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Business of Machining - Episode 18
250 Plays8 years ago
The Okamoto grinder gets TLC and opens the door to the grinding world for Saunders. Although Grimsmo's not wearing his tuxedo shirt, he DOES have a lesson on the saga of the "Linda Wheels." For entrepreneurs, self-evaluation and reevaluation is a skill that must be practiced. While it poses challenges to decisions and beliefs, it can unveil new and better solutions to problems. This past week has been full of productivity and new ideas on work-flow.
Grimsmo gears up attend the blade show in Atlanta and Saunders get the shop ready for TIG welding courses.
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Transcript
Fascination with Metrology
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning everybody and welcome to the business of machining episode 18. My name is John Grimsmo. My name is John Saunders. And I like your Okamoto shirt. It's timely. We're not out of the woods yet, but I just got a
00:00:17
Speaker
So I've been just increasingly fascinated with metrology. So I got a one micron mid to toy test indicator, not even that expensive. So that's 40 millions or four tenths of one tenth.
Grinding Techniques and Challenges
00:00:31
Speaker
And I swept that across the table. We have a video coming out because there's right and wrong ways to check for whether you checking our flatness or whether you're just checking that the table has been ground parallel to the ways, which is not the same as flat.
00:00:43
Speaker
Anyways, knock on wood so far, I've got the table ground and I've got the backside of the chuck ground, so now I need to put a rust inhibitor on, flip the chuck over, remount it, very careful about how you tension the chuck on it, and then try to grind in the chuck face one last time. That's fantastic. And are you going to leave the vice on the chuck forever, basically?
00:01:07
Speaker
Good question, you know, there's some residual rust on the tabletop or pot pitting and I would have to grind off, I grind off like four or 5,000 to get where I'm at. I think I would have to grind off 30,000 to get through that. So I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna put, I think, LPS3 on it. But I think what I'll do is have the guys pull the chuck off every six months. We'll see. Maybe I'll do it after two months this time, first time.
00:01:34
Speaker
And that'll be a good benchmark. You can test for flatness and all that stuff as you go along. Once you're remounted, I guess if you're remounted, you've got to surface the mag again.
00:01:44
Speaker
Correct. It all depends on what you're trying to do. I've been talking to some guys that are really into grinding and they talk about how they'll let their chucks spark out for four hours when they're grinding them in. Look, we're not holding subtents across big areas and we're not regulating the humidity of the shot. I don't even, to be honest, know what I'm doing when it comes to grinding.
00:02:05
Speaker
I bought this, excuse me, a fella named Andrew brought to the open house a gift of this book called The Grinding Wheel and it's literally 300 pages about grinding and it's frustrating about how little I even knew. Most of the times I feel like we know what we don't know. This is a whole world of I didn't even know what I don't know. You're digging yourself deep into the rabbit hole on this one then.
00:02:33
Speaker
It is fun though, it's refreshing to get, like I called it the other day when I was grinding in the table and I was like, I don't like how it's loading up, how the sparks look, how it sounds, and how the grind looks, and so I dress the wheel. Dressing the wheel is a pain in the butt when you don't have a magnet on the table.
00:02:50
Speaker
and dressed it and sure enough got a really good looking grind. I know looks don't necessarily matter. Another thing I'm learning sometimes really good grinds look terrible. Anyway, how's your Linda wheel coming? I actually have fantastic news about that. Okay.
00:03:06
Speaker
Is there an end to the saga? Good, bad and otherwise. She sent me two wheels a few weeks ago and I tried one of them out, which was the same as the one I crashed a few weeks ago or a few months ago now. I've been trying that out. I ground a bunch of blades and I was never super happy with the finish. I was on the phone with Linda a lot and trying to figure out the recipe and the speeds and feeds and the dress and the true.
00:03:30
Speaker
how to open up this wheel to make it give a super good finish. And I could never really get a good finish from it. So Eric's still spending a lot of time polishing it out.
00:03:40
Speaker
So then I tried to rough grind with my old grinding wheel, and then finish grind with this new one. No difference. Yes, we're trying all these tricks, and I can't quite figure it out. It's serviceable. It's just not near what I want from finish, right? So eventually, I tried to mount up the second wheel that you sent, which is a softer composition of the wheel. So it's supposed to be freer cutting. It might wear down more.
