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#259 - FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS
214 Plays3 years ago
TOPCIS:
- Sharing info on YouTube.
- Buying machines and how to choose their options.
- FOCUS UP!
- DIY chip conveyor and paper band filter.
- Coolant control.
- Buying horizontal machines and Brother Speedio.
- CNC controls on a new machine & providing power.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Machining Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the Business of Machine episode number 259. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough.
00:00:08
Speaker
This is the podcast where John and I talk about our absolute love of machining and buying machines and programming them and running them, but also how we deal with the fact that we've grown into businesses of about similar size, about 10 employees, about the same number of spindles and some of the wonders and joys of that, but also some of the struggles and stresses around what daily life is like.
00:00:31
Speaker
As you always tell me, the moment we stop being frank and real with each other is the moment we should just stop doing the podcast. Right? The number of unsolicited emails we get that say a wonderfully warm
00:00:48
Speaker
reiteration of what we're already doing under our own conviction. Nevertheless, it is nice to hear it from third parties or from folks that we don't have a relationship with or we don't know. We have people that email in regularly that run, like there's a guy in New Jersey that runs a brewery to other small entrepreneurs and folks that I know appreciate the candor and that doesn't make us more candid. I think that's already the point of this, but it does tell us like, hey, we're on to something. We're
YouTube and Content Creation
00:01:16
Speaker
all
00:01:16
Speaker
I don't know anybody who's got it all figured out. Yeah. Well, and the fun part of this podcast is there's no sponsors. There's no agenda. It's literally for you and me and everybody gets to listen in. Agree. It's sponsored by Guzman Eyes and Father's Machine Works. Today's episode brought to you by The Rask. Yeah. Yeah. Step into The Rask. Yeah. Good. How are you doing?
00:01:45
Speaker
I've totally wanted to interrupt the middle of a YouTube video with an ad for my own product. Right? It'd be kind of funny, huh? Yeah. That'd be hilarious.
00:01:55
Speaker
I do kind of wonder, and this is partly optophic, if like what's the next five years going to look like and how is, you know, YouTube has changed. I mean, everything's changed, but YouTube is almost like cable TV now. I mean, the number of ads, frankly, the awesome level of content, like it's truly incredible. I love that, but it's just not what it used to be. And yeah, I don't know. What do you think?
00:02:18
Speaker
Well, I go personally, I go through phases of not watching anything on YouTube for like months at a time. And then usually I'll go for like a research binge, where I learn everything about, you know, optical comparators or like, so something deep, you know, watch every brother's video video that is on YouTube, which leads into other things, which leads into various vlogs and like fun stuff and dumb stuff and silly stuff. And
00:02:42
Speaker
you know, I get the YouTube itch back and lately I've been watching a lot more, especially with the kids and stuff, but yeah. But yeah, I definitely go through months of just, I don't watch YouTube, I just, if I want to turn my brain off, I watch Netflix or something else, right? Yeah, yeah.
00:02:59
Speaker
It's interesting because every time you find that video on the guy who's talking about why he went with this chip conveyor for his video, that is going against the grain for YouTube algorithm success. These days, yeah. That's the video I want. That's what I want to be. It'd be a complete line to say there's not an element of popularity to contest to because look, I enjoy it when our videos are successful.
Machine Knowledge and Customer Savvy
00:03:25
Speaker
I just do. It's a validation.
00:03:26
Speaker
I want to go into why the diaphragm pump in our NP systems 1000 unit gives us instant on to TSC on the new Akuma, which makes it like that's the kind of stuff I want to find when I'm trying to understand those decisions to make as a entrepreneur. Because that information is...
00:03:45
Speaker
It's like firsthand information. It's not in the sales brochure. It's not anywhere. If somebody doesn't tell you, nobody knows about it. And that's the cool kind of information to share from guys with experience, you doing this stuff. And that's how all the nerds out there, including us learn all these weird facts about technology. If nobody talks about it, nobody's going to know about it. It's like our job to share that. But I've had machine dealers be like, you're the most informed
00:04:14
Speaker
They'll say something like, you're the most formed customer ever. And frankly, it's not a compliment because it's kind of makes their job harder in the sense that like, and look, I actually don't know that it's a good thing. First of all, I don't feel like I know that much because when we talk on that WhatsApp chat and you hear, frankly, Rob Lawrence and Dennis just spouting off and even Ken, like stuff about these machines, I'm not aware of like the design chains they went through on a ball screw bearing thing. I'm like, how do you even know this?
00:04:41
Speaker
I love that in the nerd of me, but then part of me is like, hold on, wait, wait here. Just figure out what you need, how it works, buy it, get it in the shop, make money. Don't sit here and... Yeah. But I've got this brother's video quote in front of me at home and I was staring at it this morning and I love being able to look at every line item and be like, I don't need that. That's the wrong choice. I want this one instead of that one.
00:05:07
Speaker
that's cool to be able to have that knowledge and information and whether it's from just the history of past 10 years of doing this or binge research of like, oh yeah, I watched this, whoever video.
