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#222 Firing Employees, ERP Inventory Quantity Tracking, Saunders Meets an Astronaut, Grimsmo's Experience Owning Swiss Lathes, & More!
205 Plays4 years ago
Topics:
- Grimsmo shares an update about firing his father
- How the justice system relates to owning a business
- Saunders leans toward LEx tracking inventory and communicating with Shopify's API
- Astronaut Hangout: Outer Space, Infinitesimal Perspectives, & UFOs
- GK Seco Tool Update
- Swiss IRL - Setup, Material, Guide Bushings, Turning Centerless Ground Material
- Willemin - A Customs Nightmare
- Helpful Advice for Decision Making - More alternatives = Better decisions
- KERN - Tool Life & Pallet Management
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Focus
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business and machining episode 222. My name is John Grimsmough. And my name is John Saunders. And this podcast every week we chat about machining and new things and adventures in the shop and employees like last week was amazing and all kinds of fun stuff. And I just wanted to tell you real quick when we're, you know,
00:00:21
Speaker
pre-setting up the podcast here, and one of our audios didn't work. I'm like, let me just check if my headphones work. So I go to YouTube real quick, and I'm like, I'll just click on the very first video, and it's your video. That's funny. And yes, my headphones work.
Technical Glitches and Family Dynamics
00:00:36
Speaker
Great. Yeah, dude, last week was really good. It was really nice. Yeah. It was funny. So last week was also the first week we posted the little video clip on our Grimsmore official Instagram channel.
00:00:50
Speaker
Oh, I'm sorry, I missed it. That's okay. Because Zencaster now records video and audio. So we actually have the files, we just haven't used the video yet. So Fraser put up like 10 seconds of me talking about something on our on our official Instagram.
00:01:07
Speaker
And so my mom talks to me over the weekend and she's like, yeah, so this little video of you two chatting popped up and I did the swipe up and I spent the next 45 minutes listening to you guys talk about employees. So I have to ask you, did you fire your father? This couldn't have been. It was so good. Yeah. So I mean, my mom listened to it, which was great. So the videos on Instagram work.
00:01:34
Speaker
You want to finish the story? Yeah, yeah. So I did fire my dad's programmer. Okay. And my dad's still in the picture because it was most of the programmer's fault. We're just trying to figure out next steps and who is going to replace
Decision-Making and Communication
00:01:51
Speaker
other programmer guy, and we don't have a solution yet, but we got a lot of great ideas, a lot of leads, and we're playing with our options there. That was a lot of nerves leading up to that conversation, and it went well. It went very well. It's never what you think it's going to be, even though your mind goes through every option.
00:02:12
Speaker
You know every worst-case scenario They go. Okay, they're simple then. Yeah. Oh, yeah, it was super good My dad was actually understanding like he's not surprised, you know, yeah, so that's good. That's a good place to be Yeah, so everything's great. We're probably almost closer now because of
00:02:31
Speaker
Oh, good. That's great. There's so much good advice and books. And look, you want to be positive, so be positive and surround yourself. I wholeheartedly believe in that whole like, if you want to be stressed, you'll be stressed. If you want to be positive, you'll be positive. But I'll tell you, not enough content around how to deal with the not fun decisions.
00:02:56
Speaker
I'm obviously not in the know or in the wear of the situation you're in with the ERP system, but it's certainly quirky in the sense that it wasn't a direct employee. The culprit was even one step further removed as a consultant for somebody else, but it's also complicated because it's a family member. Some of the best advice I've learned was actually just through hanging out with a friend who's a defense attorney and this idea of
00:03:23
Speaker
parallels between the criminal defense system and, and hiring and firing and, you know, being non-emotional and factual and really sticking up for yourself. Like that's, I think the hard thing to do because there's a, there's a lot of desire to be compassion or non-confrontational, even in a confrontation, like, but, but sometimes that's not what needs to happen. It's kind of like, Hey, you know, in the sense of a criminal defense or prosecution is like,
00:03:49
Speaker
You did this, you're guilty of this. We may need to prove that, but this is the fact, this is what happened, and this is going to be the consequence. We're not going to sugarcoat it, and frankly, we're not going to talk more about it. That's interesting. I don't have any lawyer friends to discuss that kind of thing openly about, which is good. That's a very good perspective. But you're right, the parallels there would be very flat, like the whole legal system.
00:04:19
Speaker
very blunt sometimes. These are the rules. It didn't work. The start of this actually was a super quirky, weird situation, but talking about what a defendant should say to police. I'm not a lawyer. I luckily have never been arrested.
00:04:39
Speaker
Police, their job, first off, super unfortunate and controversial topic these days with some of the turmoil going on in the world. From a simple police standpoint, their job is to do their job, which often means, hey, we need to try to get information to help solve the crime. Better or worse, right or wrong, innocent or guilty, they need to gather
Business Management Challenges
00:04:57
Speaker
facts. Well, you as a defendant or person being arrested, you have a lot of rights, including the right to remain silent. That's not a joke. You have the right to remain silent. I remember
00:05:06
Speaker
having this conversation about saying, look, what if you have something that could help your case or could help diffuse a situation or it could help whatever. You'd want to say that naturally that you would just blur it out. Right. Now I shouldn't say diffusing a situation like if there's a greater threat, totally different game. But basically the way my buddy put it was like no defense attorney has ever in the history of
00:05:27
Speaker
representation been like, I'm really glad my client said that to the law enforcement. You had your day later to share that information. It's not going to be with the police. It's just super counterintuitive to, I think, how most of us are. The other example being in a self-defense situation, it's not your time then to plead with people that are coming to you about what happened and why. Not your time.