00:04:10
Speaker
but still 500 grit just like the other one. Wow, that's a really fine grit though. Yeah. Well, I'm trying to get like crazy good finish from this. And I'm only taking off a thou at the most, but in like 10th passes. Yeah. So I'm doing 50 passes basically to get this down. Oh my God. Wow.
00:04:30
Speaker
But so I tried this new one and I trued it up and it had these speckles in it that would cause a line to go around the wheel like in the truing process. So I don't know if it was like a heavy grit or a piece of dirt or contamination or whatever in the wheel. I sent a picture to Linda. She never got back to me. So eventually I just tried to run the wheel and it got a phenomenal finish. Like world's different than the other one. And it's only a slightly different composition change.
00:05:00
Speaker
And that's so funny. And again, that's what that book talks about is how there's the coarseness of the wheel itself. There's the bonding agent. There's how you dress it. And it talks about how dressing it and truing the wheel are two totally different processes. It happens to be that both happen when you do the other, but that's coincidental. Hmm.
00:05:19
Speaker
It's so cool. Yeah. And aluminum oxide wheels are different than a diamond or CBN wheel in the way they work and the way they true and dress and everything. You're using aluminum oxide. No, I'm using a CBN wheel. Sorry, you are. OK. Everything in my world, I think, will be aluminum oxide.
00:05:37
Speaker
Right. So aluminum oxide is, I assume, relatively the same throughout the whole wheel. But a CBN wheel is like diamond particles glued in with a bond, with a matrix. So as you're truing it, you're literally knocking out each diamond particle and exposing fresh diamond particles. Right. Right. Sure. Does it self, I guess it would CBN would self-dress a lot less than aluminum oxide. I don't think it does. I think you have to expose new grit.
00:06:07
Speaker
once they wear down. But yes, I was able to grind about 30 blades, so that's 60 different sides, on the same dress, same true, and it looked like the wheel was loading up, and it looked dirty, and you touch it with your finger, and your finger turns dark, and I'm like, but it's working. It's working great. Did you stop at 30, or was there a problem, or you just happened to be done?
00:06:30
Speaker
I happened to be mostly done at 30, and I filmed a video for Linda, sent it to her. And as I was filming, I realized that there was a bit of a wear spot on the wheel, like a low spot on the wheel, a high spot on the blade from wear, something like that, which is not a bad thing. But it was a good time to catch it, too, because now I can dress the wheel again and true it and get it back to square. You have to pull it out of the Cat 40 to dress it? No, I leave it in the Cat 40.
00:06:58
Speaker
With these wheels, you don't use like a diamond single point stick. You use a truing stick, which looks just like a quarter inch end mill. And it's made of tungsten, but it's not tungsten carbide or something. It's like this weird formulation of. And you just rub it up against that a couple times. So I've got this program I wrote that takes a thou off.
00:07:18
Speaker
every time it comes up and down. Okay. And then you, you literally stick a, um, aluminum oxide, uh, square one inch square. Right. The candy bars. Yeah. You just shove it into the wheel as it's spinning manually and it's terrifying. But once you get the hang of it, it's not so bad. Yeah. I just, I cringe at the thought of you because every time I used to use those candy bars to dress grinding wheels, like bench grinder wheels, you'd like be pelted with fragments, sharp, sharp, small optic. You can't see them, but you can feel them.
00:07:48
Speaker
Well, especially on like a 60 grit grinding wheel, bench grinding wheel. This is a 500 grit. That's true. That's true. There's just dust coming off. I would think you could get really good surface finishes with a sill with a coarser wheel. Yeah.
00:08:03
Speaker
And the goal here was to both save total amount of time, but more importantly, to save labor time, right? Yes. And the difference with the method we're doing is we're trying to take a one-inch wheel, and we're trying to swipe it directly across the blade in one pass, one finished pass, basically. So any imperfection, any grain, any lines in the dress of the wheel will translate directly into the blade.
00:08:31
Speaker
Sure. Whereas like a surface grinder will traverse back and forth and back and forth and you can spark out that way. So the way that I'm doing it relies heavily on the dress of the wheel that has to be perfect and the composition has to be perfect. Even though Eric is still touching them afterward? Yeah.