Machine Purchasing Decisions
00:05:22
Speaker
Yeah. So actually, so we record this on a Wednesday. You're listening on Friday. So two days ago, prior to the day of you listening, we launched our first sort of formal video on what it was like to buy the Okuma Jenna. Nice. A very different process than buying a Haas machine. Yeah. And I want to bring folks along to just give you guys the tools to think and ask questions and poke and prod. And we were helped along the way by lots of folks.
00:05:49
Speaker
including folks I just mentioned and Chris Fox over at Ignite Digi and other Genos. There's not a ton on the internet, but some.
00:05:57
Speaker
And so we did that. It's a video that just shows everything we kind of did, why we bought it. And then I literally screenshotted our final signed quote with all the prices stuff redacted, but just showing every single option because it's very weird, to me, or unfamiliar, again, compared to what Haas does a great job of, which is like, I'm going to go order a VF2 with the Haas mist unit and the Haas conveyor. And you know, it just kind of fries on the side.
00:06:25
Speaker
Yeah, right. Yeah. What's, what's, what's buying a speed you like? What are these options that you are choosing between or?
00:06:34
Speaker
Um, I mean, you get a base speedio for just over a hundred grand with three spindle coolant and well prepped for anyway, things like which probes to get, um, which table probe. You can get the cheap little single touch sensor. You can get the three dimensional table touch sensor. You can do diameter and all that. Um, I want to get a laser so I can measure my grinding wheels. So I choose between the Renishaw laser or the bloom laser. Um, I'm probably going to get the same one I have on the Kern, which is a bloom laser just cause the machines will be side by side. Um,
00:07:05
Speaker
But yeah, and then digging through the pricing on that and like, wow, is it worth that much? Yeah, probably. And then chip conveyor, which through spindle coolant pump, you know, there's a brother option.
00:07:18
Speaker
On the quote, they listed a $10,000 chip blaster separate unit high pressure pump and I'm like, No, first of all, brother has an option. Second of all, all the guys, like a lot of the guys on Instagram and Facebook and stuff are just building their own high pressure pumps out of pressure washer pumps. And they're like, yeah, 1000 bucks. It works perfect. Everybody's doing it. Really? The way to go. Yeah.
00:07:41
Speaker
That strikes me as not passing muster long. I don't need to be arrogant about it. It sounds like a lot of people are doing it. It's like a motor, just any old motor off the shelf, but then pumping unit for pressure washer that makes like stupid amounts of pressure and then you regulate it down to
00:08:02
Speaker
435 whatever the speedos can take I don't know. I don't know if that's the way I want to go or if I just get the $6,000 brother option, but I'm not spending $9,000 plus on a chip blaster external unit and also a $9,000 cyclone filter Then I'm like no those don't need to be on the quote. Got it. So little things like that, you know Yeah
00:08:26
Speaker
And it's cool to be able to – I don't really go on Practical Machinist unless I'm trying to answer a question for myself. But there's a lot of speedio chatter on Practical Machinist and there's some really good threads like what options to buy. Oh, really? Yeah. Guys that have bought a bunch of speedios are like, clearly, every machine needs to come with this. You spend your money here, don't buy that, waste time, blah, blah, blah. And it's just cool to be able to find those threads within
00:08:52
Speaker
minutes and dig through them. You come back every couple of days just to keep – I can't just binge once. I need to refresh a couple of times to be able to really get a good feel for it sometimes, especially for a big purchase like that. But anyway, it's nice. The information is out there and I get to really get my feet wet with best practices kind of thing.
00:09:20
Speaker
Ultimately, you just want to buy the right ... I would buy the $6,000 cyclonic filtration in a heartbeat if you're grinding, but I'm not saying you should, but it just seems like that could be a ... It's not overkill, but nobody would look at that and be like, oh man, you aren't going to use that at all.
00:09:41
Speaker
Go ahead. Go ahead. We were talking about chip conveyors on our WhatsApp last night. Very tempting to buy it like the May Fran concept 2000 that you got the expensive fancy. It's like a scraper and a hinge belt and a filter canister. It's got everything. But it's like really, really silly expensive. And then Dennis is like, don't waste your money on the chip conveyor. He's like, I just use
00:10:10
Speaker
filter paper and you replace it every 12 hours. I'm like, yeah, that's silly. Doable though, and a good way to save money if you really want to. But what I was thinking is, it wouldn't be that hard to build a paper band filter like my current has that just passes paper every hour or whatever.
Leadership and Business Growth
00:10:28
Speaker
You just shift the paper over. You could totally time that. So I was thinking about that a lot this morning and I was like, okay, so I spent 30 grand on a fancy chip conveyor or do I make a fun project and
00:10:40
Speaker
all I have to do is move this paper a foot over every six hours. Come on. I feel to hark back to the opening line of like this wouldn't be the right podcast if we weren't pushing each other. I feel like
00:10:57
Speaker
You're making decisions based on trying to bootstrap, which I admire. Keep an open mind, John. I'm not sure. I don't care about what conveyor you buy or what laser in the end. But you're grinding. You want process reliability. You want lights out automation.
