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KERN, DATRON, TOOLHOLDERS, TruePath, CAMplete, ST-20Y UPRISING, WARM UP ROUTINES, TORNOS, AND A MACHINE TOOL URBAN LEGEND.
245 Plays5 years ago
QUICK MATHS The Johns have been Business of Machining it for 4.38 years (3.38 years recorded to be exact).
ROI Envy Sometimes you get a machine, crank out parts, and make money right away. Sometimes you have to invest time to develop reliable processes and workflows. Grimsmo reminds himself that the KERN is not a job shop machine.
THAT HAS TO BE A KERN FILTER!
Click Image Below for Full Post
The question is, "how do you cheat the KERN and push it beyond those limitations?" Although the machine is incredibly accurate, Grimsmo still has to chase tolerances. To him, that's proof it's not just about the brand of the machine, it's about tooling, the machining strategy, and various factors that come into play when making parts. Finding out those limitations is key to getting the most out of the machine tool.
BITE-SIZE KERN? When Saunders asked Marv if the Datron could outpace a KERN, the answer was revealed in this hilarious Instagram post. However, to Saunders, in terms of footprint, rigidity, and usability, the DATRON is pretty much a bite-size KERN.
Full Grimsmo Evolution Grimsmo shares his story about trying to make a perfect carbide detent press with a PCD endmill. Sometimes entrepreneurs must be willing to bail on an idea or process that isn't working despite sunk time or costs. Full Grimsmo is starting to expand its meaning to more than just being in love with an idea.
Leadership Strategy and Tactics
TOOLHOLDERS The Johns discuss REGO-FIX, shink fit, and hydraulic tool holders. Saunders adds that moving away from the bootstrap mentality is tough but it is necessary in some cases. If you buy the beat-down, cheaper version of what you need, that may create a negative perception of the process or how the equipment should be cared for--and that could cost more than buying the new item!
TruePATH + CAMplete Grimsmo shares a "pucker moment" on the KERN. Saunders expresses his burning desire to have machine tool parameters set in CAM to avoid having to manually change them. While talking about TruePATH and CAMplete, the one thing they caution is to make sure you don't get used to ignoring the warnings!
JOHN: Cycle Start!
ST-20Y: "I'm sorry, John. I'm afraid I can't do that."
Saunders has a HAL 9000 moment where the lathe REFUSES to make a part! Let's just say it has to do with a spindle thermometer and a specific IF, THEN loop.
Scrapping Parts for Warm Ups - No Big Deal, Right? As an entrepreneur, your attitude can push the business to unimaginable heights or it can blow up in your face. A seemingly innocuous approach to warming up a machine tool could end up translating to a major case of apathy and huge costs in wasted material for Grimsmo.
TORNOS - BARS. BEATS. BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. What do you do when the machine's been making great parts all day long? You stay at the shop until 4am and feed it! Fraser confirms that the Tornos didn't stop running from Friday morning until Saturday afternoon.
URBAN LEGEND Saunders shares an urban legend about a machine at IBM 30-40 years ago that, once commissioned, NEVER turned off the spindle for the entire duration of the machine tool's life. IF ANYONE HAS HEARD OF THIS, E-Mail businessofmachining@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining Episode 176. My name is John Saunders.
00:00:06
Speaker
And my name is John Grimsma, and this is the podcast where, geez, for the past three plus whatever years, two entrepreneurs have been talking about everything from life to business to new machine purchases and growth and the odd vacation every now and then, rare, and whatever else is going on. According to simple math, 176 divided by 52 is 3.38 years. And we were thinking we'd talked for about a year before we hit the record button.
00:00:35
Speaker
Yeah. So 4.48, 4.38 years. It's been time. I love it. Yeah. Good times. How are you doing?
Kern Machine Setup Challenges
00:00:45
Speaker
I'm wonderful.
00:00:48
Speaker
Yeah, things are good. I've been playing on the current a lot lately. That's been super fun. It kind of occurred to me that I haven't actually made a dollar on the current yet, meaning have a sellable part. But I'm OK with that. This is an investment. It's the time up front. We're making a production system, basically. We're not trying to turn around job, shop, jobs every day. And that's fine.
00:01:16
Speaker
It does make me a little bit jealous when other people get machines and they're like...
00:01:20
Speaker
making money on the first day and paid off within months and stuff. And that's okay. That's just not how we're set up the business. But I'm having a lot of fun setting up these systems into place. I made a set of rask handles over the past few days, at least the inside. The inside's the much more complicated part. And they turned out awesome. The Instagram post, I think it was from Frasier, looked stunning. I mean, absolutely.
00:01:48
Speaker
Was that a filter? That was unbelievable. No, it's no filter, no nothing. It was a filter. Yeah, exactly. The lighting inside is super bright and harsh, and the quality is better than I was getting on the Maury. The cut quality, the smoothness, when you face something and there's step over lines between the end mill,
00:02:12
Speaker
I've vaguely seen that before once or twice in my life, sure. Exactly. It's just less of that and fantastic. I'm super happy. That's true. That's what I've been excited for is this is what we expect. I want to know what John Crimson is going to say. It will take you probably a year, year and a half to learn the machine. So where do you start pushing the Kern to in past its limits?
00:02:40
Speaker
How do you end up cheating on the current to out current or current? That's a good question. Well, it's funny because it is one of the most accurate machines you can buy.
00:02:53
Speaker
yet I still chase tolerances, like tool wear, stock to leave kind of thing. Maybe that's just me and my methods and my methodology and stuff. I'm certainly not the ... I'm the world's okayest machinist.
00:03:13
Speaker
But it goes to show it's not just machine. It's end mill, quality of end mill, and then your approach, how much material you leave left, how you tickle it at the end kind of thing. But yeah, I'm trying to hit a few tenths tolerance on some of the bores and things like that. And it's nice. I'm taking my time, walking my way in and understanding what the machine likes and what each tool likes and needs. And I'm trying to make a stable process.
