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#354 Tracking and quantifying order issues
357 Plays1 year ago
TOPICS:
- Days Off In The Shop ("Doits")
- Taking Purchasing off my plate
- Tracking and quantifying order issues
- Magnetic chip separator
- Variation between fixtures
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Transcript
Introduction and Business Management
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining episode number 354. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough. And we've been talking a lot about what it's like running our approximately 10 year old manufacturing businesses. And for me, the focus of that has been a lot of kind of putting a pause on some things to rebuild some of our foundation around the organization and layout and assets within the shop.
00:00:28
Speaker
Yep. Which has also been quite on my mind. Um, you talking about it a lot more. And yesterday I definitely spent some time, uh, just kind of moseying around the shop and staring at things and, uh, you know, wondering if they could be optimized or deleted or, you know. Yeah.
Overcoming Overthinking and Taking Action
00:00:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:00:47
Speaker
It's funny. My wife and I were just talking about this in the car. It's a point that Tim Grover from Relentless, the Michael Jordan trainer book guy talks a lot about. Stop thinking. Have the confidence to know what you need to do today and stop thinking about it and evaluating it and just shut up and do it.
00:01:11
Speaker
Yeah. And sometimes I find I'm too daily focused and I lose the bigger picture or I lose the direction that I need to go in. Like if I worked on this project, which will take three months, like change everything. But if I'm too day to day, then I don't even see the big project, you know? Yeah. So if there's a balance, you got to figure out what works best for you. But, um, but yeah, I'm totally with you. Like thinking doesn't accomplish anything. It's action steps that that make progress.
00:01:40
Speaker
Yeah, and it's also knowing what your own fallback is. You know, you and I will never stop thinking, like we're always going to be chewing. That's not to say that it's not important to set aside time or allow yourself to think in certain moments, but I think I did that.
00:01:57
Speaker
where you and I, I think a lot of us sort of fail or could do better is recognizing our need to focus on the task at hand and not overanalyze and worry and look our lives. I have somebody eight minutes ago walked in. Actually, the number of things I've been like lobbed in, emails, texts, or people coming up to me in person of things to handle or deal with is
00:02:24
Speaker
not uncommon, but not good about like, Hey, you exist. This happened where I do here. So yeah.
Productive Days Off: Organization in the Shop
00:02:30
Speaker
And if you want to help, you want to use your knowledge and you don't provide value and all that, but the less of that, the better than where you can focus on what you need to focus on, you know, like where is John Saunders best in this business?
00:02:44
Speaker
So I wanted to share, I had my first doist, terrible word, days off in the shop, and it went great. And when I say it went great, there were definitely some surprises, which I wanted to share about. Number one, I was delayed starting it by about an hour. I had put my calendar from 10 till noon.
00:03:05
Speaker
I was on the horizontal doing a prototype part and that machine is pretty special. Like if I get time on it during the day, I try to be respectful of that. So it was a judgment call to stay on that machine and delay the, uh, doist by an hour, which, you know, it's no big deal with the caveat that I hate this idea that it becomes un-sacred. Like I do like that idea of blocking out the time and respecting that. Um,
Decluttering and Planning a Yard Sale
00:03:34
Speaker
Is it Doist or do it? Days off in the shop. Thank you. Do it. I'm glad that Moist with a D doesn't work. Days off in the shop. Do it. Thank you. I don't know what I was thinking when I was making my notes here. So it was the room next to my office, which has a toolbox that had a bunch of old electronic stuff, 3D printers, laser, puck chuck stuff, other miscellaneous junk.
00:04:01
Speaker
I thought I would kind of bang through this in two hours and I don't mean the naive like, oh, I'll go quick and then I thought like, no, I really was like, this isn't going to be that bad. Yeah. And, uh, was wrong. You got like two boxes into it and time's up.
00:04:17
Speaker
Well, some of it was the emotional process of, and I shared this on an Instagram post I put together. I feel, I am admittedly guilty and self-conscious. I kept some stuff, but I also threw away some stuff that isn't trash, but wasn't worth. My threshold in my mind was if I called up the local maker space, the local machine program, and said, hey, Joe, this is yours for free, come pick it up. If that was something that I think they would say yes to, it would be,
00:04:45
Speaker
I would do that. Like a pile of Arduinos or something? To your point, I had a pile of Arduinos that were 10 years old. Who knows how old the Rev is? Yeah. Some of them had bent pins. Some of them were soldered together with boards put on them and all this stuff. And John just threw it away. Yeah, there's a point, right?
00:05:06
Speaker
Now, I'm iterating here on this process and what I've realized is, I feel guilty about that for writer reasons. It's wasteful. Somebody would like that. It's electrical junk stuff. So punchline that I wanted to mention is I am planning, thinking with the intent to do this, of having a spring 2024
00:05:27
Speaker
It's not going to be an open house get together, but it's not going to just be a yard sale. It's going to be something kind of in between. Because there's a bunch of this stuff where, you know, that that box of Arduinos I would have given to a kid or $5. I don't care. It's not like, but
Spring 2024 Community Swap Event
00:05:44
Speaker
So I think I'm going to start putting stuff together with that end goal in mind. So if anybody's listening in thinks, that'd be kind of fun. Pretty easy going about maybe we have it be kind of a swap meet where people can recover stuff. I'm certainly going to have a bunch of tables set up with stuff that, you know, hey, these are six inch vices. We don't need extra material. We're not using like real stuff. Yeah, it's got to go. Yeah, exactly.