00:11:17
Speaker
Generally, actually, I love the idea of a DIY. I would fully support going in with you on a DIY paper band filter. We can talk about that in a second. On the flip side, no more DIY, John. Yeah, it's got to be a balance because that's how we live our lives and grow our businesses, you and I. But it is a conscious balance of which projects am I going to take on and which am I going to turn away? Because for everything I say yes to, it means I inherently am saying no to something else, which might be more important.
00:11:45
Speaker
So that's been on my kind of list. I don't really have like a point to make today with you or even a question, but it's been pondering and frankly bothering me, which is my theme for this year should really be include
00:12:01
Speaker
a better acknowledgement of the word focus, like in knowing that I can't do everything. And, um, what you just said, you know, yes, you add this product or add this thing, but it comes in the expense of, look, even the last,
00:12:17
Speaker
week or 10 days. I loved being out running parts in the shop. I really genuinely did. And some, to some extent, that's all that matters. Like that's great. I felt I like being, uh, I like working hard and I like showing the team that, Hey, like we're going to get through like a little bit of a surge and bad weather. It shut us down and somebody out like all that on the flip side. Um,
00:12:38
Speaker
It hit me two days ago, like, I got to stop doing this. It's actually not appropriate. It's not scalable. And frankly, I'm not being a good leader by perpetually, just not good. Yep. I think it's valuable to go through phases of doing that, realizing, pulling back, because it puts you back in the fold so that you really get a feel for what's going on.
00:13:03
Speaker
hands on with the process for a little bit as long as you are strong enough mentally internally to be like, okay, I'm good. I got it. I helped. Now it's time to pull back, let the team lead this and get back to business. I get to get back to leading.
00:13:19
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. That comes, well, I want to come back to that, but first I want to talk about this paper van filter because I love this idea. It seems like you should be able to purchase rolls of a suitable filter. Yeah. I've got a dozen rolls in stock. Like we have three paper bed filters in the shop right now. One on the current, one on the surface grinder, one on our tumbler. So I know how they work. I have examples like they're cool. Do yours use weight to index it?
00:13:47
Speaker
Index what? So two schools of thought come to mind. One is you could have the paper band filter always moving at a really slow RPM. Like measured in inches per minute kind of thing. Exactly. Yes, like two inches a minute. That's probably fine and could be a simple solution. If I recall, and we might even have shown it in the Amish SS CAD CAM tour video, his DMG when it's working is
00:14:16
Speaker
using the paper band filter that had a weight sensor. So if you think about like a roll of paper towels on its side stretched across to another roll of paper towels, a cassette deck. So as the chips start adding weight to the center of that paper band, it ends up stretching a spring pivot, like a bar, it stretches that more down.
00:14:39
Speaker
And when the bar stretches and moves an angle of one inch, it trips a sensor that indexes it one full bandwidth, like 20 inches over. And when it rolls it, it just dumps the chips on top into a hopper and stores the spent filter on the other paper band roll. Is that how yours work? Mine don't have the two things. I don't think there's a weight sensor in them. I think there's just one motor that pushes the paper.
00:15:06
Speaker
a mesh conveyor belt, the paper sits upon and the conveyor belt slowly rotates and it just kind of like grips the paper and feeds it forward and it spits it off the waterfall and into the bucket. But I think the Kern just, I think it's just constantly rotating at like 0.01 inches per minute or something like that because I can come in like if there's a problem on the Kern and like every now and then
00:15:34
Speaker
there'll be an alarm and the coolant will stay spraying for the weekend or something, but the machine is stopped. Not a huge deal, but the paper band conveyor still spits out paper. So you get this all like mostly clean paper. That's like 10 feet of paper that just spit out over the weekend. However, on the other machines, I think it's the same. No, on the tumbler, it's made by Gray Mills, the paper band filter, and it was like
00:16:05
Speaker
$4,000, $5,000, something like that, not terrible. And the surface grinder, the Okamoto has the exact same unit on it. And there is some sort of auto feed, like, I don't know if it's weight or if it's sensor or light or something, but it kind of knows that it's heavy or clogged up or something. I don't know.
00:16:27
Speaker
I keep it simple. I think you should easily have it hooked up to an IO so that it starts running when the machine is spindled running. That's all you need and then a stepper, like a NEMA 34, easy to program or doing like this. I'm okay with this or a PLC if you want to get fancy, but like under a hundred bucks. All you need is a speed controller. So you need the machine to say coolant or chip conveyor on, which turns the system on. And then you just need a speed controller with a pot on the top that you can like
00:16:55
Speaker
You tweak over time as your needs change, right? And not hard. And then the mechanical of like how to move the paper and how to capture all the chips properly and all that. There's some work in there, but I don't know.
