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Business of Machining - Episode 124
237 Plays6 years ago
Apollo 11. PARTS. NASA. SMITHSONIAN. ADAM SAVAGE??
Breaking the Silence on Project Egress!
This "Top Secret" mission is a collaborative, maker-inspired, project to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. Saunders shares his crazy story about what the project is, why it's so important, how it ties into his renewed passion for 5-axis machining, and why he's ready to get a "real" lathe!
If you want to meet up and see the project, swing by the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, July 18th!
Collet Bushing Drama
Old Red, White, and Blue won't provide the proper sized thread, so he turns to the Swiss for an answer instead.
Until the custom collet bushing arrives, the Tornos is a chucker lathe. Although there were some concerns about long stickout and tool deflection, surprisingly, the Tornos is STILL dead nuts!
Click Image Below to See Post
Swiss Training Continues The Tornos has made over 500 parts so far! By making what is essentially a dowel pin, Grimsmo's learning how components of the machine work together. Also, his familiarity with FANUC control on the Nakamura comes in handy.
Can I Get Your Digits? Instead of 4 digits, the Swiss has 5....meaning Grimsmo can move the machine in increments of ten millionths!
THE PRICE IS RIGHT...BUT IS THAT ENOUGH? So you're in the market to buy a machine but before you do, there are considerations you may not have thought about! Check out Guide to Buying CNC Machines.
Don't Judge an Endmill by its Coating! A while back, Saunders mentioned his preference for owning uncoated endmills to avoid having material-specific tools. In theory, this makes sense but Laurens steps in to set Saunders straight! Sure, the coating is something to consider but there are other characteristics such as the edge grind on the flutes and relief that are MUCH more important.
Recommended
Transcript
Introductions and Morning Greetings
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining, episode 124. My name is John Grimsmill. My name is John Saunders. Good morning, buddy. Good morning. How are you? Splendid today.
MODIS Shirt and Machining Connection
00:00:12
Speaker
Awesome. What shirt are you wearing? I feel like I know your wardrobe. This is a MODIS shirt, M-O-T-I-S. It's this company just down the street, young guy just like us, that makes firefighter accessories.
00:00:28
Speaker
So yes, first off, they reached out to us because we've talked about them before because of something lean, right? OK. Yeah, he's getting super into machining and manufacturing. He bought two older used Robo drills.
00:00:43
Speaker
Awesome. Super cool smart guy and we went for a tour of a shop and he gave us some shirts and it's like a really nice comfy shirt and I love it. Really cool design on it. So yeah, just love for repping it. My wife says like I cannot get any more t-shirts because my t-shirt drawer is stuffed to the rafters. But I'm guessing you wear like 10% of them a lot. Yeah, probably 40% of them. Yeah, I should definitely purge but
00:01:11
Speaker
But yeah, I've got a lot of cool shirts from a lot of cool people, so I like to wear them. Yeah, that's fair. Whereas Barry seems to only want to wear Grimms One Eyes shirts, and he thinks we're all traitors. It's funny, I have that kind of conflict. I'm actually wearing a Saunders shirt today, but usually I wear, I don't know, I have all these shirts from my friends, and people in the industry. You've got your Marjorie shirt. Yeah.
00:01:35
Speaker
Yeah, I've been liking the monkey-like shiny MLS aerospace shirt. It's got a fighter jet with the exhaust of the fighter jet rotates into a twist drill. It's actually really cool. Like there's ways you can do that that look corny and this doesn't. This just looks bad.
00:01:53
Speaker
Bad, you know what? Yeah, good bad. Yeah, the good bad. Nice. Bad donkey. So yeah, it's awesome. What's been going on?
Swiss Lathe Training Experience
00:02:05
Speaker
Swiss training continued yesterday. Okay. So I got, I guess I got three and a half days last week and probably get about the same this week. Swiss has been going great. It has made 550 parts so far.
00:02:23
Speaker
Of the same? Yes, of the same. Okay, okay. As I said, that would be hella impressive. Yep, yep. And it was nice to have just like a simple, it's a dowel pin basically. A simple part just to make in higher volumes. You get to see how the bar loader works, you get to see how the tolerances hold up, you're making like a simple easy part that
00:02:46
Speaker
Turns out, it's never simple and easy, because there's a lot of variables involved. There's diameter, there's taper, there's length, all your tooling, just learning how and where and what everything does. The first time, we ran a few parts while he was still here, and then he's like, okay, I'm going back home, taking my flight back home to Montreal. I'm like, great. But that first moment of being on your own without your parents there, air quotes.