00:05:57
Speaker
about as far off of a machine as we could get, but definitely very relevant, I think, for some of the managerial stuff.
00:06:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's the side of business that I'm learning to appreciate, but I don't naturally enjoy confrontation and dealing with people. I just want to make cool parts. I want everybody to be happy, but I'm learning to appreciate that and enjoy that side of it and finding the bluntness and balance with the compassion.
00:06:28
Speaker
Yeah. But look, think about what it's like to be a judge. I mean, it's crazy to think the people that, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people out there that are acting a role where they put people in jail and sentence people and so forth. When a judge sentences somebody or even in a judge trial, find somebody guilty, it's not that
00:06:46
Speaker
judge personally doing it. They're saying, I represent, I am the physical embodiment of a state, state of state laws or federal laws. And this is, you, you, you broke the rules. You probably knew you broke the rules or whatever. You pushed the line. Like this is the consequence. Like same thing, John, when you, you not, you, you represent Grimsman knives and you have to protect the best interest of that company. And so you shouldn't feel bad when you
00:07:10
Speaker
quote unquote, judge when you reprimand or I mean, it's weird, you know, when you handle some of these things, it's not you just think of yourself as the judge if if you have a set of rules.
00:07:21
Speaker
And a lot of companies when we haven't and I want to be better at it, establishing the set of core values and rules for the company and making sure everybody knows them. Because so many times if they're not clear and somebody messes up and they didn't know the rules, but in my head I'm like, oh, you should know better. That's wrong. Don't expect if you haven't made it clear.
00:07:42
Speaker
Sure. Look, I don't know what happened with the ERP system. It sounds like you did ask, you did push back, and you started to get a lot of BS. There are people out there who are not good. For sure. It took way too long, cost way too much, and communication was difficult, and results were none. Everything's 80%.
00:08:03
Speaker
But we have an 80% foundation now, so I'm really happy with that. We just need a closer to come in and wrap it up. Yeah. It's actually what we're doing right now is we are capitulating to the need to handle some inventory quantity levels in Lex, which I've talked about numerous times. And the good news is if you just stop and you think about the problem and you think about the solutions are, it's not that complicated.
00:08:27
Speaker
Shopify has a robust API, and we can think about the architecture of that. I think what I want is, in a weird way, Lex to be subservient to Shopify. On some recurring basis, daily or weekly, Shopify will repush and export of inventory levels that Lex will inherit, and it will overwrite things. Now, you could do
00:08:51
Speaker
parody checks to make sure it doesn't go off by a crazy amount. You don't sell 300 fixture plates in one week, that throws a red flag, but that'll let us solve the kind of, honestly, John, the last big piece of the puzzle, which is forcing automatic reorders on, rework orders, I should say, on internal stuff, which is, oh, dude, it is going, it is going well here.
00:09:17
Speaker
So basically your inventory says you just ran out of TorMac fixture plates, or you will soon. You've reached your minimum. And then a work order prints out and Ed comes in and he's like, I guess I'm making TorMac fixture plates today. Lex told me to. Right? Yes. Yeah. And the ability to balance the need for inventory versus
00:09:38
Speaker
versus urgent inventory or just-in-time orders, but we're in such a great place to handle that.
Machinery and Innovation
00:09:47
Speaker
and our VF3 SSYT came last week. It's another machine. It might, oh man, this is a tough decision. It might replace the VM3. Oh, your first one. It's our first machine, 2016. It has been without hesitation an absolutely solid machine and it remains a solid machine to this day. So a simple answer, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
00:10:11
Speaker
on the flip side, all things mechanical fail or require additional service maintenance, et cetera. And part of the long-term plan and thesis has been to become one of the shops, fast forward, one of the shops that has good new equipment and so forth. And there's nothing wrong with that machine yet.
00:10:31
Speaker
But maybe that means it is the right time to think about. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good, if you want to, that's a good business philosophy of just establishing. We cycle machines every five years or whatever. And we want to keep the freshest, the latest, just because that's who we are. That's our business. I actually haven't thought of the long-term implications of that for us. Because our Maury is five years old, and it's great. And I have no plans to replace it. Yeah.
00:11:00
Speaker
I think there's a logic to a different timetable for a DMG vertical than there is a VM3 period. It's a neat thought process. Yeah. I missed on Friday, I probably missed your Instagram post because I got to hang out with an astronaut. What?
00:11:23
Speaker
Yeah, the floor is yours. Yeah. Had the chance to hop over to New York City and to film at a really cool maker shop, like super awesome guy who's been kind of an informal mentor to me.
