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#227 - Javascript Courses, Work Offsets In 5 Axis & Kern Alarms
182 Plays4 years ago
TOPICS:
- Grimsmo tries to figure out a Kern alarm he has never seen before.
- SMW got their new DT2 milling machine and it is QUICK!
- Saunders is taking a Javascript course to edit post processors better.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Episode 227
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 227. My name is John Saunders and my name is John Grimsmough. John and I talk every week. We've talked this way for years about the stuff that we all know and feel, but you don't always want to talk about. We're running a business and both on a personal level and professional and level and so forth.
00:00:20
Speaker
Yep. And it's been, we just keep doing it. Right, right. Yeah, it's amazing. And, you know, we vaguely realize there's people listening with the most part, this is a private conversation. And that's what's nice about it. I like it. I enjoy it. Yes, I enjoy that we hit record on what is otherwise just me and you. It's a phone call. Bingo. Yeah, yeah.
Machine Issues: Robot Arm & Pallet Placement
00:00:42
Speaker
What have you been up to?
00:00:44
Speaker
Um, lots of current stuff, which has been good. I walked in this morning to a, uh, a dual alarm, both, um, I think pro batteries.
00:00:55
Speaker
complaining. We talked about that a lot. Too funny. And so I thought that was the cause of the stop. But then I see the an error on the aroa that says workpiece badly clamped. And so I walk in and the aroas the robot arm is halfway stuck out like it just dropped a pallet and it's confused. We dropped a pallet? No, I put it in the spindle or in the in the sea. Can we please change the verb? Yeah, sure. It just placed a pallet is the correct word.
00:01:26
Speaker
But yeah, the arm was still stuck out. And usually it's not too confusing to undo that. Except the problem right now is the Kern thinks the pallet 16 is in there, but the Aroa thinks the pallet 50 is in there. And I don't know how to tell the other that the one is right. Is there a way to just unlock the pallet and take it out by hand? Switch it? Yes. But then both machines still think that. Oh, it's not a physical issue. It's a software issue that they think. Exactly.
00:01:55
Speaker
Because the current didn't finish the pallet loading cycle. So it still thinks it has the last pallet. Whereas the Aroa did basically finish the pallet 50 drop, you know, in place. Um, so I'm sure it's something I just haven't, I haven't dealt with this exactly yet. What if you took physically removed the pallets, 16 50, everything, and then do a pallet change as effectively an air pallet change that could potentially sync them up.
00:02:23
Speaker
that might work except I think it complains if there's no palette to clamp. Like when it tries to grab it. I could try that though. Because yeah, if it thinks there's palette 16 and it goes to air grab 16 and puts it into 16. There's already a palette there. Yeah, exactly. In the rack, right? So you gotta be careful about that. But yeah, I could strip everything away and try to
00:02:46
Speaker
Yeah, Angela and I played with it for an hour this morning and haven't quite figured it out yet. One of them has got to be subservient to the other, you would think.
00:02:55
Speaker
It is for the most part. I just got to sync them, tried to restart both machines that didn't solve everything. And now the flappy door between the two machines is stuck in the open position and I know how to close it, but it's not responding properly. So it's just, you just got to play with it and learn and then eventually break down and call Kern or Aroa, which I've done a couple of times in the past for similar things. I just haven't gotten there yet.
Support from Kern & Equipment Manufacturers
00:03:20
Speaker
Yeah. So you have phone call tech support with Kern.
00:03:24
Speaker
Yeah, I've got them on WhatsApp. So I bought them all the time just for little things. And so how does that work from a service, like from a cost standpoint?
00:03:37
Speaker
Honestly, I don't know if I'm special or not, but I don't think I've paid for any service. Obviously, if they send somebody here, that costs a lot of money, but I think every customer just has access to email and phone support for no cost.
00:03:55
Speaker
Um, cause I've heard of other current owners that are like, yeah, talk to Tina. She's the best, you know, she'll just hook you up. And then if she has to travel to your location, obviously that costs big bucks, but yeah, anything phone or email. I'm pretty sure I haven't paid anything, but I'm pretty sure other owners haven't paid anything either. Got it. It's great. Yeah. No, that is phenomenal. I like the same with Heidenhain too. I've bugged them a lot. We've had a lot of email chatter about how to do certain things or whatever. I haven't paid for any of that.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. I should figure that out. We had a, it's our own, it's kind of funny, not funny, but we had a piece of plastic fall from like the top of the enclosure into the top of the ball screw area. And so it just happened to be, well, I think it happened
00:04:51
Speaker
when we were touching off a tool or something. Anyway, there was no crash, but it had this piece of plastic in there. And so it now has an encoder alarm because it probably did get,
00:05:03
Speaker
You know, losing steps or something. Yeah. Right. Like I'm not, I don't think I'm worried about the kinematics of the machine or any alignment. Right. Which machine? The UFC.
