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#282 - Whiplash, SMW CNC Training Courses, & Grinding on the KERN
247 Plays3 years ago
Topics:
- SMW Relaunches CNC Training Courses in a New Center! - Grimsmo Tweaks Grinding Process on KERN - Should You Max Out Spindles That Run Less Than 20K RPM? - Brother Speedio + Auto Door Coming to GK Soon! - International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) - Okuma Mist Collector Activation Issue - Reorganizing Endmills - GERP Update, Inventory, Operations, Tooling, Purchase Orders
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of CNC machining, episode number 282. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough. It's an interesting distinction we've never made.
00:00:09
Speaker
Yes.
CNC Training Class Experience
00:00:10
Speaker
Well, it's top of mind because we are in day two now of relaunching our hands-on CNT training classes. So we've got eight students here, you know, learning CAD, CAM, posting code, running the machines. And one of the students is a guy I've gotten to know in the past few years and call a friend who's Adam Booth, AKA ABOM 79, who's got a new shop and has
00:00:36
Speaker
you know, for certainly a huge history and following as a third generation manual machinist and we're, we're bringing him over to the dark side. So he's learning fusion CAD CAM and he's got some CNC machines showing up at his new shop. Really? Yeah. So I'll tell you, it's a, I mean, when you're, when you're a very skilled, competent manual machinist, there's still a lot to learn on the fusion CAD CAM software side of things. There just is.
00:01:05
Speaker
What an interesting perspective because Adam is a, I'd almost say legendary, like manual machinists, right? Like probably in his thirties or forties or something. And the dude knows his stuff probably more than most people I know. Right. Um, but interesting for him to be like, all right, it's time for CNC. Yeah. I don't know how much he knows, right? He's been around us for years and like the industry and stuff like that, but that's cool. Yeah.
Student Backgrounds in CNC Class
00:01:31
Speaker
It's, I mean, it is a good example of.
00:01:34
Speaker
It's an odd example for us in terms of our training class profile, because most of the time we have folks that are coming from the world of, hey, I've run 3D printers, I ran a shape OCO, or I'm looking to step up. New to the industry kind of thing. Yeah. And we'll get corporate students that are
00:01:52
Speaker
skilling up at their job or have been engineering but not operating. You can think of all these different profiles. We don't often have somebody who's just crushing it as a manual machinist but hasn't created CAD or CAM before. Wow. Anyway, so it's fun to be back in class and have that underway.
00:02:16
Speaker
A lot of work too, I'll be honest. I hesitate to gripe because there's no reason to, but I guess if we can not record this episode, I know it's still being recorded, but I'm a little worn down.
00:02:36
Speaker
I'm moving on, but that was hard on me. We moved into that building. We got it all ready to go. We got machines up and running. We've got classes here with the curriculum. All in the past two months. No, like three weeks. Yeah. It's been nonstop for you. I get it. Yeah.
00:02:53
Speaker
My wife had shoulder surgery, so she can't drive right now. And so obviously it's wonderfully enjoyable to help take care of her. And there's never a great time for something like that. It was elective, but never a convenient time, if you will. Anyway.
00:03:10
Speaker
When you haven't run training classes in a couple of years and your business is much bigger and stronger and busier, frankly, than it was last time you ran classes. Yes, but you know what? That's not a source of stress and that's actually a point of pride. I will.
00:03:25
Speaker
I will share for sure.
Team Acknowledgment
00:03:28
Speaker
The team here, Julie, Ed, Grant, Garrett, a new guy, Chase, that's running our shipping. I am not, for one second, worried or stressed about that, which he writes. That is awesome. It's so unfortunate we take that for granted almost.
00:03:47
Speaker
That just works so well now. I have other things to worry about. Yeah, right. Yeah. There's a part of this chapter in my life that I haven't come to terms with not so much about having lost a dog, which I know most people are going to care about. It's more about like, man, I feel very fulfilled. It's awesome to be where we are.
00:04:07
Speaker
And that makes me happy. And I honestly feel, I was actually thinking right before we hopped on this podcast, I was like, I kind of want to take a little, you do this, like you go up to the, well, and how often you do it, but like a John, I have once.
00:04:25
Speaker
I probably made a big deal out of it. That's actually hilarious. Yeah, yeah. Dude, totally. Go rent a cabin in the woods. My wife did it a couple of weeks ago. She just rented an Airbnb tiny house for like two nights locally. I drove over there. It's 20 minutes away and no internet, no cell service. It was just nice. Just get away.
00:04:49
Speaker
And you have more than earned whatever version of that you like. Go to Europe or do whatever John wants to do. Yeah. Thank you.
Reflections on Life and Career
00:05:00
Speaker
Take some time. I mean, you've more than earned it.
00:05:04
Speaker
The other one that caught me off guard in an awesome way was, do you see Ed Kramer's DM to us on Insta? No. Oh, you should look at your Insta message. I don't want to betray Ed's if he implied that this was meant to be a private note, but it was basically a very nice complimentary message about
00:05:23
Speaker
how being able to follow our journeys has led to a rewarding and fulfilling life to him. And that's the kind of stuff that makes me happy. Yes. Yeah, it's just great, right? Yeah. There's this phrase running around like, I'm just living my best life. And I'm trying to live that, right? Like,
00:05:45
Speaker
I'm trying to be the best Grimsmo that I can. It's like I want to be happy. I want to be fulfilled. I want to make a difference. I want to grow a great team. I want to have a great business. All that trickles down into not only our customers being happy and excited about our work, but other manufacturers that are learning and following and enjoying the journey as well.
