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#290 Authenticity in Marketing
258 Plays3 years ago
Topics
- Fired up after IMTS
- Authenticity in marketing
- Willemin booth at IMTS, all about lathes!
- Takeaways from the show
- shop update video
- Mini chip conveyor on the Speedio machine
- Check valve on coolant nozzles
- Opportunity cost of being an entrepreneur
Recommended
Transcript
Return from IMTS and Community Appreciation
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the Business of Machining, Episode 290. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough. We have just both gotten back from IMTS. We appreciate everyone's patience last week with a little bit of an unusual episode, but I'll tell you, in a very wholesome way, I am very fired up. There's a lot of really good things I came out of IMTS with.
00:00:24
Speaker
from meeting people and the instant machinist community, machine knowledge, and look, some really kind words from folks that I know you appreciate as well, just saying, what a great story this has all been for a lot of us.
00:00:40
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm up here in Canada. I haven't traveled in three years. I've just been focused on my business, my life, my family, things like that, which 60% of me adores. And I love just doing my own thing and not worrying about the world or the rest of the people or whatever. And it allowed me to really focus on the business. But going out and talking to all of our fans and followers and podcast listeners. And it was kind of shocking to be like, wow, a lot of people listen to this podcast.
Non-commercial Podcast Philosophy
00:01:11
Speaker
I totally agree, which I think they listen to a podcast because we keep it. I'm not interested in any form of self-congratulation, but there is a sense of implicit community, even if all the listeners are strangers, if that makes sense, which tells us how it's my thesis that is being validated. We're all in this together. We all have these questions and moments of
00:01:34
Speaker
hey, what's the right decision? How do I go? What's going well? What's not? And so it makes me, it is a validating point of saying, hey, I got a list of questions for you this week, which is great, right? Yeah. And I got to say, it was fantastic actually seeing you in person. How long was it for? Like three or four years. Yeah. Yeah. Far too long.
00:01:57
Speaker
Yeah, that's wonderful. Yeah, no, it's great dinners together and great time hanging out with the show and right zooming around. Yeah, totally agree. A couple of times you and I are booking full speed from
00:02:10
Speaker
one building to the other and this guy runs off behind us and taps us on the shoulder and he's like, I just want to say thank you so much. Amazing. Okay, let's go. Yeah, but thank you. I will say it doesn't go unappreciated to everybody that was willing to say, hey, I did want to say hi or introduce myself. I love that. It is a little ego thing that's like, great, thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, it's so validating. It's like, okay, the effort we're putting in, which honestly to do this episode is not
00:02:38
Speaker
a lot of effort, but it takes time out of our day and it's consistent and we almost never miss an episode and we enjoy it. I mean, you and I do this for ourselves and we just happen to hit record, right? That's the whole thesis of the whole podcast. Bingo. The first year of us doing this, we never hit record. It was never even a question. We just chatted. Yeah, bingo. That was six years ago.
00:03:01
Speaker
But John, that is swimming upstream, maybe less so in the podcast world, but I've made a pretty conscious decision from a social media and YouTube standpoint to continue to do YouTube as we do it. I'm just sharing my journey. We're not going to have the most popular videos, but most importantly, we're going to remain
IMTS Highlights and Machinery Insights
00:03:20
Speaker
almost largely free of any sort of paid time for sale. You tell me what you need to say about this machine or this brand that happens to be paying me this month for this thing. We may, quote unquote, lose in the sense that, who knows, I think there's probably a lot of ... I think as the builders and other folks realize how much money
00:03:39
Speaker
or opportunities there are, so be it. It's not meant to be, it's not meant to be a direct criticism of those that choose to go that path. It's rather, it's a reflection of the fact that I've now been doing this for, I've been doing YouTube for 15 years and I feel as though I'm now able to sort of say you can watch our channel as a continued reflection of my own curiosity behind manufacturing, my own
00:04:02
Speaker
areas where I'm learning or frankly have insecurities and just the story of it. It's not going to be XYZ is the most, you know, insert superlative here about what machine it could be. And what's great about that is really just this is me having a conversation with myself is it feels
00:04:21
Speaker
great. Yeah, I got to go around IMTS say hi to people we met see the stuff that we like from the mom and pop companies all up to the big boys and show what we wanted. I know you filmed a bunch as well. Right? It's the way to do it period. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean,
00:04:37
Speaker
I'm in this industry to build a strong, powerful business making a product that sells and that's all I want. I'm not an advertiser. I don't want to take sponsorship dollars. I have no interest in that. I want to be able to speak freely about everything I think. As you said, speak about the insecurities too. Speak about it's hard to do sometimes.
