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#341 Work-Life Balance
392 Plays2 years ago
TOPICS:
- Work/Life balance
- Okuma Horizontal machining valve covers
- 3d printing parts for the shop
- Fusion 360 frustrations
- Grimsmo vising Kern Precision in Chicago
- Shipping computers
- 3d printed metal parts
- craftcloud3d.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Business of Machining
00:00:01
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 341. My name is John Grimsmough. My name is John Saunders.
Balancing Family and Business
00:00:08
Speaker
And this is your weekly manufacturing podcast where John and John have been talking for the past five, six years about their businesses and the growth and the struggles and the successes and the tool paths and everything involved with all of that, AKA our therapy session. Yes.
00:00:28
Speaker
How are you? I'm doing pretty good. Feeling kind of, honestly, I'm trying to balance a stronger family life and a stronger business at the same time. You know what I mean? And I'm going through that right now and it's a lot. And I feel like I'm dropping the balls in both scenarios because I'm trying to do both well. And so that's where I'm at right now. Like things are great, but I'm trying to do a lot.
00:00:54
Speaker
Is it more difficult than kind of when you're home, you're home and when you're at work, you're at work? I'm trying to do that, but I'm trying to, I get a lot of work done at home. So it blends, you know? And it's like, I have things I want to accomplish. I want to spend time with the kids, take them places, do things. And then I also have things that work that I want to do and accomplish and spend time with. And
00:01:21
Speaker
I'm an ambitious person and it's not all getting done and it's frustrating me. I'm guessing this is top of mind but not new? Correct.
00:01:35
Speaker
Is it easier to get stuff done at home than at the shop? Some stuff. It's easier to tell your kids to go away. I'm sorry, I'm just being honest here. Just being honest sometimes, yeah. Because at the shop, I mean, I'm needed at home too, but at the shop I'm needed. I'm easy to ask questions to. People come up to me and want to interact and answer questions and solve problems and, oh, this tool broke. Sure. Let's go fix it.
00:02:01
Speaker
And at home I have a lot of responsibilities too, but I can, especially after they go to bed or whatever, I can spend a couple hours as needed, not always, but focus on stuff.
00:02:14
Speaker
kids are getting older, they're staying up later. You know, the other night, I wanted to work from nine to 11, go to bed at 11, nice and early. And then Claire's like, Hey, you want to watch a movie? I'm like, Yeah, yes, actually, I do. Like, I'm not gonna say no to that. We watched an amazing movie. And I can't feel bad about but I had a lot of things I wanted to do that two hours. I'm just balancing. That's all.
00:02:37
Speaker
William is super into football, college NFL. And I wasn't, I mean, I watched some of it. Like for sure, not like your football guy, I've never done a fantasy, all that. But like, it's super fun to get into it. There's a huge Ohio State culture here, but then even NFL, he loves. And it's like, by all definitions should be the easiest thing for me to say no to. Like I don't need to do hobby or interests. Like I want to spend time with the kids. I don't want to get into football.
00:03:04
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And the answer is I absolutely sit down with him at almost every time. It's like Sunday games, Monday night football, and how there's Thursday night football. But I hear you. As a business owner, you look at that and you go, why are you wasting your time doing that? But as a father, you're like, I will take all the time I need to do that. But my business also needs me, but my family also needs me. And you and I have big businesses now.
Building a Self-Sufficient Business
00:03:32
Speaker
And it's a lot.
00:03:34
Speaker
So I was thinking about this this morning because I've never had a sense of reconciliation around which I identify more with. The person or the profile of the business person is like, no, I will work and I will succeed because I will work harder than anybody else. That kind of hustle attitude and a lot of people probably identify with that that grew up.
00:03:59
Speaker
Can you list all the excuses, but even like situational stuff that like my parents made me work at someone on our family farm growing up and I didn't, other friends were playing on Saturdays and then working after college, had a pretty grind of a job. And then there's the almost complete opposite of me that also finds variant from not romantic, like interesting and respectable, which is like, no, like,
00:04:20
Speaker
part of owning a business is building up the team and the staff and the equipment and the processes so that it works. And it doesn't mean you aren't working hard, but you're working hard isn't what makes the business work. Right. And I think for both of us, that perspective is
00:04:37
Speaker
I mean, we've known about it for many years, but it's only become a thing in the past like three years or so where we want to be able to pull back and let the business flourish without us kind of thing. Um, but I think up until somewhat recently we would grind our faces off to get our business going. Yeah. No, that's good. Like I don't, uh, um, I'm pretty happy with my work life balance. Um,
00:05:03
Speaker
But what the kind of eureka moment that I had literally in the shower this morning about this topic was I'm willing to be the former. I'm willing to be the person that works harder if those work topics are the things that you and I have probably a bit absconded, like building the business, taking it to the next level, like helping do
00:05:31
Speaker
things that are force multiplier. So like always, I don't necessarily mind.
