if it's there to tell like honeycomb, plain diamond pattern. The two millimeter doesn't fit into the hex head, but a or the six millimeter was right so that but the two millimeter will go all the way into the hex head and touch the bottom. So I'm like, well, I got to offset that now a little bit over. Or when I probe the side of the palette, is it going to rub? Is it going to hit like it was interesting? Yeah.
00:27:42
Speaker
Remember like a year ago when you and I didn't understand why people would ever have to rent a shop robes in the same machine? Yep. Yep.
00:27:49
Speaker
Exactly. Yep. Oh my god. That's tough. If it makes you feel any better, I can vividly remember when we were trying to kind of quote unquote tool up for strike marks. So we were thinking about ramping up production and how we were going to make these things. And we had this aluminum plate bracket, just a simple like four by four by half inch aluminum. It's like, you know, double the size of a deck of playing cards. And it had a hole through it.
00:28:17
Speaker
for clearance. And I was thinking, this is how dumb I was, but green I was. I was thinking that we could do that hole and some ID features as op one. So that would give us this one and a half inch diameter hole. And then I was thinking I could lay push those parts onto like a sleeve on a tormach.
00:28:35
Speaker
clamp down on each end, and then I would have them touching each other stacked up along. So you'd get like 20 of them along your x axis, and that you could then spot drill and tap from the top on each one, which I mean, I can't even begin to tell you how many problems there would be with that workflow now. But at the time, you're thinking I'm young, I'm hungry, I want to make this work, I'm trying to be creative and no, no, no. Yeah. And in fact, hilarious.
00:29:02
Speaker
When we started making the GoPro mounts, we made the first, I don't know, between one and 3,000 on our own, for sure. And then we started subcontracting them out. And my partner actually visited the shop that was running them. And I think the first order was 1,000 mounts. We made a decent quantity.
00:29:20
Speaker
And when he walked into the shop, he couldn't believe it, but they were machining them one at a time, soft jaws. You'd already gotten past that, beyond that, on your tormach and your garage. My tormach was making 32 at a time.
00:29:38
Speaker
But I think this shop on a VMC with a lower skilled, lower wage operator didn't want to spend the money on, in fairness, a thousand of them. It was pretty competitive pricing. Yeah. Cheaper to just have someone swap them out and run versus invest in the skilled labor and the capital and the tooling and the clamps and the knowledge and the risk of building up a high production fixture.
Customizing CNC Post-Processors
00:30:01
Speaker
From a job shop perspective, that does kind of make sense. Like you and I making our own products, like we'll do whatever it takes. Like, I don't care how long it takes me to make the fixture. I'm going to make it because I know it's better. But from a job shop, that's only going to see a thousand and then maybe never again. I mean, I sort of understand the logic, but I love it when people get creative as well.
00:30:20
Speaker
Right. I see this with folks I talked to and it's hard to fault them for it because I know they mean well but they think oh man, I got to order for 270 of these parts I'm going to make a 12 position complex fixture and by the time you go through the risk and the hassle and the design and ordering clamps and machining custom things all that you would have been better off it doesn't feel lean it doesn't feel scalable but the reality is sometimes you just got to make them. Yeah. Yeah. Time is money. Right.
00:30:51
Speaker
We actually had a guy on the Patreon ask about kind of in the same vein of how we're doing what we're doing with probing and press reliability, talking more about what we do with posts. And I don't feel like I'm, I know that I'm not qualified enough to
00:31:11
Speaker
actually offer a class or anything on how to modify posts and how they work. But it is a really interesting conversation about what's the structure of a post, what are some of the, we actually do in fairness have some very beginner videos on nyccnc.com about, hey, here's how we change the cool one or the tool change or some comments stuff that really get you going on it. But I would love to learn more about, I want to call it advanced, but like intermediate post work.
00:31:36
Speaker
I like learning about it as the requirement comes up. I'll basically ask you or Lawrence or Rob or something like that. Can you help me understand this? Not necessarily do it for me, but just kind of lead me in the right direction. What block of code am I looking for? The post basically takes all the information from the CAM system
00:31:56
Speaker
reinterpret it for your particular machine and then spits out G code in the way that your machine needs it. It's cool to be able to go in there and change things around, put this in front of that, turn the coolant on before turning the spindle on or whatever you want. Move the Y all the way forward or back at the end of the cycle, center it, things like that. It's cool to be able to start small and make those tweaks and see it and post the code and be like, yeah, that's really cool. I like that I did that.
