Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Value of Teaching Young Machinists
290 Plays5 years ago
What age did you get into CNC machining? This week we talk about the value of learning machining at a young age and the impact it has on the future.
Grimsmo has gone full GERP, they have developed a wireless barcode scanner for their web base ERP system. Saunders talks all about reevaluating machine tool purchases and constantly improving.
Both shops are expanding. Grimsmo is hiring some machinists and Saunders is potentially looking at another worker for their shop as well!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Passion for CNC Machining
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 185. My name is John Grimsmough. And my name is John Saunders and this is the podcast where for 185 straight weeks we've talked about how much we love the process of taking usually a piece of carbide and cutting it with computer controlled ball screws and servos and machine tools to make parts. It's a
Evolution of CNC Accessibility
00:00:24
Speaker
process I just absolutely love.
00:00:26
Speaker
I love it too. I was thinking this morning on the drive-in that 12 years ago, I kind of fell in love with CNC machining and started and built my first CNC machine back in 2008. And I'm like, if I had known then where I'd be now, I don't know what it would have done for the past 12 years, but I didn't need to know. I just wanted to. I just did it. Just do it.
00:00:50
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And what a great time to be doing this. Not that we had it hard, but I mean, there wasn't the proliferation of, that's not the word, but YouTube and how common fusion is or just good cam where you weren't
00:01:06
Speaker
I, like so many, fell victim to Bobcat for a hot second. And just last year, they said, I held off. God bless you. Wise in your years.
E-Commerce Challenges in 2006
00:01:17
Speaker
But in look, that doesn't mean all that does is just presents new problems more quickly. Heck, even when I remember when we started strike mark,
00:01:27
Speaker
we couldn't get a credit card website. This is 2006 and they were like, you want to run a credit card through a website? They're like, you need to go through a bonding process and put up a $10,000 deposit. What? Yeah. Because they're like, there's charge back risks. You got to find all these different sub people to take different roles, a merchant processor. There were two or three different people between the bank and then the payment processor.
00:01:54
Speaker
And now you've just like, oh, I just signed up for a square account or stripe account or whatever. Yeah. PayPal or whatever. Yeah. I mean, 2006
Easier Startup Environment
00:02:01
Speaker
online bank, online purchasing wasn't new, but it was young, I guess. Well, you don't think it was, it wasn't new, but it was, there wasn't that entrepreneurial, like, Hey, everyone's got a startup or a Kickstarter or Shopify. I mean, even Shopify, we debated for a good month or two between Shopify and Volusion.
00:02:21
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I think illusion just, I think we got lucky that it isn't Shopify nowadays. So when I say it's easier now, it's not. It's just there's different, the curve, but the curve continues to get better and better, right? To create a startup and bring a hardware product
Inspirations from Early Machining Content
00:02:41
Speaker
to market, now's the time. Yeah.
00:02:47
Speaker
2008 like YouTube was I think YouTube starting 2006 or something like that So there were machining videos on there and that's certainly where I got a lot of my inspiration from especially on the hobby level And that's kind of where I learned how to build the first, you know grizzly x2 into CNC There were a couple guys doing that and I was like, that's so cool, right, you know one day I want to build the tool changer for it Yeah
00:03:12
Speaker
There was a Netflix
Manual vs CNC Skills Debate
00:03:14
Speaker
type DVD rental service called SmartFlix. This is back when Netflix itself was only DVDs. SmartFlix was this guy in Texas who pursuant to the way the US law works on DVD based stuff, you're allowed to rent it out. It's more complicated than that. But he had all these really good machining DVDs and I started renting them when I was in New York.
00:03:36
Speaker
Um, there was a Daryl Holland guns, gunsmithing one, which talked through lots of just engine turning and bridge port work, regardless of whether you cared about the gunsmithing part of it. And, uh, then there was another one, similar, similar, uh, Rudy cow hop was another one, but I remember getting my first bridge port DVD and I'd already been watching some CNC stuff. And I remember thinking when the bridge port one came.
00:04:01
Speaker
There's no way you turn those handles by hand. I didn't know what Power Feed was, but I was thinking that Power Feed would work up to a precise stop.
00:04:14
Speaker
So to say the least, I was always destined.
Training in Measurement and Metrology
00:04:17
Speaker
I remember that was more of a debate. I don't hear it quite as much these days about, hey, it's really important for high schoolers to spend time running manual machines to learn it. And for the sake of making an argument, couldn't disagree more.
00:04:32
Speaker
Yeah, I hear it from guys that grew up like that, that grew up with the manual background. Like a lot of guys went to school, apprenticeship, industry, things like that. They greatly value the manual, the skills you learn doing it manually.
00:04:51
Speaker
I respect that, but I respectfully disagree as well. Because you could take an 18-year-old and you could put him on a tormach and you could be like, go nuts, and he'd learn well. Especially with some instruction, you do that every day. Right. Well, you think about the resources and the framework and what you're asking of them. If you give them
00:05:10
Speaker
CAM templates or pre-built tool libraries, then what I care about is things. Now there's, I guess to a point, hey, understanding how to tighten a vise, that's a real... Yeah, the fundamentals. And like, Angelo is really good here about teaching the newer guys, okay, measurement is the first thing we teach you. Like when we hired Steven, he knew what a tape measure was and he was great with the tape measure, but like anything finer than that, like what's a foul? So the first two days, weeks was like, you know, read this metrology handbook from Mitutoyu.
