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#370 Integral knife button tweaking
1.2k Plays6 months ago
TOPICS:
- Integral knife button tweaking
- Thermal growth on steel
- Optical comparator with Baty screen
- 3d printing brim and build plates
- Zero gravity tool suspension device
- - Sloky torque devices
- Johnny 5 build
- Offset on horizontal got reset!
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Transcript
Episode Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the Business of Machining, episode number 370. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. And John and I talk each week, hopefully to pick up those little nuggets of, ooh, that's an interesting way to program it apart, or a tool, or a process, and all that good stuff. Yeah. How are you doing? I'm doing pretty fantastic. Things are going good, flowing, busy, lots going on, always.
00:00:30
Speaker
That's the vanilla answer. Come on. I know it is. Give me the real answer. Well, that's what this whole podcast is for. Exactly. Everything good? Everything's good.
Preparing for Blade Show
00:00:40
Speaker
Yeah. We're prepping for Blade Show. It's getting busy. One of the guys in the shop here commented on my generally calm demeanor and they're like, I don't feel as calm getting ready for Blade Show. There's a lot to do, right? And I'm like, it's fine.
Finishing the Integral Project
00:00:58
Speaker
Yeah. We got it. That's the story arc is will John get the integral done? Heck yes, I will. Okay. As Spencer Webb would say, I'm going to bring it in for a landing. Okay. Any update? I've been thinking about what you said last week about iterate faster and
Refining the Button Design
00:01:27
Speaker
don't spend a year on this button. So on and off, but we've spent the past week dialing in this button. Okay. It takes what it takes. The good thing is Jeff is doing most of that and I'm checking in. I only know Jeff, Jeff. Do you have another new person who's just named Jeff? Jeff is both. Okay.
00:01:51
Speaker
Jeff is handling that on the Swiss. He's making tweaks, he's changing, he's testing, he's measuring, and he's test fitting in the knife. He's probably handled the integral knife more than anybody else in the shop at this point, which is great. Take it apart, go back together, try it.
00:02:08
Speaker
The button is such a finicky thing because if you get the tapers, the radius stuff, the surface finish, the feed forward lines of the turning toolpath, if you get any of that wrong or too much one or the other way, then it feels weird in the knife. It's really cool to be able to see, make a big difference like what matters, what doesn't. Where we left it yesterday, we've got
00:02:38
Speaker
The lockup taper, not nailed down, we've got the
00:02:42
Speaker
All the tolerances nailed down. He found out that the sub spindle is crushing one of the critical features of trilobing it. Sure. Interesting. Eight tenths.
Custom Fixtures for Precision
00:02:54
Speaker
Yeah. So we had to make like a little custom V block fixture to be able to roll this tiny little button and measure for concentricity like run out. And then I remember back, I came from where I learned it, but that, you know, the fact you can't measure a trilobe with a mic
00:03:10
Speaker
micrometer because of the way it just, there's three points and a mic only measures from two points. So you're always only going to measure wrong. So if you want to measure the trilobe out of round, you kind of need like 120 degree V block or I don't know what the exact answer is. Yeah. And we just didn't want to send the file to it and run that program. So we wanted the manual way to do it. Um,
00:03:37
Speaker
But so we basically super glued two end milshanks to a flat surface and are using that as our custom V block.
00:03:46
Speaker
Oh, there it is. And it actually worked awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you proved out with measurement to try the local layer in me? Yeah, around 8 tenths. It's super awkward to get in there. I actually used a piece of, you know, like on a vacuum plate, the rubber tubing, the rubber gasket that goes around the outside. So I had a piece of that and I used that as like a violin string to roll the part. Does that make sense?
00:04:12
Speaker
Oh, no, totally does. Yeah, sure. Sure. Because we're sitting there with our fingers and we're bumping it, we're moving it. And this part is like a quarter inch long and eighth inch diameter. It's like really small.
00:04:23
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that's nice too, because it's like way more even. Yeah. We were trying to build, we actually built it. We're not using a rolling parallelism checker. It's really cool, but it's hand pushed, pulled in. So we built some isolation springs. That way the kind of undulation and force vectors of your hand aren't as directly influencing how the rollers are sandwiching the needle of the indicator. Yeah.
00:04:54
Speaker
Now you got to get the heat out of it too.
Effects of Temperature on Steel
00:04:57
Speaker
Yeah, heat's our issue. I know, us too. We thought about that briefly, but we're like, I've got it stuck in my head. So steel, regular steel grows by six millionths of an inch for every inch, for every degree. A degree Fahrenheit. A Fahrenheit, exactly. So that's like a good baseline. But this part is way smaller than an inch.
00:05:19
Speaker
So the growth will be like one millionth per degree, like sure something, but not much. I assume it's linear, but that's probably not a good assumption to make. I think it's linear within normal temperature ranges. Like you get into hundreds of degrees, it might get a little weird.
