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"Choose The Option That Gives The Customer The Most Confidence."
238 Plays6 years ago
Things are going well for both Grimsmo & Saunders! Saunders relaunched their website and saw their highest sales week! While Grimsmo has been getting more comfortable on the kern! Saunders' brings up a quote from his friend, "Possession is 90% of ownership". The boys also talk about "When you're faced with a tough decision, always choose the option that gives the customer the most confidence." This is a vital aspect of running any business and they weigh in on their thoughts on it!
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 167. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo.
Listener Engagement and Rapid Episode Consumption
00:00:08
Speaker
This is a podcast where two entrepreneurs talk about all things business and life.
00:00:14
Speaker
It's funny, I had a guy reach out to me on Instagram and he's like, I've been watching your videos lately and I'd love to hear more. You should start a podcast. I'd love to hear you talk more. I was like, have you heard about the business of machining? We've done 166 episodes and I had to do the math.
Podcast Journey and Guest Appearances
00:00:30
Speaker
I'm like, holy cow, that's over three years of weekly episodes and we haven't missed a single week. Well, we missed one week in Germany.
00:00:37
Speaker
Did we? Yeah, we tried to record in the car, but then the recording failed or something with Lawrence. That's right. Which would have been our guest number two. It's very difficult to become a guest on the business of machining. Yeah, exactly. But anyway, and then the guy got back to me a few days later, and he's like, oh, I'm on episode 77 already. And you just learned about the current for the first time ever, and you talk about it. And then now I'm also watching you on YouTube, and you've got it and stuff. And he's like, whoa, this is so cool.
Organic Business Growth and Marketing Strategies
00:01:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think we probably should do a little bit of a better job. I think the reason I so you start thinking about what makes you as a person, both in business and personal life and I will say, the more I think about the pride with which we do things organically makes me very happy.
00:01:26
Speaker
you know, I built my business without, generally without things like paid advertising, we'll probably start using some for the fixture plates. I think it's probably appropriate time, but we've certainly gone a far ways building it out of our passion, our love, all that stuff that people probably know and it's true. But there's things like the bomb where we probably should make a little bit more of an averted like,
00:01:49
Speaker
Should we do more Instagram posts or mentions? And I should probably, I could mention it more in the videos because it's a good resource and it's, I'm actually, I'm proud of it. Yeah. Yeah, me too. I find, I personally find a lot of value in it and I hope that the listenership does too.
00:02:06
Speaker
I mean, I don't think it needs its own Instagram page or anything like that. But just for us to mention it every now and then a little bit more concertedly, I think would be good. And I've tried to keep that in mind a little bit. It's not hard, but it just takes that extra thought like, oh yeah, we've got this other thing we should maybe talk about every now and then, not just on itself, but on other platforms too.
00:02:29
Speaker
Well, we should make sure to remember that the potential audience doesn't know what it is. You and I know what it is at the most intimate
Product Validation and Public Conversations
00:02:37
Speaker
level. So it's a simple kind of call to action. I'll do it in the May chip rag. Chip rag is going like, I love it. I'm changing the subject. Sorry, we should come back to the podcast. But chip rag came up on a call the other day with some folks and they were like, we love the chip rag. Like it was one of those
00:02:55
Speaker
product validation things that I love. We've got an article called Minimum Product Liability on the NYC site where one of the ideas is if you think you have an idea, find a relevant customer base or audience that's not necessarily somebody that you know and love, like super close friends or family, and then bring the idea up in the context of a little bit of a fib. So be like, hey, I heard somebody else is doing this.
00:03:22
Speaker
or I wonder if that would ever work, but don't make it sound like it's your idea or your plan. Just super casual because it gives an unbiased reaction that gives you the chance. And so this was cool because I didn't know these people even subscribed to it. And they were literally interrupted the call and were like, we love the chip rag. And I was like, okay, that makes you smile. That's awesome. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. Because there's
00:03:48
Speaker
There's an element of the other person wanting to respect your idea and be nice to you and all that when you say, I've got this idea. But yeah, when you remove yourself from the equation, you get more of an unbiased opinion. I like that.
00:04:02
Speaker
It's socially unacceptable. Even you or my conversations, especially now that they're publicly recorded, it's difficult for us to be critical because it can be construed as being rude or argumentative. It's difficult for me to do that, period.
00:04:23
Speaker
Oh, just your personality, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, totally. And going back to the podcast totally agree.
