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#301 Managing Your Tasks
273 Plays2 years ago
Topics:
- Saunders went to North Carolina, shop ran well without him!
- Autodesk event
- Grimsmo working on improving his Kern, toured a flavor factory
- Saunders toured an egg factory
- Tracking process flow through the shop
- Managing your tasks
- Crashing machines
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Setup
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 301. My name is John Grimsmough. And my name is John Saunders. And this is the weekly podcast where two manufacturing entrepreneurs geek out about all the stuff that's going on in our business
Managing Absence and Company Operations
00:00:15
Speaker
lives. How are you? I'm quite wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. How are you doing? Hectic morning back.
00:00:24
Speaker
Yeah, you just got back, right? Yeah, I got back. I actually ended up making a back last night. So at the risk of oversharing, I don't do well with staying up late anymore. Like, yeah, like really, like if I'm out till 1230 or one for whatever reason, which isn't very often, I really struggle. I just like a routine. So I drove back from Charlotte. I was going to spend the night. We drove. Well, it's like six hours by the time you drive an hour. It's not bad, but.
00:00:53
Speaker
And I did a, actually made a conscious point to set up a Spotify playlist of podcasts that I've been, I listen to podcasts regularly, but this time I like just had the playlist ready to go. And I'll tell you, I really enjoyed it. Wouldn't a lot of traffic. And honestly, the drive down was great. Drive back was, was flew by. Nice. But
00:01:17
Speaker
And you know, it's funny because part of me wants to not ever be full of, full of it. Like this whole, like, does our shop run without me? Yes. Like there, there, there is an absolute yes element to that answer on the flip side. Um, stuff does some things do pile up or wait for me when I get back. Yeah. Maybe that's to be expected. Um, you're back for what been gone for two days, three days.
00:01:47
Speaker
I was out Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Okay. Yeah. I mean, look, this is like nothing big, but it's funny because part of me was chewing on like, gosh, maybe it's almost better. I don't know how this would really work. And if, oh my God, if anyone out there is listening who has done this, I am all ears. But could I self-impose a three week sabbatical?
00:02:12
Speaker
I don't want to. I genuinely don't like that idea of not being able to be there. But I almost wonder if it would be better for everybody would probably be a good I would not mind a break that doesn't
Event Insights and Industry Networking
00:02:27
Speaker
Like just kind of, you know, just even just the systems in place so that the company can do that if you had to do it tomorrow kind of thing. Yeah. Cause that's the goal. It's not just like in six months I'm taking three weeks off. Let's plan for that. It's like,
00:02:44
Speaker
Something goes wrong. Somebody doesn't show up. The company needs to run not just for your position, but for anybody else's position. Yeah. And we've been talking about that here too. Like if our shipping guy is out sick for a day, it's fine for a week. It's a problem for, you know, longer. It's like, Oh crap. Like, yeah. So I want to keep exploring this. It's not something I'm going to do tomorrow by any means, but, um, I think, uh, I think it could be good. Hmm.
00:03:12
Speaker
So how was North Carolina? Great. Give us the whole rundown. I didn't get to go, so tell us. So it was hosted by DSI, which is an Autodesk reseller, which to be blunt. And I don't want to turn this into a sales pitch for DSI. But if you'd asked me six months ago about the value of resellers, it would have been up there with conversational programming and a machine. Totally.
00:03:40
Speaker
But what I kind of now appreciate and frankly, it's because Devin and Phil have both moved over to be employees at DSI is they offer fusion support, like full stop, full send. Frankly, to come right back to my idea of having a sabbatical, if we have a problem with fusion, it's fun to be the guy in the shop who can solve it or knows the answer.
00:04:04
Speaker
It's even more fun. It's even funner to have a resource that people could reach out to and get help, not necessarily just on Fusion 360 from a like, hey, fusions down. Yes, I can't help if the clouds down or whatever, but more of the like, hey, my pencil toolpath doesn't work or I can't get a pattern to work or something.
00:04:27
Speaker
They hosted this event and it was very similar to the Portland Fusion Academy. Remember that? I didn't go to that one, but I heard about it.
00:04:38
Speaker
God, I thought you were there. Sorry. And that was a great like a mini Autodesk University. So two days of like pretty legit fusion classes. I like the fact that it was a single track two days. You did not have to choose which classes to go into. So it was everyone took the same thing. Nice.
00:05:00
Speaker
A lot of folks from Autodesk were there. So like Dan Pacific, he said he's coming to see you actually. Yeah, on Friday. Yeah, like he was there. He runs turning. So he is, and I give a lot of these guys credit. Now I will call Autodesk out too. Sometimes they're, I think they are in the business of asking for feedback and not necessarily, you know, it's like they want to check the box that, oh, we asked.
00:05:24
Speaker
But Dan, to his credit, was like, hey, here are the three things that I think turning needs to be fixed to be good turning. And it's like to a library simulation. And I forget what else the third was. But I give him credit. It may take a little while. There may be some whatever. But they care. And Al, who heads up CAM, was there. We were talking candidly about successes, pain points. Some of the new toolpaths with the module works I could go on for are really awesome.
