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#309 "The World Is Not Perfect"
244 Plays2 years ago
Topics:
- "the world is not perfect". Making parts to tolerance.
- cutting foam
- Insurance claims
- Lasers!
- making small parts with vacuum
- Lapping parts to ultimate flatness
- Willemin install at SMW
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Good
Introducing the Podcast and Hosts
00:00:00
Speaker
morning and welcome to the Business of Machining, Episode 309. My name is Jon Grimsmough. My name is Jon Saunders.
00:00:07
Speaker
And this is the weekly podcast we've been doing for six plus years on our manufacturing journeys through growing our companies, which started much more than six years ago. But kind of the lessons and tips and tricks and just the daily check in with each other, private conversation of what's going on. So that's a funny way you just phrase that is funny because the bomb still feels new to me. Yeah. And it feels
00:00:35
Speaker
new relative to the journey, but it's now going to be the case that we've been doing the bomb longer than we've been doing real machine.
Reflections on Podcast Beginnings
00:00:44
Speaker
Wait. Fast forward five years, we'll have been doing the Bob for 11 years if we're somewhere like that, whereas we've only been machining for whatever, 16 years. Bob will have been the lion's share of our career. Exactly. That's so strange to me. Well, it's funny. I think back to the origins of this, even before we hit record and we would still do this every week when our young sons would sit on our lap and say hi to each other. Yes. When they were like two or whatever it was. Yeah, that's actually took very much correct.
00:01:14
Speaker
and you might have had one employee and I had zero, Eric, my brother. A lot has happened since we started this podcast. Yes. That's very strange now. I'm remembering because I did this from my home office. Me too. Yeah. My home office became Leif's bedroom. He took it from me. Oh, really? Yeah. That's funny. I've been living at the kitchen table for my office for the past six years.
00:01:44
Speaker
Well, but I haven't even been to your current house, which is weird.
Travel Plans for 2023
00:01:49
Speaker
Cause I still think of your house. We've been there for three years. Um, yeah. So being early in 2023, I think one or both of us need to, you know, visit countries and, uh, say hi. Yes. Uh, I'll second that. Yeah. Good. Cool. So how's it going? What's up?
00:02:14
Speaker
One
Challenges in Machining Tolerances
00:02:15
Speaker
of the things that we just added, which I really like, I'll caveat it by saying, I wonder if this will be controversial, but hey, let's keep it real. The world is not perfect.
00:02:29
Speaker
And there's some parts that we like to make where we really like to hold tight tolerances. So things like parallelism, excuse me, the thickness of our modify spaces or the dimension of the top jaw that's kind of critical. And it's fun because if you do it all correctly, you can hold some pretty incredible tolerances, especially on modern machines, but
00:02:52
Speaker
machines move, tools wear, fixtures move, blah, blah, blah. So one of the things I realized that we stunk at was how are we adjusting for changes there? And so you could, I'm thinking out loud here, ways you could easily do it, you could
00:03:14
Speaker
override the fixture or the coordinate system. Usually
Tool Length Compensation Debate
00:03:19
Speaker
it's Z, but sometimes it's actually an X dimension. But nevertheless, you could override that. You can override the tool length.
00:03:28
Speaker
by adding your tool length or wear comp as well. It's funny because I feel like wear comp is a lot more accepted, but overriding the tool length seems sacrilegious. Agreed. Or you can do things like stock to leave infusion, axial or radial, negative or positive. That's interesting. Between the three, what I noticed is they're all three different root causes.
00:03:51
Speaker
But the machinist, the end user or the maker of the thing has dealer's choice between all three things. Which can I do? And me knowing what I know now, they all have different root causes. Like if it's thermal, change your G53. If it's the tool itself that's wearing, change the tool length. If it's the material or the process or the cutting force or the consistent thing, then leave more stock to leave.
00:04:20
Speaker
Do you change your G53? On the Nakamura we do. Okay. That seems crazy to me because you're sort of lying to the overall machine. Yes. I don't know if we still do, but because we have this turret probe, we could probe the OD of a bar, like turn a diameter, probe it in four points,
00:04:45
Speaker
Yeah. And now you know if your spindle and your X tool are on center or not.
Tracking and Adjusting Critical Dimensions
00:04:52
Speaker
And we would come for thermal growth based on that. Okay. And it was very good. For X only, wouldn't you just do the two points on the bar on the extremes of the X? Maybe. I'm asking not. Yeah. And actually, I think the
00:05:07
Speaker
I don't know if we do J53 on the tornos, but both of them do have thermal growth that you notice. Cold machine to an hour in, it's half a thou to a thou on the tornos and could be more on the neck. I don't actually know how Pierre does it nowadays, but I just know he does something well.
