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John Saunders' First Sub Spindle Lathe Part!
240 Plays6 years ago
Have you ever wanted to listen to two grown men talk about a lathe like children in a candy store? Well this episode is for you. John Saunders goes in depth trying to make his first sub spindle lathe part. The boys also talk all about the mist collector situation at the Grimsmo shop and to not overlook the air quality. John Grimsmo also made a "production run" of 9 parts on the Kern!
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Transcript
Introduction to Business of Machining Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining episode 161. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmohan. This is the podcast where, man, for the past, I don't know, three plus years, two to three years, the two of us have been talking to all things business and machining.
Challenges and Thrills of New Machining Tasks
00:00:19
Speaker
And you know what? This is probably the first morning that I actually, to be totally honest, don't want to be on this podcast.
00:00:27
Speaker
Because no, no, seriously, I am so pumped up to finish our call. I'm joking. Of course, I love our call. But to finish up our call and try out some stuff, finishing up the first full blown sub spindle cycle on the lathe. So exciting. Just like I commented on Instagram, your life has changed forever from now on.
Complexities of Sub Spindle Lathe Operations
00:00:50
Speaker
Yes. I mean, it was the pucker factor was was certainly high. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
00:00:56
Speaker
Like not even high, I don't know, it's different than like with a five axis, because in a five axis, there's kind of your programmed moves and your linking moves, but I kind of understand it with the lathe. Like what got me yesterday, sorry, almost crashed. I didn't crash at all because I was paying attention and ready for this.
00:01:18
Speaker
The way that your parting tool blade, the parting tool blade holder and the holder for that holder, which is what interfaces to the BMT 65 and the turret, I mean, the amount of clearances and some of which are effectively blind as they interact with the Royal Chuck, the main, the sub, the part moving in, I mean, it is...
00:01:41
Speaker
It's like the game twister where you trying to look and see what every single person's a little joint is doing or touching or would be touching if they moved in relationship to another.
00:01:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, 5-axis, now that I've done it a little bit, is kind of similar. There's a lot going on, but I think there's more going on on a sub-spindle lathe, just more to pay attention to at any one time. Because you have two spindles, you have one or two workpieces, you have the tool, you have the clearances all in between, and they're all kind of moving together, and the Swiss is even worse.
00:02:13
Speaker
Oh, I can't, I cannot even imagine the Swiss dude. Yeah. Can I, can I walk you through what I'm doing? Because I'm curious to see if this is different or if you're surprised and then I'd actually got a couple of questions for you on mind. Absolutely. Yeah. So I'm turning a small, well, to me it's a small part. It's about a half inch. It's a diamond. Yeah.
00:02:37
Speaker
So it will be a diamond pin for our fixture plate top products. And starting with 3 quarter, eventually I'll move it to 5 eighths, but I didn't have a 5 eighths royal chuck on hand. So no big deal starting with 3 quarter. So I turned the diamond side of it first, which is some simple turning, finishing, and then a live tool op to machine in a features on the diamond.
Setting Up and Programming for Sub Spindle Operations
00:03:00
Speaker
Then what I do is I'm using the Fusion
00:03:03
Speaker
command called secondary spindle chuck. And that will move my sub spindle chuck, which think of it like a tail stock that has a chuck on it. It's the B axis that'll move it up to
00:03:18
Speaker
It'll wrap it up to a feed plane, which I have set to be the model front plus 300 thou. And then it will move it at a controlled feed rate to what they call the chuck plane. So what I had to do on my control, there's like nothing online about this either. I searched for forums, help tutorials, videos. It was kind of surprising. So I had to jog my B-axis forward
00:03:43
Speaker
and set my G54, which is my main spindle offset, the B0 is effectively the face of that part. And it only needs to be as close as you want your chucking location to be accurate. So meaning it doesn't have to be within probably anything more than five or 10,000 for the work we're doing. So then that fusion command will bring the sub in and correctly run up the RPMs of both spindles, move the royal system over the part,
00:04:13
Speaker
clamp it and then it actually turns both spindles off.