Haas Machine Encoder Alarm
00:05:13
Speaker
Okay. And so we cleared that out. I mean, it was actually pretty knock where this is like real time. It's pretty awesome because we saw that alarm. I'm like, that's weird because if I recall,
00:05:24
Speaker
If you have a proper crash, you get both an overload alarm and a Z, an error, servo error too large. Like it thinks it's one place and it's actually the other. We never had the overload alarm. We just had to basically like, hey, I'm trying to go here and I can't get there. Like kind of like the quote unquote lost steps back in the separate days. And so we cleared out the debris and I honestly thought, okay, it should honestly be fine because so long as, so long as
00:05:51
Speaker
I don't know what exactly causes that alarm, but I would think if the way the Haas encoders work, I think if they get within like one rotation or close, then they use the, once they're in the right rotation, then they use the encoder to find the actual home. So it seems to be- Does that mean it can fix itself from a massive loss of position too? I don't know.
00:06:17
Speaker
I mean, if you have, I guess the question is why would you have massive loss of position? But like in theory, like let's say you somehow move the Z axis down one inch without the machine being on. And so you kind of tricked it. Um, and then you rehomed it. Yeah. In fact, that's the exact point of not having absolute encoders is the machine doesn't actually really know where it is unless it's referenced home and to reference home.
00:06:42
Speaker
Isn't there a limit switch, a physical clicky switch that it goes there and then it uses the servo encoder to fine tune? Exactly. Yeah. I don't think, I guess the question is, maybe that's what happened. Maybe that piece of plastic caused it to stop more than one rotation. It shouldn't matter because it should go to
00:07:02
Speaker
the proc switch now, and as soon as it flags the proc switch, it'll make small motions until it hits the encoder mark on that. Anyway, we'll figure it out. But I have never tried to leverage Haas phone support. I'm not even sure that is an option, but there are definitely some times where I'd like, hey, I'd be happy to pay, but I'd like some help, whether it's just a phone call or whether it's FaceTime or me send you a short video rather than you guys sending out a field tech.
Customer Support Experiences Across Brands
00:07:29
Speaker
Good. For sure. Yeah. And I've done that quite a bit.
00:07:32
Speaker
I've done it with Renishaw, I've done it with Bloom, Kern, Heidenhein.
00:07:37
Speaker
a little tiny bit with DMG Morey. And it's good. Well, that's a great question with DMG Morey. I mean, you're just a customer to them, right? Yep. You just call the number and they give you a serial number and talk to them? Yeah, I've talked to a guy in Germany once because he was like, it was through 2 AM or whatever and I called the 24 hour hotline and it worked. So yeah, don't be afraid to just try. Yeah.
00:08:04
Speaker
And phone support's easy. Most of these companies have tech guys available that it's their job to be available for this kind of stuff, right? Yeah. Well, there's got to be, you think about the future. Combining...
00:08:20
Speaker
all the stuff we've gone through with COVID, like with distance support and relationships is kind of pushed the envelope on some stuff. But then you set that aside, think about just all the technology we have, the phones that we have, and then some even thought of augmented reality where
00:08:35
Speaker
Um, if I could buy a $300 headset and then I can point to something and the guy can point to something and then we can kind of show him, you know, we were lucky that we figured this out pretty quickly, but like, you know, there's a chance that we had no idea that there was something mechanically. Right. In there, but that's clearly the most likely situation. And so it'd be great for the scenarios where you don't get lucky and realize that just have somebody say, well look, most likely it's this. So like, let's take a look in there. Yeah. And then, you know, here's the screws to take off. Yeah.
00:09:06
Speaker
Yeah, with Kern, I've done quite a few WhatsApp video chats with Tina just trying to go through the service menus or the tool changer binds up for whatever reason. And I just have to like, there's a weird combination of button pushes to get through it. And she can VNC or use TeamViewer to see the control panel and even click around.
00:09:29
Speaker
And it's cool. It's really nice to be able to use technology to do that. I haven't had them come here since it was delivered and I don't think I need to, you know? Yeah. Yeah, right. That's a good thing. It's great. Totally random.
CAM Patterning for Tombstones & Work Offsets
00:09:44
Speaker
Do you use Google Sheets? Yes, intensively. Do you know about edit history of a cell?
00:09:51
Speaker
Yes, I haven't used it much. Okay, every once in a while I'll fat finger of a cell. I've seen just your edit history total, like up the sheet. So like I had just made a note under today's podcast to ask you about the Wilhelmin and I looked over and that now had a zero in it. So I just happened to hit zero on my keyboard by accident. If you right click on that cell and say show edit history, it shows the past contents of that cell. Oh yeah. Oh, this new feature. Okay.