00:05:54
Speaker
Um, but I give DSI credit, like it was fun to have a group of about a hundred people together. It was at Stewart Haas racing, which is pretty cool to see a NASCAR and F1 team. Um, and it was a nice facility, frankly, just in terms of the auditorium and, uh, catering and all that. So, uh, they're gonna do more of these and they're going to move them around. So, um, dude, you ought to pitch them to have one up in your neck of the woods. Oh, that'd be cool. Uh, there's enough fusion users and must be,
00:06:23
Speaker
Two three-hour radio. I mean heck we have people driving eight hours for this event. Yeah So it's great. That's cool Yeah, I have to try to hit the next one. Yeah, and there's um
00:06:36
Speaker
I'm going to figure out what this could look like. I think I want to try to figure out a way to distill some of the new multi-axis content that they covered into like short videos over on NYCCNC. It's weird. I don't want to steal their content or their presentation, but I actually don't think that's the right way to view it because I think they'd be happy to
00:06:58
Speaker
This is stuff, frankly, that came from the Autodesk guys anyway, to be like, hey, rather than show 100 people, I need to show everybody what this new, they redid Swarf, they redone Flow or Blend, and the multi-axis capabilities are legit awesome with module works now, and that'll be good for you and me on our five-axis machines, on your fourth-axis control, on Willemins, and all that.
Automation and Machine Efficiency Challenges
00:07:29
Speaker
Even five axis on the Wilman because the head tilts and your C axis a axis rotates. I'm going to try if we can build no new updates yet on that, by the way. But if we can get it, I'm going to be pretty conservative about simultaneous five. Yeah. Positional is fine, but right. Oh, I think I've done that yet. I don't think I've done any simultaneous five on it, certainly for positional for
00:07:58
Speaker
Yeah, just keep playing with it. How's your Willy? My Willy is strong. Let's see, I did. I don't know if I played with it too much the past week. So many jokes there, but. Have you seen CJ's Willy? He's got two. That is a is a lucky man. Yeah. Sorry, everybody.
00:08:26
Speaker
Yeah, we just can't help it. When the machine is called a Willeman, you can't call it that. It's too much of a mouthful. It's funny because Willeman sent me a cheesy cutting board like a long time ago and I still use it in my kitchen every day. It's flipped to logo downs that my wife doesn't have to see it every day, but I know. Why doesn't she want to see your Willy every day? It goes on. How's your Willy? Seriously, have you done it?
00:08:54
Speaker
I had stuck on a little post thing. What is it? It won't post the O number in the code, but the Wilhelmin needs that. Little things. And CJ and I, we're going back and forth with a couple questions there. Not to jump in. That's an easy fix, though. It's super easy. I'm just trying to think. Yeah, this is about a week ago. I don't think I've touched it in the past week. I've been so busy on other projects. But yeah, I think it's ready for me to jump in. Got it.
00:09:25
Speaker
What is your, what have you been working on then? Um, bit of current stuff, updates to programs, um, adding little safeties and features in like, I made a mistake on the current yesterday where I ran the same program twice accidentally, um, which destroyed a tool and two handles. Really? Yeah. It's because I put like, we drill a hole, face the surface, drill a hole, and then we pause the machine, manually put in a ceramic detent ball.
00:09:53
Speaker
I ran that program again accidentally. I scheduled it wrong because I was hectic and rushing. We had a tour. Angelo was giving a tour, so I did it and said he and him and all that. I scheduled the same program twice. Not a big deal, but I'm going to put a check in there that basically probes to see if the ball is already there. If so, skip the program. Don't run it again, kind of thing. Is that an overreaction?
00:10:20
Speaker
I've done this too many times. Noted. That's the problem. I've done this many more than one time. I've done it a couple of times. One of the other guys has done it once or twice. The system is broken, not the operator kind of thing. Is there a way of handling it more elegantly?
00:10:41
Speaker
it like you could have a toggle variable that goes from zero to one when the pallets loaded and it doesn't get reset until the pallets unloaded, which means you can't really rerun the program until the pallet has been in and out of the row or something. That way you don't have to waste time probing. I'm already probing anyway. Ah, okay. The probes already in there. So it's just moving over a quarter inch and like probe again, kind of thing. Um, little things like that. But, um, the crane has been running so solid, like,
00:11:10
Speaker
It's very solid. What I need to do is I need to make a few more tombstones and optimize a couple programs. I had Zadaro make me an eight flute quarter inch end mill, which should cut our surfacing time in half theoretically from four flute to eight flute. Got it. So I got to test that out. That's super exciting. It's a gorgeous little tool. I'm like, how do you fit eight flutes on that quarter inch?
