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#220 - Purchasing & Procurement, ERP System, Raw Material Shortage Concerns, Willemin, Haas DT-2, Tool Life, KERN production, Higby Threads, and MORE!
239 Plays4 years ago
TOPICS:
- Grimsmo quits (this is a good thing, we promise)!
- ERP Systems & Purchase Orders
- Raw Material Shortages
- Willemin (Mill-ish) coming to Grimsmo Knives from Ohio
- Haas VF-3 & Haas DT-2 for production at SMW!
- KERN & lights out production
- Diagnosing Tool Life Killers & Solutions (Chip Evacuation, Fusion 360 Adaptive with Ramp Taper Angle, tool coatings, through spindle coolant, flute count, magnetism, and more!)
- Higby Threads, CNC Lathe Love, Master Ring Gauges
- Dimension Drawings for QC at SMW
- Fusion 360 FINALLY allows threading with a grooving tool!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Business and Machining Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business and Machining episode 220. My name is John Grimsmough. And my name is Sean Saunders. And this is the podcast where John and I talk every week, every Friday for years and years and years about business and entrepreneurship and manufacturing and making chips and all kinds of fun stuff, coolant management and all kinds of stuff.
Strategic Shift in Company Operations
00:00:23
Speaker
I want to tell you, I, as of three days ago,
00:00:28
Speaker
I made a mental decision, and then a physical decision, that I will no longer do any purchasing whatsoever in this company. Good for you. Unless it's directly related to my own stuff, like my project or whatever. OK. What does that mean? Like, if I'm making a new fixture, or if I'm new stuff, because there's no point in me going through anybody else to do that. But normal stuff, end mills, materials, purchasing, lathe bars, like we built an ERP system for this.
00:00:56
Speaker
And this was the shift that it's like, I'm not touching it anymore guys. And I've already had to say like three times this week, like, sorry, I don't do purchasing anymore. Why are you talking to me? Like as a joke, but there's growing pains for sure.
Transition to ERP System
00:01:09
Speaker
But it's fantastic. Like, give me some context. Like, what were the three things that people came? This guy was like, Hey, John, on your way in, can you stop by the store and get some muriatic acid? And I'm like, sorry, I don't do purchasing anymore.
00:01:25
Speaker
Yeah, hard pass. And it's also not on my way in. It's like way out of my way. But yeah, we got it taken care of. Little things like that. Eric ordered, Eric placed an order for a bunch of tooling for himself and the suppliers going back and forth. Sorry, that items discontinued. And Eric's like, can you tell him this? And I'm like, no. Oh my gosh. Right. Right. So little things. Everybody's used to me handling it all. And that's over. Awesome. Great.
00:01:55
Speaker
Is GURP running? Oh, yeah. It hasn't been utilized well. Pierre made purchase orders yesterday. We're fine tuning the approval process and make sure there's money where there needs to be and who's actually placing the order and especially big $10,000 items.
00:02:16
Speaker
has to be done carefully and make sure we don't buy the wrong things. You have to bang your head against that wall to make sure that everybody knows the way to do it. Find the best way for everybody to be involved with it. For the most part, all the information is in GURP. We know our suppliers. We know the materials. We know the little ins and outs of ordering from each vendor.
00:02:35
Speaker
call that person, send an email PO to that, order from the website for that. It's all in there. So yeah, just a total literal mental commitment on my part to be like, this is the day. I think it happened Sunday night. And I was like, I'm done. This is it. I come in Monday, tell everybody this is what's happening, deal with it. Yeah. Don't let it get down. I'm not mean about anything.
00:03:02
Speaker
But yeah. Awesome. We would not be able to do what we do without Lex at this point. I mean, I think Lex is now issuing, I mean, dozens of POs a week or more. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but it's in the hundreds of POs since we turned it over months ago. And we trust it.
Role Transformation through Automation
00:03:24
Speaker
It works.
00:03:25
Speaker
It's great. It is very strange to me that Lex now issues four and five figure POs without me involved. Then that material arrives without me in the know because we have people and processes that now receive it, process it, get it in. And then the
00:03:47
Speaker
email, the email invoices automatically go to somebody else and are paid without me knowing. And there's an element of that that's really cool. There's an element of that that's like, grow up, that's what businesses do, like, that's okay.
Procurement vs. Repeat Purchasing
00:03:59
Speaker
And then there's also this whole like, it just completely changes your perspective and role in a way that I think it was difficult for me to
00:04:08
Speaker
you know, I could synthetically think about what it would be like. But now that it's there, what I'm now doing is what I have been wanting to do, which is like I can now take a true, unbiased, like a better look at our statements or silly stuff that I like like cash before casting. Sometimes I do that more than I probably need to, but I like it. And I look at material levels and ordering levels and order history and
00:04:30
Speaker
You have that barometer, that screen of showing you where everything is and it's awesome. That's fantastic because so much of it is repeat purchasing. It's like Pearson said a long time ago, there's a procurement and there's purchasing. One is just buying the same stuff and the other is finding the right perfect thing, perfect vendor and everything. That takes effort and brain power to do.
00:04:57
Speaker
But the easy stuff should just be like yes, we need more half-inch titanium lathe bars like end of story When are they gonna be here?
