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#308 Hiring Shipping Staff and Leading a Team
251 Plays2 years ago
Topics:
- Team meetings
- hiring shipping staff and leading a Team
- feedback from listeners
- Detent ball dropper in Grimsmo's Kern works!
- Tool load monitoring on the Okuma
- laser engraving!
- Saunders has the LS3655 100w laser
- Saunders' Willemin machine arrives tomorrow!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Weekly Conversations
00:00:01
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining, episode number 308, also known as my favorite caliber. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough. And John and I talk each week about what it's like to be not at work on vacation and processes and machining and everything manufacturing entrepreneurship.
Impact of Taking Time Off
00:00:24
Speaker
So we missed last week, what we chose not to do last week. I got a lot of disgruntled texts like, what am I going to do? Am I driving to work? Flattering. Yeah, amazing. Yeah. So it's interesting. One week is an interesting length of time because it's
00:00:46
Speaker
You know, obviously being out one day, you can just ignore it. And being out six weeks, you've really got to recognize that the person may be like, like, remember when Pierre went away, like you really kind of either plan or a week is awkward because you can, um, you can kind of delay things in and so forth, but, um, well, whatnot. So.
00:01:09
Speaker
Honestly, I would say it went pretty darn well. So you went away for a little bit for how many days? Yeah, I just went skiing Saturday to Saturday. So a week, yeah. Yeah, full week.
Travel and Decision-Making
00:01:19
Speaker
And the first two days we were down in a town called Silverton with no, well, sorry, very limited cell service, which that's interesting. And I talked to some other entrepreneurs about this and everyone has kind of agreed.
00:01:33
Speaker
easier to be absent, like on the road or something, but with internet and cell phone service for one or many days. It needs to necessarily be one or two days totally disconnected. And there's that romantic idea of the Tony Ferris. Everybody has decision making. Nobody needs me. They can function without me.
Handling Unexpected Outages
00:01:58
Speaker
And
00:01:59
Speaker
And some of that I think sells good. It's good for selling books, but that doesn't necessarily be true. As an example, this morning, again, ironically, the internet went out. I think something has to happen. Something happened in town because a bunch of traffic lights were out. Again, pretty uncommon, but something happened
00:02:21
Speaker
Oh man, I can't even remember. But were you like, I don't even want to build a process around that. Oh, actually, this is kind of funny. Talk about kicking you while you're down. The water stopped working last week, and it ends up that the city came by to do a test, and they shut off our water instead of the person whose tests they were planning on doing, which is slightly uncool. I'm not building a process around how to triage the water getting shut off. Yep.
Midday Meeting Concept Introduction
00:02:49
Speaker
What it did bring about is an idea for, this is about one day old, so subject to refinement, but a
00:03:01
Speaker
A midday meeting, midday report. So we right now have usually biweekly, twice a week manager meetings. And those are huge. Everybody agrees that those are really helpful and really good. And then every Friday, we all meet for lunch. And I know you guys, I'd be curious to hear you reiterate how you guys do. But I came up with this sheet of, okay, let's just have a really quick
00:03:30
Speaker
midday meeting where it would be totally acceptable and almost good if you sort of say skip I got nothing to add but it's the some of the things on it are do we have any orders approaching a due date do we have any fixtures or machines down have we broken any tools this morning that
00:03:48
Speaker
you know, I don't care if like, wears out, but like, Hey, does something happen where it's worth communicating about
Balancing Meeting Efficiency
00:03:53
Speaker
it? What's causing a stress? I think it's important to communicate quickly, figure out if we do need to get others involved, kind of like the ISO 9001 thing that I've been reading more about where it's not so much
00:04:06
Speaker
paraphrasing is dangerous here, but it's really just about creating a path for everything. So certain people are allowed to do certain things, but you're not allowed to do other things without talking. This is kind of that version. There's some other tentacles that come out of that, but I'll stop there to see. We haven't done that yet. I just created the sheet. I like the idea.
00:04:27
Speaker
but at the risk of recognizing most companies as they grow struggle with bloat and bureaucracy and yes, um, you know, too much meetings. So that's always been sort of top of mind. And it's, it's easy to get into the habit. Like we, we met every day at noon outside. Um,
00:04:47
Speaker
for years and probably 20 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes, everybody. And it was really good because everybody gets on the same page. We get to chat about stuff. We get to joke around and be a team for a few minutes. And it's good except that we started to realize more and more that like the guy in charge of shipping doesn't need to know that end mill's broke.
00:05:07
Speaker
Exactly. It's literally like I see people shuffling their feet and they're like not interested and we're losing them and it's wasting company time basically to have too much of that. So we cut it from five days a week down to three days a week and that worked really good and we took those extra few days to have more smaller team meetings like just finishing team, just the admin team.
Hiring Challenges in Logistics
00:05:29
Speaker
And then recently this as of this year, so month now, we cut it back to just Mondays and Fridays.
00:05:36
Speaker
And that's also working out very well. And then every day or almost every day, the individual teams meet themselves. So like the four manufacturing guys meet up in front of the schedule board and like, what's going on? What's happening? You know, do I need to know anything? Um, and that's, it's working out really well.
00:05:55
Speaker
Funny, now that you say that I'm realizing you're exactly right, this is really a manufacturing meeting. Now, it happens to be the case that almost everybody that's employed full-time by Saunders right now would be part of that meeting. That's also because we need to find and hire a full-time shipping person, sort of a shipping operations assembly person.
