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Business of Machining - Episode 127
249 Plays6 years ago
Hungry...for SUCCESS?
If you wanna be an entrepreneur, you've gotta HUSTLE! And if you're in the manufacturing industry, you're also making parts. Grimsmo balances running the shop/being the boss, with learning the new machine.
On Grimsmo's decision to buy a Kern...
“You’ve restored harmony” - Saunders
It's not two lathes against one mill, now there will be an equal number of each.
Y aren't you working?!
Grimsmo struggles with the Y-axis of his Swiss lathe.
“Every time I think I get it, there’s another little headache” - Grimsmo
WARM UP
“You have to get your mind into it. It takes time to warm up. You can’t just hop between modes” - Saunders
Saunders and Grimsmo talk about strategies to balance machine time with other priorities, like thinking deeply, and home-life.
A Saunders' tip: Voice notes bring you back to the way you were feeling when you took a note.
Tool Tracking Strategies
Saunders is using AirTable
Grimsmo is using ProShop and his 3D printer
When to go BIG...and when to 3D print -1 chips
Grimsmo and Saunders discuss when to come up with a cheap solution to a problem...even when there's already a tool-for-that out there.
Project Egress
Saunders is off to DC for the unveiling of the previously secret project. Didn't make it to the Air and Space Museum on July 18th? Check out the project in this video.
Recommended
Transcript
Morning Routine and Shop Talk
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining episode 127. My name is John Saunders. My name is John Grimsmo. Good morning. Good morning, buddy. How are you? Hungry.
00:00:17
Speaker
We have a routine as we set up, and John just says, I'm going to eat a banana, which I don't think we've ever really done before. And so I sat here and watched John eat. It was actually hilarious. It was great. There's a banana on your shirt, too. That's hilarious. My shirt is the, do you know Jeff? You know Jeff, right? Yeah. The monkey-like shiny. Nice. Yeah, so I am literally and figuratively hungry. Yes.
00:00:47
Speaker
How has your week been what's been up to? I'm very busy. I'm very good Angelo is taking yesterday and today off so I'm the sole machinist and It's a lot of machines to get busy one person
00:01:02
Speaker
Yeah. Well,
Balancing Machines and Shop Harmony
00:01:04
Speaker
three plus four. You know what occurred to me this week when I was smiling would be the PC word. S eating grin would be the other word about your Kern is you have rebalanced the Zen of Germanic country machines and the correct style of subtractive machine, which is a mill. You restored harmony.
00:01:30
Speaker
Right. Now I'd have two mils and two leads and two, you know, German Swiss and two Japanese is your vertical. What country is it? Is it Davis actually? Uh, it's assembled in Davis with Japanese parts. Yeah. Okay. But, but it's not a German DMG period. Like it's not a front end or a Zebach machine. Correct. Right. Got it. What's a Zebach?
00:01:54
Speaker
Oh, I think Zabok is the DMG factory that builds the Evos and those like knuckle style five axis Evo linears or something. I don't know. I used to know a little bit more about the different factories at DMG of who builds what, but DMGs, I mean, they're conglomerate, right?
00:02:16
Speaker
And it's still always funny to me when I think about like, if you see an old deck, deck old, may ho or Gilda Meister, Maury and seek you, which I'm assuming it's one point we're separate. Like I think, I think Siki used to be Hitachi Siki, which is that like really cool kind of baby blue color. Um, yeah.
00:02:33
Speaker
The like, somebody should do like, you know, there's those beer posters that show all the different types of beers. It starts with ale and lager and then spreads out. Somebody should do like a, you know, history of modern machine tools and show like, you know, cause at one time like Cincinnati and Makino, I think we're together. No, Makino and LeBlond were like, there's old manual like engine lays that are Makino LeBlond, I think.
00:02:59
Speaker
Well, and DMG would be DMG, Deco, Mejo, and Gildemeister. Yeah. That's three separate companies at one point, I'm sure. Yes, exactly.
00:03:09
Speaker
And Ben Benz and I were laughing when we were at the 1186 DMG shop in Chicago area, because he had all of the DMGs. And it's like some of them say like, productivity champion, five axis champion. It's funny how the words are written on there. And some of them even say to this day, I think, like, deco mejo on them, not Gilderweiser or things like that.
Running Machines and Tool Management
00:03:32
Speaker
Anyway. Yeah. Sorry. It's hard to keep track.
00:03:35
Speaker
Yes. Off track. So you've been running multiple machines yourself. Yep, which is good. Um, I did not get to touch the Nakamura yesterday, but I got to focus deep dive on the Swiss, get the Maury running, making parts, um, which unfortunately broke one tool last night. So it didn't quite finish the palette, but it got close. And, uh, can you think about that, that, that will be, that will be behind you. That will never happen again with the Kern.
