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Business of Machining - Episode 25
237 Plays8 years ago
Grimsmo returns from vacation but was he able to relax?
Saunders tinkers with a new plan for organizing tools. Just because they're the same size doesn't mean they go together. To maximize efficiency, you may need to think outside your tool box.
PROCESS RELIABILITY, tell me what it means to me... Reliable and consistent results take the cake over pushing tool paths to the limit.
The guys get to the nitty gritty on boring heads, tool life and custom macro for probing. Saunders plans to test his codes to instill some confidence.
Grimsmo dreams of a book about FANUC macro code for his birthday. "If it's a Fanuc intruction book, it'll probably have to come freight delivery." -Saunders
The Founder, a movie about the McDonald's franchise, offers food for thought. Even if you don't plan on franchising your business, this movie could help you "dial in" your processes.
Are they status boards...work-flow boards? No one is sure exactly, but they're working like a charm! Tune in to find out what the guys will be calling them "henceforth."
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Episode Start
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning folks. Welcome to the business of machining actually kind of exciting episode 25 nice How's it going, buddy? My name is good. How are you? I guess we don't really need to say the my name is John and John I figure I don't know maybe people watch listen to this that don't really know us through our respective channels or through our voice because I've heard some people voice not not understand which John is which
00:00:24
Speaker
Oh, I'm not sure what to do about that though, other than introduce ourselves at the beginning. Yeah, that's their problem. Anyway, I'm John Brimsman. I do not make knives.
00:00:36
Speaker
My name is John Saunders.
YMCA Family Camp Experience
00:00:39
Speaker
Dude, how was your trip? Yeah. So we just got back from a full week at a YMCA family camp, which reminds me very much of Boy Scout summer camp when I was a kid. So it brought back a lot of fond memories, although oddly enough, it's like 15 or 16 years since I used to go to Boy Scout summer camp. And I feel like I'm twice as old as some of the counselors there. And it's like weird.
00:01:02
Speaker
That is weird. Yeah. No, but it was just, it was fantastic. You know, there's a lake there. I got to try windsurfing for the first time. That was really fun. Yeah. That's cool. Meg got to try archery, which is something she's always wanted to try. And the kids had a blast and they were just running around barefoot the whole time. And it was, it was really, really fantastic.
00:01:25
Speaker
That's amazing. Are you roughing it or are you in cabins or what? Cabins. Every family gets their own cabin. Okay. Kind of a communal bathroom that you have to walk to and a communal cafeteria that everybody goes and has kind of regimented meals at.
00:01:41
Speaker
Yeah. It was good. I've met a lot of other good families. Everybody's roughly the same age. Right. And yeah, it was very relaxing. I got to, the first four days there, I got to actually turn my brain off and not obsess about work and be there, be in the moment, play with my kids, be with my wife, have some great conversations, meet some of the other parents. And then the last three days was getting a little antsy and I was like, oh, I got, I got a lot of work to think about and,
00:02:09
Speaker
It was good because I got to process a lot of thoughts. It's nice to process them without acting on them because there's nothing I can do. I turned off my data on my phone and it was great though.
00:02:25
Speaker
Good for you, although I have mixed feelings about that, because again, coming back from a thing like that, I'm so stressed that it undoes the de-stressing of the trip is no good, but I guess that's a good balance. Go three or four days with total clarity and not worrying about it, and then ease back into it a little. Sweet.
Toolbox Organization
00:02:45
Speaker
So what'd you get up to this week while I was relaxing? What's that? While I was relaxing.
00:02:51
Speaker
We had training last week. I hate to say that cliche, but business as usual, grinding away. Been getting some exciting process stuff down.
00:03:04
Speaker
I've actually been looking for a new toolbox. I had this new idea that seems, you know how those ideas always sound perfect in your head? Like perfect, and then you have yet to expose the flaws. That's okay though, that's part of the process, right? Usually it takes money to expose the flaws, like you have to try it first.
00:03:25
Speaker
So, which is fine too, like fail well, fail fast, fail cheap. So we had this one Husky, you know, Home Depot toolbox. It's a pretty large black toolbox and it has all of our end mills in it and they're organized by drawer. So a half inch, quarter inch, et cetera.
00:03:43
Speaker
And the inside of it has shallower bins, the little red bins actually that I learned about from you. And it actually works pretty well because we know what, you know, we sort by diameter. So, you know, downside is that a rougher and a bullnose and a ball nose are all in with a regular end mill. So that's a little bit of a downside because sometimes you're just trying to understand.
