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#324 We Want to See Everyone Win
142 Plays1 year ago
TOPICS:
- We want to see everyone Win
- Shop rags
- Kern spindle is coming in 2 weeks
- Willemin updates!
- The future of manufacturing?
- ChatGPT
- heat treating parts
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Machinist Resources
00:00:01
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining episode number 324. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo.
00:00:10
Speaker
When John and I started with our hobby China machines, moved on to our Tormox and then this, the world was a different place. There was no YouTube. There was no, like I just say, there were no plethora of podcasts or resources of Instagram machinists. And you look around today and our podcast is just one of many resources out there, but we love it. It's a tool for us. And hopefully it's a tool for you guys that are listening to just be cliched, but to be your best self as leaders and machinists and entrepreneurs.
00:00:40
Speaker
makers of decisions. Yep. Yeah. And at the end of the day, I just want to see everybody win.
Competitiveness and Generational Influence
00:00:45
Speaker
And I see a lot of people winning right now. And it's very satisfying. It was a good way to put it. Yep. I wanted to go ahead. There's a lot like growing up in business, like there's obviously some selfishness, you're like, I want to win. And some people are more competitive than others. I'm not super competitive. But at the end of the day, like I call I call complete
00:01:10
Speaker
Yeah. I saw that. Oh yeah. Maybe. Maybe I think of myself as being not very competitive because I'm not outwardly competitive, but I'm certainly competitive with myself. I just want to be better. Yeah. That's what I think about. Yeah.
00:01:24
Speaker
But regardless, the deeper I get into the business, the more it grows, the more staff we have. I want to see our staff win. I want to see other businesses win, even, quote unquote, competitors. When they crash, I'm happy for them, you know? When they crash? Well, crush, crush. Oh, sorry. Big difference. Yeah, yeah. I'm happy when they crash. No. Yeah, it's just it's fun. No, no, agreed. You got to think about.
00:01:53
Speaker
the people that you look up to and the world you want to live in. And there's an element I think that was, I think it's implicit in our human DNA, although everyone's different, but nevertheless, it's that way. But also, I think for you and me, like it or not, the generation of our parents or grandparents,
00:02:10
Speaker
that influenced us. I think there was a little bit of a different worldly approach and it was a little bit more of a, you know, my grandfather who was influential on me, you know, he fought in World War II. It was very nationalistic view of like America and business and post-war. And it was kind of a win, I don't want to say at all costs, because that implies moral hazards and greed, but like, you know, win and, you know, stomp on your competitors. And I'm also competitive, but the truth is that I enjoy
00:02:40
Speaker
the rising tide raises all ships mentality. And I just found what pleases us as being a leader amongst equals in terms of how we're handling the business side of things. Does that make sense?
Jealousy and Professional Growth
00:02:54
Speaker
I still want to be good.
00:02:57
Speaker
Yeah, it's, but I'm, I'm learning not to be jealous of other people's success. Cause there's like a deep side of me that like does get jealous when somebody else grows or does something cool or like, and, and I'm actually learning, uh, consciously.
00:03:14
Speaker
to not let that, you know, bother me, slow me down to be happy for that. Because at the end of the day, I am happy for that. The jealousy is just like a natural reaction. It's like, oh, man, you know, they did that. But and then you take a step back and you're like, OK, I'm not doing so bad myself, like.
00:03:34
Speaker
Yeah, I'm really glad that you brought that up because I've had similar things in both our world, you know, there's some machining folks that are just killing it and good for them. But also, you know, I'll see things that kind of irk me like I'll see a random person who looked to be blunt, maybe didn't work as hard or wasn't as smart or whatever. And now they're doing something arguably a little bit sleazy. And
00:04:02
Speaker
And they're doing multiples better. And look, you don't know what you don't know. And there's plenty of people that are living beyond their means. But I think it is important as an entrepreneur to realize
00:04:15
Speaker
That's going to happen.
Family Values and Career Connection
00:04:16
Speaker
And nowadays, when I look at somebody who's, let's pick on somebody like, I don't know, sorry to pick on any specific trades, but like an insurance agent or a stockbroker or financial advisor, something like that or whatever. With the multiple of dollars earned is kind of disproportional to the effort put in.
00:04:35
Speaker
Well, no, I mean, I don't begrudge it because look, there can be a, it can be hard to build those books of businesses. And if you do so, more power to you. What I'm thinking about is let's pick a stock worker. If you're a stock worker and you're pulling in six times more than any of us, here's my response to that.
00:04:51
Speaker
I'm going to wake up in the morning, have my cup of coffee and read my morning news and just think to myself, I'm happy going into work today doing what I want to do and building my story. It's weird. It's not even that I'm happy for them because I actually don't care about them. I'm just like, I wouldn't in a million years stop going just to go chase a different buck if that's what makes, you know what I mean? Absolutely. No worries. I'm good.