00:03:40
Speaker
I would say you'll learn a lot if I can make a parallel to the Datron, which as we've seen from the Instagram story or the Instagram challenge of material removal rates, a Datron is not occurring.
Datron vs. Kern: Precision and Challenges
00:03:57
Speaker
Not in the spindle power, but darn it, from a philosophical approach to the quality of a machine tool and what you're using it for, I'd put the Datron
00:04:08
Speaker
right up there, if not better than a current for a lot of... We just like the control, the ease of use, the rapid prototyping. I mean, first off, it's also a much more of a bite-sized machine from both the... Well, it's a bite-sized current. Yeah, from a financial undertaking, but then also just obviously the footprint, nevertheless.
00:04:28
Speaker
We've had that machine. I was actually surprised. It's been a strange year, hashtag 2020, with we first started talking to them in January, and we sort of time-framed around six months. And I've got to get back to them because it's just been a strange time. But we're just now
00:04:51
Speaker
hitting what I would say is a level of confidence with that machine. In fact, when I was in the shop Monday, Ed, it was just like, John, it's amazing. Like I'm hitting, you know, I think he was dialing in a 1.2 inch
00:05:08
Speaker
thickness on a part. So we're using the quote unquote face mill, which is like, you know, it's like a, like a, I don't know, 20 millimeter tool or 0.6 inches or something. And it's interesting because there's the, you know, there's the frame, the rails, the trucks, the kind of table, the vacuum chuck, and then actually the Datron vacuum card, vacuum card, I forget what they call it.
00:05:34
Speaker
but it's like a paper or fibrous material that gives you some vertical stability or direction to the vacuum, which is amazing. Basically, if you blow through the vacuum or your part, you don't lose all your vacuum. Then our part or the part we're working and Ed was running a couple of different parts and we were repeating to within attempt
00:05:55
Speaker
And it's funny because I always hesitate when I say this sort of thing because of the trade show BS of dealers. But darn it, no. Pretends all day long. This is us using Mitsutoyo quantum mics. And even if the mics are wrong in their nominal value, they are pretty darn right in their relative value. Stable, yeah. And it is just...
00:06:19
Speaker
just absolutely. So it made me think because I will defend my decision all day long to get us to where we've been with largely the use of what was then Tormach and now Tormach and Haas machines and the ROI for us and the relationship of the with the HFO, the service that it just simple from an ROI standpoint, Haas has been a great machine tool for us. But makes you think
Investing in High-End Equipment for Precision
00:06:46
Speaker
makes me think, hey, what's the world like in the
00:06:49
Speaker
you
00:06:50
Speaker
in the world of insert XYZ brand here where you double the price to chase that little bit of improvement. But boy, it feels pretty good when you get it. Exactly. Yeah. And that's why there's no surprise that Haas is crushing competition in the US. I don't know the numbers, but they're everywhere. And it's because they're brake machines and the ROI is a no-brainer. And you can buy it immediately and have it five days later or whatever the time frame is.
00:07:20
Speaker
And they're all the same, same control, lay its mills, old, new. It's pretty brilliant for a lot of reasons. But then what we're trying to do here is we're trying to chase that last 10%. And we're investing in the higher end equipment, the lot more expensive equipment. And I came from Tormach just like you did.
00:07:44
Speaker
And it's like you're just eliminating variables all along the way so that you're chasing less problems is kind of how I'm looking at it. Yeah. You'll get there, though. I think that's, I guess, a long-winded way of saying you're still early in on the current like we were with the Datron. And I think
00:08:07
Speaker
you'll be sure there's some variability to a rotating tool assembly when you look at the stick out and the tool stick out, the holder length, the gauge length, the collet run out, et cetera. But boy, as you start to learn that, I think you're going to be blown away. Yep, exactly. Yeah. And you just, you get comfortable on one aspect and then you get to, that's a no-brainer now and you get to focus on something else. So like,
00:08:31
Speaker
You know, the Maury running ER call, it's all the time. You know, run out with something we'd check all the time and tweak every time and it would take time. And now we have the RegoFix PG. And I literally don't think I've measured a single one just because I believe it. You know, I should just sanity check. But I know I probably don't have to. But on that note, I filmed a video the other day, but I put a PCD end mill
00:08:57
Speaker
in and I was going to grind some carbide on the current. Just a little dimple. I just need a little dimple in the back of an end mill.
00:09:05
Speaker
Oh, did you see the bearing? Exactly. To press in a ball. Yeah. And I was super excited, and I was planning and all that. And the endmills that they sent were metric shanks. And I don't have any metric call-its for the PGE system. So I put it in an ER call-it, an ISCAR ER call-it, in a Rigofix ER 16 holder, like good, good stuff. And that was a thou and a half of run out. Ooh.
00:09:30
Speaker
And I'm like, I can't even use this thing. I'm not even going to attempt to use this very expensive PCDN mill with that much runout. It's just not happening. So instead of grinding carbide, I just milled an HSS drill bit and moved on. And it worked fine. But it took me hours and hours to get that far on the PCD, only to can it and spend 32 minutes doing it the achievement easy way.
00:09:56
Speaker
I timed it too. I set the timer on on the video and I was like, okay, fine. Let's just do this quick and easy.
00:10:02
Speaker
I'll tell you what you just said there, the willingness
Carbide vs. High-Speed Steel: Decision-Making Process
00:10:07
Speaker
to make the right decision regardless of some cost or some time, like I'm willing to say, hey, I want this to work, but if you know it's going to work, it is something I think any entrepreneur will struggle with, but if I can just vote or encourage a bit of persuasion to, and I think this happened to me,
00:10:29
Speaker
Last week, I had done four parts and one part was probably acceptable for what it needed to be, but I just looked at it and I said, it was hard, but I looked at it and I was like,
00:10:45
Speaker
I should rerun it. And so it's not that big a deal, but it's everything. It's like, hey, I got to go find a piece of stock again, cut another piece off, set it up, repost, all that. And I'll tell you, when I was done, you're just beaming with pride. You made the right decision. But to be willing to do that, be willing to bail on the carbide and switch back to the drill bit after you've invested that, hard.
