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Business of Machining - Episode 121
249 Plays6 years ago
Saunders pushes through the pain of a bowling injury. He's still tough enough to make parts on his new 5-axis machine! And there's SO MUCH to learn about it.
Saunders wants to work on the 6th side of a part with his 5-axis, and then eventually tab it off
Let's start a tab.
Saunders gives some tips on how to tab off a part, and what he's learned since starting to play with his 5-axis.
"Filing is not great, scotch brite wheels work but it’s not the best. The trick is just to get really good at tabbing" - Saunders
QoftD: How are X and Y handled by the post?
Learn more about this in Saunders' recent video
ELIMINATE THE RISK OF TOUCHING YOUR TOOLS OFF
Meanwhile, there should be a better way in Fusion to do tool orientation.
“I would absolutely consider a 2 or 300 tool machine now” - Saunders
More and more Swissish everyday
Grimsmo is getting the Swiss lathe all set up, and it's bringing the team closer together (quite literally)
"The shop is TIGHT" - Grimsmo
“In the ideal shop you never have to say excuse me” - Angelo
The Grimsmo shop is running out of floor space, but everyone is being a good sport and is excited about the new machine!
More to come once Grimsmo translates the french manual that came with one of the components of the machine...or maybe he'll just get an English one.
Fun Fact: Grimsmo’s Swiss lathe was made in the Tornos factory in Taiwan. Up until that factory was planted, Tornos had really only been in Switzerland land and, after 150 years of being in the same location, the CEO says "It was SO nice to start from scratch!"
Prune the beautiful tree that is your machine shop.
“A purge every once in a while is not enough, I want to be pruning the tree and regularly cleaning things out” - Saunders
Swiss Lathe timeline
- Schedule application engineers for mid to late next week, which should coincide with tooling getting delivered
- Then make some chips!!
Links mentioned in the podcast:
Proportional Mixer for Coolant and Soluble Oil
Speeds and Feed Class with Saunders
Also in this episode:
- Don't flood your shop, leave your car keys on the "off" switch
- Grimsmo moves the air compressor through his tight shop. "I should've done it a long time ago!" - Grimsmo
- Grimsmo buys a second coolant/oil drum, and Saunders buys his first one
- How rotary unions work
Grimsmo’s got blade show this weekend!
Catch him and his team at booth 952.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining, Episode 121. My name is John Grimsmough. My name is John Saunders. Good morning, everybody. How are you? I'm excellent today. Good. How are you doing today?
Bowling Injury and Machine Discussion
00:00:14
Speaker
I could, except I had a non-machining injury would be an exaggeration, but we took the kids bowling, and I've had that tendonitis in my right arm that's kind of come and gone for the past few years, and so I thought, you know what? I'll be smart, and I'll bowl with my left arm, left hand. Interesting.
00:00:32
Speaker
And I definitely didn't, I'm sure I didn't tear my rotator cuff, at least I don't think I did, but it's, it's a pretty not fun pain level, which is funny. Cause like the U of the Haas UMC door is a single door and it's a lot heavier than a traditional, like all our other doors, the Tormox and the Haas verticals are pretty lightweight and easy to move in that UMC's got some mass to it. So like you always do it with your left arm. And now I'm like, Oh, I gotta be careful now.
00:01:00
Speaker
Yep. Yep. It's kind of funny. That's awesome. But yeah, a good price to pay to be making parts on it. It's still, I'm sorry, the high has continued. Good. That's good to know. You're not over the honeymoon phase yet.
Challenges and Strategies in Complex Machining
00:01:16
Speaker
We, I don't know if you saw the video we did on the kind of like our five axis workflow, but we built those. So
00:01:23
Speaker
It's great because it really feels like you're winning. It feels like you're hacking the system and you've got a much smarter way to get started. And perhaps this is quite common for other folks, but I was happy with it. And so what I'm struggling with or rather what I know I'm going to really improve on is
00:01:41
Speaker
Let's take a traditional five axis part like this one right here, which is kind of a, think about like a little piston tie rod type of thing or something that not a late part of mill part, but you know, where you want to have access to all, not only all five sides, but you actually want to do some work on the sixth side, the underneath side.
00:02:00
Speaker
both to do work on it, but also to establish datums and geometries, to do chamfering, and then eventually you're gonna wanna probably tab it off.
00:02:12
Speaker
So what I'm finding that I want to do, like let's say I have a part that's about the size of your index finger. Well, you've got that part held higher up off the vice by using a taller than normal piece of raw material. No big deal, but that's pretty simple. And then what you need to do is leave a center section that's thicker at first until you start tabbing it. So you have to do an adaptive strategy or some strategy to basically remove material underneath the left and the right hand side of the part, right?
00:02:42
Speaker
So how you define the sketch that contains that is very weird because, or it's different than a normal workflow because you, more area is normally how adaptive does well, right? Normally you don't like, normally not great to do adaptive in a slot. Let's say you're using a quarter inch tool. Well, a 0.3 inch slot isn't where adaptive shines in my opinion, it works, but
00:03:08
Speaker
But you also don't want to remove more material than you have to. You've got to be conscious of your tool and tool holder collision into the vice, how tall is your raw material.
Advancements in Tool Paths and Tabbing
00:03:18
Speaker
So kind of like thinking about that stack of physically stacked, but also that idea of where it is. And then what I'm trying to do is create some
00:03:27
Speaker
kind of quasi parametric sketches in the fifth axis setup files that have that adaptive operation sketch already defined. So because you know that that adaptive sketch always has to be at least a half an inch off of the top of the fifth axis vice because the quarter inch tool that I'm using with the ERM holder from Mari tool means it can't get closer than a half an inch.