00:06:16
Speaker
and is interested in Sainsville, Ohio or Toronto,
Manager Meetings and Decision-Making
00:06:20
Speaker
Canada. Yeah, Stony Creek, Ontario, Canada. Yeah, we're looking for an assembly, not assembly, but shipping logistics person. Yeah. And we're probably going to go the Indeed route, like, you know, what's it called? Job posting websites kind of thing. And we did that previously and we got two stellar hires out of it in the finishing department. Yeah, the two guys went crushing.
00:06:45
Speaker
So it worked out really well. Good. Yeah, that's on my list. I wouldn't say put it off, but it was kind of a get to the holidays and then got some other stuff done here. We knew that we had a big band-aid in the form of some great interns that were back for college break. They left. I was on vacation. So now it's like, OK, now it's to buckle down time to find a person there.
00:07:13
Speaker
But you're right, even the interns might not need to be at this sort of a medium. What you're kind of playing with with your manager meetings, which I assume are two to four people doing the higher level, like the planning, the structuring, the ordering, the stuff that the assembly technician or the machinist, the basic machinist doesn't need to know. It's always finding that balance. As you said, putting up your hand and being like, I don't need to be here.
Entrepreneurship Reflections
00:07:41
Speaker
is powerful but hard for people to do, hard for management to allow, giving the individual power to each person being like, I don't want to go to that meeting. You don't have a choice. Yeah, exactly. Where's the balance?
00:07:59
Speaker
Look, it's the biggest misnomer about entrepreneurship is, I think it's one of the biggest things is like, dude, let me tell you, I miss having a boss. I'm this being told what to do. Of course, nobody likes to be, you know, manhandled, but the reality is it's wonderful to just know this is what I have to do. This is how to do it. And I get to go be that person. And so I find it much easier to be like, Hey, I need, Joe, I need you at this meeting. Sarah, I don't need you at this meeting. Like it's just, it's not obviously nothing personal. It's just, Nope.
00:08:29
Speaker
Yeah. And as a career entrepreneur, finally in a business that's working now.
00:08:35
Speaker
I do not like to be told what to do in general. That's why I'm in charge and the boss. I don't really love to lead people either, but I definitely don't like having people tell me what to do. However, I'm learning that I'm just as happy and eager running at a silly project as an important project. If somebody tells me what that important project is and tells me it's more important than the silly project, I'm very happy.
Value of Mentorship
00:09:02
Speaker
structured the right way, I'm very happy for people to tell me what to do as long as it's in line with the company's goals and all that stuff. Otherwise, I'll just run in different directions and do whatever I want to do, not what needs to be done right now. It does work even if our youngest employee or
00:09:20
Speaker
you know, not as experienced employee, has things for me to do, happy to do them, get them done, you know? Yeah, yeah. Well, that's an interesting point that kind of ties into, you know, leadership and responsibilities and look, yes, nobody likes a, you know, we're not in the Marine Corps period and probably for a reason, like we are not, you know, sergeants and officers and privates, you know, you need to do this.
00:09:49
Speaker
But that's the classic soft skills of, you know, that's one reason why I love what Lex has done for us is that nobody tells anybody you need to do this. I hesitate to say this.
00:10:03
Speaker
like I've got it all hand down, but you try to be like, Hey, can I get your help with this? Or do you do this? Um, and I'm willing to do, I think I'm willing to do just about everything. It doesn't always make sense to, but like you get that, you know, I want people like I am, I just, I rent parts, whatever, uh, pack orders, but, um,
00:10:21
Speaker
Oh, but Lex gives us that whole like, okay, it's not that Joe is doing it for Sarah. It's that Lex tells us, hey, this is on the radar, which is great. Anyway.
00:10:35
Speaker
That's the sort of tension between you and me, right? What's that? That's a source of me commenting sometimes on what seems like awesome projects that are killing it versus what are you doing? Yep, yep. I need that sometimes. I don't always like to hear it, but sometimes for sure. It's the perspective and you do whatever you want with that perspective, but to hear it is valuable, absolutely.
00:11:00
Speaker
Yeah, I do think there's something to be said for anybody at any stage in your entrepreneurship journey, recognizing that we are all better with advice from people that we view as mentors or peers or
Order Management Challenges
00:11:12
Speaker
look up to. And I try not to ever get too close minded. And I've been reminded a few times of where I was too close minded to realize like, most of the time, other people
00:11:22
Speaker
think they have your best interests at heart. Now, you may know more than they do, but it's generally good to try to stop and say, okay, what is Mike saying there? Does that make sense? And yeah, sometimes it's other people's ego and look, I'd be lying if I don't say it's fun to have a smart idea that it's great to say, you know,
00:11:39
Speaker
It strokes an ego to think that Grimsil hung up the podcast and thought, oh man, Saunders had a really good point. I guess that feels good, but ultimately, good grief, John. Look where you've come. You should be proud of that. And to some extent, that's validating in and of itself. Right.
00:11:57
Speaker
but everything's an evolution and you know, everything I've done up until now is if I keep doing that, it's not necessarily going to like drive me forward and change, right? The company's growing. I can't think like I did back in the garage days because it's yeah, different perspectives. So yeah. Yeah.