00:05:16
Speaker
Yep, and we all make our choices in life. And I mean, you left kind of the finance world to come into manufacturing. But I think I think we find a passion in what we do and we find enjoyment in that. And that comes with its ups and downs as well. And kind of, you know, sleep in the bed you made sort of thing. But yeah, I'm happy with where we're at. I want to do better continually forever. But we're pretty happy with with where things are at right now.
00:05:45
Speaker
You know, if I can go down history memory lane, I don't know how many folks know this or frankly even care, but when I graduated college, I had the chance to get this job and I picked the real estate
00:06:00
Speaker
group within this investment bank, JP Morgan Investment Banking, solely because we have a family farm. It's been our family since 1820. And everybody I know who is successful has some form of comfort or involvement in real estate. And I wanted to learn more and be competent in that. And I just thought, that's going to be a way to do that. And I ended up sticking around that sort of world for about 10 years. And I don't regret it. But I'm a little bit defensive because it wasn't the typical
00:06:28
Speaker
Oh, New York finance type thing. I came at it from a much more holistic approach. Genuinely from the start. Now look, I got a little sidetracked because we're doing the work we were doing had very little to do with a small farm in central Ohio. But nevertheless, I came at it from the approach of like, I want to make sure I don't need, I'm not the generation that screws this up. That's interesting. I knew many of those facts separately, but I never knew them as a story that that goes together. That's really cool. Yeah.
00:06:57
Speaker
And obviously the plan for that family farm is to keep it in the family for...
00:07:02
Speaker
I don't know. Yeah, I hope so. I think of it as kind of like a piece of artwork. You don't know. I've been there. It's amazing. Yeah, it's great, right? It really makes me proud and to be super, you know, personal, you know, there if I'm ever having moments where I'm like, oh, I don't know if I'm making the right decision or I don't know if I'm happy with where we're at right now. The gentleman, John Miller, who is my, if I'm going to get this right, my dad's mother. So my paternal grandmother's great grandfather, I think.
00:07:32
Speaker
He's the one that kind of established the farm. I'd like to think that if there's an afterlife and if he's aware, I'd like to think that he's looking down on this little micro business that we've built that he's probably like, son, you're doing okay. I'm proud that you're part of that lineage. I'd like to think that. Yeah,
Cultural Upbringing and Stability
00:07:51
Speaker
that's cool. That's very cool. Yeah.
00:07:55
Speaker
That's probably the most off topic we've started out of podcasts in a long time. I love to add some context. Yeah, right? Well, that's you. So I mean, I know your factoids, but you obviously live in the Toronto area now, but I know you spent a significant portion of your affordable years actually in the United States, Pacific Northwest, right? Yeah, all over the place. So let's just think about these yesterday. I lived in the US from age nine to about 21. Yeah, that's crazy, John. Like my entire childhood, basically.
00:08:25
Speaker
So, you know, now being in back in Canada, you know, I have this, I don't want to say identity crisis, but I'm very Canadian, but I'm also, I grew up American, you know, like the culture is a little bit different. Um, especially around things like guns and cool, cool stuff like that. Uh, in Canada, it's not typical, but, um,
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah, so I spent, I mean, we lived in upstate New York for about four years and then we moved to Northwest Washington, Lyndon Washington and grew up there, high school, everything. Yeah.
00:08:59
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. You've never had a US passport though? No. My parents won a green card lottery back in the early 90s. Yeah. So they're like, sweet. Let's just move down to the US. They had some friends down there. So we just moved. And we moved a lot when we were kids. And I guess they weren't afraid. My parents weren't afraid to just pick up and go somewhere else. Yeah.
00:09:27
Speaker
So yeah, Eric and I were just talking how many times we've moved and it's probably north of 20 something. No. Yeah. Really? Yeah, and Meg too. She's got kind of a similar, different but similar move history, just a lot of different places.
00:09:43
Speaker
Do you feel like that makes you want stability and lack of moving at this point in your life or does it make you thirst for new things and change and so forth? No, I definitely like the stability. As I've grown, I've realized everybody likes consistency to a certain degree and everybody likes variety to a certain degree.
00:10:03
Speaker
And in different areas, you know, there's like sliding scales of what you like. And I like both. I like very consistent. That's why I like, you know, the current consistency. Everything's like the same. I like to make a precision product that I can make to a tenths. I like that consistency. But the variety, you know, I have other areas of my life where I get variety from. And it's a balance of what you want. But
00:10:27
Speaker
Yeah, we live in a very nice house now, almost 100-year-old house. We bought it a couple of years ago. It's the first house we've ever bought. I don't think we'll stay in it forever, but after this, there might be one more. Either we build something out in the country or get a nice forever place.
00:10:46
Speaker
this place is in town, it'd be nice to live just outside town, things like that. And then we've also toyed with the idea of buying a small place in Europe or something because I actually have my Norwegian citizenship as well.
00:10:58
Speaker
Wait, what? Yeah, because my parents were born in Norway, born and raised in Norway, and then came to Canada when they were 20. And then because of that loophole, I was able to apply for my Norwegian citizenship between the age of 20 and 21, I believe it was. I had to write an essay submitted to the Norwegian Embassy. So I have my Norwegian citizenship. So which means I could live anywhere in the EU.