00:04:59
Speaker
the things you're learning, the things you're developing, the things you're trying and failing and struggling with, which is mostly what we do on this podcast is sharing those things. It's harder. Well, not harder to do on YouTube, but you're more present on a YouTube video. You're more like visual. It's harder to be like, I screwed up on this, but it's still great to do. And yeah, I like having the freedom to do that. And honestly,
00:05:22
Speaker
filming at IMTS the past year or so, I haven't done much filming here in the shop. So forcing myself to film at IMTS and just film everything and get excited and get giddy and the CEO of Tornos pulled me aside and he's like, John, you're like a child and I love it. You have this childlike wonder about the world and it's so magical. And I was like,
00:05:46
Speaker
I'm going to take that as a huge compliment, not like a little jab that you're a child. He didn't mean it like that, obviously. It's funny to get that. Yeah. Well, that was how I felt at the Wilhelmin booth. In full disclosure, I am actively now really trying to pursue buying that used Wilhelmin. We can talk more about that later.
00:06:08
Speaker
It actually saddens me in a really funny way to think that there are legitimate, probably major manufacturing companies that simply buy machines like that in a soulless manner just to install them and run two parts 24 seven. I see that machine and you couldn't wipe the smile off my face. Yeah, absolutely potential with a machine like that. Honestly, the Wilhelmin booth got me
00:06:32
Speaker
utterly fired up for for Willowman as a company for the machine that I have sitting on my floor, and the potential that it can make and talking with one of the applications guys there. I was like, Can I run it? Like I want to, I want to push buttons, I want to hit cycle start, I want to like jog it around on the show machine on the show machine on the far away as to the fancy one with the sub spindle. And he's like, of course, like, you know what you're doing, you have this machine at home,
00:06:59
Speaker
It was very similar, mildly different, a couple of new buttons, a couple of weird labeled things that he had to like, I was like, give me a second. Okay. MDI is here and you know, do this. And he told me a couple of things and I did a tool change and he had me hit E stop mid tool change and recover from that. And, uh, weird little things like that and hit cycle start and watch it and drive it and go slow and stuff. And it was so satisfying. That's awesome. I might be the only one at the show that actually got that treatment and asked for it. But like, yeah.
00:07:30
Speaker
Awesome. It was great. It was great. Time aside, I am so fired up to get that machine running. Just the potential into cool parts that it can make with a vice and everything at a 30,000 RPM spindle and all. Yes. I had this awkward
00:07:49
Speaker
unexpected situation at IMTS, which is after I saw the Willemins and spent some time in the booth the first day, I realized, oh John, this is absolutely the machine that we want for making the small, the six millimeter and the 12 millimeter and half inch and quarter inch fixture pins that have various different versions where a lot of the time is spent machining or milling rather than turning.
00:08:16
Speaker
And we had some custom variations of those for custom customers, but we also have some new products, particularly some of the internals to our single or zero point system that I mentioned last or two weeks ago, that I think would be a good fit on it. And the dilemma is, and I had an ITS, I was like, well, how much time do I spend pursuing plan B if for a variety of reasons this use Wilhelmin doesn't work out, they may not be willing to sell it, it may be too much money.
00:08:43
Speaker
It may not be for sale in the end. They have it disassembled right now. We may get it and it may break. I looked at Mianos, which have small turret or multi-turret lathes, but all of the lathe options, big lathes, little lathes, hard-eans, lathes, gakuma lathes, hostel lathes, still involve the relatively clunky, low RPM, gear-driven, driven tool holders. Turret tools.
00:09:09
Speaker
Which we so how we do it now we can make it work but it's not the same as a 30,000 RPM, higher tool capacity ATC driven tool changer head million percent. I mean, I've got Nakamura with a fairly powerful turret head, live tools 6000 RPM, I've got a speeder to give me 18,000 RPM on the one on the tornos as
Industry Reflections and Innovations
00:09:31
Speaker
well. It's got the gear driven tools, which I think go up to 10,000 RPM. And you actually if you really pay attention and you look at your finishes and
00:09:40
Speaker
look at the tools and everything, the vibration from the gear driven tools is an issue. It's a thing. It's not as smooth and as clean as it is from an actual milling spindle like the Wilhelmin has. It's like I have the best of all worlds now. I've got my Swiss, I've got the Nakamura for bigger, more complicated things, and I've got the Wilhelmin for everything else.
00:10:05
Speaker
Yeah. We have capital holders. They run backward relative to the ER32s that come from Haas. You've got your speeder, I know runs backward because you spent years or years ago, you spent weeks trying to figure out why you're breaking tools. Yup. Why do they keep breaking immediately? Yeah. Oh, because I'm rolling it backwards because there's an extra gear involved in order to give me the extra RPM, so it added a reverse function to those. Yeah.
00:10:30
Speaker
I did spend some time looking at the other lathe options. I also briefly looked for B-axis mill turns. The problem is that the smallest machine I saw would be something like an Okuma Multus, I think it's a B250. It is still a huge machine. It's bigger than your Haas, right?