00:11:34
Speaker
That's cool. Because we spend quite a lot of time surfacing the rask handles. Yeah. So save time. Yeah. So I'm kind of stepping back. The current's running so smooth. Now I get to look at it. And I get to go, OK, where does it pause? Where does it wait for us? How do you maximize it? How do you keep it running? How do you remove little issues and hang ups and things like that?
00:11:56
Speaker
Every time there is an issue, we've got a notebook right beside the current that we write down like what the alarm was, what the problem was. And then we start to see patterns over time like we need to implement a system to like never do that again. And it's been pretty rock solid lately, which is super nice.
00:12:13
Speaker
Are you, what are you going to have happen when if the probe finds the ceramic balls there, we'll use the program in M 30 and wait for user to intervene or will you try to, it'll finish that program. Like the program that drills those holes is a very short little program. It faces the handle, drills the hole, waits for you to put the ball in. It presses the ball in briefly and then just halfway down and then puts the pallet away. So I would just end that program and have it put the pallet away.
00:12:41
Speaker
But that can't run overnight anyways because someone has to be there to put the ball in. Correct, which is why we schedule those during the day. It's like a five-minute cycle. Yeah, right. So we schedule them all around lunchtime or whatever, and then we just come back and stand there every few minutes until I finish my automatic ceramic ball dropper that I think would be really cool.
00:13:03
Speaker
Didn't you work on that? I've been working on it for years, but I haven't touched it in a while. I've been thinking about it though, because I would say it's a five minute cycle and it takes two seconds to put the ball in. But if the machine's waiting for you and you're busy doing something else, we've got three guys that can put the balls in. But I actually have a timer on the current that counts up every single time how long it's sitting there waiting for the detent ball to put in. And it's like, in a whole week, it's probably hours.
00:13:30
Speaker
Just little things. Sure. But that's free time. Absolutely free time. If I had an automatic ball dropper, it would just save that time. It'd be machining instead. Do you watch any of the Winter Garden guy that makes the marble machine that plays music? I did. Yeah. Pierre suggested that as a mechanism kind of haven. And I did watch a couple of those videos to see all the little latches and things that he does.
00:13:58
Speaker
He just did like in depth. I forget what he calls it like a drop hatch or something or drop latch. Okay. 1520 minute video, which I thought I was going to be like fast forwarding. Nope. Hookline and sinker watch the whole thing on his design iterations of dropping a ball. Now his balls are way bigger than your balls. But so I don't know how well it would scale because your balls are tiny, right?
00:14:26
Speaker
Yes. Sixteenth of an inch. I can't lie. Measurements are measurements. Right. Yeah. I just pulled up his channel again. This marble gate surprised me. Yes. But it did make it really fun analysis of like how do you reliably drop a ball. Yeah. And anyway.
00:14:48
Speaker
Yeah, because that's the thing. I have the spindle probe so I can check if it worked, if the ball is there, whether probably after pressing it in. I drop it, I'd press it in, and then I'd probe it again to make sure that it actually worked, which I'm doing anyway. Is the ball magnetic? No, not at all. That's not good. That would make it easier. To a point, you don't want to magnetize it though. Well, I think what I would do
00:15:14
Speaker
without having spent much time thinking about this is I would build the ball drop mechanism somewhere out in the work envelope like your habit pivot in with a with a ball that's been dropped and then that magnetic tool in the spindle could pick it up and then move it over to the knife. You're not gonna don't think you're gonna drop it in place over the
00:15:32
Speaker
I think so. I'm thinking a tool holder that has a little hopper full of balls inside of it. Like the size of a spindle probe basically. And then the mechanism is inside. It's got to be tiny, but I like tiny things. I like tiny balls.
00:15:48
Speaker
My thinking is when it spindle goes down in Z, something contacts the surface which pushes up the latch and the mechanism and then a gate opens up. One ball drops and then when you lift up, it like falls down and it needs to not bounce away, roll away. It needs to sit in this little hole and then stay there and a drop of coolant is going to be a problem. So we need to air blast the thing beforehand, little things like that. But I have thought this all through and I do think even still it'll be totally worth it.
00:16:18
Speaker
Cool. Because even like seven years ago, we started using the machine to press in the balls, and it's been like never doing anything else after that. It's the best way to do it. So a lot of guys do it by hand with an arbor press or shims or things like that. It's no thank you. The only thing I'll add is the same thing I often say on these talks is, but let's say you make five knives a day or 10 knives a day or 20 knives a day.
Shop Management and Task Prioritization
00:16:48
Speaker
It's probably a better use of your time for the next year to still do other stuff because you could make the machine blow a whistle. You put a whistle on the tool changer, blow the whistle, just have somebody come over to do it. It's probably more efficient than...
00:17:06
Speaker
I would take a large bet that even if you did this, it's going to have a lot of... I mean, look at Wintergarten. The guy's got probably tens of thousands of dollars or more to spend in R&D on a full-time thing. I mean, I don't know what else the guy does, but I think he's spending a lot of his whole life on this machine and it's kicking his butt.