00:05:34
Speaker
I meant on the size because the theory is like, wait a minute, if you get a block that's 60 feet high and somehow you could heat the whole block up instantly, would it really expand? I guess maybe that's true. I think it is, yeah. That's the point. You think of a CNC machine, you go, okay, six millions per inch, but if we're 60 inches tall of Z-casting,
00:05:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And that's what's 60 times six, 360 millionths, that's three tenths, like three and a half tenths. Yeah, that's right. It's like a real thing, right? So per degree. Yes, right. So that's why thermal growth on a three axis C-axis machine or C-frame machine is like a real thing. No, that I think we've all lived and breathed.
00:06:18
Speaker
That reminds me to come back to the Okamoto real quick. I wanted to mention Spencer Webb closed the loop on this podcast within a podcast within a podcast conversation around A2. In the latest episode, this weekend's one? No, I think it was a couple weeks ago on his PFG Live. But the
00:06:35
Speaker
I would say it's a little bit pedantic or semantics, but A2 doesn't quote unquote grow over 40 years, although I would argue, yes, it does grow. What's really happening is there's some residual conversion of whatever remaining. Austinite into martin site. Exactly. He had a really good explanation of that. Cryo fixes that right now, otherwise it will happen naturally over the course of years or decades.
00:07:04
Speaker
Yeah, cryo makes it better, but there could still be a tiny bit of unconverted austenite in the material, but like, who cares is the point. But I do really, I really enjoyed all of these conversations to help demystify and understand, because like part of me just wondered as a layman is cryo, just people trying too hard and trying to be cool, like, who cares as hard as it is to be hard? Well, no, like from a dimensional stability, if you've got some leftover,
00:07:32
Speaker
your stressed or on uncontent crystals that are going to work their way around over time. And that totally makes sense for dimensional stability over a long period of time. Um, so to finish the button where we act, so clamping on
00:07:54
Speaker
the part because we have two shoulders with a relief section in the middle and the two shoulders are the same diameter. So when the sub spindle comes in, it's evenly ish clamping on both of them crushing the first one, which is semi hollow because there's a spring pocket on the inside.
Adjusting Sub Spindle Clamping
00:08:10
Speaker
It's like a delicate little feature. So we're trying to figure out either we tolerance the part so that those two features are different diameters with the weak one being thinner so it never gets touched.
00:08:24
Speaker
or the, you know, like that, um, or if we actually believe the call it, which I think we're going to do that. Um, can you, can I ask you, cause I'm, um, I'm for whatever reason, like I'm distracted or not following along, you've got a round part and that's approximately two millimeters or 0.1, five inches. 136 diameter. Perfect. Okay. So you've got this little round part. Yeah.
00:08:51
Speaker
And on the sub-spindle, which is 5C on your machine, right? No, on the Swiss, it's whatever they call it, TF16 or something. OK, but it's not a three-jaw chuck. It's actually a relatively full. Yeah, like a 5C, you call it. So there's three slots. Lost the ability to talk. Yes. So of your 360 degrees, you maybe have 15 total degrees. It's not being clamped because of the slots. But it shouldn't tri-lobal it, right? Well, you've got three points that are coming down.
00:09:22
Speaker
It's not really a full circle.
00:09:25
Speaker
Isn't it? It's happening. Yeah. I always felt like a three points would be a three jaw chuck. You have three points. The majority of your part is not supported, but a ER call it or a five C con or these whatever. Well, the air color has more than three points. It has like six or 12 or more, right? It's just like full. Like you can't you couldn't intentionally try to try to live something in your college. It's like I couldn't three or chuck. I could try to live something all day long. Like, sure. Because you have point contact. Hold my beer. I come all over this. But with these little
00:09:55
Speaker
A little call it. It's not just the contact all around. It's the fact that these three lobes, these three lengths of flexible arm are moving in as it gets tighter. The feature is really thin. Yeah. I don't doubt that you distort it, but I would think you would collapse it out. I guess I'm surprised that you can go
00:10:18
Speaker
Okay. We can easily adjust the clamping pressure. He lightened up until it wouldn't grab. I'm at the limit right now. I can't go anywhere. That's okay. I think we're going to try to relieve the collet. Now, this is just over an eighth inch ID collet and we need a hundred now of grip and then we need clearance past that. How do you? Clearance for the features. Yeah. We just machine hard mill the collet. Yeah, but from the inside.
00:10:49
Speaker
With a back, yeah. Yeah, right. So like a single point thread mill, maybe. But I've kind of come to a thread mill, like a milling thread mill, and do it manually. So spin the thread mill the right way, spin the collet the other way, jog it to zero, put it in the hole, and do kind of some mental math and machine it that way. So I think that's what we're going to do today. You could use a carbide burr if it's just relief. I thought about it, but it's too inaccurate, and it's too by hand.