Efficient Order Management
00:05:05
Speaker
Right. We're definitely at the point now where with Lex, I don't care. I trust the fact that it may have issued a $7,000 PO. It's fine. I don't have any anxiety about that system. I think once we've double ordered material because we forgot and didn't realize that it was already on order. You learn, you put a system process in place. Do you have a visual indicator that says orders are pending or in place or sent to vendor?
00:05:34
Speaker
So what happens now, pick a number A1000. If you try to add A1000 to the order queue, while it's also on an inbound status, it pops up and says, you cannot order more A1000 because it's currently on order. And below that, there's a force override because there are times where we want to actually order more before some has already arrived.
Challenges in Purchasing and Material Shortages
00:05:57
Speaker
Let's talk about what doesn't work well. Right now, it's a mix of people, namely me and Julie, that are pushing Lex POs. I don't do it very much anymore, but I still have a calendar reminder twice a week to look through the order queue just to make sure something hasn't been sitting in the order queue for
00:06:16
Speaker
too many days. What do you mean order Q specifically? Take aluminum. We buy aluminum in different sizes and quantities and we try to batch it together to some reasonableness. We don't want to just buy mini pallet material. We want to try to buy two or three days worth of
00:06:33
Speaker
over time, if that makes sense. Get better pricing, and it's actually just much easier. In the same thing with McMaster or NSC, you don't want to just order a single drill, and of course, if something's urgent, you can push it right away. I could probably do a better job of being more rigid about not getting involved anymore.
00:06:55
Speaker
It's working so well. I'm not getting too much heartburn over the fact that I'm still popping in twice a week for 10 minutes to look at making sure, hey, something hasn't been, and we have a queue. So it's funny, you learn, you change this based on what you learned. So in the order queue, it has a time in queue counter. So it shows you if something's been in the queue for four days or six days, you think, oh boy, somehow we just goofed, didn't see that. Let's go ahead and get that pushed.
00:07:18
Speaker
So it's like how with Amazon Rickmaster, you just keep dumping stuff in your shopping cart and you do it again tomorrow and again tomorrow. And then eventually when it's full, you're just like, order. Yep. Bingo. Okay. But we, for example, in our instructions, we won't let our vendors mix materials. We learned that lesson. So when we order two different aluminum sizes, it needs to all be on separate pallets because of the flow. When it gets here, it gets labeled and sent to different machines or areas and I don't want to have to sort it. Obviously.
00:07:47
Speaker
Yeah, I don't care. I just placed an order for some fixture material, some A2 and some 4140 in pretty much the exact same sizes. And I was like, I know you're a good vendor, and I trust you guys to do this. I really do. But make sure you label each one, please, because I'm not going to be able to know the difference.
00:08:04
Speaker
The
Coping with Material Shortages
00:08:05
Speaker
other thing that's not working well is, I would say it's not working well, but we also have to monitor the inbound screen to make sure when stuff gets here, it gets marked as inbound. And now that's relatively easy with like a big thousand pounds of raw material because it's a forklift, it's sitting there, somebody will go to the computer, they'll print out a barcode, that process works kind of as a closed loop system. It doesn't work as well if like, let's say we just,
00:08:32
Speaker
sent one item off to anodizing because, let's say it was a back-ordered item, and we just said, hey, instead of batching up, let's just send one off to anodizing. Well, it may come back. It comes back. Somebody knows it's a hot item. We unwrap it. We QC it real quick, and we just turn it right around to the customer. Well, nobody inbounded that, so it'll sit there.
00:08:52
Speaker
But again, we have an inbound screen. We have it all dated. It's tied to the PO. It's descriptive. So if something is longer than normal, we just sort of do a visual check and say, Hey, did that actually come in? No big deal. And clear it. Yep. Yep. Love it. It's neat to see how like your purchasing side is more mature than ours is right now, but we're kind of on the same track and it's great. Like
00:09:16
Speaker
It's actually a foregone conclusion that we'll continue to be on the same track for the rest of our manufacturing days. Basically, yes. I mean, we're probably within six to 12 months of each other on anything ever.
00:09:27
Speaker
Well, so the other thing that Lex doesn't do, and it's a choice, we have chosen to ignore it, is it doesn't handle everything we need to buy. So we still buy from Maritool at least once a month, both holders. And actually, we buy some cutting tools from them. We've never bothered to set up Maritool and Lex. We could. We just haven't. One reason is that Ed and I do that. We have a saved login, billing info saved. It's just easy to log in and do it. Same with Lakeshore Carbide.
00:09:54
Speaker
Same with like big Kaiser with turning inserts. And so there could be a good argument for standardizing that across everything, but it's also like, I don't know. It's just, it's not causing a problem. Like when Ed needs a couple of end mills, same with Y, actually we buy a lot of YG1 these days and same thing. We just, we just do it online.
00:10:13
Speaker
See, I'm kind of the opposite because our end mill tracking is probably our most important of the purchasing that we do. You actually go through tools. It's funny. Really? Oh, yeah. We go through many end mills a day.
00:10:27
Speaker
We go through a lot of drills and taps, but it's so easy to keep that stuff. That's Sandvik and MSC and both of them, I trust. This could be actually a good segue to a different topic. I trust both of them to continue to have reliable stock and quick shipping. That's okay. I think that's a reasonable part of a business strategy.
00:10:48
Speaker
We are, I would say, in trouble, because that would be alarmist. But this is as close to as an alarmist as it can get without being an alarmist. We're having material shortages. Really? Like the worldwide kind of issues. Yeah. And I'd heard about this, but it's kind of one of those somebody who knew somebody who's saying this.