00:04:07
Speaker
which variants of those you have. Likewise, aluminum and steel are next to each other, but it works. But here's the problem. I'm starting to rethink.
00:04:17
Speaker
some of this stuff in light of getting a second hose, which I think is going to be done today at the factory, which is pretty cool. Nice. And I've realized, what are you doing here, John? I was thinking about this all wrong. We have basically core tools and non-core tools. So why am I mixing those together? They're completely different.
00:04:41
Speaker
They're just completely different. So the idea that I'm playing with is to change up that toolbox and probably pick up a new one or find a repurposed one that's out on the shop floor. So I have core tools for the VM3 and then I have core tools for the VF2 and then core tools for the Tormach.
00:05:04
Speaker
And in those drawers, so like for the VM3, it has 40 tools changer, but we try to keep 20, 23 of those as core tools and the rest will be swing tools. So the core tool drawer will have the core tools we use for that machine. And so I'll be able to instantly know what's what. I'm also thinking about doing shallow bins inside of it sequentially or numbered or some system so that I know tool one is this tool and I can kind of see that. It's basically a way of replicating my tool library and the physical manifestation of the drawer.
00:05:34
Speaker
And then likewise, this solves the problem that we have to this date of swing tools where nobody remembers what the swing tool is. You don't remember to pull it out. You don't know where to put the little black box or tooling insert box or whatever and what's in there and just that whole process. So that to me makes sense. And then I realized, wait a minute, this is perfect for a quasi lean thing for our products. So now we're gonna have
00:05:59
Speaker
a drawer or more than maybe one drawer for our aluminum toolbox fixture plates. And we're going to have a drawer for our mini palettes. We'll have a drawer for our other things that we make. And in that drawer can be the tools for that thing. Smaller fixtures are things that fit in a drawer and we can even leave the laminated setup sheets in there. Okay.
00:06:22
Speaker
That's interesting. So it's kind of like what you showed at SNH machine, where they have dedicated tool holders per job. But you're talking about end mills, basically.
00:06:32
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not willing to invest the money right now to basically to buy duplicate holders. That's the difference. No, but it's halfway there, right? It's duplicate end mills. I feel like this system will require a lot of duplicate end mills to be floating around the shop, which is not a bad thing. It is just more investment. But not really, John. Yeah.
00:06:52
Speaker
You know, not that much more. A couple more maybe, but that's not the worst thing in the world. And it's interesting too, like if you listen to the Orange Vice tour we did, Eric talked about how they don't. It's so funny how business has changed. You know, my grandfather, or even 20 years ago, talked about
00:07:10
Speaker
You know safety by buying extra and ensuring you have enough on hand and not relying on others and they live through depression They live through the war they live through gas rations in the the u.s 1970s you couldn't get gasoline for a while because of fuel crisis whereas
00:07:26
Speaker
Eric is like, yeah, we keep one or two end mills extra on stock and otherwise I can get them the next day, which solves the problem of working capital that's being tied up. But really more importantly, it solves the problem of thinking you own something but not knowing where it is or having to inventory or deal with a quantity of it and that uncertainty. Did somebody grab it, you know, kind of casually grab one and put it back? We have that problem now. We've got five extra end mills. Somebody uses one and then puts it back and then I don't know, is one of these inside of here used? Did they all get used?
00:07:56
Speaker
used for five minutes on a job, which means none of them are really new, you know? Yep, exactly. And as you have more people, then you have to figure out standards to do that. Yeah, I like that idea. And I definitely have, I've got core tools as well, but I've basically got one drawer that has all my end mills in shallower bins in that drawer. Yep.
00:08:18
Speaker
because I use like eighth inch end mills and quarter inch end mills so I can fit a lot into a small area and then I have another drawer for drill bits but yeah I do like the idea of having core tools kind of separated and then the swing tools also separated
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah, and think about it, we all do, even if you don't job shop, you all do R&D or you do testing, and that means you go to a different area, you don't necessarily dip into your core tools, because that's what's important. You know, having the Norseman end mills or the Rask end mills is important. And it lets me open doors and look at what I've got.
00:08:57
Speaker
That's why I said I have yet to see a downside to this. I'm actually pretty darn excited for it. Yeah, we'll see. I love it.