00:12:18
Speaker
The other thing that came out of being out last week was we were reacting on incorrect, incomplete, or bad information about order due dates. Interesting.
00:12:34
Speaker
When stuff's out of stock, we have lead times. Those are posts on our websites and we need to hold ourselves to those because that's, to me, that's the foundation of communication and customer service. And luckily we have a lot of our most popular stuff in stock, but hey, we don't stock everything for
Improving Order Tracking Systems
00:12:50
Speaker
sure. So I was stressing about some due dates that seem to be stretching up. We had some orders piling in frankly, and that's all good to have, but
00:12:59
Speaker
To date, what we were doing was we were having work orders created that would help tell Ed and Grant and even Garrett, like, hey, this is kind of what we need to be looking at making on the machine tools, mostly for the fixture plates. And they had their own ability to look at Lex and say, okay, this is for a hot order, or it's just for inventory. And there's the obvious manufacturing situations of, you know, if we have three hot orders,
00:13:29
Speaker
The first and the third, though, are the same size. You might skip the second because there's a benefit of, of course, making one and three at the same time. Those sorts of things end up playing out quite a bit. The problem was that that wasn't the same as what I needed to see or what we needed to see as managers, which was we needed to see a list of outstanding orders and their real due date. I don't know how to explain it, but it just was very different than the work order type of thing.
00:13:56
Speaker
It's pretty cool, man. We had Lex Alex in like a couple of hours created a new Lex page which sorts all unfulfilled Shopify orders by their due date and pulls in certain information we care about like the top. It's actually really cool. It pulls in all products within the order but we then have a toggle filter to turn off products below a certain dollar value because most of the times the smaller item stuff we always have in stock.
00:14:22
Speaker
So really what we care about is, hey, did somebody order three VF2 plates? And we need to see that on this page. And we're then taking that one step further now to show, OK, this whole sheet lists a total of, call it 23 pieces of steel that need to get converted into the fixture plates. And I say it that way because some plates are sets. So there's two. And then one order we're working on right now is 22 plates.
00:14:51
Speaker
And that helps us start to tie this into a more of a job forecasting of like, OK, well, how many hours or days will that take us? And are we OK? Do we want to kind of change our lead times? Do we want to actually turn down some work right now? Or we actually didn't float a pretty big custom job with an April delivery. And the customer was fine with that. And I'm glad that we didn't incorrectly quote it like our normal quicker lead time and
Podcasting Setup Upgrade
00:15:16
Speaker
so forth. So it's been a good change already. Nice.
00:15:19
Speaker
Yeah, having that information. Are you taking more decision making away from the machinist? No, not at all. Is there any more information? Not at all taking decision making away. I just wanted to know.
00:15:39
Speaker
Work orders get mixed up with the tons of other noise and information, inventory stuff, sets, POs that may not have a critical lead time, like reseller POs. I wanted to see something that was more like, hey, we've sold a 12 on 1100 plate to a customer in Maryland. That's doing three business days. That's a big deal. We shouldn't be cutting it that close. And I want to just see that sort of information. So then I can't know, bingo.
00:16:04
Speaker
Yeah. Do we need to pull the ripcord? Do we need to say, hey, everything's stopped. We need to get this plate. And actually, we did. We realized we could run one of these plates on a different machine and not wait until a whole other job is done, so forth. Beauty. Yeah, really good. That's awesome. Yeah.
Listener Feedback and Impact
00:16:23
Speaker
Little things. So I took one squeaky wheel's advice, and I got myself acquired a keyboard for podcasting. So check this out. Can you hear this?
00:16:33
Speaker
Yes. That's the old one. Okay. This is the new one. I'm typing. Barely. Yeah. It's really cool. It's a Logitech MK925 or something. It's like $50. Even the mouse is quieter. I'm very happy with it. I was pleasantly blown away. I was showing everybody. I'm like, listen, that's cool. It's so quiet. It's awesome. I'm very happy about that goofy little thing. I thank you.
00:17:03
Speaker
Can I read some viewer mail? I know this isn't something we normally do, but it warms my heart and I appreciate it. And going back to that whole idea of entrepreneurship and leadership,
00:17:16
Speaker
It's nice to receive praise and kind words from anybody around you. Was this a letter, like a physical piece of paper in the mail or an email? Just curious. This was a follow-up email from a customer, Brian, who also made a purchase from Saunders. He mentioned, the BOM podcast has helped me in more ways than you can possibly imagine.
00:17:40
Speaker
There is no one in my life that understands the challenges that are unique to machinery, manufacturing, and employment of machinists. Bomb is my weekly therapy session to remind myself that everything is fine and all businesses have similar issues. Seriously, if I forget to listen for a few weeks, I forget all these issues, things that break, fixtures that fail are just part of life. Every episode, I have new ideas to test or try, improvements to make, et cetera. Keep up the good work and know there are countless grateful souls appreciating everything you share.
Podcast as Therapy
00:18:07
Speaker
Glad to support your business in a small way.
00:18:09
Speaker
That's wonderful. Right, John? I couldn't have said it better myself.
00:18:14
Speaker
That is why I normally don't say this, but that's why I feel like I'm the anti-Titan. I am not interested in the boom, raw, I'm killing, everything is great. I'm more interested in like, hey, man, this is where we're doing well, this is where I'm struggling, this is where I don't know what to do, or this is where I think we could do better. Because look, everyone's different, but that's how I think. That's how I work. And just being honest about it, this gives us the avenue, just privately, you and me, to flush out those ideas and those problems and those things. And yes, a couple of people happen to listen.