00:05:26
Speaker
So that's exactly what I wanted to address, which is who does it, why do they do it, how do they do it, and do you want to create a process around it? And look, I'm not trying to go overboard on processes, but some of this stuff is just super basic in how helpful it is. So on the process bin for parts where we have
00:05:45
Speaker
critical tolerances. What we do, we've got the dimensioned drawing, that's its laminated thing. And then I started printing out a page. The idea is for each critical dimension will have its own printed out piece of paper and it has on it. Interesting. Again, this is kind of fluid. Yep.
00:06:06
Speaker
It has, what's the product? What's the dimension? What's the work coordinate system used or the range that are used? And then how do we adjust the dimensions? And I have three fields, which are what I just said. Override the work coordinate system, adjust the tool length, or fusion axial radial.
Strategies for Maintaining Machining Tolerances
00:06:23
Speaker
It gives you a very simple way of reminding yourself, reminding somebody else what you're doing, make sure you're not fighting each other. And I feel like I have a lot of anxiety building about saying this because I think adjusting the first two is often wrong, to be clear. I don't want tool wear and G-54.
00:06:44
Speaker
Yeah. So I always want to be able to re-probe a coordinate system. Yes. You just should. So if you are constantly copying it, look, first off, something's probably wrong, or you've got some- Well, that's the thing. If there's a problem, something's probably wrong. No, totally. Totally. I'm not trying to comment on that right now. Of course, if there's something wrong or it moves, you got to fix it. But
00:07:11
Speaker
So, cause my, here's my thing. We should be able to, let's say we're going to re skim a fixture. We don't do that often, but sometimes you do. You should be able to re skim a fixture, you know, Dike him in. If you want to re skim it, re probe it off, retouch off the tool that's doing it. And you should then on a one year old Okuma, MB four thousand, you should be pretty darn close. Sure. Thermal stuff. Sure. Spring passes. There's some other,
00:07:38
Speaker
factors that play, but that's the recipe I want. And so the reason that leads us to most likely doing stock to leave is that it's the most intelligent one. Not that it's smart in and of itself, but at least you can mark it on this piece of paper and then in Fusion, you can see the operator intent. Like, oh, it's a half inch dimension, but we're actually leaving three tenths because all else equal, I'd rather it be three tenths over than
00:08:04
Speaker
on or under that sort of a thing. That kind of few tenths of stock to leave is a tricky number to dial in, especially with steady production like what we're doing.
00:08:15
Speaker
Like on the current super accurate machine, I do leave stock to leave sometimes often negative values to hit the diameter that I want.
Impact of Probing Tool Diameters
00:08:23
Speaker
And it also has to hit that diameter within the tool life of that tool. So brand new tool and worn out tool within the 79 minutes of tool life or whatever my history tells me is acceptable.
00:08:38
Speaker
And that's just kind of experience. How much stock to leave keeps you with intolerance without having to mess with the tool wear at all. Yeah, exactly. Because you should be able to... I mean, you've got better diameter comp. We don't really have it on the horizontal. Apparently, the
00:09:00
Speaker
table probe on the horizontal could do it, but Okuma sort of said it doesn't, somebody else emailed said it could. It's not something I'm worried about today. Oh, so you mean you don't actually probe tool diameter? We don't really do that, period. Gross. Yeah, so we can check it on the Spironi.
00:09:19
Speaker
Well, so how do you, I'm just curious. So like if you're using a three eighth inch end mill, three seven five, and it comes out, well, does it come out over because of run out or under because it's ground smaller? Either. Yeah. Almost always under, but sometimes over. And if it's over red flag, it's like something's wrong. Like you check run out. Oh, cause it's got a thousand and a half of run out. Right.
00:09:38
Speaker
Obviously. Often under because tool manufacturers have the plus zero minus two thou tolerance. That range for like their end mills. Yeah. Yeah. So we use cutter comp for all critical xy dimensions in fusion so that it uses that
00:09:59
Speaker
probe
Managing Tool Wear
00:10:00
Speaker
diameter of the tool, so not 375, but 374 or 82 or something. Yeah. And then it comps accordingly. And then you still want to play with the stock to leave infusion because you're like, okay, my tool is accurate. I'm using cutter cop. It's still making the whole undersize. Let me do negative two tenths stock to leave. You can't just run it again because now you're spring passing it. That's not like a production process.
00:10:24
Speaker
So you make that part work, you do the next part, fresh tool, fresh and check. That's been the development process and now it's all dialed and I don't screw with that stuff like ever and we just get perfect parts. So you don't ever mess with the
00:10:42
Speaker
Fusion stock to lead. Now that it's the first few prototypes, yes, you're playing with it all the time. But once you're in a production process, no, not often, not daily. That's awesome. So obviously, you're going to change tools as they wear out. Your current will automatically re-measure the diameter. So that's a closed loop self-contained process. Exactly. That's awesome. Yeah. And there are a few tools.
00:11:08
Speaker
where we do manually tweak radial wear.