00:11:40
Speaker
He is the one who went down to the bottom of the ocean earlier this year to the Mariana's Trench. His buddy that he did that with is a guy named Richard Garriott, which I think one of my favorite phrases ever was somebody else referring to him. He's not narcissistic enough to say this himself, somebody else saying he Googles well.
00:12:03
Speaker
It's like Wikipedia is the new LinkedIn.
Space Adventures and Perspectives
00:12:07
Speaker
Awesome, awesome, awesome guy. Background, again, he Googles well, you can go read about it, but he background as a software developer as a gamer, like role-play games. Kind of sort of invented the word avatar, like took it from Sanskrit and turned it into what we now know as the gaming word. Really? Vented, I mean, maybe some of the details may be wrong here, but basically invented the massive
00:12:30
Speaker
multiplayer online game thing like super super cool in that world and
00:12:35
Speaker
has been a space nerd his whole life. His father was a NASA astronaut and he was not able to go into space due to eyesight and he wanted to go into space. So he built up his company basically so that he could afford to go to space. And he was the second, I believe, person ever to fly into space as a citizen and the first person ever to spend any time. He spent 10 days on the International Space Station.
00:13:04
Speaker
And so I know this is off topic from business and machining, but it was inspirational and his background as a passionate person around science and exploration. And also some form, he didn't want to run what I would call lifestyle business, but darn it, it was in the sense that he has a lot of passions beyond that. And so to hang out with somebody who's that,
00:13:27
Speaker
nerdy and passionate and frankly experienced. And, you know, a lot of stories to tell, but like awesome guy. And one of the, one of the things that I asked him, I was talking to some friends before I went, you know, kind of like, Hey, what do you get a chance to hang out with an astronaut? What do you, what do you, I mean, I could ask, I could talk forever, but the two questions were UFOs and what it's like when there's a, there's sort of a phenomenon that's often recognized and discussed about what it's like to see earth from space. Okay.
00:13:54
Speaker
and I'm actually looking at you right now, but above my monitor on my wall is a 1986 print of a photo called Pale Blue Dot, and Carl Sagan, the late physicist, I think, but amazing guy, convinced NASA to turn around, I think it was Voyager 2, one of the Voyager cameras, back to point it at Earth in the 80s and take this photo, and it's this, my version's like,
00:14:23
Speaker
I don't know. It's 30 by 20 or something. It's a decent size. Earth is literally the size of your pinky nail on it. You and I are in that photo, John. We were born. That's obviously from almost the edge of the Milky Way, I think, at that point.
00:14:40
Speaker
seeing it from space is not that far away, but you do an orbit I think in 45 minutes. Yeah, it's like 16 a day or something like that or more. Yeah, maybe you're right. He's interesting. He's like, you have to make this up five minutes to go across North America. So it's actually a decent amount of time if you think about counting to 300 seconds.
00:15:00
Speaker
time. So you can see stuff, but you also have to synthesize it and process it right away because then it is gone. If you think about traversing states, Ontario or Pennsylvania, just like- Yeah, even landmarks like the Great Lakes or I don't know if you could see the Grand Canyon or whatever, like Florida, you could stand out or whatever, but it would pass pretty quick.
00:15:22
Speaker
Yeah, so he said at 250 miles on the ISS that you actually can see a fair amount of infrastructure, which I thought I'd heard the whole space myth, like you can't see the Great Wall, blah, blah, blah. Maybe it's too thin, the Great Wall itself. But he's like, you can see stuff for sure. And he's like, that's the moment that gave you goosebumps is when you start to appreciate
00:15:47
Speaker
You start to appreciate, his takeaway was not what I'd heard others directly, which was kind of, it makes you change in terms of the sensitive nature and maybe environmentalists are, let's take care of this place. This is the home we've got. He, I think, already has a lot of those sentiments, and I don't want to put words in his mouth, but that's kind of what he was saying. I think his moral realization was just like, it's nuts when you just see it.
00:16:09
Speaker
From me to you, he'd have to move his eyeball like 0.01 millimeters to change the view from Central Ohio to Toronto. It's six hours or something to hop a car. It's just a different perspective of how things are connected.
00:16:24
Speaker
that would be surreal. I do think about that sometimes. I'm out for a walk late at night and it's a super starry night and I look up and I just think I'm the most insignificant speck of nothing in this cosmic universe. Yet to me, I'm everything. You know what I mean? My world is the most important thing that has ever lived because it's my world and every human on the planet thinks that way. Yet you have to come up in space where nothing
00:16:51
Speaker
Yeah, crazy, right? Yeah. And that doesn't even add in the dimension of time. Right. Like, you know, nothing in relative to the billions of years. Yeah.