00:08:47
Speaker
Yeah, OK. Because if there's one grit that's sticking proud on the wheel, it's digging deep into the blade. Oh, sure. Then you've got to fix the rest. Right. So now Eric's removing 90% of the high spots instead of 10%. Yeah, but allegedly, yeah, you're taking small passes. Well, yeah, I hear you. That's tough. Well, look, so this has been kind of a funny but fun saga over how many business of machines. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the lesson learned? What's the takeaway?
00:09:17
Speaker
you know from investing quite a lot of time and quite a lot of money into this new process this new technology this try to figure this out and um...
00:09:27
Speaker
I don't know what the takeaway is. It's just showing that I'm willing to do this to get the result that I want. Not at any cost, but it's been a big cost and a lot of headaches and a lot of trial and error, but that's the way that you learn. That's the way you get better. That's the way you progress. You have this goal in mind that you want to achieve no matter what.
00:09:49
Speaker
And I'm just about there. Like the blades, I would say if my perfect scenario is 100%, I'm at a solid 80% or 85%, which is really good. Yeah, sure. I've been dealing with a couple of similar things where
00:10:05
Speaker
There's all these different ways to think about it, and part of it is I don't care what other people say. It makes me happy. It's this process. It's what I do. I enjoy it. It may be wrong, but who's telling me what's right? The flip side, though, is that I actually had a really bad day. I had a really good bad day yesterday.
00:10:28
Speaker
The value of writing stuff down because I think being an entrepreneur involves a lot of critical thinking and the ability to iterate through scenarios and play chess in your head. That's usually a good thing but I've been really struggling with a long-term project and so I just grabbed printer paper yesterday.
00:10:45
Speaker
And I just started writing out like, well, wait, why did I say this is bad? And why is this good? And if that's good, but what's the, or if this is bad, is it bad because of, for what reason? Like, for instance, in one case, I think I like one solution, but it would involve a West Coast vendor. And it's like, well, I don't like that because of all these reasons of delays and freight costs and so forth. But it's like, but maybe that's worth it long run.
Business Strategy and Improvement
00:11:09
Speaker
Maybe it's worth it for the short term. And all of a sudden you kind of shed this
00:11:13
Speaker
And it's like, in your example, I don't know anything about your grinding wheels, but you clearly have become so focused on them, and that's fine. I'm not telling you you're wrong, but maybe what you should do is say, wait a minute here. What's the end goal? Why did I make this decision? Why am I working with Linda? Why am I doing it in the morning? Just start thinking, wait a minute here. Was this still all the right path?
00:11:36
Speaker
Yeah, you're questioning your own beliefs, basically. And the reasons why you're for or against a certain thing. And that's very introspective, very smart. Because it's so easy to like, you know, the story you tell yourself, well, I don't want to do this because of this. Well, why? Right. All yeses and all nos don't have the same value or weight. Exactly. Like, why am I telling myself that? Makes a lot of sense. Right.
00:12:02
Speaker
It's not easy to do that. You have to be very conscious and very aware to step back and ask yourself.
00:12:10
Speaker
You know, why wouldn't I use a West Coast vendor? Why is this one week lead time such a bad thing at the end of the day? Right. And again, there's an element of time to these problems. In other words, it's not ideal today, but going forward with either with lead time or with finding another vendor, it wouldn't be an issue. And that lets me solve the problem today, which is figuring out a workflow that gets me what I need. And then later, I'll have more time simultaneous to
00:12:40
Speaker
to producing product or doing whatever, which is all of a sudden, it gives you confidence. This breath of fresh air, you're like, okay, I'm starting to figure this out. It's good. Yeah, and I think a big part of both of our jobs is not only solving the problem today, but also finding the best solution or an excellent solution for long-term forward thinking. But that's what it is too, because like in this case, if I get something nailed down, right now I'm like,
00:13:06
Speaker
Consider it like making a new product and it's like women here I'm I'm at that awkward stage where you don't know the lingo you don't know the processes and you don't even been through it and if I Get it nailed down with somebody. It's a lot easier to move that or grow that elsewhere whereas right now I'm kind of almost a grasping for straws, but I'm such baby steps It's like just pound through that and get something working even if it costs a little bit more Right and then and then you now work from a position of experience
00:13:33
Speaker
Exactly. Fail fast, your whole business theory. Succeed fast. Succeed fast. There you go. Well, no, but succeed fast at the expense of a little bit more margin or a little bit more time, money, whatever. Yeah, right. Totally. That makes total sense. And for me, it's like, you know, why do I have to make everything myself? You know, is that a good thing or a bad thing? It could be a good thing because it's built our brand to be the way that it is. But I have to honestly ask myself certain things like that.