00:05:36
Speaker
for the sake of a cheeky example, watching 10 minutes of football and then telling William, hey, for the next 10 minutes, I need to go. Actually, I did. I brought a part home last night and I was just sitting there looking at it and it worked. I was like, okay, just looking on the couch to help me think about what I wanted to do. And then I spent 10 minutes in Fusion. I sketch it up and then it can get 3D printed. It's actually literally 3D printed this morning. This is a cutaway of it right here. It's just a little slider. I'll explain it here in a second.
00:06:01
Speaker
Then that can get handed off to somebody else to actually machine it, to test it. Those things push the business forward versus I think what a lot of us did years ago, which is like, hey, you're working nights, weekends, struggling, hustling, just to get, you know, routine quotes, accounting, parts reloaded. That stuff is a hard no these days. Yeah, exactly.
00:06:30
Speaker
And for the most part, I don't touch production. But every now and then, like this past weekend, I did come in once, twice.
00:06:39
Speaker
Maybe twice at night to reload parts because the curtain was down for like four or five days waiting on this little sensor. I had that kind of pressure guilt. I was like, I can easily come in and spend an hour to reload all the parts and gain another 10 to 20 hours of machining. It's worth it. I tried to do it outside of family time and things like that. I brought my son once.
00:07:02
Speaker
You want to swimming at a rec center and I'm like, you know what works on the way home. We're going to stop by workloads and parts and go. Yeah. Okay, dad. We'll do it. So yeah, trying to balance that, but, um, that's good too. That's totally different than seeing MIA like, Hey, I'm going to leave for four hours. Sorry. I do that too. Sometimes try not to, um, yeah. So.
Juggling Life Responsibilities
00:07:27
Speaker
It's like some Meg told me, she's, when you're juggling a lot of balls, some balls are made of rubber, some balls are made of something else, and some balls are made of glass. You don't wanna drop the ones that are made of glass. And I think about that. It's like family relationships, things like that. Others will bounce back. There are things that I'm trying to juggle that will bounce, but some won't, right? So definitely a good thing to keep in mind.
00:07:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it just kind of triaging what matters
Innovative Uses of 3D Printing
00:07:57
Speaker
and what's important. And yeah, boy, because to me, everything's important. Everything matters. I want to do everything. Everything's equally fun and exciting and I want to do it all. Right. Yes.
00:08:07
Speaker
I also don't mind showing the kids, hey, like, no, this is hard work. Like, you may not get to go to every birthday party. Something I believe very strongly in and it's sort of off topic to the sense of this overall podcast. But it's a personal belief is that like a sense of strife and struggle goes a long way toward building your character and your work discipline. And so, yeah, my kid might miss something.
00:08:38
Speaker
but because we've got to, you know, actually two nights ago we were down at the farm, tree fell across the lane and we were like, Hey, we're going down. Luckily we didn't have to miss a practice or anything, but that's what we do. You know, we get that taken care of. That's a good thing. How's the current? Did you get that sensor? Great. Seriously? Yeah. That easy? $70 sensor. I bought two of them and uh,
00:09:05
Speaker
And Angelo put it in all by himself, which is great. I'm like, here you go. It's like sweet. And he said it was finicky. And to route it nice, he's very meticulous. And he wants it to be as good or better than factory. And current's really good at what they do. So he's like, it took a while. It took me a couple hours to get this sensor routed. It looks easy, because you can see the whole cable chain. But yeah, easy to adjust. I love when sensors nowadays have an LED on them that light up when it's active or not.
00:09:33
Speaker
Sure. Because you can slide it forward off, slide it forward on and find the middle range and just like done. That's it. There's no guessing, so that was great. Then I got a DM from somebody on Instagram who also has a current and they're like, I know that sensor. I'm very familiar with that sensor. Really? I thought it was the first one I've had. Everything breaks. Who knew?
00:09:56
Speaker
Who was it? No, no. I knew there was a kind of unknown need. You don't know. Everything breaks. I mean, all favor and current, they find the best suppliers, they use the best switches, the best sensors, Festo everything, and still things break. Yeah.
00:10:19
Speaker
Well, so funny enough, on the topic of sensors and working weekends, we are running more of those Porsche valve covers in that chamois spinoff thing. It's pretty cool. It's going good. We got some nice orders from new folks and all that, which is really fun. And so it was actually a great example of the value of this horizontal. Some of those hadn't been run in six months, and the cam was good.
00:10:46
Speaker
and tools were all good and we knew that from our JavaScript scraper. Cool. At this point, I enjoy running it on the weekend because there's so much to do during the day with it and my schedule hops and so busy doing good stuff I should be doing. I didn't mind saying, hey, I'm going to go in for an hour and run one of those. Even though the cam should be good, I just would rather
00:11:14
Speaker
Kind of like glass balls, if you will, juggling. That horizontal does not deserve to be crashed running what's effectively a fun side project. I don't say it's a fun project. It's worth my time to make sure the first one runs.