00:17:01
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. You want to hear about UFOs? Yes. It's actually super cool. Okay. Because I did want to be the guy who's like, told me about UFOs, but he's like, I actually have a great story. So his father was a very matter of fact scientist astronaut. Like what he was saying that when he was kids, he couldn't, they couldn't answer questions
00:17:22
Speaker
right and answer the question correct, because right is a direction, like a very literal, like, oh, that doesn't sound super nurturing and fun, but you kind of get it. So there's some story. I don't remember all the details, but basically his father was in space, again, NASA astronaut and saw something that I think he thought he knew what it was. Like it was a piece of
00:17:46
Speaker
It doesn't make sense if it would have come off of their space ship or something because then it wouldn't be truly unidentified, but maybe it was. But UFO means unidentified foreign object. It doesn't mean little green men per se. And so on a channel that I believe was public, like radio or communications or something, his father said, oh,
00:18:07
Speaker
I just got a picture of a UFO, meaning like we know something just left or departed or came off the spaceship. I got it on camera and it's all blurry because of space and exposure and all that and the light. His father being a very little person literally meant like it's a bolt or something like there's just space trash. And Richard has clearly told the story before because he has like the news articles to pull up. He's like the next day people are like NASA astronaut confirms UFOs.
00:18:33
Speaker
That's actually a decent genesis of some of the whole craziness around
Tech Innovations and Experiments
00:18:38
Speaker
it. That's awesome. Yeah. UFOs are real because there's lots of unidentified flying stuff. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah.
00:18:51
Speaker
But it's great. The Dubno Tour is awesome, too. He's a software developer as well, who also is a maker. And he's made these really cool things like a sand table. I think I mentioned this a long time ago. He's a sand table where it's Alexa controlled. So it's a sand table like a zen guard with a marble. OK. It's tied into Alexa. He built the thing, stepper motors, linear rails, the sand, the software code, the Arduino, the Raspberry Pi. And it works with Alexa. So you say, Alexa, have sand table draw a Norseman.
00:19:21
Speaker
knife. It will, dude, not joking, not joking. It will parse, you know, search Google. It'll find what it, I don't know how it does the image selection, but it'll find an image on Google. It will like vector trace it all behind the scenes. And it would find in this case, the outline of a Norseman knife, which I think it was probably a reasonable thing because it could find that on a Google search, or you could do our duty to or a beach ball or whatever camera. And it's just starts drawing. And this happens in seconds.
00:19:50
Speaker
That's fantastic. Right. So going back to why I got into this from the beginning as a kid, loving this idea of physical motors and sensors meets the electromechanical world of robotic arms and automation and controls. It's hitting all the right stuff. Yeah, yeah. Hitting all the fields right there. Here's a question. If you asked for the same thing twice, would it give you the same results?
00:20:15
Speaker
It's a great question. Let me answer it a different way. I don't think he has built any form of AI feedback into it, so I'm guessing it would.
Swiss Machining Techniques
00:20:25
Speaker
Do you think it would be different? I'll ask him. Because, yeah, I'm just curious. If it's an algorithm, then you would think the algorithm would choose the same thing again, because it's like this is the most likely suspect.
00:20:37
Speaker
Well, it definitely could change if different people uploaded new Norseman photos. But if you ask them twice in a row or something. Yeah, I think it would be the same. Yeah, maybe. As someone who would develop this, that'd be something I'd be curious about. And you'd obviously try it yourself. You'd be like, well, let's just do it again. We'd figure that out pretty quick. But that's cool. I love that kind of stuff. Right.
00:21:00
Speaker
Yeah. Cool. How I have a note again that I just keep copying and pasting. Did Frasier play with the, not Frasier, Pierre, Pierre play with the CECO? Yes. I ordered the wrong one.
00:21:16
Speaker
copy and paste to next week. So he has ordered or he installed it and the spacing, the offset of the insert was like two millimeters too close to the guide bushing. So he's like, I tried to install it and it just hit the guide bush. Like it can't be installed fully. So I need to order the shifted one that's like more centerline kind of thing. Yeah, I just goofed. So I did order that at least a week ago, if not more. So it should be here pretty soon.
00:21:46
Speaker
Got it. Talk to me about the real details, like the real life living with a Swiss in terms of the time it takes to properly adjust and set up the guide bushing as well as what you look at when you're miking or inspecting the straightness and circularity and diameter tolerance of raw material.
00:22:10
Speaker
So when you buy a centerless ground bar, it's usually, I mean, the stuff we're getting is pretty tight. Like the batch will hold a tenth or two, even throughout the bar. Even the stuff that's, you could buy it plus or minus two tenths or plus or minus five tenths, and the two tenths is more expensive. But even the five tenths stuff, it's like pretty solid batch to batch, or within a batch anyway. If you're super picky, you'll load them in the bar loader,
00:22:39
Speaker
grouped in batches of same diameter. So this is 2495, whatever. You want to put all the 2495s together, so you adjust the guide bushing tight, and you know a bigger bar, 2498, is not going to seize up or something. You just guide the bushing loose, you mean? Well, it depends on how. If you're running a part where you want it tight, tight, then you don't want some random bar to be bigger than the one you adjusted it on.
00:23:05
Speaker
Yes. Okay. I lost you because if you just on two four nine five tight and then a two four nine eight comes in, it won't fit right. Yeah. It'll alarm out like in the middle of the night or something, right? You don't want that. Okay. Got it. Um, but yeah, for the most part, so you kind of, so we don't really watch that too much. The bar diameter variation. Um, if, if the guide bushing is too loose, your parts will be oval.