00:11:05
Speaker
It's a balance because we all want to stretch and strive and be better and do our best and get better every day. And in order to do that, you have to make the better part. You have to see the garbage and do better. But it's not every time. There are times in life and in business when you have to go, you know what? As you say, the juice is not worth the squeeze. Move on. I have other juices that need to be squeezed.
00:11:32
Speaker
Especially after reading that Jocko book, the leadership tricks and tactics, it's been solidifying in my mind that we as humans are in love with our own ideas and me especially. So when I'm like, darn it, I'm going to grind carbide because that's awesome and it's going to be the better process because carbide's harder than high speed steel and it's not going to wear out and it's going to be epic and it's going to be sweet and I want to do it that way and this is the way I'm going to do it.
00:12:00
Speaker
I just got to the breaking point. I was like, okay, what's the goal here? Is the goal to grind carbide or is the goal to make a rask by the end of the month? Okay. There you go. Let's reframe this. I'm not good at that, but I'm getting better and I'm realizing more like the forest for the trees kind of thing. It's like, okay, the rask doesn't care if it got pressed with carbide or high speed steel. Well, I will actually wonder,
00:12:26
Speaker
If it's not even the better material period I mean carbide is I do you what are you solving a problem that doesn't exist? I mean it was the HSS wearing out No, not that I know of yeah and carbide is different, you know, it doesn't take any flex Not that you would be flexing axially here compressing it but
00:12:49
Speaker
Yeah, the goal is just to have a system that never wears out and is consistent. The actual goal was to have a repeatable thing. Say you put a drill bit upside down, you deck the top and you mill the dimple.
00:13:04
Speaker
I want an exact height between that flat and the spherical cone, so I can make like five of them or whatever. Then I just have them because I crashed one on the Maury once and I had to make a new one and it sucked. It was like many thou different than the old one. We scrapped five handles trying to dial in that thickness.
00:13:26
Speaker
So the goal with the carbide was like, let's make a perfect one, like perfect, perfect, perfect, so that I can trust the math and have it be at least close enough to not scrap parts. And then we can touch it off with the laser, with the toolsetter, and we just know it's good. Whereas doing it the quick and dirty way, you're totally guessing every time. Well, this sounds like it's really more of an issue of if you crash it, then do you have to induce a huge amount of risk or hassle factor in editing the hand code, right?
00:13:57
Speaker
Because if it's just a new, it should be the dimple pusher tool should be able to be any gauge length as long as you just update the H value. Yes. And the dimple relief, the hemisphere itself is something you control when you make it and not particularly sensitive, right?
00:14:18
Speaker
But it's relational. Sorry, sure. But you can replicate that because you're making the whole surface. You're resurfacing that whole case of that tool drill. You rotate that right when you push it in? Or I don't know. Yeah, it's been at 50 or 100 RPM. Yeah, that's awesome.
00:14:39
Speaker
Because this actually started back in the tormac days. And I was like, hmm, what if I just use the spindle to press in this ball? And I did. And I think I did it static once. And I got so many YouTube comments. They're like, oh, you're going to dimple your spindle bearings. That's totally not going to work. Blah, blah, blah. I mean, considering the force involved in pressing that ball in is like ounces. But still, it opened my eyes to the fact that, you know, what if I spin it at 50 RPM? Then that's a non-issue. It's like drilling a hole.
00:15:09
Speaker
using the Z strength and rigidity and all that. And it was great. And I've been using it ever since on the Maury and now in the current. And I'm like, this is such a good way to do it. And I got it pressed. And then I probed the top of the ball. And I probed the handle surface. And I figured out how to do math and variables on the current, which was kind of a big hurdle and step for me, which was awesome. And it's pressed within under a tenth of where I want it to be. And I'm like, yeah. Amazing. Do you still have to?
00:15:39
Speaker
Will you keep the workflow of probing, doing a halfway press probing and finish press, or can you get it in one full? Well, I don't know. Right now, I'm doing it in one full just because it was easier code, although I was working my way down and down and down. But I don't know. Because don't you grind a flat after it's pressed anyway? Yep, afterwards. If it's pressed within a couple foul, what's the difference?
00:16:06
Speaker
Oh, because the pressed height is what's critical. The ground flat is much less critical. The pressed height is what gives it the feel, the flicking. Oh, because that's how much hump the thing has on the blade. So like literally half a thou is feelable in that ball height.
00:16:25
Speaker
Interesting. No, that totally makes sense. Yeah. So we're trying to hit, I mean, tenths. And on the Maury, we log every single one because the probe writes to a variable, and then the variable deprints and gets stored. And I've got a spreadsheet of every ball height for the past, however many palettes is in a spreadsheet right now. And it's holding a range of probably four or five tenths across weeks.
00:16:52
Speaker
You need to have Frasier convert all those knives into a single statistical graph or chart and just put it up on Instagram.
Shrink Fit vs. Hydraulic Tooling Debate
00:17:03
Speaker
That's cool. Statistical process control on the press height of our detent balls or whatever.
00:17:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's fun. That's cool. That's good. I still got to figure out how to have the current print to its table, to a spreadsheet. And I know it can. It's just one of those things. Yeah. Sweet to do. You're liking the Rego? Yes. Or loving it or talking about that. Loving it. It's literally what everybody says. It's freaking amazing and really expensive.
00:17:38
Speaker
I've heard that from five or six people that own it before and after I got it. And that's the answer. It's fast. Changing out a tool takes me more time to measure the stick out length and make sure it doesn't move than it does to press it. I mean, I'm probably in and out in 30 seconds. And it's just great. It's fast. It's easy.
00:18:02
Speaker
But everything's expensive, collets, holders, machines. Yeah. Collets are like a hundred something dollars. Holders are like three to 600 and the machine's like 10,000.