00:05:39
Speaker
And we're going to teach you what a tent is and how to use a mic and a caliper and a dial test indicator and things like that. Because he's running the lapping machine. That was kind of what he was hired for. So he's got to know what a tent is and flatness and things like that. And yeah, his mind was blown
Cross-Training Benefits
00:05:55
Speaker
for a while. But now you picked it up super fast. And you teach those basic core concepts. And I mean, the rest, like you said, is just process. It's just templates and process engineering.
00:06:08
Speaker
In my head, I had a mentally assigned... I have a fictitious Grams-Moe shop in my head that I am clearly way behind on. It's still based in your old shop. I thought Sky ran a lapping machine. No, when Stephen was hired back last September or November,
00:06:27
Speaker
He basically took it over from Skye because Skye went back to school for three or four months through the winter. So that was sort of the impetus. And then since then Skye, he was on the machines with us for a long time. And then now he's doing the finishing side with Eric. Got it. That's right. You had mentioned that. Yeah, it's kind of neat. People jumping around a little bit and getting cross trained on a lot of different things, which is cool.
00:06:51
Speaker
Yeah, I've continued to think about something that Jay Pearson had mentioned of kind of majoring and minoring, and we've never even informally adopted that. But I will say the ability to have others teach, meaning not you or me, is really a force multiplier. For sure. Of being able to have somebody like Skye teach Stephen or vice versa.
00:07:16
Speaker
to help figure out ways to increase efficiency or focus on what needs to be done at the time or deal with the fact that this is a real world. People have school or are out on vacation, et cetera. Yeah, you worry
Peer Teaching Efficiency
00:07:28
Speaker
that the information gets diluted. It's like the kids' game telephone.
00:07:32
Speaker
You know, it's like, you say one thing to the next guy to the next guy and you lose the message by the end. But it's, it comes from a basic understanding of what's happening, not just like step by step, but here's why. And that, that makes it a deeper core understanding of it. It's also a good chance to size people up because sometimes information, it's the game of telephone, the information will change. But the kind of folks that we want to keep around will do something and say, well, why isn't it this way? Or why does it do that? And all of a sudden,
00:08:02
Speaker
they're on their own kind of slightly challenging status quo or wondering why can't we do it different or better? And even if it's just something, right now we're in that, again, phase three of our shop overhaul and we're dealing with little things like about 20 minutes ago, Home Depot dropped off 150 two by threes. This happens about twice a year for us to build crates for our
00:08:28
Speaker
when we ship out fixture plates. And so what do we do with 152 by threes? That's generally
ERP System Developments
00:08:35
Speaker
more than I want to... Fun fact, also they doubled in price in the last six months. Interesting. Because of COVID. Yeah. I almost fell over at the register. I was like, wait, what? Something's wrong. It's not a huge deal, but it's also not a maker. You notice it. It's like this is just a shipping crate.
00:08:56
Speaker
Um, so, you know, do we, do we cut that up into our shipping crate, um, sizes like pre-cuts w w we already do some of that. So we keep them on hand. We can create, we now keep, uh, crates that are pre-built on hand. So these are all good steps. But like when you do these steps, it just introduces more questions and steps, you know, Longest intro ever. Hey, that's how it goes, man. That's good. How you been this week?
00:09:25
Speaker
Excellent. Our GURP ERP system is so good. It's coming together so good. My dad and I have been working on it a lot lately. I think it's usable now. I can start actually updating the inventories.
00:09:46
Speaker
but I need this turning point of like, okay, don't, don't change it. Like it needs to work and
Wireless Barcode Scanner Project
00:09:51
Speaker
then we can add to it. And then once we can use it in the shop, then I can like, okay, let me count how many T nine's we have and how many, you know, quartering gen mills and all that stuff. Um, I think we're there this week, which is really cool. But my piece to has these stones, my, my fun project for the weekend was, was that French? Yeah. Okay.
00:10:12
Speaker
I took a lot of French in high school. Fair enough. The thing I did over the weekend was I've been thinking for months now, but how do I want to implement barcode scanners for the ERP system? And the classic option is you have a laptop at each station or a tablet or some sort of big computer because the barcode has to plug into a
00:10:38
Speaker
into a computer. And I was like, I want a portable solution. I want a wireless thing that's tied right to our website, ideally with a screen. So I built one. I took a Raspberry Pi with a screen on it. And it's tied directly to our group website. And I 3D printed an attachment for a battery bank on the bottom and the screen angled to 30 degrees forward, and the gun tied to it and all the wires tucked up. So now I have, and it works.
00:11:06
Speaker
Now I have a completely wireless web-based barcode scanning gun. Sweet. That has
Integrating Barcodes for Inventory Management
00:11:12
Speaker
battery for days and is so cool. And the website is formatted to like this page on the website that it auto loads to. The Pi auto boots to this web page. You scan something and it gives you a plus one minus one option and done. And that's it. So that's the value in having a screen with you is you can see as you're doing it.
