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#367 Saunders yard sale open house
527 Plays7 months ago
TOPICS:
- Saunders yard sale open house
- Wall control (pegboard)
- Drill press upgrades
- SMW puck chucks and fixture plates
- Willemin calibration procedure
- Probe tips
- Al Whatmough
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Gratitude
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining, episode 367. My name is John Grimsmough. Hey, my name is John Saunders. And it has been so long since I've seen you, my friend. No, it's been like three days. Three days, yeah, exactly. Thank you once again for having us and hosting us and having the big event. And it was so amazing and still thinking about all the conversations and thoughts and things I saw and all that cool stuff. It was just a wonderful trip. Right?
00:00:29
Speaker
I just enjoyed seeing you, seeing the kids, talking shop, hanging out, just chilling. Yeah. Yeah.
Stories from the Machining Event
00:00:40
Speaker
From a machine standpoint and the yard sale slash quasi open house, I mean, the number of people that we heard about, like one guy who has now two two sons in his quote, quote backyard garage. And then like, I found out there's three Kerns in Columbus with a guy that you know. Yeah, Zach. Yeah.
00:00:59
Speaker
Yeah, another guy who's really taken off as a bunch of hurt goes. Just like the number of little nuggets and stories is great. Yeah, it was wonderful. Whether somebody started their own shop or they started a multi-person company or they work in a company and are just crushing and loving it and finding excitement and passion in the industry that we love so much. It's awesome. It was super, super cool.
00:01:27
Speaker
My son cornered Grimsmo and informed Grimsmo that he has worked hard over the past number of months to save up $17 and thought that that would compel Grimsmo to sell him a prototype product. And I'm like, oh my God, like just dying. Yeah, he's like, I've got $17, can I just have it now? It's so fun. Yeah, it was just...
00:01:55
Speaker
Great. Did you mean anybody new or learned anything? I met lots of people new.
00:02:00
Speaker
talking about chemistry the past few episodes on the podcast, I met one guy who just came right up, started talking about chemistry right away. And he's like, dude, I worked at BASF for 30 years as a chemist. And I was like, okay, I have questions. And he's like, I have answers. And it was one of those conversations that just went and went and went until my kids were like, we gotta go. I need you over here right now. Okay, no problem.
00:02:25
Speaker
It was great. I learned a lot of stuff. Some of the big things he suggested during a blink right now, but so much information that weekend. It was just great.
00:02:41
Speaker
Shout out to, is that, did I get it wrong, is that Black Fox? Black Fox Machining Ability, yeah. Yeah, he hooked us up with a EDC utility blade, and I've seen quite a few different versions of these over the years. I really like his. Yeah. It took me, you're gonna laugh, it took me a minute to understand the way the magnet, what would you call it, magnet slider? Detent, yeah.
00:03:07
Speaker
It's like a magnet detent interference thing. You can really smoothly open and close it with one hand. And that to me is the key of a useful EDC tool. So yeah, thank you. Love it. What
Community Reflections and Challenges
00:03:25
Speaker
else? How was the garage sale? How was your purge?
00:03:28
Speaker
Purge was 100% absolutely great. I got some stuff. Yes, you got a... I got the two clear paths for $20 each. Thank you very much. Yes. I got a little granite base with a metal rod sticking out for indicating stuff. Oh, yeah. And I got a linear stage just for fun. Yeah. Oh, one of your targets. Yeah, awesome. Which is awesome. Super excited for that.
00:03:58
Speaker
I guess I'm sharing this not in any way to be negative, but rather as a reminder to anybody else going through this process. I really thought everything would sell, which is probably horribly naive of me, because I priced everything to sell. And by and large,
00:04:21
Speaker
we did great. Like, oh my gosh, did great. In fact, somebody might be coming back tomorrow to pick up more stuff, which is awesome. But like, I guess my goal was to like kind of end the day with it clear. Yeah. So Yvonne are talking about that, whether we do a little local yard sale, or what our options are. But I was joking like it's not coming back into Saunders. Yeah.
00:04:45
Speaker
It went great. And that's exactly what I wanted. I wanted people to get stuff they needed or could use. Everything else clearly people didn't need or want or have a use for. And so now you're stuck with it, but you don't want to make it. Somebody else just stuck with it. Somebody else is junk now. I mean, from what I saw, it seemed like 50% of the stuff went
00:05:08
Speaker
More, that's awesome. And by like, by dollar value, I think 80% probably went, which is great. Because look, I think I mentioned this two or three weeks ago, but like Adam, what's the guy, MythBusters guy saying right now?
00:05:24
Speaker
Savage. Thank you. Savage had done a video that was very similar. It's kind of like, we all collectively owe it to, don't look at these opportunities as trying to recoup the most, look at it as a paying it forward methodology. And so I was tickled pink to see that I think all four Heimers were gone. Great. That's what I was with. Like that was the point. You mean the box full of quality campaigns on the free table? That was on the free table. Yeah.
00:05:55
Speaker
That was fun. Thank you to everybody for coming. That actually really made me miss the things we have done in the past, which those open houses take a huge amount of work. The most complicated logistical issue on my side is parking when we actually had 500 people come. I thought it was 100. My wife, I think, was thinking it was more. I don't know. It doesn't matter. It was great.