00:11:31
Speaker
Well, that's my question, is after six months of inactivity on this product, what was your confidence level going into it? I think it should be good. The program's good. Have I changed anything weird with the way the machine works? Is this program going to run? Did I take out a tool? Is there a life change? Yeah. What went through your head? My confidence level was 100% minus I'm too much of a wimp to send it. I just sat there. And it ran fine. It would have been fine.
00:12:02
Speaker
I'm not in the business of calling Gossager to see how quick a service tech can come out and replace it. It'll ruin everything, right? Absolutely. No, I'm with you. Absolutely. What stunk wasn't any of that. What stunk is our door wouldn't close. Like the main front Okuma door? Yeah. What? So this has happened once before, and chips would build up between the outside of the machine
00:12:30
Speaker
sheet metal in the inside of the door. There's a gap, probably about three quarters of an inch, 12 millimeters. And there are rubber wipers, but the machine, the chips get everywhere in that machine. I really can't throw any shade at the design around that front. Like it's just, you know, the thing is so productive. Some ships get in there. So we'd actually built a little tool to help scrape it out. And then sometimes you just have to take a couple of screws off, pull the gasket off and just flush the chips out.
00:12:59
Speaker
When the door wouldn't shut, I thought, oh, it's probably that. It felt like it was a bit soon to be happening. And so I looked and the gasket area was perfectly clean. And I thought, wait a minute here. So the door closes from left to right.
00:13:15
Speaker
It's kind of one of those like you're pounding your head up against the wall. I ended up removing all of the gasket strips that run probably like seven or eight linear feet across like eight different gasket sections. I don't know if you call them gaskets, more of a wiper, like has a couple screws, screws every eight inches that hold them in.
00:13:36
Speaker
And because basically when you've moved the door to the right, it would, you know, that red brand of door interlock sensor that everybody has. I don't remember who it is. It's not Omron, is it? Somebody like that. Yeah. If you kind of lean on the door, it would.
00:13:52
Speaker
latch shut, but otherwise it would be just enough that it would start. But then as soon as the machine did like a tool change or movement, it would jostle and turn the alarm. And you can clearly see it was about a quarter of an inch off of the rubber bumpers that it's supposed to be. It's not the bumper swelling or adjusted wrong or something. Well, John, I sat there for 45 minutes.
00:14:15
Speaker
I cannot, for the life of me, understand what is physically causing any amount of... I even took the front cover off that has the two rollers that roll over the... It's not linear rail, but the roller track, if you will, the barn door track. Just slide the door, yeah.
00:14:35
Speaker
Um, it's kind of one of those like, what, what am I missing? Cause I'm going to hope and guess it's stupid and dumb, but I'm missing it. Um, and I ended up, um, 3d printing a 150,000 spacer and sticking the door key out more. I mean, it's still totally safe. The doors for all intents and purposes, the door is shut. Like it's not lit, letting chips are cool out or anything. Um, and I don't know, maybe this was always this way and I'm just missing something that, but man.
00:15:05
Speaker
Could you can get that stuff yeah you you don't want to put a band-aid on the situation to make it work but you also want to make it work so I commend you for that but that's frustrating same thing happened on our Nakamura last week it's been down for about two weeks.
00:15:21
Speaker
It had a lot of misalignment between the two spindles. If you have a pin in the main, a pin in the sub, you bring them together, it had like 13th hour, something silly, like a lot. We've never had service on the machine in the seven years we've had it. We're like, okay, let's get Elliot to come in and finally do a proper service on this machine.
00:15:41
Speaker
So they did. They took all the chucks apart. They realigned it. They cleaned everything. We broke an O-ring that we couldn't find locally. So we had to master it and all this stuff. So putting it all back together. Coincidentally, it's perfect timing because Pierre was off this past two weeks and normally he runs that machine. So it's like, it's a good time for it to be down.
00:15:58
Speaker
And then just in the wrap up process, Angela put it all back together and then worked on these wipers, took the wipers out as well and the door wouldn't close and things like that. And for us, it was chip buildup behind the wipers and easy to fix, but still tedious, right?
00:16:15
Speaker
I am actually really glad that we were talking this through. What occurred to me is I am going to measure the current door gap, and then I'm going to go 3D print a spacer that memorializes that distance. And I'll just, we have a little clips on the side of the machine. I'm just going to put it right there with a date. Because here's what I care about. If the door gap increases over the next month, then I know something is worth it. If it was just off and it's not moving, then I'm happy to put it to bed.
00:16:43
Speaker
Is the interlock key not adjustable? Usually they're on slider rails, like slots. Sorry. That's a great point. It is. It's adjustable in like three axes, but it hadn't been adjusted by us. So I don't know why it would have... I guess you're right. Instead of printing the spacer, I could have just moved that whole thing. You're right.
00:17:02
Speaker
But you solve the problem anyway. I guess that's kind of an emblematic of like when you have a hammer, everything looks like a... Yeah. When you have a bamboo, you just print everything. I could loosen two screws or I could go three... The print was literally seven minutes long. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. I printed a... About six months ago, I printed a plate that mounts to the speedio cooling tank and mounts a sock filter housing on top.
