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Business of Machining - Episode 87
189 Plays7 years ago
What processes work best for your shop?
Sometimes it’s as simple as wrapping green tape around material you’re not using or using google sheets more often, and other times it’s necessary to get creative with a new tool! BTW the Grimsmo shop has a band saw now.
“It all depends on your goals”- Grimsmo
If quantity is your goal, you focus on materials that make products faster. If your goal is quality, you have to invest in materials to make them top notch, but you should make sure it’s not taking any longer than it needs to.
Tiny Tolerances
Grimsmo and Saunders discuss tolerances. They are a crazy important consideration, maybe even more important than we realize. How do you make sure your perfect parts are actually perfect?
Saunders asks himself questions like “What tolerances do I need?” as he plans his trip to NYC to look at a used FANUC 2-axis lathe.
The Journey: it never ends.
Saunders is inspired by Tony Robbins too! As the Johns discuss realistic goals from the next year, to the next TEN years, Saunders reminds Grimsmo of a Tony Robbins quote:
“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year, and they underestimate what they can do in a decade”
Everyone puts so much pressure on themselves over the course of a day, or a week or a month, but those little steps will lead to huge results. It just takes time.
“It has to grow organically for it to work, and it has to take ten years, and it has to be a struggle” - Grimsmo
Ask yourself: Where were YOU last year? It might make you feel pretty good.
As a side note: Grimsmo’s hiring!
The official announcement was out on their YouTube channel Thursday Oct 3.
Hmmm...What should we buy next?
The Johns get Swissish (again) as they talk about how a Swiss Lathe works.
With the lapping machine being overused, a fine grinding machine is starting to look like a more real part of the future for the Grimsmo Shop.
Fine grinding machine by Supfina:
Model that Grimsmo is considering:
Keep an eye out!
Saunders is going to releasing a new product by the end of this year!
Recommended
Transcript
Morning Greetings and Business Satisfaction
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning, welcome to the Business of Machining, episode 87. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. Good morning. Good morning, my friend. How are you? I'm doing good. Good, awesome. Yeah. We're doing great. Yeah. We're doing great. Just, I'm very happy, I'm very happy with where we are.
00:00:27
Speaker
Yeah, I'm just you're actually taking a second to sit back and like look Oh actually no, not even the like not even the retrospect or like not even the outside look of it. It's just like Things are moving I had you know, I got pulled out to a meeting yesterday last minute and you just kind of look and maybe maybe this is I'm that I'm doing that but like people like stuff's happening people are working and even
00:00:50
Speaker
The process of improving is more enjoyable when you're improving on improvements and everybody else understands it on board. So like, we had a hiccup where we were trying to be efficient and quick getting set up for running mod vice, soft jaw basis or something, one of our things.
Material Challenges and Inventory Management
00:01:13
Speaker
And we had bought some two different types of material. One of them we didn't like, the other one we did.
00:01:19
Speaker
And it was the first time where I looked around and I was like oh my god we can't do the whole like oh we just all know that that inventory is for that product because it used to be me or me and Jared and we only had a few different things and now we've got we've got parts and inventory all over the shop and
00:01:38
Speaker
You know, it's easy to put screws on a shelf when inventory comes in and in pallets or plates or big boxes. It's not always, we can, I'm not making an excuse, but right now we, we kind of just leave it wherever, which is okay. But I realized, Oh my gosh, we just need to do combine cards for raw material when it comes in or a way of systematic way of labeling it. So it's not a big deal. And it's nice. Cause just that one little phrase immediately solves all these issues and problems. Nice.
00:02:05
Speaker
Yeah. When you start to have so much material that it all looks the same and you know, the person who ordered it might know exactly what it is, but you need to make it obvious for everybody. I love it. Yeah. And I'm really understanding, um, you know, we don't really do things that big shops do like runners and job sheets and the, some of the, some of the things with ISO standards, I'm not that familiar with them is involves
Traceability and ISO Standards in Manufacturing
00:02:29
Speaker
like.
00:02:29
Speaker
being able to track what material, when it was ordered, what was the PO, when was it delivered, what was the lot number from the mill or factory and I'm sorry. And what parts those made. Yeah, exactly. So I'm starting to realize why that's a very valuable thing and not just a marketing thing. Of course, yeah, it's full traceability. You know, you ship a product today and then a year from now you have to be able to know
00:02:58
Speaker
what the material is, when you ordered it, what lot it's from. Yeah, great. Even like you're the titanium, we were joking that you order the gummy stuff, the round. Yeah, right, the CP titanium. Who else in your shop knows that that's not really the right stuff to use? Who knows that it's CP?
00:03:17
Speaker
The giant green tape around it that says never use this. Okay. So that's a start. It's like a half. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Or like you were saying, just get rid of it. Well, you were arguing, you said you think you're going to use it. So, okay. Yeah, maybe. So we'll see it, but at least it's cleanly labeled now. Nobody's going to touch it. Right. All right. At least write CP on it. So, uh, yeah, I know. Did you end up ordering your,
00:03:41
Speaker
I did. Okay, good. I ordered all my round by yesterday, I created this elaborate spreadsheet that has, you know, every part we make every part length, every cutoff length, every stock to leave, every bar length, remnant length, because it's a different remnant for each part. And like all these calculations,
00:03:59
Speaker
and how many parts you get per bar, and how many of my bars fit in a 12-foot bar, and how much it costs, and how that extrapolates. So eventually, I needed to order three different diameters of bar, which is not that scary. But it's like 12, 12-foot bars of this, 12-foot bars of this. But you have to know exactly how much, basically. You can't just wing it. You can. Well, you can. Yeah, anyway. No, I know what you mean.