00:06:22
Speaker
Good energy. Absolutely fantastic. A funny thing, I think of the 36 hours I was in Ohio or whatever it is, I think I spent about 23 minutes in your machine shop.
Workshop Layout and Tool Organization
00:06:35
Speaker
Yeah, right? We walked around in the morning. I filmed it, which is great. But I was filming and you were showing and I wish I would have had, I want to work there for a day. I want to spend time poking around, learning how you do things. That's next time.
00:06:52
Speaker
Well, that's right, because you were supposed to dress me down. What do you think is disgusting? What are we not doing right before I do that? Your wife asked me that that evening. So she's like, what do you think of the shop? I know you guys have been talking about the podcast. What are your thoughts? And I was like, I need to digest. Let me think about it. We'll talk about it on the podcast.
00:07:09
Speaker
Compared to some of the other shops we've seen that are more linearly laid out, machines on the wall, aisles, yours snakes around and you put machines everywhere. You have a lot of stuff even after the purge. You just have a lot of tools, a lot of tables, a lot of storage racks, which is great. It was great to see actually that you're a working shop. You make a lot of parts. You make big parts, way bigger than we make. You have material racks. You have to drive the forklift in various places.
00:07:39
Speaker
You've got inspection tables and quality and storage and shipping and it's busy. How do you organize that from ground up? You don't. But I thought it was clean and tidy otherwise. Oh, thank you. Yeah, that's my takeaway was like, oh my gosh, I felt like we went from zero to 98% on this purge and I'm realizing that we're really back at 10% done.
00:08:05
Speaker
We've actually already started some daily tasks and other focus, which is already making a difference. And then there's other things that I'm realizing, rather than fight the battle with our plastic hopper sink that seems to always look dirty, I'm just going to buy a stainless steel one that should stay much cleaner. Your which? Explain that more. We have a white plastic hopper sink that always looks- What's a hopper sink? Like a laundry sink? Yeah. Like a utility sink? Yeah.
00:08:34
Speaker
We use it all the time, but it always looks yucky. If it's stainless steel, I think it will stay cleaner and be easier to scrub down, something like that. Yeah, we've got one that the guy's been using for acid etching with ferrochloride and it's brown and gross and disgusting. I'm like, can we please throw this away and just get a new one?
00:08:55
Speaker
When some of it's inverse pie, like even this morning, I had looked at a lot of our Rubbermaid bins. Did you see those in the back of the shop? On the racking that have air compressor accessories. Yeah, I think I missed that. Like where the Hostelade is, I didn't even see that. Between, closer to the Wilhelmin against that wall. Okay, I glanced at it briefly.
00:09:18
Speaker
So some of those are on, the smaller bins are on wire rack on wheels, which I like, but the bins needed, the Rubbermaid totes I want labeled on both sides. I had just printed out the labels on one side and I was like, no, take a picture of it. It tells me all the labels I need to duplicate. Walked over to the brother label printer and in eight minutes I was done with all the duplicate labels. And that way, regardless of which way somebody puts the bin back or wire rack has been pulled out and you can approach it from either side, you know what's labeled. I added one for angle grinders because
00:09:48
Speaker
Not a lot of angle grinders for a machine shop, but with the reality is we do have one and we do use one, which means I want the extra blades and I want the wrench in a little plastic bin for the crate. You need to be able to know where to find it. Like I was in the front shop a week or two ago looking for a Dremel.
00:10:04
Speaker
Like, like, we've got nice micromotor Dremels, but they're being used. I didn't want to take one of the guys. I'm like, we have Dremel brand Dremels somewhere. I just couldn't, it took me like 10 minutes to find them. And I did eventually find one and the hidden drawer that's never been used kind of thing. Yeah. Oh, there it is. Okay, let's, let's clean this up and start organizing this because I need to be able to find stuff. So on that note, I rediscovered wall control.
00:10:32
Speaker
Okay, like pegboard? What do you mean? Yeah, so it's a metal pegboard. And I'm kind of chuckling. It's a funny side story, which is that we bought a piece of wall control four or five years ago, thinking we could use it in our shipping room for storing smaller inventory parts. And we never did anything with it. I took it home because it needed to get out of the shop, like I was going to use it at home or something. I just was sitting in the basement. And then
00:10:55
Speaker
My buddy did some wall control and it looks really nice. Hanging up his hiking bags and his outdoor stuff. I was like, man, what is it? He's like, it's wall control. I was like, I wonder what the stuff is that I bought. I went downstairs. I'm like, oh my God, I bought wall control. Same thing. It's that lame excuse you need of seeing somebody else bring it to fruition where I'm like, okay. Then I realized that Tormach who came out with the 1500 MX machine
00:11:18
Speaker
yesterday. Really? We can come back to that. But it's brand new machine from Tormach. Their enclosure has a built in, I think it might be an option, but it's a built in organization rack on the control that's that is wall control. That's cool. Then Amish is a big fan of his build. It's actually super dialed his hopefully I can compel him to throw up an Instagram maybe today I'll make a note.
00:11:41
Speaker
but he's using wall control. Wall control is a brand. It's a brand. It's a really cool story because it's a 50-year-old multi-generation tool and die stamping facility in Georgia, a progressive stamping company that realized we need to also have our own product that we can control.
