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#240 - When the Music is Playing, You Gotta Dance.
229 Plays4 years ago
Topics:
- 240 is a special number! Grimsmo and Saunders share their experiences with the Volvo 240.
- Shipping & Receiving at SMW Needs Work and LEx (ERP System) Has become a Nightmare
- WIllemin: Something is Definitely Missing
- Air Compressors and Paralysis by Analysis
- Why Aren't We Making Money? Livestream
- Shiny Happy Challenge Coins from Vince
- 3D Printed Chip Augers for the Haas
- Tweaking Tool Life on the KERN
- Fresh Desk: A way to centralize customer service and communication for small businesses
Recommended
Transcript
Episode Introduction and Nostalgia
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 240. My name is John Grimsmough. My name is John Saunders. And this is the podcast where every week John and I talk about business and the things that were going on and inventory management and hopefully things that will help you guys as listeners grow your businesses too.
00:00:19
Speaker
Awesome. The 240, we were just joking, completely random, but John, you have a strong Volvo background, right? Yeah. Eric and I used to, my first car was my mom's 1985 240 DL sedan. You said you drove stick on a 240 DL wagon.
00:00:38
Speaker
I learned, a friend helped me learn to drive steak. Yeah. I have this huge love of Volvo 240s just because that's what we grew up in and Eric and I used to modify them like crazy. I mean, mine had almost 300 horsepower, but my stock DL wagon, my mom's car, I got almost 300 horsepower to the wheel out of it.
00:01:00
Speaker
We just love Eric still has his 1983 DL or a two 42 turbo that he, um, he bought when he was 15. That's awesome. I don't see them on the road, but they wore tanks. Yep. Oh, they're, they're fantastic cars. They're just in 1980s cars, but, uh, yeah, I love them. So bomb episode two 40. It's kinda, it hits me. Yeah.
Innovative Inventory Management Ideas
00:01:24
Speaker
Yeah. Um, how you doing? Doing good.
00:01:30
Speaker
I hear a doorbell. Who's there? I know Fraser just bought doorbells like yesterday. Oh, that's funny shops. That's the first time I've heard it.
00:01:38
Speaker
That is funny. Do you have to go? No, they can take care of it. That's actually a great segue. I had a great idea this morning. We posted that picture last week. Excuses, excuses, but our receiving shipping bay was a mess. I had this fun moment where I detached myself and thought about, hey, what would it be like to have a cross-stocked amazing brand new facility with huge shipping areas, receiving areas? It is quite fun.
00:02:04
Speaker
And frankly, it's part of life to think about those sorts of things. But that's not what we got to play the card, the hand you're dealt. And we were just good problems to have, but we weren't focused on keeping that clean. It got to be a mess. So I came in a little early this morning and
00:02:22
Speaker
one of those things where you put your nose down, stop thinking about it, and start doing stuff. And you make a ton of progress in like 40 minutes. And it felt really good. But what occurred to me was we use Lex with our A numbers. So for raw material that comes in on pallets, it has an A number that we put on a sticker on a piece of wood. That way the wood just sits on top of the pallet of material and doesn't fly away and isn't attached to a single piece of aluminum. And that works great, except for a lot of our smaller plates,
00:02:52
Speaker
that we don't sell a ton of, it can be easy to lose the material or hard to find it, rather. What occurred to me was, wait a minute here. I want to come back to this AirTag idea that we joked about using for lost freight shipments. I'm looking right now for a Bluetooth tracker that's hopefully compatible with something like Alexa
00:03:13
Speaker
that not only makes a beep, but I really want it to light up because a beep in a shop is going to be not as good as a light.
00:03:24
Speaker
What I wanna do is buy them, I mean, assuming they're gonna be well under 50 bucks a piece, even so cheap, frankly, and we can buy 20 of them and put them on pallets, especially the less commonly used stuff. And then when you're looking for, you know, grizzly 0704 material that we have 20 pieces of, but it's, who knows where it is, you just say, Alexa, where is A1263? And it starts beeping and lighting up.
00:03:51
Speaker
That would be so cool. We're going to do it. It's going to be awesome. Nice. I can't wait to see that. I literally stopped Googling this to hop on the podcast, but there's a Finder 2.0 Pebblebee and a Chipolo One. I'm trying to see if these have lights. I could make my own.
00:04:09
Speaker
And it may be better to do like an XB with a like a 12 volt gel cell battery because then it will last forever. I don't need all the Bluetooth trackers focus on being super compact, which is not important to me. Or I could find one and just hack a wire in a 12 volt battery instead of the coin cell or something. But anyway, that's cool. I like it. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about inventory management lately.