00:11:36
Speaker
Yes. You can corroborate. You can scan it once. You can be like, oh, there's 39 in inventory. You can glance at it and be like, yeah, that's about right. You can do plus one minus one. You can enter in like 50 if you're adding something for whatever reason. Or if you take two, but you need to put one back because you made a mistake, then you can easily do that. Because I see the scenario where
00:11:56
Speaker
I want a lot of barcode scanners around. I want one on the shelf by the lathe bar inventory that never moves, so that when I grab a bar, it's like, bop, bop, done, move on. It needs to be a one second operation for everybody to use it without thinking about it. If you've got to log in, if you've got to type in your password, if you've got to go to this page, stupid, even 12 seconds is too long.
00:12:21
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Two seconds is too long. Or like any wasted motion is not acceptable. Understood. Exactly. So I've been having a lot of fun with that.
00:12:30
Speaker
So we were a little behind you on that front, I think. And part of it's just practical reasons of schedules. And we've got people starting school and in and out and so forth. But we have barcodes printing, which is freaking awesome. And if folks are new to all this whole process, FYI, a barcode is just a font.
00:12:56
Speaker
hilarious. Like it's just a Windows font instead of an A looking like an A with two angled lines and a straight line across it is just an interval spacing. And so that makes it pretty easy. So on our on Lex, we've got the ability to have that as a font along with the descriptive information. And so
00:13:14
Speaker
Some things like screws and fasteners will go into U-line bins where the bin itself will have a barcode and thus there likely will not be a need to create future barcodes for those products because they'll be in barcoded bins. But when we receive things like steel or aluminum for products,
00:13:35
Speaker
The plan, subject to change, is we will just print a new barcode and slap it on that skid. And so now when you process inbound material in Lex, this whole process was iterative this past week. So it used to be that you could just check it as Mark receives, or you could override the quantity. Well, that created the issue of you accidentally just kind of say it was all there, even though we have had folks or instances where vendors will ship partials. So now,
00:14:02
Speaker
You have to type in how many came, and if it matches, then if it satisfies it in full, it disappears from the inbound page.
Digital Inventory Tracking Challenges
00:14:12
Speaker
But when you do that, you also have the additional option to print a barcode. And much like you said, we can't have this take 12 seconds or any additional clicks.
00:14:20
Speaker
same thing. Like if I want to print a barcode, I want to have that checked and I just want the barcode to be spit out of the printer. I don't want to open a PDF, control P, enter, wait for it. It's like, I just want it there. Yeah. It's funny how worth it. It is to automate that system. Even if you have to pay a programmer like a hundred bucks to be like, this needs to print a barcode. When I click this button, you know, like totally worth it. And we consider that too. Cause we're working on the PO side of things and, um,
00:14:50
Speaker
I wanted a checkbox that says it's all here, even line by line, like, you know, McMaster bought 12 screws or whatever. Yeah, they're all there. Checkbox all there. Instead of having to type in 12, I think that's a little bit faster. But if there's only six there, because it's a partial, you need the option to type in six.
00:15:10
Speaker
Go ahead. You're printing a barcode for a received purchase order. What is the purpose of that? For a big skid of aluminum, you'll leave it on the skid, I guess? Correct. Okay. Let's say we make soft jaws for the mod vices. Those are aluminum by the size of a playing card, and we may run all of them. If we ran all of them and ran out of stock,
00:15:36
Speaker
that would cause someone in the shop to scan, to add new ones into the order queue, or rather technically into the RFQ queue. But it's most likely the case that that packaging, whatever it was in, like a cardboard box that was on top of a skid
00:15:52
Speaker
would probably be discarded, or that's not an investment piece. Now, I think we talked a few weeks ago about the idea of when we receive material, especially material like that, we would go through a process of inbounding it where we would inspect it and potentially demagnetize it or clean it, and then put it into chunks, like
00:16:15
Speaker
You're right, yeah. And we may do that, but for now, I think the ability to not overthink it and just say, hey, if a pallet comes in, that stuff needs to get labeled right now. Interesting. So are you inventorying the pallet or are you inventorying? The barcode being printed is for the individual chunk of aluminum skew, like your material part number, and there's 500 in stock. Say that again?
00:16:43
Speaker
The barcode that gets printed, is it the individual part, individual chunk of material? You scan it and it says one chunk of aluminum, two by two by two, but we have 500 in stock, or are you inventorying a quantity? Right now, in Lex, there is no current framework or even plan to handle quantities. Interesting. I recognize the severity of that decision.