00:12:01
Speaker
In addition to making stamping and tooling for American industry, which as an entrepreneur, I love that idea of like, okay, we're going to keep doing a job shopping stuff, but also balance that out from a revenue and security, diversification template on our own product. I think what patrol has taken off. I think it's, I believe it's quite popular.
00:12:22
Speaker
and why not bring that all up which is cool because it's like a machine shop is making this stuff if you will.
Innovations in Shop Organization
00:12:29
Speaker
Yeah. They're making the tooling for it. So Amish is using it. You can buy the wall control hooks as well. There are stamped metal hooks of various shapes and sizes but frankly even better there's this whole
00:12:41
Speaker
It's on Thingiverse, but they want to direct you over to GitHub because there's a repository called DDD, like triple delta, which is, I mean, countless pre-designed wall control 3D print files for everything.
00:12:57
Speaker
I actually just for fun printed an AR-15 mag holder that's on the wall control thing. It looks super dialed and then the dual tools, everything you want, you can obviously customize your own inserts. I'm now realizing wall control is the answer I was looking for for areas like machine tool. Actually, I'll pull up the picture Amas texted me.
00:13:20
Speaker
Well, the picture of the shop that you showed me a week or two ago, our buddy's shop, his work cells have this kind of stuff, right with hand tools on the on the backboard and things like that. And it just looks super clean. Got everything you need. Yeah. So here's they have these wall control compatible clamps. So your rear wrenches, you put a little clean on it and then it sits in there real nice and neat. Yeah. It looks so pro.
00:13:48
Speaker
Yeah, and it's inexpensive. It's modular. Obviously, I like that we can buy steel versions if we want quantity, but we can 3D print. It won't be hard with the Bambuda print enough. Yeah. And it's basically a perforated back plate that you mount to some vertical surface, right? Correct. And then you 3D print your own little clip-on thingies. I'm excited to see where you take that because that might convince me to do some stuff.
00:14:14
Speaker
Yeah, I'll keep you posted. It's funny that you not only had a piece, but I know when I was at your house, you're rearranging your downstairs little man cave room. Right. And that's how this all comes up. And you're like, okay, okay.
00:14:30
Speaker
Actually, so that was in that was what the impetus that started it was like a personal, the proverbial spring cleaning project that room you're in. Look at it since you left. Oh, that is empty. Yeah, with that. Nice. I can imagine the wall control up on the side there and all your all your goodies hanging. Yeah. Cool.
Reunions and Recreational Activities
00:14:46
Speaker
Good for you. Yeah, feels good.
00:14:49
Speaker
Also, I was not expecting to see our good friend Phil or Amish. We've talked about that many times on the podcast. And so I go to Sonder's house and I walk through the garage door and I knock on the door and Amish answers. I'm like, what the heck? What are you doing here? I thought the same thing.
00:15:08
Speaker
Yeah, he told me he couldn't make it with work and kids things and he has a bunch of vacation coming up. Dude's always on vacation. Yeah. He's got some rework to do on some broken tap hearts. I was like, dude, totally get it. Looking forward to seeing you and then Friday at 3 o'clock.
00:15:31
Speaker
at 330, he just walks into my office. That was awesome. It was awesome. And Phil, I thought Phil was coming because I thought I'd seen that Phil was going to go down to Cincinnati for a DSI, meet up or employee thing. So I kind of thought Bill was coming and then the two of them came and that's just awesome. We made the weekend. It was awesome. Super good. Love seeing all you guys.
00:15:55
Speaker
Got to shoot a little bit too, which is fun. That was awesome. Dude, shooting your strike mark targets is so enjoyable. You see it and you're like, oh, cool. You shoot it once and it resets. No, but actually doing it, it's just enough time to re-aim and get your muzzle back up and just hit it again. Even Lave Shot loved it.
00:16:15
Speaker
And yeah, like compared to just shooting steel where you can hear it or you can see it swing, but the satisfaction of it knocking down and resetting is great. On the flip side, look, I mean, that was...
00:16:28
Speaker
How would you say that? I don't have any regrets that business was a key stepping stone to getting where I am, but for sure would be more appropriate to classify as a failure. Like we couldn't really sell that product at the price point needed. And you learned that lesson. I'm just glad I have one now. Darn right, right? Actually, I'm one of the guys at the shop will have it, but I will get to use it every now and then. Awesome, awesome. So back to reality, back to the shop.