00:04:34
Speaker
how we want to grow that and integrate it into GURP and how we want to track everything. So I busted
Challenges with ERP and Process Design
00:04:40
Speaker
open a new spreadsheet and I just started dumping like what all my ideas and what do I want to track, you know, like whether we're tracking actual inventory or we're tracking process flow of every component through the shop, which I also want to do. And it kind of got me to the point where I'm like, I just want to track everything. Like, yeah, absolutely everything.
00:05:01
Speaker
Yeah. Be careful. We had our live stream on Lex a couple weeks ago. It went great. I enjoyed talking about it. We have a new problem, and it's by far the biggest flaw in Lex. We will get it fixed.
00:05:19
Speaker
It's a mess is the just total honest answer. So, um, when you, let's say we sell out of VF has VF two plates. Um, it's all works great. By the way, I was using the word deprecating correctly for like a long time. That means like out of, um,
00:05:36
Speaker
Date not produced by one. Shopify sells out and reduces the quantity to the trigger point. It will issue a work order. What was happening was common ERP, just nightmare stuff where a work order got issued for three, but we knew
00:05:54
Speaker
we were going to actually want to make five or eight because we knew we were going to have a distributor order something. So we create two separate work orders. So there's three plus five into a split across work orders. And then orders come in before they're fully done, meaning they're off the machine.
00:06:10
Speaker
So we steal one, split that off into the QC, like in Lex, you basically move the work order from maybe like you go click, you say, okay, I'm reassigning it from machining by machine to QC, from QC to shipping, shipping to done or something. And we were getting the situations where you just were creating
00:06:33
Speaker
lots of bad information noise by splitting recorders and so forth. And it's part of it's the actual architectural flow of how it's done. And the other part of it is just the user interface. And so what we did, Julie and I went through and did a whole inventory of
00:06:50
Speaker
audit of reconciling lexica is what we actually have. It was actually pretty good. And so what we're going to do now is revisit that process and create a better flow so that you can kind of see, okay, it was originally these two things you forked it off here, this place here, this place here. We're trying to figure out if we want to create temporary sub numbers, because we don't make plates in any more than five or 10 batches. And so it's almost worth it to create temporary sub serial numbers like one through 10.
00:07:14
Speaker
That way if you steal one because an order came in and you want to get it out, you can more clearly show what happened to it. Yeah. You have a record of that. Nice. Yeah. But if you want, good. You guys are tracking process flow, like step-by-step pretty much. We're attempting, we're failing just probably. Of course, and that's going to take a year until we're great at it. That's fine.
00:07:37
Speaker
But like when you want to track everything, that's the kind of stuff you have to deal with. Because now I want to know that I pulled off sub serial number seven out of that work order to ship it attached to order six, four, nine, four. And there's the QC sheet for it. Here's what happened to it. And that work order is now really seven, not eight, when it goes through the normal batch QC process. Yep. Yep. So you just need, you need a method to facilitate that. Yeah. Or a method to tell people not to do that, if that's the option, you know, like,
00:08:08
Speaker
You want to establish the process and make sure it gets followed. And if it doesn't get followed, there's a reason. It's because it sucks or something, right? It needs to be tweaked. And that's the back and forth process like I'm willing to put in the next however many months, years to develop that to be where we want it to be.
00:08:25
Speaker
Yeah, that's fine. But it caused, we had a little huddle this morning and it causes a lot of problems because it's now associating Lex with a frankly horrible process. Like it needs fixed and it's not going to get fixed yet. And so I think I'm
Resolving Machine Issues and Exploring Alternatives
00:08:40
Speaker
better off telling people just to ignore it. Sorry, we goofed, we need to get it fixed, but don't, I'd rather people start skipping Lex on this than trying to deal with a broken, effectively broken system. Because it just builds, you're not going to like it.
00:08:55
Speaker
Yeah. And you don't want to use a system that you don't trust because then that develops the wrong mental like connection. Um, yep, that's exactly. Yeah. Like you said a couple of weeks ago, uh, I forgot what the context was, but it was like, you're working on a process and you're like, yeah, but you got to do it like this and you got to do that. And don't forget this. And it's like, you're, you, you know, that you have to change the process and that's not healthy. Yeah, we'll get there. Excellent. Yeah.
00:09:25
Speaker
random follow-up, whatever happened with your Swiss guide bushing that you couldn't get. I hounded tornos in the U S um, I just called one of my guys there and he looked all over the whole shop, couldn't find one, but they, they have a supplier that I had never heard of, um, in, in the U S that had a couple in stock. So I was like mine and I bought them and I got them like five days later. Oh, that's great. So that, that was totally solved. That's easy. Yep.