00:17:26
Speaker
But as I've learned with automation, the more hands off it is, just the more it runs. You don't have to think about it. You get to focus on other things. In our example anyways, perfect example of where human intervention causes delays and issues and problems, things like that.
00:17:44
Speaker
Yeah. And we've implemented other automations like this and it's just like you don't even think about it anymore. Like you've forgotten what life was like before this thing and I do believe this is gonna be an example of that because manually stopping every machine, well it's just occurring right now that puts the balls in but stopping a super expensive valuable machine to like open the door, put a ball in. I'm sick of it.
00:18:09
Speaker
No, I agree. But hear me out. If you had an audible alarm that told anybody in the shop to go over and do it. Yeah, well, don't don't keep it wrong. I don't love that solution. But yeah, you're right. It immediately solved the machine shouldn't mean there's somebody probably within 20 feet of the current every hour of the day. So no, not a huge deal. It's kind of like the phone answering the phone. You just kind of one of those things you got to do it. And versus
00:18:37
Speaker
not basically putting off every other project. You've got so many opportunities to do cool projects. I know. Yeah, I know. I hear you. And that's why it's on my list, but it's not near the top of my list of things to do. And right now, we don't have an audible alarm, but the current's very easy to visualize, very easy to see, look inside. It's pointed right at the open part of the shop. We walk by, we're like, why isn't the cooler done? Oh, it needs a ball. OK. Walk in, put a ball in. Do you have through spindle air?
00:19:06
Speaker
We do. Dude, I can't believe, I almost don't want to say this on the podcast because it would be fun. A whistle? Yes. A machine, a whistle. It's the only whistle that's ever been put into a Rego fix grip. So it's basically a $500 whistle. Yeah. But no, put a whistle in there and have it whistle four times. That's actually not a bad idea.
00:19:25
Speaker
I'm sure you can buy a round whistle that you just put in a collet. In fact, I know you can because I have a really good buddy and he has twin five-year-olds and I bought the male twin, a titanium whistle from REI for like 10 bucks. He thanks me every day for that.
00:19:49
Speaker
Put a whistle. This is where you and I are different, and I love it, John. Whistle is $10. It'll work. You have an audible beep. Somebody goes, oh, it does it. We done. Then do that until you crush it and laugh in my face about how good your ball dropper is. But that's a right now solution. Yeah. But the ball dropper is, I mean, I don't have the time to do it right now. I don't want to take the time. It's not the highest priority on my list, meaning it'll happen eventually. But until then, we're still kind of struggling.
00:20:18
Speaker
Whistleblasts. I wonder how fast you can turn off and on the three spindle layer. You know, like do a like beep beep. Yeah, you can have it. Whistle to an M4 dwell or something. Yeah. I'm going to try that. That's pretty funny. I like that. It's going on the list. Yes. What are these other... You ever do a time study? Like what do you... All the time. Yeah. What are you spending your time on? Yeah.
00:20:48
Speaker
Sometimes the wrong things, sometimes the right things. Don't be like that. It's the nature. A lot of optimizations, a lot of problem solving that we're still having issues with our Norseman, little things. The ceramic balls crack sometimes when we grind them. We have to inspect that. The grinding wheel has a life. We dress it in the machine automatically.
00:21:13
Speaker
you know, like most of the time it works, but sometimes a ball would get cracked and not get noticed early enough. So put more inspections into place, things like that. We've been organizing the shop a whole lot lately. That's like me a little bit, mostly the whole team, which is awesome. And trying to
00:21:34
Speaker
like working on finishing up the router. Our enclosure just came in a couple days ago. It looks insane. It's like really, really nice. So a lot of my time is spent like designing that enclosure and organizing all the vendors and the foam supplier. I've got a conference call with them and an hour and a half.
00:21:53
Speaker
Nice. Yeah. They sent a bunch of samples in. Um, so I threw the samples on this video and just kind of like hand jog, cut them just to see like how they cut. Um, cause there's dense ones, there's light ones, there's a thick and thin and all these different stuff. And I'm like, cause she was telling me over the phone, you know, what density do you want? I'm like, I have no idea. That's what we talked about. Yeah, I don't know. So she sent this XLPD, um,
00:22:21
Speaker
foam that they make in two pound density and four pound density. I'm sitting there like feeling it and pushing it and okay, the four pound is heavier. Let's put them on the machine, cut both, shove an engraving tool into it.
00:22:33
Speaker
you know, draw a little square, just hand jogging it. Big difference in cut quality between the two. The heavier density cuts like way finer, way cleaner. So, and we're, the end products are laminated products. We're going to have black on top, gray in the middle and the black on the bottom. And we might even do harder density on the top, softer in the middle and harder on the bottom. Oh, getting fancy, John. Yeah. So we're trying to figure this out. Um, but hopefully by the end of the day, after the meeting with her, I should be able to have a,
00:23:02
Speaker
an answer so we can place that order and have it hopefully before Christmas. We'll see how long both their lead times are. That's great. Does four pound mean it deflects a certain amount? I'm guessing. It must. I'm not exactly sure, but it would have to be with some constraints like a one inch cylinder pushes down with 10 pounds of force, whatever. Yeah. It's like a Rockwell test. How much? Basically, yeah. Must be.