Workshop Efficiency and Tools
00:16:58
Speaker
getting back to your first day at work, any thoughts, any changes, any perspective differences? Yeah, I think I went, I walked through the shop with a little bit more sense of clarity after the event, which, you know, I was definitely some work getting ready for it. And then now it's kind of like, okay, it's runway looking forward. And the simple thing I realized, aside from things like the hopper sink was,
00:17:22
Speaker
the drill press. I can't remember. Did I mention that on the podcast or on with you in person over the weekend? I don't remember. So when we use our drill press, by the way, fun fact, this is my original New York City apartment drill press. It's still nice. Like any cheap drill press just has a
00:17:40
Speaker
10 inch dinner plate platen that you you can lay whatever you want. Well, we tend to either want a quick change, not a quick change, but like one of those speed vices that has a cam lock to lock down parts of six inches. Those are great. That's what I use most of the time. Sometimes you do want something more stable, like a screw vice for something where you want to hold a piece of steel pretty tight or accurately. And then a lot of times I just want to drill into a piece of wood because I'm drilling it through hole and something. And
00:18:08
Speaker
The drill has always been a mess with the work holding with the chips and all that. So what Alex is working on, which hopefully is going to be a quick and dirty, is we're going to take that platen off and we're going to add some version of like a Lazy Susan or just a circular platter that goes all around the drill press column. And then you just rotate it to whatever, you know, fixture or work holding du jour you want. We've got a little block of wood on there, the two different vices. And then I bought a
00:18:39
Speaker
a smaller shot back and I hate shot backs because the one thing that's true about a shot back is it's never easy or great to clean the filters or empty them, but shouldn't be an issue because we're going to put a dust deputy on it that's permanent. So the shot back will be on the wall, the dust deputy will be on the wall at eye level or something so you can see it. And then the dust deputy, in my experience using them, they keep the filters
00:19:03
Speaker
They're great. They're just awkward to position. That's what I always find. Yeah, to be mounted on the wall, maybe some wall control. There you go. Now, when you're done with the drill press, all you guys do is push a button to put the shot back on, sweep up what you want. Great. I love it. Definitely post pictures or a short video of that when done because that's going to inspire me and a lot of other people. We've got a small drill press, but I don't think it has some vice on it.
00:19:29
Speaker
Like we need to use it sometimes, but not very much. And I think if it were set up in easy, we'd actually use it more, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's that's, it's gotta be one button to do what you want. I don't want to mess around with this, with cleaning or swapping out fixtures. How about you first say back, uh,
00:19:53
Speaker
Inspired and overwhelmed. Definitely inspired. Definitely some some overwhelm. We got a lot going on right now. We got a guy off this week. So tension and pressure is high. Like, you know, everybody's taking up the slack. So let me think.
00:20:16
Speaker
Yeah, it gets me to look at the way you've got your machines laid out and the way you use them versus the way we use our machines. It's got me to think a little bit more, it's like optimize. Actually, when your guy Alex gave us the Puckchuck demo, which was fantastic, good salesman there.
00:20:38
Speaker
and your whole team was just amazing. But yeah, Alex showed me the puk chuk, I finally got to see it, finally got to feel it in person. And I'm like, this is absolutely fantastic. Like, how do I use this? It'll involve changing some of the way we do things. But like on our mori, if we're going to keep it, which we're probably going to keep it, but I think about it every now and then.
00:21:00
Speaker
It's either going to get a table full of junk Vero palettes, which is extremely expensive, or I saw your fixture plates and I'm like, what would it take to put a Saunders fixture plate on this and puck jucks as necessary and you pin them around and move them and you throw an orange vise on there as you need? My big question to you is,
Fixture Plates and Mod Vices
00:21:22
Speaker
Since the Maury is one of those machines that can't machine the table, like it's got 5.9 inch spindle to table clearance or whatever, what do people do? Do they space up the fixture plate or do they just, like how do you machine something low down with a mod vice or something?
00:21:38
Speaker
So it's usually not an issue except for the 10 inch spindle to the table that you'll see on the drill mills like the Spedios. So on a six inch machine, the fixture plate, round numbers, the fixture plate's one inch, your mod vices is another inch, your tool gauge length is usually two or three inches. So now we've already got four to five and then your work piece itself is gonna stick up from the mod vices. So basically without doing really anything, you've soaked up most of that is the simple answer. We've never,
00:22:08
Speaker
We have worked with customers on the mill drills to either provide them with or have them coordinate with them to help make work spacers or solid risers, but everyone running verticals has been fine.
00:22:21
Speaker
Okay, interesting. Like CJ put a four inch spacer on his R650 or whatever. That's a 10 inch spin on the table. Yeah, exactly. And with puck jucks, if you're using a fixture plate, that's one inch, puck jucks two inch, then the fixture on top of that, you definitely won't have it. Interesting. Because like we've got an orange vise mounted to the table, the base is two inch, I believe, and the top jaw.
00:22:46
Speaker
It's, I think, another 10 minutes or something like that. And I can easily hit all work that's in an orange vice on the table. Yeah, you'll be fine. Interesting. Interesting. That's really helpful. I like that. OK. And it'll just, once I model it up,
00:23:04
Speaker
It'll all make sense, right? Yeah. And dude, if you want to do that, I mean, as a friend and as a person bringing a new product to market, I would love to have somebody like you implement that, use that. And I do think it's...
00:23:21
Speaker
Obviously, I'm biased, but since I'm not biased, because we're not creating zero point systems by any means, we're not inventing them, we're just putting our own foot for a twist on it. But we're now, actually, that was one of the other post yard sale things we started, which is a sort of formal overhaul of our aluminum product line, fixturing and they're getting all
00:23:42
Speaker
We're going to leave the fixtures in place right now. That way we can continue to make the products as needed. But new fixtures are being made that are puck-chuckable, which means now we just have change over time of 10 seconds. This is for your personal, for SMW, fixturing. It's how we make them on devices and the hobby line of products and how we make them. Your own internal fixturing.