00:18:19
Speaker
tooling up the VF6s right now. It's actually really interesting because we only got the 30 tool on them because we don't need, I mean, we wouldn't even come close to thinking about needing the 50 tools. These are not job shop machines, they're process specific machines. And frankly, we probably need about 12 tools or 14 tools. And
00:18:44
Speaker
So, we're kind of taking the chance now to revisit what's important to the workflows in our shop for everything, not just making a great part, but tool life, tolerances, ease of use, offline processes. We've got the Spironi to measure tool heights. Are we going to rely only on that or do we mix that in with the tool?
00:19:10
Speaker
Table probe and if so you've got to be conscious about how you run a master gauge so that those two are the exact same and you're not compromising things by having two different master references.
00:19:23
Speaker
But then Jared has really, Jared really likes shrink fit. And I still don't have conviction, personal conviction about shrink fit versus hydraulic. And what I do know is we're not going to use much ER except for like a drill or chamfertool or something quick. No, yeah.
00:19:45
Speaker
Jared really likes shrink. We're at the point now where if we're going to go further down that route, we have the Mari tool shrink machine, which was at the time a great decision because it was cheap. It's like three grand or something, maybe a few bucks more, but it doesn't have any cooling in it. And I don't like it because we made our own cooling ring, but I
00:20:15
Speaker
Yeah, but I think there's two different concerns. Number one, that's not what we do. So is that thing super effective? Is it causing long-term problems with the holders being cooled incorrectly, which absolutely will induce? That's exactly how you would intentionally induce runout in a holder. Yeah, if you only cool this from one side every time for a year. Right. Yeah, exactly.
00:20:41
Speaker
And the other sort of thing that I think we've got to think about is it's okay to be a bootstrapper. Like, I'll never take that hat off. Like, I'm always a value guy. I look at where there's opportunity and value. But I think it's almost hard to say this out loud. But you know, if you want to, you can't have a
00:21:07
Speaker
really cut, I don't know what the word is, cutting edges. I'm not chasing, I'm not competing with anybody other than myself here, but we want to have a process in our shop that's refined, that takes pride in what we do, that has a process. We invest in the right tools. It's very difficult to say, hey, we're willing to
00:21:27
Speaker
Invest in these sorts of things and have these process when you've got kind of Well, the forklift is a great example if you if you really need a forklift buy a brand new really nice polished shiny forklift because it's it's when you have a When you have a tool that's beat up and used and all scratched up and junky. That's how that tool gets treated That's what it looks like
00:21:50
Speaker
And these there's oh there's it's it's that you can make exceptions to these things and maybe just one thing alone isn't the end of all representative but of it, but like just think like your
00:22:01
Speaker
your Rego, your Powerfix gripper station, like you could probably find one if you got lucky at an auction for half off, which means, oh, man, I got one for five grand. But what if it was the paint was all chipped off of it, and it was kind of all banged up and beat up? That's not the mentality you want, the culture you want to create when you're putting a rotating tool assembly together to go into a almost million dollar milling machine. You know, you want this to be almost like a lab.
00:22:32
Speaker
That's basically how we're treating our shop here. You paint the floors, you put in LED lights. We're installing air conditioning now. We're trying to make it a lab, like a research facility, not in the way of making everybody envious.
00:22:50
Speaker
you know, it's that yeah, it's not that that feel it's for us. It's for us. It's so that we can come in and have pride in our day and our work and everything. And I see what you're saying about all the tools that we use. But I wonder if there's still a level of
00:23:03
Speaker
You can't apply that to everything, otherwise growth eats cash for breakfast and you're going to be completely broke all the time. But yeah, there has to be a level of bootstrapper still that's like means to an end. We slapped this together because that's all that it needs to be and knowing where to put your attention basically because some things just don't need that much attention.
00:23:27
Speaker
Well, so that's what I'm thinking now, though, is, okay, so look, John, we are in, you know, we are a business. And if, you know, Jared likes heat shrink tools, and I like them, I just don't like, right now, I don't like the fact that it takes like a half an hour to cool it off. I think the, well, it's much quicker if you use our DIY thing, but I don't love that. And
00:23:56
Speaker
The other thing is I think you'll get better life and better accuracy if you heat the tool in a much more intelligent way, which the higher end heat shrink systems are much better about either if you buy, I think if you buy a heat shrink machine that's made and then that same machine company's holders, they have presets. Otherwise, I think you can kind of put in like the diameter of the
00:24:21
Speaker
up the thing and it'll do a better job of heating it up to the minimum amount that'll allow you to put the tool in. And that's the kind of cool thing about heat shrink is that it is like the perfect system. It has no moving parts and you're creating an actual mechanical fit between the two things.
Heat Shrink Tooling Advantages
00:24:40
Speaker
In terms of run out and gripping power, they're not quite perhaps as insanely rigid but
00:24:46
Speaker
We're not hogging out or roughing out tons of material, and there's a lot to be said for gains in run-out with high-speed machining style cutting strategies that will promote tool life, chip evacuation, service finish quality, etc. that are a little bit more important than just saying, hey, I want a giant Uber chuck, for example, where I can just blow through material.
00:25:08
Speaker
So it's kind of like, hey, why not buy the right high end, brand new heat shrink system, which isn't even that expensive. I think it's probably comparable to the Rego system you bought. And we'd use it and then the nice thing is that
00:25:25
Speaker
Heat shrink holders are actually quite a bit less expensive and I was looking at some of the ones now that have built in coolant ports right at the tip and that can be really useful because Jared's like, hey, one of the things I really want is a slender nose that we can get good coolant access for a couple of the operations that we do.
00:25:45
Speaker
And it's kind of like, hey, rather than worrying about the external coolant on the Haas, get those heat shrinks where you not only do you have a slender nose, so you can use it if you want it, but otherwise you've got the higher pressure through spindle coolant right there at the cutting action. That's great. I love it. Yeah, I got a couple of collets for the PG that are slitted, like right around the tool. Yeah. No, I haven't even tried the through spindle yet.