00:06:06
Speaker
Honestly, I feel like I'm not doing enough of a good job to like share what we're doing and what we're up to and like so many things we do here nobody even knows about. Yeah, I don't have time to like make a micro video on everything but I want to. I hear you. I really do. Yeah.
Small Business Challenges
00:06:23
Speaker
So I'm trying to think about okay, I told myself yesterday I was like,
00:06:28
Speaker
Man, I really wish I could just post all these videos that I have in mind. I'm like, okay, John, calm down. If you want to do it, make it happen. If it doesn't pull back from the production, the R&D, the whatever is keeping you busy, then you have to find people to do that either in your company or new, whatever, and then focus on that if you want that to grow your company and you do the marketing and you make videos and whatever you want to do.
00:06:54
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't get too far with it, but I was like, stop complaining. If you want it, go after it. Otherwise. That's not an insignificant point about lots of folks in our position running a small business. You have a choice and you may not like to hear this and sometimes it can be tough advice, but darn it, make a choice. Make a choice about how you're going to run this or make a choice about
00:07:21
Speaker
what you're going to do to bring things on. And it's wonderful to read about it done in books or case studies or other. It's pretty, it can be difficult. Um, kind of a weird transition
Lessons from a Drumming Movie
00:07:31
Speaker
a little bit. I just watched this movie with flash with, um, the drumming one. Yes. I haven't seen it since it came out, but I remember it being just mind blowing like, yeah, yeah. You know, I guess, yeah. So I had not even heard of it. And then all of a sudden it came across my radar and I do enjoy music and, uh, it just caught my eye and blew me away. Uh, that guy, J K.
00:07:51
Speaker
Simmons, I think. Yeah. Yeah. The older guy. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, like I'm not really spoiling anything here, but if you're a diehard, don't want any insights on the movie, pause this for the next few seconds or mute it. But, uh, he is an overbearing character in driving his, the people around him too far, too hard, but it kind of reminds me of like a Marine Corps mentality of, uh, and that there's a quote that I think is the perfect encapsulation, which he's like the two most
00:08:21
Speaker
dangerous words in the English language are good job. Yeah. And there's that weird balance that I haven't certainly don't feel like I have conviction about having struck about when do you nurture and in praise and say a great good job because started, you know, like things like how we're running this company right now, there's so many elements are good job. When are you unapologetically like I hear I'm not here to be your friend. This is what needs to happen. This is what I expect of you. I know you can do more and do better. There's there's there's there's books.
00:08:51
Speaker
I struggle with that so hard because I want to taper towards Mr. Nice Guy all of the time. No drama, no arguments, no confrontation, but I know that I can't do that. I need to be frank. I need to turn up the tap of my candor, my frankness, so that I can be clear and drive people forward in a positive manner, but still help people improve and do better results, but without being the jerk.
00:09:20
Speaker
Yep. Anyway. Yeah. What are you up to? A lot of little stuff. Angelo took some time off. So I've been like running the current the past few days. As I do that, I see room for improvements always. So I'm like making these tweaks, making these changes, um, changing the way we grind our Rask blades.
00:09:38
Speaker
which the way we've been doing it, like the little grinding wheel tends to taper as it wears down, because I'm just cutting in one direction. And then a few months ago, one of our guys, Dave suggested, why don't you cut down sometimes and up some other times? And I was like, oh, you can't do that. And I just kind of brushed it off. And then I was thinking about it the other day, and I was like, of course I can. Like, how about on one
Optimizing Grinding Process
00:10:01
Speaker
side of the blade, I grind down. And then on the other side of the blade, I grind up.
00:10:05
Speaker
And then it should wear the wheel evenly top to bottom. It's like on a surface grinder, you run it back and forth and back and forth and evening the wear. So I tried that and I posted the wrong bit of code, which thankfully didn't have a problem, but it did scrap like three blades. I posted the wrong operation twice instead of two separate operations. But so I scraped three blades yesterday, whatever.
00:10:27
Speaker
and fix that. I think it's I think it's better. It's not like the glowing results that I was hoping for. But I think it's a step in the right direction. Well, you won't see that you won't see the wheel taper for a number of after a number of parts that right? Yeah, number of parts. Yeah.
00:10:45
Speaker
So I think we did four blades last night or something and that is the period, I think 200 minutes of cut time is where the wheel auto dresses the next time to clean itself up again. And I happened to catch it right at 198 minutes and I looked at it and it wasn't tapered like it used to be, but it was kind of wavy like the edge profile of the grinding wheel.
00:11:08
Speaker
Put it under the microscope, put it on the optical comparator and just saw the cut formation of the wheel to wear. That was interesting. It took a bunch of pictures and that was yesterday. I'm thinking if I need to reevaluate my plan or just run it for a little bit. When you say taper, are you talking tens or thousands? Six thou.