00:23:31
Speaker
even two tenths is somewhat common. So you're measuring a part and you're like, like one of our parts is one, eight, seven, oh, it's our tolerance or maybe a little bit less. But you go one, eight, seven, oh, and you're like, yeah. And then you rotate 90 degrees and hit it again. You're like two tenths off. You're like, no, rotate it again, again. And you kind of have to average in your head the
00:23:56
Speaker
the average of them. And I guess that's due to any amount of play in the guide bushing, which is inherently natural, is going to push the part away from the tool or something and just create a little bit of an imbalance and makes it oval. I don't know the math or theory behind it, but in practice, like, yeah, it's a real thing. You notice it.
00:24:17
Speaker
Yeah. Or actually probably cuts under because if it's able to bounce around, it could bounce closer to a tool and cut more. I mean, it's kind of like compressing something in a four jaw, drilling a big hole, and then it pushes down on the ID feature, which then when you relax it, it's oversized.
00:24:38
Speaker
Have you replaced your guide bushing ever? Has it worn out or come close? There's one for each bar diameter. So we have a 250, we have a 375, a 50. I might have crashed one early, early, early on. No, maybe not. I don't think so. Luckily, it's out of the path of the tools. It never really gets hit for any real reason. So they're not a wear item. They have carbide pads on the inside.
00:25:08
Speaker
Oh, I think the carbide pads are wear items, but maybe it's insanely long forever. I don't know. Okay. But yeah, it's adjustable tightness, not much. It's probably tenths oversize naturally, so you can't fit much of a bigger bar in there, but there's a 5C call it style. It's basically what it looks like.
00:25:31
Speaker
So there's a threaded ring that goes on the back that you adjust and you lock down to adjust your guide bushing tightness. And you kind of slide the bar in and out and rotate it and like feel it when everything's loose to adjust the tightness. And somebody told me you put a bunch of paper towels in one hand or a rag, and you stand in the machining side and you push on the bar. And if it hurts, it's good. Like that's tight enough. Oh, we put where are you putting the paper towels?
00:25:59
Speaker
So the bar is sticking into the machining area and the 12 inches or whatever, six inches, you put your hand with the paper towels there as like a glove. Cushion. Cushion, yeah. And you push on the bar.
00:26:14
Speaker
it should be difficult to move, but it should move kind of thing. It's a feel thing, right? Okay. And some materials like to be run looser, some like titanium will gall if it's too tight. Oh. Stainless, so you do whatever on. I'm sure some of the softer stuff like aluminum and brass have their own kind of rules.
00:26:34
Speaker
But this is one of the reasons why, theoretically, you want centerless ground bars because they will have consistent thickness. We're talking tenths throughout the bar diameter. You don't want a big fat spot in the middle that's going to stall.
00:26:49
Speaker
Well, that was another question. When your experience procuring centerless ground or any bar plus or minus two-tenths could be fine, except if one side is plus two and the other is minus two, it's, quote, unquote, with intolerance. But a four-tenths range is a lot, or far worse, on the plus or minus five-tenths. Has your experience been that
00:27:10
Speaker
it stays, subject to the tolerance, it stays consistent, whatever that tolerance is. Yes. Yeah, it has. Yeah. It's not like, you know, they give a plus or minus five tenths. It's not like a foul boat in the middle and minimum on the ends. It's more of a range thing. And like I said, you get a batch and they're pretty much all the same. Like the same guy ground them all on the same day or whatever, I guess.
00:27:34
Speaker
Do you care or has there been an issue of straightness? There has not been an issue except for plastic, which is dumb.
Machine Upgrades and Logistics
00:27:43
Speaker
Plastic gets dumb or is it dumb that you've had an issue? No, plastic is dumb. We buy these half inch Delrin rods and their tacos. Yeah, they've been a lot and maybe we're just buying poor quality stuff. We're not getting a ground or anything. You can get plastic centerless ground.
00:28:00
Speaker
Really? Yeah. I look into it. Interesting. And I haven't ordered yet, but I probably will just to have like plastic so cheap even to add the cost of centerless grinding. I'm buying a year's worth of bearing cages for like $400. It's funny. Or something like that. Dude, buy like one inch so you had so much more rigid and then just cut it down. Oh, you can't go one inch in the Swiss. And it's a, yeah. So I buy half inch bars because that's my max and it's a half inch part.
00:28:30
Speaker
I thought you had about a one inch tortoise. No, I haven't purchased the second tortoise. I'm going to stall on that for a while. Got it. It sounds like you feel good about that. I do feel good about that. Yeah. Awesome. The timing is just not right. We've got the Wilhelmin coming in soon. Oh, that's right. We've just got a lot going on. OK. So speaking of which, the Wilhelmin has been quite the nightmare. I'm getting it across the border. Oh. Don't ever ship a machine across the border on a Friday.
00:28:57
Speaker
Okay. That's just a bad idea. So like Thursday, this was after our podcast last week, Thursday I emailed the rigger and the guy I bought the machine from and I was like, hey, it's been a week. I'm just looking for an update. And the guy calls me and he's like, he's like, yeah, we're picking up tomorrow morning. Get your customs broker already, blah, blah, blah, blah. It'll be there Friday night.