00:11:19
Speaker
I'd say I didn't know my podcast co-host was European. How fancy. Exactly. Huh. So yeah. That's cool. And then it can even extend to my kids. They can get the Norwegian citizenship if they spend a total of six months living in Norway before they're 18 or something. Oh, that's really cool. So we might, you know, I don't know, spend a summer there. I don't know. We'll figure it out, but. Someone needs to go use AI to like deep fake a Norseman into Frozen 3. The movie.
00:11:52
Speaker
That's cool. And that just further proves everybody's got parts of their lives that we don't know about. Yeah, right. So when we, when we view somebody else, and when we, you know, naturally judge them from the information we have, we don't have the whole story. Yeah, right. So interesting. That's cool. Yeah. And you but you've been in Toronto for 20 years now, or 19. So Megan, I moved here 16 years ago. Yeah, she was in Vancouver going to university before that. So that's where we met.
00:12:22
Speaker
Good. Excuse me. That's cool. Okay. Internet. Did you? That was, that was revolutionary for that time. 2002. Only creepy stockers met people on the internet. That's the constant joke, but it's not totally worked out. Well, that's where I remember.
00:12:42
Speaker
We've had some friends and extended relatives that have met through the apps and so forth. And this was maybe 10 years ago. And maybe there was more of a stigma then than there is now, although I'm certainly not in the loop, about the idea of if you meet on eHarmony, is that weird versus what meeting at a random bar where everyone's drinking? It's not like- Yeah, yeah. And you're like square block area of living. Yeah, right? Yeah.
00:13:11
Speaker
Cool. To bring that to a screeching halt, I'd like to talk about laundry rag service for machine shops. Yes.
Machine Shop Economics: Rag Services
00:13:20
Speaker
We actually have that. Really? Mostly for the rugs, like the mats. How do you tell? I think it's called a runner. When you open the door and there's a strip of not red carpet, but it's like black carpet. We should get red ones. That'd be cool.
00:13:38
Speaker
But yeah, we have a service that comes in, especially because our floors are epoxy coated and there's no grip in them. So they're dangerously slippery, especially in the winter with snow, ice, things like that. So we got the service to come in Canada linens or something that comes by, I think, every week and rolls up the old mats, lays new ones down. And then we also have shop rags. They just drop off a bag and they take the old bag and they wash them. And we use them somewhat, not a ton.
00:14:07
Speaker
We're big fan of paper towels for most things but the shop ranks are nice to have around.
00:14:14
Speaker
And the problem with the mats is that they always deliver wet. They're always moist. So we dry them out. We lay them out. We don't let the guys put them in place anymore. They just leave them rolled up in the corner. We'll spread them out. We'll dry them out for a day or two, and then we'll put them back in place. I would say that. That's because it's like the whole point of the service is it's turnkey, not a hassle. Yeah, I know. That's a good point. But I guess we're working with what they're providing, and we're just not complaining.
00:14:41
Speaker
Like you, you know, new mat goes down, you walk on it and then you walk on the epoxy floor and you're leaving like wet footprints and slippery and things like that. Sure, sure. Like they're not that wet, but they're somewhat wet. So anyway, I'm kind of not a part of that at all, but it just happens.
00:14:57
Speaker
We have rags, we're big fans of rags. We just bought them off Amazon. It's 23 bucks for 100 red cotton rags. I assume they're cotton. And then actually shout out to Amish for the lead on the little mini washer we have. The washing machine, it's like 200 bucks off of Amazon. He had one and it's small. It's probably the size of, oh, I don't know how to describe the size of it. It's probably one feet.
00:15:24
Speaker
Deep, three feet wide, three feet tall. So smaller than a mini fridge. Yes, wider but shallower. OK. And it has a washer on the left and a dryer on the right. We don't need a dryer. It's not a dryer. It just sort of spins it. So we really highly dry them. Further segue digress off topic. Shout out to Amish for the phenomenal job he did on the Linus Tech Tips
00:15:51
Speaker
$100,000 PC where he took these huge slabs of aluminum and machined some of them in his VF7, some of them in the
00:16:04
Speaker
Thank you, Dan. 65. Actually, shout out to using our fixture plate on the VF7, which is fun to see. Did you see the video or Instagram? I saw the Linus Tech Tips video, yeah. Yeah, it was really cool. Pretty crazy, right? Super cool. Yeah, what a build.
00:16:23
Speaker
I'm embarrassed to say that I saw Amish doing the parts and had awareness of it, but I didn't ever really put together or realize that the computer itself was the desk. Yeah. That's crazy. That's another thing.