00:17:13
Speaker
And we can go into that more, uh, in a perfect world, of course, it would be great to know you have 17
Strategies for Inventory Labeling
00:17:18
Speaker
pieces or 174 pieces of this, but there's a lot of perils to that. Um, so in this case, let's say it's a make up a number a 1211 is 34 by 12 by one inch, 70, 75 aluminum. That's been saw cut. Um, it's an A number because it's a raw material that comes to us in that form and shape. And that gets turned into say Tormach fixture plates. Well,
00:17:42
Speaker
Um, if a skid of 10 or 15 or 30 of them comes in, we just print an a 12, 11 or whatever number I just said. And that sticker goes on the palette. I mean, ideally the sticker would go on many of the pieces of material, if not all of them, but I don't want to deal with a sticker on the material for sure. Um, it's almost like
Pitfalls of Digital Inventory Systems
00:18:00
Speaker
I wish there was a, um,
00:18:01
Speaker
ink. There may be a dissolvable sticker or a like a pad printer where you could just put it on all of them. I don't know. But that's also solving a problem that we don't really have. I mean the thing you need to really know is what is that material and then where is it. So we're working much like Paul Eaker showed in his barcode video on YouTube which is the end all be all of YouTube nerdiness on barcodes. The ability to then take a
00:18:30
Speaker
In our case, like an A number product, A1211, and scan it into a location so that you generally know where it is. Because we're at that point now. We have at least three different locations in our shop, probably a couple more to come, with just a sea of aluminum and products. And it's a waste of time to be like, oh, I'm just sitting here looking through it. Where's that material? Yeah, us too.
00:18:58
Speaker
I spent some time yesterday organizing our lathe bars because I ordered a whole ton more of titanium and 17-4 stainless. I spent some time on the rack and I organized the tubes and I sorted them a little bit in order. Titanium is on this shelf, stainless is on that shelf because they used to be all intermixed. I knew what each one was.
00:19:19
Speaker
I just know, but it's not the right answer. Um, so I started to separate them and I got so excited. I'm like, I want barcodes on these tubes right now, like, like right now, but I had left my laptop at home, my other laptop. And, uh, I was like, I just want to barcode on here so I can use the new GURP gun and scan this. So are you going to barcode each piece of material?
00:19:41
Speaker
Each, not each piece, but each store's location. But I am going to quantity everything. So if there's 42 bars, quarter inch titanium, I need to know there's 42. And every time I take one, hit the scanner and 41, 40. So even if I load up the bar feeder with six bars, that is six out of inventory because they're inches.
00:20:02
Speaker
Sure. Everybody I know in business who has done that then has to have some chronic inventory audit. Yeah, I've heard that from people too, and I guess I get it. Right. That's one of those things where whether you get it or not, it's going to happen. Yeah. You want to trust the system because that's why you're building it, but I need to know because otherwise, how do you hit your minimum if you don't know how many are left?
00:20:31
Speaker
Well, there's no way to enforce that. You're going to grab something or move something. It just doesn't. Yeah. Well,
Ensuring Digital System Accuracy
00:20:40
Speaker
I guess the way we're doing it is every time you scan it, it shows you the current inventory. So you could eyeball it.
00:20:46
Speaker
Um, if that was part of the process, every person kind of eyeballs it and goes, yeah, that looks like a hundred or three or whatever, um, that might help. But yeah, maybe we just do it. Like Angela was pushing for that too. He's like every month or every three months, we're going to have to do a physical inventory of everything. And if that needed then, then we'll deal with that. But, uh, ideally not.
00:21:09
Speaker
Well, I say this humbly because I've been there so many times in life where just because you don't understand it, but if everybody else does it, you're like, okay, well, I don't get it, but I know I'm going to be there. Sure. Yeah, exactly.
00:21:20
Speaker
We're trying to make sure we don't treat everything the same. So like inventory is a great example. There's some things that we order that are longer lead time or more difficult to get, where obviously then inventory levels become more important. It's kind of funny, our mod devices use seven sixteenths by one inch screws, seven sixteenths by 20. So fine pitch, flat head, cap screw, and very, it's an unusual thread size relative to a half inch or something.
00:21:50
Speaker
At one point, like a month ago, I think we probably had bought out most of those screws in the country. I want to think about whether it's Lex or whether trigger systems that we have in Lex or in
Issuing POs and Vendor Interactions
00:22:05
Speaker
our shop. We still do the tennis court labels for steel because steel takes us a while to get ground. What do you mean tennis court labels?
00:22:15
Speaker
Have you seen the things that they use on the side of tennis courts to show the score of the game where it's like a number card? Oh, the flippers. The flipper. Yeah. Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And those work pretty well. Um, but it's also, also emblematic of the shortcomings in these systems, which is those, that's a very, very visual, invasive, obvious thing. And they're not always right.
00:22:36
Speaker
And so again, you can build a system around correcting them like, hey, every three days, somebody else needs to go through and check them against them. But it's kind of like, okay, now you're, you're building systems to check systems. And this becomes, you know, a feedback loop. Yeah. And it's a balance because otherwise you're flying blind, like for some of our inventory things, we are flying blind.
00:22:55
Speaker
When that's the scary thing about digital systems and digital inventory is with the tennis court flipper, you at least get anybody. If I walked to the bathroom, I might just take a mental picture and be like, I think I saw six, not seven, and I'll walk over and be like, somebody just forgot to flip it over. Yeah, exactly. Digital systems get way far out of imbalance.