00:11:13
Speaker
or even axial wear. I use a single flute thread mill to do an upper and a lower chamfer on the blade, like a 60 degree thing. Sometimes it'll cut deeper on the top side, so you got to comp it up just a little bit, like give me a foul vertical. And we do not have this process documented at all. If the finishing guys, which Sky brought a blade to me today, and he said, yeah, the chamfer on the top is bigger than it is on the bottom, we should fix that.
00:11:42
Speaker
I can't just tell it to Angelo cause he doesn't know what tool that is. Like I know it's tool one 10 and I know it needs a foul, but like he doesn't know that. And I wish, I mean you printing out those things, the process bins, like this is what you typically tweak on this part. That'd be super helpful for us.
00:11:59
Speaker
What I like about it is most of our parts might have two of these. I'm talking about way under a thou. The way we run stuff, these aren't plus or minus two thou dimensions that we're worried about.
00:12:15
Speaker
Even on the current, we've got well over 100 tools. There's probably less than 10 or five that need manual massaging of wear comp that doesn't get done automatically.
Finishing Techniques with Face Mills
00:12:29
Speaker
It's five pieces of paper stuck to the side of the machine or something. Exactly. Why aren't we doing this?
00:12:35
Speaker
The two other tools that this has been kind of what started this, one is just using the face mills to give that final, like five, I don't know how deep the axial cut is, but maybe five thou finish pass for our parts that make them look good. And it's that just final dimension as well. Those inserts will wear a fair amount within the acceptable use window, if that makes sense.
00:13:01
Speaker
And so how do you retouch off of that or not chase your tail? And that program that we wrote where it finds the high one of each one has been... But would you run that on a used tool? Well, a defined used tool. If it's cut metal, like would you retouch it off again? Oh, we do all the time. Really? Oh yeah, absolutely. And it's been great. Okay.
00:13:25
Speaker
Here's a question. Since you're using a two, three, four inch face mill to cut steel 4140 and you want surface finish and you want accurate thickness,
00:13:40
Speaker
Do you have a good strategy for how you do that? Does it do the entire surface finish with one tool or do you have a roughing face mill and a finished face mill? Yeah, we use a doesn't matter face mill to rough it. Sometimes there's quite a few in the horizontal at this point. Some of them are
00:13:57
Speaker
the 45 degree angled style. We literally have the ones from Sandvik YG1 and I think Marty's cool. And then we use some two inch, I think it's like APKT, but it's the 90 degree insert style ruffers because we need to rough up to or closer to a shoulder. And then we really only use, I shouldn't say we only, the Mitsubishi WWX has been a go-to
00:14:26
Speaker
I believe there are some situations where we're using 390s. Again, this isn't actually something I use the WWX. I think some of the other folks are using either 390s or even CoroCut 300s, both are Sandvik tooling. But yeah, we have a very dedicated finisher, only cuts a few of that. Like
Optimizing Surface Finish and Tool Life
00:14:44
Speaker
I said, it works great. Do you go roughing your hogging out material, leaving 5,000, 10,000, whatever your magic number is for finishing?
00:14:55
Speaker
you're expecting that to be the right semi-finish thickness so that your finisher might have $5,000 one day, might have $6,000 the next day. So I would say, if I'm understanding your question correctly, the pre-finish axial stock isn't critical on facing like it is on say, reading.
00:15:16
Speaker
Okay, if that finisher is cutting three thou versus seven thou, it doesn't care. You don't notice a thickness difference or anything like that. I mean, that's not a test I've done, but it's not had to do because it just hasn't. We don't change it. We don't change it either. Like the roughers don't know it's not an issue. I would say interesting because I've noticed on the current specifically because that's the mill I play with the most. Even the speed you a little bit.
00:15:42
Speaker
that the roughing pass, you do whatever. And then I usually come in and do, if I really care about the surface, I'll do a semi-finished pass with maybe a sharper tool and I'll leave exactly five thou. And then my finisher, Sharp, only does finishing, comes in, does that floor. And then
00:15:57
Speaker
Because I was noting thickness variations. If I just went rough finish, the finish thickness tolerance was kind of all over the place, at least as tight as I can measure it. And then I went finisher, semi-finish, finish, and I'm hitting a tenth.
00:16:15
Speaker
often and better surface finish too. I do the same thing radially, like for a side cut on the blades. I
Consistency in Production Processes
00:16:23
Speaker
have a roughing end mill, a semi-finished end mill that takes off five thou and then a finished end mill that takes off another five thou. That put tool life through the roof and surface finish through the roof.
00:16:34
Speaker
because especially profiling around the outside of these blades, they're kind of abrasive and they will chip out end mills. If my rougher gets chipped, then my finisher will get chipped because the rougher is cutting a streak into the side of the part. Then the finisher is eating up that streak and wearing out and creating another streak. Now that I have three, I notice the rougher dies, the semi finisher starts to streak and the finisher stays good and I just replace them all at the same time.