00:04:03
Speaker
I would hope so. You'll have dupes. Unless you have broken carbide in the hole, then you can't just go back with the new tool. So you won't have it automatically. Hmm. It breaks it in your regular point, so it's not like you can do proactive replacement.
00:04:23
Speaker
you. Yeah, you could if you get your tool life right. The reason it broke is because I ran out of stubby tools and I'm using a regular length 330 second end mill. Got it. It's twice as long. And in this one spot, same thing happened last week. It breaks. So got it.
00:04:41
Speaker
Yeah, I got to get more stuff. Well, good news is that's right. Hilarious, you mentioned that because we were doing some feeds and speeds testing on three 30-second tools this week. And we were using the Two Flute Lakeshore guy, and they're like $7. Yeah.
00:04:57
Speaker
It's hilarious how so that's a kind of tool at your point where I know, you know, don't take this as me telling you what to do. But that's the kind of tool where now it's like, if you know, you can get 20 blades or whatever parts out of it. But sometimes at like 15 every time just replace it at 13. Like it's just not even really, that's exactly what we do. Yeah, so I'm using the double ended Lake Shore for flute coated and mill stub. Oh, for flute. Yeah.
00:05:25
Speaker
Interesting. And yeah, the coded ones. And it's funny when I buy almost all stub tooling. And then when I go to my local tool store and say, I'm out, what do you have? What do you have in stock? I need something right now. They never have stub tools in stock. And I'm like, that's all that I buy. Yeah.
00:05:43
Speaker
We've been doing some testing with a helical, they happen to be relieved shank, which is relevant, but probably more relevant is they're effectively a stub tool on a long shank. The difference being, let's say it's three inches of stick out. Well, instead of having most of that be flute, most of that is just solid carbide, albeit relieved 10 or 20 thou.
00:06:06
Speaker
the rigidity difference just from some initial test cuts. So not necessarily scientific, but more so, you know what to expect. What can, how hard can you push that or how rigid is that? It is mind blowing. So less rigid because it's relieved? No, no, no, no. A lot more rigid because it's solid round carbide versus cut flutes. Got it. It's awesome.
00:06:34
Speaker
Nice, especially with five-axis work, you want to get down deep into corners and have the relief jank, right? Yeah. At first, I fell in love. This is last week, actually, and I thought, oh my gosh, this is going to become a new go-to tool because of how versatile it is. The drawback is the one we're using, I believe, is a 3.8-inch with maybe 6.25 of flute length, but almost 2.5 or something to 3 inches of
00:07:03
Speaker
overall reach. So it's got like a two and a half inch relief section, then the flutes. Um, the problem is it's not really, it's not the right tool for finishing because even if you do step downs, it's just not the same as doing a single pass with a full flute, uh, thing, but, um, I still love it. Like it's still going to be something that lives in the UMC. So it's relieved from the cutting edge and up. So the entire exposed edge is cutting edge.
00:07:32
Speaker
Yep. So you could, you could machine down. So again, let's say it's a half inch or six as five eighths inch flute length. You could just machine in half inch step downs or whatever, all the way down. Um, a, uh, sidewall of a part, you don't have to do taper or, or offsets. Yeah. Cool. Is that what you were asking? I think so. Yeah.
00:07:54
Speaker
Oh, this is cool.
Shop Environment and HVAC Insights
00:07:55
Speaker
The truck just pulled in with the crane to lift the air conditioning unit over the shop. Nice. Yeah. Yesterday did the like, it's actually a fair amount of work. They had to cut the roof. They put in the, what is it like the A, not the A frame, the A unit that disperses the air. And then they flashed in the roof. They have a mounting frame. And then this morning the crane comes to lift the unit up onto the roof.
00:08:25
Speaker
That's exciting. Yeah. Sorry. I can't help it. It's like distracting the drives into the shop, right? Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Our air conditioning has been on the Fritz lately and then the other day just completely quit. So it got up to 92 in the shop here yesterday downstairs. That stinks. That was not fun. Normally we keep it at 70, 72 like all the time. Yeah. Yeah. So it was, it was a bit sweaty yesterday.
00:08:54
Speaker
I tell you after, again, shout out to that fellow Omid up in BC who helped me a lot with this project and advice, but I have a huge amount of respect for everyone from HVAC technicians to engineers on what goes into those systems and the design. It is so much more than I originally thought. As a layman in your home, you just think, oh, it either cools or it heats. These are dumb devices. They're anything but that. It's really cool.