Industry Impact: Shortages and Price Increases
00:11:09
Speaker
And I kind of discount that, because it's fun to tell a tale.
00:11:15
Speaker
This is straight up Alrow, a major buyer. My understanding is that Alrow often buys rail cars worth of material. This is not a mom and pop distributor. Alrow on regular material, carbon sheet, which we don't buy. I was talking to the general manager at the Columbus branch, which is a multi-hundred thousand square foot facility. Regular carbon sheet is borderline unobtanium and price increases from 70% up to 500%.
00:11:43
Speaker
And then some of our basic steel that we source for things like our mod vice has all of a sudden evaporated. We will be, I think, okay. It could get worse. It could affect our, we had to get creative. We could change. We already started thinking about how we could change to make them out of different shape material. If need be, just to get flexible. I'm trying to make sure we have enough material on hand. Of course, everyone's going to do that. I think if you can afford to is try to start making sure you have ample in-house material.
00:12:12
Speaker
Yeah, we just started talking about that yesterday because we haven't ordered bulk like titanium or blade steel in a while and we're going to get low in a month or two.
Vendor Relationships and Procurement Decisions
00:12:21
Speaker
Yeah, so firsthand telling you it's real, we paid 100%. We paid 100% double the price on the last order of steel. I probably could have tried to slow play it, bid it out, see if I could find different material.
00:12:41
Speaker
I don't like eating that margin, but I'll never forget. The story I'm pretty sure I told a while back on the podcast, but I had the chance to tour the Glock factory in Austria 20 years ago. I didn't know anything about machining at the time. I really wish I had. There's a town called Fairlach. The guy who ran the factory was like kind of poo-pooing MBA students, which I thought was hilarious. He was like, we keep two years of steel
00:13:04
Speaker
on hand in a whole separate warehouse here in our facility. He's like, I don't care what you tell me about just in time. I control my destiny. And you and I are in a world of hurt if we can't get material job. Yeah, for sure. Same goes for any manufacturing shop. Jeez. Didn't Phil say something in WhatsApp? It was about aluminum? Yeah. Phil or Amish, I can remember. But yeah.
00:13:31
Speaker
I don't know. Tough. Yeah. So that's where we're at. Yeah, just, yes. Past two days, we placed a whole bunch of lathe bars, titanium and 17.4. I don't think there's been a problem with that, but that's probably just from current inventory kind of thing. And we're not ordering, I mean, to us, it's like 10 grand of stuff, but to a supplier, it's like eight bars or something. I guess we got 100 bars of the one, but still.
00:13:57
Speaker
I bet you you're more real than you might think, John. Yeah. I like to picture maybe that they have more than that on hand at any one time. Speaking of availability and arrivals, when does that will an income? I have a waiting email that I need to read from
Acquiring New Machinery and Logistics
00:14:17
Speaker
yesterday with details, I guess. They got the check, so that's good.
00:14:24
Speaker
And yeah, I guess now that they have the money that like it was plugged in until they saw the money because they're like, we're not on, we're not taking this, but we need the room. So give us our money. Um,
00:14:39
Speaker
Yeah, I guess it should be getting loaded in the next week or two, and then slowboat to Canada kind of thing. It's in Ohio, so it's not far. I still think that's hilarious. Yeah. So it's got to cross the border. We've got to deal with brokerage. We've got to pay our tax on it, duties, whatever.
00:14:57
Speaker
And I'm going to have, because I'm getting the Wilhelmin and then separately I'm buying a bar loader from L&S. They have a used one for a really good deal that will be perfect for this lathe. And otherwise the bar loader was going to be like half the cost of the lathe itself. What's called a mill?
00:15:18
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Mill Laid Mill. Will um, will um, I see here. Will Laid Mill. Will Laid Mill. Yeah, I'm going to go with Will Laid Mill. I like that.
00:15:29
Speaker
I love it. So I'm going to have the Wilhelmin shipped to our riggers directly, because they're like an hour away. And then also the bar loaders ship to them directly. And then they can just take one truck to us, because it's so much less the schedule. So that's great. So yeah, I guess we've got to set that up today. Awesome. But yeah, great. And then I got to buy a bunch of tool holders.
00:16:00
Speaker
That's it? I don't know. It's going to be such an awesome machine. I guess call-its. I guess it won't come with any call-its. I don't even know what kind of call-it it uses. Call-its for the holder? Oh. Like bar call-it. Oh, yeah. I got to ask CJ. What's the shock on it? You're right. Yeah. Interesting. But yeah. And then the vice, I guess I just make my own soft jaws for the little sub vice.
00:16:23
Speaker
And go. So today I'm going to plan through, OK, what tools am I actually tooling this machine up with? What end mills, what turning holders, what do I need to get? And start purchasing all that.
00:16:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's awesome. So I mean, there's an example of purchasing we're like, Yeah, I'll handle that because that's, that's new. That's weird stuff. That's a lady that so far only I know about, like, logistically, and, you know, got to figure it out. What, um, who handles rigging on the Ohio side?
