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#248 - "The Trades Have Been Good To Me" - Tom Lipton
243 Plays4 years ago
TOPICS:
- DIY a Monochromatic Light Source & Optical Flats from Ukraine
- Geeking Out: Zeiss- From Eye Doc to CNC Machine Shop
- ERP System Development: Are We There Yet?
- 10 Rules for Entrepreneurial Success
- Okuma Chip Conveyor - Wasting Pans!
- Ultrasonic Cleaners
- The NEW Prusa: Don't Over-Engineer Parts!
- Thanksgiving in the USA
We really appreciate everyone who tunes in to listen, everyone who has helped us along the way, and everyone who is part of the CNC family!
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Transcript
Introductions and Episode Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 248. My name is John Rimsmo. And my name is John Sodders. And this is the podcast where John and I talk every week about monochromatic light sources. Optical flats that come from Ukraine. Yep, yep. Yeah, that's awesome. So that's clearly top of mind.
Building a Monochromatic Lightbox
00:00:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's the first thing on my list. So my
00:00:28
Speaker
Lightbox came in. I went by a build guide that Laney Machine Tech suggested. So I bought this old artist's Lightbox from a tracing box from eBay for Jeep and then some specific fluorescent bulbs and then
00:00:48
Speaker
some green filter paper and some UV filter paper and I built it all together. And now I have a monochromatic like single color green light coming out. So I can actually measure the wave bands from it. And with the big six inch optical flat, like I had a lot of fun with that over the weekend at
Measuring Blade Flatness and Optical Flat Issues
00:01:04
Speaker
home. That's a huge optical. It is, it is large, but it's, it's awesome because it can span our entire blade or handle and I can see end to end, um,
00:01:15
Speaker
How would how the light bands go and it's I'm glad I got the big one the little ones I ordered haven't even come in yet. I Remember from Tom Lipton's video And he has he does a great job Showing them off how he had a I mean these terms are relative a high spot but like it was a
00:01:34
Speaker
Like a little tip or point may have been literally microns or tennis or whatever, but like it was causing the optical flat to either rock or not sit flat. And so I guess I could see you want the smaller ones. If you want to just avoid dealing with a, uh, little, uh, burr or mark that's not in the area of finance you care about, but I could totally see your point of like, no, I just want a whole flat that spans my part.
00:01:58
Speaker
And it's good. And it is older and it's used and there's quite a lot of scratches in it, which as I'm using it, I realize how that happens, like how they get scratched up. Because you really should be like stoning your parts before the flat goes on and it's a piece of glass and glass scratches. And you kind of want to twist it around, you want to rock it around and move it.
00:02:17
Speaker
I can see how it gets scratched up. But even still, it works very well. And it's showing us that our lapping operation is making parts flat to less than a 10th over the whole part.
Manufacturing Challenges: Flatness, Taper, and Warp
00:02:29
Speaker
And our blade is a weird shaped object. And it's generally not curling or dishing or, you know, because of the light source that I'm using each, the distance between each band is roughly 10 millionths of an inch.
00:02:46
Speaker
So like a tenth of a tenth. A tenth of it. Yeah, right. I'm trying to think about what you mean there. That's incredible. Yeah. So it's you know, I you see deviation when you put the flats on the lines should be like straight and parallel and evenly spaced and they're not on a blade. But once I figured out the math behind it, I'm like, holy crap, that is still extraordinarily flat, relatively speaking, you know, for our purposes.
00:03:11
Speaker
Yeah, so any problems that we're having from flatness or taper or warp is not necessarily from each side's lapping. It might be from the lapping machines tapering the parts because they're different pressure on each side that gets machined or lapped or wavy parts are going in and they're getting lapped out. So we still got some pre-lapping issues to figure out.
00:03:38
Speaker
It just adds more data points to our whole process, and it's awesome. It's really, really cool. The scratches are an issue just because they are noise in your picture? On the flat? Yeah. Yeah. It's not a big deal, but you just notice it. Yeah. Got it.
00:03:58
Speaker
Yeah. I've been geeking out hard about that for the past few days, researching and actually printed off a whole bunch of information and screenshots from YouTube videos and stuff just to keep with the flat set and have reference information for my team so they don't have to spend six hours Googling like I did. I printed off the best
00:04:19
Speaker
guides so you can just glance at it and be like, oh, that's what happens when you do that, and that's what it's supposed to look like.
Zeiss Equipment and Optical Precision
00:04:25
Speaker
Okay, okay. The most recent Precision Microcast episode, they were talking about how Zeiss manufactures some optics or coatings and stuff. Do you hear this? No, but I have Zeiss information as well.
00:04:41
Speaker
So this is for silicon wafer machines. So they're machine tools, but not in the sense that you and I want to buy machine tools. I mean, it's obviously both Josh and Adam are great guys, super interesting, great podcast. And go listen to it, because I'm not sure the exact number, but the flatness of this relatively small optic is the equivalent flatness if you stretched out the optic to the size of Germany.