00:17:32
Speaker
So like a 12-inch tall, 16-inch tall socket filter. And the whole assembly is steel and pretty heavy. And the 3D printed plate that I made started cracking because I did 10% infill, two walls kind of thing, not very strong. And it started to really fall apart. So I was like, let's thicken it up and we'll print it on the bamboo with like 50% infill and six walls or something. And it's heavy.
00:17:57
Speaker
Like this part. Yeah. You don't normally pull something off the printer and go, this is heavy. But it was. And it should be pretty burly now. Somebody, one of our guys asked if 3D prints are sensitive to coolant, because everyone talks about film needing to be dry. But my understanding is that the dryness mostly relates to not having it swell before it goes to the extruder, and that once you've printed it, it doesn't. Yes and no. I have strong thoughts on this. Oh, yeah?
00:18:25
Speaker
I think I heard that going through the nozzle, if there's moisture in the filament, it like flash boils and causes problems at the tip, which will cause bubbles and things like that. That's one of the big reasons you want dry filament going in.
00:18:38
Speaker
As far as using, I mean, you've 3D printed things that go in your chip auger corners and things like that. You know, top level, don't worry about it. Just print it. If it breaks, print another one. Like we've got these coolant shields, chip shields in the Kern that I printed two years ago. I should have printed a date on them because I love doing that.
00:18:58
Speaker
Oh, good call. And one of them just disintegrated the other day. Grayson showed it to me and he pinched it and it crumbled more. But again, it was like two walls and five percent infill or something, PLA, whatever. I couldn't print ABS at the time, but I could on the bamboo now.
00:19:16
Speaker
So like I got two years of life out of that print that caused me nothing. And like
Challenges with Machining Software
00:19:22
Speaker
on our tornos, we have a carousel that catches all the parts and rotates every 10 parts, 50 parts, whatever. That was printed like five years ago, but it's still holding up great in oil. So like, yes, theoretically engineering wise, it's probably not great for it, but I don't care. Just send it, you know? Yeah, agreed. Send it and see.
00:19:45
Speaker
We did the same thing. If it breaks, replace it. The hardest thing about that is trying to create a little bit of a system around where you store those 3D prints in Fusion. We have a Saunders to your 3D prints for general purpose, but then for fixtures and more product dedicated stuff therein.
00:20:04
Speaker
their respective folder product folder. Yeah, sure. Yeah. But like the Haas VF six cool things are probably going to be in a like R&D folder because we were experimenting. We never thought more they work. Let's show them into the main thing. But the other thing we have found that works well, if you want to just bolster them up is spraying them with the various versions of the Home Depot or wherever you want to buy it. Truck bed liner. Okay.
00:20:32
Speaker
It just seals the outside makes a waterproof and whatever. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. But yeah, I think ABS and PETG or some of the other fancy ones would probably stand up better to this kind of stuff. I haven't gotten into it yet. But
00:20:50
Speaker
What I will say is that if you print a shape and you let it cool it right over for days, it's not going to visibly swell. Correct. It's not going to swell like that. What we found is that plastic can get brittle and delaminate if it's weird. I have a fusion. I don't think it's an issue, but it was frustrating.
00:21:18
Speaker
Me too. Oh, we'll go first. Sorry to take your thunder, but okay. Real quick, when we're cutting carbon fiber inlays, I have one set of inlays and I select my stock size sketch, call it six by 12 or whatever. Okay. And I use the arrange function infusion.
00:21:37
Speaker
and click my models, click the stock size. And it does. It does a really nice job of arranging as many as will fit. And you give it rotational parameters. It's actually really cool. My problem is it flips my parts over, and I keep making left-handed inlays. Oh. Arrange is agnostic to restraining on. I don't know. I don't know. Can you arrange them as DXFs? I don't know. That's a good question.
00:22:06
Speaker
Well, the sketch would still be upside down. Yeah, right. Sorry. Because they're directional. Please edit that out. Yeah, whatever. And then I'm like, OK, let me copy a second set of models, flip them upside down so that it flips them the right way. And it flipped two out of three in the range. And I'm like, what's going on here? So I don't know. I don't have a solution, but I'm just more cautious of it so I can see it and fix it.
00:22:32
Speaker
My very recollection is there's a much more powerful feature called Nest, but I want to say it's in the paid extensions. I think I have it, but I haven't played with it much. Go play with that. Yeah, I might. I might. Okay. That's surprising that it flips it and it doesn't necessarily like tell you.
00:22:53
Speaker
There's a flip button in the dialogue menu, but it doesn't seem to do anything. I don't know if it's doing it right or whatever. I think it puts it below the stock or above the stock. It flips your plane, which I don't necessarily want. Sorry, that's my frustration. It's not worth just doing a manual range once. These are going to change a bunch. It's going to change. I have different stock sizes and it changes.