00:16:55
Speaker
The used machinery dealer that I'm getting it from said he will handle it. That's great. And it will basically get shipped to us, to wherever we want. And then we handle the brokerage. So we communicate. I guess there's got to be ample communication between everybody. But I was even thinking about that. With COVID, technically, the border is kind of closed, I guess. But how does the delivery driver
00:17:22
Speaker
drive across the border for an hour and then come back, there must be some. Anecdotally, I recall reading this that the freight trucks have actually always been open. I figured. Now, how that's an exception, because a truck driver isn't going to spread COVID, but obviously that's going to massively reduce the
00:17:41
Speaker
Maybe there's some clause that's like, turn around and come right back. You've got 24 hours or 12 hours or whatever. But there has to be UPS, ground shipments and everything. It's probably one of those ultimate ironies of like, we're going to do everything we can, but we're not going to disrupt commerce because you know. That's true. Anyway. Yeah, so I'm pumped about that. So we might actually see it. It might actually be like making chips in less than a month.
00:18:10
Speaker
Awesome. Pumped. Yeah.
Shop Upgrades and Machine Efficiency
00:18:14
Speaker
Well, I'll see your Willyman and I'll raise you a DT2. Yeah. No. It totally clicked. It actually made me revisit a story I was telling throughout a lot of last year, which was this shop overhaul.
00:18:29
Speaker
Um, and it's very much in the past tense, even though we're still kind of living and breathing it, like we're still moving stuff, tweaking stuff, moving, racking, but like it's a lot less interesting now. Like it's not, what would you say? Like an overhaul? It's just tweaking, but
00:18:44
Speaker
The other key part of that was like, hey, let's make sure we have the right machines to make the parts we need to make. And we know a lot more than we knew six months ago about workflows, and fixturing, and setups, and processes, and volumes. And so honestly, I think we're going to get more than one. But I just bought one DT2 because we have a couple of products where it's just really going to shine. And this is true for any of the drill mill machines.
00:19:15
Speaker
that it made sense to stay with the Haas because we just, the codes works, we know the probing.
00:19:21
Speaker
I do want to keep an open mind about if, how, and when, and why. Something like a brother could be better. That's something we should look at. I think they just came out the new rev of the X2 now, too, on the S1000. But if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And the smaller plates, like the Shapebocos or the tape plates where we're very light milling, it's aluminum. And what we're tapping, drilling and tapping, 300 holes. Jeez.
00:19:49
Speaker
Tapping especially, we should actually, we're going to do an AB comparison once the machine comes. Yes. Holy cow. Tell me you're making them on the TM one right now first. Oh, TM's gone. Oh, yeah, I didn't know that. Hashtag shop overhaul. Yeah.
00:20:05
Speaker
Honestly had a great experience with it, but we wanted, uh, we replaced it with a VF three that comes Monday. Oh, nice. We ordered it like three months ago and it's been delayed, but that would have been like the ultimate comparison. The TM one to a DT one, right? Yeah. That would not be a comparison. Three times faster. Oh, I bet more dude. Really? Yeah. The DT is like 2200 inch rapid one G acceleration. Like it's legit.
00:20:34
Speaker
BT30, right? We got the cat 30 option. The heck's a cat 30? You don't know the difference between CT and BT? I forget. It's like the dog location and size or something. It's actually real. Okay. I don't think I ever hear the term cat 30.
00:20:56
Speaker
I don't know. CT30, CAT30, BT30. Oh, you're right. I don't know. I was thinking about it before. So Haas has the exact same machine in DT and DM, but the only difference being that M's are the 40 taper. We have a bunch of 30 taper tooling from our Torlock MX and the old Robo drill. And I want the
00:21:17
Speaker
Haas told me anecdotally that the spindle acceleration ramp up, ramp down is the same, but from watching a makeshift engineering series that MIT put online about like machine design, if I recall, when you try to accelerate a load like a motor rotating up a spindle,
00:21:39
Speaker
It's like the cubic factor for every additional ounce of rotational torque you need. You have to be, not three times, but the cubed factor is stronger. The idea of accelerating and decelerating a much heavier 40 taper holder plus the taper of the spindle and so forth, 30 taper to me seems fine.
00:22:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's like, I mean, I know the current is the current, but with the HSK40, very small diameter. They're like inch and a half diameter or something, if that. They spin up and down real fast, because the rotating mass is so central and so small and relatively light, because it's almost hollow all the way through. And yeah, I can see that.
Maximizing Machine Uptime
00:22:27
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm excited and that's machine should come pretty soon. It's unclear if we're all, we kind of were trying to think about what it would replace, but then we're thinking and we're like, gosh, there's a lot of benefit to accommodating what I think is going to be some growth, but also having more dedicated. The VF2 is only going to stay set up ever for mod vice bodies and then the
00:22:51
Speaker
The other, the two YT is going to stay set up for the top jaws and insert. It's a workflow that I really think is going to make sense for efficiency. Love it. Yeah, I guess that's what Pearson's been doing is everything is modular, but for the most part, it's like, well, this part gets made over here and the machine's always ready.
00:23:12
Speaker
you just load up material and go and then you move it up to up to on this other machine, you just keep the constant like workflow work through throughput.
00:23:22
Speaker
Cool. I had a note from last week to ask you, how did your CCO quick change work? I don't think Pierre has had a chance to install it yet. He's still running out the last of the saga part. I think he'll be changing it out to a different party's making soon, tomorrow, something like that. Yeah, I'm super curious myself too. Good. That has moved to next week's topic. Yeah, exactly. Cool. What's going on?