Origins and Evolution of the Podcast
00:04:31
Speaker
Like, I don't want to create an Instagram page because because that would make it feel like a chore. And the thing I love about the bomb is it's not it's not work. It's it's, it's a chance for me to communicate and talk and share and anyway.
00:04:45
Speaker
That's a good point. It's not work. I almost wanted to call it play in my head because it's a chance for the two of us to be free for a little bit together. I don't drink, but it's the essence of us sitting down and having a beer together and talking about business on a weekly basis, consistently, on time, no matter what.
00:05:07
Speaker
and I mean this started before even the concept of a recording you know this was like hey the two of us let's just let's just chat once a week for us and we did and we did for like I don't know six months or a year and then
Impact of COVID-19 on Business and Economy
00:05:23
Speaker
Yeah. And then that's actually the criteria to become the guest on the podcast is you have to have been the reason that we created the podcast. So that is why Rob Lockwood is the exclusive guest of the Business of Machining podcast. Yeah, because he was the one guy that was like, you should record that because I want to know what you guys are talking about behind the back. Yeah.
00:05:50
Speaker
It's good. It is going really well. I think there's an energy of progress forward from the elephant in the room of, if you're listening for some reason, in the distant future. We're on the, hopefully knock on wood, the tail end of COVID. So they're talking about kind of restarting the world.
00:06:13
Speaker
We have had the last week was our strongest week of Saunders machine works product sales ever. And that's great news, but the immediate thought is why and the thoughts that I have are number one.
00:06:30
Speaker
people are bored at home browsing, looking, thinking. Number two, in America, many folks have started getting stimulus checks, which is cash money. Or number three, which I actually think is the reason I hope is true,
00:06:46
Speaker
So we launched our new website, which is awesome. We had Alex Sandbox privately work up the Shopify redesign, thinking that we would need to then hand it over to somebody on Upwork. But what Alex was going to do was figure out what we couldn't figure out and get the expert help on, say, hey, this is the functionality. And there's with Shopify, a mix of free and paid plugins and some custom code through their language liquid.
00:07:14
Speaker
And I was frankly looking forward to that. But in the end, Alex did the whole thing. The template that we bought worked, and we got some plugins that are working. So our site, the homepage, has really good photos with a scrolling gallery with text that are call to action. So things like use more machine travel, hold parts of any size, quit trimming your vices.
00:07:36
Speaker
And these are, like we were talking about with the bomb, these are things that I know, but we need to do a good job of marketing and communicating them to our potential customers who don't necessarily know or think about, hey, what does a fixture plate do for me? What can the mod vice do for me? So that is a really good first step. And then the other thing that we did is we added what we're calling bundles.
00:07:58
Speaker
And this was a huge thing I wanted to do where if you put a fixture plate in your cart, you can then also add to it a bundle. So number one, it lets the customer automatically add a lot of the common accessories in the right quantity. So fixture plate plugs, Mod Vise, Talon grips, the accessories that you before this had to go figure out on your own. The other thing it does is when you add a single bundle,
00:08:23
Speaker
to your cart, it adds each of the individual items in that bundle at the correct quantities, which I love because it means you as a customer can go in and say, okay, well, actually I want more of these, or I wanted the bundle, but not that particular option, which also works really well on our end for how we fulfill the orders because the packing slip sows the quantities of the parts as we stock them, which is much more helpful than just saying bundle XYZ.
00:08:53
Speaker
love it. That is so helpful. I think I feel like I've seen that in a few other places before, but not many. But where it just kind of like when I designed the rapid air air pipe system, you know, they have the map builder on on the website, and you just map it out. And then it just auto fills all the button you need all these 90s, all these 45s, all these connectors, all these tube cutters and all that stuff. And it was just, I like that. It's very slick.
00:09:20
Speaker
It's actually the main site I've seen it on is Tormach where they like the deluxe package adds the enclosure and the ATC and all this stuff, which is great because there's probably 30 options, but then you can still go in and say, you know, I don't want the space mouse. Yeah, I was just designing this morning and I'm like, where is my space mouse? I would totally use it right now. Negative. Yeah.
00:09:44
Speaker
And that's not actually that's why I don't like it. It's not because it's not a good tool. It's because it's expensive and you would need to have one on every computer. Yeah. And I'm I have three. I really don't know where one is right now. Yeah. Anyways, it was, you know, Business 101. We're doing a better job marketing our products. We're taking pride in the photos. We've got good
00:10:07
Speaker
images up in text. Honestly, the next step would be to try to do some A-B testing over time, which is to figure out how to measure, okay, what page or photo generated more reactions from folks, whatever those hurdles are.