00:03:14
Speaker
Yeah, I filmed it and I had the microphone on so I was just kind of talking to myself and it was very nerve-wracking. I was like, oh, and then I start watching it and so much is happening at once that it's cool. It's super fun.
00:03:28
Speaker
Are you pushing the code from Fusion, or are you doing a lot of hand stuff? A lot of hand stuff. The operation works from Fusion, but everything in between doesn't. Although if I was Lauren's level good at editing posts, I would be able to theoretically dump out a proper. I bet you'll get there. Yeah, exactly. It depends on how much I want to. I don't know, it's not that hard to hand edit it together. I'm so good at it now after the Nakamura for three and a half years.
00:03:58
Speaker
Shameless plug though to the article on the NYC CNC website of like top I forget what we call it like ten things to think about when you're buying a machine tool, which is you know So often it's easy to focus on the price because that's a huge number especially if you're buying your first one or you're upgrading your first time from say like a Tormach to a BMC or lathe and
00:04:21
Speaker
We tried to think about all the things that we've learned. So it's things like, what can you get them to include in terms of extended service, or making sure you have on paper X number of days of training, or soft expansion options, stuff like that that can help you make
The Importance of Structured Training
00:04:37
Speaker
sure. Because you don't think about, I think you've often said your training is kind of like, quote unquote, unlimited. With some really? With Elliott, yeah. If they're available and around. Right.
00:04:48
Speaker
And I have some of the guys that I text often. So it's nice. And I'm sorry, remind me is in the new late is also Elliott. Yes, both my leads are really. Yeah. Got it. Which is don't give me rock. That is phenomenal. I also always feel like that falls into the bucket of free is not good because if I have, say, three days of training that I got got as part of the package deal, I can tell them, hey, I want to.
00:05:14
Speaker
cash those in, you quote unquote owe that to me because it was part of the consideration of the deal. In the terms of Elliott, just so I don't over speak my boundaries here, probably three days of official training and then support after that. If I want to email a question or whatever, but it's not that they're going to come back at a moment's notice on my demand for 100 days, not at all. Right, right, right.
00:05:41
Speaker
So what's the gist of the train? Walk me through an hour or two session with the train. What are you guys doing? Honestly, there was a lot of him just poking around the machine by himself, kind of make sure everything's set up, make sure all the parameters are right, make sure everything works. The bar feeder actually feeds and start to set up some of the tools. And we were so busy last week that I couldn't just stand there and watch him do everything. But I'd touch in and be just right there while doing my own work.
00:06:09
Speaker
Which is kind of cool actually in a weird way like I could still work and be productive and he was there getting it dialed and then he could Tell me what he did quickly and I picked it up nice and fast and Angelo is around too so he picked up a lot as well and
00:06:27
Speaker
Yeah, so it was a bit different than before because the control is similar to my Nakamura. It's FANUC as well. So I could poke through it and aside from like two or three menus, I knew where everything was.
00:06:42
Speaker
which is nice. So it's not like we have to go through page by page by page and explain every single menu and every single option and all that. I kind of knew what was going on. So that shortened a lot of the training. Other than that, it was just how to jog the machine around, which way every axis moves. A lot of it was programming, which only took like an hour or two of us to talk about the structure of the code. There's so many M codes that turn on different coolant things.
00:07:08
Speaker
You know, because the high pressure chip blaster at 2000 psi has eight outputs, each with their own M code, M on and M off. So it's like M 601, 602 turns it on and off. And then the machine has a low pressure pump and a 300 psi high pressure pump and all these valves that can shut off various outputs.
00:07:30
Speaker
So there's one output that sprays right at the spindle, and that's M whatever. And then there's another one that sprays right at the subspindle, and then there's all these other solenoid valves that are M code controlled. So it's cool. It's really cool. Yeah.
00:07:49
Speaker
What did you end up doing about the collet bushing drama? Correct. I've called three collet manufacturers in the US, and nobody makes the proper size thread. One, well, without being a $500 custom make. They have them in stock in Switzerland, and I need to wire transfer them money, which I'll do today. I still haven't done it yet.
00:08:14
Speaker
But got it. So you had no problem using the... Do you have to manually unlock and manually index the part right now? Not manually.
00:08:26
Speaker
How are you making 500 parts if you don't have the ability? Oh, you can't, it's not a sliding, so you can't have the part move, okay. So it's not a guide bushing or sliding head lathe right now. It's a chucker lathe? It's a chucker lathe, yep. So the material stays still while it's machining, so it's hanging out like half an inch or whatever.