00:04:20
Speaker
Then I have a programmed parting operation. And I'm going to change all this, which I'll come back to here in a minute. But I part the part off, and then there's this fusion code. This is all under that turning thing called secondary spindle, secondary, sorry, turning the secondary spindle return. And all that does is it takes your part that is now severed from your bar and moves it back to whatever you want your B home to be, which is where you're going to do
00:04:47
Speaker
The op to work up to work is a new works cordon system. I'm using g55 and That's really as simple as just programming it normally like it's a new Part in a new offset. The only quirky thing is
00:05:03
Speaker
on the Haas, like tool four is in turret position four, and for the main spindle, it holds my V, whatever those are, V and MG finish inserts. So I put another stick tool into turret four for the sub spindle, which is obviously pointing at the sub spindle. Fun fact, the Haas blocks come with the, what would you call that, the stick tool tightening block?
00:05:33
Speaker
Fuck.
00:05:34
Speaker
You know, the wedges that hold your signals, they come installed upside down on the sub spindle side because you usually would want to have it on the underside, just so PSA to anybody who might actually be going through this. Oh, yeah. So what I had to do was I added 24 to the tool offset. So tool four in the sub spindle became tool 20 offset 28. So under fusion, I program
00:06:03
Speaker
under post processor tab for the tool, it's actually still number four, but the compensation offset is 28. So when it posts out, it's like T0428 or something. Yeah, that's the same on my lathe too, except it goes plus 50. So it's like tool 250 on the sub. Any reason you did 50? Just easy.
00:06:24
Speaker
It's, I think that's just the way Nakamura does it. That's like standard Nakamura. Okay. Totally fair. Does that whole Orkflow sound copacetic? Yeah. The only thing I missed was, are you pulling the bar before parting?
00:06:41
Speaker
OK, so that's what I programmed last night. And that's why I'm excited to go try this. Obviously, we want to pull the bar because you want the bar to then be in the right position for the next part. And you want to use, I'm talking out loud here. I know you know this. You want to use your sub spindle to index your bar. So your sub spindle becomes a bar puller. And thus, you're never actually using your bar feeder to push the bar in. Great.
00:07:11
Speaker
The problem is Fusion doesn't really allow for that last night. So here's what I came up with. I want to leave my parting operation programmed in Fusion.
00:07:22
Speaker
And so right now it thinks it's parting at a position that's 10 dow off the backside of the part. But once I pull the part out, I'm actually gonna pull it out exactly one inch. That works out quite well. Once I pull the part, I have to pull it out before I part it. So once I pull it out one inch,
00:07:42
Speaker
Nothing is correct anymore, right? You can't use the posted code. But what I did was a manual NC and I'm excited about this, but I'm also nervous. I'm missing something obvious. I'm awesome that we're talking to this. I have a
00:07:58
Speaker
So after, excuse me, after I grabbed the part with the sub spindle, what I'm doing is a manual pass through to unlock the main spindle clamp or unclamp the main spindle. Then I'm doing a G 91 B 1.0. That's going to move. Actually, I probably need to do a G.
00:08:17
Speaker
one feed rate, but I'll fix that here. That's going to do a relative move of one inch in B, which should pull the bar out. Then I'm doing an M10 to re-clamp the main spindle. Then I did a pass-through of a G10 L2 P1 G91 Z1. To change the offset? Yeah. By one. Yeah, so yeah, something like that would work.
00:08:45
Speaker
Oh, come on. You don't sound excited? No, I'm trying to work through it in my head. Yeah, I think that should work fine. It's that's the fun thing with with hand coding, you know, this kind of stuff is you kind of have to just stare at it till you go a little cross-eyed and then the second you focus again, you're like, I got it. Well, but that's what I like about this is I'm not hand coding. I mean, I'm putting a pass through it, but but I'm not going to have to edit the posted code.
00:09:11
Speaker
Right. But you're creating this manual NC that you're dumping in the middle. And if it's wrong or bad or backwards, it's not good. Totally agree. But I can look into figuring out if I can do this as a variable. I don't know if I can. But regardless, this is something that I can turn into as part of our master template that should be replicable. Yep, exactly. And that's the thing. It's all very logical stuff. And you know code structure well enough by now.
00:09:38
Speaker
to know what a G91 does and to know how to do a fixture offset shift and to do what you need to do. And I mean, my part of code is literally cut and paste for every single part on the Nakamura. It doesn't change. Nothing is different because it's all variable based. Got it. At the beginning of every code, I have
00:10:05
Speaker
Let's see here. So I'm making a pen slider. Variable 190 is bar length, 42 inches. 180 is the pattern, whether we want helix or crosshatch. That's called later. Variable 191 is my part length. 192 is my part off width plus stock to leave on both sides. Variable 193 is my remnant size, 0.951.