00:06:08
Speaker
The other thing I learned in doing this was I think I'm going to have to revise my days off in the shop to have a second whole round for most of the spaces I'm doing it with. Because number one, it took me about two hours to get through that room, which is coincidentally about the same size of a chunk I'm going to be breaking the rest of the shop into.
00:06:32
Speaker
call it 200 square feet, I'm guessing, but also the mindset of purging and relocating away and so forth is just a very different approach than building it back up with the organization. So like, for instance, our 3D printer, I thought, hey, I really want to put it on a nice dedicated table. It's on a folding table right now. Let's get it on a rice table. Let's get the filament stored. I don't care if we have to spend $200 or even $1,000 on getting a
00:07:01
Speaker
a really rocking 3D printer bench, but I wasn't going to stop my days off in the shop to hop on Reddit or 3D printing forums to go look at the best 3D printing setups because that's just not going to happen when I'm in a stage.
00:07:16
Speaker
So that's what I learned. Yeah, you make a note to look for it later. It's so easy to stop all forward progress and go down this little tangent rabbit hole. And then you made no progress because you found a table that happens to be at Home Depot. I could go get it right now and then rabbit hole, rabbit hole. But yeah, I like that. And I like the two stage approach actually. It's like purge and then rebuild are two separate days. They're different mindsets. They're separate, you know,
00:07:46
Speaker
Yeah, and they'll get intermixed in some obvious ways, but I was carrying electrical stuff that we were keeping back to one of our bins in the back of the shop that's labeled for that. It takes a lot of time to walk back and forth and do it a bunch. Lots of trash runs, which I had some help with. Pulling stuff off the wall. Then we ended up spackling the wall. We ended up mopping the floor. And I got help on a lot of that stuff.
00:08:06
Speaker
It was it was probably doesn't come through in my voice, but I have, I am unbelievably proud and excited of what it already was and knowing I have this kind of recipe now of, Oh, this is going to be really good. That looks good. It freed up a toolbox. That toolbox went to the horizontal, which we needed something there. Like it's all clicking. Yes. And I'm also thinking I might need to stake one of my days off in the shops.
00:08:33
Speaker
and leave it as a freebie, meaning all those things that somebody just can't do that. Hey, that was not working. Hey, an overhead light might be blinking or Hey, what this like, I might just say, okay, well, my Thursday one is now going to become the two hours I spend going through the little stuff in the shop, which most of those exactly. Hmm. I like that. Yeah. And are a lot of the things,
00:09:01
Speaker
Like, where's the line between you're going to tackle it and you're going to delegate it to somebody else? Or is everybody else busy enough that, like, I'll just do it, you know? We have a college break. Place in a flickering light or something. That was an intern who did that. And we have an intern right now, our college break, which will end this week. But for sure, I'm proud to have folks help and help take the stuff out to the trash. But some of it was my decision to oversee it.
00:09:29
Speaker
And I want in need buy in is actually interesting. I wonderfully thick skinned these days about social media comments like I don't. It's nice to know that it doesn't get to me. But one of the comments on Instagram that I kind of chuckled out was a guy who's got some truth to his point was sort of saying that, and I don't know if he was meant to be cutting at me or just in general, like, Oh, yeah, great. Another example of a manager
00:09:53
Speaker
who's fully reorganizing the shop just so that all the employees can hide their own tools the way they want them without insight. And okay, let's start, let's figure that out. So I do need to make sure I'm getting buy-in. What I did with that toolbox for Garrett who runs a horizontal was I just gave it to him. I said, hey, let's merge these two toolbox. You get the bigger one. Organize it how you want. I got some input on it. So it's not that like, hey, let's,
00:10:19
Speaker
Yeah, hide that from the boss. But I think it's probably better for me because some of this stuff is like before Saunders Machine Works was what it is. Totally. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I mean, especially with the toolbox, you're providing an opportunity for that employee. Like you fill it up. Like you do what you need to do. Although I do get the sentiment that manager, leader, whatever. It's like, I think this is my vision. I think it should be laid out exactly like this and you guys are gonna like it.
00:10:50
Speaker
And I do a bit of that and I try not to so much. Sometimes it works great, sometimes it fails miserably.
00:10:57
Speaker
And I definitely try to not be too overbearing with those kind of ideas. But as the visionary leader, it's kind of your job, on a bigger picture anyway, to do those kind of things. Maybe not so much in the micromanaging, the day-to-day tasks, the boots on the ground that are getting it done. You as the leader don't see all the dirt that's needed to get the job done like they do. So needs to have that buy-in, right? Yeah.
00:11:26
Speaker
I'll keep you posted. It's the most boring topic, but also- You're always super liberating. Next one's utility closet. That's not going to be as exciting, but then it's sticking into basically one machine area per day.
Shop Reorganization and Efficiency Strategies
00:11:39
Speaker
Cleaning, the coolant tank, fixing skimmer issues, and then tooling. Do we get rid of flat shelves? Do we buy 3D printed or Kaizen foam inserts for torque wrenches? Do we standardize torque wrenches? It's kind of a pretty fun stuff.