00:05:11
Speaker
Germany, which is like, I don't know, 900 kilometers. I don't know what that is in freedom units. It's a long way, but it would still only deviate by like, I don't know. It was like 12 microns or something stupid. And it's, and it's only, you know, I assume a couple of inches or something. Wow.
00:05:28
Speaker
The other thing that I thought was kind of wonderfully fun was listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson on Joe Rogan talk about how all those globes that we had as kids in like our classroom or at home are totally misrepresentative of the actual undulations of Earth's surface. And if you think about the Mariana's Trench is ballpark seven miles below sea level and Everest is, what is Everest? 29,000 feet or something?
00:05:57
Speaker
Yeah. So another six miles up. So it's like 13 miles from Pica Everest to bottom of Mariana stretch of 13 miles of deviation across, which is what 30 kilometers or something, uh, across the circumference or size of earth's sphere is nothing like a globe would have a speck of dust forever. It's in a speck of dust cut away for, uh, Marianas. Yeah. Yeah. I never thought about that.
00:06:24
Speaker
Yeah, so to quote Dumb and Dumber, those Rockies are way, what's the quote? Yeah, I thought they'd be a lot rockier. That's awesome.
00:06:36
Speaker
Speaking of Zeiss, you mentioned that. So two things. First of all, our Zeiss microscope that we ordered should be coming today. So I'm super pumped about that. But also, I took the kids to get an eye test last night at our local optometrist. The dude has Zeiss everything. I was geeking out so hard. This is old, like 80-year-old guy who's been doing it forever. Norwegian, just like me. So we got along great. And he actually saw my name, and he's like, is that Norwegian? OK, we're going to be good friends.
00:07:05
Speaker
But yeah, he had all these all this crazy like Zeiss was everything and he's like It's it's four times more expensive than the Japanese versions and icons and other stuff equipment that he could buy But it's 20 times better is what he said Wow And yeah, so that was that's cool. That's cool
00:07:23
Speaker
Like vice everything like I always think about just the the thing that was like a giant pair of glasses it where they can swap through different reticle That was ice that I don't know if that one was ice but they had a lot of digital eyeball measuring devices and there was one where it like it Moves the thing towards your eyeball and it shoots a puff of air at your eye life was freaking out at that one and
00:07:47
Speaker
Yeah, for good reason. Exactly. Yeah, he thought I'd poked him in the eye, and then I did it eventually. I was like, oh, that's what's happening. Yeah, it's measuring for reaction, something like that. It's taking a picture right with the air blast or something. But they had this huge carousel, like 10 feet in diameter, that had four rotating positions with each with its own
00:08:06
Speaker
a digital device, like microscope basically, and you hit the foot pedal and she rotates the thing around to the next station and you're sitting there and you're like, okay, this time we're gonna measure the back of your eyeball with a little microscope camera. So they get it all lined up and stuff. And I was looking at little name tags on the back of
Machining Details and Listener Engagement
00:08:23
Speaker
each machine. I'm like, oh, Clara, this one was made in 2014. And she was like, I wonder how much this whole thing costs, like all of this. It made me so happy that she actually asked me that question. I was like, I don't know, let's ask.
00:08:35
Speaker
It was cool. And she was like, I think like 70,000. And I'm like, no, it's probably like 200,000 for all this stuff. I think I was closer. I asked the doctor. Yeah, so it was awesome to share that with the kids and have that kind of super nerd event. I do love seeing it. I've got in the habit now when I get on an airplane, I spend like a sec. Usually it's easy to dwell for a second at where the jetway meets the entrance door.
00:09:00
Speaker
And I like stop, and I look, because on Boeing 737s, there's these aluminum hooks that were, it looks like they were either cast or forged, and then finished machined in certain areas. But you can usually pretty quickly see toolpath marks. I always wonder if they're like, fight at hand should be like, sir, you need to keep moving. You're not allowed to stare at the door frame interworkings. But it's super fascinating just trying to see, OK, that was a weld, or that was formed in sheet metal, or it's machined, or what.
00:09:32
Speaker
Cool. I love being a nerd. Well, so we're like, we're on fire here. It's awesome.
00:09:40
Speaker
a couple things I wanted to throw out. First off, we had a listener send in a submission that just said, hey, I just want to thank you guys. The bomb inspired me to have a strike up a conversation with a former, I don't know if it was a student or former colleague in school or something, but we've now had an ongoing conversation for a couple of years now. And I just thought that was both really nice to hear, but also like,
00:10:06
Speaker
if there's an unspoken inspirational part behind this, it's like you gotta go find some friends or like-minded folks or start up that conversation. And my opinion is make it meaty, make it some obligations, kind of the whole like, we're not necessarily here to be friends, we're here to push each other and all that. Yep. Yeah, it's super. I mean, that's one of the hugest benefits we get from this is personally for you and I and how it translates to our business.
00:10:34
Speaker
And I absolutely recommend that for anybody in a similar place, you know, trying to accomplish big things. Yeah. It ain't easy.
00:10:42
Speaker
The other is we had numerous folks write in with answers to whether or not something is, changes or becomes stronger if you core it out.