00:10:17
Speaker
No, that is cool. As a former Excel junkie, you don't have that. So if you overwrite something or in a collaborative team environment, it's great because you can see what other people have done. So I've got one, two, three, four, I've got five Google sheets open in my Chrome right now on my laptop. I'm clicking on a random cell and it says, John Grimsmough added the word roughing in capital letters within this thing on April 14th. Hilarious. That's cool.
00:10:49
Speaker
I didn't know that. I didn't know that actually. It's cool. Current question. When you do your tombstones, how do you do the cam patterning? In fusion, just as a circular rotation. Circular pattern around the four or six sides or whatever and then you but then you do new datums for each one. I don't.
00:11:16
Speaker
Whoa. Yeah. And I've probed the four sides. They're within a tenth or two on all four corners of all four sides. Got it. So I made sure that that was the case. You also made the fixtures on the Kern. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I use one work offset for absolutely everything on the Kern. That's your zero point. Yeah. Holy cow. The bottom of the Aroa pallets. Like you take all the pallets off. That's my zero point right there at the bottom.
00:11:44
Speaker
And it works well. And I do do some probing to tweak a tool length every now and then. That's what I was working on all the past two days making our lock bar inserts. I want them to be exactly 50 thou thickness. Regardless of palette inaccuracies between different palettes, if I made them weird or whatever.
00:12:05
Speaker
I just want from the top of that palette to the machine surface, I want that to be exactly 50 thou. So I rough machine a two thou over, probe the surface, probe the surface of the palette, and it says 52 and four tenths, then I tweak my tool lengths by four tenths. Interesting. And I got that to work now perfectly. And then I re-machine it, finish up with the finish pass, and bang on. There is a way though, I just kind of think that that could be
00:12:32
Speaker
difficult downstream if you ever do wanna tweak something on one area. But I think you can do that infusion of a localized coordinate system shift that doesn't overwrite, like G54, it says G54, but like if you probe the sort of feature and you wanna tweak it a little, you can do that just for that section of the pattern. That's a probed result. So if you had a,
00:12:58
Speaker
I think you can do this. So if you had a four sided tombstone, your datum was at the bottom, a theoretical point, like your zero point of the, um, clamp, which is never going to move or change or frankly, not even a point you can probe because it's kind of buried in the tombstone. So.
00:13:14
Speaker
If you tip your tombstone over and you rotate to one of the faces, you could also then have a feature on that tombstone in this, like, let's make it easy. Let's say you have a little precision machined dimple or bore, and you could probe that bore to establish a relative coordinate system for all the work you're gonna do in that face without changing G54. Does that make sense?
00:13:42
Speaker
Okay. I thought you could, and I think, I think Rob was talking about this a long time ago, which is where I have it kind of soared my head about always using the zero point coordinate system, but you still want to be able to do probe to tweak it. Yeah. So do you tweak it as a not G52 or G55 or the next, next one up as some extra little thing. But then the trick with that changing workpiece coordinate is you always got to make sure you come back to the original after you're done with the one.
00:14:12
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't, it absolutely does not change.
00:14:17
Speaker
Uh, I don't believe this in this area changes G to D four. It's almost like, it's almost like the whole probe a feature, probe a bore it's off. And then you recut it a little bit more. Like it's that sort of a tweak, but I don't know how that would work. Yeah. Because you're not, you're not having to go back and repost. I'll have to think about that. Yeah. I'm sure there's ways there's, there's several different ways to skin that cat. Um, and it's tricky, like you kind of pick one and you go, go full bore on it. And you're like, that's the way I'm doing it now. So.
00:14:46
Speaker
Yeah, I don't love, the only way my works where I'm tweaking the tool length offset is because I have dedicated tools for dedicated features. If that tool was used elsewhere on different palettes and stuff, now the length would be weird. You know what I mean? But it works because it's dedicated, so. But yeah, little things we always try to figure out and work on.
Delayed International Order Handling
00:15:14
Speaker
Can I ask your advice on a customer order situation? Yeah. I have a solution to provide this revenue in the future, and I have a solution for this exact instance, but to not prejudice your answer. Customer placed a legitimate order overseas. We ship the order within hours, same day, maybe the next morning.
00:15:40
Speaker
And it was picked up. In this case, it happens to be by the USPS. And we, unlike DHL or FedEx, have had more problems with them. So part of the solution in the future is going to be no longer allowing them to handle international shipments. And I'm not interested in trolling any of the carriers. It's just for whatever reason,
00:15:59
Speaker
The stuff like DHL has had much better tracking consistency, and it never gets stuck in purgatory with customs, which is what has happened to us with USPS probably two or three times in the last year. Oh, that's it? You're lucky. Oh, well, so yeah, so here's the situation.