00:16:37
Speaker
It is when you spend $100,000 on a computer. Watching the video, they're like, okay, let's buy the best computer components off the shelf. It's like $5,000 of computer stuff. How are we going to spend $95,000? It's funny. I almost had that washer. I was like, okay, great. We can buy rags and wash them in the shop, which we've done for two or three years. Works fine. The washer broke last week. I was like, you know what? We're growing up. It's time for
Machine Setup and Maintenance
00:17:01
Speaker
rag service. Call it a local company and got a quote. The quote was,
00:17:06
Speaker
I don't know how many rags more than we would need where they change them out every week. But they wanted a three year commitment and it was like 150 bucks a month. Cool. And it's just kind of like that's I mean, I have to go outside my comfort zone to take off my bootstrapper's hat to be like just don't worry if it costs a little more and you'd like but that's stupid. We could buy we could buy seven we could buy
00:17:29
Speaker
three times the amount of rags we need and throw them away every time we use them and still be way under priced. So that just doesn't make sense for us at this point, which I'm kind of bummed about because I like to have a rag service. I don't know what we're paying actually. So then who, to be a little picky here, who reviews and approves stuff like that? Angelo drove it because he knew one of the guys that worked at Canada Linens. They go biking together. Um,
00:17:56
Speaker
So he kind of set that up and started it and then now Spencer runs the accounting for it. So I don't, I literally have no clue if it's $20 a month or $100 a month, but I think it's reasonable enough that nobody else has complained yet.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah, part of me wonders if we had other services like laundry uniforms or rugs or masks, would the price make way more sense? Yeah, if it's rags only, then that doesn't make sense. But if you got rugs in the same price, because we're renting the rugs from them, basically, but they exchange them. And we have at least five or six throughout both shops. Oh, wow. They're really nice to have. Yeah, I know. Agreed. Cool. What have you been up to?
00:18:39
Speaker
Um, I turned on the Wilhelmin yesterday. That's good progress. Come on. What do you mean? Yeah, that's good. I just haven't had, uh, time or focus to like really play with it. Yeah, fair enough. But, um, but I did, I've got a little project I want to make on it. Um, Oh yeah, I saw that. That was cool. Yeah. And, uh, we'll, we'll get into that some other time, but other than that, um, what else, what else?
00:19:08
Speaker
In fairness, the Kern was a big distraction. That's stable now. It's stable. It's working. Cycle times are a little bit slower, but not that much slower on most things, except for grinding the blade is like twice as long almost.
00:19:25
Speaker
Got it. But everything else adds like three minutes, just engraving a little bit slower basically. But that's totally stable, running great, running strong. I think Kern is loosely scheduled for two weeks from now.
00:19:40
Speaker
to be here for the week. Tina's going to come up and do spindle replacement first. And then I was like, what's the spindles in? And you're just doing maintenance checks for the rest of the week. Can we run it at night? It's actually Eric's idea. And she's like, that's kind of unconventional, but maybe. And it's like, unconventional is my middle name. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's what I'm like, when you say you're not competitive, I'm like, John. Yeah.
00:20:07
Speaker
Tina, you're cutting into my 168 here. Yeah, literally. And I'm like, if we can get 15 hours of runtime when you're not here, yes, please. Yeah. So let's button it back up every night as opposed to just leaving it a project for the week because that's serious money we could be making and not losing. So we're going to work on that. She said most likely yes. Maybe one night we can't.
00:20:33
Speaker
They said spindle replacements usually a day and a half. So, and just, just her is coming up and then she'll need like a hand to put, put it in. But for the most part, she's, she's got everything. Uh, we're coordinating what I assume is a palette of parts that they're shipping up to us. Um, with the new spindle and they're sending, like I'm getting a full, they call it the annual maintenance package, but it's been three years and I haven't had it yet. Um,
00:20:59
Speaker
which the quote is very, let's call it breathtaking because the quote is to replace almost everything like XYZ ball screw. All the stuff that could be wrong when they come up so that they have it.
00:21:16
Speaker
to replace if necessary. And then if they don't replace it, then you don't get billed for it. They just ship it back and no big deal. Interesting. No harm, no foul. But that lets them, you know, make one service call, fix what needs to be fixed and then take home the rest. And that's typically what they do. So yeah, you see the quote and you're like, what?
00:21:36
Speaker
I actually commend them for that because nothing is worse than a person arriving and then being like, I need a $30 part or $3,000 part, but I can't do it today. So now you're still down. I'm still leaving. There's more travel, just inefficient. So God bless. That's actually weird. That seems great.
00:21:52
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Once they explain that to us, they're like, okay, that quote makes a little bit more sense. It's still a lot of money to get the spindle replaced and to get the maintenance package done, but whatever. Have you thought about just kicking the can down the road six months? Just running it like it is?
00:22:12
Speaker
Not really. Briefly, it occurred to me, but I'm like, is it going to get worse? And I'd like to have my RPM back, and I need reliability. Probably a dumb suggestion, but it's just kind of like. Well, I mean, that's kind of what we're doing right now. We're getting a couple weeks of kicking the can, and I'm glad to have been able to do that. But this lets us plan predictably that, OK,
Machining Challenges: Chip Control and Tool Management
00:22:36
Speaker
new spindles come in. We're good for a little bit. Who knows how long? Let's schedule that in.