00:10:49
Speaker
It's not tons bigger. It's way smaller than the 3000 like the kind of one that Lawrence used to have. But it's still a machine that's able to machine it's still able to machine apart, you know, as large as a
00:11:03
Speaker
a shoe, I'm a bad example, a pretty large part. Warsaw, which makes it kind of fatal, is it and most of the other B-axis style military machines I've seen have horrid tool change times. It's like 10 seconds each time, whereas the Willimand is really designed for that high
00:11:24
Speaker
tool change quick. What do you think the Wilms at the trade show were? At the trade show? If that probably two, I don't know. They're fast. Probably three seconds. Faster than mine from memory. I think they're 20 years newer, so they're going to be faster. I don't care. Mine, I don't know, might have a five second tool change. I should time it one day, but it's plenty fast enough.
00:11:47
Speaker
But if you look at the multices, and it's not really a knock against them, it's fine if you're running long cycle times on tools. But to do a quick chamfer, tool change, turn, quick change, tap, I mean, the machine moves over to the spot, it rotates the head, it pauses the door open, it grabs the arm. It's kind of like, oh, boy, this doesn't work. Hang on while I go make a coffee. Yeah.
00:12:14
Speaker
Right now, we don't want to go Swiss. We don't have the volumes. It doesn't solve the kind of setup or practically driven tooling desires. We're ruling that off out for right now. If I'm missing some major machine capability that I'm just not thinking of, frankly, I hadn't even thought about a hack around a bar-fed three-axis mill with a
00:12:40
Speaker
I've seen guys do that before. Even a Tormach, somebody hacked a Tormach with a fourth axis barf edit, put a turning tool on the spindle casting. Okay, like rigidly? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's not the path I want to go right now. For sure. That actually just occurred to me. It's kind of cool. Yeah, right. I remember originally before I got my Tormach lathe, I had a manual. No, I had a self-converted CNC lathe. I went down that route and I tried to turn parts with the Tormach.
00:13:09
Speaker
But I had the bar in the spindle and lathe tools mounted on the table. And I built a little gang block with drill bit sticking up. So I could like drill, tap, you know, thread mill, tap, I guess. And I just remember the programming being really weird because X is now half what it normally is. And maybe there's better solutions now where it's cleaner, but I had to like, you know, cut every X and half manually in the code kind of thing. And it was just really frustrating the day before blade show. So.
00:13:39
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Well, on the note of lathes, we sent in the kind of quote unquote final quote for buying a lathe for our training facility, which I'm super excited for. And our goal is to then be able to offer training classes next year. We ended up
00:14:03
Speaker
we thought we could get by with a smaller machine, but then we realized, well, the ST10s are really small. The ST15s, you're close to a 20, price isn't that different. And in a weird way, the bigger machines are slightly safer because you do have more turret time, travel time if you want to pause it. But ultimately it also just occurred to me, hey, we know the ST20Y and we can tool it up similarly. And in a
00:14:27
Speaker
both explicit but also kind of unintended way it could be a backup
Post-IMTS Shop Improvements
00:14:32
Speaker
machine which is great. We just know it. Here's my question for you is almost all the work we've done over the years on that machine has been pretty small stuff. I guess the question is do we get either
00:14:50
Speaker
a 5C collet on either the main and sub or just even the sub. On the training machine. Yeah, the new one. That's a good question. What's on your knock? 5C collet. On both. On both sides. Yeah. Which you limited it like. One inch. Yeah. Can you get one inch bar fed or through the collet or is it? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
00:15:14
Speaker
I think you can buy one in one sixteenth collets in 5C, but I guess that's pushing it, which the machine can probably chuck a six inch thing if you had a three-jaw in it. So we are completely limited to three-jaw or to one inch bar, which I mean once in the past six years have I wanted to machine something bigger than one inch.
00:15:35
Speaker
You know, that one time. Yeah. Um, but no, I'm really happy with the five C, the Royal call. It's the dead length, uh, five. Yeah. I guess I'll have to look if they're less expensive. That would be nice. Um, the college will certainly be cheaper. Yeah. You think for training wise, dude, do you want to be able to make big stuff? Do you want to be, is it more showy to turn a three inch diameter slug? That's a good point. Um, the reason I was good. What's, what's more valuable to your students?
00:16:05
Speaker
Well, I haven't gone, I haven't like created the training class curriculum yet, but I mean, we're not going to be turning 10 inch material in class or five inch material. Even so, you know, like, as you well know, a lot of the learning is going to happen in the tool path creation. And a lot of that you could do on a one inch part of your problem. So, um, I.
00:16:27
Speaker
The reason I like the idea of a 5C even on the sub is, man, you are with a QG65. It is a large diameter collet chuck, which makes it a lot tighter when you go to grab and do part transfers and dual part holding for part off, especially on the smart diameter parts. And even just to get your turning tools really close to the chuck,
00:16:54
Speaker
for a small stick out part, there's a lot of clearance issues. Yeah. I keep hearing that from guys with those chucks. Will you send me a picture or post up on insta of your knock chucks just so I can get to see what it looks like? Yeah, sure. Do that. Thanks. What's your takeaway from IMTS? One of my buddies, Brad texted me a couple of days after IMTS and he's like, so now that you've had some time to think about it, what keeps rolling around your head?