00:23:22
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. And it is cool to see how the Arrange arranges it because your brain wants to make it all linear and patterned and Arrange is like, no, I can stuff one
Promoting Products and Business Growth
00:23:31
Speaker
in here. If you let me rotate it a little bit with carbon fiber, I want it directional. I don't want it at an angle. So I have a zero or 90 degree rotation allowance. That's cool. Sure. Which is cool. So the part can be sideways or up and down. That's it. Yeah. And that keeps the grain in the right direction. So that's nice.
00:23:51
Speaker
Hey, that new pattern you posted is sick. With a flat line pattern, yeah. Dude. Yeah, and the team came up with that teaser video without my knowledge completely. Is that right? Yep. That's awesome. They're like, I shot a video. You want to see it? Heck, yeah, I want to see it. And it was like, damn, yes, more of that, please. Why don't we do this for every product we make, every pattern, every color, every variation? Let's go. Yeah, that's awesome. Good. I'm glad you liked it.
00:24:19
Speaker
Yeah. And that's something I think we should not feel so bad about doing on this podcast is sort of mentioning that if you guys want to support our businesses, we appreciate it. We don't want to beg for business. That's not the point. You make some pretty rock star knives and pens. I'm a proud saga carrier and I worked at my Norseman through my knife lineup.
00:24:43
Speaker
And if you run a hobby machine or a giant vertical machine center, we've got fixture plates that we're really proud of with a pretty economical work holding system through the mod device. And then we've got the new puck chuck zero point, manual and automatic versions. Which is super cool. At least on a weekly basis, I try to figure out how I could integrate Saunders products into my workflow. And I want to, I just don't have the answer for it yet.
00:25:11
Speaker
Because I really do appreciate your stuff. I think it's great. I love that you get to do it. I don't want your manufacturing journey to end without you having some of our stuff on one of your machines on the flip side. For sure. It's going to make sense for you. It's got to work. Yeah, exactly. So what's your fusion problem? So one of the big changes to the Gen 3 mod vice
00:25:34
Speaker
is we are pressing in the locating pins that we used to machine on the Gen 2. So if you have a mod vice, your fixed side has two diamond pins that are integral. They were machined in. And not machining those and rather pressing them has some benefits because we're able to then turn those. We actually grind the material to a precision diameter, turn them with features, and then
00:26:01
Speaker
Now we press them in. That also means we're able to save production time and material by not having to machine away 90% of that area. Right. Of that area. Yeah, exactly. And you can grind the flat face, so now it's like ground flat. And you're actually machining your own pins, like you're turning them on the Wilhelmin or something.
00:26:19
Speaker
So we grind round bar and then we machine them into the shape that we want for diamond features and chamfers and so forth. What do you mean grind round bar? By center of this ground. Okay, yeah. Sorry, we are not good. But we buy center of this ground bar, which is very easy to buy at scale to very tight tolerances. Yeah. Which gets away from us having to worry about a process that we've gotten pretty good at, but walking in interpolated
00:26:48
Speaker
Yeah. And side note, the big question was, was this going to be sustainable in manufacturing to be pressing in pins that we want to be accurately looking at short answers? Yes, we did a bunch of tests. Yeah. Working great.
00:27:00
Speaker
But that press fit, if you've never done a press fit, is finicky. It is. We don't want too much. It's not a press fit like a headset on an engine. It's just a locating. It doesn't require an overly tactic. Alex is the engineer on the SAS all the way. Yeah, it's cool.
00:27:25
Speaker
So, long-winded backstory to saying, we changed the CAD model to reflect the solid model was our target tolerance of that feature that's, so for like a half an inch, I think it's six tenths undersized. So there's a six tenths interference press fit, which feels great, great by the way. And that's your nominal, is six tenths under.
00:27:48
Speaker
Yeah, I think I don't quote me on that, but sure, I think so. Plus or minus two tenths or something like that. Yeah, so we have. Yes, exactly. And I wanted the fusion
00:28:00
Speaker
had to be that, let's call it 4994. That way, in theory, if it was perfect, you wouldn't have to have any radial adjustment or wear, rather than what we had, I think originally, which was like half an inch model, which kind of makes sense. But then you are copying it down with some in a cam operation. Sure. Yeah.
00:28:22
Speaker
So, when we made this change, and the Akuma horizontal for all intents and purposes is an incredibly accurate and awesome machine. When you ask for it, you get it. Of course, if you're hogging, you can get deflection induced deflection if you want to, but it's pretty darn good. When you want to interpolate something, you get what you ask for. I ran, and we've been running these already with the old method of copying it and copying a half inch hole down as needed.
00:28:50
Speaker
model the new ones, and the bottom row of holes, the parts are stacked vertically on the tombstone. The bottom rows were perfect. The top rows were consistently three tenths bigger. And everything's modeled proper. There's no stock to leave weirdness.