00:09:22
Speaker
Yeah, something I didn't realize is that I assumed it pulled outside air into the building and cooled it on its way in, but it doesn't. It pulls inside air, cools it and shoves it back in, at least in our unit. Oh, it just recycles inside air? Yeah. Huh. Ours definitely pulls in outside air, although, yes. So we don't have any ducting. We have a unit on our roof in the center of our 50 by 80 foot room.
00:09:53
Speaker
And then so the air goes, it pulls hot air up the center of it. So that's the, or excuse me, that's the exhaust up the center. But then the air that comes in is pushed out sideways around all four sides of the internal thing. So this, we didn't want to run ducting and we shouldn't have to given the room size. So that's the nice sort of self-contained nature of it.
00:10:22
Speaker
There are some different modes like fan mode. We didn't get the economizer because it didn't seem to make sense, but we could add it later, which is, well, I'd like to explain it, but I don't really know how to explain it, but it's a way of using the system without using the actual either compressor or condenser, but the part that actually uses a lot of electricity and I believe the sort of free on of cooling act like it's not doing active cooling, but the idea will be hopefully to
00:10:52
Speaker
leverage at least the fan to both circulate air and get the shop cool in the morning. And then kind of like you were saying Jay Pearson does, that will act as a form of a battery so we can turn the air conditioning on, maybe at 11, run until three or four, and then let it tail off and then have it be totally back to being warmer by six o'clock when everyone's gone or something.
Space Management and Role Balancing
00:11:17
Speaker
You got to get yours fixed.
00:11:21
Speaker
Yeah, a guy came in yesterday and looked at it and said the condenser fan is hooped. So he's calling to see if they have any in stock. Hopefully they do. It didn't freeze up, though.
00:11:34
Speaker
That was the original theory, was that it kept freezing up. The filters were definitely clogged, because like I said, they're pulling inside air, so they're full of grinding dust and mist and coolant and gross and stuff. So we replace those easily. Yeah. The air quality last time I was in your shop seemed pretty good, though.
00:11:58
Speaker
It should be good, but it's definitely dusty. Interesting. We've been happy with that ERV, even though it's knowingly undersized as a way of basically exchanging air with the outside, but always cooling or heating the air so that you're recovering most of whatever you've done to that air.
00:12:20
Speaker
before you just exchange it, which is really good. In fact, well, I would say we could sell you hours because we're probably not going to use it after the thing, but you're going to get a bigger shop too, so you don't. Yep. But these are things I'm thinking about for whatever next shop. It definitely won't air conditioning, even with a bigger place. And yeah, hopefully we can find a place that has it already.
00:12:42
Speaker
I tell you, I know you and I've talked a little bit about this, but I am, I don't think this will make sense for us because we're here and I love this shop. But if, if I absolutely could, I'll give you the fictional scenario. If somebody across the street had a three or 4,000 square foot shop and they said, Hey, can you, you want to buy our shop and we'll rent yours? Cause we need a lot more space. I would actually do that right now. Hmm.
00:13:12
Speaker
I really would. It's less overhead, less air conditioning, less stuff to maintain. We don't need the space. The space is a bad thing. It forces some extent inefficiency, too much time walking back and forth. We don't use any of the office side anymore except for training classes, which we can still do those just fine in a smaller space.
00:13:33
Speaker
Yeah, I just, and if that extra, if that lower payment or more money or whatever you want to call it, let me put that toward the next machine, I would absolutely do that. Interesting. Hmm. It's looking around for shops. I've seen a bunch of places. Some are too big, some are too far, some are too gross, some are too, you know,
00:14:01
Speaker
deep in the city parts of town that you don't want to be in. And yeah, there's options, but I'm picky. But yeah, I've still got my eye out. We'll find that. I wanted to ask how have you, because I know you've been so deep in the Swiss lathe, are you
00:14:26
Speaker
enjoying that? Or are you just trying to get it done? And how are you balancing? I hate to be cliched, but kind of stepping between like the technician that is the Swiss guru or learning to be versus stepping back into the sort of entrepreneur and manager mode.
00:14:42
Speaker
Yeah, it is difficult. Um, I am enjoying it and I am, don't want to say stressed by it, but it is, it is stressing. Um, just because there's a lot to do. It's nice to be able to focus on the Swiss, but it's difficult to run a business at the same time. Cause everybody's asking me questions, making decisions, uh, you know, all the stuff that we have to do as entrepreneurs, but.
00:15:08
Speaker
It sure was nice to come in on Sunday and spend six hours here and just focus on making a part. And as I'm learning the Swiss, it's like every time I think I got it, there's another little headache that pops up. Another thing to learn, one tool offset that's weird for whatever reason. So I got to dig into that. I've had a couple of alarms on the bar feeder. I'm like, what is this?
