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#242 INCREDIBLE TRADE SHOW FINDS! EMO MILANO 2021 and CMTS 2021
216 Plays4 years ago
Topics:
- Okuma TMAC Tool Monitoring & Tracking - POCKET SIZED INDUSTRIAL 5-AXIS MACHINE BY CHIRON - Automation Systems (HERMLE RS-1) - Heat Shrink Automation Cell - Zeiss Microscope - Robots VS Cobots (FANUC, KUKA, & UR) - PODCAST CONTEST WINNER ANNOUCEMENT! - KERN Micro HD - The Benefits of Hydrostatic - Grimsmo searches for more 3-32 through-coolant drill bit - Troubleshooting Bowed Parts
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Transcript
Introduction and Trade Show Attendance
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining Episode 242. My name is John Grimsmough. And my name is John Saunders. And this is the fantastical podcast where John and John talk about business and manufacturing and the tool shows we may or may not have visited and etc.
00:00:19
Speaker
So we skipped last week. I kind of feel bad, but also I'm totally fine with it. But for good reason, because we both got to go to some pretty cool tool shows, although I think yours was a lot bigger than mine.
00:00:32
Speaker
I'll tell you, it was great. I say half jokingly that I snuck over there. I wasn't sure it was going to happen, but was
Experiences at EMO and CMTS
00:00:43
Speaker
able to. Where like explain where'd you go? I went to emo. So emo is the sort of European version of IMTS. My understanding is that it's sort of IMTS emo and then there's one in Japan, Jip Jipmaw for. Oh, yeah.
00:00:58
Speaker
Those are the kind of three big global trade shows and I went to emo a few years back, actually four years ago, and it usually goes Hanover, Germany, Hanover, Germany, then Italy. So it's a six year kind of rotation favoring two years in Germany. But this one is in Milan.
00:01:17
Speaker
And for sure I wanted to go, if I'm being totally honest, I also just wanted to travel a little again. It's been a year and a half with COVID and I was excited to go out. I wanted to look and see some specific things for sure, for Saunders, kind of for what we do, but it was also just that breath of fresh air to go see people again, see machining, walk around. And it was, satisfied all of those things. Yep, absolutely.
00:01:46
Speaker
That's awesome. And I got to do the same thing because the small Canadian, the CMTS was the same week. So last Wednesday, instead of doing our podcast, I went to CMTS and spent the day there and it was just fantastic. It's a smaller show typically because it's Canada only, but they said it was about a quarter the size of what it normally is.
00:02:08
Speaker
Wow. It was cozy. There were only a few machine tool vendors there, but lots of little vendors, and that's what I was interested in. I'm not looking at big tools right now. I'm looking at microscopes and deburring solutions and cleaning and all kinds of stuff. As you said, I haven't been to a tool show since
00:02:28
Speaker
that show two years ago and it was just really nice to chat with people, get back in the industry, get back out there and see some really cool stuff live in person and nerd out with guys who know what they're talking about or are trying to sell you whatever.
Post-COVID Trade Show Landscape
00:02:43
Speaker
You know, completely, totally. It was great. I have not been to the Emo one before, or see the Milan one before, but it was clear that it was reduced in size. And it's a weird, it's a weird times. I mean, I think it's not no secret that with the last IMTS before COVID even hit, you had started to see a lot of companies just change how they were gonna market to people.
00:03:09
Speaker
I think DMG was one that comes to mind where they sort of said, hey, we're going to just run our own mini trade show and we can afford to pay people to come or cover travel costs to come and get dedicated DMG attention, which I totally get for both the customer who wants DMG attention and the DMG who wants the customers' undivided attention. And so many others, like so many of the cutting tools backed out, dropped out. And I was kind of cynically bearish on trade shows because of
00:03:39
Speaker
some of the shenanigans of trade shows and the good grief, the costs of them. But I'll tell you with COVID and the desire to get together and have excuses to meet people and see people, it's changed that a little.
Tool Monitoring and Adaptive Cutting
00:03:53
Speaker
It's a shame they're still so expensive.
00:03:55
Speaker
So there were, it was awkward because there were some, um, just no show booths, which like, remember IMTS, you never would have walked by it, seen an empty bear concrete floor with a little cardboard placard that sadly says the person's name who just didn't show up. Yep. And the booths are not cheap. It could be like a hundred grand for a booth at some of these shows, I think.
00:04:15
Speaker
Yes. I mean, you think about the booth cost, the rigging cost, the food expenditures, and then all your staff. It's for sure six figures, if not seven for the bigger companies. Yeah. One of the bigger companies told me they absolutely spend over a million dollars on their booth each year or two years or whatever. And I was like, whoa.
00:04:35
Speaker
Yeah. Well, what, you know, look, what's the magic answer? I don't think anybody listening is like, Oh, I love zoom. I love zoom demos or I love webinars. Um, and trade shows can be a little bit much, but it's like you said, I mean, it's the big, the big companies normally anchor it, um, in a good way. And then it's fun to walk around to see who's got some little boring insert, you know, booth or a ceramic media or whatever. I actually had a great conversation with, uh,
00:05:05
Speaker
We'll come back to that. But Karen Engineering about tool stuff. Go ahead, though. You were going to say something. They do the tool monitoring tracking kind of stuff. TMac. Oh, yeah. I've seen some of their small demos. So we bought our Akuma. Actually, it was supposed to come today, but we pushed it back two weeks so the conveyor ships with it, which is easier. Yeah. So we opted not to get TMac, which I hope I don't regret. I think we can add it because
00:05:35
Speaker
It's not cheap. I thought, we're going to have so much to learn, a new machine, a new process, a new control. Let's not bolt on one more thing. But holy cow, I had the chance to sit down with their sales guy, Ryan. It's very believable in a way you would love. It uses hardware sensors to interact with the machine tool.