00:18:45
Speaker
Yes. But yeah, it's our weekly therapy session as well.
Machining Process Challenges
00:18:49
Speaker
We get to share what's cool, what's exciting, and also what's not working so well and help each other. Everybody grows. And I'll tell you, maybe once a month, John and I will stay on for five more minutes after we hang up and talk about something that we just couldn't talk about on the air. But I think we did a pretty good job at keeping it pretty candid and raw here. Yeah. Yeah.
00:19:15
Speaker
Let's see what else is going on. That detent ball dropper that the guy made. I got the prototype in the Kern right now. I programmed it so that all the heights are right and everything because it has through spindle air on that machine so I can actually blow out the hole.
00:19:32
Speaker
the wet coolant area first. So I do that first and then I bring in the dropper and then I pop it down and I was playing with it the other day and I pushed in a ball, measured it, okay, it wasn't deep enough. So then I pushed in, used the tool to push it in a little bit more and then a little bit deeper, a little bit deeper and then I got it to a height that I like and then we put the palette away and then when we looked at it the next day, the ball was gone.
00:19:58
Speaker
Oh. And because it had popped itself out. Because when you press it in, say a thou, and then another thou, and then another thou, and then another thou, it didn't like that. It's swedging the hole in a weird way that it just fell out. Spring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that doesn't really happen to us normally. But I think if you press to the proper depth the first time, it swedges the hole and kind of just makes it fit good.
00:20:23
Speaker
So first test was initially successful, but then had a minor failure, no big deal. So I scrapped one little piece of titanium handle, put a new handle in, put the new math in, pressed it to the proper depth. And I think we're good to go now.
Design Innovations in Machining
00:20:36
Speaker
It's pretty cool. And I actually have it. I wrote some logic in the code to count up the tool life. So there's 18 balls in this one. So it does a plus one, does a plus one. And we manage that with our regular tool life tracking, which tracks in minutes.
00:20:53
Speaker
It rounds down the minute. It counts every second that it's in the spindle and the spindle is running even slowly. It's your tool life. I have it round down plus one, every ball basically, up to 18. You don't have a drill cycle that you could use? A little bit more matching the operation with the tool? For what purpose? Basically, we use drill life. Every time you drill a hole, it's one versus worry.
00:21:25
Speaker
Maybe, but not the way I'm tracking tool life. I'm just minutes for everything. OK. You don't want the current. OK. Got it. Yeah. But yeah. And then he's working on the new design that's going to hold 200 ball bearings, which is amazing. And it's working. It's like so exciting.
Automation Improvements
00:21:43
Speaker
It looked, I saw the Insta, it looked annoyingly simple and I know I couldn't learn more from watching the Instagram, which made me want to throw my phone across the room. Yup. And when I first received it in the mail, I was chatting with Eric, I opened it quickly. I looked at him like, what is this? This is not nearly complicated enough. This can't be it's like.
00:22:02
Speaker
And then lo and behold, it's like beautiful. Yeah, it was really cool. So, yeah. So I will be sharing more about it. I definitely want to film a YouTube video about the whole thing, depending on how much this guy wants to share technically about it, because it's his product. I want him to sell it to other people who want it kind of thing. It's great. So yeah, it's super exciting. And I can already see his follower count going up on Instagram.
00:22:29
Speaker
And remind me, you have always probed the ball afterwards just to confirm it got put in place. Not always, no. But for the past few months, we have for sure. And with this, it's required pretty much. Yeah, right. But yeah, not hard to do.
Fixture Failure Reflections
00:22:46
Speaker
Awesome. That's a huge, uh, huge win. And it's like such a silly little thing. Cause we, we have a good process that works, but this will automate so much of it that we just don't have to think about it anymore. And it'll catch itself. If there's a problem, if the ball falls out or is as empty or whatever, um, there's enough probing and logic in the thing to be like, it didn't work. Yeah. Yeah.
00:23:09
Speaker
Similar to that, when we got our horizontal boy coming up on a year ago, Chris Fox from Digi Ignite in Australia had helped us out with some really good post stuff that he had done.
Adjusting Machine Parameters
00:23:21
Speaker
I tried using his tool load stuff, and when I tried it, it failed. It's just the machine alarmed out, and so I did. Tool load.
00:23:32
Speaker
setting using Fusion 360 cam to pass through the max tool load I'm willing to accept for that particular cam operation. Like in horsepower kind of thing? Yes. Okay.
00:23:44
Speaker
It's been loaded as a percentage to be a little pedantic about it. But yes, same thing. Didn't work. And at the time, I had so much to do and learn on that machine. I don't think it was the wrong decision to basically ignore it, because we need to keep going on. Well, fast forward. And it was kind of the classic, to go back to Brian's comments about the bomb,
00:24:08
Speaker
It was a, well, it was a mistake to not fix, get that fixed because I needed it. It would help save us a tool that we, we had a fixture that didn't get tightened when I was gone. And my God, the more well oiled your machine is, though sometimes the worst, it seems like the failures are when things fail because one fixture screw not tightened meant that the parts spun, which meant it ruined a insert tool and it compromised the fixture. And then it broke the next tool afterward.