00:15:35
Speaker
What is it? Bar pusher clutch failure or something. And I'm like, what? What is happening? Um, so there's always little stuff that pops up. So every time I text my wife and be like, I almost got it. I'm going to be home soon. It's like, it's like an hour later. And then I'm like, uh, I same story as it was an hour ago. Almost got it. I'll be home soon. Right.
00:15:57
Speaker
So I am enjoying it, but it is taxing. It's hard to think back to what it's like to feel hopeless is the best word I can think of. When you're in front of a new control or a new machine and it's a foreign language, it just feels hopeless sometimes about what is, like you posted about that work plane offset code error on the post or the code. And it's just kind of like, why is it, I was thinking to myself, why is that even getting
00:16:22
Speaker
programmed with the wrong, what was it? G 17 versus G 18 plane. Yep. Yep. Yeah. I was, I'm going back and forth between all these different post processors from fusion. I've got my Nakamura one. I've got my Maury mill, FANUC post. Um, and I have to pick and choose what gets posted to wear until I get Lawrence to make me a perfect post.
00:16:44
Speaker
But yeah, so I posted the torques milling with my Maury Fannock post, and it posted everything in G18, which is an XZ plane, I think. And it was alarming out on a Y move that said... Right, because it can't move on Y on its plane or something. It can. It was not the first Y move. So I don't know why, but yeah, it kept getting stuck there. Hoping it because it's an arc?
00:17:16
Speaker
Yeah. But it also wasn't the first Y arc, but anyway, it would get halfway through milling the thing. And then eventually I posted on our WhatsApp chat and then Rob was like, try everything in G 17. And it worked beautifully. That's like a known, that's a proven post. That's so strange to, did you just hand edit the code then to do that? Yeah. Okay. Oh, there's a lot of hand editing going on here.
00:17:44
Speaker
We're doing a part on our UMC right now that is 170 operations around a ring. And so it's the first time where I really care about cycle time, not because I want the productivity per se, but because the difference. But the compounds you really see it. Yeah, like right now the UMC is a pattern infusion and that's like a sort of a safety feature is that on a pattern, it always retracts to a Z safe, like a Z home position.
00:18:14
Speaker
Then on the UMC, you have your B and C access brakes that are applied and released. Well, that whole setup, retract, brake, unbrake, go back down, takes longer than the machining. It's the difference between a two-hour cycle time and a five-hour cycle time. I'm trying to modify. I'm debating, do I modify the post, which I already figured out?
00:18:37
Speaker
or do I just post the code out of Fusion and then change it all in TruePath, which I also figured out and I don't know which I like better. Interesting. Changes in TruePath is smart because then you still get verification, right? Well, but I could still post the new posted code from Fusion into TruePath. Sure. But as opposed to hand bombing it in a text editor, you lose the simulation effect.
00:19:06
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. I won't do that, period. It's a good excuse to learn this part of TruePath because that's what I was at least told or marketed to that, hey, you can take this code that has problems or inefficiencies or linking moves, and we can redo those. We can fix that. So I like this idea that I don't need to worry about what post that I post this out of or what machine or whatever. I can just know, hey, I can re-rinse that in TruePath to get what I want.
00:19:37
Speaker
That's why I want to do it that way, right? Yeah.
00:19:41
Speaker
I was going to say with lathe parts, both on the Nakamura and now on the Swiss, I really see these inefficiencies because the parts are like one to three minutes. So you're, you're standing there watching it, you know, as you're, as you're dialing it in and you're like, Oh, that, that retract, you know, it could be a lot shorter or that, you know, move is redundant or so it's, it's easy for me to go through the code and be like, take out that, take out that, take out that. Oh, I just lost 10 seconds of cycle time with no downsides. Yeah.
00:20:08
Speaker
And then you see it again a minute later and then a minute later and a minute later. So it's like the more you watch the same operation happen and happen and happen, the more you want to optimize it. Oh, yeah. Well, have you played with what's it called in Fusion, the new NC setup, NC program? No, but I saw it briefly and I was like, what is this?
00:20:32
Speaker
Yeah, I asked around to see, is this what I think it is? And I started to play with it. But the idea that I can take a setup and assign that setup in Fusion to a specific post, a specific machine, and hopefully specific post parameters, because that's what I did for this part, was not only do I want to use the UMC post, but I want to go and I
00:20:55
Speaker
When you edit the post, usually what I'll do is I'll make it like a variable or a parameter that I can edit on the front end, both because it's convenient, but also it kind of helps to remind me that this was something I did. I also comment the code. So here it's like a use unsafe retract plane or something like obvious like that. And then it's a yes, no option. And then hopefully in Fusion or NC program, I can set that up as the default.