00:04:25
Speaker
It was good that I actually made that spreadsheet and it's all color coded based on material and has two text boxes. How many pens do you want to make? How many knives do you want to make? Everything. Do you use Google Sheets? Yeah, Google Sheets for everything. Yeah, yeah. It's funny because I used to worry about licenses for Microsoft Excel or Office and now it's like, nope, just Google Sheets.
00:04:47
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I use Google Sheets so much. Yeah, it's wonderful. What was I going to ask you about that? I can't think of it. I don't know. So rock and roll on that stuff. It comes in via freight truck.
00:05:05
Speaker
Yeah, so we have to order 12 foot bars because we're getting it direct from the manufacturer, I guess. Just put on your bandsaw. I'm going to get them to cut it down to 42 inch bars to aid with shipping and all this stuff. Yeah.
00:05:19
Speaker
That'll be good. I did. So we have this little portable bandsaw and I bought one of those mounts for it. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't think, I don't even think the guys have set it up yet, but so we have a air quotes bandsaw now. That's awesome. Is titanium bandsaws okay? Just slow? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I can't say I've really done it actually. Yeah. But yeah, just slow and don't heat it up and don't kill the blade kind of thing. Right. Right.
00:05:41
Speaker
That's
Efficiency in Production with Bar Feeders
00:05:42
Speaker
what I was going to ask. Will you share what the what type guys are talking about with bar feeders and quantities? I was surprised when I read that. Anyway, yeah, two of our guys were talking about. That a short load bar feeder, like a four foot bar feeder can theoretically make more parts than a 12 foot bar feeder.
00:06:08
Speaker
And I looked into it briefly, but I didn't get to really dig too deep into it. And this might be different between a lot of different bar feeders and the diameter of a park you make and all that stuff. But my quick research showed that some of the 12-foot bar feeders will only hold nine bars of any material. They're like on this magazine rack on the side that only holds nine bars. I don't know if they're all the same. It's kind of like one slot per bar, then?
00:06:33
Speaker
Yeah, basically. So whether that's a bar feeder that holds as many as you can just fit in the volumetric cavity of the space. It's like an angled tray that just lines them all up. And the short loads are all like that, I think. So the bar feeder I'm looking at is
00:06:53
Speaker
holds a 48-inch bar, 26-inch of length. So for a quarter-inch bar, that's 104 pieces. So I can hold 104 bars of quarter-inch material. Yeah, that's a lot. Holy cow. My end mills are not going to last that long, my turning inserts kind of thing. Or 26 one-inch bars, which is great too. Yeah.
00:07:17
Speaker
Or you get a 12 foot, and maybe some of the 12 footers have more racking capability than what we're talking about. But yeah, they seem to think that the smaller ones can usually make more parts and take up less floor space. Right. So it's just something to consider. The floor space thing is funny. Like Hugh Mark, the probe folks, they've got a couple of Swiss lays, and they've done the kind of back to back or in a row. Right, the zigzag orientation, yeah. But it's a weird workflow for getting around the machines and maintaining them.
00:07:47
Speaker
um stare it had is kind of funny they had started what a great example of of yesterday and tomorrow they had a as they were phasing out there i think they were brown and sharp um oh shoot what were they called um what was the old version of a swiss lathe in the mechanical world like a cam driven
00:08:07
Speaker
It's like a cam-driven Swiss turret lathe or something. Yeah, there's a name that I'm alluding to. But you had to set them up with the cogs. But the machines could make, I think they were making punches the day I toured. And it could make like 3,000 or 8,000 punches an hour or something. And they were perfect. And the guy running them knew exactly like, hey, I need to just dress up this tool every once in a while. Next to them was like state-of-the-art 12-foot barf head.
00:08:36
Speaker
You know, CNT, not a swishish lathe, an actual Swiss lathe.
00:08:41
Speaker
Yeah. So it's cool because that's how the real world works. The things change. And if the old stuff still works, then use it. Right. So they were doing, I think, what a lot of people do, which was cannibalizing some of the machines into keeping the remaining machines up and running for some period of time with all those requisite spare parts. And there's something to be said.
00:09:06
Speaker
I'm not a what's
Simplicity vs. Modern Technology
00:09:08
Speaker
that? There's some word for people that loathe technology. Can't remember it like the Unibot. Yeah. Luddite. Thank you. I'm not really a Luddite, but I'll tell you, man, I would actually probably pay more if I could purchase my next truck with like no computer, no LCD dash, like no start button ignition, no key like key fob would be nice. But like, I don't want all this technology and think some things like I just want stuff that I can work on and understand.
00:09:35
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Otherwise you're creating such a discrepancy, a disparity between what you know and what you use. To the point where you can never crack the hood and do anything to it.
00:09:53
Speaker
but anyway. Can you explain to me how a Swiss lathe works with regard to the one or more holding mechanisms in the spindle and the bushing and collet and all that?