00:29:17
Speaker
I'm like, OK, great. A little bit of heads up would have been great. Yeah, you'll reach out to them. Yeah, exactly. And he's like, yeah, it's already in place. Anyway, delays. They're supposed to pick it up at 8. They didn't pick it up until 2. They get to the border. We're spending all day on the phone with the customs broker trying to clear this $80,000 purchase. Paperwork back and forth, Barry handled most of it. It's just a nightmare. And then, of course, the guy didn't
00:29:44
Speaker
clear the border in time and the paperwork wasn't ready. So it had to sit and park at the customs for the weekend, which costs 800 bucks or something in storage fees. There's no Saturday customs? I don't know.
00:29:57
Speaker
And then even Monday, there was another problem at the border. So it had to stay for another day. And then there's a problem at our rigger where it's getting delivered this morning. And it's like, holy cow, man. I'm sorry. Is it in Canada? It's in Canada now? Yeah. I think it's delivered or should be delivered in the next few hours and be done. Oh, to our riggers an hour away. Yeah. Right. OK.
00:30:25
Speaker
Yep. So I think that debacle is over now, but that was annoying for sure. Sorry. And then buying the bar feeder from LNS, they have a used one in stock for like half price that I'm just going to get. So I confirmed that yesterday. And then over the next week or two, we'll finalize that. So once that comes to our rigor, then we'll schedule a delivery here. So still a couple of weeks away, but that's fine. Awesome. Yeah.
00:30:54
Speaker
That's exciting. What was I going to ask you?
00:31:01
Speaker
Oh, it's just a note I had written down about some just like, you know, when you get like a bunch of decisions thrown at you and your job is to make decisions. Yeah. For me, the reminding myself if and when you're not sure, like trying to list out the alternatives of, you know, like buy it now, buy it later, don't buy it at all. Or, you know, buy this versus buy that.
00:31:31
Speaker
This isn't sounding nearly as articulate as I thought of it in my head last week, but even if you only think that you have one option, you always have another option which is not to do it or something. Thinking about which way to go.
00:31:46
Speaker
It helps be a lot to force yourself to come up with other options just for the sake of making a
Programming Projects and Team Dynamics
00:31:53
Speaker
better decision. That makes sense? Yes. Yeah, I've been doing that more and more lately. We're chatting about, say, the programmer. And just right off the top, I'll be like, well, we have so many options. We can stick with the guy. We can go back to him and grovel and still work. I don't want to do that. We can drop the project. Don't want to do that. We can hire a guy full time, maybe. We can hire another freelancer and try to deal with it.
00:32:16
Speaker
Just off the top, no rules, what are all the options? And that just kind of helps focus you. You're like, nope, nope, yes, maybe. OK, then you're down to two.
00:32:25
Speaker
Right. Right. Or even something super complicated, like having a family member involved. It's like, yes, like going through pros and cons and situations like that about what do you do and helps you flush out something I do. I kind of had that big falling out with my relationship with how to win friends and influence people. The third time I read it, I was like, loved it the first two times. And the third time I kind of was like, there's a lot of
00:32:51
Speaker
actually bad advice in this book about like, maybe that's part of the process, but you don't want to be friends with people that don't want to have bi-directional relationships and nurture both ways. But one of the things I do think holds very true is it's actually really honest. It's really hard to be honest. It's really hard to be upset or angry with somebody who's being honest. Now, you don't necessarily going back full circle to the whole like,
00:33:18
Speaker
how to handle tough decisions. You don't always owe a full explanation, but the idea of knowing with confidence why you're making a decision is a huge source of confidence. Yes, that's true, which sometimes comes from the stress of thinking through the alternatives and worrying about it and playing the conversation in your head for a while.
00:33:37
Speaker
That helps me become more firm in my choice, in my decision. Yeah, right? Yeah. Even though it's like gut wrenching for the days or weeks leading up to it. Yeah, that is true.
00:33:51
Speaker
We were trying to look at, we're looking at a new machine and casting a wide net for the sake of making sure we go down the right path. And one of them we were kind of looking at, we haven't ruled it out, although we really have ruled it out because it has a 12 second chip to chip time. For tool chains? Yeah.
00:34:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's pretty slow. That's molasses. Yeah. I mean molasses. That's like you go get a coffee in that time. Right? Yeah. Is it because the machine's so big or the tool change is just slow and inefficient or something?
00:34:28
Speaker
I don't know. It said the tool change itself is like sub seven seconds. So the balance must just be some combination of traveling to the tool change location and or spindle ramp up ramp down. What else is there in terms of the difference between tool change time and chip to chip time? I don't know. And I wonder if chip to chip time is listed from the most optimal location.
00:34:56
Speaker
Or if the table has to move super far over, I guess a lot of three-axis machines don't have to move the table, do they? They just go up and change the tool? It totally depends on the machine design. Sure, yeah. UMC, HOGGMC is a traveling column, so it does have to move over. Yeah, the current two, right? Oh, of course, right. Yeah, but the Maury. It's not 12 seconds. No. It's not the fastest out there, but it's like, I don't know, five seconds or something.