00:23:28
Speaker
Yesterday, Eric and I took a factory tour at a local flavor making company.
00:23:34
Speaker
Oh, yeah? Yeah. It's like a lab, basically. And a good friend of ours, the guy that actually got me into the knife industry and kind of I owe a lot of initial success to because he got me onto this industry. But since then, he's created a company that invents and makes the juice that becomes flavor, whether it's maple or banana or everything. Yeah. He sells it to ice cream shops and coffee shops. And the vape industry is pretty huge for him for the taste, the flavor.
00:24:03
Speaker
And so we got to Tourist Factory. We had to put hair nets on and booties and everything and it's just really cool. Like really, the offices were just super professional and super nice and very inspiring to kind of walk through. That's cool. Yeah. And they're doing really, really well for themselves. So it was really cool for both Eric and I to kind of be like, you know, this is what I really
00:24:27
Speaker
well done companies is up to these days. I still love factory tours. It's just a chance to see outside of your own wheelhouse. A different industry too, which I don't very often do. It's still manufacturing.
00:24:43
Speaker
they make a product and they pallet chip it and they have forklifts and warehouse workers and shipping and quality control is number one for them. They have like a $300,000 machine that kind of breaks everything down to the chemical molecular structure and like you can put a banana in there and it'll tell you how to synthesize it and how to make it out of chemicals. That's crazy. Yeah. And so he said what they do is they
00:25:08
Speaker
whenever they get materials incoming from other suppliers that have a spec sheet, they will inspect it on their own machine and compare it to the spec sheet. And if it's out of spec, they'll reject it.
00:25:17
Speaker
and they'll be like, this is no good. Yeah. Yeah. And he's like, because that has caused problems before, like huge money and problems. If they have inferior incoming products and then they make their thing and they send it out to customers, there's a problem. Yeah, it's not worth it. So it's so many parallels, even though it's the food industry basically, so many parallels to our manufacturing industry where it's like quality controls everything, incoming is crap, outgoing is crap, you know, managing your staff,
00:25:44
Speaker
Yeah. Hours, time, people, issues, all kinds of stuff, like so many parallels. So it's really nice to have those resources. In a huge irony, a buddy of mine is retiring. Guy I've gotten to know through a local organization. And he runs an egg factory in Zanesville. And I'd said a while back, I'd love to have a tour sometime. If he called me, he's like, hey, I'm out of here in two weeks. I'd love to have you down for a tour. But come now or hold your forever, hold your whatever.
00:26:14
Speaker
And so I popped down and it's incredible. Like I feel like a lot of folks don't even know this place exists and they, I might get these numbers wrong. I think they process 120,000 eggs an hour. An hour. Yeah. So over a million a day and they run. A chicken only lays like one egg a day, at least a free range chicken. I don't know about factory chickens.
00:26:37
Speaker
These are free range. They don't own the chickens. The chickens make later eggs elsewhere and then the eggs are created to them. And I could go on for a while. Short answer is they the eggs are on crates. Robot picks the crates at a time. I cleans them and then it breaks them. It separates the white and the yolk and then it goes through.
00:26:56
Speaker
go through blast furnaces and de-waters that de-humidify them or whatever, turns them into powder. So their product they ship is a powder of either egg white, egg yolk or a mix that goes to major food production companies.
Workflow Optimization and Bottleneck Identification
00:27:09
Speaker
But he's built a lot of this equipment in this factory. And similarly what you were saying like, this is USDA regulated and
00:27:18
Speaker
quality in quality out a lot numbers but they I mean the miles of stainless steel piping and I asked them if they ran two shifts and they run one shift to do their egg breaking and working and then every day is a second shift that cleans everything every day. It's a full shift of just
00:27:40
Speaker
And they have all these closed loop or the ability to open and close pipe sections to push cleaner through there and so forth. So pretty cool. Wow.
00:27:50
Speaker
That's insane. The other thing I did down in Charlotte was had a chance to tour Brad Keselowski, who is a NASCAR driver who won the cup. So he's a pretty good driver. And he, I don't know if he had retired, but I think he had stopped racing. Coincidentally is now racing again, but it started up about four years ago, a company called Keselowski Advanced Manufacturing. And we were able to film their punchline though is first,
00:28:20
Speaker
shop I've seen, seen for sure seen, but really even heard of it is legitimately doing full blown hybrid production. So they're, they have a bunch of 3d printers, metal printers, and then they have a bunch of multi-axis CNC machines. So they're not doing hybrid machines like all in one, but they don't do machining, they don't do 3d printing, they only do projects that involve both and they're really and they've got
00:28:46
Speaker
all the credentials to be doing the medical aerospace defense man flight and space flight. And so they've got to forget all the brands. The big one was EOS and they print large expensive parts and then they go and they machine those parts. And I give them a lot of credit. I mean, they're on the cutting edge of that sort of capability and doing a lot of probing, a lot of CAD analysis like Netfab and FEA and printing analysis. So pretty cool. Yeah.