00:03:53
Speaker
Okay. So that establishes your low point and then the high point should be, uh, really hugging the part geometry. So you want to use a 3d adaptive, which is part aware. So that handles that, but you don't always want to come all the way down because let's say you're holding the part up four inches, but it's only a one inch tall part where you only want to have adaptive off a little area, not the whole job. So that's what I'm working on. Sorry. I knew that was a lot. Yeah, that was good. Um,
00:04:22
Speaker
Yeah, I was thinking with with tabbing. So when you tab a part off, you basically, you're always planning on kind of filing or sanding or, or some sort of finishing off by hand usually to get that last little tab off. Or you could throw in the machine and deck it or something. You can deck it. Filing is not great with other material. Scotch bite wheels can work but they have they are quite visible.
00:04:49
Speaker
The trick is to get really good at tapping, I think. I think I thought of this, and I'm certainly not the first person to do it.
00:05:02
Speaker
at least this is one of those things I can't remember somebody else telling me, which is what we'll do is let's say we leave two tabs that are 60 thou. Of course it depends on your part thickness and part size, but generally speaking, it's pretty shocking how strong a couple of 60 thou thick quarter inch or 150 thou wide tabs are. So what I'll do is I'll 2d contour with a few thou stock to leave.
00:05:33
Speaker
And then I'll come back in and do a 2D contour that's a finished strategy so that it's not a quote unquote slot because it's already had a few thou on the other side removed. And then this is when the part is quote unquote still rigid. So maybe I have even a whole 60 or 70 thou strip along the bottom of the part. Then you can start your tabbing. And if you're good, basically the trick I think is when you do your tabs, do your tabs with like one or two thou,
00:06:00
Speaker
radial stock to leave and then you should be able to get the tabs down to
00:06:05
Speaker
very, very thin. You've got some part deflection will affect it as well as the accuracy of your machine. But in a perfect world, what I'd like to get to is three tabs that are in a triangle shape. So that way you've got the parts supported that maybe 10th hour less. And then depending on which way the parts gonna fall, you might even be able to machine two of those three off. And literally like, I want the tabs to where they're
00:06:34
Speaker
just not an issue. Yeah. I like the three tab idea. It's like a little pyramid triangle, you
Five-Axis Machining Experiences
00:06:39
Speaker
know, tripod. Yeah. Or, or you're better off, I think decking it. Um, or I'll learn maybe there's a better way or learn another way.
00:06:48
Speaker
But there's always going to be some imbalance in the finish with the tabbing, wall thickness kind of, it's never going to be the most perfect surface ever. I mean, it's not going to be a surface that you're going to ship on your handful. Exactly. That's what I'm thinking. I've seen some pretty impressive tabbing where you're like, oh, yeah. I mean, for the work we do, it would be most times acceptable. Cool.
00:07:17
Speaker
Yeah. Well, you know, I say that meaning like we're not doing work where they have up, you know, plus or minus seven tenths on the chamfer diameter. Like something's just like, what? Nice. Yeah. Um, so how many, how many five axis parts do you think you've made so far? Oh, 75.
00:07:42
Speaker
Yeah. Some of those were some of those that you've had enough. Yeah. Some of those were batches of five or 10. So maybe you mean discrete parts. Still, I bet you I've done 30, 40 parts. That's awesome. Yeah. That's super cool.
00:07:56
Speaker
The devil's in the details, man. You can get to CAM really quick on most of it. Now that you've programmed these parts, you have much more conviction about changing the workflows. I'm really frustrated that there isn't a better way in Fusion to do tool orientation because
00:08:18
Speaker
you're basically creating, you create a lot more ops because you end up doing things as you rotate the part. So it's not like you do all your work, all your adaptive work, all your spotting, all your, you know, you're constantly moving it around and you're doing work at the top while it's still rigid then working your way down. So you click tool orientation on basically every op and on a simple part, I may have 30 or 40 ops now.
00:08:42
Speaker
And you can template those so it's quick to create them and settings What do you mean? Yeah, oh you love you. Oh But man, um, and I think that change is gonna get better on the whole stuff because it looks like when I'm doing a hole Why would you not already know the tool orientation to orient the machine? but even surfaces like I wish I
00:09:05
Speaker
Maybe, I don't know what this key, like when I open up a 2D contour, I wish I could like just hit the, I don't know, T key as I click a plane and I hit holding T while you click a plane, which is automatically orient your Z. Because Z is the only one you have to do. It's X and Y are irrelevant handled by your post or the kernel. I think it was you in your video that was saying that, and that confused me. So how are X and Y handled by the post?
00:09:32
Speaker
I don't know, but what I know is this came up when we got our Camplete demo and they were explaining because there's possibilities to do part work at B positive or B negative or A positive A negative. And you may want it a certain way. And so Camplete has the ability to take something that's done at B positive and you can literally say, nope, I want the trending the other way and you can override it. Okay.
00:10:01
Speaker
But X and Y, I literally don't know why they have that in. Well, the only reason that's of value is it can be quite handy with operations like parallel because parallel, the 3D toolpath parallel has an angle that's relative to your X axis. So you can actually kind of cheat because the X axis doesn't really matter. So if you want an angle that's at a weird angle, you can just click some feature and now you know what angle to set that at.
00:10:30
Speaker
in reference to. Yeah. It's
Future of Machining and Workflow Innovations
00:10:34
Speaker
fun. It's fun. Yeah. It sounds like there's lots to learn, but it's like interesting and exciting. Oh, you'll pick it up in no time, dude. Yeah. Yeah. Don't worry about that. Yeah. Are you thinking about it?