00:08:47
Speaker
and stay stuck and then it's doing the lathing and then it grabs the part transfers, pushes the bar forward again and then makes another. So the biggest downside is that your stick out and your hangout is a lot so you can get deflection. Sure. Whereas with those little pins are like four times stick out or something, right? Yeah, but I don't have any taper actually, which is nice.
00:09:10
Speaker
Really? Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, like I showed on Instagram, I set the program 15625 in the code. And the first part was 15625. And I was like, are you kidding me? Right. That said, it's not like one-tenth every part all the time. There's definitely some deviation. There's definitely some thermal involved.
00:09:36
Speaker
Last part of the day on a hot machine to first part of the day on a cold machine was maybe about a thou of difference. And then it takes maybe half an hour to warm up or so. But then talking to other Swiss guys, they're like, yeah, that's pretty normal. But after that half hour, it's solid all day, all day, all day.
00:09:53
Speaker
That is awesome. That was the big question, right? You're gonna need an oil chiller. And it seems like, nothing you've seen so far, it says you definitely do need it. Correct. Once it's warm and happy, it holds consistent. I could imagine that if the temperature was always kept at 72 degrees Fahrenheit or whatever, you'd have even more consistency, you know? Sure. But for now, I think we'll be fine.
00:10:21
Speaker
Which brings up another point, which is insane to me. Say on your Haas machine or on any of my machines, there are an inch format, there are four digits, right? The machine moves in one-tenth increments, right? Okay. On the Swiss, it's the next digit. There are five digits and I can move the machine. Ten millionths? Yeah, I can move the machine ten millionths. Wow.
00:10:47
Speaker
It's crazy seeing, like setting the jog wheel to one, like X1 increment. And I'm seeing 10 million smooth and I'm like, no way. No way. I can only imagine the shame that your lathe will feel when you get a five axis that's even more accurate. Yeah, jeez. That's cool though. You actually have me fired up and excited about getting a real lathe. Yeah.
00:11:16
Speaker
Do you have different projects in mind for it or like you just always need some work?
00:11:22
Speaker
It's a support machine for sure, but then it will also tie into the speeds and feeds project. And it's for sure, it's a tool. It's interesting because I have more and more conviction about, you know, we're probably going to sell our plasma machine because we don't use it to speak of. In fact, I've used it incredibly little. The products that we used to make on it, we don't make, that's okay.
00:11:49
Speaker
And I've got to take off my bootstrapper hat, meaning on a machine, I have not hit cycle start on that plasma myself for something that I needed especially same day in over a year. And it's a large machine. It's capital that's tied up. It should be used. It's a great machine. I love it. It's not part of our story right now.
00:12:11
Speaker
There's shops locally, as well as Alro, will do plasma workforce probably next day, maybe two days. So if I spend a little bit of a premium, but have them source it with their consumables and their water table and their material and their guys and their handling and deburring and all that, good grief. So part of me enjoys, has really enjoyed focusing on that. On the flip side, Alathe is a, it's a core, I mean, at heart, I am a machinist. You know, it's funny that I,
00:12:40
Speaker
kind of didn't realize that till a relatively older age in life, I guess, compared to some, I don't know, I am a machine, I love it, and I know we joke about lays, but we're ready. And the other cool thing, which I can share now, because this will air on Friday, is that, I think I mentioned it kind of surreptitiously last week, the project that we got asked to be part of today. You mentioned this, you couldn't say what.
00:13:08
Speaker
So here's
Apollo 11 Hatch Project with Adam Savage
00:13:09
Speaker
what happened. This is crazy. Thursday, approximately a month ago, probably like right at the end of May, I got an email from somebody and I saw the headline and the headline read something like, and I'm gonna, I don't wanna look it up right now, so I'm gonna paraphrase or whatever I collect it to be. It said something like Apollo 11 parts NASA, Smithsonian, Adam Savage.
00:13:37
Speaker
And I'm like, wait, what? They just threw random keywords at you? No. OK. In a very short, I quickly was like, OK, this is trolling or spam or somebody is just trying to whatever. And so I look at it and I'm like, what? Are you serious?
00:13:55
Speaker
And fast forward, Adam Savage from formerly MythBusters, now tested, is working with NASA and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum on something called Project Egress as part of next month's, you know, July's 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.
00:14:19
Speaker
What they're doing, as best I understand it, is a sort of maker-type inspired project. So Adam is, in test it, is kind of leading it, but a bunch of other folks, we're definitely not the only one, so other names I think folks will end up recognizing, have built parts for this. So what they're doing is re...