00:11:53
Speaker
Even on the cleaning route, we ended up buying those Uline Jugs with a little spout on the front for Simple Green Windex, two big chemicals we use. We buy Jugs of Windex, we pour it into the big tub with a spout on the front, and now we can refill all the little spray bottles.
00:12:13
Speaker
And it was like super cheap, fun little thing we did years ago, and it's still super rewarding and enjoyable. We used it for one of the lapping compounds too, because he puts it in the spray bottle. Oh, nice. Which coincidentally is almost the same color as Windex, although it's slightly purple and it's slightly blue. So they have to be labeled well, because I've definitely grabbed the wrong one and be like, this doesn't smell like ammonia. I would like dye one of those. That's not a bad idea. Yeah. But yeah, we just keep them separated.
00:12:42
Speaker
I'm about to look into getting a 55 gallon drum of simple Greek because we're buying the two of the Home Depot pails that are like 30, 40 bucks each. You buy them at pails, like five gallon pails already? I don't want the size here. I'll look at it. I think we buy one gallon jugs and we use it. Not that much, but we use it. It comes in this
00:13:03
Speaker
What is this size here? It looks like it's cheaper than I was thinking, but boy, this doesn't seem cheap. Nine, two and a half gallon job, I guess. Interesting. The other, well here, I've been talking, you talked. No, I don't have too much on my list. You finished your thought, the other.
00:13:28
Speaker
Okay. The three other things I wanted to talk about today share magnetic separators, um, Shopify air tracking, but then the quick one is, um, as part of my 2024 plan, I'm taking procurement and purchasing out of Lex off my plate. So working with Serena, who's been awesome to handle that some of it's simple, but, but there's so much little tribal quirks, uh, so I realized in Lex.
00:13:58
Speaker
Which i i again i don't talk about these days is completely amazing were you know well into the thousands of are using places and yeah well and the five figures of items that has. Excuse me high four figures of excuse and so forth but.
00:14:15
Speaker
Right now, if you were to go place an order, some of it might be items that come from a metal supplier, some might be from a box company, some might be from MSC or McMaster. And these vendors all have very different ways of interacting with them. And if the box company is local, they have their own box truck, pun intended. And so they don't have a minimum. I mean, I wouldn't push an order to them though, unless it was 300 or maybe 500 bucks because it just feels rude, polite.
00:14:46
Speaker
Normally not a big deal, because most of the time we're spending thousands of dollars when we place an order with them. MSC, if we spend a certain amount, it's not that much. We get free shipping, I think. Don't quote me on that. Some of the suppliers, we get better pricing when you combine items, like metal suppliers. Some of them, it's kind of funny. Some of them, we don't want to always combine them, because despite our PO instructions, it's a little bit too easy to mix the items when they deliver them, like they'll stack
00:15:15
Speaker
It doesn't happen a lot. They won't ever mix the items, but they'll stack a small palette on top of another palette, and then we have to take the time to separate it. The items aren't mixed, but it's more together than it would be if we ordered them to totally separate PS.
00:15:31
Speaker
What I had Alex do in Lex was we put in meta fields for each vendor. So when you're waiting to push a PO or to push an RFQ, it gives you that tribal commentary of, okay, no minimum order or prefer to order this amount or FYI delivers on their own truck. All that sort of relevant tribal stuff that comes out of my head to allow Serena or remember to, for the most part, do that without as much worry.
00:16:01
Speaker
I like it. So when you're creating a new PO, you pick your vendor, I guess, and you start to type in the items. In that creation screen, it tells you the notes, the tribal knowledge notes, or do you have to go looking for it? Although it doesn't happen that way because Serena would just be pushing POs that the team has already requested. Okay. Like an internal RFQ? No.
00:16:24
Speaker
No, so let's say Garrett is out of YG1 drills. He'll put it into Lex and then Serena or anybody can see the order queue and it'll queue up all the items we need. And then it'll say underneath YG1, ships UPS ground, gets here in about three days, prefer to order at least $300. But we also have a
00:16:46
Speaker
nomenclature system where people will type in hum for hold until more, which means I don't need it just sometime in the next week or two. If it's not hummed, then it's presumed, hey, we need to push it. So if you're doing purchasing, push this. Yeah, every day. Interesting. I like that a lot. That's a cool
00:17:09
Speaker
cool way to do it. Cause we've, um, I'm still probably 50 50 on purchasing, maybe probably like 70 30 on me for purchasing a lot of things, but it's, it's slowly getting off my plate. And in GURP we have a purchase order system.
00:17:25
Speaker
where we can create a PDF PO and send it to the vendor and stuff and track it. Track how many days it's been elapsed, how many days it took to get in last time, super helpful stuff. Then we have a vendor section where every single vendor we work with, you have like who's the contact person, who's our contact person, and then there's a note section in there that says, we order from their website or we call them or we go there in person or we pay via check or we pay via online, this credit card, whatever.
00:17:52
Speaker
But you have to go looking for that. If I just create a PO with my local tool vendor, I would have to go looking in the vendor's page to go find that information. I wonder if I could cross link it. I probably could in my system. That's a good idea. I like that. Yeah.
00:18:09
Speaker
And to add, we do still with a certain number of vendors, we use Lex for ordering, but the orders, the POs are actually sent to an internal warm body person here who then uses the order on the website. I won't go into all the reasons. It just makes sense to do it that way, but it still memorializes the PO. We track the quantities. It works fine.