00:10:47
Speaker
Of course. Yeah, the future definitely holds five axes for sure. But I mean, for a lot of the work that we'll do, it'll be just tombstone based positional, more for the workflow, for the productivity of having many, many pallets and many, many tools. However, there's always going to be stuff that needs like either simultaneous five axis just for the heck of it, or
00:11:16
Speaker
you know you're making this weird clamp, you need 10 of them. Just do it one and done. I'm looking forward to that for sure. I said it in that video, but I am blown away, truly blown away that the fix rate, like the rock lock system means, subject to your tooling being set up, it's not a big deal. We
00:11:37
Speaker
uh, goofed on a part. And so I had to order, I ordered six, we had to make five and I goofed on my one extra as well. So I ordered another piece. It comes today. It's just not a big deal. Like because you have it set up offline and it's on the studs. Um, it's shocking that you're just like, Oh yeah, I'll go switch this workflow through. Like I'm going to go work on another part while UPS comes and then switch over to that. And it's zero stress. Again, the change is tooling. And I'll tell you, uh,
00:12:08
Speaker
Even a month ago, we had our five axis, but hadn't run that many parts. I was thinking, look, 40 tools is fine. We can work with it. It's common for whatever we want to call it, entry level five axis. I would absolutely consider a two or 300 tool machine now. Really? Yes. I'm tired of setting up drills. I've set up so many freaking drills.
00:12:35
Speaker
Um, and it's a pain in the butt because a lot of times with drills, you got to find the small ER college. How are they being used somewhere else? Do you have them? We can't, I can't, we don't buy cheaper ER college anymore. So they're expensive. So it's just, I'd rather do what Amish does, which is set up. Um, you know, he has a number seven drill, but even if it's on the machine, it remains in a holder. Yeah. Yeah.
00:12:57
Speaker
Um, and I just want to have a tool library. I'm going to be able to program the parts. I want to not have to set tools up, touch them off risk, uh, risk. I crashed because you didn't touch a tool off. I know that sounds easy to say. We'll just touch your tools off, but, um, I just don't want it. I don't want that risk entering the equation. So I would completely understand.
00:13:19
Speaker
You know, I want a long three-eighths inch tool. I want a stubby three-eighths inch tool. I want one that's an original holder. I want one that's got a corner rat on it. Probably aluminum. You want one for steels. Yes, right. Exactly. And that's just your three-eighths tool.
00:13:36
Speaker
Yeah, no, exactly. So, um, I say that with, with clarity and conviction, because I was more, I definitely thought like when we first saw the Matt Suras and stuff, I was like, okay, I could see this like process reliability, you know, fixed, like high mix, low volume, like kind of a luxury
Tool Management and Efficiency
00:13:52
Speaker
sort of thing. And now I'm like, nah, this is, this is like, absolutely the way to go. Nice.
00:13:58
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and you miss like the, some of the machines that have access to the ATC while the machines running that, that would be huge. Oh man. Yep. I wish memory had that for sure. I remember when we were at trade shows, even like a year or two ago, and we didn't, I at least didn't really get that. I was like, Oh, that's interesting. You know, whatever. Now I'm like, Oh my God, bro. I wish.
00:14:21
Speaker
I want to climb up into the halls and rip a tool out of the pocket. I guess the trick with that is in that scenario, you need to be able to flag the tool to be touched off right away because unless you had an offline preset or which would solve the problem. I think that's the answer.
00:14:43
Speaker
Right. I wonder if those brake detection wands, the things that are kind of like tripwires, I wonder. Yeah, I got two of those. Oh, for the Swiss? Yep. I wonder if they could set the tool height to within 100 thou. I don't know if they're allowed to write to the control though, but you would think that could be helpful to at least, I don't know. I think it's just an on-off sensor, but there might be more accurate ones.
00:15:11
Speaker
I don't know. I just mean, I don't know. If for some reason you goofed, it'd be nice that that thing at least told it the gauge length was 6.6 inches and not zero or two inches and that results in a crash. Sure. Yeah. Crash during tool setting would be embarrassing. Right. How is this with? What's the latest?
00:15:34
Speaker
Latest is we've had a sea of install techs come and go and come and go. Both the LA of Matsura guys and a Tornos guy was here for a couple days from Chicago and all kinds of accessories being put in. So we got two tool breakage detection wands, which just like you said, it's like a little, it's a thin strip of metal. It's like a flapper that just moves and says, is there a tool there or is there not a tool there? It's like when you drive into a parking garage and the thing stops you from,
00:16:04
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah, it's like a parking barricade. What do you call that thing? I don't know, the wooden fence that goes up. The railroad crossing stop. Exactly. Surprisingly, it's pneumatically powered.
00:16:19
Speaker
So there's an airline to it that just pressurizes a little piston at the end that articulates the arm down and up. And there must be some very sensitive air pressure sensing device on the other end of it that tells if there's something in the way or if it has full extension. No, it has to be an encoder on the pivot.
00:16:42
Speaker
I'm trying to remember. I know there's an airline going to it for sure. I don't think there's wires going to it. I think it's just air. Wow. That's incredible. Yeah. How? What? Okay. Yeah. I'll dig deeper to get into it, but basically the guy fired it up. Each one is on its own M code. You hit the M code and the piston goes down and then another M code and it retracts. Is it tool specific?
