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Business of Machining - Episode 15
254 Plays8 years ago
Entrepreneurship isn't all sunshine and rainbows. The Johns both express their gratitude for special people in their lives.
Grimsmo decides to make his own fidget spinners (out of titanium) and two new grinding wheels have arrived. The Renishaw OLP for the lathe helps him make strides in efficiency. He is now running machines unattended while making good parts; especially with some additional macro code.
Saunders is extremely pleased about how well the Tormach fixture plates are turning out. Do you think machine time should be shown during EACH op in CAM and Fusion 360?
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Transcript
Introduction and Pre-Discussion Chat
00:00:02
Speaker
Good morning, folks. Welcome to the Business of Machining, Episode 15. My name is John. And my name is John Grimsmo. Good morning, bud. How are you? Good morning. I have to tell our listeners the funny stories. You and I have now been chatting for 40 minutes before the thing. Like, we kind of got all the good stuff out of our system already.
00:00:21
Speaker
No, no, no, no.
Customer Service Frustrations and Mindset Challenges
00:00:22
Speaker
Ridiculous. And no, we didn't forget to hit record, but we... Well, I guess to be honest, the reason we talked is that I had probably the biggest roller coaster of a week in my life. Not to sound dramatic about it, but Monday was a real low point for me. I really struggled.
00:00:43
Speaker
And there's nothing too juicy behind it other than the perfect storm of This is gonna sound random, but we had a gasoline fuel leak at the farm which was a nightmare and then my wife and I were in a fight and then stupid little things like
00:01:00
Speaker
I'll tell you man, and this gets me fired up even talking about it again, Chase Bank, they talk about customer service, your customer service on the radio, and then you call them because their QuickBooks link broke, and QuickBooks is not a fun company to deal with either, and they blame each other, and then they ask you so many times for identification and blah, blah, blah, and they transfer you around, and then they're finally like, oh yeah, we have a log note, we're working on this, is there anything else we can help you with?
00:01:30
Speaker
And I'm kind of like, you know, I pay for this service. You have no idea, like this is incredibly disruptive to my accounting. And they're like, yep, we are aware of it. We are working our best. It's just this canned, frustrating response. And a simple question of could you call me or notify me when it's back up and working? And they thought that that was an absurd request. So little things like that. And then the thing that I actually did like kind of a,
00:01:59
Speaker
Wipe the clean slate just move on don't let try not to let that stuff rule in your day Because at the end of the day if you let that stuff your own your day as an entrepreneur as a person in life You can just find yourself
00:02:10
Speaker
too many days or get lost to the silly stuff. So I kind of rebooted, rebounded, and I was doing an okay job of that. And then somebody made me aware of something that just set me off, which is I usually am pretty open about things, meaning I believe it's execution, not protecting your ideas per se, that is what makes you successful and happy in life.
00:02:34
Speaker
the whole like, I can't tell you something because it's secret and if I tell you it's going to lose its interest, you execute at a bigger level. In other words, somebody could buy a Norseman and try to reverse engineer it, but good luck. You're not going to do what John's done. Anyways, I found out that somebody had done something I thought
Emotional Challenges in Entrepreneurship
00:02:53
Speaker
was
00:02:54
Speaker
Well, it was something that I didn't appreciate. I'll leave it at that. And you know what? We're sitting here Friday morning and I am glad it all happened. I'm in a better place. I have fixed all those things on that list and I got to give John a thank you here. I actually called him
00:03:14
Speaker
Monday, late afternoon, and I was pretty close to tearing it up. I was at my limits on stuff, and it was a great conversation, so thanks bud. No problem. I mean, the low points that we have, you know, we share a little bit on, I used to do my grind videos, and you do your chip breaks, and we talk about the ups and the downs, but there are low points that you don't really want to share with anybody.
00:03:36
Speaker
in entrepreneurship and it's not easy and it's very frustrating and emotional at many times. You know, people might look at us from the outside and think it's easy and fun and we get to do what we love and oh, you got such a good thing going on, you got all this cool stuff. But man, the stress and the responsibility and the emotions are rollercoaster.