00:24:36
Speaker
Um, and you know, the wheels start falling off. You end up reposting the program, which, you know, you can then a mistake was made about, but all you just been there.
00:24:47
Speaker
And you can't avoid these things forever in all scenarios, but you can stack the deck in your favor. And having tool loads would have helped. And here's the funny thing that I'm kind of laughing about,
Preventing Machine Crashes
00:24:59
Speaker
both a good story to share, but also a PSA for Okuma users. The reason it didn't work is simple. There's a parameter that Okuma ship with that use a default time of like 0.01 seconds to evaluate the criteria for a tool
00:25:16
Speaker
load exceeding and there's a huge spike anytime the spindle starts. That was, I don't know why it ships that way, but that was all it was. I changed that to one second. So basically the tool has to exceed its load by one second. It debounces from the spike of it turning on. Now works great. Like literally it was a four second fix.
00:25:37
Speaker
And the thought is like, one second, look, if we really do have a tool, a fixture fails, and it's going to ruin the insert tool or probably would have ruined it either way. I'm more okay with that. But I do want the machine to stop. Yeah, not just go to the next tool or finish the run or whatever. Yeah, one second is plenty. It's not going to stop a crash. But it's going to stop the next crash kind of thing.
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah, well, it might stop a crash from getting worse. Yes. I think in a scenario where if you were crashing a tool, but you damaged the machine, but it keeps going, it could get worse. Yeah, yeah. Have you, because some of my machines, memory specifically, if it overloads in spindle, like from a crash or something, it stops, current too.
Optimizing Spindle Load Monitoring
00:26:18
Speaker
Have you had that on the Okuma or have you not gotten that far?
00:26:20
Speaker
Thankfully. Yeah, no. It does the same thing as the Haas where I think generally you'll get a servo out of sync error. Yeah, pretty much. Luckily, the only bump we've ever had was way early on. It was an inch off a part. I didn't have a tool length, gauge length set, and I did just do a kind of Z-plunge, but like one inch off the part, 10% rapid.
00:26:44
Speaker
Good news is that's all it was. Bad news is it does appear to have very, very slightly affected the B axis, which I'm pretty disappointed in. I think that machine should be able to take that better. Anyway. It's also probably your most powerful spindle or maybe your Genos has same spindle or something. My point is if say a clamp is loose and now you're really pushing through a part and you're throwing sparks, the machine's got enough horsepower just to keep going.
00:27:13
Speaker
Oh no, that's a strong and fast machine. Yeah, yeah. For sure. So if you had your tool load at 23% or whatever, then it would catch that.
00:27:25
Speaker
Yeah, and Ed kind of got on me to do this, which I appreciated. He's been doing it for a long time on the Genos, and it's really cool the way you can do it at a fusion where the default is a certain value. Ed actually uses like 15% for everything, general purpose, and then you can override it with an individual operation with an NC pass-through.
00:27:47
Speaker
so that way it makes it really easy to set that baseline and then adjust it for, hey, we're doing some real heavy facing here or some really heavy adaptive roughly on another operation. So say you're facing something really heavy and you accidentally set it to 5%, what happens when it stops?
Analyzing Machine Performance
00:28:04
Speaker
Does the machine just stop mid-facing? Does he stops? I mean, I tested it on some of the Porsche valve covers yesterday and I knew we were facing, which is like,
00:28:14
Speaker
It's facing 20,000 aluminum is like 0%. But then I'm wailing with a three eighth inch or half inch, half inch YG1 Alu power to just tear some aluminum out of those things. And that's like 20 some percent spindle load, which on aluminum in an Akuma, you're moving. Yeah.
00:28:33
Speaker
So that's the next question is how do I sort of go through and evaluate them? One thought is to use either the Wyze cameras or even a GoPro and film apart and then I can take that footage and I can scrub through the operations with the spindle load monitor up and start to understand. I don't want to sit there. I mean, we run like there's probably 40 hours of programs on that machine right now that we get second through.
00:28:59
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah, it's cool with the camera. Seeing the actual spindle load versus what's machining.
Comparing Monitoring Methods
00:29:07
Speaker
Can you see them in the same view? Yeah. Akuma has a little, OSP has a little pop-up window that you'd have to toggle on and then the camera could record all of that stuff. Would you be recording the machining as well or just the screen? I would want to see both. It'll just make it easier to sort of parse through it afterward. That's cool. That's a good idea. Yeah.
00:29:28
Speaker
Otherwise, you're guessing through fusion operations. You're like, that's going to be a heavy one. That's going to be a light one. You really want to have some actual feedback from the machine. Yeah. All we really want to do, we'll find some baseline at 15%. When we're engraving, that's going to be 0.1%. We're not going to catch a broken engraving tool. That's fine. It's more of the stuff that has more consequences.
00:29:52
Speaker
So that would let us look through, scrub through, and I think you could do it pretty quick because you could just all of a sudden say, hey, when is that meter going to double digits? What's going on there? And then everything would be 15% except the ones that we need to override higher. Yep. Makes sense.
00:30:05
Speaker
Now the cool way to do it is a second level stuff would be then to also set minimums. I don't know if Okuma can support this, but you know, if we're adaptiving, it should be 20% wailing. And if all of a sudden it drops to under 3% for more than five seconds or something, I don't know how you do that actually, because adaptive linking moves might be G1, but you get the idea. Yeah. Even retracts, reorient the B, whatever, like, I don't know. Yeah.