Coring Materials and Jib Crane Installation
00:10:53
Speaker
So we were talking about the idea of like IVs for bridges or you had the 4140 fixtures. So I thought Spencer Webb did a great job of a quick summary explanation.
00:11:04
Speaker
If you core something out, it does not make it stiffer. There's a thing called specific stiffness, which is stiffness per unit weight. If you have a steel rod and an aluminum rod and you bore out the steel rod such that it's the weight of the steel rod matches the aluminum rod, the aluminum rod is actually stiffer.
00:11:25
Speaker
But basically, it doesn't make it super. I think what is unspoken but said is that you, and somebody else had mentioned this, you only lose, like let's, I'll make this up. If you core it out and you shed 80% of the weight, you shed 80% of the weight, but you only lose 10% of the stiffness. So it's very accretive to do so. And on a bridge type beam, obviously,
00:11:49
Speaker
Reducing the weight means, so we're installing a jib crane right now. The jib cranes are, it's actually a huge amount of work to install a jib crane because we had to pour this huge slab and to get, I think ours is only a thousand pound crane at the end of a relatively short jib. This is like your sky hook, but on steroids. Well, it's permanently. Yeah.
00:12:14
Speaker
Yes. It's not a crane on the ceiling that like traverses across or? Correct, not a bridge crane. It's a, so a jib crane, it's mounted in one spot. So we poured a, it's 50 inches of four feet. So what is four? It is four feet in meters, you know, meter and a half or something cube. We excavated out into the foundation and ground, poured
00:12:35
Speaker
brought a concrete truck in, poured that with eight, seven eighths inch or approximately 20 millimeter steel rods 30 inches long and have hooks in them at the end to give concrete is strengthened towards attention. So you got to actually see the thickness of your concrete because you've got a big hole in it.
00:12:53
Speaker
Sure did. Yeah. Yeah, which is great. The concrete was disappointingly exactly what we thought it was, which is really thin. Four inches or so. Yeah, five. Yeah. Okay. But the sort of saving grace is the soil beneath it is appears to be a very dense, very packed, heavy, almost like a clay, but like, it looks really good. And yeah, the what I've heard, which certainly makes sense is that
00:13:23
Speaker
It's actually almost better to have a thinner concrete, but a really good sub foundation or soil. Because even thicker concrete, if it ends up being hollow underneath it or settles, it can be moving noodle. It's fascinating. Anyway, my whole point with the jib crane was the lighter you make the eye beam on the jib crane, the less weight you have to support
00:13:44
Speaker
as part of the infrastructure itself. So I got a bridge beam. Obviously, an I-beam is less weight, less cost, easier to transport, less weight in span anyways. So, yeah.
Entrepreneurial Insights and Motivation
00:13:58
Speaker
I started Small Giants again. Yep. Yeah. Love it. Cool. Having come off of Good to Great, which I thought was also great to reread and would recommend it, I would recommend Small Giants even more emphatically.
00:14:15
Speaker
Um, you've, you've read it. I read it recently a few months ago. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So it's pretty fresh. Um, it's, it's fantastic. It's relatable. It talks about big businesses and small businesses, but not these mega public companies. Um, yeah. Yeah. And it has a lot of really good stories.
00:14:33
Speaker
Yeah, and just some of the things are resonating with me as well. And like, you know, as an entrepreneur, look, I'm not looking for any sympathy. I'm just trying to be candid. Like sometimes you feel like it's never enough. How can I do more? How can I make my company better? How can I think about morale and rewarding and growth and balance at all? And the way I think it was Jay Gold's talks about it in one of his stories was wonderfully warm to see.
00:15:04
Speaker
That doesn't necessarily change. So you have to, you have to choose to kind of control that and recognize. And I feel, I am proud of what we've done here. The other thing that's really cool is I don't know if I knew this or not, but you know, that top 10 reasons for entrepreneurial success list that I brought up countless times. That is from a New York Times article written by Jay Golds, the artist framing guy. Yeah.
00:15:29
Speaker
That's awesome. We'll put the link in the description. I'm not always one to be big on motivational posters or top 10 lists, but this one just resonated with me and all 10 of them are great bullet points, but the one I always thought loved is the last one that reads, there will be sacrifices, work hard to find a balance so that you don't become a financially successful loser. It's not about the income, it's about the outcome.
00:15:52
Speaker
Um, and I do love what I do. I love the team that we built, the culture that we built, the products that we built, the pride we take in it. And, um, you know, I'm just looking to keep doing it.
ERP System Evolution
00:16:02
Speaker
You know what I mean? I don't, this isn't the kind of business that you're like, Hey, I want to build it up and then hand it off or I want to build up and sell it or like, like, I just, this is, which is hard because sometimes you forget about the loving the journey because you're always looking for that next thing. Um, but it's fun.