00:09:54
Speaker
And then Pierre said he cracked a collet, a sub-spindle, pick-off collet.
00:10:02
Speaker
It's like an extended nose, so it sticks out half an inch. And it's got to call it three fingers kind of thing. It's like a 5C call it, but it's smaller. In the knock or the swiss? In the swiss. In the swiss. And I'm not sure if it got bumped or if it just kind of failed over time. I think it just failed. So he was able to have, we had a spare, but good to know. We need more. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I keep coming back to this air tag thing.
00:10:31
Speaker
about, let's say they're 25 bucks a piece, that's a lot more, I think affordable than 50 for this scenario. We have our Renishaw probe tip drawer, no problem, but there's things I would want to keep where
00:10:47
Speaker
There's probably easy to keep it in a toolbox next to the lathe, but there's other stuff that I'd like to have on hand and it's really easy. Wow, a machine just pulled away in our driveway with a different CNC machine on it. Sorry, that is very distracting. It doesn't work at all. Oh, that's awesome. What? Oh, it kind of looks like an old 2016. That's cool. From one of your neighbors?
00:11:09
Speaker
I don't know. It's our parking lot shared with FedEx. I've never seen a flatbed pull through the machine before. Getting you all excited here.
00:11:22
Speaker
You know, the ability to take something that you know, you're not going to need for a year or two, but if you want it, you want to know where it is. Oh man, to be able to tell, say, guess I assume everybody knows this with Alexa, when you buy like smart devices, plugs, whatever you can name them. So it's like Alexa turn on the treadmill and it'll just turn on the outlet that you plug that you call a treadmill. So you can take one of these trackers and put it with, um, trying to get something like an extra, um,
00:11:48
Speaker
power supply for a machine or something. You thought that was a risk of going bad or whatever, and you can just say, where is it? It's going to start beeping and blinking. Great. Love it. Yeah, I guess the non-tracker way to do it would be to have zones or locations throughout the shop, toolbox seven.
00:12:07
Speaker
Yeah, we thought about that with, we have WEX built to allow it to do that. And it does work. Like you could say, you can have a picture of the toolbox, drawer numbers, and then it's like, Hey, the RASP files are in the red Husky bin of three. Um, but gosh, there's just so much, something so much easier about like fixtures. For example, you've been in production shops that put their.
00:12:29
Speaker
Tombstone fixtures on pallets, and then they usually have barcodes on them, and they can scan them to a rack location. Totally fine, but if you can put a wireless Bluetooth tracker on it, you can hot locate them with no intervention from anybody and always be able to find it. That's a win. It seems hard to scale an error prone, maybe. Batteries could go out, and scaling is just buying more $25 items. You don't want to have 1,000 of them. Yeah, it's a fair point.
00:12:59
Speaker
You wouldn't need 1,000. The battery's a real issue. I think the tiles work for about a year on a 3-volt coin cell. So I'm thinking if you put a $15 12-volt gel cell and regulate it down or do whatever you need to do, I got to think that's going to last for 20 years, John. In which case, you're fine.
00:13:28
Speaker
And I just, having lived it ourselves and having heard from other people, intervention of process, scanning something in, moving it around, um, is only going to lead to one thing, which is that if you, in your series, a thousand things, a decent percentage of them are going to be moved without scan, which means there's no way to fix that anymore. There's just no way. Um, the wireless thing, I'm liking this. Yeah, yeah. Definitely test it out and, uh, see how it fits, you know? What are you been up to?
00:13:56
Speaker
Um, then working on the Wilhelmin a little bit. That's really exciting. Um, finally chatting with, uh, like we've got the Wilhelmin on the floor. We've got the bar feeder next to it. And I'm like, what goes between them? There's, there's something missing that connects this like two foot gap between the two devices. There's got to go, something goes here. I don't know what it is. So it turns out we're missing something from LNS for the bar loader. It's a, it's a nose extension.
00:14:24
Speaker
It's like bolts on and it sticks out a tube about a foot or two into the machine. It's okay. So we need that. So that's coming from LNS. Um, and then there's also a spindle extension that sticks out the back of the Willimon spindle sticks out a couple inches. So I also need that. And that's a spindle liner. So if you use half inch bar, you put a half inch spindle liner in, you know, one inch bar, one inch liner. Um, so I'm getting that from JF burns and then.
00:14:53
Speaker
There's also this nut that screws onto the back of the Wilhelmin spindle that I need from Wilhelmin because the people that I bought the Wilhelmin from, they have many other Wilhelmin's and they just kind of took what they wanted and kept it. Yeah, right. They're like, yeah, we're going to need that for the next machine. So we'll just not send it with this machine.