00:22:42
Speaker
And that way we don't have to think about it. And then like we said a couple of weeks ago, like six months from now, I'm not even going to think about this ever. You know, it's going to be done. It's going to be working. Um, yeah. Good. But that's, that's a, it sounds like a good plan. Okay. So the Wilman is your, your doing well on it.
00:23:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think everything's the bar loader is not hooked up yet, but I think everything else functions perfectly. You know how yours has that chip guard that pneumatically goes under the spindle and like covers chips from going... Mine never came with that. It came with the wiring for it. So I had to buy that from Willeman, which was several thousand dollars for that whole kit. But it's this beautiful TIG welded stainless steel piece, brand new.
00:23:34
Speaker
So that came in a couple weeks ago, we just have to install that because we were getting chip packing where it shouldn't go basically when the little sub vice comes up. So that caused a couple failed, failed vice transfers. But once we install that, then like everything, install the bar loader eventually. But
00:23:55
Speaker
Yeah, we have made parts on it. We're not running a production like you guys are. So there's definitely some jealousy there. Dude, I'm going to just talk up granola here. Not only are we running production, we're now running production on multiple parts and switching between parts and adding new parts to it. That's fantastic. And it's just great. I'm so happy for you guys. Yeah. Super jealous, but also happy.
00:24:21
Speaker
a friend was in the shop, a vendor was in the shop, another vendor was in the shop, and all three times they were like, oh, can we see the Willyman? And we just walked over and it was running. And so like, that's kind of the fun thing too, is it's just like, oh yeah, if you happen to be here and you poke in, it's doing some crazy cool
00:24:36
Speaker
It's just awesome. That's awesome. Chip control is legit. Even with our guarding, we've had a couple times where I've seen chips building up in certain areas where you've got to wash, you've got to use the oil system to try to wash out the vice every, like it's, I've worked for workflows and I've been even thinking about selling or getting the post modded so that like every time before it pulls the
00:24:57
Speaker
four tips the vice over. It's like, hey, have your posts go over and strafe the vice three or four times with oil. It'll add three or four seconds, but it gives you that chance to wash stuff out. Would you do that in the post or just write a subroutine or something? It's infusion. I don't know. I probably would do it in the post because I would probably have it. I've not parsed through that post, but I believe there'd be a section where it calls it that.
00:25:23
Speaker
M command for the vice. Right before that, I would probably have an optional subroutine from there that's defaulted on that comes over and does that. Yeah, you could do an infusion with a manual pass-through. That's how I would do it. Then I don't want it to be user dependent. Yeah, that's a good point. I see what you mean. If it's in your template infusion, it would just be there probably.
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah, you could have it be kind of like one of the stock transfer like pass-through things. Maybe, yeah. And yeah. We're doing a ton, nor now, in Fusion for the Okuma. Did I tell you any of this? We have it now to where I get it. I get an email every time a specific cam operation in Fusion happens to violate a certain mode limit. Yeah, you mentioned wanting this. It works. It's great. That's awesome.
00:26:18
Speaker
So it continues, it keeps going, but you get a warning. I get an email with a screenshot of the control and what load limit was violated. What I like about it is what I call user intent. So if I'm doing a tool 85 is drilling a hole on a fixed side mod vice, that might be a different load limit than the same tool in a different product because it's a different hole depth or I'm happy to be drilling more aggressively.
00:26:45
Speaker
And so you don't have to stick a static limit in the machine control that would apply to that tool, regardless of what it's doing. I now have fusion control over each operation, which also, we live in fusion. So we can go in and say, you know what, let's change that, or what was that, or why is it there? We can add comments around clarifying, hey, if it goes up a percent or two, just check the insert. But if it goes up 5%, you've probably chipped it. And then that's a kind of a, this needs to flicks right away. And the email,
00:27:11
Speaker
I'm a zero inboxer, so the email for me or for Garrett creates a to-do list item, like immediately an action item, which I love. That's amazing. With a screenshot and everything, that's what you wanted. That's the goal.
00:27:31
Speaker
It's a notification system. It doesn't change anything. It doesn't fix anything, but it'll, it'll, it logs the event and it allows you to further tweak the tool life speeds and feeds, whatever. Um, so are you adjusting the actual tool life accordingly?
00:27:47
Speaker
with this information? So, where we're at right now is we have that working and we have it on a couple of face mills and a couple of drills. And it's working a high feed mill as well because that's catastrophic if it starts to go. We are still using tool break detect, so that will actually stop the machine. But the goal is we don't want the machine to stop overnight. Between running the 20 some programs we have and 100 tools, it's almost
00:28:13
Speaker
It's possible that you can have the machine stop every night, which is not good. Yeah, with an error. And we had that on the current. We had to work very hard to get past that, to avoid that scenario.
00:28:24
Speaker
And I actually was talking to a Akuma apps guy yesterday about a sort of related topic. And I asked him, I was like, hey, let's take a super simple example. I have a horizontal that only has two parts on it. One is aluminum and one is steel. They don't share any tools. If I break a tool on the steel part, can the Akuma say, okay, I'm not able to do anything else in the steel part. So go ahead and just run the aluminum part. And the short answer is you cannot.