00:32:25
Speaker
We go through this, what I'm about to say on the NYC CNC videos, but I highly recommend this, the logic that works quite well for me, which is, so like we had to just add a one second dwell on our VF2 between a tool change and the spindle on, because we've got a dirty valve or something and we just need a delay.
00:32:45
Speaker
while we figure this out. And so I don't know how to, I mean, I don't actually know how to do that, but I was like, okay, we can figure this out. And so I started looking for things that would call spindle on or tool change stuff. And I found a couple of different sections that I thought it could be in. So what I like to do is
00:33:00
Speaker
instead of trying to modify the post right away because you can start getting some errors or risky behavior. I just put in a comment that will get posted with the code that says John section, John section one edit, John section two edit, John section three edit, and then I run the post
00:33:16
Speaker
And whichever comment comes through in the area that I want, I'm like, okay, that's where I need to add my G4 P1. Yep. I love it. That's a great idea. Um, and to add to that, every time I make an edit in parentheses at the end, I go John and my date, the date. Yes. That way.
00:33:35
Speaker
If I want to undo something or look at every section that I've modified, I just search for John in the whole post and then it's there. Because it's so easy to screw this thing up. Make a backup. Very smart. Yes, very smart. But it's actually really, really fun to do that. It's rewarding. I like it because it's like we're controlling robots. They'll do whatever we tell them to do and only what we tell them to do, but we have to understand it fully.
00:34:05
Speaker
to be able to ever so slightly tweak this and that and this and that, then I like it. It's fun. Right. Right. Where else have you learned? You have that FANUC macro book, but that doesn't do anything on posts, right? That doesn't do anything on posts, no. Okay. So where else have you learned about? I've learned from looking through other posts, especially with the Nakamura, I had to
00:34:28
Speaker
greatly hack a Haas post to be able to do all the M471s and M88s and all this weird stuff that need to turn on at a certain time for the Nakamura to be happy. And just like you, I find where it needs to be. Luckily, I know G-code well enough to be like, I know this works. Now, how do I get the post to give me this?
00:34:53
Speaker
Yep. And just slice and dice. A lot of asking around asking friends, like, how did you make this work? I got some hacked posts from friends that I was able to look at and kind of dissect and be like, Oh, here's the section that works for him. How do I get that to work for me? Yep. The thing I have right now is I have three posts for my Nakamura.
00:35:19
Speaker
One does regular stuff, one does y-axis milling, and one does c-axis rotational milling. I need to put them all together into one post that just logically figures it out by itself.
00:35:30
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and that's something I think is kind of coming with fusion. To be honest, I haven't paid as close attention to the whole like machine configuration thing, but if I pull up pen clips thing, it should just know that the posts we use on this file is this post. And if I open up a Norseman pivot, it should be not having to put the operator to say which of the six posts it is. That's yeah, that's a good point.
00:35:55
Speaker
Cause all the time we're posting between different machines, different spindle speeds. Yeah. It's a very logical thing to me. Do you use the same posts for all your horses?
00:36:05
Speaker
Well, it's better now. And again, credit to Autodesk, as much as I like to point out things that need improvement, it's overall, they give them a ton of credit for the pace of iteration. But nevertheless, at one point in time, we had separate posts. Boy, we had five access posts when we had the trunnion. We had one that did lower retracts between patterned parts, because right now it does a safe all the way to the top. And so CJ helped us modify one of those.
00:36:32
Speaker
Then we had a separate one that would handle G68, which it now does in the factory posts. And then we had a separate, it's not a separate post, but our VF2 is a different spindle speed than the VM3. So we're always conscious about how that gets handled. And then Tuchar Max will have their own post as well.
00:36:50
Speaker
Sorry, correct. We have only one mill post. We used to have two lathe posts. The other one being BT Grimsmo, something or another. But we have that down to one for now. Tormach got a lot better, did a lot of work on their post handling the fact that the Slant Pro can have turret, gang, or tool post on either X positive or X negative.
00:37:13
Speaker
Yeah, back three plus years ago when I still had my Tormach lathe, I hacked that post a lot as well. Yeah. With a lot of help from the guys on the forums, the Tormach forums. They did all the hard work, I guess. I just kind of pick and chose which sections I wanted from here and there.