00:10:22
Speaker
like my buddy Ryan Wenner from Seneca Woodworking, he's really good at this stuff about sometimes the hurdle is not to buy a product, it's just to click on it. That's a much lower hurdle, but you can still learn a lot by saying, hey wait, this many more people engaged with that content and now you're using data to make decisions. Yeah, that's interesting.
00:10:42
Speaker
And this is the kind of stuff, too, that's going to, I think, be more important. You know, knock on wood, the world feels OK right now. But I'm not sure it's going to stay that way. I think we have a lot of, unfortunately, I think we have a lot of pain coming based on COVID and economic consequences of it.
00:11:00
Speaker
The ability to be smart as a business person and make these educated decisions about how you can use fancy words like allocate resources. But really what that means is, hey, what do I make? What do people want? How do we produce a product? How do we engage folks, get customers, and do so with a finite amount of money and time?
00:11:22
Speaker
It's difficult. But it takes forethought and actually to sit back and plan. It's one thing just to go to work and make stuff and come up with the odd new product and do that. But for guys like you and I to sit back and analyze, well, where are we going? Where do we want to be in the next three, six, nine months, two years, five years, 10 years? And then what's the world going to look like in a place where we have to meet those goals?
00:11:51
Speaker
How are you doing? How's your weekend? It's been great. I spent probably an equal amount of time home and at the shop, you know, a couple of days. This is my third day in a row home and it's partly amazing and partly like I want to get back to the machines.
00:12:11
Speaker
But yeah, things are really good. Sales have been surprisingly good recently as well. Like for the first few weeks of COVID, sales were nothing. And we're like, oh man, this is forever now. This is our future. And then just like you, like we had a great, great week or two. Awesome. And yeah, just feels, it lets you kind of reanalyze like, okay, okay, yeah, we can make this work, you know?
00:12:43
Speaker
I'm in the same boat. I am too much of a conservative, cautious person to think, OK, we're out of the woods. Of course. But boy, it could be a lot worse right now. I mean, really. Yeah, like doing that forward planning, certainly a couple of weeks ago, three or four weeks ago in the beginning when this was all really hitting hard.
00:13:10
Speaker
you have a bleak outlook of the future and you're like, okay, well, assuming revenues are gonna be zero for the next few months, that's not a likely scenario, but we have to assume maybe. We have to plan for that contingency. And then luckily we've had now a couple of weeks to see what really happened. It changes the planning a little bit and allows us not to back off, but to certainly not freak out as much and gives us a bit more breathing room to plan.
00:13:40
Speaker
better for the next even just month or two yeah with the shutdown and with you know complying and
00:13:51
Speaker
just not worrying as much, which is good. And there's a lot to be said for staying strong. That doesn't mean being naively optimistic, but you've got to pivot. We've had folks reach out to us that have lost customers, that have had customers cancel POs. Businesses have and will changed.
00:14:11
Speaker
So just be conscious of that. I'm not 100% on board with what I'm about to say, but it's worth saying regardless, which is the kind of... You can choose to be victimized. It's a big boy world. Don't go...
00:14:29
Speaker
think that you're desperate and so you're going to take on a job that's twice as big as you've ever done on terms that you don't necessarily think are good only to end up holding the bag because they don't perform and that's what puts you under. That may be a little bit of an extreme example but...
00:14:44
Speaker
Or they can't pay in this environment. Exactly, right. So try not to get back to a corner. Try to be cautious. But that's a good point because people are going to be desperate on both sides of a business transaction nowadays. Desperate looking for work and desperate to not pay anything.
00:15:02
Speaker
It's strange times. An acquaintance is dealing with sourcing different industry and the factory with whom they've had a long relationship no longer wants to accept their POs unless they have full prepayment, which is absurd in this context. But their concern is that American companies are going to start to default or go bankrupt. And that's not necessarily a completely irrational concern.
00:15:29
Speaker
But it just shows how disruptive some of these normal mechanisms are of how commerce works. Yep. And how trust, how strong the trust was. It reminds me of one of my favorite sayings from a buddy of mine, possession is 90% of ownership.
00:15:49
Speaker
Somebody may owe you money, but it's a question of who possesses the money that deems who really has the money. We've been making sneeze guards. Have you guys seen these? Have they become prolific in the Toronto area?
00:16:11
Speaker
You're not talking about the face shield then? No. So what do you mean? Just explain. The sneeze guards are these clear plastic things that are now at bank teller windows or grocery stores. Or like grocery stores. Yeah, I've seen that a lot here. Yeah.