00:29:15
Speaker
Oh man, that's awesome.
00:29:17
Speaker
You got the Toyota factory? Got the Toyota factory, yeah. Oh, they had a couple of Matsura's Mx30s with PC10s and all of these bices had these soft jaws on them and I'm so jealous because they were holding these like strange flanges that are like these crazy 3D printed parts. A lot of parts that would have been previously been weld mints or assemblies that they're able to now print as one but they're super gnarly looking and they like just 3D print these crazy soft jaws because...
00:29:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's what they do. Yeah, you can. Yeah, that's cool. What do you do today? Sweet. We've been working on tracking operation flow and product flow through the shop quite a bit. So I've got a pretty detailed section of GURP that's been doing that, but it's,
00:30:11
Speaker
It's so weird because it makes sense in my head, but for the team to truly understand it and what's happening in the workflow of things, I don't know. I'm missing the mark on how to explain that to them. So, Angelo pulled out a whiteboard and gritted it all out and did the whole product flow through the shop on the whiteboard. And now they're tracking like, okay, there's six pieces in process at the Kern. There's 12 pieces in heat treat.
00:30:37
Speaker
six pieces on the lapping machine. There's zero pieces here. So, that's a hole, that's a bottleneck. And it's really helping the team visualize the product flow and the holes basically like where the bottlenecks are. Be like, maybe we need another heat treat oven because they're always stacking up there or maybe
00:30:54
Speaker
Maybe we're spending too much time on this process, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas the blade, especially on our knives, has the most processes of anything. It's like 12 different stations to be able to pass it through. If it hangs up more often than not at one certain station, we don't necessarily know that off the bat right now.
00:31:12
Speaker
seeing it on the board in the past four days has already been like hugely valuable for the team. I just heard Angela tell them, he's like, I don't know how it's working for you guys, but like, it's been amazing for me. He's like, I get to see it now, I get to feel it and flow it. And that's kind of the vision I've had for quite a while now is for the whole team to be able to know where everything is, how many is in each spot, what's coming to you and how much you're pushing out. And it's been great. It's just awesome. Yeah.
00:31:41
Speaker
We failed at that just because it got to be too much data for the wrong reason, if that makes sense. I think I've mentioned this example before, but like, hey, you have a batch of making 10 VF2 fixture plates and one sold, so you're going to accelerate it through and strip it out and that separates the lots into whatever. It just comes through. Right, right. Now, you might have better reasons to do it because you're doing more
00:32:09
Speaker
just like more separated work. Yeah. Whereas like for us, it's basically like one person brings the plate through production, you know what I mean? So it's not like. Yeah, we've got like five hands on. Yeah. Interesting.
00:32:22
Speaker
That's not booked the goal though. I named my first CNC machine after Herbie, which I haven't read this book in like 15 years. The idea, which is these days politically incorrect, but they put the large kid at the front of the Boy Scout hiking line because if you don't put the slowest kid at the front, everybody moves ahead and it made them realize what is the bottleneck in a production
00:32:45
Speaker
facility and they walk through the book and showing that off. So is heat treat your herby? I don't think so. I think on some days it is, but some days it isn't because I think we only heat treat at most eight blades a day, but I think we're producing more than that some days.
00:33:02
Speaker
and we used to do two heat treat batches where we could do 16 heat treats. 16 minutes in a day and we're not currently and I don't know why. This was just discussed like an hour ago so I don't know all the details.
00:33:16
Speaker
It could be. And if we need another $2,000 oven done, it's not a problem. And I want to be careful that the whole team doesn't get into the mindset of this is how it is, and this is how we've always done it, and this is I just deal with it kind of thing. No, we've got to smooth it out. Everybody knows I'm not afraid to invest when necessary.
00:33:43
Speaker
Yeah, but you got to use data. Absolutely. Totally. If one person is the silo, the bottleneck, knows it but doesn't say it or whatever, but everybody else thinks everything's fine, that's not great either. Open communication. We're pretty good about open communication. We have a lot of team meetings and discuss these things, but still, things don't get observed as fully as they could. We're trying to use data to observe those things so that we can make wise decisions based on data. Like me as the business owner who's not really
00:34:12
Speaker
actually involved in day-to-day production anymore. I need all that information fed to me or accessible in GURP so that I can make wise decisions too. Yeah. With you there, John, that's awesome. That's been my secret goal of GURP is to be able to have an overview of the progress of everything in the shop, inventory levels, process flow through the shop.
00:34:37
Speaker
timeliness of things like how often heat treat is run and how many blades a day we're making of this thing and how many pivot screws we have and when's the last time we made pivot screws on the lathe and you know, were there problems?