00:10:32
Speaker
194 is, it says maths. It says maths. Like you're doing math. It's got some
00:10:44
Speaker
It says fix bracket bracket 190 minus 193 and bracket divided by bracket 191 plus 192 bracket bracket, whatever that means. And the next one, just some other math. And then 195 is my grab position. So the B negative where it wants to grab the part.
00:11:06
Speaker
And then 196 is a safe move before that. So it'll wrap it to the safe and then grab to the distance. And I have all this set in Fusion. So the Fusion post outputs all of that. Part length. Oh, so you're not hand editing code.
00:11:22
Speaker
Ideally, no, I've messed with my posts enough to be able to output all of these datas into the post. Awesome. And then the whole part of operation is a manual NC in my post. Yeah.
00:11:38
Speaker
which is you've not in your posts in your cam in fusion. Yeah. Yeah. In the cam. Yeah. It's always, always cut and paste the same thing. Um, when you say cut and paste, I feel like that means you post at a fusion, the editor opens and then you hop into notepad and paste code in, which is that scares the crap out of me. Certainly. I do that.
00:12:01
Speaker
a lot. But no, from Fusion, I can hit post on Nakamura code. And if it's structured right in the CAM operations, then it just works fine. Okay. Can you use variables in... You can use variables in manual NC because your variables are controller variables off of the FANUC. Right. Yeah.
00:12:22
Speaker
I wish I could use, I'd like to be able to use fusion, some sort of a fusion variable. And this might be possible. I have to get this out because basically what I'm doing there shortly thereafter is another, if anyone's listening who doesn't know the G
00:12:40
Speaker
G10, L2, P1. G10, L2, P1 will update your G54 coordinate system however you want it. And you can Google this to read up all the details of which coordinate system you want to edit. But P1 is G54. The G91 is a relative move. So basically, Z negative 0.1 is just going to make your
00:13:05
Speaker
Uh, actually one point zero. Sorry. You should basically move your shift. Your WCS for G4 one inch forward in Z. I parted off then. What's that? You don't need to. Why not? Are you parting off at Z zero? Is that why, why move my part out one inch? Uh, what are we doing? I, let me think.
00:13:32
Speaker
Well, let me look. Looking at code, code, code, code. My part off position is at Z plus 10 thou, not the back of the part. Meaning I have already, B comes in, grabs the part, pulls it forward one part length plus stock and then Z zero, it parts it off.
00:13:55
Speaker
How do you program the party? Is it just a manual NC? It is, but if you're programming the parting operation, you just part off at plus 10 thou instead of at the back of the part. How would you do that infusion? You'd have the party look like it's just front of the part.
00:14:13
Speaker
Yeah, basically, you just do it. It's not going to look right. You know, simulation wise. But point is that works because I've already grabbed the part and the parts now forward and you're not changing your G offset at all, your G54, because you shouldn't have to.
00:14:30
Speaker
I'm going to try this. I like that it gives me the visual here. What's going to happen after, like when you're onto your second part, you've shifted your work offset by an inch? No, the manual NC right after the parting just shifts it back one inch again. Okay, then you're fine.
00:14:46
Speaker
But I'd like for those two, the one inch, the plus one inch, the minus one inch to be a variable. That way you could change them in one location. Because that's, if you finger, fat finger one of them or miss one of them, that's bad news bears. Exactly. Yeah, that's why I like doing the variables. Because it's one place to manage a bunch of data. Right. Right. And I could actually, that would be a super easy fix. I could just have it be a variable
00:15:13
Speaker
Right now, I could switch it to a variable, and then in the machine, I'd have to set that variable. And that would trigger me to remind me to do it, and then it's always going to at least match. But I'm OK. So far, I'm OK. I'm OK with this. I think it'll work. Yep. OK. But the thing with variables to remember is either it's code dependent, or you push the buttons at the control and mess with it at the control dependent. Carefully, you don't have one writing over the other.
00:15:42
Speaker
Well, I guess that's what I could also do is, oh, this would be good. Because you can write from Fusion, I should be able to write to a variable with a manual NC. So that's how you fix this at the beginning. At the beginning of my code, it literally says, pound 180 equals one dot. Bingo. Perfect. And that's what my G10 L2 calls. Awesome.