00:17:08
Speaker
Right now, they're literally just hanging, and they give you these extensions that's sort of like a Noga arm, where it's like you can lock it down and stuff. So you mount that wherever, and then you mount the breakage sensor wherever. And then in your programming, you know that it's set up for whatever tool.
00:17:26
Speaker
Okay, but when I've seen those in vertical machining centers, they're in the ATC, so they can do every tool as it moves through the pockets. It's yours. It would be tool specific for sure. Okay, it's only for one drill or one cutting tool. Got it. Okay. Maybe that's why it could be pneumatic is because you kind of program it just for one value. I just can't contemplate. I've heard of ones that are servo-based.
00:17:54
Speaker
Interesting. So that would give you the feedback of knowing. Yeah, right. Yep. But yeah, so that's cool. Our 60,000 RPM live tool is plumbed up, aired up, wired up, everything's running, we tested it, it's near silent. And holding that what is that? Is that also pneumatic electric?
00:18:20
Speaker
The install text thought that it was air powered, but I am fairly convinced that it's electric with an air bearing of some sort. But I tried to read the literature, but it's in French.
00:18:32
Speaker
Oh, I thought you spoke like Swiss French. I can bumble through a, you know, introductions, but I can't read a manual. You can't read, you can't read technical hydraulic pneumatic literary literary literature. Yeah. Um, but yeah, it's, it's really cool. And it's, it had a minor vibration to it. Just, I mean, it's spinning a 60,000 RPM. It's insane. Um, yeah. So that just has to be mounted in a tool block. Um, the.
00:19:00
Speaker
When you get a machine shipped into Canada, it has to pass ESA safety, electrical safety advisory, something like that. I'm sure there's the same thing in America, CA or E, I don't know. I think it's UL.
00:19:16
Speaker
Yeah, the electricians like Elliott sent electricians to come in and they had to replace a whole bunch of the PLC like relay blocks and connectors and contactors and like lots of stuff to make it ESA compliant, to make it Canadian compliant.
00:19:35
Speaker
Is that on them or you? That's on them. Oh, okay. That's good. Weird. So it's no big deal. But the guy was here for like a day and a half, just replacing relays and stuff. And it's like, holy cow, man. Is that because the tornos didn't sell you the machine, but rather it was first a us machine and they're okay. Yeah, it was the stock machine in the us. It was built in, in Switzerland or wherever they're built, um, for me, then they probably would expect it.
00:20:02
Speaker
at the factory, but yeah, whatever. Are they built elsewhere than Switzerland? I think this model is built at a Tornos factory in Taiwan. Got it. When I was at Tornos, the CEO was telling me about this factory and he's like, we took our best guys. We sent them there. We said, built a factory. We built a factory full custom spec just for us from scratch. He said it was actually really liberating experience because
00:20:28
Speaker
They've been in Mutier, Switzerland for a hundred plus years, 150 years. And he's like, to start fresh was so nice. Right. He's like, we can lay it out perfectly. It's got like aisles and rows and rooms for everything. And yeah.
00:20:44
Speaker
Yeah, I'm starting to get that feeling. You know, I've been doing this for 12 years now. We've been in this shop for four, no, three years and change. But when I see stuff as much as we've done a quote unquote purge in a good way, I would say I haven't done enough. And so that's OK. So it'll take time. But when you look at folks that have a conviction and a focus and
00:21:13
Speaker
just, you know, we are in this business. We don't need, you know, I now see we have this collection of, you know, I have a bunch of one inch and larger pipe taps. Well, I don't want to get rid of those because part of me just will always be that person that's like, it's nice to know that you, if you have some reason to have to do a one and a quarter inch pipe tap, I've got one, but like nothing with Saunders business model or business plan would ever spend a dollar to acquire that at an auction or anything else. So you got to weigh those two, maybe I'll
00:21:42
Speaker
try to take some of that stuff back home.
Workspace Organization and High-Speed Tools
00:21:44
Speaker
So I have it, but at least it's not here. I don't know. Yeah. That's a good idea. Or like one dedicated toolbox there that just is the, this is John's toolbox. You know, it's not for work. It's, that's a good point. We have it if we need it. Yeah. But it's just, it's the only way to not end up in a mess in 10 years, 20 years is to be just to trim the, prune the tree each year. Right. You can't just,
00:22:09
Speaker
doing two year overhauls helps, but it's not the right way to do it. Yeah. Yeah. We've definitely got shelves and drawers and cubbies and stuff of stuff that hasn't been touched in years. Right. And it's eating up space, you know? Yeah.
00:22:28
Speaker
Well, you got a space for one more machine in that shop. Oh, yeah. How's it been having texts there while there's like one or two more employees, right? Well, Angelo said something interesting. He's like in the ideal shop, you never have to say, excuse me. Whereas we say it 50 times a day here. Yeah, that's funny. You know, you're like, you gotta like when somebody has to move out of the way for you to get by, which now happens, you know, 10, 50 times a day. Yeah. Um, it's just kind of annoying. Yeah. That's fair.
00:22:56
Speaker
Um, the, uh, the air spindle for your, what are you, or sorry, what are you calling it? The 60 K? Yeah. Uh, high speed spindle, whatever it is. Doesn't feel like that hard drive platter when you try to rotate it. Oh, I don't know. Try.
00:23:13
Speaker
Oh, man. That's like the first thing I would have done. It has so little rotational mass in the middle, so maybe it wouldn't as much. Yeah. Because a Dremel doesn't feel like that. That thing spins at 30k. Yeah, you're probably right. I guess a hard drive does that because it has that centrifugal is probably the wrong term, but it has those counterweight effect outside, like a spinner. Remember, fidget spinners. I know. They died hard. RIP.