00:24:10
Speaker
Yes, correct. Yeah. Now when you say the fixture plate is puck-chuckable, what's different about it that makes it compatible?
00:24:20
Speaker
Sorry, not the fixture plate. So if we take a machine like our VF2, it has a solid fixture plate on it already. It actually has puck jucks on it. So what we're going to now make is new fixtures for, say, soft jaws or hobby mod vise bases, where instead of that being a fixture that we bolt directly down to a fixture plate with path of screws, now it'll have the pull studs for puck jucks, which means they'll be hanging on a vertical rack. You saw that one out. Yeah.
00:24:49
Speaker
So when we need to make product A, you just grab product A's fixture, preload it off the rack, drop it on, coordinate systems are there, tools are in the machine, you hit go, and you're making that product. Full stop. Yes. Wall control. Oh, actually, oh my God, yes. Right, for fixtures. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah.
00:25:10
Speaker
Oh, oh, oh, oh, John. Okay. Thank you. Have you seen what electricians use like called a screw draw die for punching larger holes through metal? I don't know. Maybe.
00:25:27
Speaker
So, if an electrician needs like a two inch hole for a piece of conduit, two inch hole is you could hole saw, but hole saws are yucky and leave a burr. So, what they sell are these two hardened metal dies and they have a screw. So, you just use a wrench and when you screw it, it just shears the perfect circle. You have to pre-draw a little hole, I think, for the screw. Interesting. What occurred to me is we can absolutely make a puck chuck
00:25:58
Speaker
draw dye or whatever you call punch dye, squeeze dye that can let us take something like wall control, which is pretty cheap, nice powder coated if you want it. So it's just nice. And we can add the teardrop shape or key slot shaped cutaways to hang punch up pictures on wall control. Or we can just 3D print little bracket hanger things. Yeah, little cleats that they could fall into actually. Yeah, that too. That's probably easier.
00:26:25
Speaker
Yeah, but awesome. That's exciting. Yeah. Oh, this is exciting. Yeah. I love it. Yeah, because I think we would use the Maury more like we use it for daily production, but it's got one setup and that's all it does. And it's annoying because it sits there a lot of the time, you know?
00:26:55
Speaker
Making it more modular, more possible, more easier to just watch stuff out. Yeah, you want it to run. Sorry, you have work it could do, but it's just the setup, right? Yeah. Well, we don't need that work right now, but if the setup were easier, we would start making those products. Like Angelo's got one product he wants to make that is a larger product that needs
00:27:18
Speaker
some sort of a more than single pallet, you know, table size kind of thing. And it gets tricky, you know, what do you do? Do you take up a whole orange vice top, like six by 20? It would fit on that or something else, but puk chuck fixtures sound delicious in this scenario. Yeah, interesting, interesting.
00:27:44
Speaker
Anybody... Let me know how I can help. Yeah. Anybody load a puck chuck with a robot yet?
Automation and Machining Enhancements
00:27:50
Speaker
We made it automation compatible. Sure. Lumatic link. Yeah. What else did we do though? There's something else that I think... I can't remember what we would have been talking about for it. No, but to be very candid. I'm not aware of any concepts that are doing that yet. Yep. Oh geez, that goes back to your hole.
00:28:13
Speaker
Yeah, your whole idea of robotizing the mori, right? Maybe, yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I can't get the thought out of my head, but.
00:28:24
Speaker
Well, any zero point system, obviously I'd love to see you with Puck Chucks, but any zero point system is a great and necessary step in, requisite stepping point. Because, you know, the human will start to learn, you know, the biggest difficulty in it applies to Puck Chucks, just like it does any system is, you know, chips are a real thing, build up and swarf and swarf control. So are you blowing it off? Are you vacuuming it? Are you using air? Are you using coolant, through spindle coolant, fans?
00:28:50
Speaker
And then similarly, are you doing any sort of a detect to fail this to cross the system when something is incorrect? Yeah, so we use a row on the Kern and on the speedio and we also use the Shunk Vero systems, which is absolutely fantastic, like a super legit product. They're just really expensive.
00:29:12
Speaker
The Vero has a cool system. So similar to yours, how the pistons go in and out, the side pistons, the Vero you can add, I don't know how much it is, probably a lot, like some sort of optical sensor that senses if they're fully in or fully out. And you can feed that into your robot system to say clamped, not clamped. And I was like, that's pretty cool. So if you were to like robotize a Vero, whatever it costs, you would get that feature and it would tell you like clamp, not clamped.
00:29:41
Speaker
The Aroa uses air pressure sealing on the feet, the pads, that seal on the bottom. And if you don't have a high enough pressure differential, then it alarms out and says sealing air or something, something. So if there's a chip in the way or if it didn't clamp properly or if it's crooked or whatever, which is usually fine.
00:30:02
Speaker
Yeah.
Machine Calibration Challenges
00:30:03
Speaker
And our current selling point around that, which is not necessarily the automation answer, is the three pins on the puck chuck that actually in and out to clamp and unclamp have a number of o-rings, the outermost, which is red. And that red is a visual indicator that if you see the red o-ring, that means the puck chuck, for whatever reason, has not gone in far enough. So it's a fairly easy thing to tell.
00:30:31
Speaker
any tearing issue with that o-ring coming in and out of the hole?