Swiss Lathes: Part Ejection and Mist Collection Issues
00:16:10
Speaker
Sweet. Yeah. OK, this is going to be good. So how I love your enthusiasm for leads. Yeah, no, it's it is phenomenal. How do you how do you do this to the small parts? I mean, I'm doing a half inch part and it's unbelievable how tight the tolerance, the clearances are. I like that is a half inch part is.
00:16:36
Speaker
my second biggest part that I make. The pen clip is bigger, five eighths, and then the pen slider is half inch, everything else is three eighths or under. But like I don't, so do you do your screws with sub-spindle?
00:16:56
Speaker
Yeah, of course. So you have the 5C Royal, which is way better, nose profile, which is a big factor here. But I don't know how you get in there and...
00:17:09
Speaker
I mean, it's just so tight. Do you ever grab onto threads with the Royal? I don't, just because it messes up the threads. Right. I figured it would. I don't have to hear, but the thought occurred to me. It's like, oh, could I do that? So I mean, I've got one part that's got super tiny threads, and then it's a screw, right? But it's like the top hat of the screw is 30 thou thick.
00:17:34
Speaker
Oh my God. So it's like super thin and I'm grabbing on that 30 thou with the collet and then I'm facing off basically kissing the chuck. Right, right. And then come in sub spindle face that last little bit off kissing the chuck and then and then I'm done. When you so the main screws that I see on a Norseman that would go through the handle, I think these are the ones that have the torques and the dots around them.
00:18:02
Speaker
Those are made on the knock or they've been moved over to the Swiss. They've been moved to the Swiss now. When they were on the knock, so you must have done the head first in the main, switched it to the sub and then thread it in the sub? Opposite. Do the threads on the main and then transfer and then I do all the milling on the sub. But then how are you not grabbing it by the threads? I grab it on the head.
00:18:30
Speaker
Oh, because you don't have to machine around the profile of the head. Right. OK, got it. So you are really close. The tool really is close to the collar face. Oh, yeah. OK. Yes. I turn all the diameters and then I transfer it and I'm holding on to the head. And then on the subside, I put the corner radius on the part and then mill in the hex. OK. That's not so bad, I guess.
00:18:56
Speaker
And then the part ejecting, I got to look this up, part ejecting should just be an M code, right? Yep. Okay, so move it forward, part it off, and rock and roll. Do you have like a spring-loaded pusher inside? Yeah.
00:19:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's fine. Actually, so you shouldn't even need it. As soon as you release the... Yes, you're right. Call it, it'll just pop out? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so on the Nakamura, I have the hard hinge. It's a spring-loaded call it thingy. So the part on the sub is always under tension.
00:19:30
Speaker
So the second you unclamp it, then it spits it out. And you adjust the tension based on pusher length and all that stuff. On the Swiss, it's really cool because it's got an actual air cylinder with a needle at the end that moves forward. And it moves like three inches. So plenty.
00:19:49
Speaker
plenty far if necessary. Um, and the air cylinder literally pushes forward and pulls it back. So there's an extend M code and a retract and that's cool. So you open it up and the park doesn't move. And then the pusher just goes pop pop and then it spits it out. It's really beautiful. Huh? Can you, could you use it to pull apart against a custom sub spindle work holding to pull it flat? Uh, I don't know. That makes sense.
00:20:19
Speaker
Probably not, because the lay it's not happy when it's not in position. Got it. Interesting. That's cool. How is the Swiss going?
00:20:31
Speaker
The what? Well, any of them. But how is the Swiss going? The Swiss are going well. We're having trouble with the mist collector right now where it's kind of always been like this, but it's just really bothering us now. Somehow it's passing a lot of oil mist into the air, whether it's bypassing the mist collector and coming out somewhere else. Or I think the oil we're using, it's a blazer product that is just so like sticky that
00:21:01
Speaker
It's clogging up and fouling something, yada, yada. So we got a different miscollector that we're installing right now that is much bigger and more burly. And we're going to mount it like 10 feet away from the machine up on the wall using plumbing. So that should help all the oil kind of de-atomize. Right, and give it some time to travel. Exactly. Because it's bad. It's like smoky in the shop if I run it for more than an hour.
00:21:32
Speaker
We did a good. That's what we're working on today.