00:16:18
Speaker
Yeah, what I'm looking for is sustainable growth, continuing to have fun, growing everybody within the company, both in skill set and, you know, help their personal lives grow and optimize optimize everything. Yeah, yeah. I'm hugely focused on those points right now. And yeah, and it's really fun. So I get to be like, super nerd sometimes and, you know, learn Python programming and
00:16:45
Speaker
post processor edits and, you know, making the current dance and do exactly what I want, but also get to step back and build the business and implement the structure and the organization and the communication channels and all those things. Yeah, I'm jumping between those two and diving deep into both of them. And it's working really well.
00:17:05
Speaker
We had that realization, and it stopped me if I mentioned this, of recognizing that we've spent the last year building Lex and fresh desks and some other things, job runners, work order tickets, that type of thing. And what we're waiting on is to kind of finalize that, especially when it comes to Lex, which I can come back to in a second, our ERP system, such that it is now kind of in a
00:17:28
Speaker
a done enough state, you know, of course, always continue to tweak it, evolve it, etc. But nevertheless, there's going to be a moment where we flip and we flip from focusing on the creation of these input devices, these softwares, these packages, these processes that help us help us put stuff in and we flip it around to where now
00:17:47
Speaker
we sit back and let them tell us what we need to see and hear. And I didn't realize this two months ago, but we aren't ready for that yet, which was actually in itself causing some stress because we have Lex, but it wasn't telling us all the information that we need yet on, hey, where should we be placing priority on ordering material and ordering stuff. And I realized we're not there yet because we're not there yet. Like that's okay.
00:18:11
Speaker
You know it's possible, you know it's coming, you want it now, but it's not there and it still takes more work. Totally get it. But mapping that process out is important and I don't say I regret not realizing it, but I'm glad I realized it when I did because I kind of sat down with everybody and said, okay, it's okay.
00:18:28
Speaker
we will get this to the point now where then we can flip it around and now we can, with confidence, look at what it's telling us and leveraging that data. Because I had this idea of wanting to use data, but the kind of no BS answers, we're not using data. We can pull reports when we need to and we do and we're better off than we were a year ago, but we're not
00:18:48
Speaker
I can't walk in. I can't have you visit our shop and in 15 minutes show you five different ways we're using Lex and fresh desks and data sets to like, make you realize, Oh, these guys got it going on, but we will be there. Yes. Yeah. Ditto.
00:19:03
Speaker
100%, we're in the same boat. We've been investing a lot into our GURP system lately. Fraser made a huge breakthrough last night. He said he had a couple hour video chat with our programmer, Sadie, and they were going back and forth, optimizing specifically our buyer's choice system. We moved it out of Google Sheets and Google Docs and stuff and into GURP, so as website programming.
00:19:33
Speaker
with various Python scripts and we get a lot more power and a lot more functionality and they were going back and forth, back and forth, testing, test and tune last night and they got it working and it's huge and it's way better than it's ever been before. And then we're also, we've got another program we're working on our inventory management system, input and output of every process throughout the shop.
00:19:54
Speaker
Yeah. Everything that gets made or scrapped or passed on from hand to hand, I'm hoping that's functional by Christmas. That's going to be gigantic for us. Tell me more about that.
00:20:07
Speaker
So I drew it all out on a spreadsheet so that I could get my thoughts onto paper because spreadsheets are just so awesome and easy to quickly manipulate. But they kind of break with scale and complexity. And they're not databases. Yeah, they're not databases. They're not great to share with multiple people. And they get messy real fast.
Inventory and Process Management Improvements
00:20:27
Speaker
But for proof of concept and for small things, I still love them, Google Sheets.
00:20:32
Speaker
So I mapped it all out and basically I want to track like when I make a rask handle, you know, we are inventorying a piece of water jet material and then it gets double disc ground out of house and then it gets
00:20:47
Speaker
What's next? Then it gets lapped and then it gets, you know, put on the Kern and then it gets inspected and then it goes to the finishing and they deburr it and then they tumble it and then it gets assembled into a knife and it gets anodized and things like that. I actually want to track pretty much every step along the way, every critical step and where the material is flowing in that step and how many things are waiting or out of stock basically in each step. And that will also tie into our raw material inventories.
00:21:17
Speaker
so that we can accurately track how much stuff we have, when we need to order more, how much scrap we're generating.
00:21:25
Speaker
we can calculate that into our things. And so we have red flags knowing, in the past two months, we've scrapped 40 Norseman blades. That's a huge thing, but nobody's really red flagging it because it's just like, oh, let me try the next one. Oh, let me try the next one. And yeah, it's something we're struggling with. And as the company grows, communication between each people, each person, and each department, and each company as a whole just gets more difficult.
00:21:52
Speaker
Either you put- There's no process. Exactly. You're mood and who's in and who's busy and who likes each other and just all those intricacies. Exactly. I just read in the book I'm reading right now, the hard thing about hard things. He said basically the CEO's job is to establish the communication channels throughout the business. That's one of the most critical tasks he can possibly do.