00:35:24
Speaker
You can watch it and there's enough time to see what's going on. Not like a speedio, we're just like, what? Seriously, right? Yeah. I want a speedio just to be like, just to stare at the tool changer and be like, holy cow, holy cow. Right? I don't know how they ramp their spindles up to 5, 10, 15,000 RPMs. What is it like? Because you were at a 15 to zero in like sub two seconds. Yeah.
00:35:52
Speaker
Oh, that's a, that's a car analogy. Like, you know, zero to 60 time, but I've always liked the zero to 60 to zero time. Right? Yeah. All in first gear.
Advanced Manufacturing Systems
00:36:03
Speaker
Um, what are the U-MOCs have to, uh, side mount tool changers or umbrella tool changer or sorry, umbrella tool changer. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. They're slower. Yep. It's not bad though.
00:36:17
Speaker
but they're doing their thing, huh? Yeah, the one is. They're working. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. The other one still needs a spindle sensor and something else, but we don't need it yet. Yeah, cool. Yeah. What else is going on? So I'm working on two big things on the Kern. One is more intricate tool life management and one is more intricate palette management. How I schedule and how I run various programs.
00:36:45
Speaker
And, um, pallet management is successful as of yesterday. I'm so pumped and tool life management. I've got a developer on Upwork helped me write the final little Python script, um, today. So I found, I found her last night on Upwork and it's like,
00:37:04
Speaker
Great so far. Isn't that awesome? Yeah. It's like I posted an ad listing on Upwork with all the details. Basically, I'm outputting a text file from the current. I need you to parse it and put the data into a Google spreadsheet and sort stuff. Yeah. And I got five replies, four of them all around the world, and then this girl in Florida or something.
00:37:29
Speaker
I looked at all the ads, all the replies, and hers was like so good. And she's like, actually, instead of doing this in Google script, let's do it on a raspberry pie. I'm like, I'm in. I have 10 pies just sitting around. Getting you all in the field here. Exactly. Yeah, so that's been great.
00:37:50
Speaker
Can I interrupt? That's actually a great example of trying to make sense of what I was saying about making decisions. I have a fair amount of anxiety when you post a job and upwork about, do I pick the right person to go with it? One of the things I've done in the past is spend some amount of money to have
00:38:08
Speaker
two or more people start the project. And there's nothing unethical about that. You're paying them. But what it does is it lets you start to dual track the process or parallel track it. A Python work with somebody like that, maybe you spend in the hundreds of dollars. So if for an extra hundred bucks, you can have somebody else start it to get a feel of what they're like to work with, what the ideas they come up with.
00:38:32
Speaker
I have found I've never once regretted that extra time or money spent to learn or pull that into the other one or just figure out, you know, ultimately you do need to go with one person, of course, but like super valuable. Are these people aware that the project might be canceled?
00:38:51
Speaker
Well, no, it's not like that. It's more just like, hey, let's get started with this. And then you're like, OK, we're tabling the project. On Upwork, especially, the money goes into escrow and it has to be paid and all that. We just do them hourly. Oh, OK. Yeah. I've never done one as a fixed bid. I've always just done fixed bid. Oh, really? I just make up a number in my head for this project. I was like, $200. No, let's list it at $150 and see what everybody says. Because people will apply at more or less
00:39:18
Speaker
to get the job. And so I feel it out. I'm like, yeah, it was worth a couple hundred bucks to me. And then everybody was, all the five applicants were fine except for one guy. They were fine with 150 and the other guy was like 230, but I was like, for 150 bucks, this is happening. Fair enough. I'm worried about the hourly though, because it doesn't give you a scope. I don't know if it's going to rack up or
00:39:45
Speaker
Well, you can still limit the amount of hours, period. I rely a lot on reviews and efficiency overall. I assume that there's some function of an efficient market theory to upward. Someone's not going to just start running up lots of hours. There's also an option where you can force
00:40:02
Speaker
uh, screen grabs throughout their work. Look, I'm not in the business of big brothering them. It's probably a nice thing to have enabled so that you could, and if there's some, some funny business going on, but, um, look, if I miss, I'm not in the
00:40:16
Speaker
A project like yours, probably Smallish Kapoor, he did the right thing, but if somebody wants to do $300 worth instead of 150 and it crushes it, phenomenal, intricate, all that, okay, this isn't a money thing at this point, right? Yeah, exactly. For those little amounts, I've definitely bonused a lot of my developers. I've definitely added modules and be like, yeah, for another 50 bucks, can you do this? Another 100 bucks? Let's just keep racking this up. I got more for you. I got more work to do. Right. So it's fun when it works.
00:40:47
Speaker
Yeah. So pallet management. Okay. This is exciting. Assume I know nothing. So on the current, there's 80 pallets, right? There's 25 big ones and 55 small ones.
00:41:01
Speaker
I hate you. I know. There's a couple of ways you can call a pallet. You can do what's called a .p file, which is just a pallet file. It's a little tiny spreadsheet. So you define like pallet one, offset, whatever, code, such and such. Like the G code? Yeah. Okay. .h in height nine. Work with me here for us. Do they call the G code? I guess. I don't know. But yeah, the code.