00:29:11
Speaker
John, I was, this is also at the door. Like I was banging my head because I was thinking, is this some sort of an arc filtering, smoothing, a tessellated B rep issue? Because they ran great before the machines fine. And I'm now consistently getting different sized holes. This is the 2d contour. And I ended up
00:29:33
Speaker
inadvertently changing two things at once, which means I don't know which it was, but I ended up creating a brand new solid model block and I dimensioned those holes, re-extruded them as totally separate solid model stuff. And then I was using a bore command instead of 2D contour because
00:29:54
Speaker
The other problem is there's a tiny shelf at the bottom of this hole for the counter bore. It's like a 3,000 change. And so when you zoom in, Fusion doesn't do a good job at showing you which bore you're selected. I picked the right one, but bore fixed that concern because I'm selecting this whole interior side. And when I ran those, it ran fine. But when I ran those and it ran fine, it was actually over the weekend and the shop door, roll up doors were also closed.
00:30:24
Speaker
It's that time of year where it's perfectly nice with days out and we will open the doors sometimes. And I know we can induce changes in our lathe by doing this. I didn't think it would do this in the horizontal. And I almost want to test it, but I don't really want to test it. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, that's a big machine. I assume it would take a while for it to heat up enough to change temperature.
00:30:52
Speaker
But I know on our Nakamura, if the machine's nice and hot and you're running parts and you open the door for one minute and you close the door, your next part will be three tenths over or whatever. Yeah, right. It'll make a difference. But lathes are also doubled up. A tenth of casting is two tenths of diameter in your part. Gross. Yeah, sure, sure. Touche. I was looking at the simulation where this is where I
00:31:17
Speaker
I could have spent more time, and I frankly wish I had more pre-existing knowledge around this, was to look at the actual code. I just don't look at G2, G3. Yeah, sometimes I will, yeah. To be like, okay, is it, because that's what I wanted to know, is the code the issue, or is it the kinematic? Yeah, I'll use Visual Studio Code and do a side-by-side, what do you call it, compare feature to compare the different toolpaths, or I'll
00:31:43
Speaker
I guess your XY is different than everyone. Yeah, you'd have to really dig down and then just math it out. I've done it before because you want to know if, is it me or is it the machine or is it usually being weird or the post being weird or some tolerance issue or something? And yeah, these are the struggles that.
00:32:03
Speaker
Reminds me of you were talking or was it Marv or you through Marv about doing like the diamond latest stuff where you need values that are like 10 million. And so you just program everything as is and then the post actually makes everything.
00:32:19
Speaker
Because fusion doesn't go well when you go past the millionth decimal for things. You ever tried to do that? Some of the measurements come out as more, but I have all my decimals set to six digits to one millionth. It doesn't do the E5, whatever. I think in the preferences, I set it to six digits. Oh, I should check that. Because I hate the E5.
00:32:43
Speaker
That's one of those things in grade school they probably taught us. I have no clue on that. Yeah, exactly. I've had to Google that several times over the past few years. It's called Scientific Notation, I think. Yeah. And I'm finally getting decent at reading it. And it's like what says E4. It's four digits. OK, move the decimal four digits over. OK, that's four-tenths. Yeah. OK, OK.
00:33:02
Speaker
It's frustrating. And like some calculators will do it automatically. And I know the calculator on my phone will tell me as many digits as I want. Yeah, I'll use my phone more than I'll use the computer one sometimes. Yeah, that's why I love Excel for everything. Yes.
00:33:19
Speaker
Anyway, it's working great now. Okay. But I'm also still using those remodeled solid board, I guess kind of what am I without asking the question, what my question is just kind of, could there be a situation where there's some, because these boards, I think they were actually modeled to the
00:33:40
Speaker
Well, yeah. I think we were modeling them to one decimal past tenths. So that would be, instead of past tenths, instead of ten thousandths of an inch, the metric people are probably going to kill me for having to explain this way. It would be the tens of millions, like 50 million and 60 million. I just didn't know Fusion could have some situation where it handles one differently than the other. Explain the difference.
00:34:05
Speaker
tolerance setting in your 2d counter toolpath. Yeah. All the things. Um, that's frustrating. I love how we're chasing three tenths here and that's the end of the world. Yeah. That's cool. Um, I thought I was going to say something else. I don't know. Let's see next
Upcoming Events and Networking Opportunities
00:34:30
Speaker
week. I'm driving to Chicago.
00:34:35
Speaker
I invited you, but you said you can't come. That's okay. We're driving to Chicago, which I think is like eight hours straight and then a little bit of time charging in the Tesla. That'll be good. Then Kern has their open house. They bought this new facility. They've renovated it. Tony, the president of Kern USA, called me yesterday and he's like,
00:34:58
Speaker
He's like, we just got our occupancy permit yesterday and it's like last minute like perfect scenario so funny And he's like the parking lots a mess. They're supposed to pave it on Thursday. Okay
00:35:12
Speaker
So that's going to be fun. We've got their open house. He said like 100 people are planning to come. And he reminded me politely that I promised to give a 30-minute speech. And I was like, oh, right, right. Yes, I will be ready for that. Yes. Happy to do that. So I did kind of forget about that. I was like, yeah, I'll just show up. I'm like, oh, right. I have responsibilities.