00:22:18
Speaker
And I'm seeing that now, you know, yeah, that's awesome. So yeah, I think Every meeting that we have almost every day what we have our meetings every day But almost every day somebody's like how many of these do we have or I made this many of this? And are we out of that and I'm like, oh man, my inventory system is just gonna answer all of that Yeah, it's just gonna be there and it's it's it's gonna have to be rigid people are gonna have to use it But that's not a bad thing
00:22:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's not to be taken lightly. For sure. Which you know. So the thing I realized last week is we are going to try to see if and how Lex can help us actually carry less inventory. When I say that really what I mean is maybe less raw material because
00:23:05
Speaker
I actually would much rather. It's so obvious when you say it out loud, but we've gotten to the point now where we have most stuff in stock, which is absolutely awesome and frankly unique in the world of fixture plates and the products that we sell where you can go buy a VF2 plate and there's a pretty good chance it'll ship next day, maybe even same day. We know what inventory we have. It's reflected on the website.
00:23:26
Speaker
And we can get it shipped very quickly, which I love. It's awesome. And we also are much better on our custom turnaround times. And when it's out of stock, we know how to handle it and we are able to get it stuff made quickly. Rockstar. I'd rather carry some finished inventory that can handle normal sales. And of course you'll get caught off guard if somebody buys three Doosan plates out of the blue. Okay, fine. Rock and roll. We'll make some more.
00:23:52
Speaker
What that means is we can try to carry less raw material sitting around that's been unfinished, unimproved, which takes up a ton of space. That's kind of the problem that we have is, frankly, we are starting to grow out of this space. And so how do we make more use of it now?
00:24:09
Speaker
And what we can then do in a perfect world is we have every product we need in the correct quantities and finished raw material. And then as we sell stuff, we buy 15 pieces of plate material. We bring it straight in. We know exactly what it's going to get machined into and it gets processed right away. It never sits for weeks or months as plate material. Now there's some quirks about that with COVID and shortages and the nimble that I'm conscious of, but
00:24:35
Speaker
That was actually kind of a breath of fresh air when I realized, oh, we can be smarter about this. And same thing with boxes. I tried to get a little bit better pricing on some of our packaging, which is expensive by buying, frankly, more than we need to have because it takes up too much room to store it. I'd rather get what we need for a month or two and have it re-delivered than try to save a quote unquote nickel. It's more than a nickel, but buy a bunch of it because we have racking now to store it.
00:25:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's a dangerous slope to fall into. Material is relatively not that expensive to keep on hand. I mean, it can add up for sure. But compared to the cost of not having it when you need it, we're balancing that a lot. We'd rather have months and months of inventory than run out and constantly be chasing our tails. But it's a balance. It's very easy to over-purchase. Like, yeah, let's buy two years of inventory. And we got $50,000 of steel sitting there.
00:25:35
Speaker
Or not. I thought of you, uh, because we moved some,
Shop Lighting and Conveyor System Challenges
00:25:41
Speaker
I think I talked about this. We moved some lights around because of shadowing that we get from machines. And so we got, we ordered a new light. I can't believe our lights are six years old, um, LEDs. And the good news is LEDs have fallen drastically in price, even since we bought them. So they're quite, they're quite inexpensive now. And, uh,
00:25:59
Speaker
I know our lighting guy pretty well, and he was like, hey, he's like, I'm sorry. He's like, that's discontinued. He's like, I'm going to get you the almost exact same thing as close as I can get. Same color temp, same CRI, same lumen output. And we hung it up, and it's just disgusting. It's beautiful, but it doesn't match.
00:26:20
Speaker
I mean, this was shocking enough to me, but I just I can't help but think of you to be like, this is like absolutely hard pass. No, unacceptable. But it's actually not the easiest problem to solve because I was asking him, does it do LEDs fade or change color? And he was saying that no, they won't really change color temp, but they will. Their lumens will drop a bit over time.
00:26:42
Speaker
But I think what we figured out is that it's the same lumen output, but the fixture is half the size. So it's actually twice the lumen output per square inch of the fixture. So it looks, we kind of joke, it's like a beacon of light. And so we actually bought a second one that's much smaller output because I don't want that
00:27:02
Speaker
I want it to blend in or balance more. Right. So you're adding one or two light fixtures to your current lighting setup and you're noticing they don't match in the beam output the way they shine or if you look up in the color temperature.
00:27:16
Speaker
If you just walked into our shop, you'd be like, what happened there? Yeah, what's wrong with that one? Yeah, yes. So I don't know what the lesson is. It wouldn't have made sense to buy extra fixtures back then. This one, the way we swapped it out is way better. But what we could also do is take a fixture that's way back in the corner of our other bay and put it there. Talk about, yeah. But it just made me think of things I didn't expect.
00:27:43
Speaker
Yeah, something we notice here because we're adamant about tiny scratches and how they propagate and how to get them out and things like that. The LED lighting that we have, they're called like UFO bulbs. I think they're similar to what you have. Just skylight.
00:28:00
Speaker
No, we don't have UFOs. We have strips. Really? You need to give the big domes. It's not huge. It's like 6, 12 inches in diameter, but it's LED. And we have 12 of them, I think, in the shop.