00:14:42
Speaker
constructing the Apollo 11 command module, AKA Columbia's hatch door. And the hatch door was a big theme within the Apollo program because very tragically and sadly, it was the inward opening hatch door on Apollo 1 that killed the three astronauts on the ground pad when they were doing the plugs out test, which is the only three astronauts for people to directly die from the Apollo program.
00:15:11
Speaker
And it set the program back and it caused them to reevaluate things. And then this hatch door was kind of the manifestation of the changes within that program. And it's probably the most complicated door ever built in the history of mankind. And we built I think probably some of the more complicated parts on it. So we built this whole lever opening mechanism. It was probably.
00:15:32
Speaker
The the fusion files for it were probably somewhere between one and two hundred parts many of them were Fasteners though, so they were probably somewhere between 40 and 50 discrete parts. Yeah, and So I get this email and and they're like they need to ship within four weeks And I'm like are you kidding me? This is this is a huge amount of work and a huge number of parts and participation is voluntary which
00:16:01
Speaker
was tough for me as a business owner because part of me wears the business owner hat and then part of me realizes, wait a minute here, this is what life's all about. I stood at Air and Space Museum with my wife and son and daughter over Christmas and was actually disappointed that the Apollo exhibit was shut down in preparation for the 50th this summer. And to think that I could be part of making parts
00:16:30
Speaker
for that now, and I believe the folks that participated are going to get their name kind of listed, which, I mean, what? Absolutely. So we had to keep it under wraps until this Friday or today, and we'll start sharing stuff on Instagram and social, but it was actually in a really sort of unexpected way exactly what I needed, because
00:16:59
Speaker
getting the five axis had already gotten me so fired back up about making parts and pushing myself and so forth. Don't tell anybody this we've actually been doing a little bit of job shop work with it which I actually love now and then we just finished that stuff up when this email came and so
00:17:17
Speaker
Guess how you learn? You get pushed your feet to the fire. So I made parts that I didn't think I could make. And you know how you did it? You just do it. You dive in. You pour yourself into it. I owe my wife and kids a little bit of a thank you because I definitely worked.
00:17:34
Speaker
I went back to the old days. I was working pretty late and I'd get in at seven or six in the morning on Saturday just to get some work done before the kids got up and all that. And I am just ecstatic and beaming with pride. And Ed has been crushing it. Everyone in the shop made a part, which I thought was cool. And Ed really took it to the next level with like, we've got like lacquer paint on certain parts. We lasered some etched material on others. We've got Dykem as like a fake color agent. It's just so cool.
00:18:03
Speaker
This ties in a lot to make sense of your beaming love of 5-axis machining for the past four weeks. Yes. But these parts are complicated. I mean, of course, anything is doable on 3-axis. Good grief. These parts were made in, I believe these probably would have been done in Downey, California back in the 60s on pre-CNC machines. Maybe they had some sort of a
00:18:27
Speaker
you know, duplicator or cam style jig system to automate some motion. But these are parts that we did so many of them one and done. So I got the Mari tool slitting saw so that we could do some of these slit cuts as well as part off cuts. And I got some longer reach tooling, some plumps. It was just freaking awesome. I love it. It's amazing.
00:18:49
Speaker
Yeah, like you said, that's what life is about. That's why not only are you building this kind of global network of connections that your name gets passed around enough that, you know, either Adam Savage himself or somebody around him said basically, yeah, he needs to be on the team. And then you've got the skill set, you've got the tooling, you've got the passion for it. Like, this is perfect. This is exactly what you're doing this for.
00:19:13
Speaker
Yeah, it was actually a really cool side note is the fellow Andrew, who was a big part of this project, is a student in college and he is working at the Smithsonian this summer. And he happened, this is so weird, he was driving from
00:19:31
Speaker
where he was in the Midwest to Washington, D.C. the day after I got this email from the Smithsonian person, or the tested.com person, and they're like, blah, blah, blah, the person can come meet you tomorrow. And I'm thinking, well, they think I'm in New York City, like, because no one's gonna come meet me tomorrow in Zanesville, Ohio.
00:19:50
Speaker
And so long story short, about 18 hours later, Andrew, who learned fusion from our videos and knew of us, was in our shop. He pulls in, and in the trunk of his car, on his way to DC for his internship, in the trunk of his car, he has a semi-functional jet engine that he built himself, as well as his French horn. And I'm like, God, I love you. This is awesome.