00:11:19
Speaker
I meant in a machine, but... You could. Yeah, you're right. It would be the same as the thread mill. Okay. So that's what we're going to do. Yeah. And I figured the collets are probably hardened. I don't know how hard, but they look hard.
00:11:32
Speaker
We've hard milled the Royal GQs a lot, actually. Your QG is what they're called. I mean, it's hard milling, but it works great. I'm more worried about the kind of doing this manually and making sure everything's turned on properly in the right direction and jogging it in. It won't be that hard, but it's just something we got to do. Can you 3D print one? It won't hold up, but it might last for five parts. Do you have a solid model of a collet?
00:12:00
Speaker
Um, I don't actually, I don't think it'll last for five parts. You'd be surprised, Sean.
00:12:06
Speaker
We do a lot of like 70, 80% infill bamboo, just PLA. We don't even do PLA tough or ABS or anything. And we build fixtures that we actually haul on. A couple of them have failed, so you kind of have to do it in a way where you know if this flies off, what's going to happen. But it has been actually awesome. Cool. I think I saw some of them when I was down there. Yeah.
00:12:35
Speaker
But he was able to confirm that the trilobe is a problem by, like on the Swiss, you have dual spindles, right? You make the part halfway on one spindle, you transfer it to the other spindle. So he basically didn't do the transfer. He made half the part and he cut it off and just found it in the chip tray, basically. And we put it in the knife and it fit better and felt better. So that trilobe is being annoying. Yeah. So we'll find a way. I think if we leave the call it, it'll be great. Is it awesome? Sorry.
00:13:05
Speaker
Go for it. You if it's as small as these features are part of me is almost wonders. Obviously, I was already thinking about roller birdishing in cocktail. You and I have been down that path. I think we've all been kind of like maybe has its place, but it's also it. Oh, I have a place for it. Oh, do tell that. Well, later. Okay. The other thought I had on a feature like this, just quote unquote, swage form it back to the to the correct dimension when you're all done.
00:13:32
Speaker
This feature, I don't think would work for that. But it is a cool idea. OK, the other thing we're noticing, so we're using 17.4 pH H900 stainless steel, which you buy as like 45 Rockwell. It's pretty hard already. We use it a lot. All of our pivots, all of our stop pins, a lot of our knife parts are made from that. Where do you get it from? Alexandria.
00:14:02
Speaker
Alexander. Yeah. Alexander Steel or whatever. The New Jersey place that does, that does, um, they didn't OD grind it for there. Yeah. You just buy ground stock from their website. Yeah. They're great. They're like fantastic to work with. Um, so about
Testing Colsterized Parts
00:14:21
Speaker
already, he treated machine at hard 45.
00:14:24
Speaker
And so remember I talked about the colsterizing process a couple of weeks ago. So I got samples back a couple of weeks ago, tested them. They seem to work great. It is significantly harder outside surface on this material. They say it's probably 70 Rockwell, which is insane. And in testing in the knife, so putting in a regular 17-4 button that's 45 Rockwell,
00:14:51
Speaker
It kind of, the hardened blade shaves it away in various parts and it dents it and it scratches it and it beats it up. The colsterized part does not shave at all anymore, which is awesome. So like the radius and some of the features are holding up amazing, but it will still dent. So like the locking surface, because the button causes the knife to lock open. And if we abuse that too much, if we smack on the knife or whatever, we can still dent the 17-4.
00:15:20
Speaker
That's what hardness is supposed to fix. Well, it's surface hardness. It's not like substrate hardness, right? Got it. So I'm leaning towards, we just need a harder material period for this button. So we'll probably go to a 440C and heat treat it to 60 Rockwell or something like that. We're going to test that today. Sky's going to heat treat them hopefully tomorrow, and then we'll have that answer.
00:15:44
Speaker
The beauty with 17-4 and colsterizing is the parts are shiny, silver, not discolored, not distorted whatsoever. I wish that worked out perfectly. 440C, when we heat treat them, they're going to turn, they're going to change color. Even ever so slightly. Have a back card. Back still. They're still going to turn golden and they're still going to turn a little dusty. No. Yeah. I've had it done.
00:16:10
Speaker
Respectfully, so I have not placed an order myself, but Robin had showed me photo examples of the solar atmosphere is doing not only vacuum hardened, but vacuum temper. Okay. I don't think I've had a vacuum temper, and I haven't had solar do it. They're like the pros. Yeah. It was the real deal. It absolutely did not look like it was heat treated because it was that bright, shiny, polished look. Interesting.
00:16:36
Speaker
Anyway, our local place down the street has done some heat treating for us, and they do vacuum heat treat, but they can do a vacuum temper. It's just really expensive. You're signing up the oven for hours and hours. So we haven't done that yet. Anyway, those are the things. But for testing, I think I have some solutions around that anyway. And going back to a couple weeks ago where you said, make the first batch of knives and call them artist proof, like AP01, AP02.