00:18:33
Speaker
Yeah, because you're creating an internal queue that a person in charge, you or Serena or whoever is pushing, puts a little bit less pressure on the person on the shop floor. Like some of our vendors, I have to email the guy and be like, hey, Jeff, I need Harvey and Mills. Whether or not I attach the PO almost doesn't really matter. And I've built a rapport relationship with a lot of these guys that
00:19:00
Speaker
the person on the shop floor doesn't necessarily have yet or whatever. But yeah, I like the internal order queue. If we need the PO's too, because now we've gotten good at knowing that when Serena receives an inbound stuff, she just looks at the PO to know, OK, where do these end mills go? Where do the spots go? Who wants this material? Because again, otherwise, we've got this tribal issue. Now you can start figuring out what that's going to be. Yeah, where do they go?
00:19:31
Speaker
Yeah, and we've tasked Grayson with being a receiving guy for the past year almost. So everything that comes in, it's his job to track that it came in, to close the PO, to distribute the parts to the people or end mills to the drawer where it belongs kind of thing, and find any errors, any backordered items, any missing things.
00:19:50
Speaker
which has been super cool to have not only like a real process behind that, whereas before it was just like, everybody just free for all opened everything that came in the door and you don't know if it came in or not. And when you have more than three people, then that gets lost real fast. Did those end mills come in? Like, oh yeah, they're on my desk or something. Yes, yeah.
00:20:13
Speaker
actually just occurred to me. I don't think we need this, but we could even have, because it makes more sense for Serena to just kind of, or whoever to walk around and deliver it. But you could even have a little male cubby for everybody. Sure. It could be like, Oh, leave this for, for, yeah, it makes sense to deliver it. But I like that idea. But I see what you mean. Yeah. There's, there's something to that. It's like, you know, where you park your shoes kind of thing. It's like your inbox. Um, you could even put paperwork in there or whatever, but
00:20:41
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah, delivering it's not so hard. Maybe in a much bigger shop, it makes more sense to keep it centralized, but it's cool.
Resolving Order and Quality Issues
00:20:51
Speaker
The other change we're doing this year is we are starting to quantify order issues. We were just talking about that too.
00:21:02
Speaker
Happy and proud to say this quote unquote isn't an issue, but we do have problems and I generally classify those into an assembly mistake on our side. Like we just didn't include the packing mistake or assembly mistake. So we didn't include the right screw in a sub assembly or we just forgot an item in the box. Same sort of Saunders
00:21:23
Speaker
logistical error. Second issue would be a shipping damage, obviously not our fault, but nevertheless something we have to remedy. So if FedEx drops the package, product gets damaged. Third issue is customer receives everything but determines or has some question around a quality issue of the product itself. Happily, proud to say that that's by far the least, well, none of that have a lot, but nevertheless, we need to know that's different than the first issue of we just packed the wrong item. So again, I don't
00:21:52
Speaker
I don't care about this. By far the most biggest mistake we make is we just accidentally forgot to include a product or cynically the customer claims we forgot to. We don't think that there's any real issue. We've always been hesitant. We won't do certain orders where somebody will go by. We actually still do. We used to sell Mighty Bite talent grips. We have to still make those. We actually make castle grips now.
00:22:16
Speaker
We generally won't, we wouldn't do a high volume, like somebody had to order 100 of those to an international address with a credit card. Those are issues that's not existing customer. We tend to want to understand what the customer is doing because that's not our
00:22:32
Speaker
Too much fraud risk of them rejecting the credit card. You full stop lose that argument. Anyway, so now what we're doing is anytime somebody needs a new product shipped, we have already been doing that with a manual order in Shopify to formalize what needs to be sent out to them. And now we're just simply using the Shopify tagging system to tag what happened. That way at the end of the year, we can go back and look at, man, for some reason we keep on goofing on soft shots or we have a problem with this product getting damaged more often.
00:23:03
Speaker
Or likewise, if we happen to see QC issues, tracking them across what and where. I like that. Which ties into the process bin for Shopify of like how, who and how is allowed to handle what issues. If we forgot a $20 item, Serena is just going to ship it out. We don't need to know about it. But I still want to be able to know to make sure we're not doing that every week, even though nobody else was made aware of it.
00:23:30
Speaker
Yeah, I remember something Tim Ferriss said like 10 plus years ago that I read, he's like, you know, when he created a team to do one of his early businesses, he's like, if it can be solved for under $200, don't even ask me about it. Just solve it. And whatever that threshold is for you.
00:23:48
Speaker
So that Serena doesn't have to bug you for every little, can I send a customer a sticker? Is that okay? Or we forgot a thing, $50, our fault, do I have to ask you about that? Or can I just do it? And we haven't actually implemented this too.
00:24:03
Speaker
Definitely trying to get the guys to be more on top of it. I trust you. You trust the customer. Solve the problem. Keep me in the loop if I need to. I can check in, track it. We're starting to track things like that a lot more. Every return, every warranty issue, we've got it in a spreadsheet now. We're actually tracking it and quantifying it, which is super cool. Okay. Yeah. Tim, it's been a long time since I read four-hour workweek.
00:24:29
Speaker
I don't think he sort of praises himself for this idea of I'm on the beach while my customer service reps handle our $200 mistakes, but he doesn't talk about whether they're actually tracking those either, right? Interesting. I don't think so. You want to know because if you have 10 different people handling this, you're all of a sudden they're doing this a lot. That's not good.