Upcoming Apollo Parts Assembly Event
00:20:17
Speaker
And he was like, yeah, my goal by age 20 was to build a testable, even if it didn't work perfectly, but like a testable jet engine. And so we like just, it was great. I loved it. Wow. Those are the gems. That's amazing. Yeah.
00:20:37
Speaker
So we're going to go down in July 18th, I think Adam, Andrew, the fellow I just mentioned, and Jen are going to be kind of on a stage at the National Air and Space Museum assembling all of these parts that all of the other collaborators and makers and YouTube personalities and so forth have put together.
00:20:58
Speaker
I guess a preliminary heads up. I am planning to be in DC. I haven't finalized this, but I think I'll be there Thursday, July 18th if anyone's in the area and wants to come swing by air and space to hang out or see the project. And it should be on display for some period of time. Yeah. That's awesome. So cool, man. Thanks. Sorry, I know I just took up a lot of time talking about that. That's awesome. No, that's perfect. Yep. Man.
00:21:25
Speaker
And I didn't really know Adam Savage outside of watching MythBusters as a layman. And honestly, I haven't watched MythBusters since really before my entrepreneurial machining days, if that makes sense. And I have a lot of respect for that guy. I mean, he's incredibly talented. The stuff kind of reminds me of a Steve Jobs-esque person. When you read Steve Jobs' biography, he talks about how taking a type class
00:21:50
Speaker
Was it called type font type, type class? And understanding Helvetica in college was hugely impactful to him. So you don't have to be some computer science nerd that only focuses on the syntax language of programming. You can be diverse in your skill sets like this. Yeah, I think diverse skill set is a great way to describe Adam Savage.
00:22:15
Speaker
Yeah, right. Do you follow his stuff? It comes up every now and then. So I maybe hear or see a little thing of him maybe once a month or whatever just it comes up. But yeah, he's sort of been on my radar lately. I've watched a few Tested episodes. Amazing. Yeah, I used to love the Miss Busters.
00:22:34
Speaker
Yeah, really cool stuff. The only thing that was frustrating was we were pouring ourselves into this, and normally our ethos is to kind of share it and talk about it. Actually, some of the Instagram posts were parts from it, but they were anonymous. And so as I read the agreement, we weren't allowed to share the project, but there was nothing. But anyway, so we'll start posting stuff up on it. Did you film a lot during?
00:23:03
Speaker
You're allowed to like, what do you call it, retroactively post stuff, just not while it was still secret. Right. Okay. Yeah, so we're going to try to do some of the five access videos on how those workflows went, but there were a lot of other really good parts.
00:23:19
Speaker
Thin walled, I mean literally aerospace style parts that I want to either use the footage to put videos out on or I actually may remake some of them as a way to really turn them into good lessons. Like how do you do really thin angle bracket style parts from billet and not get chatter, not get taper. I saw that part you made, that was awesome.
00:23:42
Speaker
Anyway, that was a long way of explaining why I want to lathe. Ed did some of the parts on the TM3 with a fourth axis and on the Tormach, but some of them would have been really good fits for a Y-axis live tooled lathe. Would you get sub-spindle?
00:24:01
Speaker
So the one that we have spec'd out is an ST20Y without a sub, but then Haas has something new that I haven't really investigated that's not their dual spindle, AKA sub spindle, but rather a, I don't know what you call it, but it's kind of like a,
00:24:24
Speaker
It's a live sub spindle. I'm pretty sure it doesn't have any ability to do clocking or pull or work. Basically the idea is, their pitch when I was talking to my sales rep was, you should look at it because what it can do is it can let you transfer your part over to that sub and do that final backside profiling, grooving, chamfering part off.
00:24:47
Speaker
So it's significantly, it's less money than a proper dual spindle and it's certainly smaller overall. And you can put a tail, you can put a live center in as well. So it kind of is one of those things where it doesn't look like there's any drawback to it except for the fact that it is still more.
00:25:06
Speaker
Money. Right. Yeah, I'd say I do do a lot of clocking on the sub-spindle side, but for the most part, a lot of the parts are just, you know, face it, call it good, or you know, drill a little hole or champ for the inside or something. It's usually fairly simple work on the sub-spindle side, depending on the complexity of the part.
00:25:27
Speaker
Yeah, I'm trying to approach it in that I want a pretty good simple kind of quote unquote chucker lathe with live tooling for sure and with live tooling I've been told by numerous people do not ever get live tooling unless you have a why.
00:25:45
Speaker
both for the work and for alignment. And so I'm kind of looking at it and growing it out of a simple checker lathe up to those.