00:17:00
Speaker
Oh, you don't index them up? I used to, but it got too confusing. Yeah, right. And so I just didn't care at that point. I was like, dude, just replace them. I know that finisher looks brand new, and it could be a rougher, but it's got somewhere, so whatever. It's a $20 end mill. Just move it. And the last thing, because there's like that whole like, oh man, there's ways we could efficiently optimize some business stuff. And then sometimes you're like, I just, right now, I just want to, no, don't care.
00:17:27
Speaker
Yeah, I need a process that I give to Angelo. He can give somebody else that just like works. Our program tells you to change the tools so you change the tools. You
Router Improvements and Foam Cutting
00:17:35
Speaker
don't think which one it goes into and all that stuff.
00:17:39
Speaker
What you just said, spot on, and Ed does that with end mills for us as well. The huge difference in everything you said, tolerances, finish, service quality on solid carbide end mills. I don't believe we see that sort of situation when you're taking such a small depth of cut with a giant face mill. On a very rigid machine. Yeah. Yeah.
00:18:04
Speaker
I mean, I have like three face mills to my name and I never use them. Yeah. Right. That's funny. Yeah. Yeah. What do you have to play with the router? Actually the guys are running it, but I've been playing it, tweaking it, adding upgrades and things like that. Um, kind of getting it closer to that little things like dust filtration, dust sucker upper dust boot. Um, so I printed one the other night and it, it works.
00:18:33
Speaker
way better than expected. And it's one of those things I had in my mind like, yeah, I'm going to print a dust boot or I'll buy one or something. And then the guys kind of just duct taped the vacuum hose next to the spindle as like, well, we're doing this anyway. Let's try. And it kind of worked. It was big dust. It actually got all of the dust that it makes out of the air because that dust used to settle on the spindle and the gantry on everything.
00:18:58
Speaker
That's gone now, so that's a huge improvement. And then the chunkies, you have to aim next to the tool to be able to suck them up. But that impetus got me to be like, okay, great start. Let's finish this up. Whereas I might have waited for another few weeks to print the dust boot or whatever.
00:19:19
Speaker
So that's working so good. And we actually put a little air blast as well so that it blows the chips up and sucks them into the dust boot. Oh, it agitates the... Yep, yep. Yeah. So we tried it first with 100 PSI, and we're like, we're going to blow holes and stuff. So they turned their way down to, I don't know, 20 or something. It's not much, but plenty to agitate the chips and get them up. And it's working really, really well.
00:19:47
Speaker
So now we're cutting foam production. Everything's good. We got Rask, Saga, Norseman.
00:19:53
Speaker
Everything's looking good.
Foam Loading Challenges and Solutions
00:19:55
Speaker
That foam, the XLP foam is just glue to end mills. It's so weird. And I was actually chatting with the guy who's making your foamy's because he reached out to me and he's like, yeah, I'm loading up end mills too, like exactly like you guys. And I've got special end mills dedicated, like made for this material and they're still loading up. I don't know what's going on.
00:20:18
Speaker
I talked to another guy who's cutting the same form. They're like, yep, same problem. I don't know what's going on. We just clean the tools out every run. I'm like, that's, that's where we're at right now too. Like cycles about an hour. And after that hour, you got to take a Popsicle stick or something and just kind of like clean the flutes off.
00:20:35
Speaker
Does
Innovative Tool Experiments
00:20:35
Speaker
this foam, does it have a kryptonite, like acetone or mineral spirits? Yeah, I know. I suppose I want to know too. You could just go differently. I want to put a little bucket of acetone or ISO or something under the tool rack. So when it puts it away, it just soaks for a few minutes, whatever. And then the second it starts cutting, it just breaks off. So Angela's briefly tested with that, but we'll look more into it.
00:21:00
Speaker
Oh my gosh, way back, like first Tormach garage basement. It was a Yahoo groups or Google groups. There was like a more active version of stuff and a guy had built a, what do you call it, engine turning or like a swirling? Okay.
00:21:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. Guilloche or whatever they call it. It's just the overlapping swirl patterns. Like you see it on big old airplanes or fire trucks. Oh, sorry, that's a radial engine turning. Yes. Something. Yeah. So he had taken a hot, almost like a rubber cylinder, like an eraser, hard rubber.
00:21:38
Speaker
in a collet and he built a program that would say you know the gco part of it's easy like you know move over half the diameter of the rubber that's no big deal at all but then every x number it would move over to a little you know
00:21:53
Speaker
a puddle tray that had some diamond lapping abrasive in it, and it would recharge the rubber, go back, do five more, go back. At the time, I didn't really even understand how you could do that with the let function or code that could count up and induce an action, a post processor, which could have a separate subroutine. Now, I would be like, okay, I can tackle that. I could figure that out. That's awesome.
00:22:17
Speaker
Yeah, I remember when I started in knife making that was kind of popular for a little while using a Kratex stick, a little quarter inch abrasive rod that has rubber and sand in it or whatever abrasive. And yeah, people would do that kind of engine turning in a drill press by hand kind of thing.