00:16:18
Speaker
Four-figure order, you know, it's over a thousand dollar order shipping was was hundreds of dollars In our experience with this the past few times Well, I shouldn't say we probably happened more than two or three times only two three times where the customer has Asked us to really get involved and it's kind of been for good reason Every single time the shipment has still arrived it just arrives later than we would all like and that's totally fair because that stinks but
00:16:46
Speaker
This customer was upset. Again, rightfully so. They wanted their order pretty quickly.
00:16:53
Speaker
And the question is how do we handle it? Because we've opened an investigation and there's a chance of course that it never shows up, but it's only been, you know, it's supposed to be there within 10 days. It's been like 12 days now. Now the problem is there hasn't been any tracking updates for seven days. Sometimes we've had that happen when it just doesn't happen to get scanned or something. Sometimes it's against stock and custom. Sometimes it's truly lost. So the question is if we think it's most likely that they're still going to get their order, do we,
00:17:21
Speaker
reship their whole order and incur the hundreds of dollars of shipping cost in the likelihood that they'll end up with double, and I don't think we can just ask them to pay double, or how to... What, do they send it back? No, they don't send it back. They don't pay hundreds of dollars back, and then what does the customer need two of them for?
00:17:40
Speaker
Exactly. It's tricky. Yeah, in only 12 days. In the past, I've given ourselves a 30-day window of if it doesn't drop in 30 days, then we will refund and take action kind of thing. But otherwise, I don't control the postal system, especially for shipping out of Canada, mostly to the United States.
00:18:02
Speaker
It gets stuck at the border for a week sometimes, normally. Tracking just goes dead. People are like, it's been stuck in Chicago for the past 12 days. I'm like, yeah, sorry. Sometimes it shows up in four. We're actually dealing with this. I just saw an email chain yesterday.
00:18:22
Speaker
We shipped a customer bought a pen two, three weeks ago, probably, yeah, two or three weeks ago. It hasn't arrived, no tracking updates. It's being weird. He totally thinks it's lost. He obviously wants it to be a Father's Day present for somebody and he's getting real impatient and we're trying to track it down. There's not much you can do. You can call the postal system, but they can't. Most of the time they're not that helpful. They're not like, oh, there it is. I found it.
00:18:52
Speaker
So do you refund early? Do you just say, chill, wait? It's tough. And it happens to us quite a bit, especially with the tracking slowness. And yeah, we've had possibly dozens in the past year of situations like this.
00:19:16
Speaker
I don't know the number we've, we might've lost one package this year, like two packages in the thousands that we ship. So many, exactly the same thing. Many are delayed. Rarely are they actually ever concluded to be totally lost. Right. Yeah. And that's why I want to give the 30 day window before like, before we deem a thousand dollar knife as being lost. You know, it sucks, sucks for everybody, but, and I, as the business want to, you know, um,
00:19:42
Speaker
stand on the proper ground and be like, yeah, no problem. Send your refund. No big deal. But if he shows up with two knives, he's winning. Well, yeah, it's also just, if it were domestic, I wouldn't care because the cost to ship it back and forth is 30 bucks, not 250 bucks. So I would send him a double order, no problem, and sort of trust on the honor system that if he gets a double, he'll send it back.
00:20:08
Speaker
And again, our stuff is not micro small packages where it could fall between the cracks, perverbially or literally. My thinking is we have a solid ground to stand on by sort of saying, hey, we just need to wait a little bit. We've investigated it or started the investigation. Let's just see what happens.
00:20:30
Speaker
On the flip side, we realized shipping internationally gets super complicated. There's a reason to keep USPS, because it's great if somebody from Canada buys a t-shirt. That's actually pretty inexpensive. It's not so great when people buy big, heavy items overseas. And it gets complicated to try to manage all the different carrier options for different products to different zones at different permission levels. Basically, though,
00:20:56
Speaker
And this is what really stinks. The DHL cost would have been almost the same as the post office cost. And it sinks to tell that guy, oh, you should have chose DHL because that would have been no problem. How was he supposed to do that? Of course. And so going forward, we're testing, we've already tried this. We're going to strip out the post office option. So everything goes DHL. We should solve the problem, which means this is not a recurring problem. It's a one-off problem. And if it's a one-off problem,
00:21:24
Speaker
I feel like the better thing to do is to make the customer whole, like just do it the right way because it's not systemic. And it just does. So I asked him.