00:11:31
Speaker
Oh, okay, yeah, that's real. Noticeable. Because you're taking really small step downs. Yeah, step overs and step downs. Well, the wheel is sideways. It's not like a surface grinder where the wheel is in one direction. It's like a mill where the wheel is in the other direction, rotating.
00:11:52
Speaker
I think of it like you have one of those little drums on the end of a dremel and your side of the thing with that drum. Yeah, pretty much. It's just very thin. 16th of an inch thick one inch diameter wheel and 16th of an inch.
00:12:09
Speaker
thick. Yeah. Like wide thick. So you can't take really, really, really small step overs that are full, that they're the whole top to bottom side of the blade, right? Doesn't work like that. Right now. So I'm doing multiple step overs, multiple step downs. My depth of cut is like four tenths. My width of cut is roughing is 28 thou. Finishing is two thou.
00:12:39
Speaker
And yeah, just trying to get the absolute best finish. Cause sometimes if I rough too hard with two tapered of a wheel, the finish passes doesn't get it all out, or it creates so much tool load in weird places that it leaves the surface finish kind of monkey. Same grinding wheel for rough hand finish. Correct. Which maybe I could double up or triple up multiple wheels. What about that workflow where the finisher becomes the rougher?
00:13:08
Speaker
Well, it's all like how long it's been since it dressed, basically. Okay. Because I can dress it as often as I want, but it involves a whole palette change and you're wasting grinding wheel and dust into the machine and all that stuff. You don't want to dress more than you have to. That's been an interesting process to dive into. I think I'm close.
00:13:30
Speaker
Does this move to the brother though? Yes. That's funny. Exactly. So it's still the same process, although the brother will do it slower because it's only got 16,000 RPM, not the 30,500 that I'm running it on the current right now.
00:13:44
Speaker
That's amazing with grinding. I mean, I guess you can still burn parts with a grinding. Oh yeah. You're running hot. Yeah. You want the SFM. I think they told me like 6,000 SFM for what I'm doing on a one inch wheel. That's like 30,000 RPM. Nuts. So on the speedio at 16,000, I mean, I'm going to peg that spindle the whole time, but I'm going to have to slow down my feed rate to compensate to math it out. So it'll be a little slower on the speedio, but who cares?
00:14:10
Speaker
I feel like I've heard so many bad stories about the sub 20,000 RPM spindles and insert any machine brand you want here. It could start with an H, it could start with an O, it could start with a D, where if you run them for extended periods of time at the max RPM, bad things happen after months or years. If it's a 16,000 spindle, you're supposed to run it at 14 max. Any idea on the weather? I don't know.
00:14:35
Speaker
I know some guys peg them all the time. My Maury is a 12K spindle. I run it at 12 most of the time. But that's a Maury.
00:14:46
Speaker
And so I don't know, but I've also heard brother spindles are like $4,000 to replace and you just replace it yourself. So yeah, I've heard Dennis say that a lot. I think I'm probably underestimating how good Dennis is at that kind of stuff. They're like, I've heard other people say it too though. Like, like you can have a tech come in or you can just do it yourself in like four hours. And if you know what you're doing, it's two hours kind of thing.
00:15:07
Speaker
That's what I was laughing about, uh, this week when we were setting up the Tormox for the training classes. And I remember, you know, four or five years ago when our, I realized just between wear, tear, use, and in a couple of bumps, I was like, okay, I'm just going to replace the Tormach spindle because you can buy a whole new cartridge spindle from Tormach for, I think at the time it was like $500. Isn't that funny to think about John? Yeah. Like that's incredible.
00:15:35
Speaker
Yeah. I remember taking apart my Tormek spindle and like balancing the fan on top of it or just trying to get more balance in the spindle to have less like tool chatter or whatever it was. I think I actually took the spindle to a balancing shop and had them balance it a little bit more.
00:15:54
Speaker
Yeah. And then you think about it now and you're like, yeah, but it's an R8, or like R8 call it to a TTS. Right. There's a lot of room for error there. Yeah. Which is fine, but. Yeah, fine.
00:16:10
Speaker
When's the brother coming? What do you decide? I just got confirmation yesterday, August 5th, so two weeks from now. Awesome. Yeah, so that's exciting.
New CNC Machine Setup
00:16:20
Speaker
That should give them enough time. I'm going to ask specifically, but if that gives them enough time to finish the auto door and get it set and done, maybe, maybe not.
00:16:32
Speaker
But the other guy sent me CAD photos of the auto door that he came up with. And it's like two little sliding doors that go side to side with an air cylinder for each one. And it all fits within the door panel that removes from the machine.
00:16:47
Speaker
And it all just, it would just bolt right on. And I'm like, that is such a slick design. Amazing job. And he's got all these overlapping seals and, you know, covering various things. And I'm like, this guy knows what he's doing. He's having fun with this. We had a great phone call about it. And
00:17:04
Speaker
Yeah, he's enjoying the process. Who's he with then? Ferro Technique, the distributor, and they do a lot of application support and custom integration builds for brothers and hercos and whatever else they sell. Do they sell? No, they don't sell herco. There's another Doosan.