00:35:33
Speaker
So that's cool. These are my people, so I will have a lot to talk about. I'm super excited for that. So it's a two-day event, and I'm just excited for that. That's going to be good. If folks are in the area and want to RCP, is it able to be done that way or is it invite only? I don't know.
00:35:51
Speaker
I'd reach out to Kern Precision. I did have one of my knife customers, one of my biggest fans, email me this morning saying Kern Event. I'm in Chicago. He came to IMTS and hung out with me for half the day. He might join us there. It's going to be super cool. It's going to be cool to chop it up with Simon and Sebastian from Kern, Germany are coming. That'll be cool.
00:36:18
Speaker
I'm looking forward to that. Do you know if they're showing off any new CNC stuff? I don't think it's a release of a new product or anything like that, but they've got their current HD, so that's always fun to see up close. I might actually get to touch it and hit cycle start or something if I ask nicely.
00:36:39
Speaker
And they're building out their showroom. They bought this super fancy CMM, and they bought some other cool stuff. So it's cool. They're building a tech center in the US, basically, which is just awesome. They had offices, but they never had a showroom here, right? And they had a machine, but it would get bought and sold. And they'd be like, yeah, I have one on the floor, but it's ours. But you can buy it if you need it right now kind of thing. And I think now they bought an HD for themselves.
00:37:07
Speaker
And they're like, we're not selling this. This is our machine. We need a demo machine. Sorry, customers. You can't have it. I guarantee they would sell it if somebody needs it. I know, I know. That's awesome. That'll be fun.
Automation and Efficiency Improvements
00:37:24
Speaker
It's been a minute since I've been to one of these more smaller, intimate, like I missed the Autodesk one show. So I'm looking forward to that. Super duper.
00:37:35
Speaker
Are you so good for talking next Wednesday? Not Wednesday, probably Tuesday. Okay, we'll talk. Yeah, if we can do Tuesday, that'd be good. That's fine. I had a big win. This is kind of in that bucket of, as a business owner, you can do great things if you spend the time to focus on it. So it's as minor as getting our shipping computer really dialed in.
00:38:01
Speaker
We recently upgraded it after we bought the new PCs for the Shop Guys. So the shipping computer could have used a refresh. And so it's got one of their old CAD computers, which is still wonderful. And... The shipping computer needs a web browser, basically, right? Exactly. Yeah.
00:38:17
Speaker
But it was every once in a while, the sort of like the way it handled and interacted with the label printer would get fussy and it would always get fixed by restarting the computer. So what I realized was, well, let's just automate that. So I did a quick research. You can write a batch file that does a shutdown, dash R command, schedule that in the task manager to where every two nights the computer just automatically moves itself.
00:38:42
Speaker
So great, that's done, except when the computer boots up, I don't want it to be waiting with a login, so I got rid of the Windows login. We don't need that. Then it turns on. Chrome automatically starts
Success with Metal 3D Printing
00:38:53
Speaker
with all of the shipping tabs. ShipStation, Shopify, FedEx, Freight, Lex, all the fresh desks, all automatically open. That's not a big deal.
00:39:02
Speaker
But then the last thing is ShipStation Connect, which is the way ShipStation actually prints the little printer, was fussy. It's a Windows startup program, but if it started up too quickly, it would error out. And I suspect that has something to do with the network connection not being fixed.
00:39:22
Speaker
I don't care. So I figured out you can actually take it out of Windows startup and instead add it to a task scheduler where it starts up on boot or on login, but after a one minute delay. Oh, that's so cool. I didn't know you could do this. Yeah. So like now all of a sudden that computer should just be bulletproof.
00:39:42
Speaker
That's awesome. I've done that too, or I've had programmers make it for me, to some Raspberry Pis, where I needed to start up, I needed to open these programs, I needed to run this program. If power goes out, I need it to auto load, auto turn on immediately, and automatically run all these programs so that everything, it's bulletproof. Power goes out, it works. You unplug it, you plug it back in, everything does what it needs to do. Obviously, you could do that with PCs. I never knew.
00:40:10
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't need it. I was happy with that. I love it. The other big win was we got our metal 3D printed fixture parts. I tell you about these. Not really, no.
00:40:23
Speaker
And it's hard to see them, but they're like a Uniforce clamp. But Uniforce clamp just has two flat sides. These have a custom shape to them. And I thought about machining them. Actually, the Willyman would have been a great way to do it. But like, no, I don't want to take the time to risk hassle.
00:40:41
Speaker
And so I ordered some metal 3D printed parts. My first time ever doing that. Yeah. Each part is the size of the tip of your pinky. So they're quite small, but 12 of them shipped for 60 bucks. Dude, what metal? 316 stainless was like, there was no non stainless option and that seemed like it would be fine. I was 60 bucks. I was like, if they're all trash, I'll just learn from the way. And they are phenomenal. Wow.
00:41:11
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. I went through all, was it all three VPs or metal service? CraftCloud3D.com. In full disclosure, unfortunately, these were at this price point from overseas. There were more expensive options for stateside.