00:24:57
Speaker
But I mean here too in the shop, like if the guys need to run down to the hydraulic store and get a fitting.
00:25:04
Speaker
to finish their job. I'm pretty okay with them just buying on their own credit card, and I'll reimburse you immediately, no questions asked kind of thing, or walk around and get a credit card from somebody else, cash, whatever. Oh, yeah. To reduce the bottleneck of like, oh, John's not in today, so I can't ask for his credit card, so I can't do the thing. I can't solve my problem until tomorrow. I'm trying to eliminate that. Yeah. And we're pretty good about it now. Yeah.
00:25:33
Speaker
It's like we've got a Oneida dust collector with a HEPA filter, a pretty big unit. It probably stands a good eight feet tall. We've got big googly eyes on it in the back. And it sucks the dust from both our in-the-machine shop from the light deburring setups and the little belt sander and disc sander that we have, and also from the CNC router that sucks the foam chunks and laser dust that comes off when we're engraving the foam pieces.
00:26:02
Speaker
It started to degrade in performance and not suck as much and the guys are starting to notice because we also put a floor sweep on it so we taped it to the ground. The guys sweep the whole shop. They're like, that's the most fun of the whole sweep is just watching it get sucked up to the floor sweep. They said when they first installed it, it would suck up small children. It seemed like it was really, really sucking. They're like, now it doesn't even suck up the pile of dust, so what's wrong?
00:26:27
Speaker
And so they went through the whole process. And I have this old tachometer, like a laser speed RPM meter from like 15 years ago. And I'm like, I think I have it. It's a little blue pouch in my bottom drawer or something. So they checked the motor to make sure it's spinning at the right RPM. Yes, it is. Check the voltage. Yes, it is. They took the motor apart. They found a missing screw. So it introduced an air gap. So they sealed that up. They put it back together. Still wasn't performing quite as well.
00:26:56
Speaker
The way it works, it's a big cyclone that goes down to a drum. So all your chunks go in the drum. But then on the back, it's got a HEPA filter that's like the size of a half of a 55 gallon drum. It's like narrow and tall. Oh, interesting. And that's your HEPA filter. So the waste air after the cyclone goes out that and expels. And when woodworkers use this thing, they recommend you beat it with a stick and get the wood chunks to go down. And then you suck them up from the inside.
00:27:27
Speaker
But I think ours is just pure clogged. And it might be from the vapors from the laser engraving that is melting plastic and foam and stuff. And it's kind of our thought is it's just clogged it up. Because what they did is they took that off and they ran a hose to outside and just turned it on. And they're like, it sucks again. It sucks up good stuff. So Angela was hesitating because that HEPA filter is like $500 to replace. And I'm like, yeah, that does kind of hurt because the whole thing was only $2,000 or something.
00:27:56
Speaker
But it's got to get done. We don't have another solution. Maybe let's not laser engrave and that and we'll just buy a cheap filter for laser engraving or something. How long do you think that filter was used for? We had it for probably two years. A year of laser engraving. We tried, yeah. Oh, really? Yeah. I think it's clogged inside. Everything's consumable. Everything will break eventually, right?
Tackling Dust Collection Problems
00:28:23
Speaker
Yeah. Try to minimize your effects on it. Maybe we can buy cheap carbon filters from Amazon just for sucking the laser engraving dust out, which might be totally effective and make it so it doesn't smell. Then everything else is just chunks. It should last for a lot longer that way. That's where we're at.
00:28:44
Speaker
See if maybe you could hack in a, like let's say that's a 10 micron filter, maybe you could put a 50 or 100 micron cheap furnace filter in front of it and then kind of change that every month, because those are just throwaways. That's true. Yeah, it goes through like a five and six inch tube that connects the HEPA can to the cyclone. So yeah, maybe there's something there to like a pre-filter just to catch the particulate.
00:29:13
Speaker
That's a great example of how I'm mentally preparing for the more days off in the shop. That's one of my lists is things like filters and all that. And it's difficult I'm finding to where do you store filters? Do you inventory them or do you just have a link to buy them? And then when you need them, what do you do?
00:29:35
Speaker
I've got some ideas, but the benefit of the days on the shop is I'm not worrying about that today. That's going to be a project on February 12th. I'll do it then. I'm happy to see what I come up with. 3D prints, QR codes, whatever, but not today. I love it because there's no immediate rush, but it has to get done at some point by you or by somebody else. The point is it's tracked in your system and you have a system you're starting to trust and that removes all the mental load of worrying about it now because you don't have to worry about it now.
00:30:05
Speaker
you might percolate on it and between now and February 12th, you might have an idea or two if it crosses your mind, and that's fun, but then it's even more fun to be like, sweet come February, I'm going to be ready because that's when I came up with this idea. Yeah, they needed, when I was gone after Christmas, they needed to replace the sock filters in the Okuma MP systems, TSC, and have them there in Lex, but like, why are the sock filters not stored at the MP? Well, there's not a good place to store them, so it's like, where'd you know?