00:17:23
Speaker
Um, so they're pretty big seller. I mean, do sounds popular. I think it's D N the machines now. I'm not paying attention to that. Agreed. Still do sound. Yeah. On that note, I saw that, uh, are, I would say friends, but you know, I, I felt like the folks at pocket and see have always just been really good folks. And they announced yesterday on instant that they are renaming pocket and see to I think Penta machine. Okay.
00:17:47
Speaker
And I'm suspecting that's because they're the new five axis, which the Matt guy I think his Instagram as public has been her captain guy. Thank you. Yes. Yes. He's been posting a lot of kind of R and D development videos. It's really cool to see your darn right. It's like a mini Kern. It's really cool. Like a sub hundred thousand dollar tiny little pocket NC Kern. Yeah. You're going to need big pockets to fit the machine into them. No, it's really exciting.
00:18:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's fun to watch. So if you guys, if you guys haven't seen that Instagram, um, yeah, inventor captain, this is cool. We'll throw the net in the description notes or something.
Community Support for Alfred
00:18:27
Speaker
And speaking of folks in this machining community and world, I just want to give a heartfelt shout out to Alfred over at AB Tool. The number of folks have kind of come together, particularly on Instagram to support Al, but to paraphrase, seemingly out of nowhere, he got a pretty gnarly cancer diagnosis.
00:18:49
Speaker
I mean, we toured their shop four or five years ago. He literally made custom tools for us as recently as three months ago, and it's kind of one of those life ain't fair. He's a really good guy, and he has a great attitude so far about it. I think he's having some procedures pretty soon, but just wanted to say that, Al, we're thinking of you and rooting for you.
00:19:09
Speaker
Yeah, he's the kind of guy that's always got a smile on his face. I think I met him at IMTS a couple of years ago. Right? Yeah. Just that energy that you're like, why isn't everybody like this? He seems so happy. He might not be so happy, but he certainly seems so happy all the time. I mean, I will vouch that he's a genuine guy like you. Absolutely. That's where it kind of feels like sometimes life ain't fair. Yeah. Yeah. You going to IMTS?
00:19:38
Speaker
I'm undecided. I was just thinking about it last night. I'm like, I probably should. It's been a while. Yeah. You?
00:19:45
Speaker
I am going to go, um, I kind of have to go now cause I'm that anchor tool, the year award, right?
Attending the IMTS Show
00:19:52
Speaker
Um, but I think I'm only going to go, I think I'm going to fly in Tuesday morning. I'll be there most Tuesday, all day, Wednesday, all day, Thursday, and then I probably head back Friday morning. So yeah, going, but not the whole like camping out Monday through Friday. Right. Yep. Gauntlet.
00:20:11
Speaker
I always like what Rob Lockwood says when we ask him about something. He's like, I need a reason or purpose to go. I think it's both his own time justification, but also the corporate justification. I'm sure we'll film a video because it's just too fun not to.
00:20:27
Speaker
I want to go to Learning Curiosity and Social High. It's fun for that, but if you told me I wasn't allowed to go, it wouldn't make our business worse off. Exactly. I got to balance that. That's a good point. I'm there too. I've been to a couple smaller local shows. CMTS was in September-ish, the Canadian small IMTS. That was really fun to go to. I just went by myself and I saw a bunch of robot arms and CNC machines and some stuff I haven't seen before. It was just nice to get back out there.
00:20:55
Speaker
and do that and IMTS is just the massive version of that. Yeah. But I think we're all kind of coming out of our, you know, the past few years of just staying around, staying locally, staying at home. Yeah. But it would be fun to go, that's for sure.
00:21:13
Speaker
Well, look, I think we ended last week with this idea of taking a step back and handing stuff over. And I am definitely at that point where I enjoy having a team where folks are figuring stuff out on their own without being so on that note. Ed and I will probably end up traveling roughly the same, even the same flights are roughly the same time, just because it's easier. But I'm kind of, my thought mentally is to sort of send Ed to go do what you want to do at ITS, go hear it out, walk around.
00:21:42
Speaker
Because if I end up filming it, it always changes what you do. Yeah. It goes how you're looking through things. But it's actually fun. I love that. I'd be like, go see what you learn. That's cool. What we need to be doing differently or better, or so forth. Yeah, that is super cool. And there's so much to learn if you go there, especially if you have growth eats cash for breakfast. That's the theme of this podcast.
00:22:11
Speaker
But if you're looking at a new machine, if you're looking at new equipment, ultrasonic cleaners, there were like 10 reps there last time. It's the place to go tumblers. There was a huge section on tumbling. One year I brought Eric, and he came just for a couple days. And it was super helpful for him just to see all the stuff we read about and all the stuff we talk about in person all in one place and get to talk to the vendors. And there's tons of grinding information there.
00:22:39
Speaker
Yeah, so that's hugely beneficial for that. If, you know, military was selling a used Anka for, you know, mid five figures, why wouldn't you use that for your blades? I don't know. He did grind a tiny little blade in carbide, but I don't know if they're set up to like grind them properly. They're meant for animals. But I said, I said they're meant for small animals. No, well, that's what's funny.