00:28:15
Speaker
Um, anyway, so the lighting we have in the back shop, 5,000 K quite bright, quite nice. Um, in the front shop, they have, I think a mixture between fluorescent tubes and led tubes. And they're much different feels very white and clinical in the, in the machine shop and very like a little bit yellower and a little bit like softer in the front shop. Anyway, they can see scratches there that if they bring to our lighting back here, cannot be seen anymore. Oh, yeah. That's interesting.
00:28:42
Speaker
So if we are passing parts and saying they're good to go and they bring them over there and say, no, they're not. That's added some, you know, because of the fluorescence or just the way it reflects the way it shows the color temperature. I'm not exactly sure. Um, I can't say I've seen an example of this yet. I want to like, okay, show me what you're talking about. Um, but I've certainly heard it brought up 10 times over the last two years. Okay.
00:29:12
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah, Eric, especially, my brother has been adamant about it. I'm like, our light is perfect. It's amazing. What are you talking about? Even the fact that it's different is quite funny. Yep. Yep. So the Akuma conveyor strikes again. It was a hectic morning pre-podcast because Gossager showed up and they're installing our May Fran Concept 2000, which is like the Rolls Royce of conveyors. Yeah. And it's the one that I mentioned was
00:29:39
Speaker
huge and unexpectedly quirky to unload. And so we actually had to take out our false wall in our shop area to be able to position it. We kind of knew this could be a possibility because we wanted to put the machine, the Akuma itself, we wanted to put it in place and start using it. And I didn't think the conveyor was going to be this big. It's huge. But we were able to pull out the old effectively chip pan and then move this giant thing
00:30:07
Speaker
into place and they're in the process of wiring it up right now. But they were expecting only the conveyor to drop into the existing ship pan. And so when they got here this morning, they were like, this is not what we were expecting. And I'm like, I got nothing. What do you want me to say? So we were doing back and forth what the steps were going to be on that.
00:30:28
Speaker
They've got to move all the pumps over. Like, it's actually going to be a lot of work. Yeah. That's the thing buying a machine, somewhat custom-specced, is it comes, like, Armori came with a chip pan, huge, you know, a coolant tank, basically, and we replaced it with the L&S chip conveyor, which is how the coolant tank. So we had this huge, like, steel tub thing that eventually we just scrapped, because I'm like, I don't know what to do with this. I wish the machine hadn't come with it, you know?
00:30:57
Speaker
Exact same thought. It's probably worth like $1,000 of manufacturing costs, right? Right. So the machine came from Japan to the port in Savannah or something, Georgia. And then it sits there until it sells. And then they take it to Charlotte, where Kuma North America is. And then Kuma North America unpacks the machine and goes through and tweaks all your options, coolant, unions, mis-collectors, all that stuff. Then they put it back on a skid and send it up to us.
00:31:25
Speaker
So I'm like, wait, does Charlotte just normally take these pans that come from Japan and scrap them out? Like, it does seem so wasteful.
00:31:36
Speaker
It'd be nice to be like, okay, the next three Okumas we're ordering, don't send pans because we have three of them here.
Tooling and Cleaning Solutions
00:31:42
Speaker
We're sitting on a gold mine worth of extra pans. Yeah, I don't know. It's fun as a business to see all of these processes and to analyze and criticize other businesses, but to observe and learn from it and apply them. We talk about it in our meetings every day, lean wastes like that that we see here or elsewhere. It's really cool. Have you made chips on the Okuma yet?
00:32:06
Speaker
Oh yeah, yeah, we've got it tooled up. We're making our fixtures for it right now, but we've been making test parts on it. And so far so good. Cool. Yeah. Real quick. You got, you got big plus cat 40 holders for it. What interface like ER?
00:32:23
Speaker
We bought everything. Well, we bought everything new because we wanted dual contact or big plus. And I just don't want to mix. I'm probably overreacting, but just it's a new machine. It's, you know, every time you get a new machine, it's like, that's my baby. Like I feel like with the current, if you had some ER, if you had some agents case leftover from the, exactly. Yeah.
00:32:46
Speaker
So bought new holders. Um, honestly, Ed told it up. I don't really know. I don't really know. Um, we bought some of their mega chucks, which are more of a call it like a proprietary big Kaiser call it. Actually, I think unfortunately it's now big diashoa. They dropped the Kaiser. Um, but, um, they're more of their like, uh,
00:33:08
Speaker
high-end collet chucksy fuel, but we also bought four ER, actually more than four generic 16s, 20s, and 32s just for- You got to have them. Miscellaneous, yeah. Cool. That's what I was going to say. We reached out to Crest. Ultrasonics.
00:33:28
Speaker
Not honestly sure it's gonna go anywhere, but called the sales guy, showed him what we do, and was basically like, hey, we want a process to clean up to 40 by 20 inch fixture plates.
00:33:39
Speaker
Um, I don't want to build a system around that we have one size larger. That's 56 by 24, 44 by 26. I was getting confused, but, um, we don't sell that many of them and I, it's just so much bigger. Um, and he was leaning towards kind of unclear the difference, but toward a vapor degrease scene. Was that what it was called?