00:23:14
Speaker
For sure. Which is, I guess, one of the reasons I'm trying to make the digital system as easy as possible so that it becomes a force-like requirement. But it's easy and nobody cares because it's like, oh, fun, done. And what's funny about this is I'm showing the scanner to my kids and to my wife and friends and everything. And I'm really proud of it. But they're like, oh, so it's
Wireless Barcode Scanning Solutions
00:23:33
Speaker
like a grocery store scanner. It's no big deal. But I put a lot of work into this thing.
00:23:38
Speaker
Isn't that funny? I'm programming the Raspberry Pi and all this stuff, and it's awesome. Yeah, I guess it is just a grocery store scanner that we've all seen our entire lives. Similarly, though, to how we treat things, I like the idea that any material or item can be hot. What do they call it? Hot desks or hot located, meaning it can go anywhere at any time.
00:24:01
Speaker
But I do think for stuff that we know is bread and butter repeat, especially when it comes to racking or shelving, try to put, not try, have dedicated spots for certain things because then you'll learn it and then there's swing space elsewhere, but that'll I think be a logical step. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Have you played with wireless barcode guns?
00:24:26
Speaker
Yeah, I've got three barcode guns now. One's wired and it's annoying. I've got a Bluetooth one and a Wi-Fi one. What was the difference? We had one of the wireless ones and my dad told me to get the other one.
00:24:41
Speaker
I think we got the Bluetooth one better. But anyway, right now on the GURP gun, I'm using the Bluetooth one, but I'm actually using it wired because there's just like a USB-A port on the bottom of it. So that way I don't have to worry about charging it. It charges straight from the battery bank. It's good to go.
00:24:58
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Cool. But they do work. They work great. The little wifi ones. They're great. Okay. They're good to know. I think we've only done the wire USB wired, but they're still cheap. They're like under $50. Oh,
Balancing Digital and Practical Solutions
00:25:15
Speaker
I think ours was like 17 or 20 wired wireless. Okay. Fair enough. Still. Yeah. I mean, look, neither of us have huge shops, like, you know, not multi 50, a thousand hundred thousand square feet. So.
00:25:28
Speaker
Our plan or hope is to have a couple of different scanning location computers, kind of like the idea of if you're at Home Depot and you want to do a price check, usually somewhere in the middle of the aisle, there's a way you can scan something. And then like you said, maybe have them near machines if needed.
00:25:47
Speaker
We set up a cheap, I was looking for a cheap solution. It's a 30 some inch, you can't buy a TV smaller than like 32 inches. With a, what was it? A Intel compute stick, is that something? And that is our receiving screen. So that just currently shows inbound stuff which lets you kind of do a quick visual of what's been ordered and what should be coming in.
00:26:13
Speaker
Is that display only or is it a computer and you have a keyboard on it and everything? Great question. It is a computer, so it has a keyboard mouse. It's not a touchscreen and I'm thinking, I think it was on Dell's website and they have an affordable and maybe like $1,000, 20 some inch, kind of like an i, what do they call it, iMacs?
00:26:35
Speaker
all in one computer that is a touchscreen. And I do like that idea for something. I will see. I'm just trying to explore different ways of having input devices for Lex. Go ahead.
Hiring Processes and Team Expansion
00:26:53
Speaker
I was just going to say, on the GURP gun, I've got a small screen of 4 inch by 3 inch or something. It's smaller than a cell phone screen by a little bit, 20%, 30% smaller. I was wondering how interactive you can actually be with it and it's fine.
00:27:12
Speaker
I could poke around the whole website like that. It's not ideal, but it's fine. So we're optimizing the screen that shows up. So when you scan the item, it's touchscreen, so you can scroll down with your finger and you can see all the information for that end mill. How much it cost, where you got it from, what size it is, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, we'll optimize this for the mini screen because that's, we're going to use this a lot. But how much information do you actually need on a daily basis? We'll see as we go, right?
00:27:37
Speaker
Yeah. You're doing all your cutting tools in GURP as well? Yes, everything will be there. It's actually all in the system right now. Inventory is a little out of balance, but yes, I need that. Then there's a tab at the top now. My dad implemented this that says,
00:27:54
Speaker
I think the web page auto loads to this when you log in as a user. But it's like upcoming tools that need to be ordered. Basically, when things hit the minimum, it tells you. And it says it starts adding to the Lakeshore Carbide list or the Datron end mill list. And I issued my first PO from two days ago for three different Datron end mills. And I was like, OK, I'm just going to email this to Datron. We'll see what happens. And it totally worked. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is great.
00:28:24
Speaker
There's an ultimate irony in this, which is for years I was such an advocate for online shopping carts and I absolutely still am. I think that's incredibly important, but you and I unfortunately are now hitting that point where things like having the almost, God forbid, the D-word distributor model of like, hey, we're just going to lob over a PDF PO and it needs to get processed. It's weird because
00:28:47
Speaker
It feels like a step backwards, but you understand why everybody does it this way now. Right,
Celebrating Machine Efficiency
00:28:52
Speaker
right. Our MSC rep, MSC has been great for us in the last few years. I used to not love them, kind of like the clunky
00:29:05
Speaker
They just seem to be much hungrier and in great service and so forth. And so we used to just email orders to that person or just place them online. And now that we're using Lex to generate POs, I asked her, I said, Hey, should we send these to you? And she's like, so we actually have an inbound or a email dedicated for this.