00:23:08
Speaker
The prior entries I've seen from this Anka Tool Competition of the Year award show me, holy cow, it's a CNC machine. You can get different wheel diameters, wheel packs, wheel radiuses, wheel thicknesses. And what little I know about the Rask, even as a compound race, it's a stupid feature. Those things would probably be sweet. And I mean, holding the blade is one thing. There are blade grinding machines that are dedicated for that. Oh, really? And I know a guy that got one.
00:23:38
Speaker
And there's big shops that do it production. Like, you know, I could send them a thousand blades and they'll grind them all and they'll set back 600 good ones kind of thing. Really? Yeah, it can happen. And the surface finish is is decent, but nowhere near what we're getting. And. There's issues, but see, like the way we're doing it, we're roughing it with an end mill, which removes 90 percent of the material and we're just kissing the face with a little grinding wheel.
00:24:09
Speaker
Whereas if you have a grinding machine, they're usually set up to grind the whole thing like in one or two passes. Very cool. But even a blade grinding machine is many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Are they? Yeah. Okay. Got it. Yeah, that's tough then I know. I push you outside your cover zone. Absolutely. Yeah.
00:24:35
Speaker
Okay, so here's a thing that's bothering me on the Okuma.
Mist Collection System Issue
00:24:41
Speaker
Our mist, the way the machine came from the factory, the mist collection was only wired to run when through spindle coolant ram, which is silly, because I want that mist on anytime, any coolant's on, or really when the spindle's running. So we had them, they were willing to rewire it kind of per my request, which I appreciated.
00:25:03
Speaker
Oddly, on the Genos, it's got an M code to turn it on, and it's got an M code to turn it off, a different M code, which is how it should be. The horizontal, for reasons I'm not sure of, had to be wired so that it's the same M code that acts as a toggle. So M181 turns it on, and M181 turns it off as well, same M code. Weird, but OK. And super annoying, because what happens is if you stop a program,
00:25:31
Speaker
mid-program because you don't do this. Well, the mist stays on, and then when you post the next program and hit cycle start, it turns it off.
00:25:43
Speaker
Yeah. Unsubscribe. That's dumb. Yeah. Actually, in fairness, I should just ask Oscar if they can fix that. Let's assume that they can't. Here's what I'm thinking I'll do. There's a whole bank of variables that are available. I think I'll just write a logic in the post. We start from a clean slate with the machine. The coolant is off. The mist is off.
00:26:05
Speaker
When it turns M181 on, it also sets common variable 999 to toggle one. And then every time M181 is called in the post, it actually just performs a if statement check. Just check if the one is there to make it a zero. Right. Sure. Yeah.
00:26:24
Speaker
Am I overthinking it? No, I love that. That's a very doable post tweak that uses one of your thousand variables. I like it. There's hardware way to do it where you can actually change the
00:26:38
Speaker
contactor that turns on the miscollector or something. The way we're going to do the current and speedio cell, we got one huge AeroX miscollector that's going to suck from both machines. Oh, interesting. Our electrician was telling us, you can buy an off-the-shelf contactor that has input toggles so that if the speedio needs it, it turns it on. If the current needs it, it also turns it on, but it's already on. Then if one turns it off,
00:27:04
Speaker
it's latched if either machine is running. And then if they both stop running, then the thing will turn off. That's awesome. And that sounds super slick. So you just need a whatever output each machine is throwing out, whether it's five volts or 12 volts or 120 or whatever, to go to this contactor, and then it'll toggle it on. So I think that'll work really well.
00:27:25
Speaker
That reminds me of the, and they were like Amazon purchase $27 PLC logic, like DIN clip and things that we have for our Royal mist collectors, because when we turn them, when we, when the program ends on the Haas machines, it, the M code would kill the through spindle, excuse me, the, the Royal miss collector, it would kill it right away. I want it to stay on for like another five minutes. And that's what these things do. You just run the signal into them and then it has a little, uh,
00:27:55
Speaker
Yeah, like a little screwdriver adjustment pod. And you just say, OK, when I get the signal to turn you off, I'm actually going to wait five more minutes, or 10 more minutes, or an hour minutes. It works great. That's awesome. Yeah, on the Maury, we just have it hardwired to the machine. So when the machine turns on, like from cold, like on, the miscollector's on. And that's fine. Yeah.
00:28:20
Speaker
Do you auto turn? I can play that. Do you auto turn your more off at night? Yep. There's an APF button, auto power function that if we remember to hit it, which we almost always do it at an M30, it shuts off.
00:28:36
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I wonder how that works. I got to play with this with the Akuma. I'm embarrassed to say I haven't, but I wonder if it's smart enough to know not to do it in an M30, because if there's one more palette in this queue, it'll keep running those. Do you have M30s or do you have M99s or whatever between? I have to look. Yeah. Make sure I can pull up the code here. And then on the Kern, I just leave it on all the time. So even if it finishes the run, which is rare nowadays,
00:29:03
Speaker
It just stays on because it's thermally managed and the chiller keeps it at 20 degrees Celsius. And if you turn everything off, then you've got to come back up from that. You know, it's got to cool everything again. So I was like, whatever, just leave it, leave it running. So like on the weekends and stuff, it just sits idle.