00:17:12
Speaker
When you first load it, putting that roll on an idle shaft with a spring bar that just holds tension against it and then use the stepper to pull the paper done. Pretty much. That's what the mesh conveyor belt does because you just lay the paper on top of it and it's like auto feeds it kind of thing. Then we just have a rubbermaid tub like a bucket at the end that just captures all the coolant and chips and on the current,
00:17:40
Speaker
The paper is fairly dry at that point, so you just kind of shake it out, and you shake the chips into the bucket, and you cut the paper off, and you roll up the paper and throw in the garbage, and all your chips stay in the bucket, and it's better than scooping chips.
DIY Machine Filtration Systems
00:17:54
Speaker
Where do you buy, or do you know how much the price is on the actual filter? We've got a supplier in Ontario here. It's like $100 a roll or $70. It's not a lot. It's cheap. It's pretty cheap.
00:18:10
Speaker
Is there a micron rating to it? Yeah, you can get it in whatever. I think a lot of what we're buying is 20 micron. I think one of the machines has 50 micron. And they come in all different lengths and widths. And the current's got a weird special order width, probably some metric thing. But the other two units we have have the same, I forget, it's like 24 inches wide by 10 inch diameter or something like that.
00:18:35
Speaker
But yeah, so we're already stocking that paper. And that's what all the guys with speedios and no conveyors do anyways. They just put filter paper down, capture all the chips and throw that paper away periodically. It's an automated way to do that. It sounds awesome.
00:18:51
Speaker
We looked at this maybe three years ago. It's a little bit tricky on most of the Haas machines because you generally don't have a ton of extra real estate around where the chip chute funnels into the, I call it the fish fry basket above the coolant tank on the Haas machine. There's some room, but it's not, it would be easy to do if you had a hole
00:19:12
Speaker
open space all around it. That's not to say you can't do it, and I would throw out the challenge. If anyone listening is looking for an opportunity or product to bring to market, go design this, keep it as simple as you can. I will happily buy them and pay the full price that you need to charge for it, and also share it, which should result in some pretty decent organic growth of this, because I wholeheartedly believe, great example of it's not about the idea, it's about the execution. Somebody go execute on this, please.
00:19:42
Speaker
Yeah. In my thought process this morning, I was thinking all about it while I was working out and I was like, I should contact Gray Mills and I should be like, if you made this for brother's video, you'll sell hundreds of them. If they're five grand and people don't have to buy a $12,000 to $30,000 chip conveyor and it functions and it's great.
00:20:03
Speaker
I don't know. It's worth thinking about. And for the Haas machines, too, because a lot of them have that, you know, waterfall of coolant into the chip basket kind of system. Yeah. I don't think this gets solved by a company that's, you know, a mini conglomerate. They're gonna go over design it. They've got, it's just the wrong approach over. I want somebody like this is a garage startup, you know, absolutely, like, I am fully capable of
00:20:32
Speaker
designing this and making this for myself. I'm not going to bring it to market, but you know what I mean? Like there's other guys out there with the same or more skills than me that could totally, like this is a product that Speedy owners should, you know, eat up and also owners and like any machine, like it wouldn't work on our Maury because all the coolant just floods into the front. It's this huge area. You need a chicken there there. Um, but certain machines. Yeah. But even, um,
00:21:02
Speaker
I'll tell you, even if, if I want it, I look, I love cool. We talked about it in the Kuma video actually this week, but I love clean court and I value clean corn. Even if.
00:21:13
Speaker
If I had to, if someone could come up with an affordable paper and filter thing, I would easily, without hesitation, add a stump pump that's pulling coolant off the bottom of the tank, just a separate system that has a pump in your coolant tank, and it's just constantly kind of a third-party system. So it's just pulling coolant out, running it through the filter, and returning it right back to the tank at another spot in the tank. It's not perfect because it's not capturing the coolant in the same coolant loop as your machine, but still.
00:21:43
Speaker
Yeah, and that's how we do it. We have these cylinder bag filter coolant filters. Socks. Yeah, socks basically. Any micron you want, down to five micron or less. On the current, I've got two of them sequentially. I've got a 10 micron and then a five micron. That feeds the coolant to the nozzle, to the spindle.
00:22:07
Speaker
So it's constantly every drop of coolant that goes through that machine gets high filtered like that and then returned back and then goes through the paper band, which is 20 micron and then through the 10 then through the five and they catch a lot. We replace those socks every three weeks.
00:22:22
Speaker
Yeah, that's crazy. Yep. That's what's really cool about the concept 2000 unit that we have in the Akuma is the only way for the coolant to get back into the coolant tank from the machine is to sort of fall through a rotating drum. So think like the raffle ticket drums. OK. And it has a, I don't know, the micron offhand. It's called a 20 micron filter around the around the stainless mesh kind of filter.
00:22:51
Speaker
can't answer that. It's not consumable. I think it has to be cleaned six months a year, not often, but maybe it needs replaced. Anyway, so the coolant has to flow through that to get back. And then what happens is there's a spray bar on the inside that sprays outward. And it confused me at first. I think we explained this. I'm sorry. But imagine by blowing coolant outward through that rotating drum,
00:23:18
Speaker
It agitates any of the filters. It's a self-cleaning filter. And then I was kind of like, well, what happens with the stuff that it blows off though? And that stuff by and large is going to, first off, it's not going to get back into the return. It's going to get blown off down to where the scraper. Yep. And then the scraper picks it up and brings it forward. Yeah, totally. It's a brilliant system.