00:23:40
Speaker
And what was I gonna say? And then it's an ER 10 in the nose or something? ER 8. Wow. ER 8. I don't think I've ever seen an ER 8. Yeah. I bought a couple a long time ago, just super cheap ones and they are tiny. They look like a chip. That's funny. That's hilarious. Have you tested a tool in it? I guess it's not really ready to.
00:24:03
Speaker
I don't have any tools yet. My collets just came from Hardin's yesterday, which is excellent. Collets and guide bushings. I didn't actually know what a guide bushing looked like, but it looks just like a collet.
00:24:15
Speaker
I thought it would be more something with adjustability and all this crazy stuff, but it looks just like a collet, except it has carbide faces of the ID. Oh, wow. So it's pretty, it's pretty sweet. And I was pleasantly surprised at the price of the Hardinj collets because from Hardinj, a 5C collet's like $54. These, what are they called? TF16 or something? They're $41 for a Swiss collet. Really?
00:24:44
Speaker
I was like, Oh, sweet. I thought they were going to be like 150 bucks because they're fancy Swiss, like rare stuff. Um, but no, they're 41 bucks. So I got, I don't know, 15 of them or something. These are for your, I'm sorry, this is your spindle, like guide bushing call it. The note there's, so there's three call it on a Swiss. There's the guide bushing and then there's a main call it and a sub call it. Okay. The main and the sub are $41 and the guide bushing is 107 or something like that, which is still, are they wear items?
00:25:14
Speaker
Not really. Like multi years or something. Probably the sub call it will wear the most because that's what's gripping onto your finished part. Got it. And save for any crashes or bumping the call it with the tool kind of issues.
00:25:33
Speaker
Yeah, but yeah, so those came in. My tooling order is placed last night. I should be here probably next week. Very excited for that. It ended up being twice what my budget was theoretically. Really? My day one, like I think I can get everything for 3,600 bucks and it was like 6,500 bucks. This is for soft bodies, inserts, holders, all that stuff? Yeah, got it. It's a lot.
00:26:00
Speaker
Do you do the like, is that a popular thing in Canada? Like the whole like 50% coupon with a company? Yes. Okay. When I got my mill voucher, I got Sandvik to do that. With the lathe, it wasn't exactly like that, but I was able to negotiate basically $3,600 of tooling thrown in. Okay. With the Nakamura. With the Swiss. Okay. Okay. Got it. Nice. Yeah. That's cool.
00:26:30
Speaker
Yeah. So that worked out really well. And then like I said, budget went double. So now I got to pay 3,600 myself, but that's fine. Um, and then they just have to, we got a drum of blossom oil that did not
Coolant Systems and Challenges
00:26:45
Speaker
fill it up. So we bought a second drum. Oh my God. Um, just came in the other day and fun fact to empty a drum quickly, we bought a, um,
00:26:57
Speaker
like the schnozzle at the top that you plumb air into. So it pressurizes the whole canister and spits out this one inch orifice. Yeah. How could this go wrong? I wasn't here. Yeah, I wasn't here when they did that. But Sky said it, it emptied it in like just a few minutes. Really? Oh, that's awesome.
00:27:17
Speaker
Yeah, drums are, we ironically got our, this is weird, ironically got our first drum two weeks ago of coolant. And, uh, let me tell you, the drums are heavy and yeah. Did you buy a drum dolly? No. Cause it luckily came on a pallet, although the freight, the LTL driver called me and he's like,
00:27:37
Speaker
You guys don't have a doc. What do you, what do you, I'm like, we have a forklift. He's like, I don't have a pallet. I don't have a pallet Jack. I'm like, we have a pallet Jack door, like, don't worry about this. He was next door. I'm like, let's stop talking on the phone. Just drive over here. We'll figure this out. Literally he's across the street, like worked up. And so he gets here and it's literally just on a pallet at the front of his truck. So not a big deal. We put the pallet Jack in, we move it to the end and we pick it with the forklift and we move it over into our shop. Like totally not a big deal, but then, um,
00:28:05
Speaker
we were spending some time researching the, there's like $150 option. And then there's these $500 options for, uh, what's the proportional pump valves, like different terms and there's different features, but I'm trying to figure out why are some of them 500 and why are some of them 150 or whatever? Like am I missing something? This is the device that mixes water and coolant and gets you 7% out the nozzle or 1% or whatever you want. Exactly.
00:28:32
Speaker
Actually, it's funny. You say that because we bought one and we're mixing it at the kind of coolant mix ratio. But when we top off, we usually top off with much lower because water evaporates, not the core never really understood that. How does water evaporate, but not the coolant? I'm not a chemist because oil doesn't really evaporate. It's not oil though. It's a water soluble. Like does it, it's still oily.
00:28:55
Speaker
Yeah. I would think that there would be more of a loss, whether it's through VAP or through just a chip loss. When it goes out with chips, you're losing the mixed stuff, not just the H2O. But I think when it goes out with the chips, the oil tends to cling to the parts more than the water.
00:29:14
Speaker
I guess I don't think of them as being separate chemically. Once it's mixed, it looks like it's just become coolant, not water plus other stuff. Anyway, what I'm going to do is what I think Dennis Rathy was saying is plumb two of those things out of the barrel. One's at 7% that you want and one's at 1% because right now what we're doing is most of the time we seem to want 1%, so we're putting a little bit of 7 in and then topping off of water.