00:29:19
Speaker
That little banter back and forth between, was it you and CJ, was epic. This idea that you're dealing with a machine, a machine alarm because it's still running but the doors haven't been opened for seven days. Yup. Oh my God, I love that. I think the default on the Tournos was 24 hours. And we talked about this, I think we talked about it like two years ago or whatever when I first figured it out on the podcast.
00:29:46
Speaker
But like, yeah, if especially on the tornos, we we've had 48 hour runs before. And after I think the default was 24 hours, it says it gives us dumb alarm. That's like a safety check required or something.
00:30:00
Speaker
where it basically tells you, bro, you got to open the door. You can't just let this thing run forever. And then, so I talked to everybody, I talked to Tournos, and they're like, there's a parameter switch where you can change it up to however many hours you want to a maximum of 168 hours, so seven days. And, okay, so that's cool. And now I'm in my head, I was like, okay, now I have a seven day nonstop goal.
00:30:27
Speaker
But we didn't get anywhere near that. And that machine cycles off enough weekends or whatever that we don't run into that problem. But on the current, we basically set up a new schedule where every Monday morning, just give the current a full reboot when you come in, which helps with a couple little niggly alarms that happens on it. And the current definitely will
00:30:52
Speaker
It'll try to do the safety check, and you hear it clicking. It'll click all the door interlocks to make sure they all work. But if you push it too far, it will stop your cycle, mid-cycle, and be like, run the safety check right now. Oh, really? Yeah. So the hence the restart every Monday morning kind of thing. Yeah.
00:31:13
Speaker
But yeah, little weird things like that that maybe most people don't run into, but when you start to run these longer production cycles, you're like, what is this? Nobody's talking about this. What are you, uh, what are you working on today? Um, I'm having fun reorganizing our end mills. Ooh.
00:31:36
Speaker
So we've got a couple different locations for end mills. The Swiss stuff stays by the Swiss. The Maury stuff stays by the Maury. And we've got a Kern toolbox for Kern stuff. But there's a little bit of overlap. And it's just drawers upon drawers of 3D printed bins that hold the end mills. And Angela and I know where each one is. But even still, you're like, ah, you're trying to replace a tool. And we have so many tools on the Kern, so many different types of end mills and drills and stuff that
00:32:03
Speaker
like, which one's this again? Is this the longer one, the three times D or the five times D? And is this a corner radius? I can't tell. Let me look under the microscope. It's got a 5000 rad. Okay, so I need to use the 5000 rad tool kind of thing. So we got another small toolbox. So we've got two side by side now under the table, where the microscope is and the power grip.
00:32:26
Speaker
pressing unit is and I printed out labels but I put blue tape on them so I can just quickly tape the labels onto the door handles so we can move them around and I printed out flat end mill, corner radius end mill, ball mill, drill, thread mill,
00:32:45
Speaker
like 10 categories basically, high-feed end mill. And I just stuck them to each drawer and I moved all of our inventory into each segregated like section. And the first time I went to look for an end mill, I'm like, oh, this is different. I don't like this. But then I'm like, okay, what is it? It's a flat end mill, flat end mill. And now there's only 10 different options in that drawer instead of tons.
00:33:09
Speaker
Um, so it's been, it's been really nice and then we're just constantly fine tuning that. Okay. Now within the flat end mill drawer, let's sort them by size. So the small ones at the front, the bigger ones are in the back kind of thing. And it's just made, made it idiot proof. Like it's easier. And then when we receive end mills and we put them into inventory, then the guy receiving them kind of has a much easier time of putting them away as opposed to not knowing anything before. Um, so that's been a little quality of life improvement that I really glad I finally did.
00:33:40
Speaker
You should post a story about that. I wanted to take a quick clip before, but I didn't. Like before moving everything, but I could certainly do one afterwards. Yeah, it's getting nice. None of that's happening through GURP yet.
00:33:56
Speaker
Not yet. That's one of my next tasks for GURP. Speaking of which, GURP has been evolving so good lately. We've been putting more and more features into it.
00:34:11
Speaker
tracking costing of each of our items and materials at various points in time and tracking the cost of current inventory in GURP automatically. It's been really good. That was one of our guys' suggestions. And what else are we doing? Tracking. I'm just about done with the operations side of things. So I actually want to track product flow through the shop at each stage.
00:34:35
Speaker
so that we know how many parts are in op one or two or how many hard blades are done or how many lapped blades we have kind of thing because everybody's
Data Input in GURP
00:34:44
Speaker
always asking each other how much is in stock you know how many things do you have done and I do want to track all that stuff and so I've got the logic pretty much figured out I just got to finalize that and then
00:34:56
Speaker
The only downside is it's going to be a gentle shift in the way everybody works because now they're going to have to input data as they go, which is the thing. I know it's a thing, but I do think the benefits will be worth it.
00:35:11
Speaker
I can only share our failures of like when we had a workflow that we've since simplified because it's just so difficult. So like let's say we were making a batch of 10 Tormach 1100 fixture plates and they would go through obvious steps of the materials in storage and then it's machine and then it's anodizing, then it's QC, then it's packaging.
