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#225 - Chip Management, Core Values & Reorganizing
176 Plays4 years ago
TOPICS:
- Being vulnerable & making decisions.
- Moving and reorganizing areas of both shops.
- CORE VALUES.
- Traction by Gino Wickman
- Saunders installed a coolant washdown system.
- Chip management & draining coolant.
- Renishaw probe batteries.
- Draining air compressors!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Weekly Goals
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 225. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough. John and I talk every week hoping to make our businesses a little bit better and to share those kind of questions that sometimes you don't want to ask or admit because the reality is we all have them. Yeah. Sometimes you don't want to ask yourself. And I hope that sometimes we ask each other the questions we don't want to ask ourselves. You know what I mean? Yep.
00:00:28
Speaker
That's good.
Leadership in 'Traction' Book Discussion
00:00:29
Speaker
I've been still chewing on that book traction. And one of the things they talk about is that, you know, you've got to be willing to be vulnerable or raw. And that's a tough, um, that's a tough thing because, um, there's a fine line between being willing to be impressionable and listen and say, Hey, I don't know. Like I very much, I very much admire that and think about that. But then also you've got to have that confidence and leadership and Hey, this is how we're going to do it. And we, uh, you know, we got this.
00:00:56
Speaker
Yeah, it is a very tricky balance. And maybe it's situational, maybe some situations need vulnerability, some need a confidence and power and just, you know, trust me, I know what I'm doing. This is the way we need to go. Or I've just made the decision like,
00:01:13
Speaker
What is it? In Latin, the word decision comes from to cut off from something like that? Really? Yeah, I think so. Oh, interesting. I read that somewhere. Huh. Did you take Latin in school? No, not at all. I read it in some business book. That's awesome. But yeah, it's like a decision is cutting off like this is it. It's like I've decided. Yeah. Yeah, it's still being open-minded and vulnerable and questioning everything.
00:01:39
Speaker
Yeah. And I love talking practice and not theory. And that's, again, my kind of fun criticism of things like traction is it's a marketing book and they're just selling you and it's easy to talk. And anytime they overemphasize or just emphasize something, it's usually because they're trying to
00:01:57
Speaker
convince you that that's exactly what they're not the case of. So the more that book tries to tell you how real world practice it is, it's kind of like, well, that means you're just addressing the fact that a lot of these books are books, not necessarily case studies, if you will.
Optimizing Order Fulfillment
00:02:12
Speaker
But we spend a lot of this week
00:02:17
Speaker
working on the order fulfillment process. Did I talk about this a little last week? I'm not sure. Take something like the Modvice. It's actually a great example because it gets made a couple of different types of parts, a couple of different machines, some purchase components like screws and washers.
00:02:37
Speaker
We don't have the perfect factory. Probably nobody does. Maybe if you have the chance to build it ground up, it could be better. But most of those parts are made on two machines. I think they're both VF2s. One is a YT, but that's why I said I think. So the thought is, OK, well, those are relatively lightweight small parts compared to, say, a fixture plate. So we're going to make those
00:03:00
Speaker
over on those machines and then at that point we could easily put them in these red bins that we already have and they can get wheeled inefficiently all the way across the shop. I'm talking out loud here but that's the
00:03:13
Speaker
That's the plan. That's the like, okay, that's not ideal, but I don't have a solution for that yet. And that's okay because if that's the only downside to this scenario, we're okay. And they then go into the far kind of end or the far corner of our, what's now our shipping room. I don't know if we know the better word for it, but shipping room. So we have a dedicated that maker pipe table that you've probably already seen.
00:03:36
Speaker
And so that's where those improved products are stored and they kind of meet and come together with the screws and fasteners and all that other stuff. It then gets assembled, cleaned, checked, et cetera. And then it gets packaged and then it gets stored. It gets moved only a few feet. And when it gets moved, it gets moved to what we're now calling our pick shelves. So we reconfigure this area. We actually just published a shop update, but we filmed that before we have
00:04:07
Speaker
had made these final changes. And I wanna keep tweaking them before we start sharing it, but the beauty is in the simplicity. So it then moves to a pick shelf where it's now a finished, shippable good. We moved our shipping computer. We moved the shipping supplies. And so when you get an order, you print the packing list, you can print the list, you can pick right there. And then it moves one more time to the final boxing. So you put different stuff together.
00:04:35
Speaker
And that is not finished, but the idea is it'll be on a table right there. And then literally it just physically slides down toward our door and air compressor area where it will go onto a cart or dollier table for pickup or to walk it over where we're next door to FedEx. So it's that flow that I was looking for of don't move stuff back and forth, don't walk back and forth unnecessarily.