00:23:55
Speaker
Obviously, with the current and the Palette Changer and things, I want to maximize my uptime. I want to see 24-hour spindle time even just once. I've done 15 hours many days now, which just runs nonstop for 15 hours. I had a small hiccup last night, just a tool life miscalculation.
00:24:17
Speaker
not a big deal. I noticed it at like 1.30 in the morning as I'm going to bed, and I'm like, I'm not going in right now. I want to, but no, I'm not. I got podcasts in the morning. But yeah, it's neat to push it
00:24:34
Speaker
Because I basically try to rely everything on the night runs and try to push the consistency and the reliability to just trust it. And yes, there's hiccups. And yes, there's little problems. And yes, this tool breaks. So change it. Change the tool path or the tool life or whatever to get to that reliability. And everything is just getting tighter and tighter and more fine-tuned and more fine-tuned. And it's great.
00:24:59
Speaker
Once everything gets even better, then I'll make more fixtures for the Rask and run more at once. Are you doing sister tools a lot? Yes. And I'm starting to do more and more and more, which is fantastic. Like we talked about last week, you run out the life on the first one. You're like, yeah, the second one's got a little bit. And then the next day you come in, oh, the second one's almost done, too. It's incredible. I could totally see. I might have three to four for some tools, like not a lot.
00:25:29
Speaker
It's not that they gotta last forever and you forget about them. It's that it has to last until you look at it next time. You know, if that's tomorrow at noon, it has to last till then. And ideally just within the tool life, like not that it broke and you need a sister tool, it's mostly that it like, that tool only lasts for 20 minutes or that tool only lasts for 200 minutes or something. And then it goes to the next one. Do you have some tools that are,
00:25:58
Speaker
Should not last you long enough? Yeah, I
Tool Management and Lifespan Strategies
00:26:00
Speaker
think so. And it could be a lot of toolpath. Just to load and the way I'm boring into the hole or ramping it. It's like you really got to think as the end mill. It's like, how am I hitting that material? And would a corner radius work better? And should I rough it out with a different tool first and then come in and kiss it and finish it with this tool?
00:26:24
Speaker
Are they all small tools? Yeah, eighth inch, 16th inch, 32nd inch. Eighth inch should last a lot. It should. That's one of my worst ones at the moment.
00:26:35
Speaker
Is it a Lakeshore? Yeah. I told Carl this a long time ago, but the Lakeshore one eighth inch aluminum tool is actually one of the few tools I don't like from them. I tended to chip well and clog up in aluminum, just disproportionately compared to other tools. You're obviously doing them steel though. Yeah, steel and titanium. Yeah.
00:27:00
Speaker
worth looking at. I mean, for you and tool life coatings, I would think play a huge role. Yeah. Different kinds of coatings. I mean, but coating wouldn't cause the tips to not chip.
00:27:15
Speaker
I would think, like the corners chipping off is one of my bigger issues. Okay. And maybe I should be roughing with a corner radius tool and then finish with the square end mill. Because right now I'm just roughing with a square end mill and finishing with a different identical square end mill. Yeah, there you go. There you go. That's an easy fix. Yeah, it really is. And I would like triple my tool life.
00:27:38
Speaker
Even, uh, we used to do some of that work and we would do it. If you have any ability to go bigger than an eighth, an inch, even like a nine 64, we would rough with and then come back with an eighth inch. You need a sharp corner on the finish product. But like if it was a five hour ad, well, I do need a sharp corner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Rough with a bulldozer. Yeah. For some of the features I do rough with, uh, three sixteenths, um,
00:28:08
Speaker
So yeah, it's, it's just this constant mindset of like rough with your strongest tool and then come in and finish it.
Tackling Toolpath and Magnetism Challenges
00:28:16
Speaker
But having 210 tools in the machine and I've only filled up a hundred and something of them. Um, it's amazing to have dedicated finishing tool. I have a tool that only finishes the pivot head hole and screw head holes on the titanium handles and amazing. It's amazing. It's so cool.
00:28:33
Speaker
But yeah, everything's flowing pretty good. Totally random, but we found a new offender to a life that had never, never occurred to us and I had never heard before. You ready for this? Material that has residual magnetism in it. Magnetism.
00:28:56
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. Obviously, if you take a piece of 40, 140, or any steel, it has carbon. Is it carbon? It responds to a magnet, but the question is whether the material itself has any magnetism. I don't know
00:29:12
Speaker
Obviously, if the material was ever held with a magnet, that can impart magnetism, but you don't think it would be. I'm wondering if sometimes the way they process it or saw cut it could. Because some of my 4140 smaller fixtures and I've got these P20 tombstones are definitely magnetic, like they stick together. Okay, so there's your problem.
00:29:36
Speaker
So go buy the, um, although I'm not, I'm not cutting those every day. Like it doesn't matter. They're made. Yeah, but it'll transfer through.
00:29:48
Speaker
But to the blades, maybe, to the steel. You're right. Ty wouldn't. But OK, go on. Yeah. So we notice a change when it's not magnetic. So the question is, how do you fix that? I'd love to learn or know if anybody has a suggestion of how they do it in the big boy world. We have the sort of MSC $100 DMAG unit that sounds like top five most annoying noises in the world, like the sound like a transformer that's going on. Yeah, we've got one of those. It is a transformer, I think.