00:15:11
Speaker
No big deal,
Compressor Redundancy and Air Management
00:15:12
Speaker
but it's kind of leaving me going, what am I missing here? Like that's funny. Yeah. Um, but it's great. I've got several texts from Wilhelmin, um, either in WhatsApp or an email. And, uh, they've been awesome. Just happy to answer any questions, phone calls, whatever. Um, one of them actually listened to the podcast last week and reached out and said, yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, I can help you out. Are you, have you flipped the switch? Not yet. Uh, you're killing me. Yeah, I know. I know.
00:15:41
Speaker
We're getting air to it. We're just buying some fittings. We got to plug in a hydraulic pump and put the plumbing in. We thought the hydraulic tank was empty, but the Wilhelmin Tech told me they almost never empty them. It's just clear liquid inside. So if you look at the sight gauges, they're clear. You think it's empty. Oh, that's hilarious. And so I looked, and I saw a little bubble at the top of the sight gauge. I'm like, it is full. Oh, that's great. Yeah.
00:16:10
Speaker
So that just needs to be plugged in. And he said, um, he said, most people never change out the hydraulic fluid unless it goes yellow and gross. But if it still looks clear, like whatever, just keep it, um, whatever it's cheap. Um, and then we'll flip the switch, get air, get hydraulic, and then we'll flip the switch. Awesome. Awesome. That's really exciting. So yeah.
00:16:33
Speaker
Do you know offhand, the next size up, the 500, like the 508, are those only linear now? I don't know that answer. I know they're different. They have more options. Okay. I was on the website for a hot second and I was like, this is strange. Are they only linear? Yeah. Okay. I mean, maybe the newest of the new.
00:16:55
Speaker
Yeah, I don't want a linear. I mean, yeah. You do want a linear, but I don't want to pay for a linear. Well, I don't want a linear. I want to buy the right machine for the right machine. Speaking of buying the right machine, I was kind of putting off buying a second air compressor, and partly because I was not getting good
00:17:18
Speaker
seeming like good engagement. Like I had some questions about having two compressors and it's a typical like analysis paralysis. I heard so many good things about Kaiser. We have an Atlas cop-co that's been bulletproof and I've decided it's much better to have a second compressor for redundancy than it is to buy one new larger one. We've just been super lucky that we've never ever had our compressor go down, but I think that's.
00:17:42
Speaker
a bad thing to rely on going forward. And mixing a Kizer with a Copco, totally possible, but I just thought I'd rather just stick with one brand. And I got kind of lucky. We didn't pull the trigger on this a while back. We switched from doing some air blow offs to using chip fans. We were already using them, but just switching out stuff because air is ultimately kind of expensive. So don't use it where you don't really need it.
00:18:08
Speaker
So, but we need another one now. So, uh, I reached out yesterday. I was actually super excited. They look like they upgraded our base GX five model to including a digital control where you can adjust the pressure digitally and not with a valve. So that should make it easy to, um, I forget what they call it. Like that load balance, the two, basically you want them to have both working to it. You don't want the second one to always to never run basically. Right. Right.
00:18:38
Speaker
Um, but that's going to be a necessary non preparatory purchase. Yeah. Yeah. So your one is a five horsepower. They call it a GX five. I believe it's a seven and a half. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. We had seven and a half in the old shop and we got a 10 horsepower here for the, for the shop. Now, um, just with the little tank that comes on it. I think if we put a second tank on it, it would help a lot because it basically runs or idols all the time now. Um, got it.
00:19:08
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like it's running too much. But I mean, the current is always sucking air, the tortoise is always sucking air, the more he sucks a little bit. And we're using it a lot. And we thought the same thing. And we found that's not always true. We added a 200 gallon battery tank.
00:19:29
Speaker
a while back and what happens is when we do overuse air, like if two machines are going to blow off and somebody grabs a pneumatic air tool, what happens is our machines will alarm out because they drop below the minimum PSI and having the tank there
00:19:49
Speaker
It delays the time it took to get there, but it also makes it way longer to reach the PSI and the machines need again. Interesting. So in some respects, it seems like we actually are better off on days where we do that to shut the tank off and let the compressor build up pressure again quicker. So like what's your minimum cutoff on the air compressor? Like when does it turn on again?
00:20:12
Speaker
can't answer off the top of my head. Because I know the machines. Yeah, let's say the machines complain at 95. And if you're cut off on the compressor is 95, you're going to have a problem. Yeah, no, that's right. That's not it. It's it's Yeah, the compressor definitely shuts turns on way before the machines would be an issue. The issue is if you're just if you're basically dumping air out of the shop, it's it's the compressor is going to kick on at 100.