00:16:28
Speaker
not a business I necessarily want to be in. And so we're not trying to sell direct, but we had a friend who actually the same company here in town that helped us find some of the material for the face shields. They are in that business and they can't cut, they don't have CNC. They do mostly
00:16:44
Speaker
you know, door frame, window, interior design, commercial design. And so they need these bases cut for the sneeze guards.
Challenges in Production and Engineering Solutions
00:16:51
Speaker
So it's basically just, it's kind of like the old 3D printed design where you have two grooves that interlock. So we're cutting these bases that are perpendicular to the sneeze guard and the sneeze guard is just a, I'll call it 20 by 30 inch piece of polycarbonate that
00:17:05
Speaker
puts a physical barrier between you and the person you're interacting with. And sometimes they have holes cut through for passing food or cash or whatever. And so we're helping them out, which is that perfect. It just feels good to still be doing something. And I think sneeze guards are probably going to be here to stay. Yeah. Yeah, it could be not just for salad bars anymore.
00:17:28
Speaker
Exactly. I hadn't even thought of that. Holy cow. Oh, that's what it's from. That's what I think of all the time. I always remember seeing those and thinking, I don't really think this is stopping. I would certainly not want to pick up some lettuce if somebody had sneezed in front of me with the sneeze guard. You know what I mean? Even with the sneeze guard. It's like a mediocre barrier.
00:17:52
Speaker
Right. Oh, but I certainly remember as a kid, like at a restaurant and kind of leaning under the sneeze guard to get the whatever. Of course, you know, I can't have this like semi fogged up, scratched piece of whatever in the view of my tomato. Anyway, back on topic, I got a laid question for you.
00:18:14
Speaker
Mod Vice washers, it is a square washer, but it has a outside profile, has a champ on it, so it's a kind of a peculiar outside shape, but it has a half inch hole in the center on center.
00:18:29
Speaker
And we make them right now only in the main spindle, which is okay, but I have to hand deeper the backside. Only the backside circular hole. The outside profile is done with a Harvey backside tool.
00:18:45
Speaker
And that's acceptable, but not ideal, especially as we scale. So to transfer the part to the subspindle, one option would be a machined emergency collet, but I don't want to do that because I think it increases the risk of complexity because it's a peculiar shape and I'd have to clock it pretty accurately. And the face of the part is actually at a taper, so I'd have to, just seems,
00:19:12
Speaker
like the wrong approach. What I think is the right approach is to hold on the ID, because all I need to do is a very, very light edge break on that same ID, which is only about 0.2 inches thick. But I'm thinking some sort of an ID expanding mandrel would be more than adequate to hold the part. And then all I've got to do is just kiss that edge in the sub spindle, and I'm done.
00:19:41
Speaker
Royal makes a whole separate ID chuck system, but I don't particularly want to spend the money on that, partly because it's just, again, it's not much overkill, but I don't want to be swapping that out, et cetera. So any thoughts on how I could build a sort of ID expanding mandrel that would work on a traditional, we have the GQ65, but it's, for all intents and purposes, quite similar to an oversized 5C from an actuation standpoint. Does that make sense?
00:20:10
Speaker
Any thoughts on how it can- Well, we have 5C on our Nakamura, and I have a hard-inch ID collet that looks like a 5C collet, but it's full of guts and springs and stuff. And it has a little mandrel at the front with a drawbar, I guess, that ID expands. So that's how we make our pocket clips, is we make the little circular part, and then the ID collet grips on that, and then it parts it off.
00:20:38
Speaker
It works very well, but they're like really expensive many many hundreds of dollars. Just the 5C call itself. Just just the 5C call. Yeah, I want to say it's like 800 bucks, but I can't remember exactly. I would be and but it works well. So I would be more okay with that because like especially if it works with a 5C chuck that we either have or maybe we could make one.
00:21:01
Speaker
Don't laugh, it's not that hard to turn the 5C taper on an object. If I can then mount that in my... I could put that in a GQ65 collet and then you just add it on when you need it. Does that make sense? Do they make a GQ65 ID expanding assembly you can just buy? No, I don't believe so. It's a separate chuck system. Yeah, because you don't want to replace the whole chuck system.
00:21:28
Speaker
Can you send me a link or a part number on that Hardinge 5C? Yep.
00:21:36
Speaker
because the thing that's peculiar is my subspindle chuck is one of the zero, well the zero stop, it's aculink, excuse me, so it doesn't move the collet, but rather a sleeve comes out forward so that your Z is supposed to be quite repeatable, which means I don't have that natural drawback action, but my thought was you could- Like it's there, but it's not, yeah. Accessible.