00:30:17
Speaker
Oh yeah, you're probably right. We use it with a sheet of nylon to teflon to make it easier to run across. Instead of mounting it on the bench and moving your part of it, you can actually use it like a handheld. I never thought about that. Steer it around the part for bigger stuff.
00:30:33
Speaker
But basically, and I don't have a scientific proof of this other than we kind of A-B tested it to know that any amount of magnetism can help pull chips back in or prevent them from being flushed out. And the number one thing, especially on small tools when you're seeing chipping like that is going to be recutting chips. Yeah. Yeah. I could see that. What's the coolant method on the 1-8 inch tool? Just flood from the outside.
00:31:00
Speaker
fail. His PG offer through spindle, through the collet, or through ported angles? Through the collet. I think I have some, but I don't know if I have an eighth.
00:31:10
Speaker
buy one. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Or we use, I don't know what the HSK world's like, but for us, we've switched to a lot of the, happened to be YG. I know Hymer and others make them, but the cap 40 holder has two angle holes, not ports really, because there's nothing protruding, but just holes. Then you can use regular tools and the coolant is aimed, and obviously it's kind of aimed at a specific stick out if you will.
00:31:38
Speaker
that direct flushing action and not having to worry about the angle of ports, especially on a five axis. Huge. Yeah, I'll check if I have any eighth inch slotted collets or I'll get some and definitely try that out and switch to a corner radius tool for that eighth inch roughing. Kind of a no brainer.
Collaborative Problem-Solving in Manufacturing
00:32:01
Speaker
What do you know offhand your surface footage and chip load?
00:32:07
Speaker
No, triplets probably under a thou, four flute. Because it's titanium, it's either 150 or 250, I think. Right. Right. Yeah, I don't know much about tie. Four flute, 1 eighth inch, have a really small gullet. So I would consider, obviously, you'll sacrifice core strength of the tool, but two or three flute might, I mean, that may be better for chip back.
00:32:35
Speaker
Especially, are you taking shallow or you're sliding? I think one of the bigger problems is I'm doing a bore operation, so it's ramping down the whole thing because I need to make a bore basically. I'm pre-drilling it, so the middle's gone, but still the corners are getting beat up pretty good just from the bore operation.
00:32:55
Speaker
Is the pre-drill hole big? What's the pre-drill hole size? I think it's 93 thou, so less than an eighth inch. Yeah, when I can, I plunge into the hole and then I interpolate out. But I forget there's a reason why I'm doing it the dumb way right now. Try the adaptive with the ramp angle taper.
00:33:15
Speaker
Okay. So instead of boring, or you're just running down a perfect sidewall, like a cylinder, this will come in like an upside down, like a funnel, and that really helps allow coolant in and chips out. Okay. I haven't really tried that too much. And then you just 2D contour or pocket the bottom, whatever you want to get rid of that taper angle. Yeah. Right. Okay. Like one degree or two degree or something. You look at the toolpath. I mean, you'll be a little bit limited. What's the feature size of your boring? It's like a 180 thou.
00:33:44
Speaker
So it's not much bigger than the tool. I would basically maximize it. You can see fusional air out so you can plug and chug it by basically saying, Hey, if I do three degree or four degree, but, um, the tool will almost be fine with anything that shallow. You can't go too steep in that situation. Yeah. Yeah. I think part of it, the problem is probably chip recutting probably. I mean, if I'm doing a bore operation, then the corners are always buried and taken all the work. Yeah. Yeah.
00:34:13
Speaker
Okay, I can fix this. I mean, it's a cheap tool. So at the moment, I've just been like, I've got other problems to deal with. Why don't you throw a like two millimeter, is it two millimeter drill in there? John, good grief. No, three millimeter drill. Three millimeter drill is 118, so that's 7,000 under. Drills are great, dude. Just to let you plunge.
00:34:36
Speaker
Yeah. That drill should last 3,000 holes and it's probably a $20 to $50 drill.
00:34:46
Speaker
So there's already a through hole from the backside of the part. We're now machining the outside of the handles where the screw head sits. So we're machining the counterbore basically for the screw head. So from the backside, there's a drilled hole almost all the way through, pretty much all the way through already. So that's your 93,000 kind of entry hole. And then I guess you could drill that from the top. I could probably drill it to near net size anyway.
00:35:16
Speaker
Yeah. I find it's just a very reliable. We're doing that.
Enhancements in Lathe Operations
00:35:21
Speaker
The best way to remove material is a drill, right? Right. Nothing beats it. You should be able to get one that's like 135 or 141 degree. You can even get flat bottom drills, but I don't think you need to here because you're still going to come in and clean it up, but you could probably get away then without a roughing tool. True.
00:35:41
Speaker
In fairness, I don't know a lot about drilling tie, but again, you can get a through spindle core drill. Yeah, we've got a bunch in the machine already. Play with this. Yeah. Good. It's like there's so many little challenges, this being one of many, that some of them, I have an established process. I think my tool life is 20 minutes for that tool, which is pretty low. Yeah. But I have a sister tool, so I haven't cared yet.
00:36:05
Speaker
Well, the question is, is it 20 minutes or is it just all over the place, but it tends not to catastrophically fail it before 20 minutes? Pretty much, yeah. 20 is a safe number. But I pull it out at 20 or at 15 or whatever, and it's starting to chip. What have you been working on lately? A little deep project. Like just genuinely loving the lathe.