00:17:24
Speaker
couple of days later, like, like, what can't you get out of your mind? Um, Wilhelmin was certainly part of it because I have one. It just got me psyched to get it going. Um, yeah, I made a point of going to Rotors CNC. Have you ever heard of them?
00:17:42
Speaker
They make a five axis milling slash grinding machine. That's very similar to a current like it's got linear motors and super hyper accurate meant for making molds and jig grinding and doing things like that. I wish I could have talked to them more.
00:18:01
Speaker
Mr. Rotors was not at the table at the time when I was there, but he was just walking around and I didn't get a chance to come back on the last day. I really wanted to pick his brain about jig grinding, but some of the finishes they were getting from grinding wheels in a five-axis machine were insane. I really wish I could have gotten some more answers there because with the way we grind our Rask blades,
00:18:26
Speaker
We're basically doing a manual cycle jig grinding routine right now. We're going up and down and stepping over a few thousand up and down again and stepping over and we're just taking the grinding wheel up and down and up and down across the blade. I've only been doing it for about a month or two and I'm 90% thrilled with the results. There's a couple little fine tuning things. I'm like, what am I doing wrong? Is it the wheel choice?
00:18:53
Speaker
That was really cool. It was cool to see that. I'm guessing they're a European company, it sounds. Yeah, German-ish, I think. German-ish. Swiss-ish. Let's see what else. Some of the smaller vendors talked to one company that made a handheld refractometer for coolant bricks. Not too much different than anything else, but
00:19:20
Speaker
really nice quality, but they also made an inline live feedback refractometer. I was like, oh, this is cool. We've been talking about this for years. We've been looking for this. He said, it works. It works really well. I filmed a little bit about that. How much do you think it would be? It's a little tiny device you can put in your hand. It plums into your pipes or something? You put it inline somewhere in your coolant feed.
00:19:46
Speaker
I would be pleasantly surprised if it's under $700. Yeah, it was $2,500, something like that. Yeah, that was my answer too. I guess $999.
00:19:58
Speaker
And he's like, no, it's more like 2,600 or whatever. And I was like, I'm not surprised. Um, and then me and another guy were actually playing a game around IMTS for the past few days, uh, guessing the prices of everything. Like on my video, I did this whole string of it where I'm okay. I guess the price of that. Okay. I think it's just, you know, $600,000. No, it's a million. Okay. That's cool. So it's fun to gauge the reality with your thinking.
00:20:24
Speaker
There seems to be, well, first of all, I will say this for the folks that didn't get to go. It was, in my opinion, it was a great show. The attendance was down and the exhibitors were for sure down, but it didn't feel like that. Like if you just got dropped off there, you would not make, oh boy, this show's hurting. Like emo was weird in Italy last year. It was a small show. Everyone still had masks on. It was, there were like random empty booths. It was kind of like, oh, this doesn't feel as normal. This felt great.
00:20:51
Speaker
I will say, I don't know how to put my finger on this specifically, but it does seem like the conversations that I've had with lots of different folks, maybe it's not a good point because people just know me now. I've got to know some people, so if I ask them a question, they just give me the answer. The whole give me a ballpark on that has now led to the response being,
00:21:15
Speaker
a number and not it. Let me get your email and PDF and quote and we'll start a conversation. We'll set up and be like, tell me like, is it 380 or 780? You're right. I don't think I got that to run around once at the show. Maybe I had to ask just one follow-up question, be like, no, just give me a number. Is it 500,000? Is it a million? Is it $20? Is it what?
00:21:37
Speaker
And I think it actually helped for me to make the guessing game where it's like, Oh, don't tell me, don't tell me. I think this machine's a hundred thousand dollars. And he goes, no, it's 70 sweet. I was over. And then they could like play the game too. It was really funny. Yeah. Um, but yeah, you're right. It was much more open and wonderful. Yeah.
00:21:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's all I got on IMPS right now. We filmed a ton, and I'm guessing it'll take us a little while to get our video edited. You'll probably beat us to it though. It looks like you guys were already cranked on it. Yeah, Fraser's working on it now. Sweet.
00:22:08
Speaker
shameless plug though, right when I got back. It was a really, on a personal level, it was a really formidable show because, again, it kind of made me realize I had every ounce of hunger to continue doing what we do and to do it well. So by no means is there any form of complacency, but I also feel as though I'm approaching this as more of a
00:22:36
Speaker
The only way I know how to explain this is actually a terrible way because it's categorically not true, but imagine going to IMTS as a 50, 70-year-old, made man, sold a company. You're there just because you want to enjoy the show. You want to see the energy. You want to see what's happening in the technology world. You want to meet people that are the new energy and the new ...
00:23:00
Speaker
I don't like that example because I'm not that person that's complete baloney to say that, but I am not the 25-year-old who doesn't really know how to machine, who doesn't have any equipment, doesn't have a shop, doesn't have any employees, doesn't have any experience. I'm in the middle, if that makes sense. 100%. It made me feel really great. You can see that future. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It was just like, am I at the point where I want to kind of ... There's no reins to be passed on in like ... I don't know.