00:26:13
Speaker
Oh, really? Yeah. Wait, do you? Oh man. Holy cow. Cause that's your first machine with through spindle. My first mill with through spindle. Yeah. Okay. Got it.
00:26:24
Speaker
Oh, that's exciting. I was doing a Marito order for just some miscellaneous stuff. Actually, I saw on Instagram that somebody had said that they're now selling ER collets that have four little dimples, maybe two, that are four through spindle coolant. Sorry. Okay. It's like a sealed collet, but it's got a couple little slits in it.
00:26:52
Speaker
holes, not slits. So they were like 25 bucks. And so I was like, I got to try these. So I bought an ER 16 and an ER 20. And they're just sitting on my desk. Because that's like, holy cow. Now you've got the ability to convert any or all of your existing ER stuff over to a through spindle coolant holder. You don't need a through spindle coolant tool like that's could be sweet. Yeah. That's awesome.
00:27:22
Speaker
Have you played with hydraulic? No, I've never touched, well, in my shop, a string fit or a hydraulic. I've really only used ER and like the Uber chuck and a milling chuck and now the Regal fix. So like I've heard, you know,
00:27:42
Speaker
Some people love shrink fit. Some people love hydraulics. Some people hate one or the other for all these reasons. But that's the thing with the PG system is I heard basically zero downsides. Nobody hated it. So that kind of helped me make my decision. Well, I think it's also, it seems like it's a great machine. The current is a real nimble kind of Ferrari type machine where it's fast but light, if you will. And I think
00:28:12
Speaker
My big recollection is you wouldn't get a rego fix if you were looking at doing 50 taper, hogging, shell mill, corn cob, big stuff. It's great. Yeah, maybe not that big, but I think it definitely is a solid cat 40.
00:28:29
Speaker
20 horsepower machine sort of system, I think. I know a shop here in Hamilton that has an Okuma horizontal machine, and they've got the same PG, and he's like, I love it. It's just so good and easy. Always worth putting on your cynical hat, though, because if I remember, they came out with a new rego fix, came out with a new PG
00:28:57
Speaker
system that allows you to insert this little tab into the welding flat to aid with pullout. Okay. Yep. And it's kind of like, okay, well, let's call that what it is. For whatever reason, at some point, somebody had an issue with pullout on the regular system. And maybe those are abnormal cutting conditions, but whatever they were, it was worth you guys changing up the system. And that's okay.
00:29:21
Speaker
I would much prefer to work with somebody who can be candid about that. I'm not saying that they were disingenuous, but it's that when you're trying to balance these things and figure it out, that's telling. True. But I think all the big companies, like I've seen Hymer has their little twist lock thing. All the big companies are coming out with some sort of anti-pullout device to add to the offering for whatever reason.
00:29:47
Speaker
I'm not going to pull an end mill out of the holder just with the cutting strategies that I do. It's just not going to happen. Like a quarter inch end mill for me is pretty decent sized. Three eighths is like as big as I go. It's funny you bring up that Heimer, what is it like eye lock or something system. I have never once seen that in the wild.
00:30:06
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I've seen, Helical is one of the partners. So I remember when they were, we did that factory tour up there, they were grinding some of them. And look, Hymer makes great stuff. I'm not saying a darn thing bad about them. But like, how many shops, John, have we been in together around the world or, you know, country or people we talked to? Never once seen that. Yeah. Are you, be honest, are you still pushing all of your fusion code through TruePath? Can't believe.
00:30:36
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I haven't tried otherwise. Okay. If there is the Heidenhein post in Fusion, I haven't tried it. And Marv sent me a modified post for Fusion. I haven't tried it. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Are you okay with that workflow? It's, you know, there's a lot of clicks, as you've talked about before. I'm finally getting to the point where I can postcode from Fusion and have there be no errors in Camplete sometimes.
00:31:04
Speaker
What errors were you getting? When you thread mill, it's got an overcut error. When you use cutter comp, it's got a cutter comp error, which you can uncheck the tag in CAM settings or something. But yeah, every now and then there'd be little things. But it's awesome because when it does tell me, you know, I have to make sure not to ignore the errors because I'm getting used to them.
00:31:30
Speaker
I'm like, oh, it's probably just cutter comp. It's probably just because I'm thread milling. It's probably just that. But more often than not, well, like enough times, I'm like, oh, that end mill body is actually going to hit my clamp right there. So I'm going to go in back of the fusion. I'm going to clearance the clamp because I designed it wrong. I didn't know I needed that clearance. And then I'm going to run it through too again. OK, now it's going to clear. OK, so just yesterday, I had to clearance the clamp like two separate times.
00:31:57
Speaker
to be able to do the toolpath strategy that I wanted to do. And I was like, thank you TruePath for finding that out for me. How'd you get rid of the overcut error with thread milling? You don't. I accept that one.
00:32:11
Speaker
Oh, okay. No, because you're totally right. Can't plead is that software that biases towards just warning you about too much stuff, which makes you just become numb to it. You don't want to become blind to it. That is bad. And I'm starting to feel that now. But then every now and then I'll post something. I'll be like, wait, no errors? Did I generate that properly? Wow, okay. So obviously, I'm not threadmilling, and I'm not using cutter comp, and I didn't make any other mistakes. Okay, that's good.
00:32:40
Speaker
Yeah, that is awesome about it. Yeah, I wish it is nice. It is nice to see the actual machine movements properly to wrap my head around like what it's going to do and stuff because the visualization or the simulation infusion, you know, where the workpiece stays still and the tool moves is just not real life. Right. Yeah, that's awesome. Are you doing have you had any pucker moments with like how the current is the kinematics or how the machine is moved and
00:33:09
Speaker
whether it was expected or not, or just fast. I get to, um, I get to see it in camp plate first, which is nice. And then there's certainly some tight clearances. Like when the BC go to home, the tombstone seven and a half inches tall and the tools like right there. Whoa.