00:30:36
Speaker
No, but it is for sure a manufacturing consideration in terms of how we have made the hole in which that actually ends. But we did, I don't remember, hundreds of thousands of cycles on a testing rig to see how and where and why it failed. Nice. Actually, I don't think we just ended it. But it's an O-ring. Does that O-ring actually seal or is it purely a visual indicator?
00:31:02
Speaker
That O-ring is actually, that's really an Alex question. I believe that one is far more of a visual indicator. Perhaps it serves as a backup seal, but no, there are other O-rings further inside than the actual sealing O-rings. Because then in that case, it doesn't need to compress that O-ring. It could just slide into a bore that fits.
00:31:24
Speaker
it doesn't need to squeeze into a hole. It could just clearance into a hole as it enters, as the piston moves. You know what I mean? Because if it's just visual. Yeah, you probably already figured this out. But yeah, I like it. The other question I have, and this is like, I have two videos up to watch after we hang up. So if I figure that out that way, great. But do you know?
00:31:52
Speaker
I have a water drain line that I want to stop from having to run across the floor. And it's just an overflow drain line. Think from a hot water heater. And the output of that is three feet off the ground. So it's not at ground level. And it can drain down to a ground level drain. Can I siphon that over? Can I basically run that flex tubing up over a door?
00:32:22
Speaker
If it's a constant drain, then maybe. Yeah, I don't think I can. It's not. It's just a drip drain. Yeah. Like I think of a basement sump pump that you know you fill a five gallon bucket and you put the sump pump in there and the sump pump has a float built into it that as the water level goes up, the sump pump turns on and empties. I was trying to get away from the line of pump. I mean, it's not a big deal. It's more just one more thing to plug in, maintain, check on, but sump pump's probably the better answer, huh?
00:32:51
Speaker
Yeah, something like that. Yeah. All right. So speaking of Willemin, I had a lot of fun last night in a good way. Playing with my Willy. Going through the full calibration procedure to realign this machine. I still haven't fully recovered from the smash crash that I did about two weeks ago.
00:33:22
Speaker
But I figured it out to four steps basically. First step is to align your B axis for tilt. I checked it front to back tilt and it's like a tenth over seven inches, which is awesome. Side to side was many tenths.
00:33:37
Speaker
And so I was able to tweak the B angle, and I figured out the parameter to change, to type in that difference so that now B home is actually straight up and down, not tilted at a 0.001 degree angle or whatever it was. And I posted a picture on Instagram last night. I got to use my Mar Super Mess 20 Millions indicator. And I'm like, this thing is so delicious. It's a good one.
00:34:03
Speaker
run out, or whatever you want to call that, or lack thereof was legit. Super fun. Impressive. Yeah. Because I mean, the machine, I've got the machine that's five digit inch, so, and B axis, whatever angular that is, like, it's a super accurate machine. And it was just so, so satisfying to be able to use that. I bought that gauge to make a, what do you call it, a
00:34:29
Speaker
sphere-o-meter for my flat lapping plates. So to measure the dish of the plates, because Laney Machine Tech posted one. And so I've had it set up as this fixture, but I don't use it that much. I'm like, why don't I just use this indicator for like cool stuff? Yeah. And I did, and I'm so happy I did like that.
00:34:49
Speaker
I left very happy yesterday because I got to measure that precision ultimately. So measuring or changing B tilts is first, which I did, change the parameter of the machine to set it. Second will be changing the pivot point calibration of the machine, which is basically you put a sphere in the spindle and an indicator on the bottom of the sphere and you want to get it so that you can rotate the B around your indicator and see no needle change basically.
00:35:16
Speaker
Yeah, sure. And Wilhelmin told me my pivot point has probably moved a little bit. So I need to redo that calibration. So I'm doing that today. Surprised there isn't a MRZ, like we call it MRZP in the hospital where it basically auto comps your center rotation because it just, I mean, even hearing some of our friends with high-end German machines, like they run that and it makes minute updates to- Like a program to probe and change it?
00:35:40
Speaker
Yeah, it's like kinematic calibration. Yep. And that's how the current does it too. It's just one cycle we run, takes three minutes, measures the tooling ball in a bunch of different angles. Willimand does have that, but my machine didn't have the software, the specific programs for that. Because I think the probe that I have is the OMP40.
00:35:59
Speaker
They want you to have the OMP 400, which has the strain gauges built into it. Wow. Yeah, exactly. But Willamond basically told me, they're like, your probe is not accurate enough to do this kinematic calibration. So here's the manual way to do it. OK. Whatever. So I'll do that. So that's step two. Step three is to recalibrate the probe. Maybe that's step two or three. I don't know. Recalibrate the probe length.
00:36:24
Speaker
like perfectly and then touch off, like calibrate the laser as step four. So I can definitely get step two, maybe three and four done today, which I'm super excited for. And then the machine's back to stage zero and like good to go again. Very excited. Awesome. That wasn't well, I've been here to see how you along with the, um, what was the second pivot point? Yeah. Yeah.
00:36:47
Speaker
It was more just consolidating all of these tech and spec documents and what to do and what parameter to change and getting all that information in one place. So I'm writing a document in GURP that explains this. Like, crash the Z? Okay, here's how to recalibrate everything.