00:03:57
Speaker
Yeah, it's crazy. I told you this, John. It's something I believe in, which is that you have done such a good job of building this company, making these incredible products, and building a sense of a community around owning a knife. In fact, did we share the tattoo thing last week? We talked about it last week, and Julie's going to put the link in the thing.
00:04:19
Speaker
Yeah, you have a sense of community. You have a fan of yours that permanently put ink on their arm of a Norseman. Yep. Yes, good for you. But I also think, I know, you're going to have some folks that resent your success.
00:04:35
Speaker
And that doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. In fact, it probably means you're doing things incredibly well. It's tough because while I tend to be a more right-winged person or a more capitalistic person, I also tend to like to have more friends than enemies. I tend to like to be positive and build a community. So when you see people,
Community Building and Personal Relationships
00:04:55
Speaker
I was telling this to John in our talk right now this morning, I was like, I hate it when people ask me how I won the lottery.
00:05:02
Speaker
Look, I'm not gonna apologize for my success. My parents paid for my education. I will not lie about that. That was a huge, not graduating from college with debt was no doubt a huge thing, but I have earned every single thing I have right now, period.
00:05:21
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm similar. I didn't go to university, but my wife supported me for many years while I was kind of finding my way and growing my businesses. She worked a part-time job, and we lived minimal lives for many years. And then I grew the business from there with no input, basically. But that's great. That's a great part of your story. Totally. It's a success story.
00:05:44
Speaker
I did the same thing, my wife had a job and that helped us both working before we had kids was no doubt a key part of being able to pursue entrepreneurial things.
00:05:55
Speaker
I talked about it on a chip break we just did about some great life advice. And this is a little bit weird and awkward, because I don't mean to, there's things in life that happen that you can't control. But the more stable your life is with a happy marriage with a wife that gets what you do, the easier it is to succeed at things like a business endeavor or an entrepreneurial pursuit. Because the more those things, like having a bad marriage or divorce, they distract from you, they emotionally are dreamy, and they can be incredibly expensive.
00:06:25
Speaker
So I think you and I both got lucky in that we got some pretty good wives. Luckiest. Yeah. Yeah. If only my wife listened to this podcast. Yeah. My wife does sometimes, so. Oh, really? Yeah. That's funny. My wife commutes. I should tell her to listen to it.
Grimsmo's New Projects and Technical Insights
00:06:42
Speaker
I don't know. I don't know how that's going to go over. No, that's good. Yeah. How's your week? My week was pretty good.
00:06:54
Speaker
Let's see. So I'm making these spinners, these fidget spinners, which are all the rage now in the EDC, you know, everyday carry community. I could have used one this week. Yeah. It's a lot of fun. Like, I've never felt anybody else's spinner. I've never bought one. I've never borrowed one or anything. So I just made my own. And I think they're pretty awesome. But I made this big fixture. So I've been running them every night. And it's a seven hour run, which is amazing.
00:07:25
Speaker
seven hours because of the size of the fixture? Yeah. Awesome. It's one of those big, eight-inch-wide orange fixtures. That's awesome. And it's completely loaded. So it makes 28 finished spinner bodies out of titanium. A single lap? Yeah, in a single lap. Well, 28 on one side, and then you flip them, and there's 28 on the other side. So there's 56 pieces on the table at once.
00:07:50
Speaker
Every op seven hours later, I come in in the morning, the machines quiet and turned off, and I've been doing that almost every night this week.
00:07:58
Speaker
Do you remember the video you did on your X2 when you tried to drill a hole to flip the part to indicate it when you flipped it? And you did it incredibly wrong. I do remember that. Or something like that. Yeah. So I have this list of things I keep in Excel. I guess you could call it a bank. And I dip into it when I have low points. And you've got to sometimes think about,
00:08:26
Speaker
what you've done, John, where you've come like. I think you've sent a picture of that fixture this weekend. And that was a beautiful fixture using some pretty cool work holding stuff. Good for you, man. That's awesome.