00:21:23
Speaker
because the, again, this has been a frustration of mine is that if I'm hopping between, uh, Tormach lathes, Tormach mill, VF two UMC a bunch of times, uh, which that's not realistic often, but hopping between a Tormach mill and the UMC is off is happens a ton. I gotta keep switching the fusion, the default post, uh, which is annoying. Yeah. Hmm. That does sound cool.
00:21:50
Speaker
Yeah, I'm the same way now. I've got probably three posts that I jumped between. And with the current, I'll have hide nine, the current and the two U max, they both run on hide nine. So we'll be jumping around all the time. I forgot about those. God, that's crazy. Oh, wait a minute. I was totally wrong. You now have way more mills than lays. This is awesome. Do you like me now? Yeah. And I'm going to consider a lapping machine closer to a vertical mill because it has a vertical spindle that does subtractive work. So, uh,
00:22:20
Speaker
It has a z-axis, so yeah. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah. So sorry, how are you happy that, are you, quote unquote, being the surgeon with the Swiss? Are you taking scheduled breaks to go back to the business or are you just reacting, just doing it? I guess I'm reacting, yeah. Yeah, yeah, right. Spending as much focused time as I can on the Swiss and then time away from it when I can too. Got it.
00:22:48
Speaker
Yep, that's been good, it's been fun. Something I've been wanting to mention, have a note on is as you're switching between these things, it's not that hard to switch between doing tasks and then being the quote unquote manager or making those sorts of decisions, that's all fine. But that step between, to use the eMyth terminology, between being a manager and what's the level above that?
00:23:13
Speaker
entrepreneur, technician manager, entrepreneur, yeah, entrepreneur, um, which it's funny there. I, I see stuff's all cliche a little bit, but it's real, but to step into that mode is not something I can find that I can do easily. And what occurred to me is.
00:23:31
Speaker
Um, it's kind of reminds me of something like sports, you know, doing physical activity or even yoga. Like you actually have to get your mind into it. It takes time. You've got to kind of warm up. You can't just flip a switch. You can't just, just literally like hop in between modes or alt tab between the two. Um,
00:23:52
Speaker
And that makes it a lot harder because it's now this barrier to where if I want to go from busy work or running a machine and I want to say, Hey, let's think about the strategy for this over the next month or something that's a critical thinking. What should you do? I think you should probably move to a different physical place or area, and you should have a warmup routine. You should be able to kind of go through these exercises, think about it, de-stress, relax, and start planning it out, mapping it out.
00:24:23
Speaker
which is all good stuff, but that's where the rubber meets the road. That's where it's hard to do all three.
00:24:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think I'm fairly good about jumping between being the technician and being the entrepreneur in the shop here, but I don't get a lot of time to just stop and think when I'm here at the shop because although I'm sure people look at me and I'm just like standing there looking off blindly into the corner as I'm thinking about something and they're probably wondering what I'm on or whatever, but
00:24:59
Speaker
I do try to get that critical thinking in, but what I've been doing lately for quite a long time now is going for a walk every single night, 45 minutes where I get to crunch all of those ideas. I decided to buy the current on this walk a few months ago. I decided to buy the tornos. These are expensive walks.
00:25:21
Speaker
Yeah, I know exactly. But it's end of the day, right before bed, I get to decompress for the day and think and strategize and analyze. And sometimes I'll take notes, but most of the time it's just me like crunching ideas and planning. Yeah. It's really nice. So you don't take any notes then though, or you don't have a way. Sometimes I do, but not officially. What do you mean?
00:25:45
Speaker
Oh, okay, on your phone. I hate typing on my phone. We have those now. I love it. I use Voice Recorder a lot. Yeah, I never do that. You're at Android. Yeah, it's so much. I don't like typing because it's just frustrating. I'm not that good at my phone typing, but especially spell checking CNC terminology is not fun. And Voice Recorder, it achieves exactly what you want, including
00:26:13
Speaker
emphasis and the tone of your voice. So again, that's to me really important when I want to then go back later and re-listen to that note or that's exactly it. Jump back into that mindset. In fact, I was going through my voice recorder notes two days ago and I had some notes that I took from the side of the road in Germany and it's just like
00:26:36
Speaker
And it's literally, I'm talking to myself, it's like, John, you have to remember what this is like. It's inspirational to be here. You don't drive by dilapidated factories. You see the factories are maintained, they're painted, the culture, the attire. And I could read that as a note, but it's not the same as hearing it. And I'm hearing it institute, like when I was there and that I can relate to.
00:27:01
Speaker
So you're not just converting it to text and keeping the text, you're actually keeping the audio file. Only in that case. Okay, but now because I can see that. I mean, that's why you and I do video is so that we can share that passion and that that free spirited ramble that you don't really get when you're writing, because you write so much slower than you talk. And on the phone, it's even slower than that. So totally in that situation, I can see passion comes across. But like, I'll take a I'll take a voice recorder note.