00:29:40
Speaker
Yeah, you're still hacking it. But they are freaking sweet. Holy cow. Yeah. Which one did you get? You know what's hilarious? I bought one from some online website that Amish recommended, and then Jay Pearson was like, oh, I just bought the one off of McMaster, which was cheaper. We'll put the part in the bomb description. McMaster one is, I think, 150, and it looks to be identical.
00:30:07
Speaker
Nice. And it works great? They work great, yeah. Is it adjustable? Yep, it's got a little dial face. I didn't set it up, but we also just bought a digital refractometer. Ooh, a digital? I don't even know they had digital ones. Yeah, I'll put that link in the description too. The one that our coolant person brought by was like 300. I took a Amazon review breed, and there's one that was like 150.
00:30:33
Speaker
30 or 40, which frankly is the same price as a really good analog refract. It's cool because you hold it, it's about the size, it's bigger than a pack of cigarettes. I don't know how to describe the size. Sorry. It's got a little silver
00:30:50
Speaker
a built-in silver bowl on it with a little hole in the middle, and you just take coolant, drop it on there, it tells it to you, and then you just blow it out, so you don't have to like, get it. Yeah, and like close the lid, lift up, like it just seems a lot quicker and easier. But it doesn't give you, like we notice when our coolant gets old and the crispness of the line gets very blurry, whereas like fresh, fresh coolant is crisp. Does the digital not tell you that?
00:31:16
Speaker
That's a great question. I don't know. We'll certainly keep our analogs, but I just... Yeah. We're trying to do a better job of checking. On a day-to-day basis. Exactly. The digital would be great. Got it. Cool. Well, I'm excited to see both of those devices. I might get them too. Yeah. I'll throw up on them. It's worth a video review.
00:31:37
Speaker
Last summer, we bought a device, I think it was called Autofill, from a Vancouver-based company that has a float level and is supposed to automatically top up your coolant and proportionate at the same time. And we haven't installed it yet.
00:31:58
Speaker
Yeah, I feel kind of bad about that, but it's one of those perpetual to-dos. I would love it on the lathe because the lathe just evaporates coolant on a daily basis. I'm disappointed to hear that because we are trying to wrap up pulling the trigger on air conditioning, and I'd really hope that lower humidity would help reduce coolant evaporate.
00:32:23
Speaker
It's not a problem for you. It's a layered thing. Oh my gosh, don't get me started. Have a sky or somebody do the proportion. Yeah, that's the plan, but they're very busy as well. Fair enough.
00:32:37
Speaker
That's fine. The thing I like about the barrel with that proportional is it takes just a few minutes to make a bucket of water or you could run it straight into the machine. I'm always a little bit spooked about any water system that has automation. I don't want to flood the shop or anything of the sort.
00:33:03
Speaker
Yep, real concerns. And that's maybe part of why I haven't installed it, but I definitely want to try. Maybe a system that has two floats with the backup safety, with a moisture sensor alarm on the floor. There's got to be some way to save yourself to feel comfortable. Putting a sensor on the system that has nothing to do with the system would be the way to go, because at least you get a text message if it's flooding.
00:33:32
Speaker
and or it could shut off water supply. That would be cool.
00:33:38
Speaker
We, right now what I do is if I turn on a faucet like that to do something is worst case, I'll put my car keys on a zip tie attached to it. So at least worst case, I can't leave the shop with it on. Because one thing to flood the shop if you're there, it's worse to come back the next morning to the Saunders Machine Works swimming pool.
00:34:03
Speaker
But it's one of those tasks where it just takes minutes or tens of minutes sometimes to just stand there and fill buckets of coolant. And you don't just want to walk away and leave the hose running. We've had this problem once or twice where you just left the hose running too long and it starts over flooding. And so now we just have to stand there.
00:34:25
Speaker
it's basically time to do nothing. So you're like on your phone for a few minutes while you're waiting for the bucket to fill. And the water pressure here isn't awesome either. But yeah, that's interesting.
00:34:39
Speaker
Apparently, the DIY beer makers or breweries use refractometers for making beer, something.
Air Compressor Considerations
00:34:47
Speaker
I think that's what's driving, much like our DIY Haas filter system for the air filter is driven on the grower market for Mary Jane. The refract market, all the Amazon reviews were talking about folks doing beer stuff. I was like, hey, I'll take it. Exactly.
00:35:07
Speaker
Did you get your air compressor moved okay? Yes, I did that the other week. Was that hard? Not too hard. It was harder to snake everything through the tight shop than it was to physically move it. I used a pallet jack. Leif was here for emotional support.
00:35:33
Speaker
But yeah, it was pretty easy. The electrician, when he wired in the Swiss wired in a wire on the other shop for the air compressor anyway. Um, I love having it not three feet away from me at all times. That's gotta be nice. Huge game changer. Um, and it's in the loud shop, like three feet away from a tumbler now. So nobody really cares about the noise anymore. Um, so I'm super happy. I should have done that a long time ago, but I had no reason to.
00:36:02
Speaker
Check the filter more on it now though, because you're going to be, it's in the grinding shop basically, right? Not really. They don't really do much, a little bit grinding over there, but yeah, it's something we got to be careful of. We actually need an overhaul on that machine, just filters and oil and stuff, but kind of putting that off, so I got to not put that off too much longer.
00:36:24
Speaker
We had our compressor, we had a Haas alarm on low air pressure hit us and it was a perfect storm of like somebody was using an air hose while all the machines were running, which usually all like many machines aren't actually like
00:36:40
Speaker
No, we ran out of air. Yeah, we ran out of air. So I either need to get a 100-gallon tank to act as a battery, which is not a bad idea regardless of the scenario. Or I don't want to do this right now, for sure. But I think we could sell that compressor for a pretty good, not that much of a disk, or a good price, and just buy two sizes up or something. Yeah.