00:08:43
Speaker
Oh, yeah, Manta, think back to where we're in those X2 days. I mean, you with your tag too. We're just figuring it out. Like, just trying. Like, oh, I've heard that you can have a locating hole, flip it over, and it'll work, right? So just try it. And now, I mean, now we're going to know so much more.
00:09:02
Speaker
about how to do all that stuff that is kind of, I do it in my sleep and now I can do it accurately and know it's going to work and know it's going to be lined up perfectly. But yeah, it's really awesome here looking at a pile of almost 200 finished spinners. I still have to do the lathe work, make the buttons and the weights and things like that, but I'm actually less concerned about that. Usually the lathe is tricky to set up and get dialed in, but now I'm really, really getting the hang of it.
00:09:27
Speaker
How's that, it's been solid? It's been solid. So I got the probe in a couple weeks ago and that was the best investment I've ever made on this lathe. Yeah. And it's a $10,000 probe and it's just amazing.
00:09:42
Speaker
Well, I think what's interesting to me is it's not that you never see a mill without a renishaw, but a renishaw on a mill is just so common. And I don't think I've ever seen an OLP. At IMTS, I don't recall seeing an OLP. At shops, I've never seen one. On videos, I've never seen one.
00:10:00
Speaker
Yeah, and when I was researching it, I was trying to find, you know, YouTube videos or other things, you know, forum posts of people having this, and it's rare. It's very few and far between. Even my apps guys were like, yeah, I've run a Pro 1 Laid a couple times, but it's not super common. And now that I have one, it's like, oh my God, this is everything I wanted out of the Laid. It compensates for thermal growth. Yes, there is thermal growth on my Nakamura.
00:10:22
Speaker
I can prove it now, I can prove it, I can graph it out with statistical like over time and everything. And this compensates for it, compensates for tool wear, it just does, it keeps the lathe in line, I'm holding parts to within tenth. The biggest problem I'm having is if a chip wraps around the part and I probe the chip, then it probes the part being huge.
00:10:44
Speaker
But I've made macros and looping functions to spit those parts out and only keep parts that are the right size. I love it. Yeah. So now I'm getting maybe a 5% to 10% spit out rate, so 90% accurate parts. But I don't care because it's unattended. It's working by itself. You know, material cost is negligible here, right? Yeah, exactly. So it's working very well.
00:11:10
Speaker
Oh my gosh, I would take that trade off. I would take that trade off any day of the week if I could run my Oz over
CNC Machining Automation and Efficiency
00:11:16
Speaker
the night and lose 10% of the parts on it.
00:11:21
Speaker
Oh my gosh, that's a no-brainer. But you know that the 90% are going to be safe. If it breaks the tool, it's going to stop. And they're going to be totally accurate and exactly on spec. And then if there's some bad parts, say you're making 20 parts in a fixture or whatever, it'll either flag that part or machine a big X into it or something like that. There's all these things you could do. Right.
00:11:42
Speaker
Right. And it's so funny because it's like, why would you, the OLP, it seems like such a smart investment in technology because you're taking a machine, there's a great machine, but you're making it perform in a, outperform its own class. Like you're making it do work better than it should with such a simple investment rather than throw money at
00:12:00
Speaker
weight and precision and scraping and I mean you can spend, I was talking to you the other day about the Okumas that we were looking at some time ago and how there's the Taiwanese version and there's the Japanese version and the price is almost I think double. And it's kind of funny that it seems like, and maybe I'm missing some things here, but that OLP seems like you could put it in perhaps even a less expensive lathe and have it really
00:12:26
Speaker
The confidence in the parts that come on, that's awesome. Exactly. Good for you. Yeah, so I've been riding the lathe a lot. How transferable are things in the knife world to spinners? Like, because of the bearings or is there a lot? I mean, I guess there's not a lot to a spinner other than the bearing, huh?
00:12:48
Speaker
Well, I mean, as a knife maker, I go into it with that mindset. So I want to make the body out of titanium. And I'm trying to rack my brain thinking, does anybody else make them out of titanium? I don't know. All the ones I normally see are like aluminum, brass, like all these baby materials that are just cakewalk to eat, or to machine, right? Like the fact that mine are in titanium. Oh, and I'm drilling all these. Each spinner has 26 little detailed holes with a 59 thou drill bit.