Digital Boring Heads & Machining Accuracy
00:09:08
Speaker
Talk about this boring head you were texting me about. Oh, so.
00:09:14
Speaker
Again, going back to the orange tour, Eric mentioned it was a subtle comment, but it was profound in many ways, which is process reliability. When I think about that, I think about me not always being at the machine as the operator or even the QC person. I think with Eric, it's more they've got these horizontal palletized machines that need to run and do their thing, period.
00:09:39
Speaker
And so he talked about the importance of quality and reliability. So in other words, backing, I don't know whether it means the right tool or backing off the speeds and feeds or having duplicate end mills, one's a rougher and one's a finisher and so forth. But basically ensuring, it's not always worth pushing that toolpath so hard as it is ensuring that it's consistent results.
00:10:03
Speaker
And so I was blown away. I was super happy with how our VM3 interpolated holes. That was one of the first things I kind of did when we got it months ago.
00:10:15
Speaker
And there's no problem with the quality of that. I want to make that absolutely clear. You can get those suction pop fits when you walk out a hole. To me, it just makes you smile, right? I don't know what that means from a tolerancing standpoint, but certainly way inside of a thousandth of an inch.
00:10:34
Speaker
but it's not a good process, that's what I'm learning, because of everything, because of tool deflection, because of tool wear, because you've gotta then update,
00:10:48
Speaker
you either have to update comp, or you gotta deal with this fact that when you go to recut it, if you recut a hole that has less, depending on the sidewall, it changes how much, how that cutter performs. I'm not saying that well. And when you're boring out, excuse me, using the boring op inside of these tighter holes, if you don't have an excellent chip evacuation and the cutter does any recutting or any chipping, it just creates a, it's not a good process over a long term.
00:11:18
Speaker
And so one of the things that stuck out to me that I've got kind of my list to learn is going back to boring heads, which I as a machinist, I tend to not like. I find them a little bit difficult to set up and get dialed in. And I think some of that stems from my early days of using those really cheap Chinese braised boring bars.
00:11:38
Speaker
And you know, really crummy, boring heads and not probably knowing speeds and feet. So again, a lot of that is self-imposed. But they now make, and this is now going to the extreme opposite of this, which I may not, middle ground may be fine, but the extreme opposite that is amazing to me is,
00:11:56
Speaker
digital
Tool Reliability & Process Improvements
00:11:57
Speaker
boring head. So instead of adjusting a, a little scale or even a Vernier on the side, they've got a digital readout on the boring head, or I don't really know how this works, but it's actually, I saw it at Eric's at the orange vice shop, big Kaiser, I think maybe Sandvik as well and Walter make digital boring heads with Bluetooth.
00:12:23
Speaker
Have you seen these? Briefly, but I don't pay attention to it because they're way out of my price range. And I don't need it, I don't think. But do they adjust themselves?
00:12:35
Speaker
Well, that's the question. I guess I don't know how, because if they adjust themselves, that means there has to be some mechanical device inside of it, a motor or something that can... Maybe it's a limited adjustment range. In other words, instead of a motor, maybe it's some sort of a device that swells or just moves it up a hair, but... You should need more than like a thou of adjustment, really.
00:12:58
Speaker
Right, I'm under the impression, literally I'm waiting until my Sandvik guy gets in this morning to call him, that they can adjust their diameter via Bluetooth, which I guess immediately you think about iPhone, but what I would say is close the loop, bring in your boring, your probing system, probe the hole and have the tool automatically update. Yes. Right? Yes.
00:13:26
Speaker
So now I'm kind of rethinking that workflow and then thinking, okay, well how repeatable is boring head? Do you want to swap out inserts and then you can dial it in? That's a better workflow. You've got better clearance. You certainly have better concentricity. There's no question that you can get great surface finishes. Like it seems like a win all around, right? I wonder if they have through coolant or if that's not a ratio. No, they have through coolant.
00:13:54
Speaker
like through a digital boring head with all kinds of batteries and guts inside, and yeah, why not? Yeah, I'm pretty sure, because I've seen the picture zoomed in where the bar has a tip at the end for the coolant. Yeah, cool. But think about how much more open area you've got to evacuate those chips, whereas an end mill with four flutes is, I use as big an end mill as I can for rigidity, but that obviously fights against you there.
00:14:24
Speaker
What if you used an end mill with through coolant to do the finish pass and then a chip evacuation would fly right out?