00:06:01
Speaker
It doesn't rely on the control itself. And it can learn your toolpaths, which is what I love. For you and for me, we're doing enough. Take the fixture plates when we drill and tap holes. That's a very repeatable production process. We do tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of holes a month. So you can put the software into the learn mode. And that way, you don't have to sit there and think about, well, what's the minimum and what's the maximum spindle load I want to happen?
00:06:30
Speaker
And you can start to tie all the data together because you want to track. I don't want to just track min and max, but like, what's that microsecond spike when a tap inserts, enters the whole or reverses? Well, it can kind of handle that in the background. And then you can start to track where across the tool life, because I don't know because we don't check it. We don't have an infrastructure to check it yet. You know, whereas a drill goes from the first hole to the hundredth hole to the thousandth hole to the three thousandth hole.
00:06:58
Speaker
Is it wearing such that the hole gets smaller or is it wearing such that the hole gets slightly bigger? Well, we could now, I think with the software, build in a database that would say,
00:07:08
Speaker
And when you're done drilling probe 10 holes across the plate, store that in a database and across 50 plates, you'll start to see that where the size difference, because the size difference of that hole, I suspect has a lot to do with tap life or what you're doing to the tap and then checking tap life and doing it in a way that lets us maximize both drill and tap. Right now we cut them off.
00:07:29
Speaker
and a number that we're happy with because the consequences of failure stink.
Findings and Innovations from Trade Shows
00:07:33
Speaker
That's really cool. So it's adding sensors and it can integrate probe data and results from that and also calculate.
00:07:42
Speaker
The probe stuff I'm kind of making up, I think their software would let us do that, but what their software really does is intelligent spin-a-load monitoring, tool-like monitoring, building true data to look at when you need to rotate it, insert what's happening. They showed an example of
00:08:00
Speaker
a casting that was loaded incorrectly and the face mill came into it exceeded the high end range and it was able to stop the machine tool. This is a trade show demo, but I, I, so I don't, I hope what he's saying was correct, but he was saying it was able to stop the face mill before at 3000 RPMs before it rotated into the next pocket of insert pocket, which that seems a little aggressive, but, um, the idea that you.
00:08:27
Speaker
you can build these collared ranges. So you have your data line of your tool path where you can build the warning zone and then you can build the like critical stop zone. We talked a lot about small tool monitoring because on our machines to date, there's no ability that I know of in a Haas to check tool load for micro tooling, engraving small drilling. And he was saying that they really have no hesitation handling tool load monitoring on a one millimeter tool.
00:08:57
Speaker
Really? Yeah. Wow. Because I know on any of my machines, if I'm cutting with a 1 16th inch end mill, my spindle load is what it takes to spin the spindle with no load. When you start cutting, there's no extra spindle percentage. It just cruises at 7% or whatever it is for full RPM. Yeah.
00:09:18
Speaker
The culture of that company, that software seems very in line with the level of nerdiness that we like. I love it. Yeah, data, data. Right. It may not be like the super easiest. This was just, again, from sitting down in a booth. But it looks a little bit clunky, but man, what you get out of it is phenomenal. The other thing I asked him was,
00:09:41
Speaker
We want this, we were trying to standardize everything. We're always trying to improve our processes, the way we make plates, the way we fix your work, hold them, machine them. And we've noticed sometimes we have variations in cutting size of plates, maybe only 50,000 or 80,000, but I don't want to air cut around a plate that has 200 linear inches. But I also don't want to take a first cut that's way too aggressive. And I asked him about this and he just smiled. He's like, so we have this thing called, they call it adaptive cutting, but
00:10:09
Speaker
Basically, if it doesn't, it uses a feedback loop to drive the machine tool at a higher feed rate until it's satisfied as the spindle load you're looking for. OK. So if you're walking around the part, you're like, air, OK, let's go faster. Air, let's go faster. Air, let's go faster. And there it is. OK, back to normal. Yes. Wasn't clear if that's like the intended use. I think it was more like, hey, if you're just taking a real light cut for some reason, it can go ahead and
00:10:36
Speaker
increase your cut speed to get you up to what you'd like. It's kind of like the adaptive thing in fusion. It's like we're trying to maintain a constant chip thickness, but it would totally work for what we're trying to do. So I care a lot less about G zeroing effectively around a plate as a safety pass. And then it drops back down to the normal feed rate. That's pretty neat. Right?
Robotics in Manufacturing
00:10:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:00
Speaker
So how was CMTS? You said there weren't machine tool copies there? Yeah, but Sura was there. So they were doing their metzirs and FANUC robot drills.