00:22:06
Speaker
I don't need that much clamping force. And if you think about the way like a pliers work or an e-clip pliers, like if you squeeze on one end of something and you expand the other, that should be sufficient. It's just a question of building that mechanism. And maybe I just said it, maybe it's that simple.
00:22:24
Speaker
Maybe. The hardened one is called the Sure Grip expanding call it. They got a whole website on it. I think they have some technical drawings where you could dig into kind of how they work. It might help you out a little bit. Yeah. Awesome. So because if you think about like if I squeeze, so basically you have like a ball bearing or a pivot point.
00:22:47
Speaker
And so it's a sub spindle. So on the right side you would have the chuck, the traditional clamping chuck. So if you clamp there and there's a pivot point, it would expand left of the pivot point. But the GQ65 has a pretty wide open close range, like 65 thou. But I could probably build something that has a springiness to it so that even when it's...
00:23:09
Speaker
Either when the call is open, it remains captive and with some Z-repeatability. And then when it clamps down, the first, let's say 65,000 travel, the first 60,000 is just soaking up the cushion of keeping it in place. And then the last 5,000 is actually clamping down on my mandrel. Yeah. Interesting. So you'd use like a big GQ65 call at like a one inch or something. Sure.
00:23:37
Speaker
and then you'd make your own kind of assembly with a one inch shank. I would make it captive in the collet, like put a screw on the back or something. Yeah, sure. You know what I mean? To keep it kind of Z length accurate spring or something. Oh, actually, you just nailed it. We've already thought about making our own GQ65s, either 3D printed or some mix of vulcanized rubber with our own turned pieces, but we could make the whole thing monolithic. Yeah. Holy cow.
00:24:07
Speaker
Interesting. Okay. Okay. I gotta chew on this. I'm not crazy, right? Yeah.
00:24:14
Speaker
Of course not. You got to play it out. You got to at least draw it down or slap it into fusion for an hour and just see if it's even feasible. But no, I'm pushing back on you there. This is where I want to put on my Tom Lipton slash Robin hat of let's think, John. Think as a fake engineer, as a person that plays an engineer on YouTube. What do I want this thing to do before I start trying to sketch lines and stuff in CAD?
00:24:44
Speaker
Well, I do both for sure. I use my brain and I try to just chew on it. But I'm such a visual person that sometimes I just have to see it before it makes any sense whatsoever. I can only get so far in my brain design-wise and theoretically before I just have to look up pictures on YouTube, on Google, and draw it up. And everybody's going to be a little bit different with how they approach things. That's fair.
Advanced Machining Techniques and Strategies
00:25:12
Speaker
I do find too there's sometimes a benefit of the quote unquote sleep on it proverbial walk away from it like do something and they're sure like come back later and all of a sudden you just have a different fresh approach. Yeah. The downside to my method I find is that
00:25:28
Speaker
When I jump into Fusion, I start getting absolutely consumed by the details when they're irrelevant, importing the perfect hardware that I'll be using and making sure that all the dimensions are tight and stuff before even the concept is finished. I need to be better at slapping a concept down and just
00:25:49
Speaker
you know, speeding through it, and then I can go in and fine tune, because I might scrap the whole thing. Right. That's what Tom had really warned against is like, why are you trying to chase details when it's the big picture that matters? The quick, a quick search, I pulled up that shop hard inch page real quick on the part number, unless I'm missing something, number 105 C expanding call it assembly, which is the right sure grip thing is $270.
00:26:20
Speaker
Hmm. That's not bad now. Maybe you also need the college 80 bucks. Okay. This would be good to play with. I think about. Yeah. Yeah. I mean that, that is a lot cheaper than you spending a couple of days building your own. Yes. Well, yeah, I'm about to say I don't mind doing it. Oh yeah.
00:26:41
Speaker
Look, what we want is a scalable process. Right now we don't sell enough mod vice. I mean, we could, we've got the lathe set up. It's cranking them out. It's absolutely awesome. Um, it's not a big deal to hand deeper them, but if we wanted to do five or 10 fold that amount, I will want to know at least, I don't want to know how I would pursue that process. And I, and I think this, that's what this is. Yep. How's the Kern?
00:27:10
Speaker
awesome and having so much fun. But as I was texting you guys this morning, I was thread milling an M8 thread and I put the thread gauge in to try it and it was too tight. So I'm like, okay, no big deal. I just have to thread mill it again with a bigger pitch diameter or whatever, like just bigger.