00:28:50
Speaker
if you got crazy with some custom macro programs. Exactly. But my understanding from the friends of ours that have scheduling stuff through a row or a hide and hide, like the Hermos GF, I believe those machines have the ability to say, okay, that tool is down, but there are many other future scheduled things that can be run that don't use that tool. Go ahead and run that.
00:29:11
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't even have that on my current yet. Like if a tool is broken, it stops the machine regardless. However, if I got crafty with my logic, instead of having the breakage detect to stop the machine, it can just flag a macro plus one and then continue. And then the next piece of logic will decide what to do.
00:29:34
Speaker
I would have to exit out of all of my subroutines and then go back to the main pallet management and then call the next one and then lock that tool as broken. It can run until that tool gets called again and then it's like it can't or if there's a sister tool then it can keep going. But it puts away the broken pallet and the broken tool but I don't have that set up yet. I'd have to change almost 100 programs to get that to work, right?
00:30:03
Speaker
But even the sister tooling thing on frankly stinks, and I'm not going to pick on Okuma because I think this is pretty true across most machines where if you broke a tool on an adaptive strategy, if you broke it, like when it was done with the adaptive roughing, it did the tool break, the tools broken, the machine is just going to stop. I don't believe short of custom, like super custom stuff, that there's a way to say, oh, okay, grab the sister tool and redo that last roughing strategy. Now, I understand you may not want to because you could have some hard drive.
00:30:33
Speaker
Sure, but again, I think about the world a little bit differently now because That horizontal it's kind of what you're saying with Tina and letting the current run overnight I mean that horizontal we're running it right now today during the day to catch up on some odd parts that we make on it But then it's so like just invigorating to know that oh, no, it'll still get huge production done at 4 o'clock Sorry at 4 o'clock today
00:30:55
Speaker
Yeah. You can play with it during the day and then just run production at night. And that is the greatest thing in manufacturing since sliced bread. Um, however, if I'm drilling a hole and the drill bit breaks, I don't want to do anything else on that palette. Sure. Right. So it's situation dependent and you can't put logic on just certain tools, situation dependence. Like it's not a broad spectrum thing. Um,
00:31:25
Speaker
So the point is don't break tools, but also if it does break, ideally figure out a way to put the tool away, put the pallet away, just say, okay, problem. Like imagine it's two o'clock in the morning and I break a drill bit in a rask handle. Ideally, put that pallet away and flag it as a big alarm, but pull the next pallet and the sister tool and just keep going on the next one.
00:31:48
Speaker
That's the thing I think, John, that gets me, I hope we see this in our professional lifetime. There's people that come along and change the world, the way they reinvent vehicles or devices or tools. Building a machine tool from scratch is no small feat, but if you could do so with the kind of love it or hate Elon Musk, there's a lot of cool things about Teslas with the GPS,
00:32:15
Speaker
ride height. So it knows when you're getting close to a place in the class where the car has hit a speed bumper or driveway, it knows to raise your suspension because that's where it's low. Like that's the kind of stuff that's so simple. But if you told GM that five years ago, I feel like it's just kind of a like, what? Yeah, that's dumb.
00:32:31
Speaker
Building a new CNC machine. Why can't it say, hey, pallet27 has a broken drill. Put that in a chat GPT driven text message log and say, I noticed that the next five pallets don't need that tool that broke. So I went ahead and ran those. That's so simple. That's how you and I would build a machine, John. Somebody gave us $100 million and said, you two will get locked in a room until you come out with a machine design.
00:32:57
Speaker
And there's nothing about the machine. That's all logic programming. Exactly. And like in Heidenhine, I know the logic to do that just takes time to like pull it off. But I'm trying to apply that same kind of logic to like our speedio and our mori even.
00:33:16
Speaker
to a point, what can it do with the limited amount of tools and the limited amount of space that it has? I'm just super spoiled with the current because I never take out tools from the current. I just keep adding tools. And then if I want to make a fixture, if I want to make a steel part, aluminum part, whatever, I just program it from the tool library and just make the part. Whereas in the speedio with only 21 tools, one of which is a probe, one of which is the fan. So I got 19 tools.
00:33:44
Speaker
Like I'm planning jobs that I'm going to be putting on it and I'm like, Oh, I'm going to have to pull out all of those tool holders and switch to the next job. And I'm not used to that workflow and I don't like it, but I'm about to place an order for like 60 Mary tool holders so that I can do this. Yeah. And I don't think it'll be hard. It's just like annoying. Yeah, that would be, uh, yeah.
00:34:08
Speaker
I'm like, I'm so distracted by this idea of like, if you and I got locked in a room and we didn't limit machine to it would be some conflation of a like horizontal five axis that has a 400 tool matrix with like quick change racks and a controller that doesn't exist on the market. And, you know, like Rob was saying, vision systems are so good, like it should be so simple to have
00:34:30
Speaker
I hate buzzwords, but the truth is AI photo learning that learns what fixtures and parts should look like both before they are made and when they're done. And it could do auto, like machine learned photos to do crash detection. Like there's so many phenomenal things that could be implemented.