00:21:36
Speaker
We mentioned that in the shop update video we put out a week or two ago, and we just kind of embarrassing mistake, but I had no idea that the mist collectors, the units that we had on the VM3 and the UMC750 were just way undersized. They were the mist away units, nothing wrong with them at all. And they worked quite well on the smaller machines like the VF2, but we
00:22:03
Speaker
We needed two new ones anyways for the lathe and the robo drill. So I thought, well, those are smaller volumetric enclosures. So I'll move the VMs3 and the UMC units over to those, which worked great. They were sized correctly. And then we got the, I don't remember what the size rating is, but 1,200.
00:22:24
Speaker
happen to be the royal ones, which were pricier, but it's a little bit of a cooler design. I just wanted to try something different because it's kind of like life's too short to go through it only using one brand of miscollector. They use a centrifugal thing, so it's either no filters or less filters in terms of maintenance and longevity.
00:22:46
Speaker
They're great in terms of performance. They are a little louder and they require three phase, which just makes it a little bit trickier to do cool things like wire them into the machine with the way we can have them turn on and off as we want. But we got it all working. We hacked them a little and the performance is awesome. Like you do not. It's absolutely a market difference. So I guess I would encourage anyone who's like, I don't feel like I'm liking my miscollector or fix it because once you fix it, you realize, oh, this is great.
00:23:16
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Love it. Um, yeah. And we've kind of always had the problem with this one on the Swiss, especially the old shop, it would get, you know, smoky in there and we'd smell it and everything. And even with a HEPA filter, which should take out, you know, almost everything. So something, it's just undersized. Um, and the, like I said, the type of oil I think is the other problem. Um, but yeah, I'm really excited to get this new one on. It's a, it's a beast. Is it, was your old one a mist away?
00:23:46
Speaker
No, they're MIST fit from AeroX. It's a Canadian company, only a couple hours. So we've got them on all the other machines, and I'm really happy with them. The current comes with an electrostatic MIST collector. Of course it does. And we took it apart, and there's no filter. There's just a series of coils and wires that
00:24:11
Speaker
electrocute the air and the water just falls out. And I'm like, what is happening here? They thermally compensate for it as well. I believe they run isolation. Yeah. Sure. Yes. Does it work well? I guess. I hear it turn on. Okay. I'm picturing like a bug zapper.
00:24:32
Speaker
almost. Yeah. If we apparently got to maintain it every few months, wash it out. So once we dig into it, we'll, we'll share it, share it, I guess. Bring home, bring home like a butterfly for, for your kid's school and see, see if it makes it through the gauntlet.
00:24:50
Speaker
Yeah.
Success with Kern Machine and Calibration Concerns
00:24:53
Speaker
I did my first production run on the Kern production run. Well, I made nine parts, but they went so good. Production parts or nine parts, meaning you used the PAL system production parts, meaning I needed more than one.
00:25:16
Speaker
It's a Norseman clip support for the Maury Mill.
00:25:25
Speaker
It's just something we've been avoiding making on the Maury itself because it's so busy. So I'm like, oh, I need a project on the current. So let's just, you know, this is perfect. And man, it worked out just so beautiful. I got to do some wonderful 3D machining and surfacing. And it's just like stunning. The first part that came off, I was like, are you kidding me? The surface finish was just so good. Awesome. That's really cool.
00:25:54
Speaker
What toolpath did you use for the surfacing? It was 3D Contour. I played all kinds of fancier ones, steep and shallow, and I just got lazy. And I was like, this first one that I tried looks fine. And it's not as fancy, but it'll do the trick and I'll get fancier later.
00:26:12
Speaker
Did you have the tool though, basically normal to the surface or was it? No, I had it at like 30 degrees or something. Okay, that's great. That should be pretty good. Yes, I made sure the sides of the ball were doing all the work, not so bottom. And was it 3 plus 2 or was it simultaneous?
00:26:31
Speaker
I was three plus two, so the B and the C didn't move. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. Which is fine. Oh, yeah. It's like that thing that certainly we've been learning from the folks out there that are experts is, you know, don't do, you know, it's funny, like listening to the power mill delcam sort of folks talk about, you know, you want to lock the access out. You want to minimize that extra movement. You don't want simultaneous unless you really need it.
00:27:02
Speaker
I think it's opposite on the current. Watching it surface that thing at 65 inches per minute with a 93,000 ball, it's flying. That's cool. And I'm like, I could go faster. This is crazy.