00:13:17
Speaker
And I'm counting how many holes each one has done and I'm at over 5,000. On the same drill bit? Yes. No way. Little lakeshore carbide.
00:13:30
Speaker
59,000 carbide drill bit. And yeah, I'm at 5,000 holes in titanium with the same drill bit. It's awesome. I generally don't spot carbide holes drilled with carbide, but I've also never drilled things that small. Yeah, I am spotting these ones. You spot them. OK. Interesting. Good for you. Yeah. I was talking to my Sandvik guy yesterday about when our, so we use a Coro drill 860
00:13:58
Speaker
Through spindle coolant sand that drill. This is the I'm told you cannot throw more money at any drill in the world Maybe that's a maybe that's a bolt clean But it's supposed to be the bees knees of drills as high as end as it gets and we're running it at 1100 service feet a minute in aluminum here in this case. We do it. That's a lot of this 11 or service for the aluminum at right now. I'm at 32 thou per rev
00:14:24
Speaker
So it's drilling at 9,000 RPMs. I think it's too, don't, someone's gonna quote me on this wrong. I think 230 inches a minute plumbing. No, no, obviously no pecking through three quarter inch aluminum. But we're drilling, these are for our Tormach fixture plates and they've been going incredibly well. I'm so excited. And we drill a lot of holes. I mean, some of those plates have 180 holes. And I think the tool is specced to 17,000
00:14:54
Speaker
which sounds like a lot until you start realizing, wait a minute, we're pulling plates off every few hours or every hour or whatever that have huge numbers of holes in them. So we were just talking about how and when that drill is going to fail. Most likely it'll just start either chip welding or just chipping the edge or something like that. They said build up will do it. Yeah.
00:15:19
Speaker
Is it shiny, or is it coated? It has a bronze colored coating on it. I don't know what the coating is. And you have through spindle coolant, right? Correct. At what pressure? Only 300. Yeah. Which is fine for that drill. Smaller drills, really under a quarter inch, you need 1,000, period. Yeah. Under a quarter inch is everything that I do.
00:15:46
Speaker
But you don't get to have TSC. I do on my lathe. And I have some through spindle drills on the lathe. But it may do with what you have, right? Like it's working fine. And you got higher PSI though. 300. I thought you had like 700 or 800 on the lathe. No, 300 on the lathe. And I don't even know if I'm getting 300 to the tool because there's a couple other orifices that are spitting coolant at the same time.
00:16:11
Speaker
So I've been curious about putting a pressure gauge there, but at the end of the day, does it really matter? That's pretty cool. In other news, since we've been talking this whole series of podcasts about these grinding wheels that Linda is making me.
00:16:28
Speaker
How was Linda? Linda's doing awesome. I got the two new ones in yesterday morning. Oh, yeah? I haven't tried them yet, but I'm very excited. I'll be doing it this morning, actually, with that. Measure the diameters first, please. Exactly. Yeah, they're exactly two inches, actually, which is perfect. Yeah, I will not be crashing these ones. I will be taking every precaution in the book to make sure that it goes well. But I'm very hopeful.
00:16:58
Speaker
Yeah, so it was exactly four weeks since we crashed the first one. And just super excited to get this going. So have you been not doing anything? Because you crashed the one. We went back to the old one that we had before that. Oh, that's right. Yeah. OK, which is a quarking, but not exciting. Exactly. It works well. But yeah, Eric still has to spend a considerable amount of time polishing out. And that's not the point of spending all this money on equipment.
00:17:27
Speaker
to do this. And seven months of research into grinding wheels, eight months. And all the money we've put into it, and testing, and time, and all that. So the purpose is to use technology and automation to make our lives better and make our products be the best that we can.
00:17:44
Speaker
Yeah. No, it's something I've been thinking about a lot as we've started to hit some bottlenecks. And it just doesn't make good for you. Think about, I remember, what was it, three or four months ago that you were excited to start hitting, having the machine run when you were not present at the shop, right? Yeah. It wasn't that long ago.