00:27:28
Speaker
And I was looking through my math and it turns out I got my actual thread pitch, the helix of it wrong, just off by ever so slight by like 10th out. And I'm like, where did I even get that wrong number from? I don't, I don't even understand. So my thread is hooped as far as an M8 thread goes. So, uh,
00:27:49
Speaker
kind of disappointed, kind of not sure yet what I'm going to do as we were chatting on WhatsApp, if I'm going to put the helicoils in, or as you suggested, just scrap the whole thing and start over. Both are options at the moment. I think Amish had a good point of you could still keep that one and come back to it, but you're going to make lots of...
00:28:07
Speaker
You're gonna make more. So my thing is just And I am you I am the well, I'm just gonna fix it with helicoil or whatever but but then that's my natural Reaction but then I've often found gosh John new machine new process If you have any problems downstream, you're gonna wonder if that was it and certainly if you goof because of it Then you're gonna kick yourself
00:28:33
Speaker
for if it's, you know, whatever, 100 bucks of material in a couple hours of time. Go clean. Yep. Although I did think of a way to do all that roughing on the Kern instead of on the Maury. If I can just dovetail it, you know, as a first stop and just cut a bit lighter and a bit
00:29:02
Speaker
faster on the Kern. So I got kind of excited about that this morning, because I do have another big chunk of metal that I can start cutting into. So that could be an option. You're using the fifth axis vice. Yeah, you do know, I mean, I don't think I've ever cut dovetails for the for the actual vice use.
00:29:22
Speaker
I also have those clamps, the dovetail single bolt clamps, whatever they're called, D155. Like the actual dovetail vices? Yes. Yes. But you're using a screwed self-centering vise.
00:29:38
Speaker
Right. Currently, that's what I machine. Yeah. I mean, there's reasons you might want to dovetail that stuff if it's certain if it's super precarious or, or really hard, hard, hard material. But when we're doing normal aluminum and steel work, we just clamp it in the dovetail of the vice, but without having previously machined dovetail. Sure.
00:30:01
Speaker
But I'm not going to put a 55 pound chunk of stainless hanging off the side with no clampage. You know what I mean? Yeah, clamp it in the fifth axis vise. And just let the jaws grip into it? I don't know. It just feels weird.
00:30:17
Speaker
Oh man, I got to push you here. Absolutely, dude. Well, the other thing is, your UMC is a lot bigger than the current is. If I put that chunk on top of the fifth axis vise, I can't even change the tool. What? Yeah, I'm out of clearance. So that's why I have to get it lower. So if I use the small vices, the tiny vices, whatever they're called, the dovetail ones from fifth axis, then I should have enough clearance.
00:30:45
Speaker
Okay, well, that's obviously different. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I wish I could do something that would convince you that holding on to material with the self-centering vice is pretty darn good. I've done some of it for sure. I just need experience and the more I do, the more comfortable I feel with it. Yeah.
00:31:11
Speaker
You're not doing anything wrong, John, so I don't mean to sound like that, but... Yeah. I'm certainly cautious. If you... I'll send you the link to it. Oh, man, what was that? Let me look it up real quick. It's the Johnny 5... Johnny 5... 5-axis part.
00:31:31
Speaker
We may want to pivot, yeah. Five axis CNC machining on the UMC 750 robot part for Johnny Five. Go watch that video because we held onto a piece of steel about a half inch thick, but
00:31:45
Speaker
probably five by eight inches footprint and we held on to the half inch thin part. So it looked like it was a sail flapping in the wind and no, just clamped on it, no previous, no op zero. And I think that will show you the fact that we were doing adaptive cuts all the way out at the end of that part when it was tipped over a B90 without chatter should show you, okay, wow, this is okay. What was the title of it again?
00:32:15
Speaker
I'm what's happening in the video right now. And we'll throw it in the description for other folks as well. That's what's fun. I mean, that's you just nailed it. Like when I have to when I have to redo something.
00:32:31
Speaker
On a three axis, you just think, oh, man, that stinks. On a five axis, you're like, oh, just put a new piece of material in and hit go and walk away. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I'm more worried about the weight of the part. I'm looking at your video now. That is a pretty big part.
00:32:48
Speaker
Yeah, that part doesn't, the material doesn't have so much weight to it, but in terms of the clamping power, obviously on that one, you gotta be careful. If you're holding on to, you know, if you're holding on to, say, the oversized deck of playing cards, you're just holding on by the very bottom, you can't go take a drill at the very edge of the part and slam a drill through it, because you have too much vertical tool pressure that'll push the part out. But machining, where you've got radial loads, tends to work quite well.
