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#316 Willemin works! From both teams!
274 Plays2 years ago
TOPICS:
- Biscuits with the boss
- Willemin works! From both teams!
- Pipe organs
- hiring
- Kern crash at Grimsmo
- Bambu 3d printer
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Ted Lasso Discussion
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the Business of Machining, episode number 316. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough. John and I talk each week to keep each other sane.
00:00:14
Speaker
end. Yeah, it's biscuits with the boss if you get the reference. Yes, I haven't started the new season yet. That's only a good thing because it means you have that much more Ted Lasso that you haven't watched. Exactly, yep.
00:00:30
Speaker
Yeah. Look, folks, this is all a journey. And it just I don't know why Ted lasso resonates so much. I really don't. And I don't. I always have to remind myself that TV shows aren't reality. Like, even if Ted lasso is inspirational, or the team responds well to his managerial style, that doesn't necessarily mean he's actually a good manager, because it's a script. But yeah, darn it. If I don't like the kind of energy and just Yeah,
00:01:01
Speaker
Just his attitude. It's written as such and Jason Sudeikis is such a wonderful actor. It's just so enjoyable. That's all it is. Even in the context of a sports team, there's a lot of business entrepreneurial like Biscuits with the Boss. Funny little things and it's hilarious.
00:01:23
Speaker
Yeah and look there is a direct tie-in to that is I think true about leadership in terms of having that strength and confidence to ignore the naysayers, the critics and be yourself, be happy.
00:01:40
Speaker
Even when they're trying to, I'm not going to spoil anything, but he could have taken low blows at somebody and instead he just says, yeah, that person's a great person and I wish them the best.
00:01:55
Speaker
Sure, maybe you're rooting for your enemy or your competition, but the reality was being that comfortable and confident ultimately is going to be what makes you win. Like somebody who's your enemy doesn't get one more second to live underneath my skin.
Dealing with Negativity and Trolls
00:02:10
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Yep. Nobody's going to hold power over me other than myself, you know? Yeah. And look, you can't please everyone. Yeah. Remember Jimmy DiResta told us that once when he was hanging out here, he was like, oh, the more trolls you have, the more shine that you're doing something like, the more that you're impactful in raising awareness and attention. Mm-hmm.
00:02:34
Speaker
And you just get more comfortable with it. It's like all the trolls and all the negative comments. And I've learned that most of the time, any negative comments are not actually meant to be hurtful. You know, they're meant to be a joke. They're meant to be like just an observation, but you take it so personally and so negative. Once you start to realize that, you're like, oh, it's all jokes. You know, it's nothing.
Machining Challenges and Installations
00:02:57
Speaker
Yeah. Cool. How you doing? Good.
00:03:02
Speaker
Oh, I'm looking at a lathe part or a male part, what would you call it? Oh, that's a Wilhelmin part. Yeah, that's beautiful. Oh my god, John, it's just like, I don't know if you can see the... The face finish, yeah. The engraving, it doesn't focus. Oh no, I can't see it on their webcam. There we go, yeah, it says inch.
00:03:22
Speaker
Yeah, you know, five axis chamfers and nice engraving just the finishes. We're doing a see if you can focus on that. We're doing the build. I think you already do this, but the build blood start instead. Yeah, I can't see it on the camera, but sorry, we do the.
00:03:43
Speaker
We do already, we've always Higbee'd our threads on these, but now we're able to do it with an end mill. Yes. I actually like better than the lathe Higbee, it just has a C slope. More control. Like, are you drawing a sketch or is Grant drawing a sketch to Higbee that? Couldn't tell you. Yeah, probably. He's killing it. That's awesome.
00:04:09
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, he's actually been not using it the last sort of two, two days because I am because here, I forget what their cup. It's the, I am a bar feeder, but I think it's through buchi. Is that like a parent company or something? But they're here doing the bar feeder installed. Cool. Yeah. Curious if that's a big job, you know, like you already have the bar feeder, right? Did you place it on the floor yourselves or is it like in a box?
00:04:38
Speaker
No, we were, we, bar feeder came, we unloaded it, no problem. And then scooted it over toward the machine. Then the sales rep came by, kind of looked at it with us a little bit. And he and I, so there's kind of a like three way relationship or four way between us, Willeman,
00:05:01
Speaker
the sales rep guy and then his, the bar feeder sales rep guy and then the bar feeder tech installed guys. But they had actually spent some time at Noblesville when the machine was still in Indiana looking at the right IO connections to make sure everything was okay. And then they, I think actually Wilhelmin did some of the help of the initial power hookup because the bar feeder is actually powered from the Wilhelmin.
00:05:27
Speaker
There's like one main vehicle that does everything. Then the guys are here now doing the actual bar feeder install. So like, has to get anchored into the ground and then the bushing linings and the oil goes in it because it's a hydrostatic floating system. So the bar turns in a, it's like the current of bar feeders. Yeah, yeah, cool.