00:29:26
Speaker
And it's, you know, I think it's orders at MSC direct.com. And I'm guessing, I kind of want to ask her that that gets just auto scraped by like a script or something. Like just figure out a way to automatically read those, which is fine, but it's just ultimately irony that it's going through so much work to create it. And then for them to parse it when you, you know, you almost could have a system like Lex or GURP, you know, hook into an API of one of these companies to just auto talk to each other. And maybe some of them have that option too. Maybe it's not as publicized. Yeah, I don't know.
00:29:56
Speaker
Right? You don't ask, you don't get kind of thing. Right. Well, it doesn't, I mean, it's kind of funny because I guess there isn't really a reason. They would be the ones saving money because of the processing, but maybe not. Maybe it's just not even that hard. And, you know, value to their customers as well. You know, if they can offer that system, then their customers who are willing to implement it could be happier too. And they must have a lot of huge customers that are like 20 times bigger than us.
00:30:24
Speaker
But you hear, that's where I think we probably take for granted, John, there's companies that are not old that still have huge amounts of staff dedicated to just purchasing and procurement. A relative worked for an insurance company and had mentioned at one point they did an audit and it cost them like $120 to process an invoice. Huh?
00:30:51
Speaker
that was their overall purchasing staff overhead and salary, everything divided by the number of invoices per year. So whether the invoice was for $5 or $17,000, their cost per invoice was $120. I can't decide if I'm impressed that they actually took the time to calculate that or if I'm sad that they actually took the time to calculate that.
00:31:16
Speaker
Right. But the cost, I mean, that's not, nobody, no one goes to school and thinks, I mean, all I want to do in my life is process invoices. It's like, it's not like a, it's kind of like the whole movement of automation and moving up like food stream.
00:31:31
Speaker
I get it because you and I do a lot of purchasing. We probably handle most of the purchasing or have in the past anyway. And it is a lot of work. You try to find the best source of material, the best size, the best end mill, the best price. It's a lot of research. And if you strip it away as a dedicated job, you've got to know your stuff to be able to do it. But it is a big deal. Yeah.
00:31:56
Speaker
which is why I'm so excited about group because it's going to centralize everything and like add notes to every vendor and just repeat stuff. It's going to be great. Yeah, absolutely. Love it. That's great. I'm glad. Yeah, me too. Okay. So what else is going on with you? Um, we are thinking, um,
ERP and Shop Efficiency Improvements
00:32:17
Speaker
probably need to hire one more person. So actually, how's your process going on that front?
00:32:21
Speaker
We put out a blast last week, and we've had six actual inquiries to the website, which is good. And Angelo's away this week, so we're kind of sitting on it till he gets back. Got it. But I've had a lot of DMs. A lot of guys from the States are like, I'd move up, but I can't. Right, right. So it is tricky. We're just across the border, but we are in a different country, and it puts a big roadblock on a lot of potential.
00:32:51
Speaker
But yeah, so far, there's a few really qualified guys, it seems, and I haven't dug deep yet, but we'll be doing that really soon. I'm feeling good about it. Good. That's all just off of this. I think it was a story I saw. Yeah, I did a post and a story, and I'll probably do a YouTube video this week just to spread it a little bit. We're not in any rush. It doesn't have to happen tomorrow, but in the next few weeks, I want to make a decision for sure.
00:33:17
Speaker
Yeah, awesome. I may piggyback off of some of your tactics there, because I think we're really hitting a good run rate here. It just becomes obvious. Yeah, but I also, you got to feed the beast. We're so excited about some of the continuing product development, getting machines humming. I think last Friday, we had
00:33:45
Speaker
eight machines running at once. Actually, in the time, you just stopped and smiled by two or three guys. Both EF6s were running. The VM3 was running. The VF2 was running. The Datron was running. The ST20Y was running. The UMC was running. I just loved it. I think the success we've already had with Lex of giving everyone the
00:34:11
Speaker
to knowing that we're going to ride that train of helping us grow has really reinvigorated the underlying passion of just making stuff that we love. It also makes me want to focus on some of my own personal time, whether it's directly me working with tooling or just getting somebody else on board with the proven cut YouTube process of like, hey, let's go down deep dives on reamers.
00:34:35
Speaker
and let's go down working on some of the tool paths in Fusion that are tricky that I know you can do. Actually, we have a video coming out today, yeah, or Wednesday, two days ago from this airing, talking about just machining a hemisphere. There's a million different ways you can machine a hemisphere. It's not particularly difficult surfacing one, but let's show some of the tips and tricks that we've learned in perils and
00:34:57
Speaker
whether you care about tooling or surface finish or cycle time. I absolutely love that. I will do that kind of thing until the day I die, but making sure we continue to get people on board to help us with that is the goal right now.