00:33:18
Speaker
Mm-hmm. I love this stuff. Sorry. No, but I love this stuff too. I am having so much fun with the current, with 5-axis, with Camplete. I spent an hour on the phone with Camplete support the other day. Just getting kind of Camplete set up for me. Yeah. You know, fine tuning it. Me understanding how to properly import things like vices and where to set work coordinates and how to translate them within Camplete. Yeah. Just how to use it properly.
00:33:49
Speaker
What was that? What was that spindle modeling taper issue?
00:33:55
Speaker
So the tool holders that I have designed in Fusion have the HSK taper, like a Cat40 taper on the top. And when you bring it into Camplete, the whole holder is now like an inch lower, because the taper is now not in the spindle, but below the spindle. Got it. You know what I mean? So it took the kind of Z0 as the top of the tool holder, not the spindle face. So that was one error where
00:34:24
Speaker
Now the can't, the can't please simulation is not accurate because the tools now an inch or whatever lower than it should be. Right. But we got that fixed. Got it. Got it. So what's going on? What's going on this week?
00:34:41
Speaker
So this week, I'm going in tomorrow, Thursday, figure out what I'm going to do with this tombstone, if I'm going to redo it, or if I'm going to helicoil it or something. Helicoils themselves are not that expensive, but there's the installation tool. You need a custom tap for that helicoil thread. And I don't know, a couple of things like that.
00:35:05
Speaker
We use the... Or just make a new one. We use the Keen inserts, I think, and if I recall, I don't know why we like them better, but I think those are more... And ironically, I was using one this morning. The half... I needed a 3.816 thread, and the tap for that one is half 13, which is great versus... Standard size. Yeah, some of the... I think it is the helical branded ones are a customer peculiar thing, but...
00:35:31
Speaker
I don't know. I'm not trying to push you the wrong way. I've used those kind of key inserts too, and they're great because inside and outside are standard threads. But in my case, the outside would be bigger than I can fit on the design of my tombstone. Yeah.
00:35:49
Speaker
Well, in a weird way, remember that comment we brought up a few episodes ago, when you're uncertain about how to handle a business decision, in this case, that's customer facing, always make the decision that increases the trust and, what is it, increases the level of trust and experience from your customer's perspective, right? So if you think of your current as the customer, which would your current rather have a mistake? That's really good. What was really, oh, you like that quote?
00:36:20
Speaker
I like the quote, I'm trying to remember it so I can write it down. We'll get Fraser to pull out the audio and put it in the description. Okay, so if your current is the customer, what would the current rather have? A mistaken part that you fixed with Heel equals, which John and Grimsmill in two or three months, when you've gotten some confidence,
00:36:39
Speaker
That probably is a no-brainer, easy to go. But this is like your first part. Let's set yourself up for success. Let's put the deck forward, pay it forward. The time is irrelevant, and the material and the money isn't that much rock and roll. It's a way of thinking about it.
00:36:56
Speaker
I like that. Doing some research like how strong are helicoils? The general consensus seems to be it's as strong as the biggest thread diameter, which is the helicoil itself. Where's your point of failure? If it's in aluminum, is the aluminum going to rip out first, et cetera, et cetera. I'm putting a stainless helicoil into stainless material with a steel bolt, and it's a pretty strong situation, but it's just wrong.
00:37:25
Speaker
Well, it's not the strength that you necessarily have to worry about. It's the whatever you're not thinking about. I know. And I don't know what that is, but stick to the fact that... Go ahead. This first palette is now going to be odd and different from the next good palette. So, you know, one option is I heli-coil it or I tap it up to the next size bigger and I just kind of burn through it and like finish the palette and finish... I've got a lot more to learn on this palette, a lot more potential failures to make on it.
00:37:52
Speaker
before I make the next one anyway, so this might just be the test piece. But still, I need to have confidence that that mating connection is as rigid as possible and not a cause for concern.
00:38:09
Speaker
Here's the other way to think about this, John. And this is probably one of the better direct examples of the difference of where you are and where we are right now, just to be blunt. If you are not directly involved in this, but rather Angelo or Sky or whoever was, Frazier was making the part.
00:38:29
Speaker
And they said, hey, this happened. What do you want me to do? Like, if Jared came to me or Ed came to me, the answer would be, keep it. We'll play with it later. But for now, go remake it. And that's the end of your involvement. Because right now, what you're really worried about is your time. And so you're compromising a decision because you're the one that has to deal with it. Even though the business decision, you would happily have somebody else spend that time on it. To an extent. But yeah, I definitely see your point.