00:05:49
Speaker
So CJ I thought said he did it himself because it just worked out that way. It's funny, this is again, just kind of was like funny anecdote of growth. This is the first time we've ever had a third party here doing
00:06:04
Speaker
real work and I've not really, I've not even spoken to the person, um, Grant's handling it. And so like, I was actually pallet jacking over some orders and work yesterday and they were like, they like came in, just went over to the machine and they'd been here for two days. And I feel bad. It makes me sound like a cold boss. It's not like that at all. So we're just like, Hey, no, they're doing their thing. Like I'm talking. Yep. Yep. Yeah. I got my own stuff going on. Nice. Yeah.
00:06:29
Speaker
Normally it's like, hey, I introduce myself, we shake hands, you know, kind of talk about the machine. We're excited. Like normally I like enjoy the relationship, but it's just, we're like, no, it's okay. I don't have to be involved in everything. Well, like Grant's running point on this, you know, so let them go. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome.
00:06:44
Speaker
Yeah, with our bar feeder, we're doing the install ourselves. It's placed next to the machine. Basically, I'm telling myself, once the machine's making parts, which it basically is, then the next big job is to get that thing lined up and plugged in. It should just plug right in. When we bought the L&S feeder, they wired it up just so, so that it should plug and play with the Willeman.
00:07:09
Speaker
And then Marcus has already talked to me about a couple changes we got to make on the Wilhelmin to get it to talk to the bar feeder. But then it's just like bolting it to the ground and aligning it, which we've done before on our tornos. Does your Wilhelmin have the hole in the sheet metal for the bar feeder? It does. Yep. OK. It's got these rubber flappy things that somebody added because I think they ran it with a manual bar loader, like pulls the bar or something.
00:07:38
Speaker
But yeah. Cool. Well, if we can help, let me know. I feel like it might be nice to pay back because you helped grant us some. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of Willyman, so past couple of days, I've been trying to run it and run the warm up program
Troubleshooting Machine Issues
00:07:55
Speaker
just fine. Then I go to run a program and the thing reboots during tool change. Like literally the machine turns off and turns back on again.
00:08:05
Speaker
while the tool changer is mid rotation. Oh, that stinks. Only during tool changes and it does actually reboot the control, not E-stop, not full power off. So I'm like trying to go through my head, you know, what could it be? And it kept happening. Like it happened four times to me within a couple of days of like trying to play with it. So I never actually finished a part in those four days.
00:08:33
Speaker
And then going through my head, trying to figure out, talking with Marcus, but he wasn't available, he's traveling. So I'm like, well, what can I control? I can control what's going on. So maybe the machine shakes when it does the tool change, and maybe a wire is loose and it jiggles or something. Ooh, maybe, right? OK, so I can control that. So I shut off all the power, and I checked every single flathead wiring terminal to tighten them.
00:09:01
Speaker
specifically from the wall to the machine because we've actually had those get loose over time and they increase resistance, they heat up like those panels on the wall. I remember in the old shop, we walked in one day and it smelled like burning plastic.
00:09:16
Speaker
And it was the electrical panel because one of the wires was a little bit loose and like hot. And so now we kind of have a procedure where we walk around to the electrical panels with a laser heat gun temperature monitor and look for heat because that's no fun.
00:09:34
Speaker
So I basically shut off most of the power to the shop, like everything to this zone, and went through the breaker panels and tightened everything. Some of them were kind of loose, but most of them were tight. On the machine side, I found a couple loose connections, and I basically tightened everything I could and jiggled every plug that I could find in the electrical panel, and it seems to have gone away.
00:09:59
Speaker
Oh, are you sure? I think I'm happy with that. I ran the warm-up program which tool changes every minute or so. I ran it for an hour and a half and it was fine. Was rebooting every tool change?
00:10:14
Speaker
No, not at all. Okay. Intermittent. Yeah, intermittent. So, I don't know. And I got to say there's that back of your mind, you're like, oh man, this is an older machine. Oh no. I'm never going to find the problem with this. Oh no. What did I get myself into? I should just get rid of this thing. No, I can't do that. Wait, how much is a new one? No, I shouldn't think about it. Oh my gosh. Like, right? You just go through this thought process. And so I have no way of knowing for sure if it's fixed, but it seems to be not there anymore.
00:10:43
Speaker
The other thing, this is like me commenting as a complete novice on electronics, but the fact that it's happening with a tool change and there's our servo driven tool changes versus like error or pneumatic. Actually, it's cam driven, not servo. It's got a motor. Sorry, I believe a servo turns the cam.
00:11:07
Speaker
No, I think it's a- Your dumb motor? Induction motor, whatever you call it. Yeah, a motor motor. Happy to stand corrected. My point or my thought would still hold true. Check your electrolytic capacitors. You know, you can check for a blown cap. Okay, yeah. The top looks like it's blown up or crowned up. Sure. I'm trying to think where those would be.
00:11:32
Speaker
Yeah, I don't even know where the, where's the like quote unquote motherboard of a FANUC control. Is it up near the screen or is it in with the PLC and servo drives and all that?