00:33:28
Speaker
There's an inch of clearance or whatever, but I'm watching it and I'm slowing it down and I'm like, okay, that'll clear. I figured out a setting in the current to leave the B at negative 90, so horizontal sideways, leave the tombstone down while doing a tool change, which good, bad, or otherwise, I don't know, it certainly saves some movements.
00:33:51
Speaker
I need to do it because when we put the bearing ball in, if everything homes, the bearing ball is going to fall. I had to figure that out at least for one operation, but then I left it for all operations. I'm like, this is fine. This will work. There's no downsides to this in my scenario. Somebody else might crash the machine because of that.
00:34:14
Speaker
Is that like a machine setting, if you will? It is a machine setting, yeah, in the options. Okay. Marv showed me. It's visible. It's not hidden or anything. It's just right there. Yeah, you can have it home the fourth axis and or the fifth axis for tool changes and things like that.
00:34:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's nice to have that control and make the choice. Be like, no, this will be fine. If I had a big 13-inch diameter cylinder on there and did that, it would cause problems. But case by case. I wish there was more opportunity or clarity or direction for there to be more interaction between the machines and the SCAM software. Because to me,
00:35:02
Speaker
Everything is, all decisions are made in CAM for all intents and purposes. That's how I make parts. It's not on machine tools, it's in CAM. So things like those settings or like on the Haas, even something as simple as the auto door, I like it, but I like it when we're running parts. I hate it when we're testing stuff out because it,
00:35:27
Speaker
The auto door is actually really slow compared to what I need to do. I just need to crack the door, check something, close it again. And so it's just this parameter setting, but I don't want to, in fact, I am completely unwilling to go in and update parameter settings all the time. What I want to be able to do is have that all stored on the machine side, the CAM side, the NC program side, wherever you want to call it in CAM. Because when I'm posting a job shop job or testing, I want the door off, auto door off. But when I'm running parts, I want it on.
00:35:57
Speaker
It's just like you're homing the B or C. That stuff should be all saved back in a replicable way so you can basically make the machine behave differently when you're doing different kind of work.
Managing Thermal Growth and Spindle Temperature
00:36:08
Speaker
From CAM. Yeah. Yeah. I was wondering about that too with this one being an actual machine setting and I didn't see any labels of like, oh, M500 turns this on or off.
00:36:20
Speaker
I don't know if you can control it remotely or if you'd want to. I might want to. Maybe it's possible. I don't know. Heidenhein is insanely powerful with stuff like that. Broadly speaking, I don't think the machine tool companies love this idea because there's safety or giving up some control, if you will. The idea of writing to
00:36:45
Speaker
machine parameters. I understand how that could be scary, but it's just like, no, this is how I want it to be. Yeah, I do it all the time. Yeah. Especially with FANUC, you can just change stuff and it's nice. I ran our, we were switching back to running diamond pins and I had updated that program to do the spindle temperature check. Can I tell you about this? I don't know.
00:37:11
Speaker
These are the only things that we really care about holding tight tolerances on. And we're gonna do a whole video on this. I'm happy to share everything on it. But it's kind of one of those examples of even a
00:37:24
Speaker
even a Haas ST20Y can hold. Going back to the, when are you going to learn how to cheat the current? This is us cheating the ST20Y. We're asking it to do more than you should buy that machine to do. If it's the only work you're going to do on it, you should buy a better machine. Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to put it, actually. I want to hold these diamond pins to, I don't know what we're actually publishing as our true tolerance spec, but I know the number I want, and it's a specific 10th value.
00:37:54
Speaker
And I want to know why, if I can't get to that number and repeat it, why can't you? Is it because of the quality of the linear guides? Is it the backlash? Is it the brake? Is it the slop and the screw? If not, why not? And so far, now it's a brand new machine, basically. But
00:38:14
Speaker
So long as we take into account the thermal nature of the machine, we are holding it across hundreds of parts. And there's some tooling tricks to the wear, the inserts, and the finish cut.
00:38:28
Speaker
What I figured out was the pause has a temperature, a thermometer, whatever, in the spindle, and it can tell you what the temperature of the spindle is. There's more to warm up the machine than just that, but when I do my warm-up routine, that is one thing that hits a targeted range. I figured out how to write an if-then loop that if the spindle temp is not up to sufficient range, right now, it just M30s the program. I actually wanted to write
00:38:58
Speaker
error message because of what I'm about to tell you which is that I knew I had written that program I didn't think I had put it in to the diamond pin part and it's an NC program so I just run the NC program I don't like look at the code or the ops and I went up to the machine the other day and I'm hitting cycle start and it's like just looking through back to the beginning and I'm like come on no run the program what is wrong I went to like graphics and it wouldn't run it and
00:39:22
Speaker
And then I looked at the code, and I was just trying to run a test. I was trying to prove out the tooling before I ran the machine warmup cycle, so I didn't care about the temperature. And sure enough, the temp check was already in it. And it was like, no, you're not allowed to run this program, John. So you can actually, you're referencing the spindle sensor in your if-then statement, whatever. Correct.
00:39:45
Speaker
That's cool. The value. Yeah. So it's simple. It's simple, John. Yeah, of course. The only thing that's weird is that the way the parameters store it, it's not like it's 72 degrees or 100 degrees. It's some like four or five digit value. But I mapped out like five different temperatures as I saw it warming up because the control will tell you, hey, and I just figured out what they were. And then you just, in the hands, you just say basically like pound 610 equals that value. And then when you run the program, you just say if
00:40:15
Speaker
610 is less than or equal to this, go ahead if not that. That's all it is. It's just figuring out what the analog thing is on the backside of the control. That's awesome. We battled with this with the Nakamura for years because thermal growth is a real thing and it causes real effects. I actually thought about installing
00:40:33
Speaker
like six temperature sensors around different places, even if just manual so that we could visualize and data log and do basically what you're doing right now, find the optimal sweet spot temperature. Because when that lay this cold or even just cools down, like parts are different.