00:14:02
Speaker
especially with regard to things like spindle liners.
00:14:07
Speaker
I'm not gonna poke you anymore on that. But I posted on Facebook yesterday about our dang and somebody had sort of mentioned blah, blah, blah, you need to outsource and hire more or offload or delegate. And I'm kind of like, gosh darn it, I've hired two people in the last two months. That's a huge growth for us. I'm not going to grow at an uncomfortable pace. But what had occurred to me was the ways I would grow
00:14:33
Speaker
do more of what everybody who's been through this talks about, which is you are further removed from some of the technical stuff, the technician stuff, from the E-Myth book. So here's my question to you. Does Grimsman Knives lose what it means to you, John Grimsman, if, let's say for six months, you never touched a Norseman or a Rask from a manufacturing side? I do think about this every now and then.
00:15:02
Speaker
It's a tough question to answer. The product is the product. If it can be produced identically here in our shop with our equipment, with our standards,
00:15:13
Speaker
I think it's still a Grimsmo knife. Like... Oh, totally agree. Fair enough. This is about you personally, I think. No, but in the custom knife world, this question comes up a lot. Like if a business grows to the point where the guy who created it, Grimsmo, isn't making it anymore, the customer doesn't feel that it's a special anymore. But from our perspective, it's the same knife. It's made here to our specs in our shop with our...
00:15:41
Speaker
So I think long term, if say Eric and I both replaced ourselves with monkeys and robots, then I don't know. It would be a different feel to it for sure, but I think it would still satisfy what we need. Now I have my own personal needs as a
00:16:02
Speaker
as a business guy. I love to make stuff. I love to R&D. I love to figure it out. The problem is right now I'm doing that while trying to run production at the same time. That's a big issue for me because I'm not a production kind of guy. I'm always on to the next thing. I'm always trying to figure out what's wrong. I'm creating problems within the products that are already existing to just keep working on them.
00:16:29
Speaker
That is not okay. I know, just to make them better. But that's like my nature is to want to improve all the time.
00:16:36
Speaker
Which is, that I'm okay with. And I think the fact that you're willing to acknowledge, somebody asked me about culture at our company and why it's what it is. And I'm like, I think a lot of it comes down to just be comfortable with who you are. I have no problem with what I'm not good at. I will tell you that all day long. I think that makes it easy to say, okay, you know, Grimms don't know, you know your weaknesses. And that makes it much easier to work around them and work with them.
00:17:00
Speaker
I'm not saying that I'm okay with my weaknesses, but I am aware of them. Yeah, but we all have them. Of course, of course, yeah. Maybe I'm not to the point yet in my life, my personal satisfaction where I'm like, yeah, I suck at this and I'm okay with that. Because at this point, I have to do those things. I don't have replacements, right? So they still bother me on a daily basis that I can't perform to my own expectations.
00:17:24
Speaker
Once I split myself in four, hire a machinist, hire a video media person, then that might get me closer to my true self. Yeah. I remember this mind-blowingly rock my world moment when I was probably in grade school, so seventh or eighth grade, and my grandfather was a fabricator welder. He ran his own company, his own shop.
00:17:49
Speaker
And I remember, I don't remember what triggered it, but I realized, I thought he was like an excellent welder, like just, cause that's what he did. He was a structural steel welding company and I just thought he's gotta be so good and he welded and we welded at the shop on the farm and all that. And I basically learned that all the guys did the welding and he could, he could lay a bead, but he was no longer
00:18:11
Speaker
He was not a great welder. So he kind of and it's kind of how I feel now a little bit I'd say this humbly because I think I've got a lot of room left to go But you know nowadays most the guys are out there running the machines I'd still like to think that I walk up to them and I know what I'm doing I'm good and so forth But it's kind of starting that path to where yeah, it's it's it's that's what it is
00:18:30
Speaker
Oh, you've got your own office now separate from everybody else. Yeah, that's been a good thing. Yeah. Sorry, I say that not because it's everybody else. It's been a good thing because for me to be able to think and process and organize has been huge. And run the business, I mean. Right. Most people don't understand what it actually takes to run a business. What is it? Working for the business, not in the business? Right, right, exactly. Is that the same? I'm not sure I get that, but yeah.