00:23:41
Speaker
I'm missing something in that explanation, but the spirit of it is true. This is assuming that it doesn't have longevity problems and things like that. All things mechanical, it will eventually break. That's what caught me by surprise when you and Dennis were talking about, I don't have experience with conveyors that don't work.
00:24:02
Speaker
I mean, the Haas machines, you could criticize, frankly, a lot of machines you could criticize for not having a great chip evacuation in the machine tool enclosure, like hosing down or chip stuck. And some of that's your tooling and chip size, but like the conveyors work great and Dennis has had an issue. And I think you guys are talking about just like,
00:24:19
Speaker
We've got two LNS conveyors. They function fine. They're like bulletproof. They work great, but they leak a lot of chips past the belt and into the coolant tank. That's my biggest problem because there's no internal filtration. We have piles of chips in our coolant tank right now, which causes bacteria and just
00:24:40
Speaker
You have way less coolant than you think you do and you have to do a massive clean out every six months or a year. I'm like, how do you avoid that completely? All that crap shouldn't be in the tank. The filter, $25,000, $30,000, concept 2000 will answer that problem. Either put your money where your mouth is or you just live with it.
00:25:01
Speaker
Do you use the, you guys have a Freddie, right? Yep. Do you use that then to solve the more ease coolant type issue? Like when we need a full clean out, basically. Oh, we did a full clean out the first time in two years on the current, uh, on Monday. And that was really good.
00:25:18
Speaker
So great. I mean, I supervised, uh, helped a little bit, but we pulled out all the old coolant, put in all new quality chem, two 51. And, uh, the shop smells like flowers. Now it's like fragrance super new coolant smell. And, uh, yeah, it worked really good.
00:25:38
Speaker
We have a rotating schedule. I don't know how many spindles we have now, like eight or nine, but every week. That's hilarious, by the way, that you don't know. I agree. I'm the same way, but you have to think anyway.
00:25:52
Speaker
Every week, I think usually on Monday, one of the machine gets, we have the X-air tank drum thing, and that way, at most, you're going a couple months where the tank is not drained and refilled. I mean, that's the purpose of buying that unit is to, on schedule, suck out all the coolant, filter it through its sock, and push it all back in, and what are you looking at, under an hour? I've never done it. I've done it once, but it shouldn't even be that long. No, exactly.
00:26:23
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, we don't actually use the Freddy for that purpose too often. Maybe we should, but because we have a lot of otherwise filtration on. I don't know. It's like it's an annoying job to especially on the Maury to pull out the entire coolant tank and on the Nakamura for that matter and like take the covers off and do a full vacuum of the whole thing. It's annoying enough that we're not going to do it every month. You can't just stick the Freddy wand in and do
Chip Conveyors and Coolant Challenges
00:26:50
Speaker
it. There's access that you wouldn't be able to reach now.
00:26:53
Speaker
Oh, I would get a sauce all out and solve that problem. Exactly. No, seriously. Can you not make a port? No. The conveyor has to roll out from under the machine.
00:27:04
Speaker
to be able to do that. Uncool. Yeah. So I mean, that's what's cool about the speedio coolant system is like, all the coolant from inside just waterfalls out the back of the machine. The hostels are like that, too. It's, it's like simple, but brilliant, because it's so easy. And then your coolant tank is just right there. And yeah, I'm like, and, you know, taken
00:27:29
Speaker
$25,000, $30,000 off the price of the Speedio by not getting a conveyor right now. Maybe I'll get one eventually, but that makes the purchasing decision that much easier. You're not going to have any conveyor on it? I don't know. I mean, it comes with the standard cooling tank anyway, and then you buy the conveyor and then you have two cooling tanks to get rid of. I don't know. This is since last night, since Dennis tried to talk me out of getting a conveyor.
00:27:58
Speaker
Yeah, maybe I buy the machine without the conveyor and then we'll see how life goes. Then I build the auto paper band filter thing and I don't know. Did you watch Parks and Rec? No, I never did.
00:28:10
Speaker
Oh man, there's a great scene when Ron Swanson sits down in a conference room. It's like an intervention and they put a VHS tape. I think it was VHS tape into the TV. It's like strapped to a cart, like typical like US small town public government. And it's the video starts playing and it's Ron Swanson. He's like, hi Ron, this is Ron. If you're watching this, you're thinking about getting back together with your ex-wife. You need to remember that she is a crazy, I'm not going to say in this podcast,
00:28:35
Speaker
And I feel like right now, I'm like, John Grimsby, you're looking at buying an automated lights out, Aroa-equipped, brother speed up next to a current. What the heck are you thinking? I'm not getting a conveyor on it. Yup. And as I said, up until last night, I was totally just going to spend the money, get the conveyor. So I'm playing my options, you know? Yeah. What does a quote unquote cheap conveyor cost? 12,000 maybe? Darn. Yeah.