00:11:09
Speaker
other Nakamura's and things like that, all stuff I've seen. So it wasn't that super interesting. I was going there with a couple things in mind. I wanted to look at microscopes and at the Elliott booth, they had a Zeiss microscope with a TV output and everything. So I'm like, Oh, this is really interesting. So I had a great time with him, sold me on it right away. It was literally the first thing I saw at the show and I was like, Yeah, okay, I'll get this. So I'm like, Oh man, this shows gonna be expensive. I'm already spending money.
00:11:35
Speaker
Is it a stereo mic that you look through like an Oculus? It's got that. It's got a beautiful, very quality display, even higher quality image than my Leica microscope, I think, like my impression of it. But yeah, stereo microscopes, you get the two eyeballs, and then it's also got a camera inside a digital output that also has two lenses or something and like makes the image look 3D. It's really cool. Yeah.
00:12:04
Speaker
And it actually comes with basic measuring software on the screen. So you draw a circle over a hole, and it tells you this hole is such and such big. Really? Yeah. It doesn't see the shadows and see your contrast. So it's not capturing the hole. You have to draw a circle.
00:12:25
Speaker
in order to do that, but you zoom in a bunch and then you draw your circle. And if you can draw really well, then it's close. So he said, that's pretty cool. People like that. That's effectively similar to an optical comparator. I mean, it's still up to you to decide where you're going to line up the line and the edge. So I don't look back on that badly as if it's not a CMM, it's joint contact measurement. You know what I mean?
00:12:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's not why I want it. I don't need it for measuring, but it might be one of those things. It's like we actually use this all the time. What I really just want is I use my stereo microscope all the time, but I want to show people what I'm looking at, like guys in the shop or whatever. Or I think it will be easier for the guys in the shop to use the microscope if they just put their hands under it, not their face in front of it. Everybody's got different eyeball widths between, so you've got to adjust the things.
00:13:17
Speaker
It takes a while to get comfortable under the stereo microscope, like to be able to zoom it right and get your depth of field perfectly. And I am really good at it because I use it so much, but some of the other guys in the shop aren't. So just thinking a big 24-inch monitor or something would just be amazing. So yeah, I'll be getting that, just waiting for them to get back to me. I was going to say, what's ballpark on that? About $5,000, I think. Got it. Yeah, I think that was Canadian, so maybe less US.
00:13:46
Speaker
I went, I don't know, a year or two ago, kind of knee deep into this with the, is it not Scientific America? There's some company like that that makes a bunch of other microscopes. Seth Medor from Liberty gave me some really good input and there's other, some good information out there. And it gets complicated quick about what sort of like ocular zoom you want and flipping relief. I don't know the terms off the top of my head. And then how are you handling the digital side of it? And it's kind of funny.
00:14:14
Speaker
I'm not sure yours is going to be amazing. We've just ended up sticking with those $100 Coolatron Amazon Junkers. I know they're not. There's ice insanities, but there's only the little mini TV screen. It's super convenient to use. It does what we need. Yeah, I've got two of them and I never use it.
00:14:35
Speaker
It's so weird. I don't know if it's because it's, it's clunky and I have to turn it on and or... Yeah, maybe I should. But I just use the Zeiss or the Leica that I have all the time.
00:14:50
Speaker
Yeah. It is like a friend of mine has a pair of Swarovski binoculars. Have you ever looked at those? No. Another friend who's kind of a jokester was like, he looked at him, he's like, this is like SCX for your eyes. Yeah. Somehow looking at a field, somehow it looks better through Swarovski glass than it does with your... In the real life. Yeah. It's incredible.
00:15:13
Speaker
Well, maybe that's what I don't like about the cheap Amazon digital ones is because they have that kind of pixelated granular image to it. Whereas when you look under the optical Leica, it is crystal clear. So I wonder what your digital output like is it 4k? Because when you watch 4k now, like if you pull up a sports game, it's incredible. I don't know what they say in K, but I think it has an eight megapixel camera.
00:15:40
Speaker
whenever that means. Sounds like a lot. When you tell me 8 megapixels, I think of like 2003 Sony marketing for their pocket cameras.
00:15:50
Speaker
What else do you see at CMTS? I really wanted to look at robot arms, both the UR and the big companies, FANUC and KUKA and stuff. KUKA had a really amazing booth and I talked to them a lot about kobots, collaborative robots versus an industrial robot. They have a kobot that is very similar to the UR and they also have their industrial ones. They said the industrial robots are significantly cheaper.
00:16:14
Speaker
than a cobot. But you do have to add the guarding and either a cage around it or light sensors or whatever. But he's like, don't be scared of that. He's like, a cobot is great if you have to stand next to it all of the time. If you need that accessibility. If you don't and you can guard it, then it's almost always the better solution. So it kind of opened my eyes to that.
00:16:38
Speaker
thinking machine tending kind of application. Then I talked to a company that reps the UR robots a lot too. Seems super capable. I know a lot of people that load their machines with the UR's.
00:16:54
Speaker
personal preference, you know, how much you want to spend, how much time do you want to spend integrating? Do you want to be able to do it all yourself or have an expert come in and just do it for you? There's a company out of Quebec that does a turnkey carousel pallet loader with a KUKA robot that's like in its own cage and you just roll it up to your machine and they integrate it. And I'm like, okay, I need a price on that because as fun as it would be to integrate it myself and to write all the programs and to, you know,
00:17:22
Speaker
tweak around with it for a month, I'm very curious what a plug and play would look like. Metal Quest, the awesome tour we did in Nebraska, I think you would relate to them a lot with your passion and personality. Totally vertically integrated, does all their own integrations, FANUC stuff. The difference is they have a whole team around that. They have full-time people.