00:37:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's something that's definitely on my mind for the next shop and for the next few machines is we're definitely going to need a bigger air compressor and a battery tank, like you said, like a buffer, probably both.
00:37:27
Speaker
I tried to find a tank and other than buying, maybe I just need to get off being a bootstrapper, but other than buying a brand new, really expensive, dedicated tank from somebody, I was like, there's not a really ... The cheapest way it seems to be to buy a tank would be to go buy the $300 piece of junk compressor from Home Depot and just use the tank on it. It's not a horrible idea, but it's waste. It's too bad.
00:37:53
Speaker
Does Home Depot sell replacement tanks for some weird reason? No. Although I guess you could even strip the head off of it and maybe sell it to somebody. I don't know. Yeah. And you don't really want to buy an old rusty tank that somebody has abused. I will not put anything used on our system. Yeah. It's like I will not put it in student group. Right. Nope. Nope. Won't introduce that. Yeah.
00:38:17
Speaker
You were talking about the Swiss collets.
Coolant Solutions and Machine Setup
00:38:21
Speaker
It's interesting, the Haas guy was explaining how rotary unions work on through-spindle coolant. Have you ever heard this? Yeah, I've done a bunch of research on them because I won't be bad. I thought you had it. I have it on my mill. I just don't have the pumps for hybrid for coolant, but I want it on my lathe so I can have sub-spindle coolant flush.
00:38:45
Speaker
What's that mean? Subcendal through the actual spindle of the sub? Yeah. Yeah. So you're injecting chips and garbage out the collet using coolant pressure. Cool. And this is an option. LA Metzora wants five grand to install it. And I'm like, that's just not happening. Yeah. Because a rotary union is like hundreds of dollars. So I'm like, it did a bunch of research. I'm like, gosh, should I just do it myself? Blah, blah, blah. No. Yeah, right. That's why I haven't done it.
00:39:12
Speaker
But it's also not worth five grand just to flush some chips out to cool it. Is your lathe under warranty? Probably not anymore. That's funny. It still seems new to me. It's not new, right? Holy cow. Three years. Yeah, no, not at all. So the thing about that, which is awesome, is like 50 PSI would be fine, right?
00:39:33
Speaker
Yeah. What the guy was explaining, it made me want to learn more. All he really explained was that you have two carbide faced washers or rings and that those are pressed together
00:39:47
Speaker
One is stationary, one is rotating. So you think it's basically trying to friction weld itself together, except it's actually using the pressure of the through spindle coolant to weep, coolant out through the ring faces. So it's an intentional leak system that provides the cooling. And he showed us, I couldn't believe it. I've stared at these Haas machines for three or four years now. Behind the spindle, there's a probably half inch copper pipe. Anyone who's listening who has a Haas with TSC, go look for this, it's hilarious.
00:40:16
Speaker
our VF2 is in a different spot, but basically you have a copper drain line that should be dripping a little bit of that overflow. It shouldn't be a hose. It should just be dripping. And that's kind of how they work, which is really cool.
00:40:33
Speaker
They have to purposely drip. So the rotary unit is physically stationary. Like there's sometimes an arm or something that holds it from rotating. At least that's what I've seen. Because one side rotates with the spindle, but the other side has to stay completely rigid. I don't think it takes a lot of force, but it can't move. And then, yeah, it's like an intentional, not an air bearing, but a water bearing, like a liquid bearing.
00:40:59
Speaker
So it's bound to leak something and then through the little drain line, it just returns. It's cool, right? Yeah. So there must be like an intentional gap of half a thou or whatever, whatever they want for the bearing. I think the gap is created by the pressure of the coolant.
00:41:20
Speaker
I think. When it's pressurized, it must move away enough, a certain distance. Oh, that's a good question. My understanding, which was basic at best, was that the spring naturally keeps it open. And then when you turn TSC on, the TSC pressure forces it closed, except it's able to weep out.
00:41:42
Speaker
I can't imagine that there's a physical stop that keeps it open at foul or something because that would be way too prone to needing adjustment. I don't know. I don't know. Cool. But yeah, they're pretty cool. That's awesome. If you bought a rotary union, you could figure out how to attach it to the sub and then M code it on. For sure. Yeah, not hard. I guess I would probably do that. You wouldn't even M code it. You would just key it to one of your coolant pumps.
00:42:11
Speaker
Either my low pressure or my high pressure. You don't mind if it's on all the time? When the core's on? I guess you wouldn't want that. You could put a solenoid on it or something. Do you have M codes on the NOC? Probably. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not aware, but I'm sure there are. Got it.
00:42:30
Speaker
Yeah, that doesn't actually seem all that crazy now that we say it. Right? It's not that hard, but just another project, right? But it would be super helpful because chips packing up in the sub-collet are a bad thing. So on the Swiss, it comes apparently
00:42:45
Speaker
wired and plumbed for a physical ejector pin, like an air cylinder that just ejects the part out with a pusher stick, and then also through coolant through the sub spindle. And I think he said air as well. So you have your three choices of how to eject your part. That's cool. Super exciting.
00:43:03
Speaker
And then as far as the timeline for the Swiss, we've got Blade Show this weekend. And then I think we're going to try to schedule applications engineers to come in mid to late next week, which should coincide with my tooling getting delivered. And then we can actually make some chips next week. Awesome. That's cool. It'll take you a while to physically install the tools though, right?