00:27:31
Speaker
and when I'm somewhere inconvenient, a parking lot, and then when I do get back and I type that out, I think the process of typing forces you to be more deliberate and parse your words and call the list down, which is a good thing as well because I think that's the problem with audio and video is you can just ramble and not be
00:27:52
Speaker
you're not forced to be as concise. But then that also gives you a second distillation of what you're trying to say, improve and think through it, which is actually really good. Yep. Yep. Yeah, when I take notes, it's more of just a note, like thoughts, you know, just a couple points, bullet points, current period by period, basically, yeah, not, not writing paragraphs to myself. Right. Interesting.
00:28:19
Speaker
That's cool. I like, yeah, I like that. And I think it reminds me again of when I, when I either literally or, or, or fictitiously sit down with somebody who I want advice from or as a mentor, you don't
Mental Preparation and Strategic Thinking
00:28:31
Speaker
sit down with that person or call that person and just start dumping information on them. You warm up, you know, you kind of, how is it? What's going on? How did, you know, what's.
00:28:41
Speaker
You know, and then eventually it's kind of like, well, what's going on and what's on your mind? Why are you here? And there's this whole like natural flow and it sounds so silly now that I'm talking about it. But, um, sometimes when I'm on my own and I'm just trying to take notes, you just all of a sudden are like, I need to figure this issue out. And that's like, well, you, you, you, you, you didn't warm up. You didn't get anywhere here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll keep that in mind. Warm up.
00:29:07
Speaker
The other thing we're working on, which I'm super cautiously excited for, is using Airtable to build our own tool storage system. I love it. Yeah, now I don't know if this is going to work. Rob Lockwood and Phil are much, much more capable Airtable gurus. But Phil seems to think there's some potential here
00:29:36
Speaker
And so the idea is actually quite simple. For now, we're building out what the initial phase of what we would need, which is not going to deal with necessarily quantities or reordering that could come later, I think, but what it's rather going to do is
00:29:53
Speaker
We'll take a regular Home Depot toolbox. We will put nice little numbers on the drawers, so drawers one through 20. And then inside those drawers, we can have whatever we want. So that could be laser cut foam, it could be shallower bins, it could be 3D printed bins, anything we want. And those can just be numbered one through 30 as well, or A through Z. And so you'll walk up to a computer, screen, tablet, whatever. And let's say you have in your hand a,
00:30:23
Speaker
three flute end mill that has a 30,000 corner rad, but it didn't have the brand or model number lasered on it. So you don't necessarily know where to put that tool back. Well, there'll be a front end interface that would let you search by tool manufacturer, EDP, or number, and then number of flutes, overall length, diameter. So it would be quite simple to just hit, okay, well, it's three flute, it's three inches overall, and it has a corner rad. That's gonna give me like one or two options probably at most.
00:30:51
Speaker
And then it'll just tell you, oh, that's drawer seven, bin three. And you'll open it up and it's quite easy to open drawer seven. It's quite easy to look to find bin three. Um, and there'll be a picture of the tool on air table. That's quite easy to do. And this should be, I get excited because this should work. Hmm.
00:31:12
Speaker
Definitely. Yeah, so we'll keep folks posted. I also think if this does work, we'll share a version on NYC CNC or something like that. But we've got Alex built, he built part of it and I, it needs more, the sort of front end search filter stuff is where we have, where we're struggling, but we'll continue to work.
00:31:35
Speaker
It's interesting for you because you've spent so much time lately with your secret project doing filtering searches based on end mill and material and all that stuff. You have the framework, the mentality already. Part of me did think about re-leveraging that, but this is simpler.
00:31:56
Speaker
I want this to be something that is easy to do. That was very expensive. Yeah, of course. But wouldn't this work for you? I don't know if you use ProShop or how you do this. We do use ProShop for tool management, and it works OK. I'm not leveraging it to its proper potential. But it does
Tool Inventory and Management Systems
00:32:18
Speaker
work. I can look through ProShop and figure out
00:32:23
Speaker
I have a minimum and a maximum for all my end mills. And I, when I order new tooling, I order to the maximum for everything, everything that we go through on a daily basis. Cause I just want to know that they're there and I don't have to worry about it anymore. Um, so in pro shop, I, every time we pull a tool, we, uh, basically minus one in pro shop. And then it sort of keeps the inventory levels in check so that I can go through fairly quickly and find all the tools I need to order and how many, and then I just order them.
00:32:50
Speaker
So you treat a tool as a consumable, not durable, meaning if you take out an end bill, you assume it never gets checked back in. And it never goes back. Yeah, right. That's fine. It's easier that way. Yeah. Especially tiny titanium, and they're all tiny tools. I just toss them.