00:37:04
Speaker
with every little tip and trick and what parameters so that hopefully the next guy or if you need this document, I can send it to you. Right? I hope we don't. Yeah, I know what you mean. It becomes one of those things. It's like you need to be able to adjust the timing on your valves. Yeah, all right. Yeah, so that's my day is. Playing with my wheelie, which I'm quite excited for.
00:37:31
Speaker
I should close the loop on what I thought would generate some hate mail of, and it didn't, which is the idea that I should keep and try to reuse a probe. I should have shown that to you guys when you were here.
00:37:44
Speaker
The probe is like, it's got like 40 thou of run out from the right vent. And I couldn't consistently change it or get it better. I thought I was going to break it trying to like reef, uh, you know, back bend it, if you will. And, uh, I just stopped and said, John, you're just emotional buy a new one and, um, throw this one away. So that feels like you're right to reach that crossing point. Then it's you're over it. Like that was the right decision. Move on.
00:38:12
Speaker
Well, but it's like, think about if a team member had thought, hey, let's save some money and I'm going to do this. Well, the first way you're going to find out is you're probably going to ruin a piece of material that's going to cost somewhere between $10 and $40. Plus you're going to waste some time, maybe even worse consequences. All of a sudden, in no way would I have thought that was a great risk to take. You used to compromise proton, but I needed that.
00:38:40
Speaker
I need to think about that way. Because part of it was like, hey, this thing is just kind of like snap back in place. And you can still dial in the run out. The probe, probes don't have to be the shank doesn't have to run true, just the tip. Yeah. So it's trashed. There you go. And I guess technically, the calibration procedure offsets the tip even if it's not dead center. But I think us as machinists always want to get it dead center, right? Yeah, I've never
00:39:09
Speaker
There is a calibration that tells it, oh, it's actually 2 tenths out of round. Because there's static runout and there's probed runout, where the probe actually touches your calibration sphere and says, based on your trigger points, here's where it's supposed to be, right? Which I think is different than static runout with an indicator kind of thing. I know enough to know. I don't really know.
00:39:38
Speaker
what I'm talking about. I know some of the higher end routines or probes can, they'll do the ball or re-engage touch off rotating 90 degrees touching the same point four times each rotation of the probe to kind of check for that stuff. But I don't, I don't know how to kind of ignore that stuff these days. To your point, just get it right physically first. Yeah, that helps. And it appeases the OCD of a machinist kind of thing.
Advanced Techniques and Future Prospects
00:40:07
Speaker
update on our colsterizing heat treating process. Okay. I mentioned a couple weeks ago. So the button for our new integral knife, we're making it from 17 for H 900. It's like 45 Rockwell. But they do scratch and then gouge and wear on a 60 Rockwell blade just due to the design of the thing. So I found this process colsterizing by body coat, which
00:40:34
Speaker
uses magic to basically infuse more carbon into the outer surface of the material and get it to 70 Rockwell. And so I got my samples back the other day, and I inspected them, and they look absolutely identical. You can't even tell that they're different. Interesting. Serious? They're not matte. They're still exactly the same color. I didn't like them yet, but I'm pretty confident they're only going to be a tenth difference, and I can't even tell that.
00:41:04
Speaker
Yeah, they look, I'm like, really? Yeah. But I put it together in the knife with the hardened blade and I started to actuate it and no deformation whatsoever. It actually started to deform the steel blade ever so slightly. Really? Telling me maybe it's a little bit softer or maybe it's a little bit harder than the blade is, which is 61-ish. Yeah. So that's awesome.
00:41:30
Speaker
Yeah. And I was worried that they'd be too hard to polish, like the head of the button that you see, that you push with your finger, we want to be able to work on that and polish it or whatever. And I was worried that this hardness would be impossible to polish. Not the case. I bet it polishes beautifully. Yeah. I spun it against some 400 grit sandpaper in my finger, in like part of the drill, sandpaper in my finger, and it polishes fine. It's harder, but like this is great.
00:41:56
Speaker
That's awesome. Absolutely fantastic. I got thinking about, we make a lot of parts from 17.4 and some of them could actually use this hardening procedure. The cost is not that much. Batch size is like $300 and you could fit 1,000 parts, the small parts in a batch size, so whatever. Three-week lead time, full turnaround time door-to-door.
00:42:19
Speaker
is what it is. And yeah, so we're going to keep playing with this. This is a really cool process. And apparently the corrosion resistance, it doesn't change whatsoever. And it can be done in any Austin, the big stainless steel, so like 300 series, etc, etc. super cool.
00:42:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's not fussy like when I hear about codeings or DLC where you're like, depends on how that batch was handled. This is just a simple heat treaty type thing. Yep, infusion process. The guy gave me the full, you know, zoom call, PowerPoint presentation on it. Really fascinating, really interesting stuff.
00:43:00
Speaker
So basically the outer 20 to 40 microns skin is now super duper hard and it doesn't peel off. It can't delaminate. It can't do anything bad. It just sounds awesome. Cool. Yeah. I'll be curious to see dimensionally that is measurably different. Yeah. I think it's the, one of the pictures in their presentation basically showed imagine like the skin of the material as molecules and it just shoves carbon molecules between all the little gaps.