00:19:00
Speaker
working on the business, not in the business. That's easier to make sense. And I find myself doing both constantly, basically back and forth. Whereas Eric works in the business, he doesn't really work on the business, nor do I think he actually understands much of what is required to run a business. And that's just, some people are entrepreneurs, some people are excellent workers, and we need everybody in the world. Right, right. Oh yeah, totally.
00:19:30
Speaker
What are you even up to this week? All kinds of stuff. It's actually been a super crazy productive week.
00:19:37
Speaker
So I got that grinding wheel thing working. I think we did that on Tuesday, on Monday. Actually, over the weekend, I designed a new spinner design that I wanted to bring to the blade show. And I wanted something that I could make purely on the lathe. So I didn't need water jet titanium. I didn't need to outsource anything like that. I could just buy metal from the metal store and make something totally on the lathe. So I designed it over the weekend.
00:20:01
Speaker
And I came in Saturday or Sunday, I think, and I prototyped it. And by Monday, I was cranking them out already in production. Seriously? Yeah, so I've made over 100 of them, which I'm going to bring to Blade Show. That's awesome. When Blade is coming up real soon, right? It is. We'll be there in one week today.
00:20:17
Speaker
Oh my gosh, so, oh shoot, this podcast, we shortened up our lag, but it's still a two week lag, I think. Yeah, I think I'll be able to squeeze away half an hour from Atlanta next week, so. Oh, right, right. Okay. Because the show doesn't start for a couple hours after we normally talk, so. Cool. Yeah, so we'll be good. You excited? I'm very excited. I'm nervous, not for going to the show and performing there, but I mean, like presenting, but for having everything we want to have ready.
00:20:47
Speaker
for the show. Yeah. You know, I'm nervous for it. We got to ship stuff ahead of time so that we're not bringing it. Are you driving down? No, we're flying. OK. Yeah. It's just so much easier to bring nothing with you when you fly. Right. Right. But yeah, so we made Monday, Tuesday, we made a whole ton of Norseman parts. I think I made 20, 21 Norseman knives. Whoa. Which I realized in the entire year before this, we've probably only made 20 or 30 Norseman.
00:21:17
Speaker
Wow. And we bust out 21 knives in two or three days.
Manufacturing Hurdles
00:21:23
Speaker
At least on my end. I did all the machining for them. Except this is where batch work doesn't always work. Because some of the blades where we milled the bevels, they turned out kind of thin.
00:21:37
Speaker
But we're like, yeah, they'll be okay, they'll be okay. Just, we'll be careful with them in heat treat and everything. So they heat treated and they started to get a little wavy at the edge. And just because they're so thin, they don't really support themselves through heat treat. And they become very delicate. And then throughout the tumbling and the sharpening process and everything, and probably half the edges on these blades ended up being wavy and unusable.
00:22:00
Speaker
I wonder what happened. The way that we mill them just puts a lot of force into the edge because we use a big torrid insert cutter and it's not supported very well and it just causes problems downstream. But we know how to spot them and everything. It just kind of sucks that we were planning on having 21 knives to bring to Blade Show and we're going to probably end up with about 10.
00:22:24
Speaker
Right. Is that a workflow that needs fixed? Yeah. And I got a new Kyocera end mill, which should help a lot. I'm still using a Tormach torrid cutter. That's the one, the Tormach TTS that you have in. Exactly. It's a TTS in a Cat40. That's hilarious. You know, it works fine, but this one's going to work a lot better. No, it's funny because that's where I struggle with some lean things because we've got some fixtures now that do kind of like your Norseman.
00:22:53
Speaker
product fixtures where it makes one of each on a pallet. But then the problem is, we haven't had this problem exactly, but let's say you need to remake 10 of just one item. Well, I don't have a fixture for that. Yeah, or the code is dedicated to make a bunch of parts, not just this one part. Right. Yeah. But yeah, I guess you wouldn't have a fixture that made 10 parts. You'd have to use that one fixture 10 times. Right, which is a bummer. Yeah, but it's sometimes when you need to do. Right.