00:17:06
Speaker
as the guys are reminding me, they're like, for those APs, it doesn't need to be all fleshed out. It can be a little, you know, you almost want it to be a little weird. Yeah, I think it's okay. Yeah, I'm leaning into that and accepting it and realizing that.
00:17:22
Speaker
Can I ask though, the big question was, was the colsterizing dimensionally? John, that's insane. It's an amazing process. I'm impressed. And I think for the saga buttons, we're going to start doing that because the three little ceramic ball bearings will scratch and dig into the 17, four ever so slightly. And I think it would solve that completely.
00:17:45
Speaker
And you could still colsterize something like 440C that's at 60 and you'd still get maybe 10 more points of hardness. That's a good question. Or is it only? No, it's only for some kinds of steels. I don't think that knife steels, like blade steels, like a 440 worked for some reason. I can't remember exactly.
00:18:08
Speaker
Because if it's not adding, I mean like PVD, like those add dimensions to it, they're small, but they add. So if it's not adding, it has to be affecting the material. Exactly. They're basically shoving carbon atoms into the spaces between the surface of the steel kind of thing. Yeah. We need more to weigh in on this. Yeah, exactly.
00:18:29
Speaker
But it does do. I have proof now that it's a really cool process. Just the substrate softness is still denting, and I don't want that to happen. We're seeing it after a day of playing with the knife, abusing it. But still, it's not going to last for 100 years.
00:18:45
Speaker
This makes me want to like scream though, because if there's one thing I've learned, it's like you cannot be in denial and product development. Like when you started to see something that might be an issue, assume you're designed to the lowest competent denominator, assume it's going to be used, abused. You know, for us, we think about this with puck chucks, like, sure, we could do, we could go out of our way to do some best practices, tips, tricks, but like the reality is, maybe the person that opens the box sees that, but the operator a year later, they don't even know that.
00:19:13
Speaker
or frankly care. So you've got to just solve those problems. Yeah, fix it. Yeah, it's interesting. The other cool thing we've been playing with is the optical comparator that
Using Optical Comparator for Measurements
00:19:26
Speaker
we have. It's a Starrett HB 350. Found it on the local
00:19:31
Speaker
you know, Craigslist kind of thing. It has high nine glass scales on it. So it reads to 10 million accuracy. And it is shockingly accurate. It's fantastic. A couple of years ago, we had a computer system hooked up to it called a Beatty. I don't know what you call it. But it lets you basically, instead of being fully optical with the crosshairs, it puts a fiber optic light sensor edge finder onto it.
00:19:56
Speaker
Okay. It can scan, it can track. That's cool. On the computer, it can measure lines and tapers and radii and hold the whole features and it's like a cheap little fake CMM. Yeah.
00:20:09
Speaker
we were having issues with the software and Pierre was getting frustrated with it. So he just kind of stopped using it and went back to the manual digital readout. Um, and that always kind of bugged me. So I, I got back into it last week, um, turn it on again. And it seems to be working great. Um, had to have the service guy come in real quick and just fix one little thing. Cause after two years, it was giving us this calibration warning. They're like, Oh, you got to calibrate. I was like, bro, you need to come in and get rid of this cause
00:20:37
Speaker
I don't need to be reminded every two years that it needs to be calibrated. Yeah, I did calibrate it like two years ago. And I don't know, whatever.
00:20:49
Speaker
But it's been really fun. So Jeff has never used something like that before, so we use that. So Jeff, Jeff and I have been using that quite a lot, like quite a lot lately. And it's super cool to be able to basically build your part, measure this radius, measure these tapers, measure that diameter, measure this diameter, measure that diameter, and track it all up on the screen. That's awesome. Like for lathe parts?
00:21:10
Speaker
So how do you does it pop up like on the computer side? Does it show you what the radius is? I'm like digitally. Yeah, absolutely. Our Spironi does that. So we use our Spironi Presetter for some stuff sometimes because it's similar, similar. Yeah, but it like can find the curve based on the light projection of the dark part relative to the white background. And then it's like, OK, that's a point one to radius curve or 80, 41 degree angle would be an easy one for
00:21:39
Speaker
for champers. So that uses a camera, right? Correct. A light to dark camera, whereas this uses an edge finder. So a little tiny fiber optic cable that just measures light to dark. And it also reads the scales on the machine. But yeah, very similar thing. And we didn't have that capability before. Even CMMing some of these features would be weird. Yeah, I get that. Sure. You could see them on the trilobe. But to measure all this stuff, that's why opticals for the lathe part are awesome.