00:05:02
Speaker
Nice. So I heard a lot of, we move this, we move that. What's the thought process behind moving an entire area like a shipping computer or a thing? Because I think we all suffer from, well, that's where it is that we go down there to do shipping. You'd like to never even think about moving it.
00:05:22
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Well, I think about moving a lot. I think my energy and passion for fixing this stuff is I give myself an A. My experience, skill sets, and confidence, I give myself like a B minus.
00:05:37
Speaker
I wouldn't market my... I'm good at figuring out fusion problems. I'm good at solving shop fires. But I'm not good at being like, okay, no, no, this is how this is going to work. I don't have that confidence. But darn it, I'll figure it out. So what I find is best is you've got to start from a clean slate. And that's really tough to do as your shop lacks enough empty room to vacate a space and rebuild it up. But almost everything we have is
Core Shop Principles
00:06:05
Speaker
on wheels.
00:06:06
Speaker
I think that's important for this reorganizing or tweaking, and I think it's important for cleaning, which is important to us as well. I'm starting to think about that from traction of, hey, start identifying the core principles of your company. You can take that as super cheesy, but I don't. I actually care a lot about that.
00:06:25
Speaker
I think about the core principles as being weird things, not like profit or quality because those are intrinsic. I'm thinking about technology. I want to be a better machine shop and a better manufacturer and a better company because we use technology in creative ways that you just don't see elsewhere. I want to think about us as being innovative on quality of life things. I'll talk a little later maybe about the Washington system and our air compressor drain system.
00:06:53
Speaker
I'm not good at those things, but I can get good results when I think about it and work on it. And that's kind of something I want to see. And then organization and cleanliness has always been a priority. And most times people walk into our shop, they go, wow, you keep a really clean shop. And you do too. I mean, I don't think that's like super rare, but it's a lot of manufacturing. It's not. For sure. So the thing is like,
00:07:16
Speaker
When I was going through that exercise, and I want to go back and do it better, of kind of defining your core principles and what you see, how you see your company, and how you want to be seen by everybody else. A lot of the default answers, either in the book or in other businesses that you've seen over the years, they're like super cheese, like synergy and power and winning and profit and things like that.
00:07:41
Speaker
I don't feel right putting those down. But some of the ones you get listed, technology, cleanliness, passion, things like that, like, yeah, I can totally get behind that. Yes, I would, you know, we could have the most important person in the manufacturing world come to our space. And I would happily be like, hey, look at how we like rig this, you know, wash down system with with, you know, back or not back foot preventer, check valves and evolve house to balance out the load and the pump return like,
00:08:10
Speaker
Because that's what I love. I know. It's those details. But every detail, every small project adds up to a whole picture of a smooth running shop. And that's the goal of everything is that. It's funny, I filmed a shop tour walkthrough yesterday.
00:08:25
Speaker
awesome of the whole shop and on your suggestion I tried to make it as kind of snappy as possible but my default was to dive in on every little like automation project every little thing and like talk for 20 minutes about that but I avoided it but I'm like I could so easily talk about that or talk about that or talk about that
00:08:44
Speaker
And maybe those will all be breakout videos, but it was fun going through and just flying through and trying to give an overview, not just this is a thing, but also like why and touching on some of the core values, I guess, like how we do things. I can't wait to watch it. Yeah, it should be done at the end of this week. By the time the podcast is up, it should be out. Awesome.
00:09:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's great that I think about we're at the point now where these questions need answered. And I think if you're listening and you're not at that point, that's okay. This wouldn't have been a step. But Traction also talks a lot about team and roles. I think it's really kind of written for a bigger company than ours, where you've got
00:09:32
Speaker
maybe 30, 40, 50 employees, managers, levels. You may not know everybody. He says it right in the book. He's writing it for companies 10 to 250 people. So we are at the minimum of his audience. And that's OK. But I still find
00:09:48
Speaker
value in thinking. A lot of the things he talks about, I read it and I go, yeah, we really should be thinking about that and we haven't been up until now. It might seem cheesy or too big or too fluffy or too marketing or whatever, but back in my head, I'm going, if we did that, if we actually applied that, what would it look like?
00:10:11
Speaker
When it's a question of accountability and roles and responsibilities, and I think it's going to be a good example of stopping the, hey, you need to let go scenario and theory and analogy and really talking instead about it, you know.
00:10:31
Speaker
here real time and I had made some notes for our talk today about, look, we're doing that. Ed is, I say solely, I'll caveat that and come back to it, but Ed is running our manufacturing and he's got a team that helps him and that's great. And Alex is building Lex and we're tweaking it and we just added a functionality now to where when we competitively did material, which you should do,
00:10:59
Speaker
And it sends out two or more RFQs. And that happens automatically. Basically, it's not a perfect system because we have it set to a default supplier. That's the one that we've generally found to be the best. But you then have check boxes to add and send it to the additional potential suppliers for it. What's great, we've had that for a while. What's great now is we added the functionality to when the RFQs come back.