Audience Question: Organ Electrical Issue
00:11:43
Speaker
It's everywhere. I don't know. Like, yeah, in the electrical panel, it's mostly relays, contactors, wires, no circuit boards, really. I can't think of any capacitors in there. And then there's whatever's behind the control panel, the box. I could dig in there.
00:11:59
Speaker
If you're having a power surge that's rebooting the computer, caps will help smooth out your current or flow. Caps do blow over time and that's not an easy fix but easier than unknown microchip. Yeah, we saw that on the UMAC machines because ramping up the spindle to 30,000 RPM, those caps were going bad. Yeah. We actually swapped them between the two machines and got it fixed basically.
00:12:30
Speaker
Cool. Wait, are those machines still in Gersonis? They are still in our shop and haven't been turned on for months. I had a couple of people interested, but still no traction on it. I need to get rid of them. I was going to say, this is the uncool friend pushing you, but if they're not gone by pick a date, November 15th, then you got to call the scrapyard. I've been considering that.
00:13:00
Speaker
not considering it, but you know what I mean? I thought I had the same thought. I was like, I hope it doesn't come to that. But yeah, if it has to come to that, like that's a business decision where it's like to just go away. Um,
00:13:12
Speaker
I have a question for either you or the audience. This is super random, but my dad is a theater organist. He plays the organ. He is an organ and it was a hodgepodge retrofit thing. It has a minor-ish problem, which I'll explain it using the correct technical terms, but I don't mean to
00:13:36
Speaker
There's a bunch of weird terminology in the Oregon world. The combination action, which is what moves the stop tabs that control what pipes are playing, there's a couple hundred of them or something. They're all solenoid driven. When you hit a button, it may actuate 75 solenoids at the exact same time. It's a super crispy mechanism.
00:13:59
Speaker
Yeah, well, solid weight. So they're pulling a fair amount of current really quick. So the way this system was designed by this guy who's alive, but not super well, just older age and no longer kind of involved is it has a little computer box thingy that controls it. And then next to it, it has the
00:14:20
Speaker
It has a home built. This guy was a savant, like total genius who built it. So there's no flaws in terms of like what he did. It's just more of a like, hey, it's been 20 years now and or their things change or fail. So it has a, what I think is like a homebrew trickle charger that trickle charges eight
00:14:41
Speaker
two, eight, quantity eight, two volt batteries. They look like giant D batteries, but I think they're like the kind of batteries you might see in a backup of a home security system or security system. So they're wired in series. So that gets you, oddly that gets you 16 volts, but the whole thing is meant to run at 18 volts and it does run, I put a meter on it, it does run at 18 volts, but
00:15:04
Speaker
The combination action is now laggy, so they don't all fire correctly at the same time, which to me makes me think that the battery system is not working great. Basically, it can't handle the current.
00:15:20
Speaker
and the batteries were replaced about 10 years ago, which we're going to buy new ones because that's not that expensive, but it makes me wonder. I just love any input from any folks out there because I super enjoy the technical problem solving side of this. A lot has changed in battery technology in the last 30 years when this system was originally built. So if you need
00:15:46
Speaker
18 volts that can be, I think of it like a cold crank car battery. Like you need a battery system that can dump a lot of current quickly to give enough current to that system. So I put a voltage meter
00:16:01
Speaker
across it, the 18 volts does drop to like 10 or 12 volts when you fire the combination action, which tells me it's not able to quote unquote, keep up. That makes sense. And that's probably fact even when it was brand new, but it has to be enough to keep all the solenoids open and keep and give them enough juice to fire them all. Yeah. Instantly. Maybe that is 10 volts, but you need the 18 volt capacity to do it or something. I don't know. You would assume that 12 volt
00:16:28
Speaker
It's like a volt watts amps, right? It's taking some of those. It's taking enough amps to open every solenoid because they all add up.
00:16:39
Speaker
And then at the voltage, it's just power flow. But it's like, could you use an 18 volt power supply? That's what I'm wondering. Or like the new relative to 30-year-old cordless tool batteries. That's what I'm thinking, like an 18-volt two-watt battery or something. Right, right. But there has to be enough juice, like you said, a capacitor to be able to suck that much power quickly.
00:17:04
Speaker
Well, I think that's what the battery bank is because there's a separate power. The battery bank is like an auxiliary plug-in, so it supplements voltage that's coming in from a more regular source that could never handle that many solids. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe the batteries are acting like capacitors, like power reserves. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, it's been fun to kind of play around and learn. Yeah. Yeah.
00:17:33
Speaker
Well, and in the electric car world, not that I know too much about it, but when Tesla kept upgrading their capacitors, and there was all this talk about super capacitors and stuff, because when you floor it in electric car, all that juice has to go to the motor right now.