00:22:08
Speaker
So it's been great. It's been having a lot of fun with it. Good. Did you ever, on this integral button thing, I think part of the sort of difficulty in following along is just, I'm not a knife guy. And I think probably like some listeners, we don't really know the inner working detail. But internally, do you ever print like a 50 times mock-up where like the button is the size of like a two-eater pop model and you like show the inner? That's a really good idea.
00:22:37
Speaker
We haven't really done that, but I have definitely exploded things up because it's so much interesting to see, and you could. It doesn't cost anything. Sure. I definitely have some strategic section views in our
00:22:51
Speaker
knife assembly that I sat down with Angelo and with Jeff Jeff, and I like showed them, okay, this is how it works. This is what happens when the knife opens and the button goes up here, and it locks up here, notice on the radius, it's only going up halfway. This is why that's important. This is why that's important. And that really helped him, you know, bring it home and make sense of what's happening. And then for the past week, he's been assembling, put it together, feel it, and really learning like on a granular level, what's happening and why it's happening. And
00:23:18
Speaker
banging his head against the Swiss trying to like fix it and then the communication there is really important too because he was trying to fix something that he told me you know a day later and I was like oh don't worry about that like that gets fixed with this thing over here and he's like oh I thought I was trying to solve that with this button it's like okay no that's okay miscommunication yeah that's cool that's awesome
00:23:44
Speaker
I had both a share comment, but also a question on bamboo. PSA, we had a relatively early bamboo X1, but not that early. I had mentioned in Alex in passing that I was sometimes frustrated that you really needed to do brims more often.
00:24:02
Speaker
which I don't like doing brims, but worse off, the slicer doesn't tell me I need a brim. So it's kind of like, hey, why is there this disconnect? Because if I'm giving my aunt a 3D printer, she's not going to know this stuff. Alex was like, I think he either looked or I just said, you know that has the old build plate on it. I'm like, what are you talking about? So the texture, I think it's the texture PEI plate that
00:24:22
Speaker
basically everybody uses, we use everything. Ours was the old generation. So for 30 bucks, I think I bought the new one, which is slightly goldish in color. Our old one was much more of a black and gray. Okay. And John, it's insane. Now I printed, I was printing some wall control stuff and one of them had this like
00:24:43
Speaker
tiny, like one millimeter thick ring that was like one inch in diameter, no brim. Like I printed all these, I printed these tall, thin parts at an angle that only had like a quarter inch of here that were huge, no brim. So if anybody out there has the old build plate, good grief, go replace it. Interesting. I think ours is the more black textured build plate.
00:25:04
Speaker
take a look, Google, I'm sure there'll be Reddit posts or forum online, but see if you have the old one if so replace it. Interesting. The question is, I mean, we are pretty more and more and more.
00:25:16
Speaker
And I'm tired of having to manually export STLs out of Fusion. So the first file, the first object I want, you can automatically import it into the slicer. But if you continue to click that, it opens up new instances of Bamboo. And you can't copy paste between Bamboo windows. And
00:25:36
Speaker
So what I do is I uncheck the export utility, I save it as STL, I go to Windows Explorer, drag it back in. It's not the end of the world, but I'm tired of doing it. And I'm also just like, hey, is this one of those, this has been solved in a way I don't know. I know you can get a little bit cute. I think we did a video on this where you can try to export the parent level component from Fusion, but that still only works if you're in one, all your parts are in one file and we're doing mixed prints now. So, I don't, just kidding. Do you print a lot of multi-things to deal with this? Sometimes.
00:26:06
Speaker
I haven't even linked Fusion to export properly. I still export the STL and just do it the hard way. Okay. I assume it's not difficult.
00:26:16
Speaker
Apparently, on Bamboo, you shouldn't even export the SLU. You can just export the step and Bamboo will take a step file. The step file, really? It's more accurate because it hasn't been tessellated right or whatever. I haven't even done that, but PSA. Then there's a 3MF2. I don't know really much about that. I think that's just the Bamboo file that saves your recipe.
00:26:37
Speaker
Okay, so like the cam quite like which most it's not just the part geometry. Gotcha. Oh, so if you which works so well for sharing the file because now it shares the filament, the recipe, the temperature, everything, not just the STL model.
00:26:54
Speaker
Correct. And one of the wall control things I've been doing is they triple D. Oh, no, this actually isn't triple D, but it's a derivative, which is a tape dispenser that has, you've seen this, it has 3D printed sections of dowel rods or round parts, and then it has hangers. So you put multiple rolls of tape on this thing, but you can swing them out of the way to grab the one you want.
00:27:17
Speaker
I don't think I have seen that. That sounds awesome. I'm doing a great job explaining it, but I'll put a link in the description to this. I'm just turning it out to it. And why did I bring that up? Oh, so I have my own version of how I want to print that because I want certain of the tape options, not all of them. And so I laid them all out on the build plate and I saved that one. And now I want to print another one. I've got my, the files I want saved. That's actually more important than the print settings, the print settings I just use our default. Nice.