00:23:23
Speaker
I made all those Norseman parts, made all those spinners. We make our own Delrin cages for our knife bearings. I figured out a big milestone a couple weeks ago about a big problem I was having because they're so thin and small and they're hard to grip in the lathe.
00:23:44
Speaker
They kept popping out of the sub spindle, call it. I remember that. That's the 5C that you have the floor machined on it. Yeah. Emergency call it? Emergency brass 5C call it that I machined in. It works awesome, except I wasn't gripping fully onto the part. I was only gripping about 75% on.
00:24:01
Speaker
So once I figured out that I just need to grip a little bit deeper, then it worked great. So at about 4.45 pm, I started changing over the lathe by about 5.15 pm. I'm running parts and then I'm like, you know what? I've got a whole bar in here. It's going to make 225 parts. I'm just going to leave it on all night.
00:24:19
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm like, what's the cycle time going to be? It's going to be like 12 hours. Holy crap. It takes that long to make that many. Yeah, they're about three minutes each. Oh, OK. So times 200, right? Yeah, sure. But yeah, so the lid is going to run for 12 hours. It'll almost still be running when I come back in in the morning. That would be amazing. Let's try. Why not? What's the worst that's going to happen? So I made 10 good parts. It's a late. I can tell you what the worst thing is going to happen. Well, yeah. But I mean, it's supposed to be right. I'm just kidding. You're right.
00:24:49
Speaker
As you keep saying, we buy these machines. They're automated machines. They need to be run. It's not going to crash. It's not going to glitch or anything like that. It's just something in the workflow could happen. So we found one of those issues. We're cutting Delrin, which is a plastic. And I've got a little internal threading tool that does a little boring on the inside. And it just loaded up with chip wrap.
00:25:11
Speaker
around this tiny tool. So then it just started melting and wrapping more and melting more. And then it kept messing up the parts. So it made 10 good parts, 10 bad parts. And then after that, the sub-spindle wouldn't even grab onto it. So it wouldn't grab onto the next part and pull it out. So it just machined the exact same part 200 times in a row.
00:25:34
Speaker
So at least you didn't lose your raw material. Yeah, that's a good point. Just lost the time, the 10 hours of unattended. Electricity bill. Electricity and wear and tear on the live tools and things like that. So end of the day, no big deal. And it proved something that we can learn for the future, figure out how to minimize this chip wrap and all that stuff. So that's kind of funny. It's a random question. Would it be possible to design a 5C emergency collet?
00:26:03
Speaker
that had a vacuum because the collets were rotating. So I don't know if you could have a pneumatic coupling joint that would support that rp rpms though. I'm sure you could put a, could you put a vacuum through the whole sub spindle tube and seal up the, you could seal up the collet with an R with an epoxy. Maybe there's a way to do it.
00:26:30
Speaker
I don't know. Do not do this. No, it wouldn't work for this application at all, but I'm sure it's been done before.
00:26:37
Speaker
Cause I've seen some pretty cool headstock, oh, not chucks, what do you call it? The blanking, face plates on lays, where people have done vacuum, although now I'm thinking about that in the same problem. I don't know how they have the vacuum. Well, they certainly have hydraulic, like all of the big lades are hydraulic three-jot chucks, and that's a rotating seal. Great call. I mean, and a car engine is a rotating seal.
00:27:05
Speaker
I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. Interesting. I'm sure it's possible. Got it. Another quick thing that happened was Barry went out to get something at the store, and then when the door opened up, I thought he came back in. But I look up, and it was my friend Jesse who bought my tormach a couple months ago. Yeah. And he makes these circus wheels, a sear wheel.
00:27:27
Speaker
and he shows up and he's lives like three hours away and it's like yeah i just wanted to stop by on my way to toronto cuz i'm going to uh... france right now
00:27:36
Speaker
to go to Cirque du Soleil and meet with them, meet with the Cirque du Soleil, and try to sell his sear wheels direct to them. So he's all excited. That's crazy. Yeah. And he brought a portable band saw. And he's like, yeah, I was listening to you guys' podcast. And you mentioned that you don't have a band saw. So I had this Harbor Freight one. It's crappy, but you guys don't have a band saw. So I wanted to give this to you.