00:17:51
Speaker
And so that has to be controlled extremely well. You know, that's like, like a lot of super cheap DIY car swaps, electric swaps are slow because people can't afford to like pay for the battery technology, colors and all that stuff. Um, cause you can build an electric car with 12 volt car batteries and like a forklift motor. Yeah. It'll be electric, but it'll be slow as you know, heck and uh, but it'll work.
00:18:18
Speaker
I've heard some people say that the Tesla battery packs are just 75,000 AA batteries. No, they're 18650. It's the bigger one than that, like a big flashlight battery. Really?
00:18:35
Speaker
I think my car has 4,000 of them, something like that, 4,500 of these batteries, and they're all synced together into these little modules. Maybe, I don't know how many, 100 in a pack or something, and they're all linked together. They're all liquid cooled, I'm pretty sure, because they get hot.
00:18:53
Speaker
Most chart charging and draining so they have to be temperature controlled and they're all monitored individually so that the computer knows like oh this bad yep and you can do this on DIY swaps too because I'm gonna make my 1968 yeah 68 Volvo Amazon I'm gonna make it electric so I haven't done research in a couple months but
00:19:14
Speaker
I walk by it every day and I'm like, oh, I'm so excited to get this car going. It's nice out now. It's warm. And I'm like, this is the year. I'm going to start playing with this car. That's awesome. But yeah, when I was doing research on electrifying that, there are control modules. And you can use literally Tesla battery packs from Crash Teslas. You can just buy them.
00:19:37
Speaker
and they can monitor every single cell because Tesla already has that monitoring technology in the battery pack itself. These management systems plug into that and notice it and monitor it. That's cool. You can say like cell 52 is bad, replace the whole pack or something. Interesting. Yeah, it's cool. That's really cool. I'm going to have a lot of fun with that. To solve your organ problem, I don't know.
00:20:02
Speaker
But that's so cool. I just googled those batteries. They're little like 3.7 volt lithium, but they look like a double A-ish size battery. It's crazy. Yeah. Oh, man. Huh.
00:20:14
Speaker
Yeah, I know I'm behind on the whole electric car world, but we were in an Uber this weekend that was a Model Y, which isn't even the bananas one.
Electric Cars and Personal Projects
00:20:24
Speaker
I've been in a test a couple times before, but those things, the acceleration is ridiculous. It's different than any other car. It's just full power instantly. Yes. Everywhere. Push you back in your seat. Yep.
00:20:40
Speaker
It's crazy. I've had mine for over four years. I'm completely used to it. It's the only car I've driven for the past four years. I'm so spoiled with it. It's enjoyable. Do you still have an operable stick ship Volvo? I do have my yellow Volvo 850, but it hasn't ran since I got my Tesla.
00:21:02
Speaker
Like, literally, you haven't rolled the engine in four years? Yeah. Oh, man. We pushed it across the street because it wouldn't start when we moved to shops across the street. Yes, the brakes are all rested, and it leaked oil when we tried to start it. So we're like, oh, no. Yeah. So I also need to get rid of that. I can't.
00:21:22
Speaker
It's a cool car, but I would a hundred times over rather build the Amazon than even have the yellow car. I need to find somebody who really wants it. It's a really cool, special car. There are people out there that want them.
00:21:36
Speaker
That is going to be the friendly theme for the rest of this year as you and I need to keep each other honest about it's OK to have side projects in like fun elements to life.
Optimizing Shop Inventory
00:21:47
Speaker
But for me, it might be a good transition into talking about the operate. We're calling it the logistics and operations role per years guidance. Yes. Having that person come on board is going to help me tackle some things on my to do list of, hey, there's some work holding stuff, some small machines like our tumbler.
00:22:06
Speaker
Um, and other stuff that is not adding value and playing a role. And I think if I add up all that stuff together, it's got some, you know, low five figures total for sure. Actually maybe more than low five figures of stuff that isn't, we don't need anymore. So I want to get that stuff cleaned up a little bit and you've got to represent what it is to the seller so that they will get paid a fair price. But I'm also not going to like, like it's used stuff. Like I'm not going to be unrealistic about
00:22:33
Speaker
what it's worth, but I want to get that stuff out of here. Yeah. It's kind of that lean mentality of like walk around your shop. If it doesn't directly contribute to your daily operations, it doesn't belong in your building period. And that's a harsh reality that we like our stuff. But I've always had that. Or I could use it one day. Or like, oh yeah, that's that old thing that I can't seem to get rid of. We have a tormach surface grinder that we haven't touched.
00:23:01
Speaker
three plus years, four years. John, sell it. Yeah. We put ours. We had one as well. We weren't using it. We put it up for sale and we found a knife maker who actually wanted it period. Perfect. That's such a win.
00:23:17
Speaker
Yeah, I should do that. Because we have our Okamoto and we have many other techniques of making things flat. We literally just don't use it. It is collecting dust next to the heat treat cell. It's a couple thousand dollars that could be applied to whatever. Done. That's a good point. I didn't think about that.
00:23:38
Speaker
Good. John and I were laughing because we both had Indeed postings up before.