00:41:29
Speaker
The problem with the .p file is you can't edit it once it's running. And I've always wanted that because say a part finishes and the next one's called and the next one's running and you reload the first one and you can't edit the palette file and tell it to run again. It's a one time only thing. It's one file for the whole 80 palettes. Sort of. It's not one file per palette, I guess. Right.
00:41:54
Speaker
Yeah, so it's like a little table file, a spreadsheet. The problem is you can't tweak it, and you don't have the modularity. So I haven't even been using that style. What I do is I write a handwritten G code that's like, call this palette, call this code, call this wash down procedure, and then the next block is this palette, this code, this wash down, and then just chunk it like that. And every night, I just kind of tweak that, depending on what palettes I have running.
00:42:20
Speaker
But even that, I have to have all of the pallets loaded and ready. I have to have all of the tools ready. I have to have all, I have to have that program perfect and I'm locked in for 15 hours and I can't do anything. Like it's great, but you know, I come back in the morning and it's still running and I want to make something real quick. I can't. Okay. So I read through the hide and hide programming manual many times. I learned everything about it. I learned SQL server programming.
00:42:47
Speaker
and develop my own little script. Basically, now I have my own spreadsheet that says
00:42:57
Speaker
one to 80 rows for each palette. There's an order column, there's a status column, there's a wash down column so I can choose if I want to do the wash down or not. But basically you go in the status column and you go palette 12 status one, it'll run that program for palette 12. It'll run 12.h, which is a specific file just for palette 12. And in that I say run rask all.
00:43:24
Speaker
And then the cool thing with this is I can edit it and I can tune it and I can reload parts and I can edit the table file while the machine's running. Why can you do it now but you couldn't before though? Because I can't do it to a palette file, a .p file. Okay. This is a .tab file, just a different kind of thing.
00:43:43
Speaker
So yeah, I've been so deep on this for the past week that it just works. And I love it. And I was running it this morning. And I was like, I was reloading lock insert fixtures. And I just changed it to one in the status column. And when the parts finished, it changes it to 1,000. Like the fields, just so I can visually see, like, oh, those parts, those palettes are done. So I can look at the table. And I can be like, oh, the pallet 12 and 16 are done, ready to be reloaded.
00:44:10
Speaker
I reload them, I go over to the table file, I click one, one, and I know it'll loop again and it'll run again. And then on top of that, the order column, I can specify the order, not just sequentially one through 80, but I could be like, yeah, you're on pallet 16, don't run 17 next, run two or run 72 or something, because like, I know you're busy, but I've got this quick little thing in the vice. Can you please make this for me when you're available? And then go back to whatever you were doing.
00:44:39
Speaker
That's amazing. So that module took me like a day to figure out properly and get the code right. But it all works now. And it's like, it works so good, I don't even have to tweak it anymore. It just works. I guess I'm just surprised that those are the sort of things that seem silly that you have to almost ground up. Yes. And part of it is me being me and wanting to do things myself. There is, I think it's, Hyd9 calls it their batch process manager.
00:45:06
Speaker
which does something very similar, but I think it has some extra features and one or two limitations that I didn't like, and it's like a $4,000 upgrade. I think I can do it myself. I've read the manual, I've skimmed it enough to know this should be possible, and then I go down that rabbit hole deep, deep, deep, and I'm so deep that I can't not stop doing it.
00:45:30
Speaker
And yeah, it's like, it's always more work and more work and more work, but the more I do, the more I realize this is actually possible. I'm just doing it wrong. And then it works. Awesome. Well done. So, I mean, I like explain this to my wife or, you know, the guys were in the shop and I totally understand if people aren't excited about it. I am so excited about this.
00:45:52
Speaker
No, it's amazing. It's like the idea that you have a whole fleet of machines and then you can just be like, oh, run this down there, run this on there. Like what? It's amazing. This is like the tool touch off that I created a few months ago where I just typed 999 at the one variable. I put the new tool holder in the machine.
00:46:08
Speaker
and I walk away, and I know next time it gets called, it's going to touch off that tool and continue
Consistency in Manufacturing Processes
00:46:13
Speaker
machining. It's like the greatest, right? And then what I'm doing with the Upwork developer is the tool life management, like look ahead kind of stuff, being like historically over the past five pallets, this tool has taken five minutes per pallet or something, and your maximum is 100 minutes. So how many pallets ahead can we machine? And you're like, tonight I'm running three pallets. It's got 14 pallets of life left. Good to go. Yeah.
00:46:39
Speaker
Well done. I love all this stuff. No, that's really cool. I'm trying to get all this stuff to the point where it's so dumb and so obvious that the work is easy. You load and go.
00:46:50
Speaker
Yep. Yeah, we did. We're doing the setup sheets like I think I told you laminated drawings like I've got the more legitimately using. I've got a video partway filmed on like the Haas M30 M109, which is like user questions when you start it. It pulls a video up to show you because it's it's not about
00:47:16
Speaker
The confidence is about following the process. It's not like the confidence is like, oh, I love this, I'm passionate, so I remember it. It's like, oh, that's right. I need to have it oriented that way or this tool here. Yeah, the bigger everything grows in our companies, the more there is to forget. Yeah. Awesome. Well done, dude. Cool. See you next week. Sounds good. Take care. All right. Take care, bud. Bye. Bye.