00:14:33
Speaker
You could, I do not own any solid carbide end mills through coolant. Yeah, me neither. You can get them for sure. You could switch to a carbide, but I just don't like it. Actually, we were talking this weekend about, Ken gave us that tip, or maybe it was you. What was the tip about the Z-axis on finishing? It's Ken's idea, yeah.
00:15:02
Speaker
Oh, share it with everybody. Genius. Yeah. When we were at AU back in November or whatever it was last year, Autodesk University, Ken brought this up to me and he's like, so when you're profiling around an object, whatever it is, and if there's chips in the end mill, you get the streak around the outside or multiple streaks. And he likes to raise, like do a finished pass, raise the Z up 10 thou or something, and then do another finished pass, theoretically cutting off those high points from a chipped in the end mill.
00:15:32
Speaker
And I've been implementing that basically since he told it to me. And I'm not like 100% sold. It's not a complete problem solver for me, but it does. I think it makes a difference.
00:15:44
Speaker
I just was laughing because it's so, maybe it's not as good as I'm hoping, but I was in the shower this morning and I was thinking about it because I have a half inch end mill, which is a rougher, it's at the roughing stage, so it's past this life as a finisher, but it has a little nick in it and you see that nick line in the part for sure. And it's not a big deal because the finisher comes in and cleans it up, but nevertheless,
00:16:07
Speaker
That's harder on the finisher because the finisher... And that's a real problem. Like that nick from the rubber will wear out a nick in the finisher and I've seen that happen. Right.
00:16:18
Speaker
And so it's all that process reliability. So that idea of bumping it up 10 thou and at least cutting that nick line maybe in half is amazing. And then I think about, wait here, wonder why fusion doesn't have that as a setting. Then I'm like, well, now changing your Z height in a anywhere other than Heights is a weird concept and you could do it manually, but yeah.
00:16:40
Speaker
Yeah, like when I profile my handles and blades, the end mill is already like 25 or 30 thou below the part. So I have some up and down room to clear it, yeah. Yeah, that got me excited just thinking again about little, it's like something that doesn't cost you anything. You already own it, it can help make your tools. I still don't, tools are expensive and I care about them.
00:17:05
Speaker
Tool cost isn't what, we're not factories that have, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on tool light where we need to manage it from that perspective. But I now care, every day I care more and more about not only maximizing the life of my tool, but making sure I'm not wearing them out prematurely. And it's just that whole process reliability. For the tolerances we're holding, I hate having to pull out new end mills because you gotta dial it in.
00:17:30
Speaker
Yep, absolutely. Yeah, you must hate that, right? Because every time you switch tools a lot. Yeah.
00:17:37
Speaker
Yeah, and then I switch, my finishers become roughers and then eventually the finisher gets new end mills and then the rougher is barely used as a finisher. But yeah, I switch out tools a lot because part surface finishing and edge quality and everything is paramount to us. The handles, we're at the point now when we can throw them in the tumbler for an hour or two and that's all they take.
00:18:02
Speaker
you know, in, in the past we used to have to scotch brighter sand or, or grind every machine surface. And now everything's good enough so that we can just tumble it out and not aggressively to just very gently tumble it out. But, um, any chips in the end mill, any, you know, et cetera. So even my, my chamfer around the outside of the titanium handles, I use a rougher and a finisher.
00:18:25
Speaker
serious oh yeah because a chamfer I mean like about it you're cutting a 90 degree edge of hard metal titanium or whatever and it's gonna wear a groove into your chamfer for sure it's not the case with aluminum but with the titanium and the stainless steel it
00:18:43
Speaker
Before too long the end mill gets a big chip in it So I use a kind of a bead or drill mill to do the rough out and then I use one of the lakeshore spiral flute Jamfers to finish it off and yeah, it takes more time, but it's like it's like hands-off time, right? I don't care. I'm writing that down Lakeshore the spiral flute chamfers. I think I have them. I just want to look them up. I love those stools They're they leave a great finish
00:19:09
Speaker
I was trying to figure out a way, because now that we're putting those chamfers on those steel parts,
00:19:16
Speaker
You know, now it's hard. Everyone's a hero in aluminum. Now I'm focused on steel. And I've got that Meritool chamfered tool that takes the same inserts as the Tormach Superfly, which is great. And so it's pushing those inserts out at like a one-inch diameter. So you have much better surface footage.