00:38:54
Speaker
It removes the emotion that the work from the decision separates them. Right. Although, as I said, I got kind of excited about the theory of making the whole thing, roughing it out on the Kern itself, not tying up the Maury and using that.
Machining Advice and Future Planning
00:39:10
Speaker
And I got some Iskar high-feed end mills with inserts and everything. A couple weeks ago that I played with the Kern, I roughed out half of it with a two-insert button end mill. And it took a lot of power. And it was noisy and loud and vibratey and stuff.
00:39:23
Speaker
And then I would switch to the high-feed end mill and spindle power went from like, I forget, 50 to 100% down to like 12% on the same cut, same parameters with the high-feed end mill. And it sounded amazing. So I was like, okay. I would offer a piece of unsolicited advice though. Don't use the high-feed mills right now.
00:39:48
Speaker
They are awesome when they work, but usually the feed rates that you must use to run them mean that if and when you have a failure for whatever reason, you will never catch it. And we stopped using them. We need to get back on board with them. And I'm not saying that, I mean, high fee bills have their place, but on a new machine, new process,
00:40:10
Speaker
Best case, you just ruin the holder. Whenever you have a failure on a high-feed mill, it really almost always destroys the soft body or the actual insert mill holder. It's not like a traditional inserted tool where a lot of times you'll just ruin the insert or maybe the pad behind it. And you don't want to have that half on your current and be like, ah, did I in any way compromise the bearings or whatever?
00:40:36
Speaker
And you don't need productivity right now. That's not the goal. There's a lot of metal to remove. I'll put it this way. No joke, if that were my machine, I would much rather set it up with some basic ATM, like tool management parameters, and let it run unattended with a regular tool than be there monitoring it with your hand finger over feet. Yeah, I have no interest. Just right now.
00:41:08
Speaker
You can't not push high-feed mill. Even on our VF2, we would run them lightly at 200 inches a minute, and when it fails, it's destroyed before the control can even react to it. Okay, I did get a small face mill as well, like a five-eighths or something, three-quarter inch face mill. Because when I was using a two-inch face mill on the Maury, it took well over 100% spindle load and a lot of heat and a lot of, like,
00:41:39
Speaker
you know, angriness to push that face melt through hard steel. What is the material again? Okay.
00:41:56
Speaker
So it's like 30 Rockwell. Look, we machine... It's the HD. I would check it. I know, we buy a lot of that stuff in round and we buy it in bar, round, and plate and it's almost always 28 to 32 HD. Which is like 45. Yeah, okay.
00:42:18
Speaker
Regardless, you should get many hours of cut time out of a traditional solid carbide end mill. And I would be surprised if the roughing takes more than five or 10 hours. So you should be able to rough the whole thing with a single carbide end mill. And if that breaks, no big deal. This end mill snaps off. Done. No big deal. OK. We'll consider that.
00:42:46
Speaker
So what are you up to coming up? I owe a thank you to everybody who listened and sent in advice on the iPhone wireless charging pads. Ends up that the thing they don't tell you is as you increase the thickness of the case or the spacing between the charging pad and the phone, it drastically narrows how centered the phone has to be on the charging pad.
00:43:14
Speaker
So if it's just the bare phone, you can put it almost anywhere. But as you add a credit card or similar case, you've got to have that thing really dialed in, like almost within a millimeter on the thickest settings. So I am going to just 3D print or machine a profile outline that automatically puts my phone in the right location for the pad.
00:43:37
Speaker
Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, 3D. I've seen one of my buddies, Brad Souther did that. He made like a charging tray for his watch and his phone and everything, self-centers and... Awesome. Yeah. Is that on his Instagram? I think he just texted me the picture of it. I don't think he posted it, but... Brad, if you're listening, will you put that up on your Instagram? Yeah. I love it.
00:44:00
Speaker
So thank you, Ed. What am I doing? Running the video version of that generative Datron longboard truck on the UMC. Really good lessons there on both toolpaths, five axis workflows, and the absolute coolest up to work holding technique. Like blow your mind, phenomenal. I'll leave that as a teaser for when that video comes out. Cool. And...
00:44:29
Speaker
just cranking. I mean, like we're getting kind of back into the swing of things with Provencut with our products. It's exciting. Awesome. Yeah. Cool. Good stuff. I'll see you next week. Sounds good, buddy. Thanks, bud. Take care. Okay. Take care. Bye. Bye.