Job Postings and Role Clarity
00:23:45
Speaker
I was originally calling it something like shipping and receiving, but I realized a better role title, which ends up is common. I'm just not familiar with this job market world, but the term logistics and operations coordinator. That sounds fancy, not just for a name, but that sounds like a pretty decent role, not like a minimum wage role.
00:24:07
Speaker
That is absolutely correct. It is far, far minimum wage. We don't know. But I also don't want to misrepresent to somebody. This is a job where you're going to be packing orders, receiving inventory in. You're going to help take the trash out at the end of the day. Everybody hears a valued member of the team. But I don't want to make it sound false and glamorous. That just seems wrong. Yeah. Well, operations coordinator sounds like,
00:24:37
Speaker
Like Angelo is our director of operations. He's in charge of all manufacturing. You know what I mean? That's a director role. That's huge. Sure. Sure. Yeah. So.
00:24:47
Speaker
Cool. So we had four interviews and extended an offer this morning. Sweet. Yep. Which I'm very happy about. That's awesome. Similar. We had six people scheduled. We had two no shows and we had four interviews and put in an offer last night.
00:25:07
Speaker
Oh, hey. Really? Good for you. Awesome. So I'm waiting to hear back. Maybe we have already heard back. I haven't talked to Spencer yet today. So yeah, very excited. Awesome. Cool. And then do you have a, how formal is your onboarding process? It's loose, but it's developing. I think especially in this role, we know what we need to do. Yeah. Yeah.
00:25:34
Speaker
Yeah, similarly, you know, to date, because we've hired machinists, you know, there are people that we've either gotten to know or, you know, it's been more of an organic onboarding process, you know, because it's like, hey, fusion, Haas, machines, Okuma, like this is what we do. Here, it's really totally different because this person is going to take over jobs that have been primarily held by one or two people before balance, but also some pickups from other folks, but
00:26:01
Speaker
It's much more of a defined, potentially siloed role, like your job is to handle work orders, production scheduling, shipping orders, receiving material, tracking levels. So we are being much more deliberate with preparing ahead of time, kind of like job responsibilities, daily tasks, weekly tasks, what we know they're going to need some training on, they'll need training on Lex, they'll need training on how we handle
00:26:27
Speaker
stuff like that, and then it's been a good reminder too that I'm trying to shun every tribal piece of knowledge. Yes. We just want it to be process driven. I hate saying that sounds so lame, but we have these
00:26:47
Speaker
packets of dielectric grease that we include for certain fixture plates. Not all of them, but certain ones. And it's a tribal knowledge thing about which plates get those. And we hadn't put it into
00:26:58
Speaker
Lex, because that is a long story requires a Shopify skew change. It's really weird. But we figured out ways to kind of hack that and it works great. But we never did on these because it gets more complicated. But I was like, hey, we do need to figure that out or revisit it because we need somebody to have a packing list that just says I need to include this or I don't need to include something.
00:27:17
Speaker
Simple. Yeah. It's good. It's good to go. It's good. Yeah. You're preparing for the role, which, which we've been doing in for previous roles too. You know, we spend good time beforehand listing it out. These are the job responsibilities. This is the training they're going to need. This is what they're going to be doing on a daily basis. Like is that enough for a full-time job? You know, once they're trained up kind of thing. Um,
00:27:40
Speaker
if they are sitting around because they don't have enough to do, what else can they do? How do you make sure that that role is full and they're not bored or lazy in any way because there's just visible work to do? Which also really helps with the hiring process because then when you're interviewing, you can clearly explain
00:27:59
Speaker
what to expect, what they can expect because you want a good fit. You want the person to enjoy themselves at your company and you want to enjoy that person at your company and you want everybody to succeed and win. That's the process. I guess this is obvious when you talk about it with the benefit of hindsight.
00:28:20
Speaker
we of the candidates that we interviewed, some had strengths in different areas of the job requirements. And the person that we were sent the offer to had seven years managing logistics for a distribution center. So it's kind of like that's
00:28:36
Speaker
A plus 10 out of 10. Most important specific element of this. Again, it sounds so basic, but it wasn't basic when we were going through this. We realized, okay, forklift experience, we can train and teach. You're on the forklift here.
00:28:56
Speaker
maybe twice a day for five minutes at most. Like it's not a big thing, but it's important to be able to do it. And then we have very light assembly, like putting two screws into a mod vice. It's not, you know, not assembling a V8. It's just that basic stuff that we can teach. Interesting. So
00:29:19
Speaker
Originally, it sounded like you needed somebody to package orders, but the role has grown into somebody. You said work orders. Are they taking incoming orders and creating work orders for the staff to make stuff?