00:17:47
Speaker
how you do your first one at least. Yeah, exactly. Which is, you know, it's amazing. And I honestly, I would love the challenge to do it, but time versus effort. Like I, the more I spend making
00:18:02
Speaker
stuff that other people could make, the more I realize how much more progress we'd make if I can make only the things that I can make, new products or really specific things. So I'm really opening my eyes to outsourcing more effort or sharing it with the team as well, even if it costs money.
Cost and Efficiency in Robot Integration
00:18:23
Speaker
And that's something that's been very difficult lesson for me to learn because you and I were bootstrappers, we're cheap in a lot of ways. And we just like to do a cool project. But man, if that slows down everything else, it doesn't always work.
00:18:38
Speaker
The Haas has, I think they've had their kind of FANUC robot bolt-on arm a little while. It's not brand new, but this was the first time I saw it at Emo. And what's interesting is to Haas's credit, it's like, hey, it's $50,000. Here's the price. It's turnkey. It literally just, you roll it up to the front of your Haas machine and it just clamps onto any new-ish machine. Haas already has, it's like funny how good they are about thinking that they already have AutoDoor on most of their machines.
00:19:08
Speaker
And here's the ringer. You don't even have the fanic jog pendant, which is very difficult in my opinion, we had our robo drill, you had the machine control, you had the fanic pendant control, it was very difficult to know which was which, what we needed to do where.
00:19:25
Speaker
Um, and some of that's my own inexperience. Some of it's also legitimately true from what we've heard. It's just very confusing. Um, the thing I think I'm great about cobots is I don't know. This is true with industrial robots is you can, you can literally hand move them in like a move mode where you grab that where you want to programming. Your way points is perhaps a lot easier than the way you have to jog with the Fannock pendant. I found just really difficult, but.
00:19:57
Speaker
I'm trying to remember if they showed you push a button and you actually move the robot with your hand. I think you could. The robot or the real robot? The real robot. Yeah, the industrial one. Awesome. That's cool.
00:20:11
Speaker
on their pendant, they had literally a space mouse bolted to the side of it, or like hacked into it. It was really cool. So there was the knob. And I asked him, I was like, is that a space mouse? And he goes, yes, sort of. But it's built in. So you can jog using that, which I played with it. And I jogged from two locations. And I'm like, yeah, this is easy.
00:20:29
Speaker
Jackpot. Because you have six axis of rotation, you can twist it, you can do everything. I was like, yeah, this is not hard at all. Sweet. I hit the gripper and I picked up something and I moved it to another location and I dropped it and I was like, okay, yeah, this is not hard. Oh, that's cool. It really opened my eyes to industrial robots.
00:20:49
Speaker
It seems like the cost is the same. It might be the same cost to integrate a cobot full out with all the options or an industrial robot with guarding and things like that. It's going to cost you $40,000 to $80,000, whatever it is. Even the bigger URs are not cheap
Automation and Zero Point Systems
00:21:08
Speaker
at all.
00:21:09
Speaker
I've heard the URs or Cobots potentially wear. I don't know if it's like an actual wear item or whether that's more just people that have used them over years. Whereas you think about the little fan of robot armor, KUKA or ABB. I mean, those things are the definition of- It's a machine. Yeah. Oh, and at full speed, they're ridiculous. It's cool, right? Yeah.
00:21:34
Speaker
Is this Wilhelmin unloading? The Wilhelmin that I'm sure you've turned on by now? Maybe today, actually. Okay. No, this would be for the mori. Oh. Yeah, keep that thing loaded and running more. Interesting. Loading pallets? Yeah, small pallets. Interesting. So you have to get it moved to a zero point system?
00:22:01
Speaker
Yes, because right now we're kind of we load up the table and the doors closed for a long time.
00:22:08
Speaker
And then if we run it during the day, we have no access to those finished parts. It drives me crazy that there's finished parts on the table that we could flow through and process. Sure. And that's, I see that with the current now, like the current flows through pallets fairly quickly. So we have access to them when they're done. So on the Maury with a robot system, I would have literally one small six by six palette on the table at a time and the robot would swap it out and then it would be done. And you just, it would flow parts better.
00:22:39
Speaker
You're making four big orange pallets right now in the morning? Yeah. And so you do them all at once, meaning when the tool 16 is out, it works on all four pallets. No, it makes one entire pallet at a time, then it skips to the next pallet, and then it moves to the next. You could optimize, but it's easier this way for me. No, that's even better for what I was thinking, which is why don't you just program in an option stop
00:23:02
Speaker
or a variable toggle so that when you're literally like on our host, we could put a light switch on there into an input IO, which means if that switches up, it's going to pause or even email you when it's between pallets. But that wait time adds up fast of an M0 wait time where the machine's just kind of sitting there waiting for somebody to attend to it, whereas a robot would unload it for you.
00:23:30
Speaker
And not only that, but I want to run, I mean, if I could run the Maury 24 seven, I would, you know, not that I quite have enough work for it yet, but, uh, I need to take work off of the current and put it onto the Maury, which I hope this would help with that. Help me out here.