00:41:33
Speaker
And it was great though. Like it's just a huge, to me that's just like super exciting. Right. Well, for the, your first foray into metal 3d printed parts, I think that answered a lot of questions for you. Yeah. Right. In, in the future viability of that and me too, for that matter. Cause I've certainly thought about it. Um, but I'm like, but what for? And it's like, when you have a need,
00:41:57
Speaker
and for 60 bucks, you can scratch that itch and get your answer, right? Yeah. Well, the nice thing too was the price was great. The other hack I tried and didn't have to do because the pricing didn't make me have to fidget with this. Again, each one of these is about the size of my pinky nail, so I bought 12 discrete parts for that price. The other hack that I tried
00:42:22
Speaker
I'm not trying to beat their system, but just to make sure it made sense was to order, to take all 12 of those and infusion, you add a 10 thou connector bar at the bottom that connects them all into one center part. And then I would just have to zip that off here on a mill, which no big deal. I don't really want to do that. But some places I've seen sites where they, you know, they treat that as one part in its way.
00:42:48
Speaker
significantly cheaper than 12 discrete parts. Interesting. Yeah, that was fun. Cool. If you actually use them and clamp them and they do the trick, yeah?
00:43:02
Speaker
Yeah, it was actually great because we were using PLA tough, I think printed ones and they worked, but I knew they would fail over time. And so sure enough, when you tighten the set screw in the uniforms kind of wedge, they would get just soft and mushy, but it was adequate. These, you lock that down, the wrench just stops. You are tight. Yep, yep. That's great.
00:43:30
Speaker
That's rapid prototyping right there. Let's print one. Wow, it works well enough. Okay. Now let's print one out of the metal. Done. Yeah. They just showed up. What do you see today? Today, I think we're going to film a video on how we're gluing the inlays into our handles.
00:43:51
Speaker
We're laser cutting VHB tape now to tape them into the handles. Oh, that's genius. Yeah. So apparently that's how some big knife makers like Chris Reeve Knives have been doing it for a long time. Interesting. So I'm like, let me find some sheets of VHB tape, not in a spool, but in like a paper. Yeah, they shall talk about it. And Digikey, of all places, is who had it.
00:44:17
Speaker
I was like, they're eight bucks each. I'm like, yeah, let me get four of those and try it. We put them in our laser and took some tweaking and some certain fire hazards to mitigate. It works great. Sorry, this is masking or this is the actual adherence? The actual adhesive. You put this into the handle and then you slap the inlay on top. Got it. Our guys were saying that you have one shot, one opportunity to make it fit.
00:44:48
Speaker
We just lost connection and we're back. Still there. You there? Yeah. Lost you for a minute. Yeah. We have one shot. Yeah. Like you can't tap it down. Oh, I misplaced it. Like you have one opportunity. Yeah. But other than that, it works great.
00:45:10
Speaker
That's our way. We just superglue them in, like with a special superglue. Yeah. And this is nicer, better, easier? I think so. We're finding out. So that's same alignment issue or question of those metal 3D uniforms clamps we made. They actually have an O-ring. We designed it with an O-ring that helps them retract after you loosen them. That way there's no hassle with that side of it.
00:45:37
Speaker
and getting the O-ring over them is a real tush pain. And so I 3D printed a pyramid, effectively. The two clamps slide into and then the pyramid has like a seven degree loft angle. So 3D printed this thing that's like half an inch or an inch high. And you just take the O-ring on the top and you just roll it down and it just slides right over the thing. It's just like, I'm sitting there with like a pick and a screwdriver trying to like wedge it over. So much more elegant.
00:46:06
Speaker
That's for the birds. I love it. Well, maybe think of your knife handles, 3D print, a pre-alignment. Yes. Slide guide, like a bushing guide. Yeah. I think that was brought up in the meeting yesterday. Everybody was shooting out good ideas. Another one was to use, did you ever use rodico putty? It's like a watchmaker putty that sucks up dust and dirt and stuff. We use it all the time.
Enhancing Production Organization
00:46:34
Speaker
It's like clay, like poster putty. Exactly. But way more, way more high quality. We bought this up for you. Yeah. And, uh, we use it, we clean our end mills with it before the laser touches them, all that stuff. Um, so you could use that to stick to an end mill and, uh, or sorry to, uh, you know, the inlay and then you have just an easier way to hold it than holding it by the perimeter. That's a good call. Something like that. So we'll, we'll not get any fingerprints on it too. Yeah. Oh, that's, that's one of the things today. Sweet.
00:47:03
Speaker
Send just arrived for the grinder enclosure.
00:47:08
Speaker
And those little jigs were already 3D printed. And then I'd move this note to talk about it more next week. Maybe we will, but we're really refocusing on process bins. And yeah, I'll talk a little more about that next week. Yeah, I'll make a note. Let's dig into that. Because I made some process bins, and they're there, but not being used actively. Yeah. Cool. Let's talk about that. Sweet. Sweet. I'll see you. All right. Have a good day. Bye.