Chamfer Tools & Surface Finish
00:19:36
Speaker
It's inserted, which I like here. And it's got better surface footage. But it's only two flutes. And I want to run it faster.
00:19:43
Speaker
I would honestly like to find that tool. I'd love to find the little insert tool that has like six or eight flutes, but it's like an inch diameter. I don't have any clearance issues, like I suspect you may, because my stuff's wide open here. But I'd love to buzz around that part and not have to deal with what looks to be a very fragile, solid carbide tool, even though I'm obviously using the offset function to cut toward the diameter.
00:20:12
Speaker
I'd love to hear from anybody if there's a good chamfer tool like that. Yeah. I mean, fitting a lot of inserts in a one inch diameter just gets super tight. You know, well, but look at the, have you seen the Sandvik three nineties? Not specifically. They're like these high feed mills there. Uh, I've got two of them and they have inserts that are boy, what do I say? You could probably fit, uh, four or six inserts on the size of my pinky nail. Really?
00:20:42
Speaker
Yeah. Cool. So I got, I got, I got to think if you, you know, that's not the right insert, but if you rotated that 45 degrees and put it on the right sort of holder, uh, you're not far off. Well, you've got a fifth axis. You make your own holder. So that was the other thing I was like, Oh my gosh, I really want to get that thing mounted up again. Uh, the VF2 coming will help with that. Is the VF2 wired for it?
00:21:07
Speaker
No, but that'll free up some potentially free up the VM3. That's the only thing on my list today is I've got two custom
00:21:18
Speaker
probing routines that I wrote and I don't trust them. And I don't mean to say that that's Renishaw or Haz's fault, but I got some weird results before and I just, I truly abandoned it, which is probably the right decision rather than sit there and try to figure out why, which I love doing. We had to work around and just got through a big order that is now done. And so now I want to, and that's something I really want to do today, which I'm adding to my list.
00:21:49
Speaker
This was like three to six months ago, right? Exactly. Yeah. I remember you talking about it and the downside to dropping it is now you've felt sour about probing for the past six months.
00:22:01
Speaker
Well, it's not that I've felt sour about probing it, there's two things. One, it is a little hard to write these, writing these macros isn't intuitive when you haven't done it, period. Yeah, it's a barrel of laughs, I mean. What's that? It's a barrel of laughs, you know. Yeah.
00:22:19
Speaker
So I want them to do two things. One is I want them to check for alignment of the part and potentially update that, which shouldn't be a big deal. That's where I was getting inconsistent results. So last night in Fusion, I set up a model and I set up some angles with outputs, like measurement outputs. So basically when I
00:22:41
Speaker
I'm gonna go over to the machine, I'm gonna dial in some parts, and I'm going to look at the angle that it outputs, which is usually something like 0.002 degrees, and then I'm gonna try to check that against the basic trigonometry of an indicator, sweeping across it to say, okay, if I'm running out 1.7 thou across 18 inches, what angle is that? And see if those triangulate, pun intended.
00:23:07
Speaker
The other thing I want to do, then I want to probe. So a lot of these features were machined at the same time. So I want to confirm that I can replicate the angle between, say, two edges and then two boards as well, because it should be the same. Then I want to pick a third point. This might be overkill, but I want to be able to do it even if I don't use it.
00:23:30
Speaker
I want to then pick a third known point location, like another feature, which I know where it should be located. And I want to probe that. And I want to have it confirm as a QC check that it is at the correct location, which will help be, I think I want to keep that. It doesn't take much more time. And that will help confirm if I happen to have a problem with a feature that I'm using
00:23:56
Speaker
for the original probing like and there's a chip in there or a burr or something's wrong then basically if I could confirm that third points location then I know we're money good. Right, right. Yeah, I love the sound of that. That make sense? That make sense? I'd suggest the other thing you might want to test doing is probe for the diameter of the hole so that you have a macro variable that says this hole is 0.50001 inches. Yep. And then dial in that to
00:24:24
Speaker
Because I mean it should be able to probe the size of your hole and then ideally go back in and re interpolate the hole and and Check it again if if you want to You mean have some closed loop system where we machines the hole till it gets to size right because like when I'm making my spinners I have a I want a slip fit for the bearing to go in so Mm-hmm. It's probably a five tenth tolerance or so, but it's got to be consistent and
00:24:51
Speaker
I had a batch a couple of weeks ago that was too tight. So now we have to go in and hand, hand ream and hand barrel lap with diamond lapping compound. Right. A whole bunch of these spinners and it's taking forever. And if I had a closed loop system where it probed it, went in, redid it again. I don't mind if it's a few tenths oversized because we're gluing the bearings in, but a few tenths under it's impossible. It's like, it's a waste of time. So I do want to do that closed loop.