Insurance Concerns for Machining
00:22:36
Speaker
There's another name for it that's going to bother me. Engine turning is what I think of.
00:22:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's what it is. My geometric pattern turned into a finish. It doesn't look really cool. I've never actually done it. I bought Craytex and everything, and it would be so easy to do on them.
00:22:56
Speaker
I did it on a name plate that I made for myself, my own name, in 2012, on my 2011, on my old X2 Mini Mill, but with an end mill. And I just did a drilling cycle and plowed an end mill 100 times into the surface of the part. And it looks super cool. Yeah. And you know how the end of an end mill is actually tapered up towards the center a little bit? So it left this kind of jouly finish on the surface of the part. And I actually should play with that more. That's cool.
00:23:26
Speaker
That's cool. Did I close the loop last week on insurance? I don't think you closed it. No, you mentioned a few weeks ago. Okay. Insurance guy was listening to a podcast. You were complaining about it. Yeah. So the update is that it is believed that we would have been covered. I chose not to file a claim, but
00:23:52
Speaker
I have mixed feelings about it because at the end of the day, what matters is we believe we have the coverage. It's a little bit snarky because... What was the incident again? Well, the incident in question was... Oh, crashing a machine? Yeah, operator mistake DT2 spindle. Right.
00:24:12
Speaker
So it appears to be the case that yes, this is exactly what you have coverage for off kind of a verbal conversation, which I mean, I interpret is kind of off the record was what we wouldn't cover would be if, if the crash was really just due to wear and tear and the
00:24:30
Speaker
the machine getting worn out over time. Which is fair. Yeah, totally agree. But I still feel a little bit mixed because it's kind of like, you know, you have a car and you buy car insurance and you know, you make a mistake and you drive off the road and flip your car into a creek.
00:24:47
Speaker
I either have insurance or I don't. I understand if the policy says, well, you didn't buy, there's a lot of these terms like actual cash value or full replacement value and that defies different premiums, but it's kind of like, do I have insurance or not?
Introducing Laser Engraving
00:25:03
Speaker
If we goof and we crash a machine, do I have coverage? And the answer is still, it depends. There has to be an investigation in a case. And I don't know how much time I really want to go spend trying to read more into the policy. What threw me off, and one of the reasons I was more poignant in our original conversation was that the marketing flyer I dug back up really made this policy sound like it had more to do with
00:25:29
Speaker
let's say a pump on a machine through no fault of anybody, so the pump just randomly fails. Well, now you've got downtime, you've got repair, replacement, all that. That clearly is what they marketed for as well. And he was sort of saying, yeah, they don't want to necessarily put in there, oh, and we cover operator crashes because everyone may come and say, there's a moral hazard on their side. So I'll leave it at that. That's where we're at.
00:25:59
Speaker
Interesting. My insurance company liked the post that I made yesterday or the story that I made. I was like, oh, you guys. What was the post? Just one of my stories about the router last night, like random. My insurance company is also whoever's running their social account, whatever, like the post. I was like, I don't normally see you guys. That's funny. Do you use a local area broker? Yeah.
00:26:26
Speaker
Yeah, they kind of do our house and the business and it's been good. Do you get involved in that? In what sense?
00:26:35
Speaker
They've asked us this question before, like, do you design products? Which is a weird question. Because I mean, look, the shortest answer is yes. We design fixture plates. We design a lot of devices. But it's kind of a no in the sense that, like, no. If someone calls us up, they're like, hey, we need a contraption that can launch a pumpkin over four cars. Can you help us design it? Like, no, no, no. We machine, like, basic steel plates. Like, that makes sense. They don't ask you that. I don't know if it's different in Canada. OK.
00:27:09
Speaker
I want to thank everybody for the awesome amount of feedback I got on lasers because apparently a lot of people have lasers. I'm the one missing the boat here.
00:27:21
Speaker
Mixed reviews, everybody has their own favorites. A lot of people have and like CO2 lasers, a lot of great suggestions either for the boss or against the boss. If people have one, they like it. If they have something else, they like that. Got it.
00:27:39
Speaker
but generally that's good. I don't know if I'd need or want to buy a $10,000 plus CO2 laser. So thinking
Considering a New Laser Purchase
00:27:47
Speaker
on what you said and what a bunch of the guys said too of putting a laser diode on the router itself, I looked into that and there's like this $1,000 one that's pretty powerful and
00:27:59
Speaker
built like the Maso documentation for adding a laser literally says use this laser. Oh, dude. And it's like kind of a no-brainer and it looks like it will absolutely do my intention, my goals, which is really just to engrave our logo on the phone. Yeah. So I'm like minutes away from just pulling the trigger and buying that $1,000 laser and like see what happens.