Chucker Lathe Preferences and Considerations
00:25:52
Speaker
Often when you say that, people seem to say, well, you need the sub. And I'm like, well, the sub changes it. It changes the size. It changes the cost. And frankly, you're going to change the way you think about tooling and programming and collisions. So we'll see. So what are you up to today?
00:26:11
Speaker
More training, we're switching to a second part on the Swiss Laid, one of the spacers for our knives. So this will be a real part with a little bit of complicatedness. Internal thread, tight tolerant shoulders, very good finish on the radius. It's the spacer that holds the two handles apart.
00:26:34
Speaker
Yeah. OK. It's got a little groove on it. Yeah, exactly. Donut. Cool. A fun fact that I learned about. I was going to.
00:26:43
Speaker
about turning inserts is most turning inserts as you know from your Sandvik tour are molded and then there are some that are fully ground on every surface as well and the ground ones tend to be a lot sharper and a lot better and more expensive but I've never bought ground inserts except for like really shiny aluminum ones or something like ones for aluminum but I bought some really nice ones intended for the Swiss but I started using them on the Nakamura and whole great Guga Muga do they ever leave a good finish
00:27:15
Speaker
That's funny. So much better. And I'm like, why didn't I do this before?
00:27:24
Speaker
Yeah well it's funny because you often see there's a trade-off speaking broadly that the sharper an edge is the generally the less sort of ability it would have to hold that up over time or it certainly will that edge sharpness in characteristics will change as it wears down and all things do wear so you think about the opposite of a sharp ground edge you think about a
00:27:44
Speaker
giant honking CNMG that has almost a rounded over edge, but it just plows into material and has higher amounts of tool pressure and requires more horsepower. But let me tell you, that thing will cut for a long time. Yeah, so it's always a trade-off. You want tool life, or do you want excellent finish with less tool life? And what's the balance you want to do? Yeah, interesting. So you're buying titanium or steels that are ground and potentially also polished, or just ground? For the inserts?
00:28:13
Speaker
uh... just grounded coded cool that's cool actually it's a good point uh... months ago on the podcast you and i were talking about uh... end mills and i made a sort of comment about maybe it was on the video i did uh... but i made a comment that i like to own
00:28:35
Speaker
certain tools like bullnose end mills or corner radius style ones. I like to own them uncoated. That way they don't have kind of a material specific coating, and I can use them as general purpose regardless of the project I have. And I think that Lawrence kind of corrected me and said, yes, coatings can be kind of material specific, but that's not really what makes the end mill good for a certain material. And rather, there really are different grinds and
00:29:04
Speaker
and reliefs and edges and edge prep and so forth. So that's what makes an end mill good at cutting aluminum or steel or hardened steel or tool steel. It's not just whether it had a coating on it or not. For sure.
00:29:19
Speaker
If you want to get picky about it, then for sure, but if you just want a beater end mill to do this quick little op, you almost don't care what it is, as long as it's not the wrong tool. You know, like a TILN coating for aluminum, you know?
00:29:37
Speaker
No, I think that's what he's arguing against. I think he's saying the reason you're not supposed to use titanium aluminum nitride on aluminum is that the aluminums will kind of bond or stick to each other in the coating and the material. Right, I've seen it. I think he's saying
00:29:52
Speaker
That's not that big of a deal, especially in the short term. What's a much bigger deal is the fact that if you purchase the tool that's meant to cut, say, soft 1018 and you go try to use it for a 30 Rockwell tool steel or something, the edge grind and the margin and the reliefs are going to be substantially different.
00:30:15
Speaker
And I now have exhausted my knowledge in the subject matter, except to add to it that I know that there are significant differences in how end mills function with the variability of the flutes and the grinds. And moving from like on the helical line, moving from five to six to seven flutes, it's not just adding a flute. They have different styles and they're good at certain things.
00:30:35
Speaker
Yeah, and at this point, we've had many custom end mills made from scratch, where we got to influence the grind and the design, and I don't claim to know hardly anything about it. But I do know that I've tried, for cutting our 62 Rockwell blades, I've tried a four-flute ball mill from Lakeshore, from IMCO, from OSG, from YG, from basically everybody, and they all perform the same.
00:31:01
Speaker
I get four palettes, I get four palettes out of every tool before the tool is just destroyed and starts to have problems. And then the guys at Milterra or Zadaro tooling, custom ground to some and I'm getting 12 palettes out of it, nine to 12. Wow. Yeah, huge difference. That's cool. Uncoated.