00:25:21
Speaker
That's what I'm curious about with moving to the boring bar, too, is I think, you know, it's funny, everything is sensitive. Interpolating a hole is sensitive to the amount of material pre-interpolation that's there, as well as the number of finish passes or spring passes. And reaming a hole is incredibly sensitive to the amount of pre-ream diameter. And I'm assuming the, I'm hoping that boring is a little less sensitive because
00:25:50
Speaker
It's cutting axially, but more so than radially. But I'm sure that's still, you know, basically it's kind of funny. I think I'm going to hold like under a thou tolerance on the pre bore interpolation before I bore it. Right. Right.
00:26:05
Speaker
Am I crazy? No, I think you have to. Yeah, I mean, it's so funny. You and I talked about this now because, you know, years ago, we're always trying for tight tolerances, but, you know, plus or minus five tenths or a thou was acceptable. And now it's like, like a tenth here and there is pull your hair out crazy. Yeah. Well, but.
00:26:29
Speaker
I love it.
Probing Systems & Machine Operations
00:26:32
Speaker
I want to be confident. Last night, I was at the machine. I was like, I just want to use my Renishaw right now to measure the X dimension of this part. And I'll be honest, I didn't know how to do it. The only way I could think to do it was to basically set G54 at the left side and then just probe G55 to the right side and subtract the two, which works, but that's not the right way to do it.
00:26:57
Speaker
So I need to go get better at using. Haas has a probing class at the HFO, but selfishly, I don't want to drive two hours and sit through a class all day. I may, I think I've got like one day of machine training left for the VM3. I may impose on my AE to come do that sort of a version of that class here. Cool. The shop. You have, you must have gotten a ran a shop probing book with your machine.
00:27:21
Speaker
Yeah, I know. I've got the Inspection Plus book. I was reading through it last night. And I've written a couple programs. I wrote a program that probes a bore, moves over probes a bore, and gives me the G, what's in the hos, is the 189 variable, which is the angular offset. So I'm not a complete beginner, but I'm pretty beginner. Yeah. It just takes time.
00:27:46
Speaker
read through the manual, try it out, understand it, find out where the, um, the output goes to like what macro variable or whatever you call it. And, um, cause yeah, you probe a board diameter and there should be a variable somewhere that says this hole is 0.5001 inch. Um, right. That's what it's like on FANUC anyway. And now I've grabbed little sticky notes beside my whole lathe saying like,
00:28:11
Speaker
Variable 139 is tool wear deviation. 140 is G53 deviation. 143 is the probe diameter.
00:28:19
Speaker
But you know, here's the thing, I wanna be clear. I don't actually want to become an expert at this. I wanna know enough in a pinch to do something, but really, I wanna know enough to be able to create the recipe and then either have somebody here, bank through it, spend the time troubleshooting it, or even pay somebody else to make it. But like for instance, what if you want to probe multiple features, John? Like what if you wanna probe multiple wars at once,
00:28:47
Speaker
and store the deviation of each one of those separately and then have it switch to an end mill and have it come in and fix each one, fixing it with a custom offset for each hole's deviation. I'm sure you could do that, although... Right, you can, but you've got to now pass through like an array or something that stores each one incrementally, which is not how the inspection plus usually contemplates kind of a one-to-one.
00:29:14
Speaker
Yes, but once you learn a bit more about macros, so say it stores probe diameter to 143, the next line in your code, you say variable 143, or sorry, equals, and then some long-term storage one, so that you can pass it through and use it for later. Right, which is super elegant once you see it, but it takes time to... Oh yeah, none of this is easy, but since getting the lathe,
00:29:42
Speaker
Like before that, I didn't know anything about macros really. And now I know, I feel like I know a lot about macros, but at the same time, I feel like I don't know anything cause it's so deep. Um, right. I asked my wife to get me this, uh, macro book. It's like 60 or $70 on Amazon, like a big book, um, all about Fannock macros. And, uh, that'll be my birthday present in August. If it's a Fannock instruction book, it'll have to probably come to freight delivery. Exactly. Yeah.