00:21:40
Speaker
to wait till the end of the week. And if we haven't had an update, then we're going to just go ahead and eat the cost ourselves, send it all out. And I think that it won't happen again. Every customer is different and has different needs and wants and expectations and desires. I found most of the time they just feel more comfortable with communication. Just some back and forths. Know you're on it. Know you're aware of the problem and are working on it. Sometimes that's never good enough. Sometimes people get uppity way too fast.
00:22:09
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And stand on their high horse. But that's what we were talking about here was, well, it's interesting. If he tries to do a formal, I guess it would have to be a credit card charge back. I don't think he would be successful yet because I think we could tell the credit card company, hey, there's trackable shipping. We have an investigation. There's plenty of time for this to be- It's been 12 days for a USPS international order.
00:22:36
Speaker
I don't like that response. I understand. That's the you and me response, not the customer facing response. You clearly agree that it's not at all wrong to at least wait a little bit of time. 100%. Although I do like that you have a hopefully more bulletproof solution going forward. That's a win.
00:22:59
Speaker
That's awesome.
Challenges with International Shipping
00:23:01
Speaker
It's tricky with us shipping a knife or expensive object across the border from Canada to the US because you ship it Canada post, which turns into USPS. There's no extra duties or fees on it.
00:23:14
Speaker
But if we ship it UPS or DHL and it's over $800, then the person has to pay duties and tax on it. So it's like this loophole that Canada Post has where it just works. Yeah. So I'd love to offer UPS and stuff, but the customer is going to have to pay an extra hundred bucks when he gets it. And no. Yeah. That's brutal. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we've battled with that for a long time.
00:23:45
Speaker
Perfect. Well, that was my major items today to ask you about.
00:23:49
Speaker
All right, what have you been working on? UMC alarms. Yeah. No, it's good. We're 3D printed some cart. Did I tell you about these? The chalk blocks. I'll tell you about them on Instagram. Really happy with how that's coming together. Want to work more on the shipping area to streamline that. And we got it. We got it. I told you this. You've got a DT2. Yeah. That thing is.
00:24:17
Speaker
Amazing. We want to, Grant's kind of running with it. We want to get comfortable with it, but we already did the test that kind of turned me onto it from area 419, which was just take the same code and run it, and it's stupid fast. Now, of course, it's going to depend on your part. Lots of tool changes, you'll get speed, but really it's lots of either holes, ramp ups, or in this case, tapping. I mean, the acceleration, deceleration,
00:24:46
Speaker
you couldn't have a better savings gain than something like tapping. So super happy with how that's going so far. So is it weird watching a program that you kind of know and you're used to and it's just everything's at a faster pace? It doesn't look like it's tapping. It just looks like it's drilling. It's insane, John. It's instant. You would think it's, you know how like, if you watch a big,
00:25:14
Speaker
honking VMC, run a huge tap into a part, it like slows down toward the bottom and it dwells and it reverses back up. This is just like speed, speed through hole drilling, like zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip. And you think in your head, you're like, it's reversing. It's, you know, sinking properly. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's fantastic. Yeah. So do you have specific work you're going to put on it?
00:25:41
Speaker
Yeah, so for now we're doing the new Shapeboco plates. We redesigned those just a win all around for, we used to have two or three different size plates for the different size Shapeboco machines. It was a pretty good attempt to solve a complicated problem about
00:26:01
Speaker
the size of those plates, which is we switched to what are effectively 12 by 12 plates that work on the new shape of the fours and the shape of a pros. And so if you want, if you have a big shape, you end up with nine plates, which sounds like a lot, but it's actually great because it makes them easier to ship, easier to handle. You don't have to buy all nine.
00:26:20
Speaker
And the shape Oco is one of the quirkiest machines for us because almost every other plate that we make, the plate is screwed down to a table and thus inherits the flatness on the machine table itself. Now we make them.
00:26:34
Speaker
pretty darn flat and incredibly parallel, but nevertheless, the fixture plate is ultimately designed to be used in a constrained state. Shepoko didn't have that. So what we actually do is a really good job of not only making them parallel, but making them flat in an unconstrained state and matching the thickness spec.
00:26:57
Speaker
between different plates because you have to exactly so that's been a That's a pretty tall order and it's going pretty well
00:27:05
Speaker
So how does a customer mount nine plates to a parallel surface? Like is the base of the machine flat enough to sync up all the plates? Yeah, it's a great question. So the base of the Shapeboco is a T-slot extrusion. It is not perfect, but it can be stoned or tweaked or I have to, to be honest, I'd have to talk to Vince to see what the latest kind of look at is on that. But we,
00:27:34
Speaker
First off, we still want ours to be good and flat and all that.