00:27:20
Speaker
I've been thinking a bit about the cube. This is like right when I was first starting to understand who and what Kern was, how they took that cube and they put a three by three grid on a couple of different sides of a cube and they surfaced in at different angles and orientations.
00:27:39
Speaker
I think maybe the same tool, I don't recall, but then they took the cube off and kind of showed how accurate the machine is by doing this surfacing at all these different angles and orientations and so forth. And I want to look that up again because that struck me as being pretty cool.
00:27:57
Speaker
Yeah, and then I think they see all those features to make sure that they're all the same. That's like a test part, I think. I don't know if Marcin went through that, but it's certainly, at the very least, a cool demo part that they make. From a fusion, hide and hide current workflow, like if I came to your shop, could you
00:28:19
Speaker
Could you get me making parts in 30 minutes or so, half hour? Yeah, probably. I mean, five axis is the same. Toolpaths are the same. I posted to the Camplete post. Camplete has the same workflow you use, and then you post and go. Certainly, the control is different in the way that things were. Even loading a file from the USB stick onto the machine took me. I had to ask how to do that. You're going to put it on ethernet? I will eventually. OK, got it.
00:28:49
Speaker
But yeah, outside of that, you're just loading the program. It's not like you're doing that much more in Heidenhine as a general rule, right? Yeah, as far as basic production, like just loading a code and running it. Yeah, it's very straightforward. It gets more complicated when you're doing manual probing, when you're doing calling a palette. These are all very new things. OK. Can I ask you a separate question?
00:29:17
Speaker
We were dialing in some work for some parts on our UMC and kind of having one of those quirky problems. I said, Jared, you know, it's probably been too long. We need to get on a more rigid cycle to calibrate our spindle probe and our toolsetter probe. I was like, go ahead and grab the ring gauge and the Mari tool, master gauge, and let's go through all that. And sure enough, it was off by 2.1 thou.
00:29:41
Speaker
which, you know, not the end of the world. It's been quite a while. And here's what spooks me, and I want to see if you agree. If we then update our tool probe, let's say that was the thing that was off by 2.1 thou, we basically need to go retouch off every tool that's in the ATC, right? There's no hesitate.
00:30:04
Speaker
Excuse me. Don't hesitate. Just do that. Just do that. Right. Right. I guess you could maybe because you wouldn't want to just manually add that to each one because that's or subtract it because that's just scary. Yeah. Like I do that. You know, I come across that quite a bit, especially on the Swiss. But if you have a reference tool or a reference tool set or something and it changes, then everything else is out the window.
00:30:28
Speaker
Right. Right. If you're trying to make parts to under a thou, then you can't take anything for granted. So you have your master, your reference, and then everything else is based off of that. So start over and it's whatever it has to be done.
00:30:43
Speaker
Yeah, not the, it's actually not, it's like one of those things where it's a little bit of time and then you do it and you finish and you make a great part and you're like, that was absent in no way would I ever undo what I did. Yes, that's freaking great. If you want to get creative, just write a program that touches off all 40 tools.
00:31:02
Speaker
Yeah, it actually shouldn't be that bad because we don't really use face mills in the UMC. So most of our tools, we actually just touch off with the dumb routine, which doesn't turn a tool. It's just a straight on center. Basically, just control feed rate crashes into the toolsetter. Yeah, from a safe distance, like a big one.
00:31:25
Speaker
Well, there's the option even for like a traditional half inch end mill where you would come down, stop a quarter inch above it, rotate the tool backward, slowly move down while the tool's rotating. We don't even do that. We just, the one that just goes straight down, beep. Mine only does that when I'm measuring diameter. Right. But when I'm measuring length, it stops like two or three or four inches above and then slowly starts feeding down. Yeah. But yeah, that's a good point.
00:31:55
Speaker
I'll have to play with that. But like on the Swiss, uh, you'll laugh, but every tool has to be touched off with the shim because there's no serious literally in there with either a metal shim that is a 0.0214 inches thick as I've memorized. Um, or if I want to be more accurate, I'll use a piece of paper. Holy cow. Paper. And that's 2.9 thou. And, uh,
00:32:24
Speaker
Yeah, so I have my reference, which is either my part off tool or sometimes part off tool and then the front turning tool. And then I have a zero surface and then I measure every tool on the main side off of that. Why don't you get one of those little, it looks like, I don't know what it looks like, a little cylinder that has a light at the top and it's electrically contacted, but it has a spring so you don't crunch your tool if you over travel it or whatever. And it just, once it completes the circuit, it lights up
00:32:54
Speaker
I wonder how accurate it is. Should actually be quite accurate because there's no room to put anything on the Swiss. The tools are literally 40 thou from the spindle face. Oh, my God. Right. OK, I always forget about I always think about the Swiss with your like the other turret, not the not the main one. You've got it.