00:27:47
Speaker
Cool. Yeah, I was printing ABS last week on the smooth build plate, I think, and it totally let go near the end. And I think my camera wasn't working because of some weird update issue or something. And I didn't think much of it, but that means the spaghetti detection is not working either. So I totally trashed right at the end this whole part, big part funnel was moving around coming in the morning. Grayson said, I stopped it with 11 minutes left because it was still going.
00:28:16
Speaker
like a nine-hour print. But then I used the textured build plate with the bamboo liquid glue or something and black ABS and dried the filament and it worked awesome.
00:28:27
Speaker
I was just going to ask, we just ordered ABS this morning. I've never printed on the bamboo with ABS. Any tips? I could smell it, actually. It does kind of smell stinky, so I wouldn't do it in your kitchen or something. But anywhere else is fine. But yeah, the clean build plate, the liquid glue helped stick it down. I did a brim as well, a pretty big brim. And this was a big part that wanted to curl in the corners. OK. Got it. Little stuff, whatever. Just dry it.
00:28:56
Speaker
Otherwise, yeah, we have a little filament heater thing. Yeah. Try that. Okay. Yeah. And this role has been open for three years. So like, yeah, it's not even bamboo filament. It's just whatever I had from the Vorone printers. It worked great though. What do you have to feel like I've been talking a lot?
00:29:23
Speaker
Um, okay. Tool balancer. We actually have a tip from a, not a cat 40 balancer, a, the suspension. Gotcha. Zero, the zero gravity suspension device. Somebody had mentioned on Instagram, I'm trying to remember who I thought my head about these, um, sloppy makes them, but as do others. And they're.
00:29:46
Speaker
They're torque specific bits that go between the tool and your actual driver bit that say the one I'm holding is blue, has a blue collar and it's 15, the torque's 15 and it's 26.6 inch pounds. I thought these were gonna be great and then I tried one and as soon as I tried it, I felt it. I was like, that's really warm and then I went and looked on their website and they are for hand tools only. I reached out and I was like, hey,
00:30:14
Speaker
explain the application and they're like, yeah, no, we don't absolutely not recommend they will, these are aware item and they will super premature wear under power tool use.
00:30:26
Speaker
negates that. But what I do think we're going to do is, so there's other versions of these. McMaster has them for about $160, which is not cheap, but certainly different compared to five grand for a digital system. But I think what I'm going to do is look at, this is, I was laughing too, because we actually had these Slockeys in a Torquette drawer. Like there's just for some reason we have them. I've no idea why. Okay. You didn't buy that one. No, no. Do you know where you got them from? I was just curious.
00:30:54
Speaker
I do. I remember when we bought a Tormach machine, Tormach had a kit that they came with for changing inserts and super flies or something.
00:31:04
Speaker
Yeah, I bought a bunch of them, like many hundreds of dollars of inserts, because we used a lot of the hand tools. We torque our knives, the screws, things like that. A lot of the screws on the fixtures. And what I was very surprised and didn't like about them is they don't click. They just split. And that feels super weird by hand, because we've got some other weird ones. And they're like, click, click, and like, sweet. Yeah, that's awesome. And this one's just like, there's no sound, no feel, no nothing.
00:31:32
Speaker
And I'm like, how do you know it's done? Well, it moves. Yeah, it's there's a mush. Maybe it takes some some getting used to but yeah, kind of weird.
00:31:44
Speaker
I want to look into, again, we have a cheapo Milwaukee from Amazon, but one of the smaller lightweight drivers. I'm thinking, my understanding is tools like companies like Bosch, they make tools that are much better quality that aren't going to be what you get at the big box stores are going to be different from the Amazons. If you buy Bosch direct from the consumer line, on the website, it looks like a really nice lightweight driver.
00:32:10
Speaker
And it's smaller. We don't need this giant tool for what we're doing. And then a look at maybe some of the McMaster, they call them adjustable torque limiting socket adapters to see if that would work. Those do appear to be, they have a max speed of 300 RPM. So clearly they are meant to be running a tool or a power tool. So that's running on that. Interesting. The bigger update is Johnny five. Yes. Watching a little Instagram updates.
00:32:39
Speaker
Yeah. So man, part of me wants to just kind of reminisce on how awesome it was and how, you know, well, the past is the past. I moved him back into my office and I remembered the way you eat an elephant is one bite at a time. And so it's like, just don't worry about building dry five. Just pick, could you, sometimes I take it to the extreme, like looking at the next section, which is only about six inches tall, still quite a few parts, but not that big. And I'm like, Hey,
00:33:05
Speaker
if all I needed to do was do a world-class job at finishing this next section, could I do that for the rest of my life or in the next 10 years? Of course, good grief, totally. Then it's like, what parts do I need to do? Because that's something you could do really in the next month or how do you want to do that? Do you want to spend an hour a day? Do you want to do it on the weekends? Or I want to take him home? I haven't figured all that detail out yet.