00:23:47
Speaker
If the mori is done with the palette and it blinks or emails or plays a song, walking over to it while its options stop, let's say you do that within a few minutes, and then undo a fixture, drop a new one on, which you should be able to do that.
00:24:09
Speaker
Pretty scalable, sustainable, et cetera, no? Probably. Versus 50 to 80 grand for a robot that's going to mess up operator access and frankly, it's not going to be easy. I mean, just be blunt. Of course. Yep. Guess I haven't thought about it like that, which is good to think about. Sometimes you fall down the rabbit hole if you're like, it'd be so sick if it had this. Maybe I'm there.
00:24:33
Speaker
having the robot on the current and having it auto load and just schedule and you can prep all of the work ahead of time and you don't have to be there. It just runs and runs and runs. That is so enticing that I want it everywhere.
00:24:50
Speaker
If palette one is done on the mori and it's in the middle of palette two, if you hit option stop, the next time it does a tool change, it'll wait for you. At that point, couldn't you open the door and grab the palette? We certainly do that as necessary, but it's too variable. I don't like it.
00:25:10
Speaker
Well, go back and think, though, to the basics of what you're trying to solve. It's kind of one of those red flags. If you don't see a lot of people in the shops that we've toured spending 100 grand, because you're going to have to buy zero point systems, you're going to buy secondary pallets, you're going to have to do blow offs, part cleaning. I don't need to be a pessimist because this stuff is super cool, but you're going to be at the point now where you could buy
00:25:33
Speaker
you spent a hundred grand and then more is worth a hundred grand. So wait a minute, for 200 grand, you might actually have a small automation style machine period. Yeah, I've certainly thought a lot about that. There's a lot of options to do that. It's
00:25:48
Speaker
I don't want to say putting a robot on the more is like putting lipstick on a pig, but you're right. There could be another plug and play solution that's a different machine. Do I want to get a different machine? Do I want to integrate something else? I have a system that works. Yeah, you're spending more money onto something that might not be ideal, but it works. I don't know. There's a lot to think about. Sometimes when it comes to spending money on new things, you kind of make a choice and you just go for it.
00:26:17
Speaker
The Mitiko makes those shuttle tables. I don't think that's easily retrofittable nor the right fit for you here at all. There's zero points with robots. I just think about rewinding over the years where you and I have been stressed about things. It's like the current is built around a whole ecosystem of palletized work holding fifth axis or five axis. It can clean the parts, dump them, check them. Man, the second you have a chip,
00:26:39
Speaker
in between your pallet and your part. Oh, man. I had that problem on the curtain a lot until I fixed it with wash down routines in between. Right. Yeah. I mean, these are avoidable problems if you're clever and plan it out. But yeah, there's tricks to automation that will mess you up until you fix them.
New Machining Technologies
00:27:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:03
Speaker
The surprise cool thing at Emo, it's kind of what's new in the world of machining, not really a ton that's crazy in three axis or four axis or five axis. There's just, I don't know, it's because of where the industry is or whether it's because of the fact that you and I aren't
00:27:20
Speaker
We've been to trade shows now for five or six years, so it's not quite as awesomely mind-blowing as it used to be. I will tip of the hat, though, to Sharon. They have a... They call it the Micro 5, I think. We got to film it, so we'll have a video out on all of emote. It is... I don't know. It's probably the size of...
00:27:47
Speaker
I mean, you could almost fit in the backseat of your car. I mean, it's tiny. It is a 60 or 80,000 RPM spindle HSK 15. What? The tapers look like, you know, you're the size of a thimble. It has a, I think it was an eight position tool changer and a four
00:28:08
Speaker
three or four pallet ATC for work holding. They had a watchmaking demo on it where they were machining the face of a, or what do you call the watch body, if you will. And so five axis, and that's totally what it is. Like dental work, watchmaking work, kind of that small, high surfacing, high RPM. I'm assuming based on
00:28:31
Speaker
the Chiron brand, that this is a very well-built, accurate machine. And I've just seen nothing like it. It was just really cool to think about. You could totally, not with saving the price, have this thing in your living room. Wow. Well, I've always wondered when somebody is going to come out with a pocket-sized, real industrial five-axis mill automated.
00:28:55
Speaker
Yeah, PocketNC, have you seen that on Instagram? A little bit, yeah. Do you see the door up movement? That wasn't PocketNC, that was inventor, captain, guy, right? That's the founder of PocketNC. Is it really? I didn't know that. Matt, I believe is his name. Well, that makes a lot more sense. I've had a couple of conversations with him. That's supposed to be pretty legit. I mean, a total step up from the PocketNC that we all know. For sure.
00:29:23
Speaker
Really? Yeah. Okay. That, that ties a lot together. That's awesome. Yeah. Here. I thought it was just a guy in his garage that, you know, is building the dream machine. Yeah. That's even better. Perfect. I mean, it's still a guy in his garage building his dream machine, but
00:29:39
Speaker
Yeah. No, I give him a lot of credit. I don't know him super well, but man, like he and I were talking at one point and he kind of realized he didn't want to be the, I don't want to put words in his mouth. It's been a while since we talked, but he didn't want to be the CEO, the business leader. He wants to do what he wants to do. So he has somebody else that kind of runs the company and he's the chief machinist or chief technology guy or chief R&D guy, which you know, tip of the hat on that. That's perfect.