00:11:23
Speaker
And we do what's called convert an RFQ to a PO. So whoever is the one where we're going to go with, it automatically then deletes the other RFQs that you're not going to obviously use. So Alex is doing that and I, you know, Ed learning manufacturing, I give it an A. Not that we can't do better, but an A. Alex running Lex, I give it an A. Julie running shipping and order fulfillment. We're in the process of overhauling that.
00:11:49
Speaker
I'll grade it when we're done in the sense that it's real time. But what we've done is what I just said about, hey, the carts are here. The shelves are here. We've purged stuff we don't need. Julie's reorganizing boxes, throwing away old boxes, consolidating stuff, met with Uline. We just bought one of those air pillow machines. OK. To make your own air pillows? Yeah. OK. Go ahead. Explain it.
00:12:16
Speaker
Oh, it's the things that look like little mini airbags. Yeah. It pops it and it heat seals it and holds it down. Yeah. There's different quantities or costs. We bought a pretty entry level one, but it still makes, I don't know how many.
00:12:34
Speaker
two feet a second or something of strip. Because bubble wrap is like liquid gold when it comes to scaling your packaging. It's super expensive and it's bulky and it's a pain in the butt to order and to ship and to switch out the rolls. Because you have to buy it already puffed so that it's volume. Yeah. Now you can actually get bubble wrap
00:12:59
Speaker
for these air pillow machines as well. Our intent is to use it for the sort of airbag. I think it's like four by six inches or two by six inches. So that machine comes tomorrow. We'll see how that works. But now you've got a, and again, it kind of ties back to like technology and efficiency. And you've got a really small machine that doesn't take much space for the machine or for the thing. And it's kind of on demand what you need. Yeah.
00:13:27
Speaker
That's cool. So that's where we're up to. Yeah. Nice. How about you?
Remote Monitoring and Efficiency
00:13:36
Speaker
I'm busy with the current, just trying to streamline and smooth out everything. It's cool that I can VNC viewer into my current and see the screen from my house or from my phone or from anywhere.
00:13:49
Speaker
And so I check on it throughout the evening just to see if it's worth coming in and changing it or something. So I looked at it last night at about 11.30. And I left the feed rate at 48%, which is not terrible. But that means all my speeds and feeds are now half what they're supposed to be or the feeds are. And also the rapids are not full speed. They're half. So they're way slower than full speed than a full rapid.
00:14:18
Speaker
It was already five hours in, it should have been on the second pallet, and it was still like halfway through the first pallet. And I'm like, wait, oh, oh no, it's like really, really slow. So anyway, I came in at midnight, cranked it to 100, went home. And then less than two hours later, I had a tool touch off alarm.
00:14:33
Speaker
that I've had a couple times. I've had it like four or five times. And I actually had an email from Bloom yesterday with the solution to that. I just didn't get a chance to put it in yesterday. So came in early this morning, implemented that, finally figured it out. Ended up corrupting my touch off 584 table settings, whatever. So luckily I had a backup. But I was able to fix that and put it back in immediately before the podcast. And it works great now.
00:15:03
Speaker
Huh. So VNC is view only. You can't adjust the machine, huh? Correct. You can tweak some things, but you don't have buttons on the control panel. You just have screen functions.
00:15:16
Speaker
Got it. So I can interact with a table file, like a spreadsheet file. I can change the order of palettes, which palettes run, which palettes don't, what order they go in. I can change tool information, length offset where, life, things like that. But yeah, I can't start the machine, stop the machine, turn on coolant, et cetera. Yeah, right. I mean, I guess it makes sense. Which is good, yeah. Well, no. You want to, but it's dangerous.
00:15:46
Speaker
interacting with the control panel without seeing what's happening on the machine. So if you had a video, it'd be better. But this morning, I actually looked into the RotoClear 4K cameras that John at area 419 has. And I was like, I might need one of those. Interesting. Do you think... Oh, sure. You don't think a regular camera way up high would you get dose with cooling? Yeah, I don't know. It's a jungle in the small enclosure, right?
00:16:16
Speaker
The RotoClear is meant to be in a coolant environment, spinning window disc. You could put a camera outside and hope you're getting through the window, put it way up high and aim down or something. But I just want to see what they cost. I don't know if it's $1,000 or if it's ridiculous above that. I think it's probably a couple of times that amount, but I don't know that for sure. Yeah. So I sent in a quote this morning. We'll see what they get back to me as.