00:33:04
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Part of, you know, you're not a job shop where you're going to do a couple cuts and put it back. And there's inherent inefficiencies, but I'm okay with some of that relative to the other option of like, for example, if we don't have quantities, you know, there's not that many core tools. In fact, what we've done for the past six months is we pulled all of the tools that we use for like Saunders production or tools that we don't ever want to run out of. We put them on a table. It's not that many. We could have, we could have an
00:33:33
Speaker
unhealthy amount of inventory of those tools and it's not that much money to keep extras, which buys you the buffer of being more likely to see it, visually just see it when you're like, oh wow, we're down to three, I should get more.
00:33:47
Speaker
Yeah. And that's, that's kind of what we do too. Cause we have all our tools and shallow bins. Um, I 3d printed these little green tags that say a minus one on the tag, like tiny little hexagons. So every time we pull a tool, if we're, if we're too lazy to, to moving too quickly to go into pro shop and like minus one, it, we just take this little 3d printed thing, drop it in the box. And then every now and then we'll catch up on pro shop and be like, Oh, we've taken four of those, two of those. Um,
00:34:14
Speaker
So you have just a hopper of minus one tags and you can just keep adding them to shallow bins to, so there's four of them in there. That means you stole four without logging pro shops. Exactly. That's freaking genius. It works so good and it lets us move quickly. I mean, it's not, it doesn't take more than like five seconds to do it in pro shop, but sometimes the computer is not on or you're just like in a rush. So this, this works really well.
00:34:38
Speaker
No, that's the sort of level of honesty that is real that I care about. Because the other option is a digital solution, which they're frankly very expensive. And at the level we'd be looking, they don't really get us that much more. Yeah. Or going to the digital. Yeah.
00:34:58
Speaker
Yeah. Well, the digital solution I like is having a toolbox that like a list of that has LEDs. So just level the drawer lights up and then the bin itself is locked and it lights up, which is very cool. But now it's not only exorbitantly expensive, but scaling it remains expensive because of the hardware costs and frankly, the complication of bin sizes and knowing what sizes to order. I kind of like this
00:35:23
Speaker
Um, the drawback of DIY is real. Like I don't, we're not in the software. Well, we kind of are in the software development business, but, um, I'm not, I'm not necessarily marketing that or proud of that, but I do think it's simple enough with the tools at hand today of using air table and not having to do that much custom coding. And I may have Alex hop on Upwork and, and push it over to them to get some.
00:35:43
Speaker
for 200 bucks that someone can help refine this. That's a win. And then I like this fact that if we get this done and we can turn it into a useful tool that maybe others can use as well, that's freaking awesome.
00:35:58
Speaker
That's all I want. I could walk into your shop, John, and you could hand me a Kyra Sera insert and be like, hey, I grabbed three of these. Can you put it back? And I can just go put it back myself. It'll just walk up to the tablet or screen, and it'll tell me the drawer, the number. Once I get there, I can do a quick visual to compare to make sure this looks right. Boom. Done. Yep. Yep.
00:36:20
Speaker
I was thinking would it be sweet to have like in Lawrence's Sandvik cabinet, you open the drawer, it's got a little LED right next to the bin that says this is the tool. If you were to DIY something like that, imagine if you had a grid pattern of say 40 bins, each one's got its own LED and I'd almost even want each one's got its own plus and minus button.
00:36:42
Speaker
right? You can take a tool hit minus leave, the system knows. Or if you're in the system, and you're like, I need a quarter inch flute, then it lights up the certain bin that it's that it's looking for. So that's actually, so the lights, the LED lights, I've realized are just really not necessary. It's so easy to say drawer one bin seven, that's just not hard. But the plus or minus is a real. And frankly, with an Arduino, that's not hard. The hardest thing will be
00:37:11
Speaker
kind of wiring it up, but what you just said made me realize that's what we'll do, John. We'll have one or two drawers that are our critical tooling, and those will have plus minus buttons. But what gets me fired up about this is I bought five Harvey tools yesterday for $200 that are small, not custom, but small unusual tools that I got to use for a job. They're all small diameters, weird lengths, all that, corner rads.
00:37:40
Speaker
I'm going to go put those back into our quote unquote small tools drawer that probably has a hundred plus other tools in it. I have no way of easily and competently finding those in a month or a year. And if I'm programming up a job now, I can go to this air table, say, hey, show me everything I own from Harvey that's under one sixteenth of an inch.
00:38:02
Speaker
And I can assume I have that and then I could even text, if I'm not at the shop, text somebody and say, hey, can you go check drawer one B12 to make sure we have the two that it shows there? That's freaking awesome.