00:30:12
Speaker
So before we part ways, I gotta tell you to go watch a movie. I was totally unexpected, which almost makes it better. Called The Founder, if you watched it. No I haven't, but I assumed, you teased me last night, you're like, I watched a movie, I'll tell you about it on the podcast. I assumed that that was the one you were gonna say.
00:30:30
Speaker
How did you assume that? I've known about the movie, I haven't seen it yet, but I don't know, I just put two and two together and I thought so. I thought it was gonna be like a, I don't know, kind of a documentary puff piece. This is on the fellow Ray Crockett, quote unquote, founded McDonald's. I don't wanna spoil it, nor do I want to, there were so many good,
00:30:56
Speaker
things in it that I actually stopped the movie halfway through and wrote a whole chip break episode on all of the business, entrepreneurial, partnership, life, legal advice stuff I've ever, it was just so wholesome, it made me smile. So go watch the partnership, folks, and then I think we'll do a video with our sort of twist on the lessons learned and takeaways.
00:31:22
Speaker
I'm looking forward to watching it. It has nothing to do with McDonald's as a food or political thing. It's all to do about business. I've been rereading and finished reading the E-Myth and he talks very highly about McDonald's. He goes with the franchise enterprise, the concept of growing a business like this. With that new movie coming out with the founder, it kind of ties it all together.
00:31:50
Speaker
which going back to today's episode, you wanna build your micro business as a franchise, even if you have no intention of ever franchising it or growing it because it's the thought of focusing on it being a franchise which basically says I need to be able to give
00:32:09
Speaker
somebody else either access to this facility or an instruction sheet to open up a duplicate of this one and have them be able to run these machines, tool these things up. Like I was thinking, I was watching a McDonald's video and I was like, oh my gosh, we need to revamp
00:32:26
Speaker
everything. Cause like right now material comes in and we just kind of throw the material like on a skid. We just kind of put it somewhere. Should we be, should we be QC'ing it? Should we notify it? Is there a Kanban equivalent to say, Hey, that that's in or what's the triage? Like, and again, the big thing is really,
00:32:43
Speaker
Do we need to QC it or do we need to do any sort of prep to it? Where does it go? Like that matters. It's not hard. And all of a sudden you get this beautiful orchestra of how the shop works.
00:32:57
Speaker
Yeah, the concept of having this binder, this operations manual that is, this is how Saunders Machine Works runs, and you can buy this manual and start your own Saunders Machine Works. Whether or not that would ever happen, but it orchestrates, that's an excellent word for it. Yeah, I'm glad you said that because it absolutely orchestrates the entire business and you're the conductor and you're standing up there with your little stick thing and orchestrating the whole ballet. Right. I love it.
00:33:27
Speaker
How are your garage Pearson boards holding up? Really, really, really well. What do we call those? Process sheets. I don't know. Product. One's called assembly board, one's called manufacturing status board, and one's called a production board. And those are words from Jay.
00:33:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's fine. They're not really process boards. I'm thinking like... Yeah, workflow. I don't know what they're called. I call them my Pearson boards. Status boards. Maybe we call them Pearson boards. Maybe that's the name. Because I literally ripped it off right from him.
00:34:04
Speaker
No, no, but I think Jay's probably too humble to self-title the Pearson Board. That's our job, to do it for him. Yeah, sorry Jay, we formally now name them there, henceforth now known in the rest of the social media machining community as Pearson Boards. Yes.
00:34:25
Speaker
Um, so Jay, are they working? They're working really well. Uh, Jay, uh, laminated his and also glued the, or maybe didn't laminate them, but he glued the paper to the metal, like with sprayed. He said, and he said, there were all kinds of problems with that. I've just got mine magneted on in the corners. Um, and it's just great.
00:34:47
Speaker
What are you, are you, and don't sugarcoat it. I mean, are you, I guess I feel like I would want to be changing those and potentially reprinting them every day, which has the, they call, economists call it menu costs, like the cost of having to reprint your menu because you changed something. But then also the hassle of having to move all those darn buttons around.
00:35:07
Speaker
Like if you want to reprint it, I've got to move all the markers. Well, that was one of the reasons why I did not glue mine onto the thing because it sounds like a pain in the butt to unglue it and then glue the next one. Yeah. Because I figured that I would be reprinting it a week later and putting a new one on. But I've got a bunch of Sharpie notes on it and mine were printed.