00:43:29
Speaker
Oh, interesting. Okay. Which is kind of a neat little paint visual. Yeah. I know. Anodizing could make a similar case, but it's, I mean, the anodizing for sure is measurable. Yeah. Anodizing grows an oxide layer on the surface of the part. This does not. This infuses carbon into the surface of the part. Okay. See you. It's pretty cool. It's awesome.
00:44:01
Speaker
What do you have to do today? Yeah, pretty much just get that Wilhelmin dialed. If I can do that, then I can move on to the next steps, which is I've got some parts to make. Actually, I worked with our machinist, Jeff Jeff. We call him Jeff Jeff because it's Geoff. I worked with him yesterday to program this button to be made on the Swiss, not on the Wilhelmin.
00:44:25
Speaker
Because on the Willamint, I have to do so much weird grooving and roughing and slow turning, mostly for chip control, that it takes a very long time. And on the Swiss, we can just plow it in one toolpath. And it's good. So he got into fusion turning cam yesterday. He used cam works, I think, for many years. So it was great to get his feet wet. He got stuck a couple of times. And I'm like, OK.
00:44:51
Speaker
It was great. So I mean, he should be able to have some postable code today for that. And then he can work on the setup and install the tools and then. Sweet. That's awesome. That felt really good. Like get him cranking on that. He's, he's been here for maybe two months now. Get getting comfortable now. Like he's got his daily routine. He's got his tasks down. He started to get some more time, starting to get a bit more freedom. It's awesome. Awesome. Yeah.
00:45:22
Speaker
Yeah. It goes back to business and life 101. Make a plan and then put on blinders. You'll be a surgeon and ignore other stuff. Just do the plan. Shut off your phone and go work on the world for two hours. If you need to do the break, fine. That's what I need to do today.
00:45:40
Speaker
I found myself in that same boat Monday post the night. It's like, oh, man, I could, I could spend a lot of time looking at the length of my to do list. Nope. Shut up and pick three things, three things, do them real quick, then go bite off more. Yeah, exactly. Sweet. Hey, let's wrap up with a little, a little public thank you to a gentleman named Al Watt.
00:46:04
Speaker
Yes. He's still with us, but is he really? Al, oh, I don't know if I'm going to correctly recollect his life's professional career story and maybe doing him a disservice, but he was the brains behind the original CAM plugin for SolidWorks called HSMWorks.
00:46:26
Speaker
And that later became, was purchased by Autodesk and became the cam for Fusion 360. I mean, Al is in many regards the father of that software, I should be clear, the cam side of it. But really, when a lot of us were, you and me and others were a lot younger and greener and so forth, Al was the glue that brought this community together, the events, IMTS and AU and the fusion meetups of,
00:46:53
Speaker
getting this instant machinist community so many in-person meets. I've met people and traveled because of Al's impetus and the sense of building a community. And Al has totally understandably decided that he wants to pursue a different
00:47:09
Speaker
you know, sort of a startup energy, create something from nothing, which I get heading over to the toolpath.com, sort of, same thing. I don't want to misstate what it is, but like AI, coding, toolpath generation, AI can, but so that's actually really exciting, but I will miss him in the, in the development and efforts he led.
00:47:30
Speaker
Sorry, I'm talking very much. Yeah, it was great. And we actually got to meet two of the guys that work at toolpath.com, one of the co-founders at your event. So that helped explain more because I was like, okay, what is toolpath.com? I got to ask him, got the pitch from him, which is awesome. And we got to talk about Al with that guy and
00:47:48
Speaker
Yeah, Al was just such a solid dude. Al was saying it's bittersweet seeing CJ leave Autodesk many years ago and start his own thing. And now Al's so proud of him because he's like, I hired that kid. I got that kid into Autodesk for many years where he got to thrive and grow. And now he's got his own thing. And I mean, Al's only a couple of years older than us. But he feels like an older brother, not quite a father figure, but he's such a great guy.
00:48:20
Speaker
And as he basically told us, he's like, Autodesk can handle it now. They don't need me anymore. The team is strong. He built the team so the team can do it. They can move forward. And he's looking for the next challenge, basically. Yeah. I was one of those guys where
00:48:40
Speaker
All he wanted to say, he was wonderfully eloquent in explaining the good and the bad of what was going on in the plan. But then also, he wouldn't challenge you as to who are you, why are you here? His question was always, how can we help? Or what can I do to help you? And Al is a mentor to me, even if he's a peer. He's also somebody I absolutely would say a mentor. And I will miss him at Autodesk. I appreciate what he did. Absolutely.
00:49:09
Speaker
And I think toolpath.com still only works in Fusion. So there's still a lot of cross compatibility. No, for sure. For sure. But yeah, it's cool. It's good for you.
00:49:19
Speaker
Yeah, poor toolpad.com isn't, they're not ready for, they're not, they're not ready for go to market and like the prime time. So between Al's news, which is public on LinkedIn and so forth, and then things like this podcast, I think toolpad.com is in for getting some, from some probably early attention. Good. I don't think it's ready yet. All right. Sorry. I am under the impression that they are happy to stay quiet for a while. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Al's going to change all that. Yeah. Yeah.
00:49:47
Speaker
Awesome. See you next week. All right, Ben. Have a great day. Thank you.