00:33:26
Speaker
took them apart and actually paid for a SolidWorks Maker license so that, I didn't know about this, but they've come out with a, it's 50 bucks a year and it's, you know, for hobby use only, but Johnny Five is not, he's just for hobby. I don't think they're gonna get mad at me. And that's nice because the file formats are made of SolidWorks, so you do get a better stuff that way. So yeah, it's been actually super, super fun. What I didn't wanna do was,
00:33:53
Speaker
publicly dust this project off and then fail again, frankly, or let it go by the wayside. And I think we're doing the right thing to actually set this up for success, which would be awesome. Cool. That's exciting. Yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna pick it away. Like, I don't even want to ask for, you know, timelines or anything like that, because it's what it is. You're gonna make little progress. I like you starting with the neck.
00:34:17
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and I'm starting with the neck because the head is not done. The CAD they're still working on at the input ink team. So I thought, well, let me just start with the neck. What is the input ink team?
00:34:28
Speaker
So the inputting team, I'm not sure. Folks in Google, I don't want to say it incorrectly, but it is the team that is basically driving this project. And when I say this project, they have this incredible solid model cap repository. They're the ones or their team is the one that had access to the robot. I think it was like 20 years ago when somebody was able to actually spend time and measure it.
00:34:53
Speaker
Yeah, they're the ones that are, you know, I don't know how many of their team members have fully built one. I did see one recently. The guy's got some fair amount of public stuff on it called the Texas Johnny Five build. And in fact, on Facebook, just that robot just went to San Francisco for somebody's wedding like last weekend. And the robot J5 is on the dance floor at this wedding, doing a toe tip, singing along or like dancing to John Travolta, just like in the scene.
00:35:21
Speaker
It's actually pretty legit. Yeah, I see their YouTube channel right now. Okay, I'm going to dig into that a little bit.
00:35:28
Speaker
Yeah. So it's been fun. I'm realizing I'm going to basically have to disassemble the whole thing and swap out parts, replace parts. Do not. Yeah, I know, right? We have had people already ask about making parts. I do love the idea of taking people up on
Community Involvement in Projects
00:35:44
Speaker
that. But I think I mentioned this before, putting the onus on us first. We need to make a little bit of progress before we start holding our hand out and saying, do other people want to contribute? So we appreciate that. Give us a couple of weeks or a month to kind of figure out where we're at on this guy.
00:35:58
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a great plan and I think people do want to help and they do want to feel a little connection to it. They want to be part of something bigger. It's like when you did the egress door, the project egress. I didn't do anything but you guys were all a little part of every piece of it. It all came together and it must have felt awesome.
00:36:18
Speaker
The last thing and then I'll shut up is we almost got our butts kicked and then we saved ourselves. Don't know how this happened, but one of the offsets on the horizontal
00:36:34
Speaker
X, Y, and Z, which is really what Suspect all got reset to the spindle home position. And you can do that by hitting the CAL button. The Akuma Control CAL basically sets the offset value to the current position, which a lot of times the spindle parks itself home. So somebody hit that. I think you have to hit that on all three offsets. I don't think hitting it once would overwrite X, Y, and Z. But regardless, that happened.
00:37:03
Speaker
It happened on a part that we hadn't run for two months because we had sufficient inventory and that part got scheduled to run overnight, which I would prefer we not do that if we haven't run something for two months on the flip side. The fixture hasn't been moved, the part tool hasn't been moved, so I kind of get it. Basically, we got an alarm
00:37:28
Speaker
over travel alarm at like 2 a.m. I woke up and I saw it and I thought oh my god and worried but it wasn't a crash alarm but it was an over travel alarm but I was pretty nervous going into the shop. The through spindle cool luckily it was a Saturday it was Friday night run so it's Saturday morning so nobody was here. The through spindle coolant was running for seven hours straight which isn't great.
00:37:51
Speaker
And so figure out what happened. So we didn't crash, thank God. What was interesting or what helped me was that I do an iPhone video once a month. It's a Lex reminder. It takes 10 seconds to do it. And I just scroll page down through all the offsets in an iPhone video. And I store that video on our shared drive. And I love that because to me, an iPhone video is so much more sacred and helpful than exporting a CSV database where you just, I don't know, I'm just weird.
00:38:21
Speaker
And so I pulled up the historical videos and looked to confirm that offset should have been what I thought it should have been. And it gave me a lot more confidence in what happened and how to fix it. I like that a lot. I remember you talking about that many, many months ago. And you're like, yeah, that's probably a silly idea, but I'm going to do it anyway. And boom, here you go. Yeah, not really. Save your bacon. Yeah. Yeah. It's like with us, on the Kern, we export the entire tool table
00:38:49
Speaker
almost every tool change and update it and track it over time. So if something's weird, I can literally look back weeks, months, even years and see the history of that tool length, length offset, diameter radius change, length change, where things like that, tool life, even where our life limit was.