00:28:23
Speaker
Is it diode? It's a diode, yeah. It's a blue light diode laser, six watt, something like that. But I watched all the videos on YouTube and a bunch of guys in their garage just testing it out or getting the so-and-so, it's OPT laser. They're like, op laser sent me this diode to blah, blah, blah test. And they're cutting through wood and acrylic and super accurate beam, like tight, tight beam. So they're engraving very small font if they need to. So good.
00:28:53
Speaker
Yeah, it looks cool. It looks really neat. I realize I could just look up the one we bought quite easily. It was eBay bought, jeez, six years ago. That's crazy. It was a 445 nanometer, 2500 milliwatt. Is that 2.5 watts?
00:29:13
Speaker
What? I don't know. It's a $70. So let's be clear, like nothing compared to what $1,000 one should be and six years. I think lasers have my understanding is that they are getting cheaper more so than they're getting more expensive. Like we're getting the world's getting better. Sure. And again, like that thing would engrave balsa wood. No problem. Cut paper. No problem. Are you trying to totally
00:29:37
Speaker
like 2D plane pocket out your logo or just trace it? Okay. Both. You want to like evaporate a decent amount of phone? Yep. Cool. So yeah, some probably like 90 something percent just going to buy that in the next few days. No big deal. And actually the way I designed my dust boot, I downloaded the model from OPT laser of their laser and I was like, how big is this thing? It's tiny. It's like a couple packs of playing cards size.
Integrating Laser with Router
00:30:06
Speaker
And it would fit exactly like I could print the dust boot with the mount built into it. So the laser would just click right on. They have this awesome magnetic mount. So it just pops right on and off with all the spring pin wiring connectors and everything. Sounds pretty legit.
00:30:23
Speaker
And it just has a power source. Yeah, like it's super easy, right? And again, yeah, exactly. And the massive documentation is like, put these wires into here, run tool 111, because that's our laser dedicated tool. And it'll turn on the laser and your spindle RPM is your pulse width mode modulation, yada, yada. And I'm like, this is kind of writing itself right here. And yeah.
00:30:51
Speaker
Cool. And it'll handle the fact that the laser's XY offset from your spindle. Yeah, I used a multi-head setting, multi-spindle setting. So it's just an XYZ offset from the main spindle. And the issue is, if I mount it in front of the spindle, like towards the operator, if I left it on, the laser would hit the door on forward Y travel.
00:31:16
Speaker
Oh. So the magnetic base is pretty cool because you can just pop the laser off and then put it on when you need it or build a little docking station or something might do something like that. So it's coming together. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. It's pretty cool.
00:31:31
Speaker
I was going to ask you, the few fiber lasers I've heard about are Galvo, which is insanely fast. Is it an issue that your router is fast, but it's not Galvo fast? Totally. Is that an issue? No, it'll be slower. Your CO2 laser is
00:31:51
Speaker
X, Y, like knee, knee, knee, knee. I don't care. Yeah. It doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter. And I'm cutting a light duty foam so I can do it pretty fast and light power. So to do the sheet of, I'm just engraving words. If it takes minutes or 10 minutes or 20 minutes, like whatever. It's in cycle. It's perfect. Should be good. I'm quite excited for that. That's awesome.
00:32:17
Speaker
It saves, it frees up capital to not buy a laser and either save it or buy something else instead. I'm probably going to pump the brakes on the fiber laser for the moment anyway. If I don't need it for foam, then I want it for knives and pens and stuff like that, but I don't need it right now.
00:32:37
Speaker
I hear you. That's fine. Good. We've been cutting a ton of foam tonight. I'm going to drive it over to our local guy who has a TroTech CO2 laser. He's going to laser engrave a bunch for us until I have a solution and then happy to pay him whatever it costs and then good to go.
Vacuum Card for Foam Cutting
00:32:55
Speaker
You're laying in sheets that are
00:32:58
Speaker
two feet by three feet or something, and it just makes a bunch of case out. Man, it would be so sweet if there would be like a, maybe even be a UR robot, where it's just like, okay, at some point in an hour, somebody just lays the next sheet, next outside, and you know what I mean? But there's so much dust and like cleanup that I wouldn't have just unloaded and load again. But with the way I have the Bush vacuum pump and the Datron vacuum card,
00:33:25
Speaker
It's amazing because now I'm cutting into the vacuum card just a few thou and the cases are completely cut clean. There's no skin on the bottom. They're just coming out really nice because he blows them off and they're done. Yeah. That vacuum pump can sustain a lot of leakage. When you cut through and you're exposing more oxygen, it doesn't lose all vacuum like a gasket kind of Venturi pump does.
00:33:54
Speaker
So I'm really happy. Like the whole router plan that I've been working on for a year now is done. Like it's coming together. It's working so cool. Good for you. So that's nice.
00:34:04
Speaker
funny you bring up the vacuum thing because a guy who's been a mentor to me, called me last week. And he kind of was like, Hey, I wonder just know if you had Oh, I think he one of his guys knew the superglue technique. And he was gonna ask if you thought the superglue would work to make these things that are like potion stamp size metal parts.