00:16:41
Speaker
I was going to ask you, are your, I did get a quote just now. Let me just read it. 3900 euros. That sounds really expensive. Yeah. With, with, um, accessories and mounting cable. Yeah. 4,500 euros. That's holy cow. That's five grand. That's a lot of hooch. Well, it's funny too. Cause you know,
00:17:08
Speaker
4k cameras of varying quality are like, you know, a hundred dollars now. So food for thought. Yes. Fair enough.
00:17:20
Speaker
Can you explain your rapids? I thought your... Well, there's only one. Like some machines have two feed rate knobs. One only touches feed rate, one touches rapids. Like our Mori is like that. Other machines like our Swiss and the Kern and some other stuff have a combined switch, a combined knob. So feed rates and rapids together at 50%. Interesting.
00:17:44
Speaker
And in this scenario, let's say your normal rapids are, I don't even know what the current does, 2,000 inches per minute or like fast, right? Super fast. But at 50% rapids, it's much, much slower than full speed. You know what I mean?
00:17:59
Speaker
It's still 50%, right? It's not a different relationship. Yeah, I guess. But like, I don't know, full speed is super fast and like a tool change would take a second's worth of rapid. And then at slower speed, it would take like several seconds. I don't know how many. Interesting. But it just, my point is it slows down the entire cycle. Like the tool's got to retract up to the tool change position. It's got to move over. And that adds up over time. So I feel like the cycle time would be more than double
00:18:29
Speaker
Yes, got it. One of the best things I saw, and I actually think it was back at area 409, was the feed rate override or speed override knobs. I'm assuming that they were on mores because I don't think it was on the grove. It was a traditional physical knob like we all kind of have, except instead of going from say zero to 100, the first
00:18:52
Speaker
30% of the knob travel was zero to 10 because so oftentimes I care about it being at 1%, 2%, 4%, 6%. I really want that fine resolution on zero to 10 and then it jumped 10 to 50 to 75 to 100. Yeah, that makes sense. Right? Yeah, I like that. Yeah, you want crawling and then you want half and then you want full, pretty much.
00:19:17
Speaker
I like the ones, I think the Maury is a tactile clicking, rotating knobs, like 10, 20, 30, 40. Yes. I mean, I like both. Some machines are smooth. It doesn't really matter, but it's that tactile feedback. It's like, okay, three clicks. It feels good. Yeah, I'm with you there too. Yeah. Because the current, it's a smooth knob. I've left it at 105. I've left it at 95. I'm pretty good at blindly aiming it to straight up and down, but
00:19:46
Speaker
You don't always hit it. It doesn't even have a tactile for 100? There's no detent for 100. It needs that. All machines out there need a zero. Pop it to 100, you never miss it kind of thing. So it's no big deal, but kind of a little fun fact. And our old Heidenheinz, the 20-year-old ones, are the same way. Just smooth rotation, 0 to 150.
00:20:10
Speaker
Interesting. It seems very surprising for a German machine. You would think they want that precision of clicking back into 100. Yeah. We got our first iteration of the wash down system in place. Nice. So baby steps here. I found a pump on Amazon. It came in. And it's a pond pump. If this all works out, we'll share everything. But I want to. Yeah, you got to trust it first. Yeah.
00:20:39
Speaker
and bulkhead manifold drilled through the Haas sheet metal, which is surprisingly thick. I guess it makes sense because if it was not as thick, you could have potential reverberations of the sheet metal. But man, I was surprised. So bulkheads there and then- Which machine did you put it in? Started with one of the VF6s.
00:21:02
Speaker
So the plan is to, I mean, I want this done, right? Like I want this to, everything you look at, you're like, oh yeah. So check valve after the pump that keeps it primed, if you will, or kind of, you get washed out fluid quickly. And then quick disconnects between the pump and the bulkhead so that you can take the pump off or take the system apart without any tools or hassle, fuss, muss, et cetera.
00:21:28
Speaker
And then inside the machine right now, I only built one lock line just as a test. But I've ordered some of the parts. And it's going to be PEX. PEX is great. We've got the crimp tool. It's not even that expensive, like $50 or something. But it's relatively simple to use and reliable and safe. I don't love PVC glue. If we need to tweak it or cut it, no big deal. So we're going to do a mix of PEX and lock line. And then it was that.
00:21:57
Speaker
kind of like stress, anxiety, figuring out, oh man, I want this tile fitter and this tile T and this tile. I want male here, female here. I don't want extra adapters and fittings. I want it all in one everywhere I can. I think I found most of it. I've got teas that have the correct male, female orientations and
00:22:19
Speaker
So we're going to do the obvious one. Anyone who runs a Haas knows the corners and the backside of the sheet metal can build up chips. So we'll do the wash downs there. And I ordered a bunch of different lock line nozzles. Only thing I complain about is they make so many different ones, but you can only buy them in orange unless you buy like 20, 30, or 50 packs. Then you can get them in black or white.