00:30:04
Speaker
Yeah, Hermla had, they have a bunch of automation systems. They had their RS-1. It's like, it's incredible, John. It's a robot KUKA that was, I mean, just, I don't know how they program it. It looks, for some reason, it just looks like smoother and more awesome. And it can load workholding. It can switch grippers. It can load pallets. It can change out.
00:30:30
Speaker
devices, or zero points, or direct clamping. It does it all. And just sitting there watching it work is amazing. That's cool. Yeah. Some of those robot integrated systems are utterly capable, switching between all different work holding options. There's so much possibility. And it's really cool to see companies, at least for demos, show what's possible.
00:30:58
Speaker
And they were very upfront. They're like, look, we're not always going to be the fastest. Like we're going to take a little bit more time when we change a vice out or swap a part out, we're going to, but we're going to do more checks. We're going to be longer to make sure it always works. And they, their sort of thing is also just, it's, it's from us. We're not going to point our finger at.
00:31:18
Speaker
the manufacturer of the automation tower or the robot arm or somebody else. It's all integrated through them, which totally get that. That's cool. The Haas cell that you were talking about, what robot do they use?
00:31:33
Speaker
It's a FANUC RoboMate IR, the medium-sized one. And that's great. It comes with the K-Gene. So it's kind of ready to go. You do have to have a service that come for some reason. I don't know why. But it's the best thing I've seen to a true just bolt it on. And then if you don't want it, you can just pull it off for a while. Yeah, that's really cool. We saw the micro HD, the Kern. Yeah.
00:31:57
Speaker
Have you seen? I've never seen a micro HD. When we were there a couple of years ago, it was behind the curtain and Mark was like, that's going to be really cool, but I can't tell you anything about it. I was like, okay, whatever. As if like pulling the curtain, I would have revealed anything. It shouldn't look the fact that that machine just from a pure awesomeness, it's the hydrostatic version. So there's no where services, there's no metal on metal. There's no linear rails. It's a film gap of liquid that is
00:32:26
Speaker
what we saw before, like on the pyramid nano, and they figured out how to reduce that gap. So apparently it just makes the machine stiffer, better at every single way. It sounded like they were pushing the boundaries of what anybody's ever done for a hydrostatic way. The gap was like five micron or 20 micron or something very small. And I remember when he first explained it, I was like, oh, so it's just like the micro, but with
00:32:54
Speaker
a couple extra differences like what's so cool about that. But over the past two years of their marketing and stuff, I start to really realize how incredibly amazing like getting rid of the berries, linear rails, replacing it with hydrostatic and smoothness, stiffness and never going to wear out ever. And then also linear motors instead of ball screws and
00:33:15
Speaker
and servo motors is also a huge win. Obviously, the linear motors are going to add a lot more heat into the system, which they control, but I would assume you'd need a bigger chiller to do something like that, like minor. Also, this is old information, but I think you said it's like 30% more expensive. Oh, I'm sure. Which is a lot.
00:33:40
Speaker
It's like that justification. If you were to buy one or I were to buy another one or whatever, would you go for the HD? Is it worth that extra money for what we're doing or is it just cool factor? Obviously, the super precise industries would be all over it. I'd be really curious to see what their sales numbers look like comparatively, like how many customers are buying the HD versus how many customers are buying the micro over time.
Advanced Machining Techniques
00:34:07
Speaker
The, the verduction in, in that, uh, hydrostatic film thickness sounds like, like that's all it's ever going to be. I cannot imagine they got it down. I'm making this up from like, if it was 10, whatever, it's now like 0.5 or something. And so, um, and you're just like, wait, what? Holy nuts. Um, are hydrostatic machines generally the more, like if you crash one and you in any way mar that service, I got to think that you're in trouble.
00:34:36
Speaker
I agree. But I think I read Tony said something that the gap is so stiff because of the oil boundary layer that I don't know if the surfaces would ever contact. I mean, a hard enough crash, maybe. Yeah, right. I don't know. But yeah, that's a good question. They were. I mean, I think it's total overkill for.
00:34:58
Speaker
even you right from what I know, but they were showing a effectively a jig boring demo on the microwave see where they pulled in a
00:35:07
Speaker
grinding tool, they dressed it, measured it, comped it, and then they were moving the spindle in a just absolute beautiful way, in an insane, accurate way, and that's where you're like, oh, doing these high cycles. It's like a stamping press, like high up and down strokes at incredible speed. No issue whatsoever. Yeah, and I think the rapids are double what my machine is, which is nuts. Mine's fast, but double would be insane.
00:35:32
Speaker
Yeah. The other cool thing, just on the note of what did I see that caught my eye, was a heat shrink automation cell, but in the simplest of form. So you had a little trolley that had these plastic, they could be 3D printed, a little holder. So you would put your Cat40 or HSK 63 tool in the trolley bucket, a little bin.
00:35:57
Speaker
With it would have a tool in it that say need to replace then you get a little hold of the left of it with the extra tool QR code and so forth as as appropriate to integrate with a bigger system and then it would shuffle it underneath an enclosure like an 80-20 enclosure. There's a UR arm it loaded the tool in the heat shrinker pulled the old tool out put the new tool in
00:36:18
Speaker
all automatically put the old tool in the extra hole there in the side of the thing. And then it could do a touch off. It could scan another QR code. So not really relevant for you or me, but for production, sell, haul. It was pretty cool. Yeah.