00:40:53
Speaker
That's cool. So it's a spindle sensor. It actually measures kind of the bearing temperatures or whatever. I don't know. There's two or three different temperatures. And I didn't. Because a coolant tank is another, like, ours has a coolant tank sensor. I wonder if I could get that variable. That would be cool.
00:41:12
Speaker
The one thing I learned, I want to go over this in a more organized fashion on this video to make it a little bit more as a resource, but the best way to warm things up is to replicate the program itself. We used to have just a warm-up program, now we're actually running the part program in air because it's replicating the turret, it's replicating the cooling on-off, it's replicating the spindle. The tool changes. The only thing that left that I would consider as a problem is the fact that
00:41:41
Speaker
right now if we only run, so we do loop cycles, so I'll run like five parts, QC them all. If I had a lazy Susan like you do, I might run more, but I'm okay. Quality matters massively here, so we're just bite sizing it. If I only run five parts and I'm off doing something else, and then the machine sits there for 20 minutes, I got a problem. Doesn't count, yep. So I think what I needed to do is do a
00:42:10
Speaker
program that will run five parts and then immediately go back to The warm-up program and just basically the machine never turns off. Oh Or Wi-Fi why not just warm up 50 and then just don't forget to go back soon
00:42:27
Speaker
Because that's not a process that's scalable or sustainable, John. Yeah, there you go. There you go. So what we do with the Tornos is because it does have a warm up period as well. We don't warm it up. We just start making parts. And then first one's always scrapped because it's different from yesterday. But if we tweak the offsets quickly on the first or second part, we can usually get it close. And then we just leave it running.
00:42:51
Speaker
And if we're there and we can tweak every three, four, five parts, then we can hold good tolerances through the warmup period. Or we just let it run, making actual parts, and then scrap the first handful, whatever. And then we know it's warmed up and can settle down and start to be super consistent.
00:43:13
Speaker
Because the parts we make are so small, the material is like pennies. I don't mind wasting it. It's fine. Whatever. You got to be careful, John, because I understand that works. But in the pennies, the material is cheap, et cetera. But you're also creating a process and a culture where newcomers to grooms and knives don't realize what they're seeing may be different. So they may think the same thing works when it's $20 or $200 of material.
00:43:40
Speaker
That's a good perspective. Yeah, I got to keep that in mind. And that's a good point. Even as I'm teaching Sky, my carefree nature is teaching that it's no big deal. Don't worry about it. Just the material. Don't worry about it. And if he interprets that differently, then that could evolve past where my intention is. Right. And it's weird.
00:44:05
Speaker
I love your obsession with stuff. But it's it's very contradictory to hear you say like, Oh, yeah, it'll make 20 or 30 bad parts. We don't care about that. We'll start worrying about it later. Like, no, like, just develop a process, you know, for us, it takes only takes like 40 minutes to run the warm up and get it to going and cutting air.
Continuous Machining for Efficiency
00:44:21
Speaker
So it's like, hey, make the tornos have a warm up period, not doing anything. And then the first or second part, we're really going to put our, you know, per classes on and really get it going.
00:44:32
Speaker
And those two might, may work, may not work. That's okay. And then from the third on, I expect that thing to be working. Yeah. And if we're there to do offsets and most of the time, 67% of the time, we are standing there and can offset the first, second, third, fourth, fifth part and keep it dialed. And then it's the first part.
00:44:54
Speaker
every now and then for the first 10 parts, and then it's every five parts, and then it's every 10 parts. And these are just guesses. But you start to get a feel for it. You're like, oh, these parts are almost exactly the same. And you measure five parts later, and oh, it's two tenths. And then you measure 10 parts later, and oh, it's only one tenth now. And then when we were making spacers last week,
00:45:15
Speaker
I think we turned it on Friday morning and the machine didn't stop until Fraser said it was still running Saturday evening at 8 when he left. It's amazing. I love that. And I just, I had that moment. I stayed at the shop till like 4am on Friday night, Saturday morning.
00:45:35
Speaker
And I had that moment where I'm like, you know, it's been stable all day. Like we literally haven't touched an offset in 18 hours and it's holding great and it's just going good. I'm like, why did I buy this machine and a bar feeder if I'm not going to load up bars? So I put in, I put in three more bars and I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to run it. I'm just going to go home. It's good. There's nothing that should go wrong and it worked great. Sean, that's awesome. Yeah.
00:46:03
Speaker
There's some, this reminds me, there's some like urban legend, please somebody reach out if you know any shred of truth to this, that somebody built a machine, I want to say for IBM, maybe 30, 40 years ago, so like olden days, if you will, but and it was something to do with like silicon or high end, you know, wafer stuff. And the machine was delivered
00:46:30
Speaker
they commissioned it. And over the life of the machine, they never turned the spindle off. I don't know how like, it's an urban legend. So I don't know if that's true. I mean, how do you do tool change if the spindle is not off? Maybe there was only one tool in it. Maybe it was. I don't know. Like that doesn't make sense for me, like all these holes in it. But on the flip side, I can kind of see like some shred of truth behind like, holy cow.
00:46:52
Speaker
Yeah. Well, if you go into it, I'm realizing this with goals now. If you go into it where that is your goal, that is your intention, it reframes everything around that. It makes you do things differently. Like with the current, that is my long-term goal, but say that were my short-term goal for the spindle to never turn off. And like Marv was teasing me, he's like, you know, you don't have to run a spindle warmup if it never turns off. Yeah.
00:47:21
Speaker
But it can be done. You have sister tools. You have redundant tools. They get changed while the machine is running on the redundant. And then you can set flags in the tool table that say, OK, this tool has been replaced. It needs to be touched off before it can be run again. That can all happen automatically. You can have pallets going in and out. There are definitely shops where the current basically never turns off, except for maintenance, whatever.