00:34:26
Speaker
And it weren't crazy complicated, but there were some features outside inside, or like flat features, but chamfers, holes. And I was like, I don't think Super Glue may make, and they had got to make a lot of them. I was like, dude, and they didn't know about that workflow, the whole vacuum pump with a vacuum card. Actually, a couple people have asked me, what is that? It's still all about, what's that, home?
00:34:56
Speaker
There's a Home Depot product that it's been a long time since I used it. I don't even think I was the one that primarily played with it, but I believe it's called Trimico X-board. Trimico is spelled T-R-I-M-A-C-O, and it's a thick cardboard that you can purchase retail from Home Depot that I believe is a sort of directional-ish cardboard-like vacuum card.
00:35:19
Speaker
Anyway, I sort of explained the workflow of like, okay, don't try to think about making one at a time, you want to lay down a sheet that's the size of a piece of printer paper, or even four times that size, do all the ID work profile the parts, but leave 20,000 then co profile the parts down a little bit further. Yeah. And then walk them off. And it's funny, because I'm again, I'm not like, I didn't come up with this, maybe we tweaked or innovated a little bit, but like, again, it's kind of just one of those, you pay it forward, we learned from a lot of people. And then they were all like, Oh, my gosh, yes.
00:35:48
Speaker
It felt good. Yeah. And at the end of the day, when you're breaking through, it's still about surface area sucking down. Yeah.
00:35:58
Speaker
Like the vacuum card won't break a vacuum like a seal will when you go through, which is cool, but it's still like a one square inch part. It still only has 14.7 pounds at full vacuum of twice that, whatever, of weight. So it's not a lot, but the key is like you said, you do a full size sheet and you get all that surface area, thousands of pounds holding it down and then do all the work. And then the final cut through like the last little, just go gentle, go a thou at a time if you need to.
00:36:26
Speaker
Yeah. Like very little and I learned this when cutting mother of pearl for some inlays we did for a fancy knife. That material, it smells like burnt fingernails when you're cutting it and it chips like crazy and it would break so many pieces until I learned this like be overly gentle with it and just nip away at it like one bow at a time.
Lapping for Flatness
00:36:49
Speaker
Who cares if it takes longer?
00:36:52
Speaker
What we would do is profile the outside down to say 20,000. And assuming that your vacuum setup is flat enough and the machine is accurate enough, 20,000 means you've still got the whole sheet vacuum power. Then depends on how tight you want to run this or how close you want to cut it, pun intended. But you could say, if you really had your stuff dialed, you could try to then do a
00:37:16
Speaker
of profile down to 5,000. So you're accurately profiling the part down to 5,000. Then when you do your cut through, leave 2,000 radial stock. That way your end mill's not ever actually touching the part. So it's not putting axial forces into the part. And again, your mileage may vary, the material, the tool, blah, blah, blah. But it can be a good trick to get them cut through it. Now, you will have a 2,000 burr, if you will.
00:37:43
Speaker
Depending on the part, sometimes your opt-to is going to flip it over, put a chamfer on that side. So it's totally, yeah, I've done that too. And it can work very well. Yep. What do you do today? Yeah, bringing the foam over to laser guy. What else am I doing? So I'm making these, I've been completely obsessed with lapping the past week or so.
00:38:08
Speaker
So we have this lapping machine, but there's the concept of hand lapping. So you make these cast iron hand lapping plates that Spencer Webb on Instagram has been also absolutely nerding out about the past week or two. And that's a way to manually by hand get things optically flat. So you make cast iron lapping plates, use diamond lapping compound, which we have in every grit from 3 to 30 already.
00:38:34
Speaker
And you hand lap these parts. And flatness is something that is near and dear to my heart. And I've got some needs of things through our heat treat process, that if these certain plates were even flatter, then it makes flatter blades, which helps our production lapping process be easier, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I've been so deep down the rabbit hole that I'm like, it's the first thing I think about when I wake up. It's like flatness and lapping and things like that.
00:39:01
Speaker
I bought a bunch of these cast iron discs from McMaster. They came in yesterday. Today, I'm going to figure out how to machine these things into lapping discs. You just bought cast iron blanks and you didn't buy lapping. Correct. Cool. Just a cast iron six-inch slug that's one inch thick. I'm going to put it in the speedio and then surface grind them in the Okamoto. Everything I've heard, everything I've learned about cast iron, obviously, I've tried to avoid it my whole life.
00:39:32
Speaker
Basically replace the coolant afterwards, which is good because both machines need a coolant replacement anyway. Angela was saying that because we work with stainless steel so much on our blades, that the machine cast iron will put free iron into the coolant, which could attach to our stainless steel blades and cause rusting later down the line, which is not good. Yeah, sure.