00:18:04
Speaker
And it's
Enhancing Workflow and CAM Software
00:18:05
Speaker
just, it's completely unacceptable in this day and age world that I have the investment of the financial investment and the investment of real estate. I mean, that's the other thing. Like these machines take up shop space. Shop space isn't free. The thought that they only run from whatever, like we try to keep our VM3 running from 6 a.m. So I usually leave about 6 p.m. So that's 12 hours a day and still only half the day.
00:18:31
Speaker
Not acceptable, man. Second shift, third shift. No. No, but that's silly, too. But just getting to that point of running it, even if it's one, it depends on what you're doing, but automated loading or even the last run before you go. Yep.
00:18:48
Speaker
Yeah, I've been really trying to maximize this last run before I go thing so that it's awesome having both machines running as I leave. And I know they're going to be safe. And I know they're all safety checked and probing for broken tools and everything. So at worst, it's just going to hang up and pause mid-program or something.
00:19:07
Speaker
Yeah, we just did a Wednesday widget on automating our little tormach with the clamps. And it was cool. I liked it. It was happy. But what it made me kind of think about was a total rethink of how humans interact with CNC machines. And I would like this idea. So let's say you have a fixture palette for a bearing, because I assume you're going to make a lot of the parts when you're not making bearings. But let's say you have a- I tried.
00:19:36
Speaker
Are you serious? Of course, I tried to make my own spinner bearings. I found out that they're not as smooth as the store bought ones for this purpose. I love you. Oh my god. So let's say you have a part, and you have a pallet of them, and you want to run it while you're at the present at the shop. So you want to be blown and going because you're there, right? You should be able to change
00:20:01
Speaker
one variable in the code, or better for me, I would almost like to flip a switch. So to have a magnetic box that you can just put on your machine that, you know, sits on the front of your, I'm looking at your machine right now in video here, like right below the DMG Maury sign, you just have a little box that says like present or not present, or you know, attended or lights out. And when you flip it to lights out, that program has variable, I think we can do this.
00:20:26
Speaker
has variables that change. So now, all of a sudden, it goes into slow mode. It goes into every time it does a tool touch off, or it does more probing to check where come. I shouldn't have to load up a different program or be taxed with thinking about. I should literally be able to be on the phone with somebody, trying to get out of the shop, rush to me, and just flip that switch and have the machine change modes. Interesting. See, I tend to run it safety mode all the time, like tool check. You can't do that.
00:20:57
Speaker
Yeah. Or you need to do tool check for certain fragile tools, but not for every tool. Yeah, I don't do it for every tool, because I know that every tool is not going to break. But the fragile ones, for sure. Especially the ones that will cause problems downstream. But basically, if I'm here and the machine's running, I don't want to have to think about it. I don't want to have to have that 10% of my brain paying attention to it. Right.
00:21:20
Speaker
Well, I check for, I check, actually, that Sandvik 860 drill. It's set up in Fusion 360 with the, if you go into your tool library, the last tab, what's it called, break control, I think. Yeah, I've never tried that. What is it? So it just automatically, anytime I use that tool, when it's done with its op, it goes over and touches off to the Renishaw toolsetter to confirm. And I have a threshold, I think, of like 5,000.
00:21:45
Speaker
So where that's really helpful is if it broke, or more importantly, in some cases, could be if it slipped in the collet. Or pulled out or something. Right, exactly. So that's helpful. But the reality is that takes time. And I don't need, when I'm here at the shop, to check that every single time.
Surface Finish Challenges and Solutions
00:22:03
Speaker
See, I do need that, though, because if it broke or pulled out or caused problems, then the next tool goes in, then you've got problems. And you're not going to catch it fast enough because you're on the phone or you're whatever.
00:22:14
Speaker
Well, so it's a trade-off. What I'm saying, which is kind of crazy, is I would rather break a tap.