00:28:00
Speaker
That's hilarious. I still think it's so funny and I get it. In fact, looking around our shop and I'm really thinking hard about
00:28:10
Speaker
doing a big purge, like a big purge. And it's pretty mind blowing. But a great example. There's a lot of little tools that I think we could sell and they have
Optimizing Shop Efficiency
00:28:20
Speaker
value. You could raise some money, but then I have a Whitney portable punch. It's a very good 30 ton punch. It's got a hydraulic power unit. Brand new, it would be 10 grand. And I bought it for 1200 bucks or something on eBay. It wasn't working, I got it fixed, so forth.
00:28:37
Speaker
I haven't used it, John, in two years. I have an iron worker, which is a punch as well. I have this idea that I'm gonna create this new product where it's gonna be great, because that's gonna become a key dedicated part of the workflow, and why? I need to buy a second machine, a second hose. That's a machine that will get used every day that makes money. Get rid of this stuff. It's just sitting there. The guys clean it once every two weeks. Get rid of it. That makes sense.
00:29:05
Speaker
Sell your bandsaw. I'm kidding. You have one of those, what are they called, swag off-road mounts? Do you have one of those? No. I know what they are. Do you think it would be useful?
00:29:18
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's nice to have that as a, it just puts it into a vertical. Right. Cause as a handheld thing, I don't see the insane use, but if it was a, um, if it was a stationary item, I think we'd use it often. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, actually that's a Wednesday widget I'm going to record. I'm not, there's no way I'm getting to it today, but maybe this weekend or next week, making a little jig that has some guide pins like dowel pins, but you could put a part in and then push it through a saw like that and keep your cut a lot straighter. Oh, interesting.
00:29:47
Speaker
going to be your control the cut like how on a wood table saw they have the fence thing that Yeah, kind of it. You'll see it'll be a little different But there's some work that I've wanted to do where I don't want to use slitting saws But you want a band saw that has a much more controlled Cut path and depth and all and so forth. So that's what I'm working on Are you still making didn't you make an attachment for some sort of portable bandsaw table jig thing?
00:30:15
Speaker
Did we? The wall table saw? Oh, no, chop saw. We still make those. That's for a chop saw. Yeah, chop saw. It's not a friction saw. It's a aluminum cutting, tweaked saw blade saw. We actually sell a lot of those. That's fantastic. Oh, and we have a awesome week. I got to say.
00:30:36
Speaker
The entrepreneurs who are listening will get this. There is nothing more of a high than I get out of seeing somebody buy your product. And it's not, it's for one reason, which is it's a validation of what you're doing. We sold, I had kind of a number in mind of what I'd like to start selling for our Torbok fixture plates.
00:30:52
Speaker
And we haven't really started marketing them yet for some reasons that'll be obvious later. But we sold way more this week than I thought we would. And that was just so freaking exciting. It makes me so happy and yes. And we've been working on our workflow and quality control to get that nailed down. We're iterating so fast.
00:31:15
Speaker
on some of that stuff that it's exciting. Nice. Yeah, I'm starting to see them pop up on Instagram, just random pictures in my search feed, like, oh, that's Saunders Fixture Play. And it's unique enough, you know, I can tell the black anodized ones, right? Yeah. It's obviously- It's exciting. Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome.
00:31:33
Speaker
And then we had electricians here yesterday putting in the drops. We are starting a TIG welding class with Crummy Welding and Superior Welding, Jonathan Lewis and Roy Crumbhine. So they're coming here and like once a month we're going to do a two day TIG training class. These guys are like awesome TIG welders and they're actually a teaching experience.
00:31:54
Speaker
and it'll be intro to TIG, but they're gonna talk about all the different types of TIG welding and materials, and then also, which I think is cool, is TIG welding in a machine shop. So fixing blends, building services back up, which is something that I have never done, but am very much interested in learning more about.
00:32:12
Speaker
I've always loved the concept of TIG welding. I did it a while ago before I got into machining, or as I was getting into machining, but I had never had the money to buy my own welder. And even nowadays, I don't have the need for it. Sure, I totally agree. You know what I mean? But it's something I would love to get into, but at the time now, when you work on cars, you need to weld everything. But making this stuff, machining, I never have to weld, basically.
00:32:41
Speaker
Oh, but I'll tell you, like we had a, we ran a job yesterday on our new JD squared plasma and it did a Pierce point goof on a tiny little nest pocket from a serif on a font. It shouldn't have done it. I should, I guess I should have caught it, but anyways, I didn't want to rule in this large piece. So we just literally dropped a little Tig beat in there and fit fixed. Awesome.