00:35:39
Speaker
That flow alone was hard enough and complicated enough to track where it was crazy was when when let's say they were in QC they weren't QC there's 10 of them to QC but we have a sale for one well then you would have to fork off the work order into two separate reporters so that one could be QC in the end
00:35:58
Speaker
and pulled out and moved ahead of the rest. And those things are just a little nugget into the world of how quickly complicated and convoluted and difficult it was to have that kind of
00:36:14
Speaker
There's either the simple ERP type thing or there's the every single footstep of every single product at every single point in time is there. I just don't know anybody that actually does that period, let alone short of companies that have full-time staffed folks with spending millions of dollars on that level of integration.
00:36:42
Speaker
You just get bad info really quick. I could see that. Yep. I'm not trying to discourage you, John. I'm just saying. Absolutely. I really don't. I know in Pro Shop they have a very similar method where you can track each operation. You can have your operation notes and you can track quantities going out throughout. Where it differs, I agree with you on the work order side because it gets complicated. And in my brain, I don't
00:37:12
Speaker
I don't like work orders and I've never worked in a shop that had them. I understand their need and all that stuff, but we don't operate the way we normally make parts naturally. We don't use work orders. We don't think about it. We just make parts always constantly. It's a daily flow of parts.
00:37:31
Speaker
If we track the actual part flow, not work order based, then we're just saying, I'm heat treating six blades right now. And then track, and then they're done. And then tomorrow you do it again, and then again. And then we know, and then the next operation will pull from the mini inventory of done previous operation.
00:37:52
Speaker
Maybe that's what's different about your business is you're constantly in a one-piece flow where you're never reacting to sales or customer demand. You're just selling what you've made, which is incredible. Like, oh my God, it saved so many hassles.
00:38:11
Speaker
But not sure it's sustainable forever. Yeah. And we've played over the years with our buyer's choice system where a customer will actually kind of create a custom order and say, I want blue, I want honeycomb, I want acidage blade, yada, yada, which is essentially a work order.
00:38:27
Speaker
and trying to figure out how to integrate that with the plan. And maybe it'll be an individual fork of the plan that is kind of an add-on, but not the way we normally operate, like work orders kind of thing. So I'm going to play with it. Let's see how it works. And we'll see if I like it. If I don't like it, I'll scrap it. But there's enough desire that I want to see it through.
00:38:54
Speaker
No, totally. And even just stuff like end-to-mills. I mean, I like where we've gotten it, but I would absolutely stand up and move myself over to the failed category if somebody asks me, like, how well are you handling your tool crib or Google management?
00:39:10
Speaker
Because our system works, but it isn't like, I don't know. What we've done, I guess maybe I'm poo-pooing a little bit, but when we want to buy tooling, most, but not at all, of that tooling is in Lex. And then Lex means it gets its own Lex ID. So like T1693 would be a YG one quarter inch Alu power mill or something.
00:39:36
Speaker
And what we've generally done is kept tooling specific to each machine. So like the horizontal has its own toolbox with tooling for it, the Genos as well. The physical toolbox. Bingo, yeah. So I don't really care if Garrett uses a tool on the Haas VF2 and I use on the horizontal, that's irrelevant. Like they're totally separate. Maybe even separate Lex IDs separate physical storage. So you kind of manage your own tools that way.
00:40:04
Speaker
where it does really shine well is because tooling is just so complicated like you said about which part number, EDP or corner radius. Which vendor am I buying the same tool from because they make the same? Yeah, right. What we'll do sometimes, it's not perfectly implemented is let's say we break a corner tour, we need more of them.
00:40:24
Speaker
I know it's T127 in the horizontal. That didn't really help me. You can try to label the physical storage bin. You could try to label it T127, but that also stinks long-term for other engines. It's handy for the operator because they're holding T127. They pulled it out of the machine. They know they need to replace it. Then to go to the drawer and see it would be helpful.
00:40:45
Speaker
That's not incorrect. You're right. What's great is to have the number you actually care about, which is the Lex ID, because that lets you reorder it and lets you look up all the information on it. Then below the Lex ID, physically written, you could have, we use this as tool 127 or whatever. Most importantly, you want to be able to reorder it or figure out what information on it. Are you tracking inventory decently of unused tools?
00:41:13
Speaker
It has that ability to track it, but it's all, it's every single one is garbage. It's not relied on. So it's more of a, look, we don't use that many tools. So it's pretty easy to have five extras and then operators, it's on the operators to reorder and most tooling is able to be had in a few days. So that's kind of one of those, look, I'm not gonna worry about this right now. So on that note, it's on the operator to reorder. So if Ed needs an end mill,
00:41:42
Speaker
What does he do specifically? Well, that's the beauty of Lex. He just goes into Lex and says, I need T-1193, orders it, and then anybody can just immediately push a PO directly. So does that create like a little queue in Lex somewhere that says these are the tools that need to be ordered right now? Yep. So I've been focused on that. And then your purchasing manager would push it kind of thing?
00:42:07
Speaker
No, anybody can. So like right now we have one, two, three, four tools in the order queue for YG1. We have a three-eighth inch radius, a solid start by drill, quarter inch and an alley power. And it tells me the part number, the date it was added, so how long it's been in the queue, what we're planning on ordering, the price, and then the total
00:42:27
Speaker
what the total PO would be. Because I want to know if it's one, and this is where it gets the tribal knowledge, if it's one or two extra quarter inch end mills that I don't really need, I'll just let it sit there. But this one, sometimes there's one like I need it yesterday kind of thing. And so anybody at any point in time right now could click push this as a PO, and then it becomes a PO. And then what happens next? The tools arrive. It goes to like the PO doesn't push automatically to the vendor or?