00:22:22
Speaker
which I would hear and rule on the part, because at this point, I think it's a numbers game, which I know people don't like thinking about. I'm not advocating reckless of use of your machines, but it costs me how much time to check that tool each time. That's worth a trade-off of breaking a, even an $80 or $100 tap. It's just gonna break the tap. It's not gonna damage your spindle.
00:22:47
Speaker
And remember, in this case, I would still be checking that tool every night, so it's not as though it's going to go days without being checked or slippage. Right. I'm on the fence. I totally love your idea of having two modes, and we can totally do that with macros. I would not rather break the tap and ruin the part, because you're out a lot of time and a lot of money to get back up on snuff to save 10 seconds to check the tool.
00:23:15
Speaker
Well, but 10 seconds over how many parts? You're absolutely right. And I'm not advocating. In your case, I'm thinking I would never do this if it also broke the fixture, for sure. I totally, totally get it. But I think you have to remember there is a price to pay for
00:23:34
Speaker
in the form of time, period. I mean, you don't check every late part, right? With OLP, you check every third or fourth, right? It depends on what you're doing. Currently, I do check every one, but I only offset every fifth.
00:23:46
Speaker
OK, that's what it is. Got it. But that way, I have tracking. I have a data print file, like a text file, that says the size of every single one, and the thermal growth, the off-centeredness of the tools. And it's redundant. And yes, it takes 13 seconds, I think, to go in and probe the thing. And yes, that adds time to my three-minute cycle. But at the end of the day, I don't have to think about it anymore.
00:24:13
Speaker
exact tracking that spits out the bad parts and just makes good parts and I'm willing to make that trade off so I don't have to think about the machines anymore. Yeah, that's awesome. But I'm not a job shop, I don't have that mentality. I will do whatever it
Online Community and Continuous Improvement
00:24:29
Speaker
takes in my method to make it work the way that I want it to do, no matter how long it takes.
00:24:35
Speaker
You know, the seven hour run of spinner bodies, I could probably shave it down to six hours just by changing a few things around, like the order of the tools that call up and all that stuff. I just haven't had the time to do it because I'm like, well, the machine's sitting there for like 12 hours, 16 hours at night. I don't care if it takes seven hours instead of six hours, you know?
00:24:58
Speaker
Sorry, maybe that's what it is. My point was more this binary mode where you can change how the machine acts when you're there or not there. Because the more I think about it, I don't mean to sound reckless about crashing. But I'll put it this way. I'm probably going to wait for that drill to break instead of just replacing it.
00:25:17
Speaker
You know, I just, we'll see. But same thing, you can have a mode, the lights out mode, could detune the machine. Slow down a little bit, because who cares? It's not going to run until eight in the morning anyways. I read an article in, I think it was Modern Machine Shop, where a shop had a horizontal machine or a pallet series or whatever, and they specifically detuned the cycles to be 12-hour cycles.
00:25:42
Speaker
hilarious so that the operator could just walk up to it every twelve o'clock midnight and do his work and they could plan the schedule according to that so that they would they would make it slower and just run it care yeah just run it for 12 hours instead of 10 or whatever right so that they could time it better it was funny
00:26:00
Speaker
It reminds me of Pearson, again, where they focus not on spindle uptime, but rather the flow, the orchestration of the workflow of our business, and how certain machines do certain things at certain times, and that's just how this song and dance works. You can walk into my shop, and three spindles are running, and three are idle, and we're crushing it. Don't tell me I'm doing it wrong, because I could be making chips on that machine. It's not supposed to be working right now. That's okay.
00:26:30
Speaker
And that's OK. And that's his goal. I love it. I told Autodesk, too. I would love to have CAM allow time. This is a weird request, but time to be an input. So for 3D surfacing, I would love to program a morph or a parallel or something and have it say, basically, in most cases, it would be the step over or step down, subject to a 15-minute cycle time. Interesting.
00:27:01
Speaker
You know what would be good? It has the machine time calculation, but you kind of have to right click and search for it. It'd be nicer to have that, I don't know, in somewhat more obvious.