00:20:37
Speaker
but you're dumping so much air that it can't, it's going to still deplete even though it's running. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. The two compressor things are really interesting idea. Um, and especially if you load balance them and make sure they run alternatively and kind of keep the system pressurized. Then if one of her goes down, which it will at some point or needs maintenance, then you already have a contingency plan.
00:21:00
Speaker
And the compressor is the one set. It's like power to the show. I don't know. It's like, if you don't have air, nothing, nothing works. Yeah. You have the second one in the other shop? Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, if we had to, we could run a hose over. But literally just thinking that, like, OK, that's a good idea. It wouldn't keep all the machines happy. My backup was always the drive to Home Depot and buy a piston, which is probably a terrible idea, but I just put it as a mental solace idea. Yeah, yeah.
00:21:31
Speaker
Yeah, our case of reps are 20 minutes away and always in the area for service because they service everybody around here. So they usually
Financial Management and Economic Resilience
00:21:40
Speaker
like same day service if you need it. That's nice. Oh, PSA or shout out today, which will be Wednesday, two days prior to this video airing, we're doing a live stream, which I'm really excited about.
00:21:56
Speaker
I do, my wife now does our bill pay, but I still do our accounting every day, like just reconciling transactions because it's super easy and that's very sustainable. But then I kind of wear a different hat at the end of the month when I try to look at our income statement and just general, like, hey, how was the month?
00:22:18
Speaker
month or two ago, we actually had a good month, like just from a mood and morale and sales, like everything looked good. And I looked at our numbers at the end of the month and I was like,
00:22:28
Speaker
Where did it all go? And it honestly really upset me. Because it's like, this isn't a hobby. This is a business. Why aren't we? The title of the video is, why aren't we making any money? And so I did a kind of deep dive into what happened there. And if you're an accountant, you're going to know some of these answers about accrual versus cash accounting or buying stuff and so forth. But there's also some other kind of gotchas that I found that were really good stuff. And I think stuff that anybody who wants to run a shop
00:22:57
Speaker
should be aware of. So it'll be a live stream two days ago from listening, but it'll also be obviously available for replay. So I would encourage folks to check that out. And it's a good segue into the next one I want to do, which is this topic of preparing for a slowdown. Yes. The kind of things we don't like to think ahead about, you know? Yeah, exactly. Things are good now. Let's just run. Yep.
00:23:22
Speaker
That's my thought, try to be a little bit contrarian, but also when the music's playing, you gotta dance. Yeah, yeah. And Vince is working on some, he did an awesome job on these challenge coins. We're doing brass, we're engraving them, then painting them, then we're lacquer coating them, or decking them after the paint, so it's got this sweet color fill. They're from my wife's golf event, and it makes me smile, they look really good. That's awesome.
00:23:48
Speaker
That
Enhancing Manufacturing Techniques
00:23:49
Speaker
was the other thing I wanted to update and share was the 3D printed Haas augers. How did that turn out? Great. The comments, especially on Instagram and the podcast emails were outstanding. I literally started making a list of all the suggestions because I think we're going to end up doing a video on this. They were almost countless. Lots of great exceptions.
00:24:12
Speaker
explanations or ideas. I want to keep it fun, meaning anybody can do it. You don't need to have a metal printer or you don't need to use $200 filament rolls or sending out for casting or obviously we can machine them if we wanted to. I want this to be fun and fun to me means, hey, I've got a Prusa or just a basic FDM printer. Do I need to buy a certain type of filament and or do I need to do something to that afterward? Have you ever heard of the salt curing, salt reflowing? No.
00:24:41
Speaker
freaking awesome. So if you print something out of material like PLA, it's basically a bunch of extrusion lines.
00:24:50
Speaker
you find a really fine-grained salt. The finer the grain, the better the final resolution. The salt acts as basically a poor man's mold or form. So you put your part in, pour the salt all around it, and then you put it in the oven. You can Google all the recipes and times. And it reflows, it remelts, and then cures all the plastic as a true monolithic structure versus the extruded lattice. What?
00:25:16
Speaker
That's incredible, right? So the salt doesn't melt in the oven, but it holds a rigid enough cast, a mold. Yep. And the salt stays soft, like powder.
00:25:29
Speaker
Yeah, again, you can look at the photos, like there'll be the outside most layer will have some porosity due to salt, the salt jagged, like think about a salt being like a sandpaper kernel with sharp edges. So the finer the better, for our purpose, we don't care at all. And frankly, if we're going to coat it, having that texture may help. If you're trying to print, you know, 632 threads, it might be an issue. Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible. I've never heard of that.