00:36:31
Speaker
Ed had some fixturing parts we wanted to make, 60 of them, and the template worked great. I even added the Higbee. We Higbee a bunch, but it wasn't really well designed within our Fusion Master Template. So I update our Master Template, so the Higbee's already there.
00:36:54
Speaker
Fusion to their credit also now lets you pick, that lets you thread with a grooving tool now. No. They fixed it. Finally? Yeah. So you don't have to hack it. Okay. So the paper is easy now.
00:37:10
Speaker
Very, very complicated, John. I mean, it takes hours to figure it out. It's actually just insane, right? I actually need to look, I think this is what I'm almost behind. I think there's more CAM variables now. I'm embarrassed. I don't know the answer to this. But on something like Higbee, oh my gosh, what I want to do because
00:37:31
Speaker
So for those listening that don't know, when you HigBeat, you basically make two changes. You change to like one or two passes instead of seven or eight. But the difference is you only want to thread along the thread one times the pitch diameter. So if it's a
00:37:48
Speaker
I was just doing half 13 threads. So half 13 thread pitches 0.077 or something, round number. So you only want to thread 0.077 down the part if you will. It's going to cut off that first full thread. So that's the first change you need to make. And then the second change is
00:38:04
Speaker
instead of starting at the same starting point, which for us and most people, I don't think it's the start of the part. It's usually the start of the part plus a clearance or something. Yeah. So let's pick a hundred thou. You're starting your threading operation, a hundred thou in front of the part where you would add half the distance of the width of the threading insert, which we pull off the Sandvik website. That makes sense, Sean. So both of those would be
00:38:29
Speaker
very easy to, well, actually, in theory, if you don't change your thread and insert, the latter won't even change, but I'd like to parametrically link the Higbee to the threading ops so that it's truly a template thing. I like that. Yeah, that's great. God, they're so satisfying though, when they come
Improving Quality Control with Digital Tools
00:38:47
Speaker
off. Yeah, you get it just dialed perfect and X and Z and it's like, oh, do you guys microscope parts like that to get them dialed?
00:38:56
Speaker
We, no, we have a loop at the lathe, I use that a ton, and we just got in those, I talked about this last week, the master ring gauges for- Briefly, yeah. For the threads. Yeah. Yeah. And that's been awesome to feel those koan, it's just butter. Oh, yeah. So I'm really enjoying how that process works, and we just switched over, we're running different parts. I am, other than that, going through
00:39:27
Speaker
work that I'm not good at. It's new to me, which is creating dimension drawings for parts. I'd like to think we're taking a little bit of a unique approach. This is not what you would look at if you, say, got a job shop drawing for a part, which has littered with dimensions and features and radii and notes. CNC machines are really good.
00:39:49
Speaker
at making stuff. So for me, I'm making call outs on like, hey, check for streaking along this sidewall. And we're doing a lot of roughing with separate finishing tools like you are. So if the finisher has streaking, that's also going to tell me if a non-critical dimension all of a sudden could potentially be out, but usually that stuff is not critical. So I'm not too worried about it, but I do care about
00:40:13
Speaker
the critical dimensions. It's an obvious statement, but giving a drawing that has six pieces of information to me is a little bit more useful now. With that brings this whole world of drawings relative to revisions and file names and setup sheets and QC jigs. I'm on the fence about, look, all you're trying to do here is laminate
00:40:40
Speaker
good drawings for each part. You can add a revision, which for now we're just doing the revision as the date, so we at least know the date it was done.
00:40:50
Speaker
I think there's a lot to be said for a more sophisticated revision system that could relate to a master product library of what we've done and kind of your classic PDM, like document management and so forth. But I think it'd be pretty easy to get hamstrung in the details if we don't just pick something that we want to do well, knowing that it'll get redone or complemented when we add more to it. So I have drawings for...
00:41:18
Speaker
three of the parts. It's been great though. I realized, hey, I need to buy an additional thread gauge. I want to buy an additional, I call them ring gauges. MSC calls them setting gauges, but nominal diameter hard gauges that we can use to check way better than mics for some things. See? That's fantastic. The drawings side of our business is
00:41:42
Speaker
Not there. I mean, Angela's really good at it, but he doesn't usually have the time or we don't really have the need for them. But when we talk to other shops or when some of the new guys come on, they're like, OK, where's the drawing for this? I'm like, we don't have one. Maybe you guys should fix that. But it's like I can throw it together in the drawing package and add some diameters and lengths and stuff. It's not hard, but I don't know.
00:42:10
Speaker
you know, evolving this business from myself, where I design the part, I program the part, and I make the part. I don't need a drawing, because I have CAD right there. I just look at the CAD. Well, you basically only ship a finished product, right? Yeah. So that's, I mean, don't do something if you don't need to do it, right? Yeah, right. But it's super nice on the lathes to magnet up, like, this is the drawing. Here's all the dimensions you know. They're not written down in a paragraph. They're like, this is the part.
00:42:39
Speaker
Actually, I take back what I said. That's not really true because you could be of the view that Grimsman Knives is a manufacturing company machine shop that kind of, quote unquote, sells its products to Eric. Like you were saying at the Sandvik factory, they do that, right?