Swiss Lathes Mechanics
00:10:09
Speaker
Sure. Never having actually run one, but I get it basically. It has, instead of a three jaw chuck that just holds the material, it has a guide bushing in the front, which is a
00:10:21
Speaker
I don't know how big, but call it like two tenths bigger than the bar. Okay. So it's always sliding and it always has some clearance and deflection and that's by nature. If you have a one inch piece of ground bar stock, your collet or your guide bushing, I mean by default has to be slightly bigger, which manifests itself in known tolerance deflection, but repeatable
00:10:45
Speaker
Very repeatable, so nobody cares really. Got it. Yeah, so for argument's sake, let's call it two-tenths. It's an adjustable guide bushing, some sort of call it, I guess, that you go in and you adjust and you slide the bar in and out and you feel and you develop this feel for how tight to make it. And there's oil flowing through the guide bushing to always, I guess, hydrostatically lubricate it. I'm not sure exactly.
00:11:10
Speaker
But the tolerance is so minimal that it doesn't matter. So that always slides and is fixed. That's why they call it a fixed. No, they call it a sliding head machine. But that part is fixed. And then like, I don't think so. Gosh, I would think that would generate friction.
00:11:29
Speaker
I don't know. That's good. That's why there's oil flowing through it all the time. But still, I would think, because material moves. I mean, material's effective. OK, maybe it does. Yeah, that would make sense, that the whole assembly would just rotate together. OK. But it can slide forward and back. It doesn't have to rotate, though. The material doesn't have to rotate within the guide bushing.
00:11:49
Speaker
Yeah, the guy bushing in the material are both turning at the RPM. That makes it Yeah, that makes sense. I don't know for sure. But that makes most sense for sure. And then let's say nine or 11 inches back, there is an actual clamped call. Okay, like, you know, like a five C call it or whatever they call it that
00:12:10
Speaker
that rigidly holds the material and can then slide the forward through the guide bushing. Ah, that does the informal Z travel movement. Okay, got it. So that is completely your Z travel. So the material instead of your tools moving in Z, right, you know, left and right, the material moves in and out. So if you're doing multiple passes, the bar is actually going in, out, in, out, in, out.
00:12:36
Speaker
And then your tool is just moving X. I remember one of the guys explaining you usually can't do multiple passes because after your first pass it's no longer contacting the guide bushing.
00:12:46
Speaker
True. Depends on length and things like that. If you're making, say, a long pen, a lot of people might want to do it in one pass. Yeah. Pinch, turn it, or figure out how to go in one. Right, right. And does? OK, so that explains why you need, well, generally, I think you need ground stock or something consistent. I guess so many of them now seem to have live tooling and positional kind of work done. I wonder if the
00:13:15
Speaker
And that wouldn't normally be done. Well, no, it could be done while the Z axis is moving, depending on what the sort of machine work is. I guess it just continues to have a couple of tenths of slop in it. You don't see it on the parts. No. And you plan for it, I guess. You just offset your tools to make a good part. I just mean if you got, and I know we're talking small numbers, but
00:13:36
Speaker
I wouldn't want to machine with a good end miller, especially a small end mill. And certainly, Swiss lathe work can be small tooling and have your part bouncing around one or two tenths.
00:13:50
Speaker
Maybe it's less, I don't really know. Okay, I'm just curious. Yeah, no, that's a good point. And you also brought up a good point about pinch turning. Most of the smaller Swiss lathes only have one gang tool block with a bunch of turning tools. But the fancier ones will have two, one on each side, so you can pinch turn. And that might be a consideration for me when I get one, to make sure that maybe it does, so that we have that option.
00:14:16
Speaker
Right. I just feel like I guess I want to walk up to a Swiss laid now and put an indicator on it and see if I can just move the bar around. Yeah, right. I mean, they're so freaking awesome. There's got to be a way that this is actually handled. Right. And so the guide bushings are a wear item. Yeah, I guess so. Like a multi-year wear item or something.
00:14:39
Speaker
Yeah. Although you tighten it and you adjust it every set up. Okay. So it's got basically, so yeah. So maybe it doesn't matter so much. They're probably made of some kind of lubricitous material. I'm not sure. Yeah. That's cool. But yeah, I'm, I'm looking forward to buying a Swiss one day. You still just, what's the, what's the hurdle? Money and space, not necessarily in that order.
00:15:07
Speaker
Yeah, fair enough. And then once the pens are rocking into production, and we're like, there's huge demand, and we're making them, and we're like, man, if we could make 10 times more, that would be amazing. Once we're there, it'll be a much easier decision.
00:15:23
Speaker
So how do you get there? You got to order, order material. Okay. I'm not joking. So you, cause you've been on a Norseman run for good grief, like a year now. Yeah. For a year. For sure. Um, are you going to go back to rasks or pens or how does that work?
00:15:40
Speaker
Pens this month, for sure. Dude, the box. Oh, sorry. I don't know if you're sharing that or not. I'm not sharing that. Not yet, anyway. Angelo's been working on drawings for the pen. Oh, cool.
00:15:55
Speaker
So we're going to go over those today because there's some tolerances in the pen that if machined incorrectly, the thing doesn't assemble properly. And we're talking half a thou on various, especially the mechanism, the click mechanism. And we had that problem before. We're like, I think everything's to spec, except these parts aren't going together and the pen's not clicking. So we had a bunch of scrap parts because of that. So we got to dial in what is the acceptable tolerance on these three or four parts.