Production of Shapeboco Plates
00:27:37
Speaker
And, um, you, you, it's a shape book. I'm not as concerned about this minor variations on the bottom left quadrant as 30 inches away on the top, right? Nevertheless, we want it to be, uh, let me get back to you next week on that. Cause I don't know exactly what they were saying or what they found. It's curious though. Or yeah, you have to, you have to wage your, uh, expectations with reality in that sense. Yeah.
00:28:04
Speaker
Yeah. What are you going to do? Awesome. Um, not filming. I feel like I should film something. It's okay. Yeah. No, it's, it's fine. I'm just kind of feeling both the itch and the need, the expectation, I guess, um, to do that. Um, that's okay. Just trying to decide if it'll be like a project or a.
00:28:29
Speaker
I don't know, pick up the camera and talk about something. We, not even me, outside of my control, since we did the shop tour like two weeks ago, quite a few things have changed already. Fraser came to me and he's like, so how about we switch offices? I was like, oh, okay, go for it. I was like, I could either sit here and think about it for way too long, or I could just be like, you know, that's a great idea, go nuts.
00:28:57
Speaker
And then by that evening, it was done. So my old office was much bigger and now him and Ryan can both moved into that. And it's like, I walked in yesterday for the first time and I'm like, holy cow, this looks so right. This looks amazing. You guys got room for all the shipping, all the photography, all your work. It's great. And then now I'm in the, their old smaller office and it's fine. Cause I barely use it anyway. Yeah, right. Right. So it's great idea. Yeah. So it's neat when things like that happen.
00:29:27
Speaker
It's funny. In the company, right? Right. It's awesome. We're reorganizing the whole Kern area. As I bring more guys onto the Kern, I realize that's no longer my R&D cell, my home. So that's going well. Move the Regofix power tool pressing unit right beside the tool changer on the Kern, which is amazing.
00:29:52
Speaker
Oh yeah, of course, where it should be. Yeah. I used to walk all around the shop to change the tool and now it's like two feet away. I'm like, yes. And then the microscope is also right beside it. Um, so I inspect the tool, change the tool, get it going. Oh, it's so great. That's there's some more stuff like that. The spaghetti map type moving around efficiency stuff that, um, I value a lot more when you're trying to
Shop Efficiency Improvements
00:30:17
Speaker
do it and live it. Like you kind of take for granted how much, um,
00:30:21
Speaker
wasted motion there is and I kinda didn't, I didn't respect it enough when you hear people talk about it in books or other examples and now you're like, oh no, this is real. You get so used to doing your way of doing it. Like on the current, when I replace a tool, I take out one tool at a time, I get the end mill, I replace it, I clean it, I put it back and then I get the next one. And whereas how Angela would wanna do it, he's like, can't I just take out the 10 that I need to replace and then,
00:30:49
Speaker
replace them and put them all back. And it's like, no, but why am I saying no? Hold on. I don't know. We have to, you know, plan it out and figure out which is the most optimal method without making mistakes and things like that. So it's interesting to have other perspectives making you question why you do the way you do. You know, because now I'm walking around the shop 10 times to do 10 tools. Right. Right. So the spaghetti just got longer.
00:31:17
Speaker
We used to have our little Sandvik scrap carbide in over in the corner of the shop and it just got moved to where, guess where it got moved, to where we changed. Exactly. Fun fact, it makes a lot more sense there. Yeah. Ours is a plastic bucket in the middle of the shop. And just yesterday, Angelo was like, because I took a little plastic like container and put it right under the Regofix unit. Because I'm like, this is where the two, I'm just going to drop it in here. And then once a week, I'll empty that.
00:31:43
Speaker
And then Angela's like, yeah, we should move the bucket here too, because this is where we use it. You don't think about it until you do, and then it's way too obvious, and then you feel dumb. Yeah, that's what it is. It's great. Yeah.
00:31:57
Speaker
But that's why you almost want somebody to come through who knows machining, but doesn't really know your business and just be like, what, you know, kind of in that like Dick's last resort, like just being totally rude to you. Like, why are you doing it this way? Like, why am I, you're just like watching people.
00:32:17
Speaker
Yeah, if the receiver of that, the being watched person had an open mind and was willing to take some annoying criticism, that can be very powerful. Yeah. Well, it's not personal. Just challenge it. You've got to make that clear. Otherwise, you're going to feel attacked on every corner. Yeah, thick skin. Know what it is, right?