00:23:31
Speaker
I don't know if I'm making any sense, but a part of the chapter of my life is now closed in a good way. It makes me want to make sure I'm doing everything I can to invest every ounce of energy and time into the team here and the resources we have here for fixture plates, for the shop operations, for being my best here, the training stuff now. That's what I kind of came away from with. And I think you're right. I think the past 10, 15 years for each of us separately
00:23:59
Speaker
has been the grassroots growth phase. We went from just us in our garage or you in your apartment next to your pillow with your little tiny machine to build a team, to build a culture, to build a brand, a company, a legacy.
00:24:19
Speaker
a marketing business, a fan base. But we've built all of that to the point now where walking around IMTS, I find I feel like I belong there. First few times, first few big shows, I'm just a total imposter here. I'm just a kid tagging along. I don't really know what all this stuff is and now I'm like, I know what most of this is and I am a purchasing customer and I could
00:24:47
Speaker
you know, hypothetically get whatever I needed here.
00:24:53
Speaker
as I self justify everything that I feel like I need. Right, right. I wanted to, 10, five years ago, I wanted to fight to be relevant. I wanted to fight to build this company. Now, I am far more interested in what I can do to help. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a philanthropist. We're growing a company. I want to help our own team first. Yeah.
00:25:17
Speaker
Do everything i can to be kind of an official bastard to help in any way i can elsewhere period and that's what i get kind of goes back to like the whole like you know i'm not interested we had a. What are the household name machine builders like hey we're paying mtd cnc.
00:25:35
Speaker
to publicize what we're doing. I was like, dude, I'm not your huckleberry. I'm going to film this stuff because what you've got here is interesting in this element, but I don't want your money, dude. Yup, exactly. I have to say that too. I'm like, I'm sorry, I'm not for sale, but I will do what I do as I want to do it.
00:25:54
Speaker
And that's cool. But as you said, I think the transition, you know, when you're a solo printer, when you're the only person in the business, you're doing it for yourself. You're doing it for your skill and your knowledge and bank account
Entrepreneurship and Personal Growth
00:26:06
Speaker
and everything. And we've grown now for the staff where kind of the health and growth of the company is probably number one, but then me being at the show and hearing from all these wonderful people about the stories of their businesses and what little part I might've played to inspire that. Um,
00:26:23
Speaker
really help remind me how good you are at that and how good-ish I am at that, at sharing the passion and the commitment to the industry and makes me realize that more of that please. Yeah, exactly. The effort for me to do those things and the benefit that they have to the community is like a million to one. Yeah, let's just make sure we don't get too full of ourselves either. I know.
00:26:52
Speaker
What I wanted to say was I came back from MTS, felt super invigorated, ended up filming a shop update tour here. And I keep a running list of things I wanted to share about just quality of life improvements. And that video comes out, came out two days ago if you're listening to this podcast. Honestly, if you run a shop, go watch the video. Like we talk about some really things that we've just done. Honestly, at this point, most of the suggestions come from the team, which is great. So in some respects, I'm just stealing their ideas.
00:27:19
Speaker
But it's wonderful. And I talk about manager meetings, Johnny Five, how we have been handling all the different fluids and oils that we have to have at the shop now, how we got a new floor cleaner. And again, it was just this refreshing change to be like, this is just kind of a moment in life of what I'm hoping to do to run this place better. Yes. That's awesome. I can't wait to watch that. I should do a video like that too.
00:27:43
Speaker
You should, Don, I want to, I'm better because I've gotten to do these shop tour videos or, you know, there's a form of FOMO though, every time somebody else knows something, you're like, Oh man, I wish you want to learn that stuff because that's that intrinsic desire to just be our best selves. Speaking of which, so I've been running this video more and more lately, cutting this rich light material for the saga cases going super well, except it makes mountains of chips.
00:28:12
Speaker
Really? I cut four cases yesterday, and with the filter paper in the chip tray, it was not draining. It was a bathtub. Oh. Because the filter paper clogged up after making just four cases.
00:28:26
Speaker
I was about to give you a hard time for the episode whatever when I'm like, dude, just buy the chip conveyor. I know. Would that have even helped? Because that's downstream of the filter. Yeah. And a lot of the not draining was the finer dust, I guess, that the filter paper is catching, but it's clogging. And then there's big stringy chips, too. These black plastic kind of paper, rich light chips.
00:28:54
Speaker
So I was thinking about it a lot last night and I'm like, okay, how do I make like a super easy DIY chip conveyor? Just I have filter paper. No, hold on. Hold on. You got to go through the process. I have all this filter paper. I'm like, all I need to do is get it from the roll.
00:29:09
Speaker
underneath the waterfall and then into a bucket. Like even if it's manual, you're pulling it or you build some quick little belt conveyor kind of thing, but it's got a drain and I have a bunch of paper band filters. So I know how they put other built. It's not complicated, but it's definitely time and engineering and effort. And then so I slept on it. And the quickest answer I thought is to have the role on the on one side of the chip conveyor. And I'm
00:29:37
Speaker
feeding the paper completely under the whole cooling tank, up around the back and then forward again under the waterfall so that I can just pull it forward every little bit. I see most people cut a forefoot length or whatever and just lay it down and then wad it up and put a new one down.