00:34:50
Speaker
What's the most recent up-to-date operation notes? So that if, I mean, Pierre is leaving on Friday to go away for a month and I will be running the Swiss while he's gone. And I don't just want to like have to pick his brain on the last day and be like, yeah, what's last, you know, I got to make these parts. What do you remember? Like it needs to be in a system, in our system. And he's pretty good about tracking those notes, but still. Yeah.
00:35:20
Speaker
where I feel like I fail as a leader is everything you just said gets the juices flowing. Yeah. And it's something I should be doing more. So hard to do, though. It's a full time job, John. Yeah, I know. And so I've got to think, do I want to? Should I? Like I literally just said that this morning, I was like, I wish I really there are days I really wish I had a boss or I really wish I had somebody who just told me
00:35:48
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't even think I'm that low on the self-discipline scale. I hustle, I get stuff done, but still, everybody probably thinks they do. So what do you think of yourself there? Probably doesn't much matter, but yeah.
00:36:03
Speaker
I mean, you probably thought the same of yourself five years ago, but the amount you're able to do in a day today versus the amount you could do in a day five years ago is vastly different, at least for myself. I'm executing so much more and so much faster with less hesitation and more results now than I was five years ago.
00:36:21
Speaker
Times 10. For sure. And the team helps with that, absolutely. But that's part of the growth process, too. Something else I put into GURP three weeks ago or so was a tasks section, a to-do list, basically. So it's in GURP by user and by category. So under my John user section, there's a category for speedio, a category for current, category for GURP.
00:36:45
Speaker
category for general, all the little to-dos that are not ideas but things that actually have to get done. But it gives me a place, a central place that's team shared that lets me catalog them, organize them by priority and that becomes my boss. In the morning, I check that list. What am I doing today? Which one do I get to cross off the list?
00:37:10
Speaker
I use my notebook too but it gets lost in my notebook and I'm really enjoying having the central system to track all that stuff and then I can assign things to other people and what I'm seeing now on my to-do list is it's getting bigger than I can possibly cut it
Tool Management and Risk Mitigation
00:37:25
Speaker
down. Like I just have too many tasks that I want to accomplish, too many things and it's to have them numbered and visible and I'm tracking the time like day in day finish kind of thing so that took 32 days or whatever.
00:37:40
Speaker
It's showing me that either I need some serious assistance in tackling these tasks or I need to move them to other people or if I actually, if they're important enough that they need to get done, I got to find some way to get them done kind of thing. The real thing I do to push you off the ledge, you're staring over it right now, is you need to stop talking about that.
00:38:05
Speaker
in doing one of those actions, either getting somebody on the team or what we've done was recognize over the next, you know, it's December 8th, over the next sort of 40 days or so, you know, kind of getting us into the new year. These are the only few things we're doing. And it almost feels defeatist because you're recognizing how many things you're not going to get to do. But the reality is,
00:38:29
Speaker
If we, that's what we got to focus on and make sure we're, we're in the business of getting stuff done and not just making to-do lists. Of course. Um, but the to-do list has extremely helped me to not do useless crap because I'm very shiny object focused. Like I'd love to do that project right now. I'd love to do that project. This lets me see the whole, the forest for the trees kind of thing. Um, and be like, I'd love to do that. And if that was the only thing I thought of right now, I'd be doing it.
00:38:58
Speaker
But I know this one's more important and just as fun, honestly. I will have the same enjoyment doing any one of them. They're challenging, they're fun, they test my skills, they whatever. But some are more important than others. And seeing the forest for the trees lets me really focus on that. And even delete things sometimes. Like, yeah, it's a great idea. It's never going to happen. Delete it right now.
00:39:20
Speaker
Yes. If that's the only thing, if it just came to me, I'd be like, stop it. I'm going to do that right now. That'd be cool. This gives me the filter to be like, I'd love to, but dude, it doesn't matter. You're going to have that same thought six months from now. Maybe you can deal with it then, but whatever. We broke a probe tip this morning. I mean, not a huge deal.
00:39:44
Speaker
the way it broke, it's actually probably totally fixable. Like you can just super glue the tip back on because it just barely broke and you could still dial in the run out blah, blah, blah. And I got all excited about it and then it luckily the whole
00:39:59
Speaker
process of going through that realization and then the realization that that's a really dumb thing to be spending time on. When I'm a little bit stressed from being back and having a bunch of stuff on my plate and I kind of have to just go into this hunker down mode and bang through a bunch of stuff for a couple of hours. So it's like just put in a Ziploc, a McMaster baggie, put in the drawer. You could super glue it another day. It'll be fun.
00:40:20
Speaker
What are you doing? I've been there with those projects. Yesterday or two days ago on the speedio, we were running the rich light cases switching to the OP2 which we haven't run in a little bit.