00:32:38
Speaker
a little bit hem hauling over this final flow of fulfilling orders. And one of the big things is, you know, heavy fixture plates. Like that's more complicated than parcels that you can move around by hand. And so we got a new dolly cart that is beefy enough that we can modify with just four holes in the top that makes it a fixture plate cart, which is great for us to have you to make our own. That seems to work. That just came in yesterday. So now that flow,
00:33:10
Speaker
lifting the plate off when it's finally ready to go into the crate. And I was thinking about like an A-frame or something that's overhead that gives us a safe and easy way of moving those around. And then I was like, wait a minute here, a jib crane actually makes more sense. And the only reason I don't like jib cranes is they kind of have to get bolted down and they're permanent. But this is one of those instances where I think it still wins because a jib crane, although it's permanent, is only a 12 inch bolt pattern.
00:33:28
Speaker
really should be
00:33:36
Speaker
in the floor, whereas an A-frame kind of, yeah, it's on wheels, but it's a huge footprint. And a jib crane actually is nice to the way it swings. And frankly, I should have some conviction around, okay, the plate comes off, it goes here, it goes here. And then it kind of meets up with the, we have the stack of boxes or our crates right next to the door. It swings around. We have the permanent VCI paper right there. So you don't have to move it. It just gets pulled out. The crate goes underneath it. It's like a little sandwich.
00:34:04
Speaker
If you watch McDonald's people build a sandwich, it's like the ketchup is already on a pre-squirter. You just pull that. It goes to the three dollops. Then when you're done, the plate is already in the right place for pickup. That's exactly what should happen. Once the plate is in the box, the crate, how does it get picked up by the guy?
00:34:30
Speaker
Once it's in the crate, it would have already had a bill of lading because we had that printed out ahead of time. And so then our trucking company will come pick it up. When they come up, they walk in the door to tell us they're here. We then hop on the forklift to load it into their truck. If we ever get or move into a place that has a loading dock, which would be really nice, that means the truck is already backed up to your loading dock. You open the door and you just pallet jacket into the truck, which is frankly a lot nicer than having to
00:34:57
Speaker
Fire the forklift. Yeah, exactly. But what if you have multiple plate orders, multiple crates ready to go at a time? We just queue them up. We usually don't have, I think the most we ever really get on any regular basis is three. And so they're just kind of in succession. But you have the table space or floor space for them, I guess. We do. And the freight usually gets picked up the same day, sometimes the next day. But it's not ideal.
00:35:27
Speaker
I guess what I'm thinking is if you're going to bolt something to the floor, think of growth. Think of what this is going to look like if you have eight orders in one day kind of thing. So if your point being the final packing may be different than shipping, and I guess the answer is once it's on the crate efficiently, then having a pallet jack
00:35:51
Speaker
that you where you just pallet jacket down 10 feet or 20 feet. That's not a big deal. Right. I understand your point. You don't really want to stack them. You don't want to stack them because that gets complicated on freight. Like if you don't want the freight to get merged by accident. Right.
00:36:08
Speaker
Okay, good to know.
Improving Heavy Fixture Plate Workflow
00:36:10
Speaker
Yeah. So like a jib crane being a sky hook, basically? It'd be, yeah, like for the industrial jib crane that has like the floor mounted thing with just a swing arm, but similar to a sky hook, but it would be straight up and then a hard wrangle sky hooks are kind of that like 45 thing. Yeah. All of these efficiencies.
00:36:33
Speaker
Right, but that's what you want is that kind of, I don't need, you don't necessarily have to go through a complicated instruction process. Like it should be kind of obvious, like it comes off the machine, it goes here, it's cues here, we cue see it, we do final cleaning and so forth, pull in the other accessories packed out the door. Well, when a system is right, it looks simple. Like it might be complex, but it looks simple from the outside. You know, you show somebody and they go, that just makes sense.
00:37:02
Speaker
Obviously you came up with that and like, no, it took me 10 years to come up with this, but yes, this is our current thing and it's still got issues, but yeah, it does look pretty good, doesn't it?
00:37:14
Speaker
What are you up to today? Today, I'm going to make some more lock inserts. I figured out that auto probing thickness, height, tool offset, measuring routine, which is complex in Heidenhein. They've let you read from system parameters fairly easily, but to write to system parameters, like write to the tool table, much more complicated. Interesting. I had to learn the basics of SQL programming to be able to
00:37:40
Speaker
access the table file, the database. Interesting. You're trying to change the tool length? Yeah. You can't add a wear length easily.