00:29:55
Speaker
But this lets me feed it forward, just keep pulling from the roll. So I tried it, took a minute to do that, and I'm like, this is good progress. And then one of my other guys, Steven, looked at it and he's like, why don't you just get deep fryer baskets and put them under the waterfalls? And I'm like, brilliant. There's a restaurant supply store 10 minutes down the street. I'll be right back.
00:30:14
Speaker
They had six different sizes in stock. They're all nice stainless steel ones. They were $50 each, whatever. So I got four of them. So we could have two in the machine and two ready to go with their own filter paper in each one. And we had to cut them and bend them to modify them to fit a little bit. But for almost no money, a couple hundred bucks in deep fryer baskets and some filter paper, we got a pretty good solution the next day sort of thing.
00:30:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's good progress on that.
00:30:45
Speaker
We've had some folks send us or we've made like little fish fry, like the flatter style, not the fry, not like a basket, but like a flatter thing. And they help, except they also just exacerbate the potential risk of an even bigger kind of flutter problem. So it's been mixed at best. What you're doing is commendable. Like you want the hot swappable, like, oh, let's go grab a new one. And then you can clean that one out. And even if it does overflow, it would just overflow into the where cooling normally goes.
00:31:14
Speaker
Yeah. Hold my beer. Ours flooded right before IMTS. Same thing. We were cutting VF6A. We were cutting some HDPE for some covers for picture plates and those are chips that whatever. It overflowed and then it overflowed and then it got the flood alarm set it off right away, which is great.
00:31:38
Speaker
Haas, I missed it, but Amish sent it to me the day I left. So Haas, God bless him, has come out with some, it's actually an interesting way of solving it because the whole, like the DMG style, I know Amish has the,
00:31:53
Speaker
paper band filter that is always presenting new paper scroll, a roll or scroll of paper is great, but it ends up that's a little more complicated to design than one might think. Case in point, we also threw out this challenge on the bomb and no one has followed through. We had a couple people say they were on it and it's, I mean, this is a- A while ago, right? Oh, if you come up with a good design, and I'm not saying that can't be a good design, I think you could sell six figures of these in the first few months. Yeah, absolutely. I did have a guy,
00:32:21
Speaker
actually design something fully featured. I'm going to have to look into it again now that I have my speedio and it's like here, I have to look at his design again. The problem with the speedio is you want to go left to right, but there's pumps and baffles and everything in the way. To go front to back would be ideal, but there's no room. It's tricky. I hear chip management problems on speedios all day. People just shovel them out and they just live with it. We don't accept that.
00:32:49
Speaker
The Haas one, which I'm hoping they publicize, I kind of think that they will, it was picture A.
00:32:57
Speaker
conveyor belt like on a conveyor belt. But instead of a rubber conveyor belt, it was a fine wire mesh. So that was your scroll filter was this wire mesh that's just constantly treading along like a treadmill. And then when it hit the far roller, there's a scraper that helped scrape off whatever was on the roller.
00:33:20
Speaker
So that way you weren't consuming filter paper, it was just constantly cycling. Obviously how it works, I really wish I had seen it in person. Yeah, I saw the picture that Amish sent us because he went and looked back at it and I added it to my little, my speedo folder because it's for reference and it's not complicated to
00:33:38
Speaker
Like really? But it's everything's more complicated than it looks like. Yeah, exactly. But of all chip conveyors, that's like the simplest, smartest, coolest like for these kind of waterfall machines. It's like, that's cool. Okay, how do I do something like that for cheap?
00:33:55
Speaker
Well, and I'll throw myself in the DIY bloodbath of the horizontal is so productive. And for whatever reason, it does consume a ton of coolant. And sometimes we don't realize it's lower than we wish. So one of our interns designed, I was like, this has to be as simple as possible. And so the current design is 3D printed parts. So we don't have to spend time machining stuff. 3D printing is cheap and easy.
00:34:22
Speaker
that hold a toilet bowl plunger like the sort of the softballish size float thing. Those are fun fact, those are tapped quarter 20 on the end, God bless them. So that will float in the tank and if it gets too low, it just shorts out or just depresses a micro switch that has a, I bought extra trailer backup LED lights, they're super bright with a 12 volt battery or something.
00:34:48
Speaker
So we could 3D print this thing, install it, and basically you'll see the light if it trips, which is plenty of enough of an indicator. You still have a day before it's like out or something, right? Yeah. It just means you don't have to like try to poke your head in to see. You'll react to something. Nope, that light's on. Yep. Yep. Yeah. I've thought about that in the past. We're shooting like a bright flashlight at the ceiling or something where you could, from anywhere in the shop, you're like, oh yeah, I got to go take care of that. Yeah.