00:29:35
Speaker
Uh, the, the role has never really changed. It was always meant to be that, but to your point, we were, when we were calling it shipping and receiving that doesn't appropriately reflect what it should be. So the way we handle, um, actually it's really super interesting question because the horizontal machine is what partly what makes this such a weird thing. We don't create work orders for parts that come off the horizontal because they just come off every night and we can create
00:30:02
Speaker
You're making to order or you're making to your own schedule not necessarily to customer. Yes and then when there's over when there's an override because some like a distributor puts in a big mod vice order we just have a conversation about hey we need to run more of this tombstone during the day and that has worked totally fine whereas things like let's pick a shape oko fixture plates that get run on a dt.
00:30:28
Speaker
those are batched via a work order. And sometimes it's for inventory, sometimes it's for orders. So this role will look at the, sorry, actually to be specific on Shave Okos, we try to keep inch and metric in stock. They can be hard to keep in stock because sometimes people will come in and buy nine at once. And then so we keep three, I believe, that are in a
00:30:52
Speaker
in a box at the bottom of the stack wrapped in yellow tape. That's our emergency ration that we keep on hand. It is a reminder to trigger a work order, but this person would then create the work order to say, hey, we need more of these. Do you ever use those emergency stock ones either on purpose or accidentally?
00:31:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's fine to sell them. It's just a physical reminder that we found that we need because whether it's a new person or a person that's for whatever reason, if you don't have a more disruptive reminder, it's just too easy to grab them, ship them and then forget to whatever.
00:31:34
Speaker
I guess my question is, do they, sounds dumb, do they get old? Processes change, you might change the way you chamfer and then, oh, yes, those old ones are, we don't use those anymore. You know what I mean? So I don't have a formal, we don't have a formal policy on how you replenish stuff like that. We do, for this kind of reason, have barcodes from Lex that have the option to print out with the date on them.
00:32:00
Speaker
And so that is a good reminder to just sell those out and replace them at some point. Yes, absolutely. Because they're fine now, but a year from now, two years from now, you're like, oh, we don't make them like that anymore. You can't sell them with the new stuff. Oh, they're just garbage. Yeah. And you don't want to get to that point. It's funny you ask this because those
00:32:20
Speaker
are fine to be sold at any point in time to anybody. We've also thought about having more of a reserve emergency stash that's kept in a separate room with a kind of Fort Knox because every once in a while, we'll get a super weird situation where say somebody will call and they want a FedEx overnight for a bunch of stuff. This happened two or three weeks ago for a Florida order. I was like, hey, this is going to be two, three hundred bucks to ship it.
00:32:44
Speaker
Did I stutter? They're just kind of like, okay, you're ready to roll. And so in situations like that, I don't want to mock up an order like that because we're missing something relatively minor. And sometimes if you have, just, I don't know, we're not doing anything like that yet, but it's been on, it's been top of mind to kind of that emergency stash. Yep. And we do that for say all of our knife hardware from the Swiss, all the screws and the pivots and things like that, where we make hundreds or a thousand or two at a time.
00:33:15
Speaker
And you know the guys in the finishing shop they have their stash their inventory they pull from if they run out We also have a hundred or two hundred backup here in the machine shop that's like it's both the trigger to make more and it's also like a
00:33:30
Speaker
Everybody's safe. There's always inventory. Nobody's going to run out because if we run out, we're hooped. We can't make product. No, for sure. It's no fun to scramble and be like, okay, tear down that job and set up this job because we need that part on the lathe that we couldn't plan properly. Angelo's put a lot of effort into the planning of that machine and the other machines to make sure that that never really happens.
00:33:55
Speaker
I'll tell you, keeping an extra drill index set that's got tape around it and then keeping our... We have the Mari tool sets of ER16 and ER32, the two sizes that we use. Those sets stay as emergency sets intact and on top of those, each set is a little printout label
00:34:17
Speaker
in a rubber band paper that say, I took one of these, the size, put this on John's desk. And so I don't, anyone is welcome to use one at any point in time, but when you take that out, I don't care if you take it out to use it for 20 minutes. The fact is it left the emergency bin. You need to, we need to reorder one because the odds of it making back it into the emergency bin are approximately zero. Yeah, that's good.
00:34:49
Speaker
I had a interesting night last night. You do tell. I posted some stuff on my Instagram. So I came back to the shop. I was in and out of the shop like three times yesterday, but I came back late. I think it was five or something. And then I'm working on the Willyman and I hear the current thump. Oh, I saw. And I'm like, oh, no, that's not good. And then I look over and the machines off.
00:35:17
Speaker
When the current crashes, it overloads one of the axes, the B or the C usually, and then the lights turn off and the controller stays on, but the machine just goes into shutdown mode. It's basically like a hard E-stop, even worse than an E-stop because it's an overload. That's fine, but it's never fun to see the lights off in the enclosure. I go look over and a tool had
00:35:41
Speaker
gone into the part so hard that it overloaded the axis and crashed in Z.
00:35:51
Speaker
And so I'm like, this machine's been running for 29 hours nonstop. It ran this palette 10 hours ago. We reloaded it. We fixed it up. So OK, is the tool offset the wrong length? Is the palette loaded wrong? No, palette's loaded right. Tool offset is fine. Where's the offset? And on the current, I've been doing a lot of what's called a datum shift. So it's a fixture coordinate offset.