00:37:30
Speaker
Yeah. And it goes back to, I think, how you and I got to where we are, which is usually I found people are pretty willing to help if you say, hey, here's what I'm trying to do. I've already tried to help myself. I figured out, I think this is the section, but I just can't get the... To me, I've always found people are much more willing to co-invest in solving a problem than the person who's just like, this needs to get fixed. Who's going to fix it for me?
00:37:55
Speaker
It's tricky because you and I come from such a DIY bootstrapper background that I want to figure this out. I want to understand it. I want to be better at it. I want to know how the post works and why it works and that way I'm smarter to be able to make it. Imagine if a big machine shop adopts Fusion and buys four machines and they just go, why isn't this working? I need this to work today. I understand that perspective too. They're not going to invest the time that you and I do to understand this stuff.
00:38:23
Speaker
there's no right or wrong to either thing. It's just, if you want that, you have to pay a lot of money. Whereas if you and I do it, you have to spend a lot of time and have connections. But then like Lawrence, it's so cool to see what he's doing on that Akuma, Malthus, Milturn five axis that's got two spindles, a turret, a B axis head. And he's modified his posts to, I think, automatically handle doing simultaneous main spindle and sub spindle work
00:38:52
Speaker
Yeah. Like that's amazing. I don't think, I think he's quite talented and gifted at all the stuff that has some experience, but is that just knowing what little things to edit or is that like total overhaul, you know, major code writing? I don't know. Yeah. I think he is gifted with that. And, uh, he just, he sees the matrix, you know, he tried, he had the blue pill.
00:39:17
Speaker
Uh, no good for him, but it's cool. And he's had, and he's been done a ton to help other people too. I know of course. Um, yeah, but it feels good to have the confidence to at least try to tackle it. You know, baby steps. Yeah.
00:39:32
Speaker
Yeah. So what's going on this week? Uh, implement that probing thing today. Angelo was working on the lathe when I came in this morning and he's like, did you see this? I'm like, no, we're making these little tiny, um, LBS screws for our knives. They're about 0.350 diameter. Um, very, very thin parts. And like eight of them had stacked up in the sub spindle grabbing, call it.
00:39:57
Speaker
normally supposed to be one at a time, right? They didn't eject properly, so there was like eight shoved in there, and the whole ejector spring assembly had unscrewed. And I'm rattling around in the sub-spindle tube, like the spindle liner. And while we're having this conversation, he's dismantling it right now. But yeah, kind of weird. Kind of like I don't think there's any damage, but it's like, oh, that's unfortunate.
00:40:27
Speaker
Nervous. So yeah, machine's a screw on the main and then it transfers it to the sub and it just kept pushing more into the sub. Yep. It wasn't ejecting properly. Hold on. I got to go write this out of my list of reasons why I hate legs. Exactly.
00:40:40
Speaker
Oh my god. I wonder why the thing unscrewed itself though. I don't know. Maybe it wasn't tight enough. But I think he said to put it in and it was it was very tight. But again, one of those plus ones that torquing everything to spec. You just don't want a variable anywhere.
00:41:01
Speaker
Right. Well, and some things are just going to come undone or, you know, I always try to remind myself of something I heard years ago, which is that every single thing mechanical is going to fail at some point and that's okay. Like don't, don't be so naive to think. And don't be surprised when it happens. I mean, it can be disappointing and shocking, but, um, be like, yup. Yup. That was bound to happen sometime. Yep.
00:41:26
Speaker
So I am going to Dayton tomorrow. I'm very excited, but I'm also nervous. We are going to meet with the folks at Reynolds who is the dealer for Okamoto and the Okamoto, somebody from Okamoto is going to come as well.
00:41:45
Speaker
We were in it for the long haul to make absolutely spectacular fixture plates and part of our problems and stress points has related to some of our outside vendors on a whole list of things in terms of quality, lead times, pricing.
In-House Grinding Considerations
00:42:04
Speaker
Mostly in regards to grinding or heat treat.