00:31:23
Speaker
That's cool. That's cool. So the problem is I used all of the ones that they sent me to test. And I'm like, OK, I want to buy, I forget, 10 or 15 of them or something. The problem is they're moving shop right now. So they're down. And I'm like, I want them now. I'm back to the crappy ones. That's funny.
00:31:47
Speaker
That's an impressive move. They've got a lot of, they've got a lot of, I can only imagine what it's like to be a company in their position, you know, financially and with a vision and, you know, things to do, and to have that kind of clean slate. Well, heck, it's just like you, John. I mean, you're going to move shops soon, I think, I hope. And you now get the chance to, you know, rewrite the playbook.
00:32:13
Speaker
But even, like, I got to tour their new place, and the manufacturing space is not very big. They have a million offices, but, like, 3,000 to 5,000 square feet of warehouse to manufacture in. And I'm like, this is it? Like, this is not a lot for you guys. And he's like, I know. Eventually, we'll build a huge extension on the back, and there's property and stuff.
00:32:35
Speaker
And then we'll have more room to play, but it's more of a long-term play. But he's been looking for a big building like that for years. And he's just took it. We'll make it work. And it's like us trying to find a shop right now. Trying to be picky, but you also got to be super flexible and make something work. And I do have one in mind that I saw.
00:32:59
Speaker
I saw a few months ago and I hated it because it was full of garbage and junk and did not look like a nice place. And then I saw it again, Eric and I went and saw it empty last Friday. And you start looking around, you go, wait a minute, wait a minute. This is actually not that bad. Interesting. So we might have found a shop. Awesome. Although now I'm questioning if it's big enough. I think it's? How big? 5,000.
00:33:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's 5,000 square feet, which is excellent. I'm just laying it out. I'm telling you, John, you don't need that much space. Depends on how it's laid out. Don't be, don't, yeah.
Efficient Shop Space Utilization
00:33:45
Speaker
I was just editing the Sporoni and Big Kaiser, Switzerland and Italy tour video footage. And Europe doesn't have that luxury. I mean, 5,000 square feet is like a mega-conclobberant in some of those cities. And when you think about going vertical with ways you have racking and automation and storage and just being efficient, I mean, again, a part of me
00:34:11
Speaker
Like no joke, today, if I could easily sublet the other half of our shop, I would actually reconsider doing that. Because I would rather have, especially, good grief, if I could do that and that made the payments on another five axis or something, I would do that in a heartbeat. I don't need all this space right now. So your big room with your machines in it is like 4,000-ish?
00:34:36
Speaker
Correct, it's exactly 4,000, 50 by 80. And it's huge, and we don't have any efficiency in its use, because we don't have to right now. Yeah, what I really want to do is... I bet you I could put six MAMs in there or equivalent or something like that. Like, in five lays, you could have 25 machines in that room, I bet. Nice.
00:35:02
Speaker
Yeah, I want to make my way to that shop again and measure it up, put it to Fusion, because I've got all the machine drawings laid out, and just start placing stuff. And I need to look it around, and having it feel big or small doesn't really count until you start laying some machines over top. And you're like, how many machines could I fit? And what's the layout going to be? There's some weird, like, partition walls and stuff in random places that kind of breaks it up into weird ways.
00:35:31
Speaker
It's nice. There's office space. There's closed off tumbling room slash grinding room slash place for Eric and Yo to do everything they need to do, which is awesome. And then it should be great.
00:35:48
Speaker
And some of those support style machines, lapping machines, those are pallet jack or forklift easy machines. So when I take my, you know, if I put on my kind of play god hat with Grimsman eyes, I feel like if you had a
00:36:03
Speaker
You know, a checkbook that never bounced. Okay, buy a five axis that has palatization automation on it. Maybe you buy one more lathe. You get those two U-Mac machines. You guys have now a lot of iron to go make a lot of parts for a couple of years. So I'm trying to think out loud why you could justify more than four or five thousand square feet. Yeah, as long as it fits comfortably.
00:36:29
Speaker
You know, we're about to move out of this place once we find a new place. And it could be more packed, but it's pretty busy in here. We're always bumping into each other. I honestly feel like in three years that other shop will feel the same, just more. And then we'll be ready to move up again.