00:25:56
Speaker
We are doing, we printed them out of, well PETG is an obvious upgrade versus PLA, but I had a bunch of PLA around. So we printed a PLA one and we had a suggestion to print TPU, the squishy stuff, because it's actually quite strong. It doesn't tear apart. And then what I did is I coded them in the Gorilla
00:26:19
Speaker
People make Gorilla Glue, it's called Gorilla Waterproof Patch and Seal. The rubberized sealant sprayed 12 bucks for a can. And unlike the truck bedliner, you can spray this stuff on and you don't have to use the whole can within an hour once you start spraying. They feel
Optimizing Toolpaths and Automation
00:26:34
Speaker
great. We're going to put them in the machine today.
00:26:37
Speaker
But I think that actually might end up being a pretty decent recipe when you want to 3D print something and have a little bit of strength to it. But elegance is in the intelligent answer. And the intelligent answer is not to do the augers, even though I'm doing them for fun. The intelligent answer is to print a half pipe shape that fills most of that void, and then to print or sheet metal a cover
00:27:03
Speaker
Basically, don't try to clear the chips out, stop the chips from getting in there. That's the right answer. Yeah. But it takes 12 revisions to get to that answer. Yeah. So that's the R&D process. I love that process. And I still plan to print them and coat them because it's just easier for me to do that than sheet metal. That's just it, period. What do you have to do this week?
00:27:32
Speaker
I feel like I'm constantly fine tuning to a life, especially on the Kern. The Maury has been pretty solid, except one tool has been complaining lately. But on the Kern, I basically, I don't want to break tools, chip tools anymore. I'm pretty good. It almost never happens, but there's two tools that consistently die early and variably.
00:27:53
Speaker
And I'm trying to figure out why. So I'm literally going through every single toolpath, looking at how they enter the cut, how the corners are used. I bought a flat bottom drill bit from OSG to clear the bottom of a hole so that the end mill doesn't, you know, plow into the bottom to open up that little hole. So playing with, you know, I'm throwing everything I got at it just to add consistency to the tool. So it does a bunch of different options. You don't know where it's breaking.
00:28:23
Speaker
Yeah, I have some ideas, but like the flat bottom is going to help. And it's super great infusion. You watch the simulation, especially with the section analysis in CAM now, that's only a few months old. I use that all the time. So I'll literally section analysis, cut a hole in half and then run simulation. And then I can see what the tool is doing halfway through the hole. They're like, oh, it's plunging.
00:28:49
Speaker
And even if it ramps down, the corners are getting hit. And then it's doing a full sidewall cut. How do I get rid of that corner action? Because that's where it's chipping. But I really enjoy that process. It's just time consuming. And when you when you sound super weird, when you watch those, do you ever feel like you're the tool?
00:29:08
Speaker
I think of the tool as a person sometimes. What does the tool want right now? Well, I just think when you see a tool ramping into a 135 degree floor, I feel like, okay, when the tool starts to engage at an angle, I feel like, okay, my shoulder is getting pushed on.
00:29:25
Speaker
I don't know, this sounds super weird, but I think it's good. Like one with the tool. Yeah. No, I guess I don't think of it like that, but I definitely think of what the tool needs, how it's feeling, how it's, you know, what pressure is going on it. You know, if the corners are being used too much or something, I want even pressure on the whole thing. What's the diameter of the tool? These are small tools, like one sixteenth inch.
00:29:51
Speaker
Uh, can you get a flat bottom drill? Yeah. That's all kidding. Yeah. You can get through coolant up an eighth and bigger, maybe a little bit smaller, but, um, so I think that I'm using a 93 thou flat bottom now and, uh, put that in a couple of days ago. We'll see. Yeah, that's awesome. Do you, and you want, I'm guessing you want a sharp corner. Yeah. Can you, you could use a radius tool sometimes.
00:30:19
Speaker
I was going to say, can you rough it with a radius, quote unquote, rougher and then come back in with a finished tool that is not going to do much work and thus. But even still, I think about going from a radius tool to a finished tool. Now the finished tool corners are cutting through that radius. Oh, sure. But it's not. That's its only job. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
00:30:40
Speaker
And you can much more, you can ramp into that along the XY plane, like just kind of scoop into it. And you're separating the tool out, which could be huge.