00:36:36
Speaker
And then I got to meet, um, I got to meet Alex, chief bub on Insta. Um, really nice guy. Yeah. Yeah. One of those guys were definitely recognize the name and, but I had the chance to really hang out with him and, um, they, they, uh, his shop has a bunch of Willamans. So I'm like, Oh, this is fun. We talked a bunch about that. Yeah. I had to ask him specifically. I'm like, did mine come out of your shop? Cause I know you guys just sold one. He goes, no, no, ours was different, but they were apparently early adopters. Yeah.
00:37:06
Speaker
Um, the ones I think they said they sold or were old. Yeah. Like 2004 or five, something like
Williman Machine Setup
00:37:11
Speaker
that. I want to say even really, I may be misremembering. Um, I think he had mentioned that they were some of the first to adopt Willamans or some style of Willman that was in the nineties. Wow. Well, cause my machine is number 128. And I don't know if that's for the model or for like all Willamans, like I know the current serial numbers are for all currents, the pyramid nano, all of their machines and minds 11, 1109.
00:37:35
Speaker
So they made 1,100 machines by the time they got to mine. But yeah, number 128 for the Willimans. Part of you goes, that's not a lot. Is it good being that early model? But yeah. Yeah. So you haven't powered it on? I've not powered it on. But I'm hands off. I haven't touched it in a while. The guys are doing it. I'm letting them run with it. They had to order a bunch of bare fittings and hose and stuff to get it properly plumbed up.
00:38:05
Speaker
But it's got air, it's got power, got to plug in the hydraulic tank. We got more hydraulic fluid coming in. It came in already. So we have everything we need. It just needs to put the hydraulic in and then turn it on.
Podcast Conclusion and Contest Announcement
00:38:18
Speaker
Awesome. I'm excited. Yep.
00:38:22
Speaker
Well, before we wrap up, you want to revisit our bomb contest? Yeah. So we had some good applicants there. And time to, what, pick a random? Yeah, I've got the list up. John's going to do the random number generator software. OK. All right. Let me generate a random number generating number three.
00:38:49
Speaker
Number three, we will email you as well, but Harrison H, congratulations. Sweet. Okay. So we're going to do a, what, like half hour, 45 minute, uh, kind of zoom call. Yep. Yep. Just, just to shoot the ass, whatever, whatever, whatever you want, man. Um, that's, that's always fun. Yeah. So we'll, uh, John will reach out, Saunders will reach out and we'll set that up.
00:39:13
Speaker
Awesome. What do you do today? Excellent today. Okay. I have to find a new source for a through cool and drill bit because OSG seems to not make a three 32nd through cool and drill bit anymore. Uh, at least this specific a brand one. Um, yeah, I've been using it for a couple of years and then I try to buy more and it's zero in stock in Canada, zero in stock in the U S and they don't know when more are coming. I'm like, what the heck?
00:39:41
Speaker
Yeah. And then I ordered some, um, have you ever heard of the Micron crazy drill? M I K R O N. Yeah. Yeah. The vaguely the name. I don't know the tool. I've heard good things. So I ordered some and then I got them and realized they weren't through coolant and I was disappointed. Yeah. And they're not cheap. So yeah, I might look at Mitsubishi. I know they have through coolant stuff. Um, just trying to find a good, reliable source that makes a drill kind of more suited to titanium and stainless that I do. Um, short.
00:40:11
Speaker
with through coolant, because I don't want to change. I probably got 15 programs on the current that turn on the through coolant, so I can't just put a non through coolant in there. Oh, no, you want through coolant. Of course, and I want through coolant, even with shallow holes, I just do. Do you not have tooling reps that are distributor level that work with many brands? Yeah, my local place. You'd pick email, pick up the phone. That's who I got the micron drills from.
00:40:38
Speaker
Oh, hard fail then. Well, it was my mistake. I said, I want this one. And then now looking on the website of this one, it's non-through coolant. And I was like, oh, crap. I did it wrong. I mean, I want to say IMCO, YG1, Sandvik, Gurring. Look at the big players, the Iskars, but don't spend your time doing this, too. Yes. I've already got an email started, too, with my guy there.
00:41:03
Speaker
We'll find something good. I don't mind spending decent money on them. I need them to be good. Email OSG too. I mean, I've actually randomly emailed them over the years for a few things. They've actually- That's true. Like a engineer person has actually read my email, gotten back to me. Okay. And if I were, it seems like they're the kind of company where it's like, Hey, we've been using this drill. We like it. We want more. Yeah.
00:41:25
Speaker
Do you have a... Because maybe they just revved it up and it's a replacement version that you're not... Yeah. I'm trying to find it on their website, a replacement that's like this. I can't find anything, but you're right. I do have one or two OSG guys already in my email that I'll reach out to. Yeah. Yeah. Because it works.
Sourcing Challenges for Tooling
00:41:42
Speaker
It works. I just need more. What are you up to today?