00:22:47
Speaker
I don't want the orange. I want this to look really good. So it's going to be black and white. So I ordered a couple of orange ones just to test the size I want. And then I'm going to reorder them in the correct color. And I think what we're going to do is then run pecs around to kind of the front inside of the enclosure. And that'll let us go up a little bit and actually aim some lock lines at the front weight covers to have a flush wash system because you'll have chips build up on the front. They're easy to wash out, but I still want that automated.
00:23:16
Speaker
Yeah, you want to open the door and not see any chips like nothing piled up to a point. Yeah, we'll see chips, but but way less. Do you guys use the big Kaiser makes them the little T slot way cover the slot covers?
00:23:32
Speaker
So funny you asked that. They only make them in two sizes that are metric and oddly enough, the VF6 is the in-between size. They make them in 12 and 20 and that machine is 16. I think we have purchased them for another machine and we've also just 3D printed them. Yeah.
00:23:50
Speaker
Yeah, I know we installed them, the big Kaiser ones on the Maury years ago, three, four years ago. Never thought about it since. They're so perfect. It just, oh my gosh, it works so good. Yeah. And printed, I'm sure, works great unless you have hot chips melting into them. But so what? You figure it out. Glue some aluminum foil to the top or something. That's great.
00:24:13
Speaker
No, it is great. Like all that stuff adds up. It's not stuff I cared about three years ago, but we're spending a lot of time washing
Coolant and Chip Management
00:24:20
Speaker
out chips. And so I don't want to run the risk of
00:24:25
Speaker
running your sump low because we're adding flow via a wash down, but I'm hopeful that it actually will have the opposite effect. I'm hoping that by constantly flushing ships out, you're gonna cause less coolant to get held up in the system in the form of a ship. We'll see, the sixes have big tanks, I'm not too worried about it, but we'll figure it out, because this is still gonna be the way to go.
00:24:50
Speaker
Yeah, and that totally depends on the design of each machine. I think the Hosses are all typically the same kind of coolant drain into the tank conveyor design. Do they all waterfall out of that? Yes. The difference is some machines have an option to go from a 55 to a 95 tank. Yes. I think the sixes already came with 95, but I think the VF3 we optioned it larger because it's the way to go.
00:25:21
Speaker
Yep. And then on our chip, all of our chip buckets, um, well, I should say all of them, we just built two of our new drain system prototypes. So they are nested barrels or nested buckets that have an angle and then certain size hole drilled. So then the
00:25:39
Speaker
relatively clean, fresh coolant to the extent it can drain out of the chips just drains back into a bottom bucket. I'm going to look at that over time, I think it's going to be good enough that we can just literally put it back into the machine. Yeah, we could also potentially strain it if needed. But Lex, we're crushing Lex already now has a Monday morning task for Garrett, where every week on a cycle, he goes around with our xair and just every week, one machine gets as cool and strained. So
00:26:09
Speaker
And he tracks it, and he knows what machine was last week. Just a schedule. That's fantastic. Yeah, I've seen guys actually just hook a hose from your bottom strainer bucket back to the machine. So the coolant just drains immediately. You don't have to worry about it getting stale or anything. It just drips and goes right back in. That's an interesting idea.
00:26:30
Speaker
I like the thought of that. I want this kind of strainer system too, because I've got a brute trash can under the current conveyor right now, and I know there's four inches of coolant in the bottom of it. Yeah, right. What makes it heavier to dump? It's wasted. And then you're dumping the coolant into the big chip bin outside, which I don't want.
00:26:52
Speaker
Yeah. So the one I did was a 27 gallon black tote, like a square, like what you'd put sweaters in in the winter type box. And I just, we'll do a video if we get it to work out, but I just screwed some two by fours in an angle that the identical one sits in the top of it with holes drilled in it. That works great. They're not quite as convenient of a size relative to a circular drum barrel. And I think you probably have the same 33 gallon brute bins. Yeah. And they have garbage cans.
00:27:21
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So those are great because Uline or Amazon sells casters, like a caster base for them. The 27 gallon Rubbermaid tote, I bought some $11 furniture dollies from Harbor Freight, and then I screwed the coolant one to the furniture dolly, and then just siliconed over the screw so it doesn't leak. And then the whole thing is now on wheels. But Ed thinks we might like the round ones better because of the shape and profile. And we're just going to cut the bottom barrel
00:27:51
Speaker
Let's call it normally 40 inches high. We're going to cut it to like 12 inches or 18 inches high and then build a, put some blocks in it to keep the one on top above it. And then that'll be the drained. I've seen, I saw a guy, a couple of guys on Instagram a few months ago. Um, what did they do? They said they actually like, they actually, um, was trying to think.