00:36:21
Speaker
to shift it, you know, you probe a hole, you shift it off a thou or something like that because it needs to shift a little bit. So on the height and they have this datum table, which is basically an Excel spreadsheet that can give you XYZ, ABC offset, but like as many as you want, 10 different ones or whatever.
00:36:38
Speaker
So I knew that this operation was using that because it was probing a hole, shifting it over like a thou, whatever, wherever the handle is in space. So I opened up that file, X was off, two thou, Y was off, two tenths, Z was negative 0.622 inches. So like five eighths of an inch negative offset on Z. And I'm like, nothing even uses the offset. What is writing to the Z offset? Nothing.
00:37:06
Speaker
And so I was extremely confused, um, dismayed, pissed off, like everything. And I'm like, I needed to go home, uh, hang out with the family at dinner and things like that. So I'm like, I'm going to go home and I'm going to come back like eight, nine o'clock. And then I was here from,
00:37:25
Speaker
9 till 1 AM. I got it figured out pretty quickly and then I played on the Willaman for those extra few hours but I still don't know where that number came from which really annoys me and I don't know what wrote to that exact field that caused the problem.
00:37:44
Speaker
I went through all my logic, all the previous programs. I'm like, I have a history of every program that ran right before this. I looked through every one of those. It's driving me insane. I can't figure out what wrote to that field. However, I was able to fix the problem by basically clearing that table before that operation so that when it probes the whole, it only writes new data to that.
00:38:09
Speaker
Okay. X, Y, that's it. Sure. So, whatever was writing to it will get cleared before it crashes basically, which is a safe way to do it. I do it on some of my stuff. I need to do it more often, you know, like, but yeah, that's not fun.
00:38:25
Speaker
Yeah, but still WT like what you wrote five eight six twenty two to this table. I don't know. Could it be a fat finger in code or do you think it's like truly some crazy weird bug?
00:38:45
Speaker
There must be a logical answer is where I'm at. Um, I'm just not seeing it yet and I might never. What's awesome is razor here. I mean, did you post a new program lately? Nope.
00:38:58
Speaker
Not, no, not in the past two days that it's been running constantly. Does any other Grumsmell employee use that machine? Angelo, but to run production. Yeah, but like kind of when it was like, Hey, no swords down. No, no, but like, did, did you type this in this datum table? He doesn't look at it. Okay. He doesn't even get to it. Yeah, really. I mean, he can, but he's not familiar enough with it. Um, so that's not it.
00:39:29
Speaker
What? Yeah. Is there a key logger? I guess the Kuma has sort of a history key logger thing. Really? Remember when I typed the- Yeah, you did mention it. But Jesus had it myself because I thought I wrote a B offset to say offset 120. That's like G56 or something. I thought I wrote offset 120 to have a B angle of 180. And then when I was looked up, it was still zero. I was like, oh my God, was the cursor like the spreadsheet?
00:39:57
Speaker
work an offset table on a different offset and I just wrote a different offset to have a B value and I was like that's, it's like the worst thing ever because it's like I just did something that's probably gonna cause a crash but who knows when the crash is gonna happen. Yeah. And so I figured out the key history to see what changed. I kind of think I'd notice something like that. I haven't heard of it but maybe, maybe it does. But I don't think it's a manual input at all because it's an exact like 62215.
00:40:26
Speaker
you know, like, yeah, so nobody typed that in. So something wrote to it. And it's like in the folder structure that I have it hide and hide. So I have, you know, Rask and then a subfolder Rask handles subfolder Rask top side handles. And inside that last folder Rask top side handles is the datum table for topside handles only. Blades will have their own folder and their own datum table. And it's like,
00:40:56
Speaker
Nothing would write to that topside handles other than programs in that folder, theoretically. Yeah, yeah. The tool was in a Rego fix? Yeah. So it didn't break the tool? Yeah, eighth inch tool, totally gone.
00:41:12
Speaker
I took up the Rego Fix call. The face of it was smashed up a bit. It had a tiny little ding in it. I'm like, let me take an eighth inch barrel lap and just barrel up the bore and see what happens. This is a finishing tool. It's like whatever.
00:41:28
Speaker
It really does. It finished, passes the pivot head bore on the rask handles. It does like 12 seconds of work on every rask, like no big deal. So anyway, so I barrel lapped it out. I felt great. And I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to keep using this. This is a $200 call it. I don't need to throw it out right now. Sure. It's fine. It's good.
00:41:50
Speaker
Yeah, huge hit to the bride, huge hit to the, I mean, decent bump to the current, no fun. I ran the kinematic, ran the laser calibration. It's good to do. Do you know what orientation the B axis was in? Yeah, so B was 90 degrees so tilted to the side.