00:42:57
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. The worker knew exactly. Yeah. And that's true. That's how it kind of works here. One department kind of makes the part and sells it to the next department and then they approve it or tell us it's garbage and then we have to remake it. Yeah.
00:43:12
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, when you're going to go make 300 lock bar inserts or ring threaded, thumb screw ring, I mean, you don't want to make 50, let alone 400 and have it be wrong. And you really don't want to think you're sitting on three months or the inventory only to realize you need to scrap it.
00:43:31
Speaker
We've been there. So the more callouts, the better, especially when you're setting it up and making it. Yeah. So we've been using GURP for that with basically text-based notes of like, here's all the dimensions, diameter, length, now surface finish, callout on some of the parts, notes, you know, this end mill lasts for so long, which is great. And Pierre has been like loving that. So he's in GURP probably.
00:43:54
Speaker
more than anybody else because he's using it on the lathe for every job and he's adding to it and it's like, yes, this is what I want.
Handling Quality Control and Customer Service
00:44:02
Speaker
Yeah, you may be very much going down the right path of keeping it in GURP. I'd never really thought of it. We do QC sheets in Lex, but I'm thinking that a laminated sheet, and then we're going to have a little physical bin that's going to have the gauges for that product. And then we're going to keep, in some situations where there's a surface call out, we talked about this, we'll keep a good example, a bad example. I think that makes a ton of sense.
00:44:30
Speaker
Yeah, and if you're going to have printed documents of each, I do kind of like what Pearson does. I think he might not do it anymore, but a couple of years ago in one of our tours, he said he's got this big red binder, and this is where all the products live, like the setup sheet, the technical drawing, and notes or whatever in a little
00:44:51
Speaker
You know paper holder in there and you just flip to the book and you're like i'm making that right now i'm gonna grab that to take the machine make it put it back when i'm done i'm just gonna get a nice binder nice place to keep everything but in a sense that's where using for all the parts are in there if you need anything just look you're right right.
00:45:09
Speaker
The part, we were already doing this, but one of the things that kind of reaffirmed why we need to be doing this is the, for example, the mod vice fix sides has some very critical features and dimensions as to how it relates to fitting on the fixture plate. And if you're using multiple mod vices, we want them to be coplanar says you can use two next to each other and they will hold the part. Well, and in act and why if you will, because you have two, two,
00:45:38
Speaker
A lot of devices next to each other, they need to be both coplanar on the face, they're gripping the part. We had a customer service issue where the customer claimed that our product was out of spec and out of tolerance and we were working with the customer.
00:45:56
Speaker
Long story short, we always want to do the right thing, which is easy to say, but probably a good example where you can get a little frustrating because we replaced the product immediately just as a... Let's see this. We want to get the old one back. We want to check it. The replacement got to the customer before we got the old one back. Customer claimed the same issue was happening. So then you're kind of like, okay, hold on. Time out. Because we, of course, went out of our way to triple check the one that we'd set out.
00:46:23
Speaker
It was good. No joke, honestly, it was good. I'm proud that it was good, but this whole QC process and system is a way to increase the confidence factor of knowing that mistakes happen, but let's try to make sure those are so minimal. Long story short, wasn't our fault.
00:46:40
Speaker
I'll leave it at that. Our product, the QC issue at hand was a question of it being out of tolerance by something like 2007 inch. When it was actually checked, it was within 50 millions. Oh, nice. Yeah. So I was beaming. I was proud of everybody and it was awesome. On the flip side, there's sort of a fail takeaway because
00:47:05
Speaker
I thought you're inclined to think it wasn't us, but I don't think that's the right approach to address a customer service scenario with. It's not us. We're perfect. We don't make mistakes. It's delicate.
00:47:20
Speaker
But there's a long-term lesson learned of like, hey, we need to be confident enough so that we know we're shipping a good product period. Yeah. So there has to be a level of humbleness of like, maybe we did do something wrong. OK, let's work with the customer and let's understand fully what the situation is. We get that every now and then with our products, too. Customers say, well, it's not working. And then Fraser is doing customer service now. And he's
00:47:44
Speaker
sometimes he'll just get on a Zoom call with people, like video, and be like, how's it going? I just want to check in with you and show me what's going on. And sometimes it's the way they're looking at it, checking it, whatever. You look a different way and it works. It works fine. But sometimes they're like, there is an actual issue. No problem. We'll take care of you. Send that one back. We've already sent a new one out to you. I really want to look at that and see if we can improve our whole process, right? Yeah. Cool.
00:48:13
Speaker
Yeah. Long-term, one thing I do know is you and I need to disassociate ourselves with some aspects of that because I love what I do. 99.99% of our customers and vendors and folks we interact with are good people.
00:48:30
Speaker
you get the person who isn't the good person that basically does something destructive or damages it, wants to get a replacement, maybe doesn't tell the full truth in the whole story. And honestly, those are so few and far between that we are more than happy to kind of like take it on the chin and just replace it. But it's also like,
00:48:50
Speaker
I don't want to be involved in that stuff. I know. Yeah, we've had that too. And I mean, I don't wish that on anybody, especially anybody on my team, but it's a reality of business manufacturing. And you put the best person in charge of that and then just handle it. Yeah.
Conclusion and Future Plans
00:49:06
Speaker
Yep. All right, man. Cool. Oh, wow. We're over. Sorry. Yeah, that's good. Have a good week. I'll talk next week. All right. Take care, man. Bye.