00:43:25
Speaker
Yeah, it will. Like a two days or something, I would think. Could be. Yeah. I mean, they're not that hard, but plumbing the through tool coolant has been one of my bigger challenges, just wrapping my head around. How do you get coolant lines to every tool? But I think I got to figure it out.
00:43:43
Speaker
I say that with the tooling time because again, it kind of ties back to the UMC. It's like be a surgeon, put your phone away. Don't look at email. I've got to set up seven tools. That doesn't sound like that much, but by the time you grab the holders, check the gauge links, write down the gauge links because I need to put those back into fusion for
00:44:03
Speaker
true path detection and like, I want to write down the stick out this time. I want to make sure that I've got the right size collet so that it's closest to nominal, not having an extra collapsing. I want to check the TIR. I may want to look at this. Like you add this up across seven tools. And the reality is it should take you a couple of hours when you're like seven, seven tools, I should just be able to grab seven tools, the wrench, boom, boom, boom. This is five minutes. It takes a long time. Yep. Especially if you're feeding back to fusion and doing it, doing it right.
00:44:32
Speaker
Yeah. But it's fun. I'm loving it. We ran a carbide slimming saw last week, and it went awesome. I was pretty nervous, and that was great. Yeah. It's one of those scenarios, like why was I nervous? Yeah. I suspect we'll break one. We'll probably end up pushing one. So that's the fun thing about the speeds and feeds project. And thank you to everybody who signed up. It's been a phenomenally awesome response to the beta list. Cool.
00:45:00
Speaker
A lot of the work to date, aside from the building, the infrastructure, the site, and the database, a lot of the work has been on what I would call the bread and butter recipes. Building out a strong underline of your basics on whether it's titanium or stainless or steel or aluminum and basic tools.
00:45:20
Speaker
what we've started to do and what we certainly will be doing is more time pushing tools to the limit. So like Ed was on the MX with a quarter inch lakeshore running both ways adaptive as hard as he could. So what is that limit? Where do we find, and we're starting to think about ways that we can convey long-term tool wear, long-term process reliability, time in the cut.
00:45:43
Speaker
It's hard with aluminum and even steel because even in mild steel, a tool should last quite a few hours. But certainly with titanium, you're going to get much shorter, perhaps 60 minutes or something in the cut. But it is fun. It is a lot of fun.
00:45:59
Speaker
Excellent. Well, I'm eager to see how that project evolves. It's going to take over. I have a call this afternoon. I'd hope that we would be talking to beta folks today, but we're struggling is not the right word. We are evaluating server side stuff.
Web Hosting and Event Preparations
00:46:17
Speaker
So most of the site is run through Amazon Web Services, AWS, which is kind of like Amazon's little secret sauce. AWS, I believe earns more profit for Amazon than amazon.com does.
00:46:30
Speaker
Amazon is basically a server web hosting company that happens to also sell the coffee mug you just picked up. We've changed the server specs and the server size, but we're thinking about moving it to an elastic server, which would allow us to scale as needed. It's expensive, but I think it's appropriate. Still through Amazon?
00:46:52
Speaker
Yeah. So that's what we're working on right now because the filter system requires a fair amount of computing power, which is what makes the filtering system awesome. Because if I want to look at stainless steel tapping, I want to see the results, but then I also want to be able to go back and add, well, let me see if there's also some good steel recipes. That's probably not the best example, but you know what I mean?
00:47:14
Speaker
I want the site to have a... It's never going to be as fast as just a text-based Craigslist because there's a lot of imagery and filtering to calculate, but I want it to be acceptably fast to use.
00:47:29
Speaker
Yeah. If you hop on, cause you need to run a part and you want to say, Hey, you know what? I just need to slot two times D and aluminum. What are they, what's show me what works. Um, you, you, you need to be able to easily find that recipe, watch the video, decide whether you want to download the fusion file, look at the toolpath, look at the specs, look at the holder, all that stuff. Boom done. Yeah. What are you up to? Uh, this is, this is T zero last day before blade. Yep.
00:47:57
Speaker
Last day, just wrap up some projects, makes more knives. Got a lot of family stuff to do today. Tennis with the kids, cross country meet tonight with the kids. So I've probably got five hours here. Sweet. If that. But yeah. Cool. And you fly down tomorrow? Fly down tomorrow morning, first thing, sweet. And then we're there till Sunday. And it's going to be epic. Wait, wave when you're over Zanesville. Yeah.
00:48:25
Speaker
Eric said he's driving, Eric and you are driving down. Um, and he said he's driving through Ohio. No kidding. That's awesome. Well, they're welcome to stop on the way back. If they want to say hi, I don't know if they're on 77, that would be pretty close. I'm not sure which way they're taken, but cool. But yeah, yeah. So they're going to bomb down. Sweet. So yeah, good for you, man. Well, have a great show. I know that's a, um, always a, you shared a booth with Brad Southern again. Yep. Cool. Awesome. How many pens are you taking?
00:48:56
Speaker
30. Oh, man. How are you going to sell them? Yeah. Lottery system, like drawing style. People put their names in a hat that we pick. Do you have to pay for a lottery ticket? No. OK, it's just you obviously have to pay for the pen or the knife. Right. Right. It's picked. Yeah. Got it. Sweet. Good. Well, I look forward to seeing everything. Are you back next Wednesday?
Conclusion and Farewell
00:49:19
Speaker
OK. Cool. I guess I'll see you next Wednesday. Have yourself a good week. Safe travels.
00:49:26
Speaker
All right, safe, bye. Take care, bye.