00:42:55
Speaker
So funny story, many and most of our Lex vendors, the email, they receive an email with a PO, PDF from Lex automatically. Really? That works great. This happens to be an example of YG1 moves their prices around all the time, by like three cents or 27 cents. And so we kept getting- You can't send the wrong PO.
00:43:20
Speaker
They kept emailing me back there. It was like a price change. So what we do now, and this is one reason why I will happily stand up and sit back down in the fail categories. Right now, YG1POs are sent to my personal email address because
00:43:35
Speaker
Lex emails that go to my work email usually are auto read because I don't, I want them in my email, but I don't want to read them. So they go to my personal email, which is a kind of a red flag or, or they go to add, he knows it as well. Cause he or the, we're the two of us that handle that. And we have, we have an online YG one account that we then just look at that PO. We just copy the items over and it's not the best workflow, but it actually is kind of fine for now. Interesting. That's really helpful because we've been,
Purchase Order Process Improvements
00:44:04
Speaker
developing the purchase order side of GURP and the receiving side. And it's just phenomenal to be able to track orders that we're placing and have a queue in the receiving. And I know what's coming in. I know when it was ordered. I know when it came in. I know how long it took to come in. I know if it was partially received and we set up one of our guys, Grayson to do, uh, he's the receiving dude. You know, it's his job. If any package comes in, nobody open it unless you need it like now.
00:44:29
Speaker
but it sits on the table until he can receive it properly in GURP and he just uses his phone and clicks it and receives it and counts everything and goes, we're missing two end mills. It's partially received. Either they're coming or we got to talk to the vendor. That's been phenomenal. I really like this queue idea. I think we'll have to add that somehow. I'm currently not tracking or even the end mills that we have are not in GURP yet, but I want to.
00:45:00
Speaker
and then probably print off little QR code stickers for each bin where we keep them. Yeah, right. To further clarify how messy the process is, one of the reasons we have to do this with YG1 is that their online store where we log into, it doesn't save your cart. You lose your cart after like an hour. I have no idea why.
00:45:22
Speaker
So to counter that, what we do with Sandvik is Sandvik stuff is not in Lex because everybody knows what we use with Sandvik. It's just easy the way it's marked on the insert boxes and all that. And it's in the fusion library. So when we need a Sandvik tool, we just go straight to the... Everybody has the login. We just add stuff into the cart and then anybody can just push the cart.
00:45:45
Speaker
Which I would do that with YG1 if the cart didn't automatically expire every hour. Right, yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah. I like all this stuff. Yeah, yeah. It's funny. I mean, I'll go to it next week, but we just made another big overhaul on Alex, which actually would be a good way to kick off next week. Yeah, yeah. That sounds great. What do you do today?
00:46:11
Speaker
Not too much. I've been putting off playing with the Wilhelmin a little bit more. I've got a couple things I need to do on it. But I did work on it last week. Really good. It was fun. Good. But yeah, just finished my blade grinding tweaks on the Kern and keep everything running. Yeah, I love
00:46:32
Speaker
So I'm always conscious of not micromanaging. So it's a bad idea to like, just because somebody is needs a hand or is out that you step in. And then immediately when you step in, you find all these things that you would tweet. Like, I feel like that kind of makes you look like a turd.
00:46:47
Speaker
But on the flip side, it's like, no, no, this is my business. And I've got I've got value to add and conviction and processes and knowledge. And that's okay. It's not personal. So I feel like one of the better things to do is also just to kind of like, kind of rotate through like, hey, on Wednesday, I'm going to kind of sit and shipping for a couple hours and help out. And then Thursday, I'm going to look at cam toolpaths. And it doesn't it's like everyone
00:47:10
Speaker
Everyone is fair game to tweaks and improvements and processes from everyone. It keeps you grounded. It's kind of like the TV show when the CEO took the- Yeah, they're coming from boss or whatever. Yeah, exactly. I actually find that a good way to stay connected and it makes me sympathetic to realizing, oh man, we got folks that are doing a lot of work for no reason. Let's fix that. Yeah, that's really interesting. I'd like to do that more. I do it little bits and spurts, but to kind of set up a schedule and make that part of my job, I think-
00:47:38
Speaker
That sounds like a direction I need to travel in. That's really good. Well, let's keep on each other. I'm going to make a notice of that a lot. Yeah, I like that a lot. Recurring. Not topicly. Audit is the absolute worst word. Recurring time with different business areas. Yeah, let's talk about that more over time. Just to stay into. That's a good one. Yeah.
00:48:02
Speaker
Cause if I can schedule my, my days normally to, to make that an important thing, you know, week by week. Um, so I'm not just running around with my hair on fire kind of thing. Like I have time to focus with everybody and to help people out too. Cause I've definitely seen situations where people are struggling with an issue and just living with it. Yeah, exactly. And it's, I don't want that help. I'll see you next week. All right. Take care. Bye. Bye.