00:16:25
Speaker
And then it's just making parts. It sounds so simple, but legitimate tolerance critical. Yeah. And not over tolerancing where you don't need it as well. Right. For sure. Exactly. And tolerance stack is the problem here necessarily. You know, it's like this plus this plus this plus the ball has to equal less than three tenths or whatever. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
00:16:51
Speaker
So my goal is by the end of October, have pens ready to sell at least one, you know, in production. Awesome.
00:17:02
Speaker
Somebody asked me yesterday, you know, never sent out a, never had a part machine before. What do I answer for tolerances? And I love this question because it literally was the first question that made me feel uncomfortable. Um, 10 years ago with strike part, cause I was like, I don't know. I was going to answer these questions in like carpenter terms, like, well, maybe we could do like a 32nd of an inch. Um, yeah.
00:17:27
Speaker
Yeah. Laugh it up, bud. Yeah. And so but then it's still kind of now we know too much. It's like a hard question to answer because there's all these gotchas and caveats and what do you need. But I said for lack of a better answer or a specific answer to your product or partner or circumstance, most machine shops or job shops I think are pretty comfortable seeing a print and says all dimensions, even if not labeled, are plus or minus five thousandths of an inch. That's what I was thinking.
00:17:56
Speaker
And then on things like motor mounts or brackets or stacked things where things fit together, interference fit or clearance fit, plus or minus one thousandth of an inch is generally easy. But in my opinion, a lot of people don't, you know, it's a question of what are you measuring a tolerance from and
00:18:14
Speaker
I think a lot of people probably say plus or minus one thousandth of an inch, but the reality is if it's actually, you know, twelve tenths, are you going to actually reject the part? Does it become not usable or are you just giving tight tolerances because you're just trying to bake in a safety factor of making sure it's just, you know, parts aren't perfect. I think it's part of what I'm trying to say here, like there's just tolerance variation on everything.
00:18:41
Speaker
Exactly. But my machine can move in one tenth. That means all parts are perfect, right? Oh, speaking of IMTS bingo or IMTS, you saw the, I almost hate to say the name because I feel bad picking on them, but the Okuma machine that tips over.
00:19:00
Speaker
Right. Apparently a rigger, an airbag valve got stuck open. So it was more innocent of a mistake than may have happened. But then I also heard that it's not funny either, but a forklift caught fire in the Mazak booth and completely smoked out the South Hall. What? Yeah. During like teardown, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my goodness. This is kind of funny.
00:19:29
Speaker
Inside a building. Oh, it's just terrifying. Right? Well, can you imagine? I mean, smoke damage is actually can be real. I never thought about that. And everything's so white and clean. Right. The machines. You've got to keep the smoke inside the electronics. Yeah, exactly. Don't let it out. Anyway, no tolerances are real. I feel like I wonder if there's a way on a small round part like yours to build an in-process QC jig.
00:20:00
Speaker
In what way? I don't know. To quickly measure parts as they come off kind of thing or? Yeah. So like they have blade mics or blade edges and blade, they have blade tips for test indicators or dial indicators.
00:20:19
Speaker
So I'm just thinking, because I'm thinking about this, because we're trying to do it now.
Quality Assurance with Go-No-Go Gauges
00:20:23
Speaker
I don't want to measure parts in the sense of stopping picking up tools. I want to drop a part onto a fixture that has two or six indicators on it.
00:20:34
Speaker
And all of a sudden, the needles move into a green zone. Right. And I've seen it's like a go, no go gauge. I think Sunin makes them and some other ones. Ken has a bunch of fancy stuff at his job where it's like a swing. You almost don't care if it's plus four tenths or minus two tenths. As long as it's in the green, you're good to go. Right. So you set up the one tool for that one tolerance and you just put your part in and you're good. Yeah.
00:21:05
Speaker
Yeah, although at this point it's easy enough just to use a mic, but I see that that would be faster in bigger batches for sure. Faster and it's a, you know, franchise isn't the right word, but I think people understand franchising clicks easier than like the idea of lean process, scalability, blah, blah, blah. Remember the McDonald's term, whatever that average employment tenure at McDonald's is 40 days.
00:21:34
Speaker
But that does not see up. Yeah. But when you walk into a McDonald's, it doesn't look like everyone's right. Everybody's brand every once in a while you get trainee day at the register, but generally it's pretty, pretty well oiled machine. Yes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, anybody could drop a pen cap onto a really cool little jig that only goes on one way and it depresses different tools in different directions to give you go, no go gauge readings. It's a good idea. Yeah. I'll consider that for sure.
00:22:05
Speaker
Because obviously the goal is to make lots of parts and have them all be perfect. So the quickest way to verify their perfect to city. Yeah, the better. I'm trying to think about what other people would say about our businesses.
00:22:22
Speaker
people that have gone from where we are to hopefully where we're going. If we're at one now, they go to 10. You know what I mean? In terms of number of machines or size or all that. And I would think somebody would look at our business and say, you guys are so small and you have so much ability to craft things the way you want. That doing 100% inspection for you right now is a joke. So easy to do it. And if you grow that way,
00:22:51
Speaker
it takes up some real estate and it definitely takes up some capital, but it doesn't necessarily, I don't know if it would necessarily slow you down prohibitively. Right. Depends on the goal. If your goal is to churn out a million parts a month or whatever is realistic,
00:23:12
Speaker
you need to find, you need to put whatever money it takes into indicators and process and everything to find the fastest way. We want to make an excellent product and we want to work kind of slowly methodically to make sure it's perfect. I don't know if that, you know what I mean? Like, like we want to take the time it takes, but without wasting it necessarily. Right.