00:35:27
Speaker
a month, five weeks ago, and I haven't felt the need to print a new one yet, but I've got a bunch of notes for the next round. They're fine for now. I'm just adding to it with Sharpie. But yeah, we use it all the time, and I don't think all three of us here are fully understanding of the capability of it, of the power, but
00:35:49
Speaker
We're getting there and we just have to keep using it. It's like any system. It's only valuable if you actually use it properly. Right, right. You know, it's all fun and games to come up with something, but then if you don't manage it, then it's useless. Yeah, right, right. I totally agree. Okay, so you just came back from a pretty, you know, a normally a big vacation.
00:36:14
Speaker
Did they help? What's on tap for today? Today, I gotta finish, today's a rask week. I'm gonna machine everything left on the rasks completely this week. Sweet. Oh, that's awesome. To finish off the pre-order. That's awesome. Yeah, so that's what I'm doing this week. A little bit of lathe work, making spinner parts on the lathe, and then a few rask parts as well. And that's my week right there. I'm booked.
00:36:44
Speaker
Good, but you don't seem, I'm obviously busy and hungry, but you don't seem stressed. That's good. Yeah, I'm excited for the week. It's getting over this Rask hump is so going to be so transformational for us. So very excited to do that.
00:37:01
Speaker
Good for you. I feel like that was uh... I feel like now you're getting started. Like, now Gramsman Ives is getting started. Like, watch out. Yes. And as you say that, you know, it's funny because I never read the last third of the E-Myth. You know, you read most of it. You're like, I get the joke. I understand what he's talking about. And it's the last third that has all the gold in it. Like, the actual, do this and then you will prosper. But now it's like...
00:37:31
Speaker
it's like now is the time to restructure the business as like you said as a franchise or as this gigantic corporation that it could potentially be 10 years from now structured like that now so that we can grow into it as opposed to always chasing our tails and always like painfully growing and not being prepared for it
00:37:54
Speaker
So yeah, no, totally great. I think it's, and here's what I think about when you say that about the book is I think about, well, darn it, there's a bunch of books I want to reread. How do I do that? What do you think about this?
Business Book Video Recaps
00:38:09
Speaker
We're relaunching, I think I told you about this, the NYCCNC website to be kind of a curated content of what we do, both the existing YouTube stuff, but also some new stuff, including some business stuff, entrepreneurship stuff, you know, how we manage our shop, all that. One of the things I want to do, I've got this list of books that I've read that I care about that I believe that help me get where I am. I'm going to record
00:38:30
Speaker
videos Recapping those books and it's not a substitute for reading the book. You know, you still need to read the book But it's a teaser. I Well, what I want to do is I want to sort of say because the thing I've learned about books is is it's especially with these types of business entrepreneurship books is there are different books to read at different points in your journey different points in your story different, you know times in your businesses, so I want to kind of
00:38:56
Speaker
help steer people towards what book to read when, and then, you know, let's say you've read How to Win Friends and Influence People, or the E-Myth, or Delivering Happiness. Well, if you, six months later, wanna refresh yourself on that book, this video might be kind of a John's version of the Cliff Notes, and then pointing out some anecdotes in that book where you could go reread further if the video didn't, you know, whether it's getting you fired back up, whether it's remembering some of the takeaways, some of the lessons learned, some of the focus points, that sort of thing.
00:39:25
Speaker
But it's also a different perspective. Like your perspective on that book is guaranteed to be different than somebody else's perspective. Like the, the influence that the book has on that person. Um, cause when I first read the E-Myth, it was four years ago or something like that. And it didn't, it didn't strike me like it does now. Like right now I'm, I'm reading the whole thing and I'm like, yes, yes, this is exactly what I need to do. Whereas before I was like, oh, I'm not there. It's too far away. It's, you know, that's not for me. Um, yeah.
00:39:55
Speaker
It's almost like a version of fail fast fail cheat because what you can do is you can go watch a five minute video recap and it almost helps you decide if you should reinvest the time in rereading that book now. Yeah. Right? Yeah, I love it. I love it. That's my thought. Cool.
00:40:13
Speaker
Crush it, bud. All right, you too. Yeah, it's going to be a fantastic week. Good luck. Do keep me posted on the rask. That's awesome. Good job. Awesome. Sweet. I'll see you, bud. All right, take care. Bye. Bye.