00:30:33
Speaker
Whenever that day comes up, we're going to 3D print a little cubby that holds two of them. It's going to have a link to the Lex ID, the reorder code right there. And then if they're there, you've got to, if not, you need to order them like done, like great. That's what makes sense to me. Yeah, when things are stored in multiple places in the shop, I find that's problematic. It's tough, right? Yeah, it's tough. And sometimes it's needed. And our SOC filters are shared between multiple machines.
00:31:00
Speaker
I, unless it's labeled on the machine, which most of them are, but not all, like 10 micron, five micron, 20 micron, whatever. We just have lots of different ones kicking around the shop and some share. So you can't just share it, store it by the current or whatever. And then when you order them from McMaster, there's like three different options for 10 micron. You get the paper one that, and you know, as you're purchasing, you're like, let me try them, try them all or whatever. And there's no record of which one works best or like what you like better or,
00:31:30
Speaker
That's where Lexus helped us specifically on filters because some of them we actually bought from
00:31:37
Speaker
Amazon, Uline, and MSC, and sometimes one vendor doesn't have them, believe it or not. That probably was a COVID thing, to be honest, in hindsight. But Lex allows us to actually make those notes about your other options. Here's what's going to be the best. And then all we need to have next to the machine is A1447. That's our part number. And then I can have different buying options in Lex. And that's because usually I can handle or Serena can't handle.
00:32:04
Speaker
Do you keep price and updated price in Lex? It's a great question. Yes, we keep prices in there. Yes, it's going to be unfortunately wrong because, well, so what we do is the price in Lex gets updated based on the latest
00:32:26
Speaker
RFQ, so RFQ items work great. So stuff that was an active commodity market like steel and aluminum, the Lex price is based on whatever the most recent RFQ is. Things like filters, we don't obviously RFQ. It's up to us to update the price in Amazon, but because most of that stuff is less cost of goods sold and more overhead related, I don't care if a filter's $54 that was not $50.
00:32:53
Speaker
I do care if a screw that we use in a sub-assembly change because I follow our margins a lot more closely. But that adds to more tribal knowledge and passing that whole skill off to somebody else leaves a lot of variables. So it's like, do you want to set a precedence? That's like everything in Lex is tracked for price properly or not. Or maybe put a little checkbox to be like, yes, price matters. Price does not matter. Yeah, you could.
00:33:18
Speaker
Because I care a lot about data integrity, meaning if you look at a system like Lex and you're like, ah, you know, some of the stuff's good, some of it's all... Yeah, it's tough, right? When they built that in 2018, that was probably the price. But again, I just don't care on various filters, not worry about it.
00:33:34
Speaker
Yeah, so in in GURP, we have we track material, price, vendor, everything for for some of the big things that we do purchase a lot like round bars of centerless ground titanium and copper and all that stuff for the handle materials, the blade materials, all the big things that were actually
00:33:51
Speaker
You know they're worth big money and we purchase them frequently and there's a lot of rules with purchasing so we track quoted price basically with a date so there's like a literally a bar graph that shows the price over time.
00:34:06
Speaker
The price of our ball bearings doubled last year. Yeah. So they were 25 cents each. Now they're 50 cents each. I'm like, that doesn't sound like much, but when you're holding a thousand in the palm of your hand and you sneeze. Holy cow. Yeah. Yeah. That changes.
00:34:22
Speaker
But yeah, a lot of things like filters and even end mills, we don't really have in GURP yet because it's a lot of work to add 100 items or more. I haven't set that up yet. But for the big things we are tracking, and I really like to see the price progression, especially with materials and something you're spending $30,000 on an order kind of thing. Oh, and it saved our butt.
00:34:44
Speaker
often, including two weeks ago, when a vendor misquoted an item by 10%, they never would have caught it except for it shows us, Lex, when we push that shows us all the recent order history. And you can even click through to understand if it was part of a bigger order, which means better pricing. And I wrote back and he was like, Oh my gosh, yeah, we had the wrong something. And yeah, you can sometimes you kind of wonder like, did you but no, you know, that's literally saved us some dollars. Yeah, that's huge.
00:35:16
Speaker
Okay, last topic is we need and will be doing somehow a magnetic separator.
Improving Chip Management with Magnetic Separators
00:35:25
Speaker
This is a final chapter in this saga of dealing with hard scrap material.
00:35:33
Speaker
And originally I had thought of a fancy system, which still sounds cool, but is completely over-engineered. But basically it would mean using the Aluma with a variable in each program, whether that program was aluminum or steel. If it was aluminum, it would rotate a lever or something like a feed shoot in that would divert chips to another bit. Well, that's far.
00:35:55
Speaker
more complicated than need be and it ends up there are a lots of these magnetic separators. The general principle is a rotating drum that has magnets in it, magnets stick to the drum, which causes them to rotate to say nine o'clock at which point the magnet ceases to be there so then they fall off at nine o'clock whereas the aluminum chips fall off at three o'clock because they just roll over the drum.
00:36:19
Speaker
We actually 3D printed a very small working prototype. They exist. I haven't found one that kind of meets the small Sheehan's shop world. Some of them seem like they're from major industrial conveyor manufacturers or like for big recycling centers, which I don't want.
00:36:35
Speaker
A sales call where a guy's going to fly out and start putting together a five-figure quote for us. Like, I want to buy a $2,000 Netflix separator. So if anybody recently has experience or not, I'm frankly shocked that these aren't more common in machine shops because this single-handedly should do exactly what we need. It'll allow steel and aluminum chips to go into separate bins.