00:35:16
Speaker
Can I change the subject? Actually, this is a good question related to coolant. I'm sick of getting coolant all over me when I'm constantly opening and closing the doors to look at parts when we're doing R&D or proving out stuff. I really want a
00:35:36
Speaker
something like a... I don't think it would be a check valve, although I'm wondering if a check valve could work in for lock line or whatever fitting style so that it doesn't drip. Basically, as soon as the pressure stops, it doesn't spend the next 14 or 15 seconds dripping out a decent volume in the pipe. Is that a thing? In our Mori, there is a check valve more near the pump.
00:36:00
Speaker
that fun fact got clogged up at one point and we have to like disassemble it and clean it. It's definitely a thing. And I think if you put it more near the nozzle, it would just do it. And so check that would stop fluids from going backward.
00:36:16
Speaker
Right. Because you need enough pressure forward to open the valve. That's what I want. You want the spring of the valve strong enough that static weight doesn't flow through. It might take a little bit of trial and error. I'm sure on McMaster you can buy in every spring weight you would ever want.
00:36:35
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. You want a spring flapper that is easily overcome with pressure, but with just a little bit of fluid in the pipe. You don't want it to be an obstruction so that you're reducing flow on the way out, but worth playing with for sure. I think they're solenoid valves, but they do dribble
00:36:55
Speaker
between tool changes and afterwards for a little bit. And I was also thinking the same thing. I wish there was a check valve at the nozzle, right before the nozzle, because that's silly. So maybe Lockline even has a problem.
00:37:09
Speaker
I literally just wrote down lock line check valve. I'm going to Google it. Worst case, I'll adapt lock line into one of those push to fit check valves that you can buy that we use for others things. You just got to make sure that if the coolant flowing through that has any debris, any dirtiness, if you're not going through a bag filter down to 20 microns or something, it's going to clog up the check valve over time maybe. You think? I don't know.
00:37:38
Speaker
We had it clogged up after running a lot of foam in the Maury. We run the foam dry, but you can only clean up so much, so much of the stuff got in the coolant, and that's what clogged up the check valve eventually. Depending on if the check valve is after filters or if there's no filters or whatever, it could clog up, but you'd see it pretty quick because you wouldn't have any coolant.
00:38:00
Speaker
Yeah. So we have two stock filters on our MP Systems Okuma machines, one for the Genos, which is almost a year old, the other for the horizontal, which frankly is probably massively outdone the Genos in terms of spindle hours just because of what a beast that machine has been.
00:38:17
Speaker
And we stopped me if I told you this, but the machine went down. It was a VFD alarm on the high pressure pump. I cleared it and I thought, well, let's just wait and see. And it came back the next day. I thought, okay, that's real. And so I looked at the SOC filters and they were not bad. I mean, they clearly were dirty, but
00:38:36
Speaker
I would say that they were nowhere near end of life, but there's two of them. They were probably 12 bucks each. I thought, well, that's easy. Replace those. Well, that didn't fix it. Ends up in a shout out to MP Systems for being frankly honest. I don't always think every company would be so straightforward. When I called them, they're like,
00:38:54
Speaker
We've just started to see this. We are pretty sure we got a bad batch of VFDs, but there's a wire harness that's either coming loose or something's wrong with that. They were able to get us a replacement one. They wanted the old one back to try to help diagnose it, but I really appreciated it.
00:39:10
Speaker
It would have been easy to just say, you know, we don't know or whatever. Um, and luckily that solved it. But, um, Oh, why did I bring that up? I don't remember. Sorry. Anyway, cool infiltration. Oh, it just made me sorry. Maybe look at the coolant. Um, and we have not to be naive or whatever. We have not had those sort of issues. Now the hospital machines, when the guys clean the tanks out there, they could be pretty gnarly at the bottom of the tank. Yeah. Yep.
00:39:39
Speaker
Um, speaking of issues and alarms, our tornos gave us a good complaint while I was gone. Um, some Y axis. Ah, I forget what the error says.
00:39:51
Speaker
But it's like some fanic alarm, and if you look it up, it's a somewhat common alarm. But it basically means either the motor is unhappy or bad. The ball screw is unhappy or bad, or the drive is unhappy or bad, or something like that. And on the Tournos, the Y is the one that goes up and down. So it's always holding a bit more weight for the whole sliding, all the tools.
00:40:11
Speaker
So it hasn't run in the past week because we're trying to diagnose and figure this out. And since I got back on Monday, I've been emailing TornosUS and our Elliott guys here trying to figure out what's up. Do we need to get a technician to come in? Do we look at it? Do we, you know, we're here. How can we help you diagnose this from a distance kind of thing? And the last email I got from Tornos is like, I don't feel good about your machine right now. I don't want to see that email. I'm sorry.
00:40:42
Speaker
So I don't know what the answer is, what the solution is right now. Like maybe a chip got in the ball screw and it's just creating extra load or something. But if you jog the y-axis, at some point it just alarms out and just says, nope, I can't do it. But sometimes it goes freely up and down. So I'm not sure.