00:39:58
Speaker
lazy right now, so it's going to cut all this cast iron. We're going to do a full clean out, wash down, replace the coolant, and then they go in the Okamoto surface grinder, surface grind them flat, do a full clean out on that machine, and then we have all these lapping plates. Oh, you need the brother to cut the slots in them. Yeah. The waffle cone. Exactly. Yeah, we have a waffle pattern. Yeah. I'm going with triangles on mine. I spent a lot of time thinking of like, OK, I want to put our logo as the little waffle pattern at the top.
00:40:28
Speaker
The more I thought about it, the more like it's a silly idea and it just won't work as well. Like you want linear straight grooves where all the sludge just goes to you don't want all these weird shapes and curves and stuff. Anyway, that's been my my hyper obsession lately.
00:40:43
Speaker
You ever watched Tom Lipton on YouTube? I watched a lot of Tom Lipton the past week. So he's got a great penny video testing out. Yeah, penny copper plates, making copper lapping plates, and then also he's got a four-part series making exactly what I'm talking about. Highly recommended.
00:40:59
Speaker
And the concept he talks about is if you have three lapping plates and you lap them together in a certain direction, A to B, B to A, A to C, C to whatever, you will be left with three completely flat planes, optically flat, like to millionths of an inch.
00:41:19
Speaker
And so originally, I was going to do that. And then what I've learned since, from Robner and Zeti and from Spencer and things like that, is that you only need two plates and a way to check them. So whether it's optical flats and an optical light source, monochromatic light source, or a sphereometer, which measures the bow. And when you lap the top plate on the bottom plate, the top plate is always going to go convex, concave, and the bottom plate's going to go convex. And there's all these little rules.
00:41:47
Speaker
So yeah. Cool. It's been fun. The Moore book, Fundamentals of Machines. Foundation of Mechanical Accuracy. Yes. That book has the, I think it's the Bible. I'm not sure there's a better respected book on this. I love the three plate thing because that's the caveman. That's how it all started. It's that chicken egg question of like, okay, so you want to build a thread cutting lathe
00:42:14
Speaker
But where do you get the lead screw from? Yup. Yeah, that's cool. Sweet. I'm going to have to pull that book out tonight when I get home.
00:42:26
Speaker
Yeah, see what it's got.
Setting Up the Wilhelmin Machine
00:42:28
Speaker
But yeah, so flatness is, as Tom Lipton said in one of his videos, lapping is kind of seductive in a way where it's like it just draws you in and you can measure with light and you have this feedback loop and you're like, this technique and I'm, yeah, I'm really, really geeking out about it. It's cool. Okay. What about you? What about you?
00:42:50
Speaker
Oh, just installing a wheel on the inside? Yeah, yeah. How's it going? How's it really? That was going to be my opening question. I totally forgot about it.
00:42:59
Speaker
Almost nothing to report. I mean, arrived, got it offloaded, no problem at all. Got it powerjacked it over to the spot. And then just hoping that they finish getting the electrical and, well, air's easy, but then the electrical done probably this week, I actually just emailed them this morning to sort of say, hey, what makes sense on having this service guy come? Some tooling has showed up and I mean, there's like a whole,
00:43:27
Speaker
I should do it like a shop update video or something, or the Wilhelmin video maybe, but there's like a whole pallet of Wilhelmin stuff that I didn't really open. So I don't know what all this exactly is in that. So yeah. Bar loader? Should ship next week. They ended up having to change one part, and that had to come from Italy. This is the IONCA. So they're going to ship the bar feeder, but it's not going to work for like four weeks, which I'm like, thank you for explaining that.
00:43:57
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Thank you for the cheat sheet. Appreciate that. So it's not turned on yet, the machine. Not even hooked up to power. I'm going to have the power next to the liquid type drop right next to it, but it goes to a transformer. So they'll do that, I believe. So service guy will come in, Willam and Guy will come in and plug in the physical power and turn on.
00:44:22
Speaker
started up for you and teach you how to warm it up and stuff like that. I believe so. My first Wilhelmin. That's how Akuma and Haas have always done it. Sure. Well, I mean, you're lucky because your hours drive away from Wilhelmin, right? We installed ours ourselves. We had our electrician wired up. We crossed our fingers and turned it on and checked every pump to make sure it's rotating the right direction and et cetera, et cetera.
00:44:50
Speaker
Well, I'm looking forward to, hopefully, I can help any questions or whatever.
00:44:56
Speaker
I thank you, sir. If you're not going to touch it and Alex, he said he's going to touch it, who's the one who's going to run it? Grant. Grant? Yeah, he can reach out to me too. Thank you. No problem. I'll throw up an Insta story or I'll make a post that way it doesn't disappear because it's kind of cool to show where it's at right now. It is funny. Everybody in the shop is like, I can't believe how small it is. I know. It's like a phone booth. Yes. Especially you don't have the bar loader on it now, so it's just tiny. Yeah.
00:45:46
Speaker
and the tools are so cute. All right, I'll see you later.