00:28:20
Speaker
They spray clean water over their chips into this drain system. They're washing their chip in so that it drains clean water. They're cleaning the chips and it drains back into the tank based on their little hose that connects the two. Does that make sense? Sure. I'd be sort of surprised to think that adding liquid helps.
00:28:44
Speaker
What they're trying to do is they're trying to wash the chips to get the coolant back off and also promote drain back into the tank and also topping up the machine with like clean slash 1% kind of mixed water off the coolant. It seemed like a worthy idea to think about, you know what I mean?
00:29:02
Speaker
For sure. Hashtag keep an open mind. I will say though that from the week of running these two nested bins, the amount of coolant runoff we're getting in the bottom bin, it tells me it's a high double digit recovery percentage. Like of course the chips are the top, the chips in the top bin are not bone dry, but holy cow, you're getting a huge benefit with no hassle. Yes. So you are getting a lot of liquid coming off. Oh yeah. Cool.
00:29:29
Speaker
I didn't want to drill too many holes. I didn't want to drill them too large, but I did three sixteenths on two inch spacing along the bottom edge with an angle and a couple in the quarters to make sure the low points were covered in again. Seems great. And you want the hole small enough so that you're not passing chips through it all the time. Depending on if you make big chips or tiny chips like we do. Right, right. Yeah. Do you know totally random? Do you know what size micron filter your Freddy uses? It comes with a 10 and a 250.
00:29:59
Speaker
Oh, 250. Yep. Interesting course. So like, if you're just clearing chips, like volume of chips, use the 250. But if you're just clearing mostly coolant, use the 10 and clean it that way. We had a five micron sock filter in our xair and I just bought a 25 micron, which I think 25 microns is still under a thousandth of an inch. And I just thought, yeah, probably.
00:30:22
Speaker
Yeah, that's, yeah, exactly. 25 microns is a foul. I'm not trying to clean my coolant of sub-fat chips. I'm trying to clean it of like, of swarf, you know what I mean? So we're trying to 25 micron to see if it is a good fit. I actually ran out the paper on the paper band filter on the current. Yeah.
00:30:47
Speaker
It alarmed out and it said, what is it? Filter fleece used up, is what they called it. Oh, that's great that you got an alarm. Yeah. I was expecting it to just run out and now drain Chippy Coolant into my next tank, but it didn't. It just stopped feeding the paper. It left enough paper in there to still filter and give you the alarm and continue machining and give you time to replace it.
00:31:11
Speaker
Luckily, we had replacement rolls that just came in and good to go. Interesting. Do you have to buy that from a Kern or is it supply? Yeah, we found a Canadian supplier that sells filter rolls. Perfect. Yep.
00:31:26
Speaker
Speaking of all this maintenance stuff, I want to ask publicly a question about Haas Renishaw Pro batteries. And I think I already got the answer, but I'm kind of spooked. When we first got our Haas machines four or five years ago, somebody had said, and it seemed to be common knowledge, you really need to be proactive on replacing your Renishaw batteries. The type of battery they are, they'll show their voltage. I think it's 3 volts or 3.3 volts. They'll show it.
00:31:53
Speaker
all the way until the day they die, like the second they die, and then nothing. Yeah, you have to measure them under load, I guess, which most multimeters can't do. So today, we've always tried to be diligent about having a schedule and proactively replacing them. Well, we've got enough machines now to where, frankly, that's
00:32:15
Speaker
I'll do it in a second if I need to, but my thought was why don't we just keep enough batteries on hand and when a probe's battery fails, we'll get an alarm like the probe can't see it and we'll just replace it. Meaning there's not this risk that I was led to believe years ago that letting the batteries fail can cause a crash or the probe can plunge into your table or something.
00:32:38
Speaker
And it seems to be the case that, yeah, let the batteries fail and you'll get an alarm. And as long as you've got batteries on hand, no big deal. Obviously, if you're unattended or nights out, it could stop the machine, which that's not my concern right now. If anybody knows otherwise, I'd be curious to hear. Yeah, we have quite a bit of experience with that. I mean, have you ever run out the batteries or have you just proactively never run into it?
00:32:59
Speaker
Uh, I'm sure we've run out the batteries before. Um, I'm sure we have. And I know we had that VM three probe fail a couple months ago and similar, I think assume behavior. You get an alarm and so fix it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We've had it cause we run the Maury overnight every night for years. Um,
00:33:21
Speaker
The worst that happens to us is it gets stuck. Sometimes the dried coolant will coagulate on the outside of the probe. That happens over time and over time. And it would stick, and it would stick in the open position, even though it looked fine. But just that micron out of tolerance caused the sensor inside to stick. That would happen quite a bit.