00:39:08
Speaker
and if we've messed with that over time. It's really cool to be able to look through the spreadsheet and be able to see the entire history of that tool. Even I can tell you this tool was last replaced on April 15th and we've been using that same tool for the past three weeks. If we have three weeks of bad parts because of that tool, it's because we had that. For over 10 years now, Lakeshore Carbide has been making this double corner rounder for us.
00:39:38
Speaker
Like a single corner rounder just rounds the top corner. This also rounds the bottom corner. So it's shaped like a sideways U. Like an hourglass kind of thing. Yeah, sure, sure. Interesting. And so I designed that, and they've been making it forever. It's awesome. And we use it to kind of radius the knife blade for on the Norseman, the whole spine, and on the flipper tab, on the rasp, just the flipper tab. And it was, for the past three weeks, it hasn't been doing a full radius. It's been leaving like a flat.
00:40:08
Speaker
Oh, why? So I traced it down to this particular corner rounder that we're using that the groovy part is six thousandths diameter skinnier than everyone we've been using for the past three years. Like they all vary a little bit, not much. This one varies a lot.
00:40:29
Speaker
and whatever, everybody's got manufacturing tolerances. I'm not complaining, but I want a way to catch that and to not have it be a problem ever again. So I got to use our optical comparator and the computer again, and I could like scan the feature and measure distances and lengths and diameters and all this stuff and kind of build a little process for knowing what the tool is before it even goes into the machine so that we can do any comps needed as it goes in.
00:40:58
Speaker
So I've been wanting to do that for years and did it this week. It's awesome. Good. That brings up. So speaking of tools that are possibly poorly manufactured, I'm going to throw some shade at Harvey and Helical companies. First off, some of our friends have mentioned that they've written them off because so much of their tools are outsourced and frankly produced to poor standards or repeatability. I don't have a dog in that fight. But they continue to, this is just a rant to be clear, they continue to send us
00:41:28
Speaker
countless numbers of catalogs for their new companies that they buy. They're owned by a private equity firm, Titan Drills, Micro 100. And generally, I like to be a positive guy. I've actually toured their facility. I've noticed people there and generally like to say good things about people and support the trades and be positive. But I've called twice now and spoken to a person. These are employees that don't even work at Saunders anymore. They're sending us
00:41:52
Speaker
It's like Uline abuse. They're sending us numerous thick catalogs. We'll get a bundle of six or eight of them. I've politely but firmly been like, please stop sending us all these. I don't even want to deal with throwing these away now. We continue to get them. Shame on you that your private equity growth needs of not respecting people's desires and not be mailed your junk continue to be disregarded or ignored as you continue to send us junk. Stop.
00:42:21
Speaker
Really disappointed. Yeah. On a more positive note, what do you have to do today? Today, a lot of the things we just talked about already.
00:42:34
Speaker
that double corner rounder, I still have to go measure like all the future ones that we have, we have maybe 10 or 20 in stock. So I want to measure that I want to write the length offset on each one, which then goes into the machine. Oh, that's awesome. You know, so every time Angela pulls out the tool, he knows, oh, I have to write that number to the machine as it goes in. And then
00:42:56
Speaker
cut the 440C buttons or basically watch Jeff do it, which is awesome. But kind of make sure that happens today. I have to make another integral blade on this video so that tomorrow it can be heat treated and then we can see the results of that. So my goal is by the end of this week, I want to have a Spencer Webb would say P3.
00:43:16
Speaker
I want to have prototype three in my hand by the end of the week. I wrote that on Monday on my notebook. I want to have P3 in my hand. That's a new handle, new blade, new button, new stop pins. Next couple of days, I'll be making all those parts. Cool. Super exciting. If I can have P3 done, then I will feel very accomplished.
00:43:37
Speaker
that will be very close to kind of final version. Once all those parts are together, then they'll be like minor tweaks. But I think I'm coming in real close here. Which is good for you. Dude, go buy a shadow box from Hobby Lobby and put put P1 and P2 in it, even if you got to like fake remake some parts, but like, you're far enough along this journey, where it's like, you should document like a wall display of the original. I like it.
00:44:04
Speaker
Yeah, I'm going to engrave P3 on this next handle. And I'm going to hand engrave P1 and P2 on the first ones. And even though as a prototype gets iterated, the parts get shifted around. And whatever this one that I showed you that I brought down to Ohio, I'm going to leave it together. That's P2. Yeah, that's awesome. And then P3 will be all new parts. And then we'll keep that together. And then we'll be close to production after that. Good. Yeah, we're on track. We're doing good. All right. Good.
00:44:58
Speaker
All right. I got to run. I will see you next week. It sounds good, Ben. Take care.