00:47:47
Speaker
Oh, John, you're gonna get there too, I think. I know. It's one of the reasons why I got it. But that's not my short term goal. My short term goal is like, take my time, figure it out, you know, make make parts. But now that I've, you know, set an aggressive goal for myself to get these rasks done, it's just, it's reframing the way I think about things. And, you know, carbide 10 pros versus high speed steel, like get it done in a very effective manner, but maybe not the perfect like idealistic, you know, man, I really wish it was this way kind of thing, because
00:48:17
Speaker
I've got other fish to fry. Yeah. Yeah. I'd much rather fry fish than skin cats. That's yeah. And on that visual. Yeah. What's on tap today? Today.
00:48:33
Speaker
The first set of handles that I actually made are wrong because I looked at it and I was like, that's stupid. So I moved one screw location a little bit over, like six degrees over. So that handle is scrap. So I'm going to make another set of handles right now. And then
00:48:50
Speaker
I'm putting a hardened steel stainless steel lock bar insert into this knife, which we've never really done before. So the guys have been heat treating some different kind of steel, I've got to make a fixture on on little three inch pallets for the current. So I've got I've got a lot of work lined up for today. I'm excited. The one thing I will tell share is it's a recurring theme. And I
00:49:18
Speaker
I hope you will acknowledge this, which is I still don't think you get it on taking a step back and realizing... And there's a lot to be said here. You're doing a lot of things right. So who am I to say anything's wrong? But I think you're still not getting... And what's inspiring me was two different things. Number one, go watch or rewatch the movie The Founder.
00:49:48
Speaker
And there's some really good takeaways from that movie that I think some people will get, some people may not get, but it's a darn good movie for some stuff like this. And the second was just having a really good conversation this week with somebody who's quite successful. And there was no specific discussion of this topic, but it became clear of like,
Building a Skilled Machining Team
00:50:08
Speaker
building a team to execute on what you're doing. And you have too much work, too much talent, too much vision, too much opportunity, and to be limited by your own personal throughput capacity. Very true. Yep. But I still don't think you get it. And I know you're going to argue with me or say you do, but I don't think you do.
00:50:33
Speaker
No, I'll argue and say I'm getting closer. I'm starting to see the forest for the trees. And I've noticed, it's just something you notice more and more over time. And there's no pinnacle of like, yes, I see everything. I can read the matrix.
00:50:50
Speaker
It's definitely becoming more clear to me that I need to let go of more things. And I have been. It's awesome. Sky's running the Swiss today all by myself. That's huge for me. But I just need to do more and more and more of that. That's awesome.
00:51:05
Speaker
But yeah, stay on me. Because it's so easy to just default and be like, yeah, I'll do it. Yeah, I'm good at that. I'll take care of that. I'll do that. I want to do that. Yeah. And look, you got to make things ends meet. I mean, the easiest way to solve this problem is building a team of which means hiring people. And that's not an easy thing to solve. But if you doesn't take a rocket scientist to do some math and look at the opportunity and realize it's very accretive for you to find
00:51:33
Speaker
a incredibly good five-axis machinist and get them in and basically have, you will never touch the current again. I know you don't like that, but... No, I don't like that in a funny way, but I see where you're going with that and it's something I think about. I haven't thought about it so much with the current lately because that's my baby and that's all I want to do, but you have a good point there.
00:51:59
Speaker
But that is the point. Put on your, I have $10 million hat and realize that you just hired somebody to get them in. You hired a rock star and their full-time job is to soak up and dive into the current. You're now making decisions about the current. You're making decisions about the priorities. You're now overseeing other stuff. You're tackling new, like this is, you'll never do that and go back and say, ah, no, I should have saved the salary by doing all that work myself. Yeah.
00:52:29
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and we're getting to the point, certainly over the next year, we'll be hiring some more people and growing into those kind of positions. And it's really fun to think about. Yeah, we're in the same boat too. I'm starting to look at the conservative side of me needs to shut up because...
00:52:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's a weird world with COVID and I don't want to build a team only to dismantle it. Yeah, there's opportunity too, right? But that's not going to happen because again, the future will be kind to me for I intend to invent it. So I need to put my hat back on of looking for... We nailed it. Jeffrey's been great. And we want to... That further proves the point, right? It does. Yeah.
00:53:12
Speaker
But look, the one thing that's not great about this podcast being public is it's not appropriate to talk about some HR stuff. But I will say enough time has passed that there's been quite a few people that we have let go, mostly in the form of internships. But I think we're better off for being able and willing to realize that when somebody is not the right fit or simply the right skill sets or so forth, nope, not happening.
00:53:38
Speaker
Yep, and I don't think I've mentioned it to you yet, but Yo, our finishing technician, quit a few weeks ago. Oh, really? And it was a long time coming, for sure. He wasn't totally happy. He wanted to do other things with his life, and that's great. He was great to us, and we were great to him. And on both sides, we had good open conversations about where the holes were and the flaws were, and what we can both learn and grow from it. So we've grown as a company, Eric and I specifically,
00:54:07
Speaker
after him opening up and wanting to leave. It's slightly tough, but also very empowering and very like, okay, we can do a lot better. This exposed some things that we can definitely work on. We're a man down right now and we're catching up, but we'll have to rectify that here pretty soon.
00:54:28
Speaker
It's a great way to end the podcast, which is you now have the focus and ability to offer somebody the opportunity to join in. And here's the job. This is what we're doing. This is the journey. There's some really fun stuff. There's some work to be done. But I need that framework myself as the boss or the hiring person to recognize and say, hey, I enjoy
00:54:54
Speaker
when this is a win for everybody, but at the end of the day, this is a job. You need to be excited about it and the ability to do this and to do it well, or else that's it, period. You know what I mean? Yep. Anyways, awesome. Good talk to you. Yeah, great. All right. We'll see you next week. Have an awesome day. Take care. Bye.