00:29:04
Speaker
So like for your basic one that we have on other machines, that's gonna, I don't know. Yeah.
00:29:10
Speaker
There are some space constraints. Most conveyors are left output or right output. I would preferably on this video want a rear output to match what the Kern does. It fits it out behind the machine, which is a custom order thing. I don't know. It puts another plus one to don't get a conveyor and just see how life is. Then if you need one, buy one later. That's a fair point. If you can add it later, I hear you. For sure.
00:29:36
Speaker
And with what I have to, what I have planned for that machine, it's not going to be like, you know, pails, drums of chips every day. It's half of the time is going to be spent grinding and then some roughing, you know? So the grinding tells me you should be doing the absolute best end of the road filtration. I mean, same as we're doing on the current. It's not hard, you know?
00:30:03
Speaker
It's fun to think about. We actually have this problem potentially with the horizontal. The conveyor is delayed about six weeks past when the machine comes. Now, it'll take us a while. Same conveyor? Yeah. It'll take us a while to get the machine tooled up and so forth.
00:30:24
Speaker
And everybody who I've talked to who knows what they are talking about is like, do not underestimate how daunting it is to get a horizontal running. On the flip side, our tombstones show up tomorrow. We already have
00:30:40
Speaker
like six of the fixtures made. So all we have to do is tap, you know, 12 holes in the tombstones to bolt our fixtures to them. We have, we're actually, it's kind of weird. We're on the Genos because of how critical that machine is for fixture plates. We only use brand new big plus, almost all big Kaiser tooling for it, like strict new tooling, big plus, high quality.
00:31:08
Speaker
on the horizontal, we're not going to do that. I can't afford, I can't justify it. We have so many tool holders. Yeah, we have a hundred extra cat 42 holders right now under maybe 50. And it doesn't need to just doesn't need that for what we're doing with it. So we already have tooling, some of which is already literally set up. So putting it into the machine isn't that hard. And
00:31:33
Speaker
So I'm kind of like, I don't think it's going to be, you know, maybe it's five, four or five days. Like, I just don't think it's going to be that crazy to start making parts. And so we don't have a chip conveyor for the horizontal, which means our gosker guy is trying to look at like what the access looks like, because like, can we get a Rubbermaid perforator Rubbermaid thing and just let it drain into the, I don't know, or maybe the maybe the bomb contest on this vapor band filter is going to come to fruition in like the next two weeks.
00:32:01
Speaker
Yeah. Somebody able to make a generous one. Yeah. Or horizontal one. Yeah. Hmm.
00:32:09
Speaker
So yeah, I actually been curious to to about, um, Chris, I keep bringing him up. Chris Fox got that pucker machine Italian. Yeah. The, the chip compactor. Yeah. And he seems very happy with it. Yeah. Yeah. Every, everybody else that I've ever talked to has been like, don't buy it. You don't come close to doing enough volume. Like you need to be doing a 40 cubic yard a week or something like crazy volume. And that's a machine and it takes maintenance and it will break. And
00:32:39
Speaker
Yeah, I need an operator and $100,000 and pain in the butt and they're huge. This thing literally fits in the same size as a little 55 gallon drum or 33 gallon drum and it looks freaking sweet. It was not $100,000. Do you know? Yeah, I asked them. Let's just say it was under $25,000. I got to reach out. Like a lot under. I'll buy that. I'll buy that today if that's true.
00:33:05
Speaker
At the time, when I asked him when he first got it, I was like, well, how much? I was hoping it was under five grand. I was like, yeah, I'll try that. It was a lot more than that. I was like, okay, it's still really cool. It's still probably worth it if it functions well. Maybe it's chip dependent. Maybe you don't do stainless all day long on it. I don't know. Maybe it's great for aluminum. I don't know.
00:33:28
Speaker
He had a short video on it and they show, not only do they do mixed materials in it, but the pucks actually change color, which solves the other problem, but the fact that we're going to be running mixed materials in our horizontal. It's going to be a lot easier to see if you happen to be there when the pucks are coming out when you want to switch bins.
00:33:50
Speaker
It sounds awesome. It sounds like a brilliant thing and it's actually kind of cool how it works. I remember watching a bunch of videos. It's like this screw auger that constantly pushes it smaller and smaller and smaller and then it compacts it into a... I don't know.
00:34:07
Speaker
I wouldn't want to design one and make it, you know what I mean? It's more complicated than you think it is at first. Yeah, it is. But it's cool. It's one of those technologies that I want to take off and I want to dominate the market because it sounds like I hate dealing with massive amounts of chips and the coolant stuck inside of it. Every machine should have this, you know what I mean? But only if it functions perfectly.
00:34:30
Speaker
It's like a little orange juice squeezer, squeezes out your extra coolant. You can filter that and then right back into the machine. It sounds brilliant. I will do more research on this. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. If you get one, I expect a full documentation, documentary on it. And growth each cash for breakfast. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I am excited though.