00:33:19
Speaker
unsubscribe. It's fun. So last night, I mean, that's, that's what I spent an hour doing last night was like.
00:33:27
Speaker
I broke an insert or I was changing from stainless to titanium actually, and I don't want to run worn out stainless tools on titanium because stainless can deal with worn tools, but Ty does not like it. So I replaced a couple inserts and just had to retouch off every single tool on the main side. That sucks. And whatever. I'm used to it now. Do you use any CBN? No, I never have. OK.
00:33:57
Speaker
I've got an idea and I want to, I think it could be perfect because I want to do something where it's basically finishing pass with a very light cut, but I want to not have tool wear. And I think that actually could be a pretty good candidate for CBN.
00:34:12
Speaker
I'm pretty sure that's how Jay Pearson does some of his hardened pins to where he would basically he stopped having to deal with some outsourced grinding because he got his Doosan's to give him a good enough tolerance with the right tooling and recipes for hard turning. He was also saying when I toured his shop a couple of years ago,
00:34:32
Speaker
He says when he's turning the pins, he doesn't even move the machine in X. He just comes in and Z forward and back and leaves it in Z. That way there's no variation, no backlash, no nothing. Oh, that's an interesting point. Sure. And he's like, if we're trying to make the same size all day or for so long, yeah, just don't move anything you don't have to move. That's interesting. Set it up once.
00:34:58
Speaker
Well, that was the other thing. Going back to the workflow on this dual spindle, the traditional fusion parting operation, like all lathe operations, has an approaching retract that happens from a safe Z. So it basically would move down to your approximate
00:35:17
Speaker
stock diameter or whatever you have your height set as for your retract plane, I think, or maybe clearance. And then it'll move along your part back to where it's going to part. Well, that would crash on a dual spindle when you've got the sub in there. So I had to, I mean, that was an easy one to catch, but I had to change my approach and retract to be what's called the first tool path point. So just like Jay was saying, he only moved in and out an X. Well, with this parting on a sub spindle, I only want the machine to move in Z.
00:35:46
Speaker
Yes, exactly. Yep. Interesting. That's why I don't know sometimes like my parting off is just the same for everything. So it's it's something I no longer have to worry about setting up properly or whatever I just do. Right, right.
00:36:06
Speaker
Sweet. I was thinking about programming parts on a three-axis with Fusion. It's like you just put a whole bunch of operations together. You know it's always going to retract to the top to do a tool change. You really don't have to. You can't screw it up. But with a lathe, you just have to pay attention. Yes. Yes. It's fun, though. I'm loving it.
00:36:34
Speaker
Yeah, good. And it's funny because even I don't have a lot of experience using turning cam and other software, but there's this census of there's lots of comments that it's like, oh, turning is really limited.
Fusion 360 in Lathe Programming and Economic Considerations
00:36:47
Speaker
Turning is really, you know, has a long way to go in fusion. And look, there's things I could see that I would like. And some of the improvements that they've come out with, you're like, OK, this is awesome. I could see this is great. But
00:36:59
Speaker
I can get it like it's not been that difficult to get to do what I've needed to get it to do. And I wouldn't say we have, we certainly don't have complex parts, but we don't have simple parts either. So I don't know why it's capable. Yeah. Sometimes you have to be a little creative. You have to, you know, fudge some numbers or reverse things. I don't know.
00:37:21
Speaker
to make it do what you want to do, which is why I like hand coding lathe parts, like hand editing, tweaking, because then it can do exactly what I want it to do. But yeah, sometimes it's hard to make it just plug and play. Right. Maybe like I was saying, with three axis milling, it's just easy. And maybe people want that for lathe work, too. And it's just not.