00:40:35
Speaker
Everything's going good. I programmed it normally around 10 at a time, but we had issues before where we'd scrap 10 at a time and that sucked. So I reprogrammed it to just do one in the top corner and like 10, 15 minutes does the top one, no problem. One of my guys, Steven and I were standing in the back of the machine watching the chips come out and making sure the conveyor is working and then we just hear this bang from the machine.
00:41:01
Speaker
And it broke a carbide arbor with an indexable head on the front, just a little three-eighths shaft one. And this car tool, that's a T-slot cutter with a replaceable T-slot head, like those high or low pitch, you know, thread on heads. Yeah. And it smushed it in Z, like... On the brother? On the brother, yeah, the tool just broke.
00:41:25
Speaker
And it's because the previous tool to that was not in the machine. It was sitting on the bench from the previous setup. And every other machine will stop and be like, hey, I don't have a tool in this middle right now. I can't run. Pretty sure. Or just won't call it. But the brother just called an empty tool and just machined nothing. And that hole was not there. So then when the T-slot cutter went in, it just smooshed into material. And it broke the arbor. And this is a $350 carbide shaft.
00:41:56
Speaker
And yes, I'm sitting there thinking for a few minutes like, okay, how do I, everything's good, everything's fine, machine's fine. How do I, you know, do I figure out another tool? Do I switch another tool? And then after like two minutes, I think I was like, order another arbor, move on. Like I felt like crap for a little while there. I'm like, ah, whatever. But order another tool came in today, two days later, move on, whatever. Yeah, I'm sorry. That happens.
00:42:27
Speaker
It shows that set up and process and everything like we currently don't have a process to make sure that all the tools are in the carousel because we take it for granted on the current and on the Maury. The tools are just always in there. This is like validating that whole point about like when you have a positive attitude about like, hey, I know I'm bringing in a new machine brand and a new control, but I'll be I'll be good and I'll figure it out. It's like doesn't stop that. There's new things. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah.
00:42:56
Speaker
I don't even know, what do you say to that? Yeah. And you know what I did immediately after that is I went to Fusion and I didn't print it, but I did export a setup sheet for that job. Just to see like, show me these setup things, these setup sheets, like somebody looks like, oh yeah, look, it lists all the tools. Oh, if that was printed out in a little notebook beside the machine, then it was the operator's job to look in the carousel, be like, OK, 1, 3, 9, 7, 14. Yeah, OK, all the tools are here.
00:43:27
Speaker
I don't know if I would ask. I don't know that I would want to impose that. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm dumb. Imagine switching out tool holders and like you're changing a job. Like there has to be some way to know that all the tools are in there. You know, we don't set up jobs often at all. We're not used to it. We failed there. You know what I mean?
00:43:48
Speaker
Yeah, but that can break down if it's two different people or... Look, it makes me love not setting up jobs, period. Like we do machine set up or... That's the best. Or trying to horizontal or like, look, we had a machine go down and I...
00:44:06
Speaker
wasn't willing to risk moving a relatively inexpensive part over the horizontal because you can argue this is an overreaction but there's always risk when you're setting up a new part, new featuring, new tools, new process and I don't want to be out of stock of that product. I'm also not willing to
00:44:27
Speaker
risk mucking up the horizontal, which is one reason why I've been a little bit vocal about like, hey, man, you're making packaging on a hundred some thousand dollar speedio that you have a router for like, I mean, you can really ruin that machine. Yeah, the don't don't you that's not a good outcome. It's not anyway.
00:44:50
Speaker
router's almost
Episode Wrap-Up and Reflections
00:44:51
Speaker
done though. Good. I like that. It's super cool. Yeah. Once we're going to put it on the enclosure either today or tomorrow, and then, uh, gotta run some wiring and finish it all up. And then yeah, it's going to be so sick. It's going to be great. And the foam and most likely the rich light packaging should be able to go on there. No problem. Awesome. Um,
00:45:13
Speaker
It was funny, we had a number of folks at the DSI event compliment the podcast, which is always very nice. One of the things that a couple of people had said was how much it's helped them with machine purchases and knowing little quirks and things about what to look for, options, specs, tool probe arms, stuff like that.
00:45:35
Speaker
I get excited about that because I'm proud that it's helped. I also feel like, man, but it's not like we've like data-based this stuff that you can go like and pull up John and John's tips on buying a, here's the seven things. So yeah. It's funny because one of the guys interested in my UMac machines is an avid podcast lister and I'm telling them all the stuff in the emails and stuff. And he goes,
00:45:56
Speaker
Just to be clear, I've heard enough podcasts to know that there has been issues with those machines. I'm telling you right now, I'm not trying to hide anything, so he's learning machine buying tips as well from the podcast about the machines I'm trying to sell.
00:46:13
Speaker
Yeah. This is a private conversation, folks. I know. Stop listening. I'm allowed to use this information against Grimsmo. Yes. By those U-MOCs, they need to be gone. Yeah. They need to go into good hands. Somebody who wants very cheap machines and put some love into them. Yeah. So yeah. Good. See you next week. Sounds good, man. Take care. All right. Later. Bye. Bye.