00:23:35
Speaker
I'm more trying to stop work happening on parts that are already bad and making educated decisions. 100% inspection doesn't mean 100% inspection of 100% of the features, but it just means, again, for us, the
00:23:51
Speaker
critical things on, you know, we're not going to measure or mic or air gauge every freaking bore on a fixture plate. But boy, it'd be nice to do seven of them or, you know, 10 of them, six in a configured spot and four at random or something, because then all of a sudden you can back into the head condition and the machine tolerance and blah, blah, blah. So I think it's easy. I think it's probably easier for us to do that than I'm letting it be, given what we're doing now.
00:24:17
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah, some of the parts we make like the knife pivot that needs 100% diameter inspection, just at least on the one tolerance, actually two of them.
00:24:30
Speaker
Because if there is variation when we make them, and if a bad one, if a big one goes through that's even a few tenths too big, it's not going to fit in the knife. And I don't want Eric to have that headache. I need to make sure that the parts that he gets are 100% perfect. Exactly. But there's nothing against having a go-no-go fixture that makes that quick and easy. Just pop it in, pop it in, pop it in.
00:24:51
Speaker
Yeah. This may be a bad example, but it works. What are the pins that you measure by tenths and put into the fishing tackle? The stop pin. Yeah, the stop pin. I mean, it shouldn't be hard to tie in
00:25:08
Speaker
a way of measuring those. There's contact measurement, there's non-contact, there's air gauge, and then have it just kick them into one of 10 drawers automatically. You may not need to do that because I'm not sure. No, for sure. But the thought of be smart about it. Dump a thousand of these pins into a thing, and it just kicks them out into the right bucket. That would be epic because they do take a while to measure. Yeah.
00:25:36
Speaker
The way they do that actually in the ammunition business is it's crazy. They have two picture paper towel rolls. It's just like cylinders. But instead of being a foot long, they're 10 feet long and they're ground. So you've got two perfectly ground 10 foot bars, about two inches in diameter. And they taper away from each other.
00:26:01
Speaker
So it's like that game as a kid where you try to get the marble up the ramp by pulling the things in and out. And so as the ammunition cases go down, they actually go down the two rollers as the rollers continuously open up by something like some very small amount, a thousandth of an inch per inch.
00:26:27
Speaker
And the cases are consistent enough that the right ammunition round drops into the right bucket as they tapered out. So you could actually make that for your stop pins. That's interesting. Very easy. Interesting. Mike's giving you a good visual of that. Yeah, I do have a really good visual of that. I can send you a picture of it offline, but the ammunition one is hard because they're like 10 foot shafts. For you, you could do this in like two foot, so you could have them centerless ground for
00:26:55
Speaker
Probably. You can buy rods. Yeah. Right. And you just adjust. One of them is fixed and the other one is your adjustment bar. So you just put an indicator on it and you adjust it to the taper or the angle between the two and boom. There you go. Interesting. Yeah. And you'd figure out your taper per inch and then you'd have one inch buckets, shallower bins basically. Shallower bins. It's many. Yes. No serious. Yeah. Under each one. It's actually also very satisfying to watch.
00:27:26
Speaker
Yeah, I'm going to have to look up a YouTube video of that. It's how they sort ball bearings by grade and size as well. Yes, I have seen that. I have seen that. Okay. Interesting. The ball bearings that we buy, the spec sheet that comes with it, it comes with the certification report and everything because they're grade three tolerance, which is as tight as you can get.
00:27:48
Speaker
the amount of zeros after the decimal that these things are literally measured to, it's like 0.06251272, something like that. Don't breathe on it. Yeah. And they were actually out of stock of the exact size 0625, but they had one micron smaller in stock. And I was like, okay, what's a micron? Three tenths of a tenth? Yeah, I'm not going to care about that.
00:28:18
Speaker
Right, exactly. But just for fun, I kept the two batches separate so that at least two different ones aren't going in the same bearing assembly. Did you try miking them with your... Do you have a... No, I guess I haven't. I have a half-tenth mic. Yeah. It might actually do it, but anyway. Yeah, that'd be fun though. Yeah. See if they come up the same. Very good. I feel like if there's one like,
00:28:47
Speaker
There's a lot of things that I think you and I both have to do for our businesses and we will do because we have to do them. But if there's one thing that's kind of optional that I'd like to see us be having crushed in a year, it's like a handful of different
00:29:02
Speaker
projects that are so freaking awesome and cool that everybody is like, why didn't I think of that? Or how did you do that? Which things like the little in-process QC jigs, or you've got a pneumatic assembly thing that's freaking genius. And I don't think you invented that, but it doesn't matter. You implemented it. Exactly. So we got to scale the business to the point where you and I can dedicate actual time to make these crazy cool things, which I love to do and you love to do. Right.
00:29:32
Speaker
Or outsource it within your team or outside. Once you've got the idea, you're good at quarterbacking that process. Show Sky or Angelo, hey, here's the two roller bearings. You build the jig, the stand, print it, outsource it, whatever.