00:42:07
Speaker
Exactly. And I'm very, I'm going to be smart about this because while I am, you know, I'm smart and I'm hungry and we're hardworking and we've built businesses and frameworks around things. So I'm not, I would absolutely say we can do this. I'm also conscious of the fact that I didn't
00:42:25
Speaker
I would prefer to not be in the grinding business, right? I would prefer to have somebody who is an expert, who's doing this daily to sort of work with them and for sure pay them for that skill and that labor. But it's partly the fact that just it's been very difficult these days. Grinding is kind of like, you know, anodizing or some of the other services where there's so few folks that are good at it. And it's just, it's, you know, if I'm in the business of selling fixture plates,
00:42:55
Speaker
the way we're selling them now, it's difficult with one, two, three-month lead times with varying quality to be in that business. So I've got to think about that and I want to just learn more about what would it look like to really bring this in-house from a skill set, from an equipment, from a... So because I know I can get the material
00:43:15
Speaker
If it's, I can get the material heat treated, but not ground very quickly, like very quickly, reliably. So that's the goal tomorrow. That's going to be really, really interesting for you.
00:43:29
Speaker
There's a big plus to quick turnaround, quick lead time. We're in a very similar boat because we get all of our material water jet cut first and then double disk ground. And then we used to send out for lapping, but now we bought our own lapping machine, except it's a full-time job for Sky to lap the current quantity of parts. Wow.
00:43:51
Speaker
as much cleaning as there is lapping for that matter. But then, well, what if we double production? Are we going to buy a second lapping machine? I don't want to buy a second lapping machine. I don't want to be in the lapping business.
00:44:06
Speaker
Do we find a vendor that, you know, laps our handles and clips and we lap the blades in house? That would allow us to scale. But it's that thing like we've had probably two lapping vendors and they've dropped the ball and a bunch of stuff and they add, you know, six weeks to the lead time. And on top of quarter jet, on top of double disc, on top of shipping. And I don't want to wait three months to get parts. Well, and now, but keep in mind too, there's a difference now if you were to give something out because you now
00:44:33
Speaker
It's different to sub out laughing when you've never, you just think you know what you want versus say, Hey, this is our machine. This is how we, you know, I've heard about like Amish has sort of had, I think some situations where folks have sort of said, you tell us we're going to rent, spend time. We're going to program it. We know the machine. Like you're sort of going to these companies to say, Hey, we know how to laugh. And this is what they need to be.
00:44:51
Speaker
don't you dare think about how exactly how you're going to do it because I'll follow along like I can understand your conversation. Yeah, the only thing we don't have yet is a profilometer to actually measure our surface finish and be able to share that data because I'm just like shiny. Here you go like but I can send them a sample of ours and be like make it like this. Sure.
00:45:12
Speaker
And we're thinking about tweet or like in between solutions, which is, which has its drawbacks, but we're thinking about, okay, we can have them kind of quote unquote rough ground outside quicker, lower hassle factor, so forth, get them here. And then we could do some of the finish grinding. I actually really like that workflow with the caveat that you're now paying two different people, if you think of yourself as a person, two different people to grind it sort of twice. And
00:45:41
Speaker
The Okamoto that we, I think, would look at is not a small machine because we've got some larger fixture plates. And that's OK. That's that's good. But it is not a, you know, I've got to be very careful. I mean, that would be a it's a big machine. Similar to like what Eric at Orange Vice has kind of thing.
00:46:01
Speaker
I think it could potentially be that same one. It's like a 32 by 80. That's technically bigger than what we need, but the largest saddle style they go is I think 40 by 20. And that's right on the edge of what we would need. And that's not, to me, that's not smart in terms of thinking about growth and potentially doing matched pairs or plates, or just, I just don't, I don't like that idea right now, but hey.
00:46:27
Speaker
One of the things I'm excited about is to see what do they say? Like, let's talk to them. They're experts in grinding. Yeah. Makes me wish. I wish I almost could like help, help start a person here next door and say, Hey, you get in the grinding business will feed you all the business. I'll be a guaranteed customer for 10 years kind of. Right. Right. Yep. Absolutely. Right.
00:46:51
Speaker
And it's a drawback. Jay Pearson has a wonderful grinding shop literally around the corner. Part of the hassle on my end has been the fact that it's literally hundreds of dollars to get stuff freighted to and from places a couple hours away. And it's not just the money, it's everything else. It's the packaging, it's the hassle, it's the lead times.