00:27:14
Speaker
So actually, I'm going to put a link in this podcast, folks. Will you go upvote this? I got this in the Idea Station four or five months ago. I very, very much want for all of your CAM lists in Fusion 360 to be able to just have it show the machine time for each operation. Because a lot of times I want to know, if it's 47 minutes, how is that distributed amongst these 12 operations?
00:27:37
Speaker
Which ones are quick? Which ones do I need to check? Sometimes I've misplaced a decimal on a spot drill and it's taking six minutes when it should be 60 seconds. I really want this feature. The data is there. I just can't get it presented to us. I love it. Yeah, because I am always right clicking machine to machine time. And then half the time you click clear toolpath instead.
00:27:57
Speaker
Yes, yes. Except undo will fix that. Correct. Controls you will do. There's no keyboard shortcut for machine time either, so I can't even do it quickly on the keyboard. Right. Yeah, I'm always checking machine time. That would be super handy, just to have listed right beside the toolpath, the name, you know? Have you ever tracked how closely machine time is to cycle time on the actual machine? On my mill, it's very close. I'd say 90% close. So it is trustable. You?
00:28:26
Speaker
We just started paying attention to it and it's pretty far off and I need to do some poking into it for sure So the way the machine time works in fusion is you have to input your tool change and rapids which for us changes depending what machine we're on but the first one I checked yesterday was Calculated in fusion at 37 minutes and that the machine it was it was over 50 minutes. So that's a big problem Yeah
00:28:50
Speaker
Yeah, even for my longer runs with 40, 50, 60 operations, Fusion will say two and a half hours, and I'll come in at 2.15 or something like that, which is fine for me. Right, right. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I don't expect it to be within a minute or anything. Totally. But I wanted to know, I want to think about, in that 12-hour workday, how much can I expect to get done? Right. And especially when you're doing a 3D surfacing toolpath, you want to know if it's going to take 20 minutes or two hours.
00:29:18
Speaker
I don't think that's probably the mistake in fusion or I don't think that I suspect the disconnect has more to do with some Some disconnect on I don't think it's well. I don't know I've done it before with single apps, and it's pretty darn close Yeah, so I got a look at why I'm off yeah
00:29:36
Speaker
I'm speaking of 3D surfacing. A week or two ago, I was making these damn steel pocket clips. And I needed to surface the top surface with the best tool path that I could possibly do so that they'd come off as smooth as possible. And I was getting all these deep lines and gouges, not super deep, but noticeable over the surface. And ask, of course, our resident HSM lord, Rob Lockwood,
00:30:04
Speaker
Sure, sure. For advice on this. And he said turn off smoothing. What? Turn off smoothing? So next time you do a surfacing toolpath with the step over of like two thou or something really tight, duplicate it, have one with smoothing, one with off, and look at the toolpath in fusion. Make sure you click show point when you do this, right? Not required, but it would help. But with smoothing off,
00:30:34
Speaker
the toolpath is visually cleaner and clearer and with smoothing on, it's jagged and there's peaks and valleys and the toolpaths are not smooth lines.
00:30:45
Speaker
Did you watch Lockwood's Friday HSM thing a month or two ago? I have not yet, but it's on my list of things to watch. It's amazing. He shows, and this is what makes me realize, I could never answer the question, why is a $700,000 machine, CNC mill, five axis, whatever you want to call it, better than a $100,000 machine? Why is a half a million dollar Okuma better than my VM3 Haas? I love my Haas. Why is that one better?
00:31:10
Speaker
Really a lot of it comes down to how the controller handles the code and Rob was saying that any high-end machine Will have this little triad logo with three points of the triad being speed accuracy and surface finish and that you may think that surface finish and accuracy are related, but they're actually almost complete opposites or do different points on the triad and it goes back to what you just said which is that
00:31:34
Speaker
accuracy would mean I'm hitting every little minor datum on that polygon or that shape, whereas surface finish has to do with how the machine is flowing, kind of like a spline. How is it moving from one point through one point to another? And that is much more important, and Rob does a lot of mold work, obviously, so it's important for that.