Long-Term Planning and Rapid Growth Strategies
00:29:52
Speaker
Which is actually a great segue to a awesome awesome, um, Tony robin's quote from I just because of last week's podcast I started to rewatch the I am not your guru and one of the first guys first scenes is a guy
00:30:09
Speaker
Who's struggling and Tony's doing one of his, you know, one-on-one interventions in the middle of this 5,000 person attendance hall. And Tony, I thought that it was a great quote. He's like, most people overestimate what they can do in one year. And they underestimate what they can do in a decade. Yes. And I think that's totally true. You put so much pressure on yourself for how much can I do today or this week or this month or this year?
00:30:37
Speaker
But it's the sum of the small wins over time that gets you to where you are or the big stuff. Well, do you think about what Saunders Machine Works is going to look like in 10 years? Absolutely not. Yeah. That's not what I said. I don't either.
00:30:53
Speaker
Yeah, but you certainly think of what you're going to do in the next year, right? But it's the sum that's the problem. It's the difference between like when people's the explanation of why goals are worthless because people think about the goals and then stop thinking about What's what you have to do to get there if there's a more elegant way of saying that but um, yeah i'm more focused on being efficient on the day to day and then it's the sum of those parts over time
00:31:18
Speaker
You couldn't take where I am today as a case study and try to reverse engineer it as some sort of a plan. That's absurd. This doesn't work that way. I want you to start a knife company. I want you to hire these people. I want you to buy these machines in Toronto and then build this Instagram and this YouTube and these following and this brand. It doesn't how it works.
00:31:42
Speaker
No, it's it has to be organic for it to work. And it has it has to take 10 years and it has to struggle. Yeah. But that's okay. It's what it's all about. Yeah. But even I, you know, sometimes I try to think I used to be such a bad long term planner and thinker, you know, I'd have big ideas, but I'm like, where am I going to be in five or 10 years? I have no idea. I can think of the next year.
00:32:08
Speaker
I can think of the next week, the next month that I can work on because I'm so process driven. I'm like, I can create a process for the next few weeks, months. I know how to get where I want to get, but to visionize like too far forward, like.
00:32:22
Speaker
I don't even know what Grimsman Ives could theoretically look like in 10 years, even with the sum of all the actions between now and then. But sometimes it's good to sit back and like, well, maybe I should think about it and maybe I should try to work towards a long-term goal. But that's what's so funny is I feel like I know because I know you so well and because we talk like I know.
00:32:48
Speaker
Um, if you could snap your fingers, you would move your shop tomorrow into a four to 10,000 square foot shop and you would buy definitely a five axis, a Swiss and a just second mill spindle tomorrow, like tomorrow done. Um, I was just telling somebody that yesterday. It's not like a debate. It's just like, let's go. Um, right. And I would, I would hire more people and we would do all like, I would do all of that tomorrow if money and time and everything was no object.
00:33:17
Speaker
Right. And so the one year, it's funny, because I don't actually even think that that's unrealistic at all for a one year goal for you, frankly. Oh, definitely not. I'm sort of, well, the all of it within a year, maybe, but most of it within six months, I'm hoping. Completely, I mean, you don't need my blessing, but I completely, I completely endorse that. But I think that
00:33:42
Speaker
It's a little bit of a weird timeline example here because you're in a different point than more like whole overestimate what you can do in one year. But still, like if you maybe if you, let's say you got all that done by June. Well, in June of 2019, if you looked back to June of 2018, that's way, you're accomplishing way more than you would have strived to plan. And that's, I don't know, this isn't really coming out the right way, but yeah. But it's funny because
00:34:11
Speaker
I can picture in my head all of those things happening in the next year easily, like, oh, you just do this, you do this, you have the work set up, it's gonna take a lot of work. I can estimate that that could happen in a year, and that might be completely overestimating, because a year goes by quickly. Yeah, it does. Like a year ago, I remember exactly where we were, and it's a totally different place than we are now. It's because you can,
00:34:36
Speaker
Think of the quick and dirty top end processes to make all those things happen. Find a shop, buy a shop, talk to the bank, get the financing in place, hire people. You can almost chew that bite. But to actually enact it and make it happen is a totally different story. Things take time. I mean, picking out machines.
00:34:59
Speaker
Exactly. And you don't think about that upfront. You're just like, yep, I would get a five axis. Well, which one? Well, what we're holding? Well, what tooling? Well, that's a six month process. We're in the control, build a relationship, find the post, work, tweak it. Yeah, it's a lot. Holy cow. But I think that's a good time to remind ourselves it is the journey, not the destination.
00:35:25
Speaker
It is tough to live in the present sometimes, but this is what we love doing. Well, I mean, you get to the destinations and then you're already on to the next one. There's no like sitting and relishing and reveling in like where you are right now, because it's like, nope, I've already got bigger goals next destination. So it has to be about the journey because you're always in a journey. Right. And that's okay.
00:35:52
Speaker
But it doesn't feel because you and I are driven people. Right. But like everything we do in our life, like you go through school and you strive to get a grade, which summarizes the completion success. And then you move on and then eventually you finish school. But like there aren't those kind of hard start stops. It's not like you're going to say we completed the Norseman and we did a good job. We got an A and so right. Like it's always going to be ongoing. Yep. Yeah. Ongoing is a good word. Yeah. Hmm.
00:36:23
Speaker
evolving, you know. How are those pallets coming for the Norseman? Are they, isn't Amish making them? I don't know Amish. How are they coming, Amish? I don't think it's snowy. I don't think it's snowing in Vancouver. Maybe snowing in Calgary, but yeah. I don't know. I haven't talked to Amish really since IMTS a couple of weeks ago. That was like three months ago, dude. What are you talking about? Yeah, right.