00:34:00
Speaker
But I kind of was put off because it was kind of like, oh, I'm going to need weeks to talk to our engineering and get because I was like, look, I need an idea of what this machine would be, the specs of it, the footprint and cost. And I mean, I am very excited to see what he says. But I the fact that it was that much of an effort on there and tells me it may not be the right fit.
00:34:23
Speaker
We have a Crest ultrasound, we have two of them, and they work quite well. They have a lot of off-the-shelf sizes. I think they can and will make a custom size, but I'm not surprised it's going to take weeks. I think what you're looking for is just quick off-the-cuff answers. Why don't it take weeks to get me the machine? I mean, give me an idea. No, even just to talk about it.
00:34:43
Speaker
Is it 10 grand or 50 grand? Exactly. Come on. Yeah. I find the salesmen are so reluctant to even ballpark that because they feel tied to it. They want to send you an invoice or a quote, basically. I'm like, dude, just is it 10 or 50, exactly, like you said. Ballparking. I'm not going to hold you to it. I just need to know if we need to keep talking or if not. Exactly, which I guess I should stop feeling bad about wasting their time. I mean, I'm not wasting their time.
00:35:12
Speaker
No, I've started saying that. I was like, is this a conversation or not? Because if it's going to be 75,000, like, sorry.
00:35:20
Speaker
And I know nothing about how ultrasonics are built. I know that they work with cavitation, which is like the coolest thing in the history of mankind. But, you know, we want effectively a drip pan, like a thin, huge pan ultrasonic, which is not normal. Do you want it? You want to lay the plate flat, like how it's permission? Well, actually, it would be easier to lay it, to slip it in vertically. That was what I was thinking. So sure. Either way, it's going to be
00:35:50
Speaker
that odd profile. Yeah, actually, vertically with frankly, sick, easier to get in and out for sure. Yeah, with the jib crane. So you're planning on steel plates, aluminum plates, kind of everything. Yeah, maybe I'll call him back because we kind of been focused on flat. And what we thought about now is our next idea, which actually could be pretty solid is a effectively homebuilt
00:36:16
Speaker
parts washer that would be kind of like how a contractor builds a custom shower where they frame it and then they put in that shower matting that gets waterproof and it gets kind of tiled into place or whatever. So that would just be a thin trough, but on one end you'd have a deep end where you could have a combination of pumps and filters and drain valves so that you could then pump the fluid or drain or clean it, but pump it back up to a number of overhead
00:36:42
Speaker
washers and then the plate would actually sit probably like a half an inch above the water line so that you're flushing and cooling onto it or cleaning fluid onto it. And it's recirculating through, but you could also, you don't need to submerge the plate.
00:37:00
Speaker
That's my backup option, which frankly we could build. No big deal. But man, I'd love for Chris to come back and be like, we can custom build you a slip, like a slot style ultrasonic. I want you to sell me something. Yeah. Yeah. With the ideas like that, like your parts washer, what I've become a big fan of doing in the past year or so, it's like,
00:37:20
Speaker
I'll get my notes on paper. I might draw it up real quick in Fusion, and then I'll find somebody to build it for me. Yeah, yeah. Because then they get to maximize their time doing something fun for them, and I get to maximize my time inventing it, but not touching it, and then a little bit back and forth, and then I get a solution. And we've grown the business to the point where I'm happy to pay for things like that, and it's just so much more efficient and faster. Because honestly, I'm slow developing something new like that.
00:37:48
Speaker
test it and figure it out and invent it and have the idea. And I just want to have it now. I want to move on to the next. No. And I'd say I'm locked up with you. I mean, we've outsourced those shipping crates. We've outsourced the storage crates. Nice. And I'm happy to keep doing that type of stuff. As much as we love tinkering, and I love all of these projects, and I would love nothing more than to just spend all my time doing them. But it's not practical, and it's not actually what I want to be doing.
00:38:16
Speaker
I want to come up with the next one, you know? So on that note, for one of the first times ever yesterday, I looked at my like to-do list and was just kind of like,
Outsourcing and Project Focus
00:38:29
Speaker
I'm good. Yeah, there's tons. It's actually funny. There's some big things I want to do, and I don't want to do them because I want to find the right person to take them over the task because me doing them is not good. I don't want to do them. Anyway, on my list, other sort of longer term list has been, hey, I really want to improve the Haas
00:38:48
Speaker
chip evacuation. We've talked about this before. So I 3D printed, this is just a proof of concept, but this is a short, think of it like a short triangular bridge piece and it would get extruded longer. So it would look basically like the roof of the house, an A-frame. And these go over the stub and the connection end of the augers. We had printed the auger
00:39:12
Speaker
like addition that gets auger section to the coupling section and that's a this is a way better idea just to cover it. So we're printing I printed two that were really thin just to test the fit and I'm printing one right now that'll be the proper three and I think it's 3.75 inches but I guess my question kind of rhetorical but actually do care we can print these for free they're like three dollars a piece and we have plenty of
00:39:38
Speaker
printing, well, actually we don't have printing time. We're using our printers a ton, but easy to print them or good grief, John, this could be so easily done properly out of sheet metal. Um, and then it could be coded or something. And there's plenty of sheet metal folks out there that would do these with pride better than I could. So it's kind of like, Hey, prove that it works with 3d printing and go over 20 of them from a sheet metal company that show up powder coded, you know, all that. Um, I should, I should go that route if I, if I like the design.