00:33:01
Speaker
That's cool. What do you, what do you do today? Today I'm making, I gotta make more of these titanium buttons for our spinners. Sweet. And they're, they're driving me nuts. The one side's working, but the other side's not pulling out enough or too far or something. I don't know. Lathes are dumb. Lathes stay. As much as I love them, they drive me crazy. If you could buy, if I could plop down in your shop tomorrow, another Dura vertical or another Nakamura, what would you rather have? Mill or lathe?
00:33:36
Speaker
Especially from a headache perspective, another mill would be a lot less headache. Is that because you like them more or because it's more of a workflow problem? A workflow thing. It's a bottleneck. No, I mean both machines are awesome.
00:33:50
Speaker
It's a tough call. I mean, now we're starting to use them both kind of equally. Like I have so many parts that are made on each machine. I need to keep them running. Instead of getting a new machine, I'd need a machinist. That's a great point. That I hear you on. Right. But honestly, I think our next machine, if we ever do get one, will be another mill. And then after that would be a lathe. Maybe a Swiss lathe. Interesting.
00:34:16
Speaker
Yep. Yep. That makes sense. Yeah, because right now it's just uptime that needs to be maximized. You know, like we just got to make more parts.
00:34:26
Speaker
Yeah, I'm really, I don't remember whether we talked about this on a bomb or not, but I'm looking at the VF2. I know we talked about that. I'm really thinking about the pallet system. It would probably be the Pearson, but a pallet system where it's got the hold downs and we just have a rack next to the machine. And I hate to say it because it makes me feel a little bit
00:34:47
Speaker
I don't know, I just don't like the way it feels. But then I don't need a skilled person. I can literally have the parts loaded up ahead of time. I think there's some skill involved in setting them up and then just drop them on. And I'm thinking about that idea of how to have the machine know what pallet is on at the time. But anybody could put any pallet on the machine at any point in time, hit cycle start, and it automatically runs the right program. As long as all the tools are in.
00:35:11
Speaker
Correct. Right. So you keep standards of everything, and then? Correct. You run your CAM, and you sacrifice probably some efficiency by trying to standardize tooling. Yeah, but.
00:35:24
Speaker
And you sacrifice two minutes per cycle with all the probing and stuff that you're doing. But yeah, when it can be run by an operator, by anybody in the shop, like, oh, look, the VF2 is not on right now. And then you look at your Pearson workflow table organizational chart on the wall, which I had talked to him about it. And he sent me his file on how he did it. Oh, really? Yeah.
00:35:45
Speaker
So that's cool. I think I would love to implement something like that, but I don't have time. I know. You're going to get through your RASP pre-order. Super soon. Good for you, man. You're going to start crushing it. You're going to have cash come in. When cash comes in, here's the thing I trust about you. You will make the right decision on how to hire and grow. Yeah.
00:36:09
Speaker
Seriously, we should talk about it more. Yeah, we will for sure. That's good. But it's funny, all this talk about what would I get, would I get a machine, machinist, whatever. What I need right now is cash. Just from a pure, I'm just going to say it, we just need cash. But that's what's happening, right? Right. That is what's happening.
00:36:29
Speaker
And once in the next few weeks, once the raft pre-order is done and that obligation, that already paid obligation is off our plate, then we start bringing in serious cash. So, yeah. Yeah. Well, and I got to give it to you. I mean, you have done a phenomenal job of making product people. Look, Bigit Spinner, some people may not like them. Tough.
00:36:47
Speaker
the first product that I ever made was this gun cart target company. And we had the successful target that was sold to, literally we had a contract with Naval Special Warfare Group. I was 24 and I sold a product to the SEALs. I had the paperwork, but that was so cool. And you know what? That turned into a GoPro gun mount business. And GoPros at the time were not a household name. I thought they were silly. It was like paintball, you know, one of the, you know, mall ninja operators.
00:37:17
Speaker
And you know, who's, you know, from a serious shooter perspective, putting a GoPro on your AR is so silly and stupid. And I, so in some sex, I didn't like it. And you know what? It was awesome. It launched your career. I mean, yeah, it did. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Hey, I gotta get to work. Sounds good. Me too. I'll see you bud. Have a great day. Bye.