00:41:47
Speaker
We are kind of overhauling some packaging stuff. So when I, Julie was out for a while on vacation, and so I was kind of stepping in for order fulfillment. And I'm really glad to do that because it kind of is eye-opening toward the difference between a mess, a decent process, and a well-oiled machine.
00:42:11
Speaker
And so one of the things we need to do is improve packaging on fixture plates, not mod vices. The other stuff we have is either decent for now or lower volume. So I'm not as worried about it, but it plays so many roles, how easy it is to pack up and assemble the product, how easy it is to make sure you have everything assembled correctly or included, how you store it here in inventory, how it gets shipped to the customer, how it gets packaged in the box. And it's that first impression of the customer to see what it's like.
00:42:40
Speaker
And so we actually, as we talked about on the podcast, I would fire up the laser and was using the laser to make some custom boxes, super easy, like super fun, super clean edge, like so much nicer than box cutter or free cutting. And so I'm gonna, we've got a guy come in this afternoon, I'm gonna show him what we've made and then say, you know, hey, like I want your, you're the expert, like this is kind of what we know works, it doesn't work. So wanna see how that goes.
00:43:09
Speaker
And then I'm going to more cleaning. I feel like this is a recurring theme on the podcast with you, but I just look around. I still see like toolboxes in areas where I'm like, that's not what I want us to have anymore be doing. And so I'm thinking about getting pretty aggressive on a another kind of purge. Yeah. The grouch sale. It's on just machine works. I know. Right. Well, maybe I don't know. It's weird because some of it's not really worth much individually, but man, I don't want to throw it away. So sure.
00:43:36
Speaker
I'll either reach out to the local trade school or something on some of this stuff. Good point. We have like four boxes of shim stock. It's like we use shim stock once every four months. At this point, I'd rather buy new from McMaster if we needed something and then keep storing four boxes of it. That's all I got though. Good.
00:43:54
Speaker
Let me ask you one more question. We're trying to make these fixture plates for like what we always, we've made them for years, but we're trying to make new ones on the Kern and they're not flat. They're actually dished on one side, like almost all the way around. It's a piece of six by seven 41 40 one inch thick. I put it in a chunk of ice on the Kern.
00:44:17
Speaker
Okay. Deck one side, I'm taking off about 50 thou very gently and doing a bunch of other holes and features and stuff. Then you take it off and that thing is now a conical taco by about eight thou. Lake or mountain?
00:44:31
Speaker
Lake. Lake. Okay. So it bowed under. So are you willing or able to super glue it? Maybe. So I mean, that's what the first question is. Are you imparting stress as you get with the vice? Yeah. We were trying to think, Angela and I were looking at it hard yesterday. Is it clamping pressure that's bowing the material and then we're decking it flat and then you unclamp and it goes down. Or if it's like the grain of the material or something, you know, is playing a factor.
00:45:00
Speaker
Is it laked the direction of the clamp? No, it's more like if you're looking at the vise normally, it's left to right. Left to right. OK. So the long way, the seven inch way. Probably not clamping pressure. Could be. Makes sense, right? 41, 40 plate should be hot rolled. So it shouldn't be cold roll where you have a bunch of built up stress. It might be cold rolled. Like the finish looks like a cold rolled finish.
00:45:25
Speaker
Well, check on that. I'm not a medical expert. But I remember having conversations where 4140 should be hot. If it's cold, you're going to have a huge issue. But if you have holes in it already, or you can add more holes, the easy thing to do would be to... The best thing to do is figure out how to do it in an unconstrained state. So you have a service grinder. I mean, most of the way you do that is
00:45:46
Speaker
It's not me if you know this, but you would shim it so that it's not getting sucked down. You're going to shim it with that 8,000 Lake on the bottom of the magnet, deck that place, the top flat, and then flip it over and deck it again. Yeah. One side cannot be surface ground because there's bosses and features and stuff. The bottom side is flat. I currently made it fully. I left 2,000 on the bottom, and Angelo was going to surface grind the bottom 2,000 off.
00:46:13
Speaker
But he's like, this thing is so warped. There's nothing, I can't get through it all. Yeah. Check and see if it's hot roll or cold. If it's moving hot roll, it's an easy answer. But if you have through holes as well and that features in it, that's the other easy answer is to clamp it down through that way. Even, and then, and then deck it and see what happens. Yeah. I made both sides in the vice. The second side is flat, even unconstrained. It's dead flat within like a 10th or two.
00:46:44
Speaker
It's the first op, the bottom of the plate that is oddly bowed, you know? It's kind of weird. Do you have more pieces of this material that you haven't seen yet? We made three and that's all I had. And they're all equally bowed, eight to 10 thou. I was going to say, check it. Yeah.
00:47:02
Speaker
Yeah, be a surgeon. I mean, you put indicators on it when you're clamping it, unclamping it to check and see how it is on you. But if it's bowing left to right in a vice that you're clamping front to back on, it's not clamping pressure usually. Yeah, that makes sense. It's got a little bit of bow that way, but most of it is lengthwise. Yeah,
00:47:22
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, look, it also should be as simple as lightly clamping it back in the vise and then decking six or seven thou off. You'll have one thou left, but you can just clean up the left and right edges of the lake, if you will, the shores. That'll come off. OK, cool. Cool. Awesome. We'll figure it out. All right. I'll see you next week. All right, man. Thank you very much. Take care. Bye.