00:40:06
Speaker
unless the 3D printers works.
00:40:08
Speaker
Yeah, this might be a, it's no time off me. I mean, we just hit reprint. Exactly. This might be the end of the conversation. It's like, okay, it works. I'm moving on to the next thing. Um, might need to replace it. So we'll have three extras on the shelf and then never think about it again. Uh, cause it's so easy to over engineer and overthink and over process and like, Oh yeah, we could spend, you know, for $600, we can have somebody bend these up in sheet metal and powder coat them for us. And we'd have a lifetime supply, but so you do already on printing stuff.
00:40:39
Speaker
It's true. I actually put a $200 deposit down on the new Prusa. Did you see it? I briefly saw it, the big XL or something. Yeah. Yeah.
3D Printing Innovations and Reflections
00:40:48
Speaker
I mean, it's fully refundable. It's kind of like Tesla model where you have it committed at all. Right, right. I watched a tiny little clip on it, and he said it's got a strain gauge in the head. So it notices how much filament pressure is coming out. So you can sense a clogged nozzle, but it can also come in and touch the plate. Yeah.
00:41:06
Speaker
Oh, so cool. It's got a hypocycloid gear as the extruder. You see that? Yes. No backlash. So there's some quality of life process improvements around that. It also will accommodate two to five optional additional materials. And it's moving from for us, like we are printing so much stuff now. Yeah. And it includes a print server, whatever they call like octopi type thing. Really?
00:41:34
Speaker
That's what I want to do now. I'm printing enough stuff to where, and actually it was just yesterday messing around with fusion. I've never actually sliced and cammed up a part in fusion and pushed it. But it should be doable. And there's so many times when I'm testing that I make minor revisions and it's an unnecessary step to move it into cura or prusa slicer, reorient it, re-slice it. So I'd like to get fusion working.
00:42:01
Speaker
So with that new printer, you said it's multi-material as well? It has the option of doing one, two, or up to five different heads and materials. OK. I would love that. Head change. Head change, OK. Which is what you want, because you want to have different nozzles, sizes. Actually, that's another reason we would use it, is that we, by default, print with a 0.6 millimeter. But sometimes it would be nice to have the detail. Is that the bigger one? I think it's 0.4 standard?
00:42:30
Speaker
.4 is generally stuff. That's what I have then. Yeah. And then like a lot faster than .6. Yeah. Like Spencer Webb for the, um, the trays on his flat stones. I think he prints with a gigantic nozzle. It looks like a hot glue gun is making these things. We put a one millimeter in before for huge prints. Really? It can take a, I'll make this up. It can take a twin hour, 10 hour print down to three hours. Wow. But you lose quality or something, but. Right.
00:42:56
Speaker
What's the price point on the new Prusa? I haven't looked. So the reason they did the deposit was to get an idea for how many they're going to be able to make, which will affect the price. But ballpark 3K, I think the 3K was maybe the one I'm looking at, which would be at least the two heads. Yeah. That's fair. Yeah. I've definitely thought about dropping 3,000 to 5,000 on a nice printer. There's the raised 3D ones that quite a lot of people seem to love.
00:43:24
Speaker
I sometimes like a little bit better, bigger build volume and at least two nozzles because I've never printed with the soluble stuff and that just sounds brilliant.
00:43:34
Speaker
You know, I bought some because I have an IDEX at home and the independent dual and we've actually never used it. And I want to use it and I want to like it, but I've also heard some folks sort of say like, you're better off being more intelligent with how you design and orient your part than trying to use the Elmer's glue, what's it called? Not PLA. It was a name for the drill limits.
00:43:59
Speaker
Anyway, it's also expensive, but I hear you, it would be nice to have, oh man, you can have two different diameters, a color, extra color. We printed some go no-go gauges and I just used electrical tape that was green and red to color the ends, which actually looks great. I had no problem with it, but if you had red and green filament, it would have been cool to integrate it. I've done a couple, two color prints just by switching, um, filament halfway through and I'd add so much life to the part. Like it's, it's so cool. Yeah. It's awesome.
00:44:28
Speaker
I love this stuff. Over time on the untime constrained podcast.
00:44:33
Speaker
Hey, I don't know if you guys celebrate Thanksgiving up there. We certainly do here in America. And Happy Thanksgiving to everybody. I always remind myself at this time of year how fortunate I feel to be doing what I do. I do truly love it. There's days when we get stressed. There's days where you get down on yourself. But ultimately, it's a lot of fun. And I like the Tom Lipton quote, the trades have been good to me. I'm proud to be doing what we're doing. And thank you all for being part of this journey.
00:44:58
Speaker
Yep. Absolutely. Uh, Canadian Thanksgiving is early October. How weird is that? Sorry. Cool, man. Hey, I'll see you. All right. Take care. Have a good day.