00:30:55
Speaker
Yeah, especially on the Kern with so many holders. I think I have 115 tools in the machine now. I counted the other day, which I still got a hundred left. It's fantastic. Yeah, that's incredible. But I'm using a lot of roughers, finishers, semi finishers, tools that are absolutely dedicated to just a few processes and through coolant call it. So the coolant is aiming right at the tool tip, doing all kinds of fun stuff.
00:31:22
Speaker
Yeah, that's awesome. Because I want process reliability. I want to know that the tool is going to make it. Even if you pull it out and replace it and it looks good, you're like, well, historically it doesn't look good much longer than this. So now's the time to replace it. Right. And you're saying it's not just short life. It's unpredictable. Yeah. Yeah. If I normally get, I don't know, 80 minutes out of a tool and it's dead after 22 sometimes, I'm like, no, no, no. Why did I get 80 last time?
00:31:50
Speaker
Is there a way in the current Heidenhain to take a tool, put it through the laser and detect if a corner is chipped? There is, I think, I'm pretty sure. I haven't really tried it. I think it's harder to do it in a very automated process because where would you define that in fusion setting, fusion tool table settings, like to check that cycle?
00:32:15
Speaker
No, it should be like a ... It's not Renishaw, it's a Bloom, like a Bloom cycle. Sure, but how do you post it properly after every tool without thinking about it? What I would do, I don't think I can do this on a contact table probe because it can't look at corners.
00:32:36
Speaker
you would just have a can cycle, like a rain shock code and NC pass through or an M alias that would then say every time take tool 27, go up to the bloom and the Z height should match. Obviously the Z height doesn't match, they broke and make sure the corner is sharp or make sure the corner is still this radius. I guess, I don't know, can it measure corner radii or chamfers? I think so. I know with complete, I can't do NC pass throughs.
00:33:04
Speaker
Yeah, which has changed my workflow, but, uh, yeah, that's not good. Getting it figured out and thought about that issue. Yeah. But yeah, I'm getting it. We're loving the like check every 10 parts hack we did. Awesome. Yeah, it's great.
Improving Shop Communications
00:33:20
Speaker
Just, it's like, we all work for the process now and you don't have to think and worry about it. It just reminds you and tells you. Nice. Yeah. The other thing we added, did we talk about fresh desks? A little bit at all. I forget though.
00:33:34
Speaker
Yeah, Alex is really wrong with this, but we implemented fresh desks. I think we're still on the free version, although I would happily pay for it if we needed to, because it's wonderful. And basically, when you email, I think Info at Saunders MachineWorks, it goes into fresh desks, and it allows anybody to respond internally, add notes. It allows us to respond directly to the customer, and all those communications are right there in fresh desks. So I can see what Julie said or Alex said, or I can have
00:34:01
Speaker
I can tag Ed and have him chime in and say, hey, can we take a look at what's going on here? No, we have not talked about that. Oh, yeah. Johnny is phenomenal. Yeah. Because I've seen, you know, I'll get vendor emails or whatever, and they'll be like, at fresh desk at sauntersmachineworks.com. Sometimes you can tell that they're on some system or there's a Z1, I forget what it's called.
00:34:22
Speaker
Zendesk, I think. Yeah, Zendesk, a big one. Yeah. Okay. I've wondered about that because even like we use Gmail for all of us here and they're still like, how do you know who's replied to what? So explain that again.
00:34:37
Speaker
Okay, so if you email infamous honors machine works, it goes to fresh desks and we do have a fresh text point person whose kind of first job is to triage them to look at, you know, okay, is this urgent? Is this not urgent? Is it something we need to respond to?
00:34:56
Speaker
What we can then do is market open or closed urgent tag people we can have private internal notes But what's great is that I can go look at everything else that's happening you it has great search built-in so you can search for order numbers or customer names and what we also use it for is when we create our shipping bill of ladings for freight orders and
00:35:18
Speaker
So let's say order 6550 is ready to ship out. I go over or whoever's packing it up. We put the palette on the scale after it's ready to go and we take a picture of it on the scale with the weight showing, which all rules were invented because somebody
00:35:37
Speaker
did something that made you create a rule. It's like this example. Our freight company a couple of times has told us that these packages weighed 1,000 pounds and they weigh 150 pounds. So it's not a terrible thing to create a process around it that shows us what it looked like and how much it weighed. And then I email that to, it's another fresh desks account. I think it's something at sauntershippers.com with the subject of that. And so anybody can now go look up the photo of the shipment.