00:35:14
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And so what we did is we created a Google form, people would sign up, put all their info in and upload a two minute video of themselves. Kind of an intro and it's that sort of like elevator pitch.
00:35:30
Speaker
I don't care if people are nervous. I don't care if they're scared to do it or whatever. But the point is not to be a videographer. The point is just to introduce yourself. And that's going really well. It's sort of a little barrier to entry. Like, well, if you're not willing to do that, I don't know if you're willing to work here. But it's cool. Yeah, that's a good idea. They just do it with their phone and upload it to their own YouTube or something? Upload it to, you can upload it directly from your phone to the Google Drive form.
00:35:57
Speaker
Oh, perfect. You're right. All right. That works great. I like that. Cool. What are you going to do this week? I've been running the you Mac.
00:36:08
Speaker
I saw. Foamy. Foam is coming out great. Oh, it's so nice. It is three minutes faster than the Maury because I can utilize twice the RPM. I've got it running at 23,000 RPM. The guys were in yesterday trying to figure out why we can't get it up to 30,000 RPM. It'll spin to 30, but it won't decelerate from 30.
00:36:29
Speaker
Right. It pops a breaker or something. And he said, he talked to the VFD manufacturer. Most likely, the drive is old, and the slow down capacitor is just worn out. OK. So from 30, there's too much juice going into it. Sure. But from 23,000, it's fine. So he's like, just leave it at 23. It's fine. Just run it till it dies, and then you buy a new VFD, and then you're good. Or spend the money on a new VFD, and get that extra little oomph. And I'm like, you're probably right. I'm just going to leave it alone.
00:36:59
Speaker
Is it an electrolytic cap? I don't know. Man, I'd be so inclined to it's working. So maybe I'm wrong here. But like, apparently it's like a big cap. Like I'm assuming we can sized but I don't know. Right. That's awesome. Yeah, that's awesome. And then they're fixing up the other one. Still a little issues. They're gonna have to take some time and fix that up. But it's it's going great. Like the machine just runs and it's so nice.
00:37:28
Speaker
Yeah, that's phenomenal. What a great outcome. Yeah, I'm so happy with it. Other than that, today is current focus day. I'm actually going to put on my yellow vest and just leave me alone. I'm making rasp blades.
00:37:43
Speaker
Great. Yeah. Oh, you're gonna start the grinding. Yeah. So I have to clamp my clamps first to hold it and be able to clear all the grinding moves. I still can't figure out how to do a toolpath that I want. So I might lean on you guys or Rob or Phil or something. Just the nature of the toolpath. It's going to be a five axis simultaneous, where the grinding wheel is going to match the bevel of the blade.
00:38:12
Speaker
So the whole tombstone is going to rotate up, traverse over and rotate up near the tip of the knife where it sweeps forward. And I need to be able to step that up 20 times. Classic may be overthinking it, but Swarf ought to do that in various ways. Okay. Yeah, I'll try that. I'm new on Swarf, so I haven't tried it yet.
00:38:35
Speaker
Swarf is great because you just pick the bottom of the top rail and then it's kind of like a 2D contour. It just does it. There's some other settings within it where you can go a lot deeper, but getting a good quality swarf with a couple clicks is very easy. Okay. I'll play with that. That's awesome. Are you nervous? Have we talked about this with grinding with oil? I guess that's fire. It's cool.
00:39:03
Speaker
Why did I think your Kern used oil? Gross. No, I purposely chose. It can run either, but I purposely chose coolant.
00:39:11
Speaker
Oh, okay. I knew that because of the whole quality chem conversation in the cooling systems. Yeah, exactly. At the Kern we played with in Germany, with Marv, it ran oil and it's like you pull a whole vice out and there's like half a gallon of oil stuck to the bottom and you put it on the table and I'm like, screw that. That is not happening in my shop. On the Swiss, the oil is fine because the parts are tiny and they come off and there's not a lot of
00:39:38
Speaker
oil that leaves the machine in parts or fixtures or hands or whatever, but with vices and tombstones and parts and not happening. Gross. I'd love to be able to just blow the coolant right off and parts are good.
00:39:51
Speaker
Oh my gosh, the processes, we got to wrap up that shop overhaul video because I think we've got enough content to make it a good video even if we're not done. We'll never be done, but just the number of improvements that we've made now, Ed's got the parts drying routines and it's funny, man, we had to land the chip fan for a long time and
00:40:14
Speaker
We're just using the same... We've been buying these YG1 side lock end mill holders. This is like they're not expensive. This is as basic as a tool holder gets, but they're great because the YG1 end mills that have a Woodruff key, not a Woodruff key, what do they call it? The... Well done flat. Thank you. Well done flat end them. I assume this was intentional, lines up very well such that the tool projection out of the holding is perfect. Right, right.
00:40:44
Speaker
We've got stubbies where we can use stubbies. We've got longer ones where we can use longer ones, but all of these holders that we're buying now have the through coolant port in the holder. It's been phenomenal for process reliability around chip evacuation, getting the coolant where we want it, especially even on a Haas.