00:33:46
Speaker
Also, based on temperature and humidity and weird things like that. The probe would stay on for a weekend and we'd come in and it'd be dead. It's the middle of a cycle. It stuck and then it killed the batteries. We've probably replaced batteries because of that more than actually just normal used two years of battery replacement.
00:34:09
Speaker
The only downside is, yeah, it does halt unattended production. And if that's not your main concern, then go nuts. Just let it tell you that, hey, I'm out of batteries. When we decided to do this, Ed had already made a Renishaw probe drawer in a toolbox, which I didn't even know about. It's great. And it has extra probe tips and supplies. And we had moved the batteries from a battery drawer into the probe drawer. Totally makes sense. What I did was,
00:34:35
Speaker
took four batteries. So that's a pair for the spindle probe and a pair for the table probe. I typed up a note that says, do not use this without confirming with John that we've reordered a new set from Amazon. And then it polysealed it into a sealed bag. And we've done that with other things in our shop. And I'll tell you, it's been absolutely great to know that there's a sacred set of backups. Yeah. It's the break glass in case of emergency, kind of. That's cool. I like that.
00:35:00
Speaker
Oh, but I dated it because we actually don't want that to sit unused for multiple years. After a year, we should use those and cycle in a new one. Yep, exactly. What I've been doing on the Kern, because it's had
00:35:16
Speaker
I've certainly had the probe turns on when it's in the spindle and in the machining area. And sometimes there'll be an alternate alarm, some other reason why it can't continue. So it's saddle weekend and eventually run out. I've probably gone through two or three sets of batteries on the current, just due to weird reasons and using it so much.
00:35:35
Speaker
But what I do is I keep a note in where I store the current batteries, every date that I've replaced batteries, so that at least I know, oh, it's been three months or oh, it's been nine months or it just kind of more data to
00:35:50
Speaker
give you a mental picture of how long it's been. That's what led us to not replacing them proactively was we built this into Lex. We built a Renishaw battery replacement program in Lex, which would let us store by machine the date they were replaced. It would create a work order every six months. And the problem was, I know that there's going to be too much bad information because we've been writing the dates on the batteries themselves on the
00:36:20
Speaker
outside of the machine control and potentially in Lex. And you'll get conflicting data and maybe you need to replace the spindle probe, but not the table probe. And it does seem a bit wasteful. You know, it's, I don't know, $200 to replace all the probe batteries and all the machines now. Like I'm fine doing that if you need to, but it otherwise is also wasteful. So rather than trying to worry about dates and tracking, we just, this is one of the things where we just said, no, going the other way with it.
00:36:48
Speaker
Oh, that last thing I'm doing was we have a drain tank for our air compressor where it drains out of and it's a mess. So I'm redesigning it with a five gallon bucket with quick disconnect fittings with a baffle inside of it. I bought some air compressor mufflers, silencer
00:37:08
Speaker
I did things off of McMaster, they're like six bucks. I'm going to test those out and that way it's quieter and cleaner and then it's in a bucket which we can then drain the water out of as needed. Nice. Yeah, we've got it plastic hosed into a five gallon bucket with little 90 fitting screwed into the top. And we just drain the bucket every however often it fills. How often do you think you fill five gallons?
00:37:34
Speaker
I mean, it depends on the humidity, but not sooner than a month or two. Really? It's way more often for us. Even with an air-conditioned shop? Yeah. Wow. I honestly don't touch it anymore, so it's been a long time since I've thought about it. But I know at the old shop, I don't remember. It was often a week or two to fill a five gallon bucket.
00:37:58
Speaker
The problem with the current one is that we had to drill some holes in the top of the bucket to vent air pressure, because otherwise, it pressurizes the five-gallon bucket. But then, as soon as it gets any amount of water in the bucket, it starts blowing that water out the holes, and it's not baffled or all that. And I could tweak this one, but I'm like, for under $40, we're doing this the right way.
00:38:22
Speaker
That's the stuff I don't mind. I don't mind doing it myself. I enjoy it on the coolant wash down system. I'm going to help design the first machine and then I can hand that off and have somebody else kind of implement that on the others.
Delegation and Value-Focused Activities
00:38:37
Speaker
That's something I've been thinking about a lot lately is value and where your value lies in the company and what can be done by others and what should be done by others and should not be done by you.
00:38:49
Speaker
On one hand, I look around and I'm like, everybody's busy doing their work, but this needs to get done, so I'll do it. That's fine. But sometimes you got to be like, okay, this can absolutely be done by somebody else. Somebody else can absolutely find the time throughout the day. It doesn't have to happen immediately.
00:39:05
Speaker
We had a mirror that I wanted to put up in our bathroom here that's been literally sitting beside the bathroom for the past year with the screws and the mounting brackets on the ground beside it and nobody's picked up and done it, myself included. Then one of our newest guys, I just mentioned it to him. I was like, when you get a chance, do you think you could put that up? 20 minutes later, it was done. Right?