00:36:58
Speaker
You can machine concurrently steel aluminum, not care, and assume that the conveyor and separator will literally separate into two bins for you. Yes. Sounds awesome. Yes, because we won't be machining concurrently. You'll do steel and the program will switch to aluminum, but the chip conveyor is never actually putting out tons of chips
00:37:22
Speaker
How do I say the flow is not that high? You could stand there with a Starbucks cup and catch a lot of the chips that's coming out of the horizontal, but across the course of, I probably do a one to two cubic yards a day of chips. So it's a lot across 10 to 15 hours. Yeah. Yeah. It's those automated solutions. That's the goal. Chip management, man. It's like, why is it so hard? Yeah. Just in all senses.
00:37:53
Speaker
But yeah, so just because it's scalable and we don't, doesn't rely on cute IO codes and safety issues of a, you know, like a conveyor that slides into place and then moves away. Like that's not safe. True. Yeah. So yeah, I do hope you can find something that's literally off the shelf under five grand or whatever that suits your needs. And it's just like, yes, done. I just stopped thinking about it. Plug it in.
00:38:18
Speaker
Yeah. The drum would work so good if you think about your average normal chip shoot, which is probably no different than your Kern or whatever. You could also then mount a magnetic conveyor. This isn't what I'm planning on buying, to be clear. I like the drum idea, but let's say you have one of those magnetic conveyors. They're perfectly smooth. They look like a big toy slide from our childhood. Yeah. The hot ones.
00:38:45
Speaker
Yes, you can mount it in a 45 degree angle so that the very bottom of it just barely overlapped the output droppings of my Okubo conveyor and aluminum chips would basically hit it bounce off or slide off or as magnetic chicks would hit it catch and then lift it be lifted up or up. Interesting. Well, this way. Yeah, when it's lifted up and then further over and then they would fall into the separate shoot. So like that could work too. I kind of like that. Yeah.
00:39:13
Speaker
Either way, because those exist, you can buy magnetic separate like a chip conveyor for $30,000 or whatever, but you want the offshoot 24 inches wide and two feet long. You need to almost pick it up with your hand. Interesting.
00:39:31
Speaker
Those are cool because they don't have any externally exposed moving parts. It's just the big toy slide. And then in the inside is the magnetic conveyor action. Yeah. Rows of magnets that basically, what's the smooth materials? Is it just thin sheet metal or something? Yeah, I've never held one, but it looks like almost like chromed or polished sheet metal. So it's real smooth and lifts them up. And then the magnets move away as soon as it crests the hurdle. So it just falls into the gym.
00:40:00
Speaker
That sounds cool. You're right. Yeah. That's the plan. What do you, uh, this week, uh, both my rep, my technician from fair technique and the Aroa install guy are here this week installing the speedio Aroa self finally. So good. I'm across my fingers, but it looks really good that it'll all be done by Friday. And then, uh, if not sooner.
00:40:27
Speaker
Super excited about that. So I've been thinking a lot about, OK, it's real now. How are we going to utilize this? Actually, I've had all these ideas and all these thoughts over the years. But whoa, it's actually happening now. OK, let's start planning this. And it opened my eyes to the 24 hours a day of availability of this machine. And it's like, OK. So what specifically are we going to run on this?
00:40:56
Speaker
Like right now we're rough milling, hard milling and grinding the knife blades. Pretty much is what the day to day of that speedio is. 30 minute cycles loaded again, 30 minute cycles. And that'll be really good once it's palette changed because then we can just do like 10 of those 30 minute cycles without even flinching.
00:41:18
Speaker
And then we also use this video for more random stuff like glue down a sheet of carbon fiber and mill a whole bunch of inlays, which we could actually do in conjunction with the palette changer because they're on two separate palette systems on the machine, like a fixed palette on one side and then the palette changer on the other side. So might actually start scheduling like.
00:41:40
Speaker
dual jobs, depending on how I set it up. But yeah, the question is, what's the next product that's going on this video in the Palette Changer cell, whether it's Norseman handles, or Rask handles, or Lockbar inserts, or new products, new ideas, integral blades kind of thing. So I gotta answer that question.
00:42:01
Speaker
this week pretty much and figure out what's the next fixtures I'm setting up to make. Yeah. You're ready to rock and roll though when a row of leaves like to start putting in the blades to be ground or no. I think so. Yeah. We're actually finding a tiny bit of variation. Like if I make multiple blade fixtures, there's
00:42:19
Speaker
slight variation between each fixture, fixture to fixture, that's starting to bite us in the butt a little bit. And I did have a listener email a couple weeks ago and says, you're doing it all wrong. You're trying to get too tight of a tolerance. Be like an AK-47 where everything's loosey-goosey and just always goes together. And I was like, there's some value in that concept, but we're also trying to make precision parts just because we can and because it makes everything go easier when everything fits properly.
00:42:47
Speaker
So we are trying to hit tight tolerances. So I'm trying to take that advice to heart but also push back and realize, no, I want everything to be with intense because I just want it to. I can and it makes life easier. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So we're trying to relook at these fixtures and be like, is there a way that we could like surface grind them or how do we chase those last
00:43:10
Speaker
few accuracy issues and make each palette identical, whether it's with CMM inspection or remachining or grinding or something like that. Is it Z-height or is it the clocking or X-wide?