00:41:02
Speaker
If your coolant level drops 10, 15%, that's completely fine, but it will slightly change the way the coolant flows out of the nozzles. Really? Yeah. Okay. This just solves that issue. Then the same holder, which is oftentimes already in the machine or in the spindle, can then be used with through air to blow the parts off.
00:41:22
Speaker
And so we're proving cycles by just not having operators need to even pick up a gun, an air gun when the machine is done. So you're saying the holder has little slots that go beside the end mill down the side of it? Bingo. They're actually angled toward the- Oh, that's even better. Yeah. We literally bought two, then we bought two more, then we just bought like six, maybe four more. They're just phenomenal. They're great.
00:41:51
Speaker
And it's just building that process. We built a dedicated, we tore the shelf off our VF2 and added these block down plates so that when we're switching out our product things, it just drops right onto the machine sheet metal shelf. And that's how we are changing stuff out. It's just, it is awesome. It makes me smile. That's so good.
00:42:12
Speaker
And we're now kind of trickling into that phase four, which, you know, when I started writing this list out phase four was kind of a, not a pipe dream, but
00:42:22
Speaker
it was very theoretical because of how much work we had to do between where we were. It's been like two months since you wrote this list out. Fantastic. Complete change set. It's been great. Part of phase four was reevaluating machine tools. I probably should put on my salesman hat and say, if anyone's interested in our robo drill, we have it listed with a machine broker, but I can put you in touch with them.
00:42:47
Speaker
Unfortunately, because new Robo drills are being on sale, that thing is going to sell. We need to sell it and it's going to sell for a great price. So if anybody wants a Robo drill with a robot.
00:42:59
Speaker
and the IR vision system, the machine has 130 hours on it. Reach out to me and I'll put you in touch with the broker. But now we're starting to look at what machine tools we want, what makes sense for the workflows for the products. And we just bought those two VF6s. They're working great. We're already hitting bottlenecks again, though.
00:43:20
Speaker
Yeah, those machines have not stopped. And so we're thinking, A machine, the part cycles take a lot more time on the A machine than on the B machine. And so we're thinking about getting effectively a second A machine, but it wouldn't be a VF6 because a lot of the plates are still smaller.
00:43:37
Speaker
wasn't something I had really considered four months ago, but we could basically have two different A machines of two different sizes feeding into the B machine. And what we would look for, as we started to launch the shape OCO plates and other like the hobby plates, a lot more quarter 20 size holes, a lot more holes that we want to make faster. So thinking about like a drill tat machine,
00:44:03
Speaker
I wish I could find a drill tap machine that had more than 20 inches in Y, but they don't seem to exist. Really? Then I'm like, do we go with the DT2 from Haas? Again, it checks all the boxes. We know the probing, we know the code, we know the machines, we know the service, we know the vendor. Everything checks out. The pricing is actually good in period, let alone with the sales now, or
00:44:28
Speaker
You know, you can, I'm sure tap faster with a speedio and part of me is always kind of wanting to have a speedio, right? Like, and it's better. Like what's the difference? Uh, the robot drill doesn't have through spindle coolant and, um, only 10,000 RPM spindle. And it's just not no probing. We need stuff. It doesn't have.
00:44:52
Speaker
future. The Spedios come standard with 16,000 RPM. You can get the 27,000 upgrade. They're just cool. I think, I don't think, I know that a DT2 makes sense, but I keep telling myself
00:45:11
Speaker
that I'm looking forward to. I never intended to become a Haas shop. Right. But it makes sense. Right. It's worked out well, but you also don't know what you're missing. So that's the thought. I actually just reached out. This is crazy, but I asked Ansrud how fast their routers can tap.
00:45:29
Speaker
Yeah, because our largest shape focal plate is just over 20 inches and why. And so I'd really like a machine that can handle more why and still tap fast. But I don't think that's going to mean they have some they the routers are impressive for that. Even for machine aluminum, but I don't don't think it's the right fit. I doubt they're going to tap that fast. Right. So you do. Do you tap all of the holes, even the steel ones? What do you mean?
00:45:57
Speaker
Like in your steel fixture plates, do you tap those holes or do you thread mill them or something? Oh, sorry. Every hole is tapped. Yeah. Really? I hate tapping. I've just broken too many taps and I haven't done it enough to like it, you know?
00:46:08
Speaker
Oh, yeah, no, you totally get comfortable. All the aluminum is form tapped. The steel is generally cut tap, although we might look to we actually are going to start playing with form tapping. You don't really need it in terms of the strength, but from a chip control standpoint, it'll be nicer to form tap if that makes sense. But form tapping at 32 Rockwell or so is
00:46:32
Speaker
potentially trickier. There's a lot more you're asking a lot more of the spindle horsepower and the coolant and the pre pre tap diameter. So we'll see if it makes sense. Cool. We form tap all the 1032s in the mod vice, which is 4140. And that works great. You get such a nice thread. Yeah, nice thread. Good to a life I'm sure. That's awesome. Good. Cool. Good stuff, man. Awesome. Well, good talk.
00:47:27
Speaker
Yeah, you do. Have a great day. Take care, bye. Okay, take care.