00:34:55
Speaker
I made a last minute design change on one of the tombstones, which changed the tombstone order them. They come literally arrived tomorrow. Um, I think we're going to probably machine them in the horizontal. We could throw up on one of the Haas machines and yeah, I wonder about that, but it just, it's not worth the hassle. Even in the, in the Genos, right? Yeah, I would put them in.
00:35:24
Speaker
Janice is pretty booked right now, which is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So what's next on the brother?
Machinery Acquisition and Logistics
00:35:34
Speaker
I'm kind of just stalled. I think I'm waiting on, what was I waiting for? Kind of waiting for chip conveyor companies to get back to me with the price, which now I have. One company got back to me, one didn't yet, but what's the other thing I was waiting on?
00:35:50
Speaker
I don't remember. I'm just kind of stalled right now, like busy with other stuff, not thinking about it too much, but also in the back of my mind, I'm like, dude, just pull the trigger. What are you waiting for? So I don't know yet. Fair enough. Oh, and I ordered, I think the same dollies from Northern Tool, like the machine moving dollies.
00:36:11
Speaker
So I ordered them to get them to Canada. They won't ship directly from Factor Direct to Canada. So I got to go through a re-ship company. So I definitely want those to be here before anything big happens.
00:36:23
Speaker
But then I've already planned out a shift to Kern over five feet, stuff the brother in there. It would totally work. We could do it with the dollies and the toe jack, do it ourselves. I already asked Kern, is there anything weird about moving the machine five feet? And they're like, no, it's fine. Just level it and you're good to go. Having the three feet helps with that. So there's no machine twist at all. Yeah, so I want to be ready. But I don't know. Those dollies should be here in the next three to four weeks probably.
00:36:54
Speaker
I don't know. It's just that like, do we pull the trigger? Is it time? I don't know. It's not a need, it's a want. A company needs it, but not today. It could be in three weeks or three months or whatever. It's just like, when do you decide to do it? The sooner we have it, the sooner we're making money on it. I don't know what I'm stalling on.
00:37:14
Speaker
Then do this. It's Wednesday, February 9th. Quit thinking about it until Tuesday of next week. Literally. Do like everything in your willpower to just focus on other stuff. I've kind of been doing that the past few weeks though, but okay, I see your point. I find when you do that, you shake what we all have is like the TAZ or tool acquisition syndrome, like I'm excited.
00:37:39
Speaker
But you'll either be like, oh my God, what am I doing? Like buy this thing? Or you'll kind of realize, okay, that's not the first problem right now. The first problem that we have is whatever, something else. Yep. Absolutely. And that excitement, that eagerness of Taz is very real. And if I was looser with my money, I've already had spent it. But
00:38:07
Speaker
It's good to sit on things and see if it's still a good idea a week later, uh, two weeks later, as long as you're not, you know, wasting time unnecessarily. But, um, but yeah, I'm, I've, so I kind of done that and I'm kind of at the point like, yeah, I still want it. Yeah. It's still a brilliant idea. Like, yeah, it's going to work great. I know how to do it technically. Um, the chip conveyor thought process has been good, um, the past day, basically. So I'm kind of glad I waited until, until now to do that. But otherwise, like, I don't know.
00:38:36
Speaker
I'll talk to some of the guys at the shop and make sure everybody's on the same page with it. But yeah, we're close. Again, I'm not picking on you. The conveyor and options like that remind me of when we
00:38:51
Speaker
were debating certain options on the horizontal, including the tool matrix. I'm like, ah, we could probably make 64 tools work. It saves this cost and rigging and extra space. And then that next morning I had in the shower when I was like, oh my God, thank God about the tool matrix. That was by far the largest PO I've ever
00:39:10
Speaker
even dealt with on a machine tool. And it was actually probably one of the least stressful because by that point, I wholeheartedly realized how this helps us. It was easy. Yeah, for sure. Maybe I'll be surprised or regretting it somehow. I don't think so. Yeah, I don't think so either. But that comes with a level of confidence and time and experience and knowledge of the industry. And you've earned that over the past 10 years.
00:39:35
Speaker
It's not your first machine tool purchase, but it's certainly your biggest and it's awesome. I hope so. We got to work on... Okay. Well, for me buying a speedio, it's going to be one of my smaller machine tool purchases. Maybe that's why it's... Yeah. I'm kind of on the fence. I'm not on the fence. It's just timing. That's all. Okay. Everything else good? Is there more to that? Like behind stress or anxiety about other stuff?
00:40:04
Speaker
Like I said, I haven't been thinking about it. I don't know. Alif and I went skiing yesterday. It was his first time skiing. Awesome. It's just nice to get away and not think about things. Then I get back. I'm like, yeah, I still want the speedio. Sorry. It seems like the business case of freeing up current time is not 100%. It's a need. Yeah, it is a need. Yes. Okay. Absolutely.
00:40:26
Speaker
If you were, if John Grimsmoth, the business owner, was working with John Grimsmoth, the manager who was putting together a capex budget, I would criticize the manager for not having more conviction about, not because I feel like, you know, it's just like the case, like, this is, it's just money. It's everything but nothing. Like, we know how to use it. We know how to put it to work. It's a new, it's a new, what do you call it? Control?