00:37:49
Speaker
That's what I'm changing, the wear. You can do this within the probe operation itself, like probe surface, it should be this, make it this. That's easy, except I've got four inserts on the fixture and I want to average them. And I've got a fixture base that I want to average the flatness of that base too. So let me probe four points, average them, that's my datum. Let me probe four points on the four inserts, average them, that's my height. So I'm making it more complex than I,
00:38:16
Speaker
Maybe need to but I need to because I want to sure it works now interesting. Yeah Yeah, it started a JavaScript online course just I mean the end goal is to get better at post processor stuff But it's really a side benefit to me just doing this because I legitimately enjoy Basic programming, so
Learning JavaScript for Post Processor Programming
00:38:38
Speaker
it's been fun. That's awesome. Yeah
00:38:40
Speaker
How is it doing a non-related class? You're not editing post processors in that online class, but you're learning Java generally. How's that? I started with the beginner level, assuming you know nothing, which is
00:38:56
Speaker
Frustrating because I know 80 to 90% of it, like I know the basic syntax and you kind of fly through it, but I think it's a mistake to jump to the next level because there's stuff in JavaScript that's quirky and unique to it in the new rev, like E6 or whatever is, like I need to learn these basics. I'm not too good for that. So it's still a lot of basic if-thens and inputting variables into statements, understand their logic. It's great. I'm enjoying it.
00:39:24
Speaker
I didn't even know there was a new Rev and E6. I have no idea about that. Well, that's one reason why I'm also glad to at least recognize what that is. Yeah. That's the thing. When you think you have a decent handle on it, even though you and I are years away from blindly, eyes closed programming JavaScript, we just don't need to get there.
00:39:47
Speaker
You think you know stuff, so you're in the class and you're like, yeah, okay, I know that, I know that. But it's that 10% that they might say you have to pay attention to hear that 10%. That's all the value in the whole thing, right? Right.
00:40:00
Speaker
Like I got tripped up. We just did a really good post processor video. Julie's editing it, it will be out in July. And this is inspired heavily by a modification that CJ made. And I was going through this code example, and I was like, what does continue mean? And it was in the middle of an if statement. And I was like, that's such a strange word, because basically it was checking something, but if the tool type was a probe,
00:40:26
Speaker
the next statement said continue, which in layman's terms means proceed, but really what continue means in a JavaScript if statement is continue running the if statement, but skip the rest of the if statement code for this instance.
00:40:41
Speaker
Okay, so I continue on so if you're doing it for for then loop so it's iterating through 20 things if you hit that continue metric it skips instance 13 that you're on and Goes the next instance 14 and then parses the rest of that Super handy. Yeah, once you understand the concept behind it, right? Yeah, like I've been
00:41:05
Speaker
the SQL programming in hide-and-hide is just little paragraphs to be able to read the table, write to the table, do certain things, and only if you want to do text-based edits. Numbers are pretty easy. You can use other functions, but anything to do with text, you have to use SQL style of things. So yeah, I got to learn how to do that. You got to
00:41:26
Speaker
You got to bind the parameter. You got to handle, fetch, batch, commit, all these things to be able to do it. And it's like reading the hide and hide programming manual. Once I got to that section a bunch of months ago, I was like, whoa, that is way beyond me. Skip. But now I'm going back to it. I'm like, OK, finally, it takes time. But I finally kind of understand it. And I love writing all these custom
00:41:51
Speaker
custom programs, decode programs that, you know, jump around if this probe value equals this.
00:41:58
Speaker
The thing I think we've talked about before, but it keeps biting me because I keep forgetting. When you want to start in the middle of the program and you do a block scan, it will write any variables that it reads. So like if there's a section where you probe and the probe value is in parameter 160 and you say 160 equals parameter two or whatever, because you're storing it, it'll do that with a zero value.
00:42:26
Speaker
And then it'll move on and it'll count up your engraving code. Sure. Do all that. So I figured out the code to skip that function. Like it knows it's running block scan. Let's just skip this. So I have to implement that everywhere that I need to. And it bit me again yesterday. I'm like, Oh, why is it doing that? Oh, yeah. Okay. I know how to do that. Yeah. I got that somewhere.
00:42:45
Speaker
So I actually have a huge text document of hidden programming notes. Yeah, where it's just like, these are what all the cute parameters mean. And these are what you know, here's your basic things. And if you want to make a number into a whole integer with no plus, no minus, just the number. Yeah, you know, this is the thing absolute value. Yeah, all my little notes to do that. That's cool. Yeah.
Automating Kern Machine Operations
00:43:11
Speaker
So yeah, that's, uh, that's, that's taken up a lot of my time doing things like that. And I love it. And, uh, you know, I try to think of what the goal is. The goal is to have such a reliable process that it just, I don't, I can move on to other things. Yeah. Right. And I'm, I'm getting there. I'm there with a lot of things and I'm close on a lot of other things. So just keep going. And you're still pushing, not with sanding, uh, hiccups this morning, you're pushing the current off to Angela.
00:43:41
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, more and more every day, which is great. The other guys, Steven for loading the Kern and Angela for running the Kern and it's going really well. Awesome. Yeah, it's fantastic. Good. See you next week. Yeah, man. Sounds good. Have an awesome day.