00:34:49
Speaker
Yeah, one of my buddies was even saying it could look at the cutter, the cutting tool for wear, like when it's parked in the tool rack kind of thing. Yeah. So the demo I did yesterday with Akuma, a webinar demo.
00:35:04
Speaker
was a sort of unknown thing from Okuma that's called, if I can pull it up here real quick. Yeah, cutting status monitor is a paid add-in, but your machine can be unlocked. It doesn't require a service call or any additional hardware, and it will start learning your toolpath.
00:35:23
Speaker
If you have a 90 second long roughing cycle, it'll start learning the loads throughout that roughing cycle. And it looks like a bar graph or whatever. What would you call it? A graph that moves up and down throughout the time. And then you can build
00:35:40
Speaker
multiple floors and collars or floor ceilings, collars, whatever, along that toolpath. You can say, okay, I want a 3% high and low is a warning collar and 10% above and below is a stop the machine alarm. Too much load or no load. Exactly.
00:35:59
Speaker
And I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing. If I didn't have the email alert system already working, I would be all over this today. I'm gonna sort of think about how much, it's not so much the money, it's more of like, do I really wanna implement this? But it's really cool. So how does it distinguish between a specific tool path on that tool being used? Like if you use the quarter inch rougher for like 10 different things.
00:36:25
Speaker
because it's a so what you would do is you would have you have a high quantity of
00:36:35
Speaker
these cutting sass monitor things, like you have 20 for every tool.
Design Innovations in CNC and Assembly
00:36:39
Speaker
And so you would call it with the G code. So your roughing cycle for a RAS candle would be called with a special G code with a Q variable. And that same tool might do a different Norseman thing and it would be a different, you would call it different routine, if you will, or a memorized profile.
00:36:57
Speaker
That's pretty cool. On our Nakamura, which is FANUC control, there is similar tool load monitoring. So we use it for one of our 3.8s roughing tools, or 5.60s roughing tools. And Angela's got it programmed.
00:37:12
Speaker
that tool breaks or overloads in the wrong scenarios. Um, so he's got it set to like, if it's broken, stop the machine immediately, or if it's overload, stop the machine. Um, but it's not as fine tuned as like 20 different options per tool. It's just, but it's got the same bar graph or line graph with the main and max, and you can, you can load monitor it like that. Yeah, that's cool.
00:37:37
Speaker
Can I ask you a quick question before you run out of time? We have a new product that I think will need to be doing a light press fit for each one. And so we've never had to do assembly or production involving that. Did you build a manual or automatic press? I did a long time ago. I built a pneumatic press. I think it puts about 1,000 pounds just with soft air. What's that for?
00:38:07
Speaker
It was for our spinners. Oh my gosh,
Thermal Expansion and Machining Impacts
00:38:10
Speaker
John. Oh, that's hilarious. 2016. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So I think it used a three inch air cylinder or maybe a four inch air cylinder. And I just machined like two posts and then a base plate and the base pallet was a mighty by vacuum top pallet that I just had kicking around.
00:38:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's fairly straightforward design. That's just a pneumatic pressing thing. It's nice because it's all straight. It pushes straight down. We've also got arbor presses all around the shop for various things like that. I also learned about coefficient of thermal expansion the other day, just more. In a bad way? No, in a good way. Oh, okay.
00:38:57
Speaker
Because I wanted to know if I cool this one part in liquid nitrogen and heat this other part how much do they grow? Yes, and I actually asked chat GPT because I know I can look all this stuff up, but I'm like it can too so I'm like It say I have a three-eighths bar of titanium and I heat it up 10 degrees How much bigger does it get and it gave me all the logic and all the thing except it literally did the math wrong and
00:39:23
Speaker
No kidding. It writes out the math, 0.375 times 4 to the negative 10ths, whatever, and then times whatever, times 10 degrees. And if I do that math, I get 4 millionths or something. And if they did it, they got 4 thou.
00:39:39
Speaker
And I'm like, your math is wrong. And here I'm arguing with chat TVT. But it goes, oh, I'm sorry. And then it gave me the same wrong answer again. And then I'm like, no, seriously, the math is wrong. Do it again. And they gave me the right answer. So trust, but verify. But it was very exciting to ask it somewhat complex questions and just have it give you the answer. But it wasn't right. Because your titanium is going to grow by 3,000. And I'm like, sweet, wait, no, no, no, not 3,000,000, 3,000,000.
00:40:08
Speaker
Like, okay. That's getting me fired up. So somebody explained to somebody about chat GPU that I love, but also made me just kind of like question life, which is that you can ask it to act like a DOS simulator prompt, like a doc member. Did you grow up on DOS at all? Briefly. Okay. I just remember typing when 95 enter. Yeah. Whatever. But you could do like C colon backslash, D colon backslash, and then change directory and, and list out the directory. So I have to do that in Linux. So annoying.