00:42:14
Speaker
how far out. Fairly close. Okay, good. To the center of rotation, actually. Yeah. Now that I think about it. So I think it was this, maybe the C axis that kicked out first, probably one of the weakest axis, the B is really big, really strong, the C is much smaller. So I think C kicks out usually first and then
00:42:36
Speaker
overloads and says, I should not be machining right now. So I'm just gonna shut off, which is good. And then you know, you you go in there, you see it's crashed. I'm like, is it still under pressure? You know, is the spindle still like, in the crash position? Oh, because it stops, of course, in that, right? Oh, yeah. And so I was able to rotate the C away a little bit. And then I felt the spindle spindle feels fine. Eventually did a spindle warm up sounds fine.
00:43:03
Speaker
Okay, it's probably fine. It's not the first crash I've had, but never fun.
00:43:09
Speaker
Yeah, I hear you. I'm sorry. So okay. So uncool that you're running basically locked down production. Like what? Yeah. Um, but lesson to learn anytime. And I learned this somewhere else on the current. The other day, um, anytime you're screwing with things with programming, like adding a fixture offset or probing a hole and having it shift two tents, but maybe it'll shift two inches for some stupid reason.
00:43:36
Speaker
Always, always, always, always put a clamp on it. Put a limit, a tolerance range. Yeah, yeah. If it's over, it's supposed to be two tenths. If it's over two thou, like something is wrong. Yes. Flag an alarm, put the pallet away, do something, do something. And it's a lot more work to do that programming wise. But oh my gosh, the downside is so much worse.
00:43:59
Speaker
Yeah. From a philosophical standpoint, I'm hyper rigid about how we adjust things. We do do some shifts like that, but we never do them as incremental because incrementals over time can grow and walk on you. It always gets reset to a home value. Fusion lets you do collared ranges, which is really nice. When you're hand coding stuff, yeah, I hear you.
00:44:23
Speaker
Cause on hide nine, it's, it's very doable. Like I can have pop-up messages come on the screen. I can have it do things. It's just work. It's just more effort to do for every single instance, but I need to. Yeah.
Experience with Bamboo 3D Printer
00:44:38
Speaker
Oh man. I'm sorry.
00:44:40
Speaker
Well, we should, I guess, with our unspoken 45-minute limit. But we got our bamboo printer. Yes. I was on the road. Alex installed it. I came in on Sunday with no training, printed to it, fell in love with it already. I printed multiple things to it. It is unbelievably wonderful. I threw up some Instagram clips, and I have never been so inundated with DMs from people. Really? Either saying that they loved it or saying, please do a review on it. Because look,
00:45:09
Speaker
these days, I don't exactly consider myself like the go to guy for every manufacturing related topic on like, there's so many people creating content out there. God bless them. Yeah, it makes YouTube a great place. But so many people were asking for their input. And so we just put a video up Wednesday two days before this podcast airs. And our my perspective is not the uber technical three printing experts review. My review is
00:45:33
Speaker
A guy who runs a machine shop that wants 3D printer that anybody can use and not have to become an expert. Yes. And that's why I love this printer. It just works and it's fast. Cool. And I don't care about the speed for bragging rights or production quantities. I care about the speed because it just lets you iterate quicker. It's wonderful. Yep. Oh my God. So good to have one. Looking forward to watching that. That's awesome. Glad you like it. What are you up to today?
00:45:58
Speaker
Uh, so Willeman works after I got the current fix last night. I like, you know what? I'm here. I've wanted to work on the Willeman all day. I've been taken apart, like taken away from different things. So I'm like, I'm just going to stay late and I'm just going to play out my Willeman. Um, once I got the power figured out, like tool changer works. So I'm making parts. And, uh, last night I got a couple of parts out and today I'm just going to run more.
00:46:24
Speaker
And this kind of test setup part that I'm working on, I want to be done with that today. And then I can move on to making this aga pen clip, which I've already started programming. So that's next, next. That's like days away.
00:46:38
Speaker
Is your Nakamura cam close up to where you can just copy a lot of it over? A lot of it, yeah. Or at least strategies and some of the sketches that we did to drive toolpaths and things like that. Yeah. But I'm doing it a little bit different on the Wilhelmin because I can. Yeah, sure. On the Nakamura, when we make the saga clip, we have a hardened ID expanding clamp in a 5C collet.
00:47:07
Speaker
thingy in the sub spindle. Yeah. So it goes into the ID hole of the clip expands, pulls it out. Uh, that broke the other day and it was the last one we had just to call it the, the ID expanding part. Um, we had an oopsie with a broken 16 cent mill and I broke that. So we had no more. So I ordered that. So I'm like, man, if I had clips running on the Willowman right now, like,
00:47:34
Speaker
we'd be okay. So motivation. Yeah, it is good motivation. I did some cam or the weekend and, uh, I think I can have a clip, at least cutting metal on a clip by the end of the week. Um, it's me starting to play with tool pass and things like that. So that's my goal. Go be a surgeon. Yes. That's, I think that's what I can do today. Good. Cool man. I'll see you. All right.