00:36:49
Speaker
But if that happens, you should be at a point in time where, again, take the approach of when you see companies that we've toured that are now doing eight figures a year. That's tens of millions of dollars in revenue. They can afford to hire consultants and experts and space planners and brokers to say, hey, go
Long-Term Space Expansion Plans
00:37:08
Speaker
spend. I'm going to earmark 100 grand for you to go do the planning and
00:37:14
Speaker
It's just a different, it's sort of like, just different. And that's the plan to get there in three to five years and then basically either build a building or buy our own building or do something else, a proper move. We're not ready to do that now. So it's exciting. Speaking of which, the two U-Mac machines got picked up yesterday. Cool. So they're in storage now along with a TIG welder, which I'm very excited about. Okay.
00:37:43
Speaker
And yeah, we're tempted to go pick up the TIG welder and just like drive it back so that we can have it and play with it because it's ours. But yeah. Part of me is enjoying kind of the opposite of what you all just said, which is
00:38:01
Speaker
the going back to just being in that that parable of the fisherman yeah who who goes to into into a fishing conglomerate and good for you don't get me wrong and i this varies neither is right or wrong but part of me especially making those apollo parts this past month i enjoy programming i enjoy just being
Enjoying the Programming and Machining Process
00:38:20
Speaker
to be cliche here, one with the machine. Just like sitting there, programming and troubleshooting, finding those end mills, playing with it. And I've spent my time doing the quote unquote business stuff and working on those big picture stuff. And you are awesome at it and you're crushing it. But don't get to the point where you can't just spend a couple of days
00:38:42
Speaker
planning or playing and having fun and all that. Yeah, I need to be able to balance that because I love that. And I get that with the Swiss lathe right now. I get to plan it out. I get to tool it up and program it. And it's my new little baby. Everything else is running gravy train. You know, the Maury and the Nakamura and Angelo's hugely instrumental and help me keep those busy and stuff. And then if we get a five axis slash when we get a five axis, it's going to be that all over again. So we have to plan and
00:39:11
Speaker
I'm pumped, so I need to set it up so that it all happens. Just keep in mind, you are who you want to be. The Spyderco is the name that always comes to mind. You may take offense to that, but if you want to be that company, you will. But I'm pretty darn happy with...
00:39:35
Speaker
Yeah, there's always a couple more machines you'd like to have or things you'd like to do, but I'm enjoying things right now. I think I like it as they get simpler, not more complicated. Yeah, I think I can handle some more complicated, but it's always a balance. It depends on what you want and who you want to be. While I won't name names, there's this company that I've had in my sights for a while, a well-respected company. I won't give too many details.
00:40:02
Speaker
I learned at Blade Show that they have, let me do the quick math so I get this right.
00:40:12
Speaker
while you're doing that math, I'll chime in, that I commend you. And this is the hard thing about being an entrepreneur, especially when you're talking with friends, especially on a private conversation that turns into a podcast, you have to be honest with yourself. Don't give the answer that you think pleases the other person or your wife or whatever. Like if you want more complication and you're saying, hey, I'll take a little more stress, be honest with it, that's great. Exactly, exactly, yep. Yeah, so this company has seven times more employees than us. Yes. Wow.
00:40:43
Speaker
But their gross revenues are only like three or four times what ours are. So I'm like, we can chase them down pretty quick.
Future Business Growth and Achievements
00:40:51
Speaker
And it's whether or not we do. It's a fun little sort of mental goal of mine to think about and be like, holy cow. Like, we could be at their level in gross revenues? Like, oh my goodness. We're not that far away.
00:41:06
Speaker
Awesome. Good for you. So it's exciting. It's a good time to be alive, a good time to maximize everything we have at our fingertips available to us and going for it, man. Yeah, it's awesome.
00:41:19
Speaker
I am going to go enjoy a day with a project I had been planning since before I bought the UMC, which is your quintessential five-axis corner pick. So if I have to machine out a relatively tight, radius corner, you could use a really, really long end mill, which has all sorts of problems with chatter and deflection. Or you could take a bullnose or bullnose end mill
00:41:49
Speaker
infusion program it with a 3D contour and then you enable multi-axis and you enable shaft and holder detection. Infusion will recognize where your tool shank and your holder starts to interfere with the part and it will tip that part over.
00:42:04
Speaker
So it will basically program it as a five axis operation, even though it's just a three axis move part. And so we're going to learn and then do a video on showing how you can quote unquote pick out a corner, meaning like pick away at it, which is again, a very, I think common thing done in, I hate to say the word aerospace because I just think it's like cliche, but you know, that sort of application. So I've got my tool set up, I got the program ready and I'm just going to go play. Go be a surgeon, man. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
00:42:34
Speaker
Awesome. Well, I will talk to you next week. Sounds good. Sounds good. Have an awesome week. Have a good one. Take care. Bye. Bye.