00:30:33
Speaker
It would still be cool. It could save you from the next, if you did break a tool and adapted, you don't want to come in with a subsequent tool. Sure, but do you use tool breakage detection after many tools or every tool? We use it after anything that. Could break. Anything, yeah, like so we do it over tons of drills, tons of taps, but now my half inch AluPower is generally not getting. Yeah. So that's your call then, basically,
00:31:02
Speaker
You're choosing which break detection you want, whether it's spin the load or breakage actual. Yeah. We, on the current, we do breakage check on almost every single tool, except for the odd tools where I've chosen, like I don't need to do that one, but I'm definitely overdoing it.
00:31:19
Speaker
but not in a way that's ever causing problems because I'm a tolerance set pretty good now. But like there's some engraving tools, like I don't need to, those tapered engraving tools from Lakeshore, they never break, ever. Right, right. But I'm still touching them off, whatever, it takes four seconds.
00:31:35
Speaker
So actually, oh my God, there's so much good stuff on this. One thing is we have a monthly Okuma sheet where we do certain things every month on it. And one of those things is we just replace these like five or $10 form taps, just replace them. We don't care. Like we're making so many parts in that machine. I don't want to deal with it. Just replace them. The only thing I need to do is
00:31:54
Speaker
The M202 code for our machine, don't try this if you have an equipment because it could be different, but M202 does break detect on our machine. It does that at a slow feed rate.
Tool Breakage Detection Strategies
00:32:05
Speaker
I should reprogram that to a new M code that does a fast break detect because otherwise it doesn't cost you anything. That's the nice thing is that because the toolsetters
00:32:14
Speaker
built into the machine, it can just go whip over, break detect, and two seconds probably. Then I would do it a lot more. Right now it's a slow feed rate, so it takes like 20 seconds or something. It's probably only like 12, John, 10 or 12. Still watching it is painful. Well, there's many parts that we have that do 20 or 30 tool changes. Yep. Yeah.
00:32:37
Speaker
Yeah, and the way the Kern does it, because it has an established tool length, it obviously machined apart with that tool length, so it rapids down to the toolsetter within half an inch or something, and then it quickly feeds through and touches the laser and then moves out. I think the Maury is kind of the same way with the Renishaw OTS or whatever it's called.
00:32:59
Speaker
We did a video. We posted a YouTube video on showing how to do this on a Haas and kind of make it look like a brother like a really fast break.
Laser Engraving Challenges
00:33:07
Speaker
It's super handy.
00:33:11
Speaker
Question for you. Do you guys still have your boss CO2 laser? Yeah, we do. Do you use it a lot? Quite a bit. Good, yeah. I watched your video from Mook a couple of years ago, and you're like, we love our boss laser. And I'm like, he hasn't talked about that in a while. So I want a laser bad now.
00:33:31
Speaker
Normally, we've been making our foam on any of our machines and then engraving it on the machine. With the old foam, it would engrave pretty good. The new foam engraves bad. It's just fuzzy. It does not engrave good, no matter what tool I throw at it.
00:33:47
Speaker
I had a local friend with the CO2 laser, laser one two nights ago. Just I said, here's a piece of foam, laser, whatever. So he laced with this like big samurai, whatever default file came with the machine. It looks so amazing. Like I need a laser. Yeah. So you have the CO2 one with a bed. How big is it to travel? I guess. Two feet by three feet or something. No, I'm pretty sure ours was the only,
00:34:13
Speaker
Well, reasonably speaking, the only laser I could find that was real, not like a kit that you put together that would support four foot. Oh, I feel I feel wrong. I feel better. I believe it supports a four foot wide.
00:34:29
Speaker
material. It does not support eight feet long, but I thought we could buy certain material in eight foot sheets and only have to cut the eight foot section down. And ours has a tray that opens in the front so you can actually fit larger material in, but obviously only work on the... Can you feed it all the way through? That's a good question. We can't because we have it up against our... It's like eight or 12 inches off a wall. So I don't know, John. Yeah. No reason. So there's... Oh no, I think the tubes back in behind it. Okay.
00:34:58
Speaker
Has it been, it's a boss brand, right? Correct. We have a boss. Actually, I probably could look it up while you're talking here. Yeah. Because that's the brand I'm looking at pretty much. There's
Considering New Laser Purchases
00:35:08
Speaker
a lot out there. There's a lot of cheap ones, DIY ones, whatever, not interested. We need a, no, not huge frills, but we need a production machine. Yeah. That's our good. And then the laser I really want is a fiber laser with a Galvo head. Yeah.
00:35:26
Speaker
with a bit of power behind it so that we can do titanium and put patterns on the knives and the pens, rotary axis kind of stuff. But I'm unclear at this moment if it can go light enough to do foam and not just burn a hole through it. So I have a friend with a BOSS fiber laser and he has some of our foam and he's going to test that real soon.
00:35:52
Speaker
Like in a perfect world, I just buy the one fiber laser, but in most likely I'm going to want to buy both. Yeah, they're very different. Yeah. So ours, our boss is the, um, I just pulled up our old invoice is the LS.
00:36:09
Speaker
with a 100 watt laser, CO2 obviously, and I pulled that up on the website. I assume the specs are the same as ours, and that's a 55 by 35 and change cutting area.