00:36:51
Speaker
Um, hopefully he'll have time soon to get them, get them rocking and he's going to make four pallets for us. And then we've got to make, um, clamps and, uh, pins and things for the fixtures. And then I've got a lot of goals for the end of October. Yeah. I want to get those pallets in from Amish. I want to get them on the machine. Um, I want to run four pallets every night unattended and have it work with no broken tools.
00:37:21
Speaker
And I think it'll work. Did you? It might just. What's that? Oh, I was going to say, are you done with that tool macro thing? I'm still working on it. Yeah, picking away at it. DMG actually has to come in and update my control software to be able to export the values to USB stick, which is good. So I'm like, do it. Come on in. Yeah. And that was two weeks ago. And I'm like, hey, you guys coming in? Yeah. You haven't set a date. I want this done.
00:37:50
Speaker
Yeah, so getting those pallets on, I got to order some more bases from Orange Vice. I got to relocate my vacuum fixture and my Pearson pallet on top of the vices probably. As well as we're going to be hiring another person throughout, we're going to launch that this week. And then let's see what else.
00:38:15
Speaker
No, something else. What was it? Oh, and pens, pens, obviously, um, ready to sell by the end of the month. And I don't think I've told you we've been working. You know how we've been struggling with the lapping machine. I love these little surprises. Like, Oh, I don't think I told you this, but we've been using our pieces before years now. It's actually great.
00:38:32
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Months, it was four months. OK, sorry. OK, lapping. So the lap, we're struggling with the lapping machine because in order to get through the current finish, it just takes forever to lap
Lapping Machine Challenges and Solutions
00:38:46
Speaker
the parts. And we're wearing out the machine. And we're, you know, the plate, we're having to dress it all the time. Because we're lapping more than you're supposed to lap, basically, due to incoming material.
00:38:59
Speaker
Because we buy thicker material, it gets double disc ground to a certain thickness, and then we have to lap it down to final thickness. It just takes forever. So we are thinking about eliminating the outsourcing of that double disc step, buying our own double disc grinding machine.
00:39:15
Speaker
that can double disk the material to micron thickness and flatness. Whoa. And then it's going to be insanely perfect. And then it'll take like two minutes to lap the parts after, and they're going to look nuts. Lapping is just like a little kiss at the end. Exactly, exactly. Wow. So it's called a fine grinding machine by Supfina. I actually saw them at IMTS, and I had like five minutes at their booth. The sales guy was trying to sell me, and I'm like, no, like, lead me to your tech guy. I've got five minutes here.
00:39:45
Speaker
I was kind of rude about it, but it was hilarious. Big smile on my face. And then some guy, Philo, pulled him out of another conversation and he showed me the machine. I was like, holy crap, this thing is amazing. This is exactly what we need. How much is it? 100 grand. And then that was about it. And then I called him the week after IMTS. We had a great conversation and
00:40:08
Speaker
And him and one of the other employees from Supina came by Monday, and we're here for a couple hours, which is really good. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. They were in the area looking at all or talking to all the big automotive manufacturing places that have their machines. So it was great to have them come by up from Rhode Island. Yeah, we went out to lunch. We had a great, great time.
00:40:32
Speaker
And so the Supfina Spyro F5 is the, I'm literally on their website. This is like crank grinding. They call them super finishers. I'm, I'm, I'm, I don't think I'm on the right page, but I'll, I'll, um, race finishing spherical. Oh, no, double disc grinding. Here we go. Yeah. Double disc fine grinding. The F5 is the one. So it's like a small.
00:40:54
Speaker
you know, probably two foot by two foot machine. Looks looks high tech. That's got it's got two plates. So it's it's grinding the part from both sides evenly. There's a height sensor on the inside that measures to point one micron and will stop when the part is the right thickness. Awesome. It's like everything we need and it should give a five to eight RA finish, which is really good. And then we lap that down to two RA and then
00:41:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's not something I was planning on spending money on. However, man, we're struggling so hard with the lapping right now. And this will solve a lot of problems. The obvious question, why don't you just ditch lapping?
00:41:35
Speaker
because it makes the parts nicer. The finish from the fine grinding is not quite enough to tumble out. Have you sent them parts to run for you on a soup? We're shipping them today. Soupfina. It's a fun word to say. Yeah, so exactly. So they've been super swishish. I like swishish. But yeah, they've been super awesome. They're going to run some parts for us, and we should get them back within a week or so. Sweet. That's awesome.
00:42:01
Speaker
Yeah. They sent us some samples immediately. And I got the sample, just these little rollers that are ground on both sides. And I'm like, these are really nice. They actually ring together. Oh, serious? Oh, respect. Totally. Right. I should probably explain this swooshish comment, which is Grimsmo's IMTS day one video. At the end of the day, we ran into each other and you were like, you were on fire. I was exhausted and somehow
00:42:27
Speaker
You were like, it's kind of like a Swiss delay. And I'm like, it's Swissish? Or maybe you said, I don't remember. Yeah, yeah. When you're really tired and you think everything's funny, that was me. Exactly. Yeah. That was most of my ideas. Yes, right. No, that's really cool. We have thought, and I think still will think about doing the grinding in-house for our fixture plates. The problem is that they're quite large. And I feel like lapping or these machines
00:42:57
Speaker
There's an, a recipe, but then it's replicable and so forth. Whereas my understanding of what we have to do on our fixture plates is very much an ongoing, constant, very, very highly skilled thing, which means to surface random. Yeah, it's just, whereas with this, it is very much right. Right. Yeah. That's awesome.