00:36:03
Speaker
Okay. Stuff like that. It conglomerates your shop's emails together and lets you interact better with each other. Yeah. I
Setting Up New Machinery
00:36:13
Speaker
mean, in your sample, if somebody emails support at Grimsman Eye, I'm not sure if that's a real email. It may be something that needs to go to Barry for an accounting thing, or it needs to go to Frasier to send a replacement screw, or it needs to go to Eric because somebody's noticing a weird
00:36:27
Speaker
a blemish on a buffing. I'm making this up here. And then everybody can see it, which is great. Nice. Cool. So you're still in the free version? I think so. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Probably going to go pro. I don't know what we, you know, we, I worked with Alex, implement it. He's run with it and I, I use it, but pay attention to it. Cool. Good progress though. It is. What do you see today?
00:36:57
Speaker
Yeah, today, I don't know yet. Yeah, lots of programming things, whether it's on the machine or GURP, like buyer's choice, maker's choice, things like that. Yeah. I'm not too involved with that, but I need to oversee and make sure things are progressing. Yeah. I got to check in on that.
00:37:16
Speaker
Are you, have you started programming the rat and at the rest of the saga clip for what it's going to do on the on the Wilhelmin? No, I haven't yet. I do have the Wilhelmin CAD file that is fully, I, I jointed all the things together. So I have full access control. Every piece moves, um, the B axis, the XYZ, um,
00:37:38
Speaker
The spindle is the A axis not the C axis like a lathe is typically a C spindle Interesting, but because that's not the driven spindle. It's not the primary spindle your milling spindle is your Z.
00:37:51
Speaker
Okay. Oh man. Yeah. It's a little different. Wait, can you explain? Okay. So there's the milling spindle. That's the vertical one. Yep. Well, it had to be vertical. Yeah, exactly. But the delayed spindle is the one I'm referring to. They call that the A-axis for rotational. Okay. So your spindle, the five-axis spindle, the milling spindle. Yeah.
00:38:16
Speaker
Does it have, it has to have rotation or rotation because it holds turning tools. Exactly. And then it holds the turning tools locked. Like there's a pin, there's an actual like physical. Got it. Stop. But it also has a swivel, which would be a B. B. Yeah. Okay. Got it. And then is Z the distance of the milling spindle to the lathe chuck? Z is up and down. Ooh.
00:38:45
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah. So X, the milling spindle moves up and down Z, side to side for X, front to back for Y. Yep. I'm with you. The lathe spindle, any clocking there is A. The vice chuck on the bottom moves left to right. That's your U, I think you told me.
00:39:05
Speaker
Okay. And then it also swivels, but just plus minus 90 degrees, like start, stop. I don't think it can index. So that's probably more of like an M code as opposed to an actual axis. Yeah.
00:39:21
Speaker
And I don't know if the spindle must be able to clock and orient, but like the milling spindle, but I don't know what that's, that would be your C I guess, but I don't know if it needs to or can or whatever. Yeah. So the, when I'm looking at the Wilhelmin, you have a milling spindle that is that twists on the B you're saying it also comes out toward you like a Y at all. Like the UMC does basically. Exactly. Yeah. Front to back. That's your Y and it's, it's got this cylinder like a eight inch.
00:39:49
Speaker
cylinder is your spindle travel and that just comes forward and back. Got it. Yeah, it looks cool. Once we turn it on, we can jog it and move it and really wrap our heads around this. I'm going to either need to post a very simple test program.
00:40:09
Speaker
or just, I don't know, figure, figure all this out. That will be a very fun process. Um, but no, I haven't started programming. I kind of, I don't know. I want to see it move, I guess, before I dive too deep into that. I'm not great about doing like, like heavy work too far ahead, too far in advance because I just, I don't feel it yet. You know what I mean? Yeah. I know what you mean. Like I'm, I'm better at rushing when I need it because it makes sense.
00:40:38
Speaker
I love the iteration of the thinking about a part like that. It's like, okay, let's think about, do I want to knock off most of the material? Then I'm going to do some detail. Then I'm going to come back and turn. Like I love, like if I could retire, all I would do is just sit there and tinker on toolpaths. It's so fun. Yeah. My wife sees me staring off into space sometimes. She goes, you thinking about end mills again? I go, yeah. Oh man. I saw this high feed when I was getting real excited. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's awesome.
00:41:07
Speaker
Marv and I were texting and he accidentally, God bless him, was converting everything to freedom units. And he was like, we're running this high-feed mill at 0.1 inch depth of cut. I'm like, wow, that is an aggressive depth of cut for high-feed mill. He's like, I'm sorry. I think it was 0.1 millimeters and then it was still nuts. Watching those currents move is insane. Yep. Especially the new ones, the HD. Yeah. Nice. Cool. All right. Well, have a good week, bud. You too, man. I'll see you. Okay. Take care. Bye.