00:36:23
Speaker
Which is pretty legit. And look, I went through the same process that you are going through. And I think a lot of people do, which is like, look, I can't, I got quotes for epilogues and Trotex. They were literally four to six times the price of the loss. I think some of that has to do with whether it's how the quality and length tube life is. But I remember thinking like, good grief, I can buy a bunch of replacement tubes and so be way ahead.
00:36:48
Speaker
and so forth. And then I also didn't want cheaper. Bosses are made overseas, but it was a real company that appeared to have user-based support, et cetera, et cetera, versus eBay. Who knows what you're buying? Yeah. And then funny enough, we need to buy a fiber laser to do some basic steel marking. I brought it up. Everybody agreed.
Laser Safety Incident
00:37:09
Speaker
They're not. That, to me, as a Galbo, is a much easier purchase because it's pretty small. And I think you can get one for three or four grand.
00:37:16
Speaker
Yeah, you can. Apparently, the OMG ones are pretty well known. OMG? OMG. If you Google it, I mean, they're OK. They're like a China kit for sure. But that's three to four grand, whereas Boss sells their version of it, which is about 10-ish. Oh, wow. I think it'd be 14 shipped with a fume hood extractor and some other fancy stuff. So that's kind of the one I'd be looking at.
00:37:44
Speaker
but it's powerful enough to do deep engravings too. So you can actually like put it not just an optical pattern, but a depth into a titanium. Yeah. So, okay. So your CO2, I mean the website says 11,000 plus options, um, something like that.
00:38:03
Speaker
Yeah, I think ours was a little less, but that was also... Actually, that's a while ago. Pulled up the date. Yeah, five years ago. Okay. That's crazy. But it's good to know you're still using it and it's like a part of your business now.
00:38:16
Speaker
Yeah. We use it. Again, if it's not daily, it's very often. If we destroyed it, we would replace it because we need it. And we actually did light it on fire. I remember that. Yeah. No good deed goes unpunished. We were cutting some new rubber gaskets for the way covers of our hospital machines and they caught on fire. And that was a bad day. No one got hurt in it and so forth. But it was a real fire. Was it fixable or?
00:38:41
Speaker
We had to buy some replacement parts and so forth.
Delegating Tasks for Efficiency
00:38:49
Speaker
Interesting. Don't set it on fire. Good to know. That's exciting. I've been geeking out about that, learning enough about fibers.
00:39:02
Speaker
I'm of the opinion that once it comes in, I should not touch it. I should let somebody else totally run with it and they should tell me how to engrave my name on my pen. And that's it. Like, yeah. So as fun as it would be, but it'll be fun for somebody else too. So still, still deciding who that might be. But, um, yeah.
New Machine Excitement
00:39:24
Speaker
Well, on that note of other people taking the lead, today is Wednesday. Everyone's listening Fridays, but from the perspective of the real day of actually Wednesday, tomorrow, we got a new machine coming.
00:39:38
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Yes. Do I know about this? I don't think I know about this. It's from a Swiss company. Oh, yes, of course I know about this. Called Willem, called Willem and McAdell. Yeah. It's a very unusual machine called a 408MT. We have a very rare serial number in the 100s. No one else has any of these out there, minus John Grimsmo, who has like three serial numbers off by pure coincidence.
00:40:02
Speaker
So that's coming tomorrow. Coming tomorrow. Super, super exciting. Oh, I'm so pumped for you. Thank you. Honestly, feel free to text me often or whoever else is on your team that's like, can you open the call it? I mean, I already sent you my cheat sheet. I hope you've printed it out. It's printed out. It's already in a Wilhelmin, Mackinac process bin, John. Yes.
00:40:24
Speaker
So we'll unload it tomorrow. Jim sent me pictures of it, texted me pictures this morning. It's up on the... Riggers have it up on the truck already. And then I bought some holders and yeah, but Grant's going to take the lead on everything. That's exciting.
Tooling and Setup Costs
00:40:42
Speaker
Which holders did you end up with?
00:40:44
Speaker
So CJ had told me about some tech mix that I got from MSC for HSK40ER16, super short, like 1.85, is that right? Yeah, I think I've got those.
00:40:55
Speaker
So I think I bought like eight of those. I basically only wanted enough to get us through the training parts that we want to make. And then I bought some of, so those were round numbers to something a piece, I think 230 a piece. I bought what we needed from Willemin, which were turning holders or something. Yeah. And they're, they're not, no. And I want to say, is it, um, let's see if I can figure this out. They're branded as.
00:41:26
Speaker
Utilists, right? Yes, but I think they're rebadged from Shelplin. I don't know. It doesn't matter. A couple of them were like $800 a piece. Yeah. It's like an HSK tapered holder, but with two drive dogs screwed into the sides with an integral insert turning holder. What did you get? A V-insert?
00:41:49
Speaker
We got the V-insert for turning, and then I got two or three half-inch stick holders that we'll use for grooving, parting, and threading. Nice. Yeah, I still need to get a threading insert holder, basically, for it. I'll just thread mill everything for now. Well, that's what they were saying.
Maximizing Existing Resources
00:42:09
Speaker
Look, it's a better milling machine than a lathe. It's more power, blah, blah, blah. But we cut a lot of.
00:42:16
Speaker
have 13 threads, and I don't economically think I can justify. Well, maybe I'm wrong, but thread mill costs over time, but also time. Well, and thread mills will change diameter on you. It's one reason why we tried thread milling plates years ago. They just doesn't work over time. They wear too much. So we'll see. Cool. Yeah, that's exciting. That's awesome.