00:43:25
Speaker
a small loaf of bread, like a panini or something. So it's like a rectangle. So it's flat on top and a soft blade can mount to the top, but the two side walls are tilted out at a four degree angle. Yes. So that when a blade is mounted to it, the exposed bevel is straight up and down. Yes. Understood. Sure. Sure. Right. But what's the review of the issue? Sometimes a thou palette to palette.
00:43:53
Speaker
and I want it less than that. No, in sidewall. If I put an indicator on that tapered sidewall and then take the pallet off and put another pallet on, I'm seeing a little bit of variation between the two pallets and it's causing variation between blade to blade. I'm trying to chase that down. It's got me a little hesitant to just make 20 pallets and just run them automatically because I'm like, they're all going to be different.
00:44:18
Speaker
If you, so pallet A is good, pallet B, you have one thouvarious. If you put A back in, is it still good? And if you put B back in, does it repeat back to the foul that's been off? Yes. And part of it, slight part like tenths is the repeatability of the aroa base itself, which is pretty good, but we're also talking about a rotational thing here.
00:44:40
Speaker
Then some of it is palette to palette, which I have to separate those two variables and tackle them separately. We haven't yet CMMed these fixtures. I think once we do, it's going to reveal some stuff. That's where we're at with that. I respect this a lot.
00:44:58
Speaker
Sometimes, I think there's a lot to be said for relaxing tolerances, but not here. This is the foundation. Every part that comes off this matters. Exactly. I like the foundation word because... There's a reason why zero point fixturing is the greatest thing ever and why quick swap
00:45:19
Speaker
everything is so good because once it's dialed and you trust it and you pull the work off, you put it back on, put a different piece on, put it back on next month, it's the same. You're building that foundation and I think that's super important. What do you make the fixtures on? The current. They should be pretty good. Yeah, they should be good.
00:45:41
Speaker
So I tilt the table down 94 degrees I guess and then face the one side rotate the c-180 face the other side Sure, pretty good. I maybe it's tool wear maybe it's something the way cutting strategies Things like that, but it's something I got a nail down before I go make 20 fixtures and You know, they're all over the place. Yeah Okay
00:46:07
Speaker
But otherwise, I'm super pumped for this video to be done and unlocked, next level achieved kind of thing. Adam Deema just put a video up. I think he put it up on YouTube and it got promptly shut down. So he put it up on his free and open Patreon. I give him a lot of credit. He wasn't looking for donors. He just wanted a platform that would host it. He made a, did you see it? I saw the first 15 minutes or so and I'll keep watching later.
00:46:32
Speaker
Oh yeah. I mean, he's just so good. He did a workflow that I've heard others talk about, but have never actually seen somebody really use, which is he mounted this piece of material with three dovetail points to make a 1911 frame.
00:46:47
Speaker
And he actually was actively moving it between a haze fourth axis to rotate it along the fourth axis, but then laying it back down on an aroa table to access the side that you can't access on a fourth axis on a vertical mill. But it was actively moving between all of them, which was really cool to see that. And taking it out of the dovetail and then back in the dovetail.
00:47:10
Speaker
Well, the dovetail, sorry, the dovetail mounted it to the aroa. So he was taking the whole aroa chuck out of the aroa fourth axis mouth. Yeah, I'm looking forward to finishing that video. And he said the dovetails repeat extremely well as well.
00:47:28
Speaker
Yes, he did. Although that's not the aroa interface. That's his machine thing, which I thought was really cool. Just three small dovetails interacting in a kinematic way that he's such a smart guy that it makes sense. Yeah.
00:47:46
Speaker
Well, that's what got me thinking of, I don't know exactly what your brother blade fixtures look like, but I've known from some of the fixtures I've made where I've struggled, especially with this variation is I've over-dimensioned or over-constrained the fixture. I don't have the blade or whatever, the product mounting on just two points or the spring pressure the right way.
00:48:07
Speaker
I've definitely improved how we build some of those to make sure that the fixture is not just a clamp, the fixture is actually intelligently looking itself and then holding the part without distortion. Exactly. When we used to mount a blade to the side of a fixture, we would basically pocket out the whole side and trace the whole bottom of the blade so that the whole thing is cupped perfectly with so many points of contact, too many points of contact.
00:48:33
Speaker
And then slowly I've been pulling back and pulling back and now just have three points of contact and you like push it down and over and there's kind of no wrong way to do it. As long as all three points are contacting. Whereas when it's trying to contact in so many places, there could be a little chip in the way or something and it causes problems. So these are the things you learned over time. But I would think that a row, like if you just mounted
00:48:57
Speaker
five different arrow fixtures, each with a one, two, three block. I would think if you swap between all five of them and sweat them with a tense indicator that they would all be, for all intents and purposes, perfect. The base itself that that arrow makes or the repeatability between them?
00:49:13
Speaker
Um, the way the Aroa would repeat itself, I would think would be exceptional. Yeah, it does repeat within two tenths or so in rotational value for, in my testing. Um, yeah. So I was able to pretty much eliminate that as the source of variation. And then you swap palette eight to palette B and you're like, why is it now five thou or five tenths or nine tenths or something like that? I don't like that. So yeah.
00:49:42
Speaker
See you next week. Yeah, it sounds good. Yeah, next week normal. Perfect. Take care. Take care. Have a good day. Bye.