00:40:36
Speaker
Bingo. So you can ask, apparently, you can ask chat GP to act like a DOS emulator. And it, generally speaking, it functions correctly, not because it is a emulator, but just because it knows what you are expecting it to see when you ask it to be.
00:40:53
Speaker
Which is such a weird existential, it's like saying four times four, the answer you're going to want to hear is 16. I don't know that it's 16. I can't tell you why it's 16, but I just know that you're going to want to hear 16 is the answer. So it says 16, which kind of ties into why maybe it does math wrong so often somehow.
00:41:14
Speaker
Another question I have for you is we're playing around some really simple heat treating stuff and we're getting what I'm guessing are erroneous results. But if we heat treat something that is a quarter inch high and a half inch wide steel, so pretty like a small strip of steel. If you heat treat that to 50 to 55 Rockwell, it will
00:41:40
Speaker
Well, the erroneous results that we're seeing, which again, I think there are areas where it seems to be growing from half inch to about 4,000 bigger than half inch, which seems crazy. Like after full heat treat cycle and it's just 4,000 bigger, 4,000 is too much. That's what I thought, right? It should grow by 10ths. If that, like we could treat our
00:42:03
Speaker
our blades, our knife blades, and they're eighth inch thick. And I don't even think we noticed the thickness change. Okay. Um, yeah. And we had some other pins he treated, uh, called it half inch pin. No, it was third, 12 millimeter. I don't remember. 0.7, 787 or whatever. Uh, and they grew by three tenths, I think. Okay.
00:42:28
Speaker
Yeah, big difference between three tenths and five fourths out. It's not warping like a taco, is it? It's growing along the half inch dimension, which would be only a quarter inch high. It could be warping. Now that you say that, I didn't think to check the flatness of those
00:42:47
Speaker
I only ask because it's convenient. We're going to go do more playing. Yeah. But I just like I don't think you kind of got me thinking because we were also looking at the Romeo Juliet idea of that's what Ferrari calls it when they assemble their engine blocks with cryo and heat. Oh, yeah. Uh-huh.
00:43:05
Speaker
My little factory, there's a YouTube video of the factory tour and they show this machine they call Romeo and Juliet where I think it's for the, what do you call the block studs that hold the cylinders on or whatever the heads on.
00:43:20
Speaker
When they seat those that are permanently seated, they cool the stud and heat the engine, I think, a little enough that it goes in there and then it becomes better than press fit. I was thinking about how much metal cools and expands. I'm kind of chewing on that. Steel expands six millionths per degree.
00:43:40
Speaker
That's not nothing. Yeah, it's not. So like 100 degrees is like 10ths or 1,000ths. And so I asked Jack GPT, I'm like, is that linear across a huge temperature range from liquid nitrogen, negative 321 Fahrenheit, to you can heat it up to 1,000, 2,000 easily in the ovens. And they said, yeah, it is fairly linear, almost perfectly linear from 300 to 500 degrees, like negative 300 to 500. So I'm like, perfect for my needs, like sweet.
00:44:08
Speaker
These little things that I'm making, I can cool one and it'll shrink by eight tenths and I can heat the titanium to 500 degrees and it'll grow by eight tenths. If I make them zero clearance, I now have 16 tenths, 1.6 thou of clearance when I push them together, which they should just plop together and then they will contract to fit. Have you done this yet? I haven't done it yet, no, but next week or two.
00:44:33
Speaker
I'm curious how it goes because the thing you have to remember is that when you start touching the two, they will transfer energy between each other. So you can't just lollygag. Yeah, exactly. And these parts are very tiny. So I'll probably do a YouTube video this whole thing because it'll be really fun.
00:44:49
Speaker
Somebody, it was either like a Tom Lipton or Robin Rossetti or maybe Dan Gelbert had a video where they showed, they had the right metrology tool set up and they just put their hand on a block and the really high-end digital height gauge with the needle thing showed it start to warm up. Yeah, six millionths per degree. It's something. It's real. Titanium is 3.9 millionths per degree and other things. How are you guys quenching them? Just air quenching?
00:45:19
Speaker
Uh, not my department. Sure. Sorry. I don't know. I may be oil. Um, we, to be totally honest, we're playing with it here because we actually did send some out to a proper heat treater and they were, we were surprised that they were oversized, but we didn't frankly pay as close attention as we should have to some of the dimensions prior to cause we just wasn't thinking about it. So before we send more out, we wanted to do some experiments in here and see, okay, what's going on. Cool. Yeah.
00:45:50
Speaker
I'm on vacation next week, so I'm going to not show up. That cool? Sounds good. All right. No podcast next week. Sorry, everybody. I'll see you on June 8th or something, or whatever the Friday would be for. Yeah, I'll see you on the... So that should be the week of current spindle installs, so I made up some updates for you. Good. Okay. All right. It's a date. Thanks, bud. We'll see you. I'll have fun on your vacation, and I'll see you in two weeks. Sounds good. Bye. All right, later.