00:42:43
Speaker
Yeah, new machines for us. I mean, laser is relatively new on our horizons. It's been on my mind for literally years, five years now. But now it's like, oh, we have a need. Yeah, okay. Maybe we should do this.
Exploring Equipment Modifications
00:42:57
Speaker
But otherwise, new machines, I think we're solid for the near foreseeable future. I have no plans for machine purchases. I just got to hunker down and get a lot done, which is good. It's a good place to be in.
00:43:09
Speaker
The fiber laser is awesome because it's like the size of a computer or something. Our boss laser, you need some area for it. Yeah. You got a bigger one. We might not need one that big. I'll look through their specs. Honestly, I spent a lot more time looking at fiber lasers than I did CO2 lasers because more applicable to us, but definitely want to do the foam under laser.
00:43:36
Speaker
For now, like I said, I've got a local guy that has one. He's going to do it for his contract for the time being, just to laser engraving. It's going to be easy. Whatever that costs, I don't even know yet.
00:43:48
Speaker
It's, he's literally, he's a sign maker and he's like five blocks away. Dude, that's great. Yeah, that's great. My uneducated, but a little bit of experienced laser thing is like, look, a big laser is awesome because you can lay a sheet down and do a bunch of work. But, you know, they can't, certain materials can catch on fire and they can go out of like focus calibration on bigger, bigger ammo. So it's not like, it's not like you can just sit down and have the machine run for four hours on its own. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:44:16
Speaker
And one piece flow is better, but nobody wants to sit there and swap out one piece at a time. Exactly. It doesn't feel like the right fit for a cobot, but it sure feels like the right fit to have somebody else do it for you if they've got someone five down.
Foam Milling Challenges
00:44:30
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, that's what we're doing right now. Cool. And the new foam and the routers going really good. We've got a good process. It's gluing itself to the Datron end mills. So they load up really bad.
00:44:47
Speaker
It looks like there's bubble gum wrapped around the end mill. And then it mostly works while it heats up and cuts. But we've established a process now where we make 15 individual cases in each sheet of foam. And after every sheet of foam, we take the end mills out, clean the goo off, put them back in, and now we have a reliable process. But it takes time.
00:45:07
Speaker
Interesting. I don't know if we need a two flute, not a three flute end mill. That might be a thing. Go faster. Go faster or go slower or something. We tried going slower RPM and increasing the chip load and that didn't seem to do anything, but not quite sure what to do there yet, but we have some of that works.
DIY Laser Integration
00:45:26
Speaker
Random idea not to plant the seed of Grimso doing a new DIY project.
00:45:31
Speaker
But years ago, we were playing around with the DIY CNC machine. We bought a pretty cheap laser off of eBay, like under $100. And it was legit, like it burned balsa wood, and it would probably engrave foam. So something to consider is, can you buy one of those and mount it to your router spindle as a new offset coordinate system? And then you just do the engraving when the machine...
00:45:56
Speaker
Oh my god, yes. Yes. My friend Brad Southerd did suggest that to me a weekend or two ago. Because you can get that laser for under $1,000, whatever size you want in power, right? You can get it for cheap too.
00:46:13
Speaker
I looked into it briefly and some machines, some controls only have one M3, which turns on the spindle or the laser. I don't know. Like you said, it'd be a bit of a DIY project, which would be sick, but I don't know if we need to spend that time right now.
00:46:30
Speaker
Yeah. It would do the job for sure. That's all the laser we need. Oh, man. I would push pretty hard to do it, John. Yeah. Because it's, look, otherwise you're buying a whole new machine with support, cost, real estate to take up with the shop floor. And it's like the material's already set up and being worked on. That is true. This was not a CO2 laser. This was an LE. Diode laser. Yeah, yeah. Which are super weak, but for cutting foam would be fine.
00:46:59
Speaker
Yeah, I might pick a look at that because I mean the laser I really want is the fiber laser because we will have use for it making cool stuff. The laser I need but don't really want is the CO2 laser. For engraving foam? For engraving the foam and putting the diode on the router would accomplish that.
00:47:17
Speaker
So do you spend 10 plus thousand dollars on a big CO2 laser that you don't really want?
Laser Safety Considerations
00:47:23
Speaker
Or do you spend under a grand and some time maybe? Yeah, I'll consider that. And then I still buy the fiber laser because we genuinely want it. But as opposed to buying both? Yeah.
00:47:35
Speaker
Cool. Yes. I like this idea. I want to say that eBay laser I bought was like either $30 or $70. Really? Because I remember it's kind of embarrassing. I remember turning it on and not realizing where it was aimed. And it was aimed at my hand. And I was like, what is like what animal is now currently like piercing its stinger? Like I was like, am I getting stung by a bee right now? And I was like, oh my god, that's crazy. What? Yeah, it's not a laser pointer. So don't do that.
00:48:03
Speaker
No. Okay. Good to know. Yeah. I mean, I wondered if there's a visual hazards having it in the machine. Like, do you need red glass around or like, it's kind of in the middle of the shop, the router right now. So yeah, that's a good question. It would be easy to add the laser safe glass. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. We're running over. All right, man. I'll see you next week. Sounds good. Have a great day. Bye. Bye.