00:37:48
Speaker
But yeah, what do you, uh, what do you do today? So if we can, I'm going to make some parts on the Swiss in the morning. If we can mount up the new arrow X miss collector up on the wall, we don't have a forklift. So we're going to have to borrow a forklift, um, to get this thing up because it's heavy. It's like really heavy. Oh yeah. Um,
00:38:14
Speaker
Yeah, if I can get that up then today, it'll be a good day. So it'll might happen today, might happen tomorrow. But that, and then working on my tombstone on the Kern, I milled that dovetail, I think you and I were talking about it. I milled the dovetail into this big steel, hollow tombstone. So I'm going to ID clamp it with the fifth axis vise. Nice. It's like 20 pounds. So I want to make sure it's held well. Yeah.
00:38:45
Speaker
What did Marv say? I didn't ask him. Oh, OK. I mean, I can't. It's like it's like the extremes of two different outcomes. Number one, it's like I cannot even think that this would be an issue. Like don't even worry about it. The other extreme being, oh, my God, don't throw a part in the current. Exactly. So I'll just be super careful with it.
00:39:10
Speaker
Don't go past the, well, first of all, smaller diameter tooling, less tool pressure, and then clamp it in there and then give it the hand wrap with your knuckles. You will get a decent feel for the stability. Okay. And that, I mean, sometimes until you get to that point, you're all worried and nervous. And then when you get to that point, you're like, oh, it's probably fine. And then machine it gently, and you're good to go.
00:39:39
Speaker
You're not doing any machining that would, because you said this is like seamless dom tubing or something? No, this is a four inch rectangle of solid square steel. Oh, okay. I thought you said it was hollow. Well, I machined it hollow. So now it looks like a bathtub. Got it. Well, the only thing I guess would be make sure whatever machining you're doing doesn't cause the part to move or stress relief or something in a way that reduces your clamping pressure.
00:40:08
Speaker
Right, it won't. It's just I got to be careful. I'm removing a decent amount of material with this and I can just go slowly and light. Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't worry about it. Yep. Sweet. Yeah, man, this is like a super nerd fest with the conversation here. I love it. It's fun. I love
00:40:34
Speaker
I am excited to go try this. Like sometimes in this podcast, we go big picture. We talk about business and life and, you know, heavy things. And sometimes we just go full details and we're like, OK, B zero G 91. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, next week we can talk about coronavirus and the and the best quote I've heard yet is the cure is worse than the disease.
00:41:04
Speaker
I think, unfortunately, this is going to have a, well, I say this as a genuine belief, not in the sense, as a desire to raise, not to have a loud voice, but just because I do think this will be true, that this will be the largest economic outcome and it won't be a good one that we've seen in our lives.
00:41:33
Speaker
I think the pullback and the derivative effects that will take some time to play out will be catastrophic. Unfortunately. Yeah, that's the worry is that it takes a while to play out and you kind of don't see it coming sort of thing. I mean, even we noticed the exchange rate is hugely different Canada to US. Is that right? Our favor. Yeah. But it's the highest it's ever been that I've seen. Wow.
00:42:03
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, luckily we take this for granted, but luckily it does seem like
00:42:10
Speaker
the health consequences shouldn't be like the Spanish flu was where you've got 50 million people dying. But on the flip side, if you look at just take the emotion out of it and just look at raw numbers, you look at the number of hospital beds, you look at the number of ventilators or the ventilator to people ratio, that's not going to go well if it gets to that. I'm not sure it even will, but boy,
00:42:36
Speaker
The list goes on, the travel restrictions, the implications that we've already started to see directly here in our business, you know, canceling everything from Coachella to South by Southwest. Heck, I'm not, I give IMTS a 50-50 chance at this point of happening. Right. Yeah, we were even thinking Blade Show is only three months away and we're like, wow, there's a chance that seems to be canceled or severely reduced in attendee amount, you know?
00:43:04
Speaker
Yeah. Ohio just canceled all high school. Excuse me. You can play the sports games, but you no one can attend last night as of last night. What? Yeah. It's a big deal. Yeah.
00:43:19
Speaker
Um, so be smart, be safe. But again, I think it's, uh, I love that saying, I don't remember who said it, but I think it was actually an article in the times, you know, the cures worse than the disease. Oh, it was, it was a comment about China. That's what it was. China did. I mean, they imposed martial law at an earlier phase on a population that was somewhat willing to tolerate that. We're not willing to tolerate that in the U S. Um, so, um, boy, we'll see.
00:43:48
Speaker
Yeah, we'll see. Stay safe and wash your hands. Exactly. Like five times more than you think you have to. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. I'll see you next week, bud. Sounds good. Take care. Have a great day. Bye.