00:40:58
Speaker
I mean, I'm no expert here or repair guy. It would be awesome if it were something as simple as a loose encoder, where it's getting out of sync with the motion. Could be. Yeah, I'm sorry. Man, you just got that machine running after the whole debacle with the oil, too. The whole oil thing. And the new oil is solving that problem completely, like no more foaming, no more issues, no more pump alarms. So that's fantastic. And we've been running it hard.
00:41:25
Speaker
But yeah, now we're like, oh no, we're going to start running out of parts if we don't get this fixed. And I just told Angelo an hour ago, I was like, I know we're capable and I kind of want to dig in and fix this, but also like this machine needs to be running tomorrow, like two days from now. And he's like, totally agree. Like, let's figure out what it takes.
00:41:43
Speaker
So yeah, that's going to take some serious focus and phone calls. I'm sorry. So what's up with that? I mean, I've had it for three, four years now. Really? It's been 2019. I got it. Oh my gosh. That's crazy. So it's been great. Yeah, but that machine shouldn't have. I mean, you guys didn't crash it, right? Or haven't crashed it recently. He was, Pierre said he was trying to dial in the run out on a drill bit. Um,
00:42:12
Speaker
And he might have been gently tapping the drill bit or call it nut or something, gently. And that is attached to the whole y-axis. And that's when the problem started. Oh, man. Okay. So I don't fault him for it, but I don't even think that would do it. Like we've bumped the machine harder. Yeah. He would have tapped it.
00:42:36
Speaker
Yeah, when it's cutting, like cutting is a controlled crash. For sure. And we've had some very uncontrolled crashes as well. Maybe not in Y, mostly in X, now that I think about it. But like X, the ball screw and the motor coupler, the coupler is just a friction fit on the ball screw shaft. Interesting. And it's like you torque it to a certain like field, the guy was telling me, and ours was torqued loose or backed off or something. So
00:43:04
Speaker
not only during a crash, but also during a cut sometimes, X would slip and it would lose position and the parts would start being like a hundred that bigger or something. So the LA guy came in, he torqued in, he's like, I have done this a bunch, no problem, I got a feel for it. And there's probably a spec, I don't know. So that's my thinking is maybe that's just loose, maybe it's the same problem I had before, we're just seeing it differently.
00:43:29
Speaker
John, you got to get a tech in there. This is not. I'm going to make some phone calls right after this.
00:43:37
Speaker
Can we part on a random snippet of conversation I just had with acquaintance? This is a left field change, but good acquaintance business owner, some elements of struggling only say this to set this up the conversation framework, but we kind of had this conversation where it was worth noting the opportunity cost of being an entrepreneur
00:44:04
Speaker
And I love what I do, you love what you do, and so forth. But ultimately, there's something to be said for if you could go out and earn XYZ as a salary, as a machinist, or engineer, or whatever, which is this day and age is certainly an easy opportunity. If you're not earning at least that, if not multiple times more, or have a direct path to that,
00:44:30
Speaker
At some point you should you should someone needs to give you the hard advice of thinking about what are the best steps to set yourself up for success and that may mean
00:44:39
Speaker
doing that while you kind of go back to a side gig type of thing and that's okay. This is a decision everybody makes on their own. You don't owe it to anybody else. The way it came about in the conversation was very organic. It was a very strange way of thinking about like, hey, don't work your butt off and end up making 12 grand next year because you want to be an entrepreneur when you could be earning the multiples of that and potentially trying to run a side thing.
00:45:07
Speaker
Yeah, that's a tough internal struggle conversation because I spent years with that struggle bus making 12 grand a year for the business and taking home nothing, just enough to buy end mills and material kind of thing. Where's the limit between investing that time and effort to know you have potential in the future versus
00:45:33
Speaker
Folding it in or creating it into a side gig and taking care of your family and getting paid well elsewhere. These are conversations I've had lately too. It's like opportunity is abundant these days if you know where to look and if you have skills and opportunity. What do you want to do with your time?
00:45:52
Speaker
you can always go get a crapier job that pays more. Not always, but it happens. But I don't even mean it in the way of memorializing your failure or giving up. I don't mean it like that. I mean it just like, don't be, we all are prone to sunk cost syndrome where you're just like, I've got so much in this, I want to keep going. Maybe it's not the right call. Anyway, I don't mean to
00:46:18
Speaker
influence anybody rather than just to offer a different mindset of thinking about, oh, you know what, hold on, this could solve a lot of problems and set me up for success if and when I relaunch it or it grows. I remember being with strike mark, insistent that we build all of them ourselves, quitting my job to do it, and then realizing, wait a minute here, let's sacrifice a bunch of margin, but have somebody else build them who's set up to do this, who has a factory, I'm in my house. And if it works, we can always take over that. That wasn't obvious to me whatsoever at the time.
00:46:51
Speaker
Sweet. I like that. Good perspective. Comment. Thanks. That's all I got. See you next week. All right. See you next week. Take care. Bye. Bye.