00:39:29
Speaker
Amazing. Sorry, I was thinking about, I just called you Ed. A great traction quote, a person chasing two rabbits catches neither. Focus on what you want to do. I commend you. You did the right thing of
00:39:48
Speaker
of outsourcing that, if you will, delegating it on the flip side. Sometimes, I would argue, do it days off in the shop. Spend four hours one morning doing nothing except a bunch of little catch-up tasks because none of us are too good for that. And sometimes, that's just the best way to get stuff done.
00:40:03
Speaker
Yeah, I know. It's a good way to put it. And that's the balance. I do not want to consider myself too good to clean, to be on my hands and knees and cleaning the floor kind of thing. I'm not too good to do that. But it's a value of time. And where's my effort best spent? So it's balance. It's got to be both. But you sway it.
00:40:26
Speaker
My own, I'm predisposed to overthinking about it. I remember how we had air conditioning problems a week or two ago. When we were up there getting that fixed, I noticed that the insulation wrapper around one of the return lines was worn out from 10 years of just being outside. I found it at Home Depot when I was there for other stuff I had at my office and I'm sitting there looking at it like,
00:40:47
Speaker
way too many times. It's just like, it'll take you 17 minutes to go out, get the scissor lift, go up on the roof, zip tie it on there. Stop talking about it. Stop thinking about it. Just go do it. Yeah. Or the alternative is you call the guy, whoever the guy is, and get him to come in and cost you a couple hundred bucks. It's worth it. Or is it 17 minutes of your time? Just get it done.
00:41:10
Speaker
Yeah, fair point. I did make the call on the air conditioning. I fixed it in the past. It was a starter cap. This time I said, nope, let them do it. It's funny. How do you define where that limit is? Where to call the guy or where to just do it yourself?
00:41:27
Speaker
Look, John, I don't have an answer for you. No, no. You can tell me I'm wrong. I enjoy knowing how stuff works. I'm not going to become an HVAC consultant. I don't own a set of pressure gauges to top off free on. But darn it, when a perfectly good system stops working, I want to know why. Yeah, I'm the same. I actually think we have a great HVAC company. They've been great. It's funny. I commend them for doing their task
00:41:55
Speaker
doing it well. On the flip side, I'm kind of surprised they didn't say, hey, heads up, you might want to replace that insulation hose. It's got a bunch of exposed areas and that's costing efficiency, blah, blah, blah. But then I also kind of chuckle because William and I changed the oil on our cars, but when I had my solar surgery, I had to take Yvonne's car in a jiffy loop, which I was
00:42:17
Speaker
Not happy about it. It pains you. Yeah. In a jiffy lube, they won't let you get out of there with telling you 17 other things that are wrong with your car. And of course, you're like, OK, you're making all this stuff up. So it's kind of funny, because I'm super hypocritical, because here I want the HVAC guys to tell you about something that needs to be tweaked on my anyway. Yeah, yeah. That's awesome.
00:42:38
Speaker
I enjoy seeing how stuff works. That's my best answer. I enjoy figuring it out. It's probably one of my better skills in life is figuring it out. Sometimes I take that for granted and I expect everybody around me to just figure it out. Some people are not wired to do that, just period. That also goes back to the common full circle of core values. No, not everyone will.
00:43:04
Speaker
you want to build a team around people that have a curiosity, a passion, and sometimes it's not as hard as you think. If somebody's not working, think about why talk through it and do your best as a team member to not discuss the problem, but propose a solution. That's what it takes. Yeah. Wait up to the day.
00:43:29
Speaker
Um, catch up. I've had too many alarms and issues on the current lately. So I'm actually like a day or two behind on, on, uh, production, a little broken tools and things like that. Um,
00:43:44
Speaker
And every problem that I find is I really dig into it because I don't want it to come back. So it's like I'm weeding out all of the consistent automation problems so that I can trust it for unattended production. And I'm better and better and better. And the repeat problems are rare, but it's those new ones that I'm like, I'll figure it out.
00:44:06
Speaker
on it. That's great. That's the majority of what I'm working on right now because I want to leave it alone. I want to give it to somebody else. I want to move on to other projects. Again, I can't pretend to micromanage you and your business, but it's good to hear that via
00:44:23
Speaker
Again, it's a traction thing of like you can have the world's best trailblazers, but you need somebody to climb up in the trees and tell them which direction to cut the trail. That's you, John. You're good at that. I don't know that you get to spend enough time doing that. Yeah, probably half the time doing that, and I want to do more. Cool. That's good. See you next week. All right, man. Have a great day. Take care. Bye.