00:40:54
Speaker
What do you want to call it? A notable flag. You're debating what could be important options, some integration risk, but like, okay. Yeah, exactly. I have immediate work for it on the current, from the current. It's a no brainer. So anyway.
00:41:16
Speaker
Speaking of new controls, that's what I got to work on. You talk about focus and what can I do
Programming and Power Solutions
00:41:20
Speaker
best. Yes, I loved running parts to help us get orders out and build up some buffer inventory, but what I need to be doing is not that. What I need to be doing is building out something. I think the logic could be used on the Haas post. In this case, I want it for OSP to start.
00:41:36
Speaker
I want to be able to probe, I want to be able to probe say 16 different points at once, storing those values in an array and then recalling them as you come through those different parts or coordinate systems. That is so amazing to do on Heidenhein. It's like fantastically cool.
00:41:57
Speaker
Is it really? It literally throws it into a table file, which is a spreadsheet, and you can pick A7 and call that. It's the best. It's complex, but it's super powerful. They basically let you do it out of the box. You don't have to write in modified posts. Yes and no. You have to dig deep in the manual to understand the logic of how that actually functions, but it's there.
00:42:24
Speaker
Yeah, I'm probably overthinking this because it's just simple. Like you probe, like on the host control, you probe something, it stores as a temporary value. Then you take that temporary value and you sign it to a user value. Yeah, like 500, macro 500 or something. And you make sure you have 20 of those that are available. And then when you go recall them up, I would try to, this is like amateur programmer John talking here. I would just put in something that does it
00:42:51
Speaker
check to make sure that the value it's using now doesn't match the last value, because those values will never be the same. Absolutely. And if it does, there's a problem. Yeah, absolutely. On FANUC, I kind of find the macros limiting. I forget how many you get. Several hundred available to you. I wish there were more. And on high man, you have an infinite amount. Yeah. Unfortunately, not the only person, but like
00:43:20
Speaker
Yeah. Well, if you want to start tracking like I do on the Maury tool life with macros and various things like that, run out kind of quick. Yeah, I hear you. The other kind of kick in the, you know what, last night was the electrician came by to start looking at the horizontal. It is specced to a 200 amp
00:43:45
Speaker
at 208 volts, three phase breaker and ends up that basically once you get past a hundred amps, maybe 150 that there aren't like normal panel breakers. Okay. And so we, we, we don't have a problem. They have a solution via a pass-through feed on the panel itself, which is totally works. It should work, but, um, you know, it's inconvenient. Also put it that way. It kind of scares me because, um,
00:44:15
Speaker
We have, overall, we have 900 amps of service here. It could get pretty expensive or just require a lot of thinking about how you need to tweak this going forward.
00:44:30
Speaker
It's that same thing. We've had the Genos now for quite a few months and putting in Ant Meter on it, it's pulling literally a small fraction of what the rating is. The momentary spikes are just at their momentary and they're still relatively small. This is not about saving money or cutting corners. It's really just about like,
00:44:51
Speaker
It also is quite silly to use 200 amp service if it never pulls but a fraction of that. Yes. We've talked about this before, probably with the Genos for that matter. How do you do it within the legal limits but without overdoing it and spending three times what you need to? We were hoping that you could put 150 amp breaker on our panel because that would have been something I was comfortable with.
00:45:20
Speaker
Our panel doesn't accept anything higher than 100. And I'm not interested in that solution. So again, we're just going to end up going 200. So it'll be totally good. But man, I got to think about what that looks like if we ever add a second one. Yeah, right. Yeah. You get more power from the road kind of thing. So yeah, you can. But I think that means you would pull out our whole main in. And I got to think that that's a five-figure project. Yeah. Yeah, right.
00:45:50
Speaker
Yeah, and you're down for days. We've looked at that here too, because we're pushing the limits. It's 600 volts here. We've got 200 amp to the back shop.
00:46:05
Speaker
And with the current and with all the machines, you know, kind of at theoretical breaker limits and stuff, you know, we're getting tight on power and to add another current that might not fit power wise, right?
Conclusion and Future Plans
00:46:16
Speaker
Um, but data speedio, no big deal, especially if I take away the UMAX and I, yeah, it'll work. So any update on the UMAX?
00:46:24
Speaker
I've got, from our mention on the podcast was last week or two weeks ago, I've got like five people interested. Awesome. It's fantastic. Thank you everybody. Yes. People from all over North America, like East Coast, West Coast, a couple people local, but I'm trying to find, I get to pick and choose which is the best fit. Ideally, I want to get rid of both of them. I want to sell both of them to the same person.
00:46:50
Speaker
It increases my chances of getting both of them gone, but also that individual's chances of having, you know, great working machines. Yeah. So anyway, I've been chatting with, with those guys and that's, uh, going well, going really well. That's great. Yeah. That's about all I got. Awesome. I will see you next week. All right, buddy. Take care.