00:31:56
Speaker
Usually accuracy we're talking about hyper small numbers here, but nevertheless When you're doing mold or nuclear work or something, you know, these things matter but service matters finish matters, too anyways, I thought it was a very cool thing to understand how a Controller digest it's like G code is just the start for further for this not the output
00:32:17
Speaker
well every time i've tried to make a three d surface as smooth as possible with the bill you know i have a hundred fifty thousand dollar more here i would expect it to make beautiful surface finishes but agreed that i haven't been able to you know i'm always getting these deeper gouges of these these stupid things that if we're trying to polish out the part this is a big problem
00:32:36
Speaker
But this smoothing off thing made a beautiful part. Seriously? Yeah, it looks so nice. And when you look at the toolpath in Fusion, you see the jaggedness with smoothing on. And I don't know why. I would have thought it would have been the opposite. I know.
00:32:52
Speaker
We did that, actually it was that Lockwood collaboration video I did with him where it was the first time I had done, I duplicated a toolpath with smoothing on and off and you saw how it took an arc and it changed it from being a bunch of little line segments with smoothing off, with smoothing on. It ripped all of this out and it made this one nice big sweeping arc in which case I would think smoothing would help your service finish there.
00:33:19
Speaker
Yeah, so maybe it's situation dependent. Maybe it's just something to be aware of. This just feels like a good test to do. Absolutely. And I was actually doing a 3D machining toolpath on my Laid, which is awesome to say. And the stupid fan of controller on the Laid has like a mag of memory or something stupid like that. Stop.
00:33:46
Speaker
I'm going to hold my tongue. Yeah, it's utterly retarded. On my Mori, I have a two gig hard drive built in that I store on my programs. So I'm literally conscious of file size on my lathe. And this file to make my silly little spinner buttons would have maxed out the memory on my lathe. And it's like, oh my god, this is retarded. However, I was playing with smoothing on, smoothing off. And I forget which one.
00:34:13
Speaker
did it, but one of them reduced the file size like hugely. Smoothing will reduce the file size for sure.
00:34:20
Speaker
So for you guys that buy old, and that's one of the reasons why I steer people away from old VMCs in particular, because mill code tends to be a lot longer than lathe code. The machines can't handle normal modern code, period. Yeah, I've got a friend with a 1992 Haas VF0, and oh, he has some problems with running. He's a knife maker, and he wants to make good parts of it. You can drip it. That's what he's doing. Hacky things, yeah.
00:34:46
Speaker
I wonder what, when I think about surface finishes on vertical mills, I can't help but think about that guy on Instagram. Is that Frontline Fab? You follow him? His stuff is dialed in. Totally. He's always got nice stuff, yeah. I think he's actually on a Genos, the Okuma mill, right? Yeah, he's got both of them, the small one and the big one.
00:35:09
Speaker
Oh, that's right, there's a 460. I wonder what his cam is and then I wonder, don't take this the wrong way, I wonder how good a machinist he is. Is he a Rob Lockwood guy who's been around forever and knows it all or is he self-taught like us? I don't know either of those answers, actually. I've talked to him a little bit.
00:35:28
Speaker
Oh, yeah? Yeah. Seems like a nice guy. His stuff sure looks superb. It's like if you want inspiration on Instagram, you look at his stuff and you look at Cal Pei's stuff. Yeah, Cal Pei for sure. And those two, I don't know if it's the camera that they use or whatever, but man, their stuff is so nice. Well, Cal Pei's on a VM3. It's something I need to do is try to see if I can get toolpaths looking as good as he does. Yeah, yeah.
00:35:54
Speaker
Good inspiration. I should get it to work. Yeah, me too. Oops. One last thing. We talked a few weeks ago about getting a stamp made. And Meg finally jumped on my wife and found a local freelance lady in Toronto that makes, she has a little epilogue laser, and she makes stamps. And for 40 bucks or something, we've just came in yesterday. We've got this wicked Grimsmanive stamp now. That's awesome. So I'm really happy about that. That's really cool. Yeah. Sweet. That's the little things, right? Yeah.
00:36:24
Speaker
That's awesome. Have a great day, bud. Thanks again for Monday. Appreciate it. All right. Take care. Bye.