00:47:12
Speaker
Same with us too. I mean, we're shipping parts, Texas to Michigan to New York, back to Chicago and then back to New York and then up to us. And it's like, oh my gosh. It's like you're paying for all this shipping and the lead time and all that. And then also we have thousands of small parts that are supposed to have a really good surface finish. Yet sometimes people wrap them up altogether or just throw them in a bag. And it's like, what? The care has to be put to every step of the way.
00:47:43
Speaker
Right. And it's just, it's not, it doesn't matter how much you want that to happen. It's not necessarily a reasonable, just like I want to think I'm a good vest customer. I pay the bills very quickly, but the reality is that doesn't matter. When our freight shows up at the grinding shop, it's one of dozens probably of orders that have just come in and it's probably going to take a day or two to process it before it even gets scheduled. And that's the difference between sending it out versus having it in house.
00:48:13
Speaker
So I question this too. Do you build a full service internal shop? Do you hire more people? Do you get all the equipment you need to do everything you need in-house for the most part over the next few years? Is that the goal that you want to accomplish? And if it is, great. If it's not, great. Just come up with a different solution. But I definitely see us growing. And I don't know. Do we need our own water jet machine? Probably not.
00:48:42
Speaker
Right. That seems to me like something that could be more easily stay out. Especially for us because we're just water jetting the same thing over and over. To have your own machine, you'd then get the variability of like, oh, I want to design this new thing, or I want to make this weird part of it. We don't do that. Yeah. And it's okay too now. I was occurred to be the other day. We can just pay to have people
00:49:06
Speaker
Like if we need to prototype something on a water jet or plasma, even our plasma, good grief. We use, we love it, but like, I don't know if we're not set up for aluminum piece on it, just go pay. There's like a ton of plasma shops that'll do that. And that's, that's not a big deal. Um, I could see you, I mean, to me, you are in sourcing, you are owning that. Um, and then just look for opportunities to support your growth to where
00:49:32
Speaker
You can quote unquote pay for it to be outsourced for now. So what I mean by pay for it is you've got to inventory more parts to handle lead time, or you've got to do more manual work or rework stuff on your end to handle the mixed quality, but that lets you get to that next stage. And sometimes that's absolutely what you have to do. Like I'm not in a position to go out and buy a water jet, a double describer and another lapping machine. And I don't know if I want to.
00:49:54
Speaker
You treat your vendors very well and hopefully they treat you well too and you'd be very clear with what you expect and what you need from them and then keep a good working relationship, eat the lead times and just make it work.
00:50:09
Speaker
But like what pushes me over the edge, and this is one reason why I was pretty stressed this morning, which is frustrating because it was such a good week last week.
Future Production & In-House Strategies
00:50:15
Speaker
I sent an RFQ out, one of our key vendors. They replied with their quote in their lead times, normal process. I proceeded with the order and then a day later he writes back and goes, oh, oops, sorry, I didn't realize, but we're going to be out of that. So it's going to now be two months before, or six weeks before we get the material in.
00:50:40
Speaker
and then to start work on it. And to me, that's just bad business. Don't take the time to respond to my quote with a lead time and not have your stuff together like that. And it's not the first time this sort of thing has happened. And so it's those sorts of things that make me... Honestly, it makes me not enjoy what I do. And it makes me think, okay, well, wait till we hear. If that means we've got to get into this business to do a better job at it and take over that, then let's get smart about that process, period. Done.
00:51:10
Speaker
I got no time for you. But again, I don't like getting into a business. It's like you don't quit your day job just to start a side business just because you hate your day job, right? It's not quite apples to apples there, but I'm open to solutions. I'll put it that way. Well, it's going to be a very, very interesting year for both of us. I'm looking forward to seeing how it unfolds.
00:51:38
Speaker
I know, right. I was excited when you said you were thinking about pallets again this morning. I was watching your, um, Matsura video from when you went to California and saw that, uh, Alex 160. And I'm like, yeah, I gotta watch that video again for the third. Right. This is our phenomenal machines, especially for the footprint and the spindle speed thing. Yeah. One day, bud, you'll get there. You're going to get there. Cool. Sweet. All right. Thanks bud. I appreciate helping on the flexibility this week. I'll see you next week though.
00:52:07
Speaker
Sounds great. All right. Have an awesome day. Take care.