00:43:22
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm pumped and they have machines in stock. They actually make the F5 in Rhode Island, which I thought was awesome. That's cool.
00:43:31
Speaker
And then Eric and I are kind of tempted to just take a quick day trip and fly down there. You should see the machine. I mean, for a hundred thousand dollar investments, like I want to see it. I want to feel it. I want to know exactly. Tell me everything and then, sure, let's do it. Get to know them too. Yeah, go down there. Exactly. Yeah. We have got to know them, but to know more people in the company and film and it, it's all coming together really fast and we might have one sitting on our floor in a month. What's with the left hand like table? Is that how it slides out, out from the underneath the,
00:44:00
Speaker
That's an addition, but I'm not sure which picture you're looking at. The upper head, the wheel, it does rotate 90 degrees out of the way, so you can load parts. And then the whole head comes back in place. OK.
00:44:14
Speaker
Yeah, kind of like a well Blanchard doesn't swing out of the way really, but yeah, okay interesting Yeah, are you ready for a speaking of flying places to look at machines you ready for a doozy? I May have told you this but and I don't want to share too much because it if it doesn't happen it doesn't happen I'll share it all if it happens, which is
00:44:35
Speaker
I am hopping on an airplane next week to fly to New York City to look at a used FANUC lathe. No. Or used lathe with a FANUC control. Right. So it's definitely an older machine. There's definitely some gotchas, caveats, et cetera. So we're, I only say that to sort of get ahead of the fact that we're aware of that, but I'm also pretty excited that this could work out. So hopefully we have a lathe on our floor by the end of the year.
00:45:05
Speaker
Two axis, uh, super simple two axis. Yep. Yep. It's going to be a beast. Yeah. Heavy, accurate running all that. What country of origins? Japan. Okay. Yeah. Very cool. Yep. Yep. I'm actually super excited. And if, and if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. Um, exactly. It's.
00:45:27
Speaker
They hold their value at this point. Yeah. Well, yeah. Again, I'll share more. But, you know, worst case, we get to film a couple of shop tours. I'm going to see a guy, a shop called Vol, V-A-H-L in New Jersey. We met him on the Sandvik trip. Really nice guy. Third generation machine shop. They made parts for like the Apollo mission, the lunar rover. Yeah. Big Mazak shop.
00:45:52
Speaker
And so I'm excited to go see what they're doing and going to meet up with a fellow Tormach owner who lives in New York City with a machine actually in New York City, which I never actually had a Tormach in New York City. And then you go see the other person's shop as well with the lathe and hopefully that all comes together.
00:46:11
Speaker
Nice. Yeah. And you get to come back to New Jersey for, which I've been to in a year or something. You get the most out of your trips. Yeah. Well, that's what you got to do, right? So go figure out one or two other things to do when you're down in New Jersey or Rhode Island. Well, I thought about that, but then I'm like, we could day trip it. We could just fly out early in the morning and come back late at night and not have to hotel or sleep or take time out of the week or anything like that. So we might just do that.
00:46:37
Speaker
Yeah. If you fly into Logan, it's probably only like an hour and 20 minute drive down to, if you sneeze, you've driven through Rhode Island. So it's not exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Sweet. Awesome. What do you do today?
Innovations in Pen Assembly
00:46:50
Speaker
Today, we're going to prototype a pen part that we're going to change. It was threaded. We're going to make it a click, like, pop-in-place assembly. Cool. Because I've actually had my pen, the clicker mechanism, unthread. And if that does happen, then you've got three ball bearings flying everywhere that you're never going to find. Yeah, right. I remember that. Right. So even lock tightens, things didn't work. So I want to make it kind of a click, removable, but kind of permanent. Got it.
00:47:20
Speaker
So between that and just cranking out knives and getting things rocking, you'll be working on some videos on the knock while the more is just making knife parts. Yeah, that's what it's doing all day every day, basically. Awesome. Yeah. You
00:47:36
Speaker
Jared is running Haas fixture plates literally as we speak. I actually helped him load him one on the machine before we started our podcast. I've got a bunch of housekeeping stuff to do on like training class registration date stuff and
00:47:51
Speaker
Um, some just housekeeping stuff, which I, I acknowledge I do a lot of these days, but that's okay. Yeah, I know. But then again, and I always struggle with this because I don't, I've never enjoyed when people, other people have said like, Oh, I'm working on something, but I can't talk about it, but we're working on the new, working on the new thing.
Exciting New Projects Unveiled
00:48:11
Speaker
Um, hopefully within, actually at this point, honestly, it's going to be by the end of the year, but when we can kind of.
00:48:17
Speaker
Right. That's not far away. Yeah. Super, super, super, super cool. I actually met with a sort of investor group earlier this week on it, which was the first time I've been on that side of the table there. Yeah. And that was cool, too. The thing I like about that is that when
00:48:39
Speaker
When money is possibly at stake, the questions aren't softballs. The questions aren't theoretical. Like it's real. And so it just forces you to be on your aching. Awesome. Well, crush it, bud. You too. I'll see you next week. Talk to you next week. All right. Okay. Take care.