00:38:16
Speaker
Yeah, the way the Pro Shop lays out the tool list is you can search by size, flute, basically any category you want. I don't fully leverage that because I know the tools that I have. But as we grow and have more machines and more products and more people working the system, then I love the drawer idea. I love the plus and minus idea.
00:38:38
Speaker
And I was thinking for you, you almost need two separate, uh, tooling cabinets, one for production tooling and one for play one for job shopping. Well, that's what we would do. I think is the, I don't think we have to be separate physical cabinets at that point. We might have a couple of drawers focused on our, like our, our, whatever we call that common tooling, but what just occurred to me is you could actually also easily have an Arduino.
00:39:04
Speaker
keypad. So instead of having to do individual plus minuses would be nice for sure. But what may be even better is we could just have a keypad on the toolbox.
00:39:15
Speaker
kind of like the Imperializer with an LED screen. And then you could just, let's say it's a B12. So B is the drawer, 12 is the bin. It's a vending machine. Shocking that we're coming up with this, right? Somebody is going to run with this in the industry. But you could hit like B12 and the plus one button. That could then be one sole source to do all your increments up to down. And then
00:39:41
Speaker
If you hit B12 plus, it could increment it up and then it could just tell you right there on the LED, you should have seven, which means you can quickly look right there and it should match. Like that to me makes more sense than trying to run wires to individual little shallow bins. Sure. Although that would be epic, but yeah, is, is it worth it? Yeah. I like this a lot.
00:40:04
Speaker
Yeah. I haven't never tried to integrate in Arduino with air table, but through like Zapier or if this, then that I, I am not nervous about that whatsoever. Not worried. Well, yeah, totally. This is cool. It's exciting. This is exciting. What are you up to today?
00:40:21
Speaker
Going home for a bit. Just nice. Gonna take a little bit of time off this morning. Come back in, crush it on the Swiss, get the Maury back up and running. Gotta make pivot screws on the Nakamura. And then all the admin stuff that needs to get done as well. Cool. Do you use ProShop for other stuff like inventory and location and what do they call it? Breadcrumbs and parts and stuff like that? Or you have physical bins? Not really, yeah.
00:40:52
Speaker
Yeah, we have physical storage locations. Yeah, I am not utilizing Pro Shop to its fullest potential and I have a lot of, guilt is the wrong word, but I feel like I really should be. It's almost a full-time job probably setting that up, managing it. Understanding it, integrating it for a while, yeah.
00:41:15
Speaker
Yeah. Cool. But yeah, I realized it's something I need to get done because it will absolutely benefit us. Well, that's what I'm thinking with this toolbox thing is then it's not just tooling. I don't know how far we would go with it. Do I need to label where we keep our files, like our cutting like Nelson who makes files, the end company.
00:41:41
Speaker
or where other stuff are, but it could still be quite helpful. And it supports on a, at least on a paper level, it supports this idea of, Hey, as you have different employees in here to help or new interns being able to say, um, search for something and have it tell you where it is. It's actually very cool. Isn't that the goal is you have a new employee come in and you just say, go to work. Here's
00:42:07
Speaker
You know, here's everything you need. Well, yeah, but I'm trying to be realistic about are you, I know, of course, but you set an audacious goal and then you get closer and closer towards it to the point where you can't even remember what life was like before you did this kind of stuff. Right. Well, there could be a really good like, so we have a deburring drawer.
00:42:26
Speaker
You could just have, maybe you just put a single toolbox in this air table and then in that you list all the stuff it has as keywords. So deburring, extra one, two, three blocks, extra files, whatever, files. And then somebody could just search and they could say, oh, that red Husky toolbox over here, there's a picture of the toolbox, it has all that stuff. So at least you're then, there you're going to the right toolbox and that's pretty simple and not,
00:42:55
Speaker
trying to get too granular with it. Right. I like that. Cool.
Tooling Purchases and Future Planning
00:43:04
Speaker
Any other progress on the current or thinking about tooling or setups or timing or stuff like that? Yeah, lots. I'm trying to figure out my palette slash vice layout scenario, what to purchase. I definitely need a bunch of vices. So which ones do I get? Do I get the fifth axis ones? Orange Vice has their new five axis vices that actually look pretty sweet.
00:43:33
Speaker
and then tooling as well with gauge length diameters. I still need some time to sit in a coffee shop for two hours and think about this. Do you have a deadline to make that decision? Yeah, five weeks, I think. Oh, OK. Too much time. It's a bad thing. Yeah. That's funny. Well, that'll be disappeared by tomorrow. No, I know. I know. But sometimes shorter deadlines can force you to not. It's a good thing.
00:44:04
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Got it. I don't envy you there. It's been fun to grow slowly and learn how... Yeah, I'm continuing to learn. I got to get that video going on tool holders. We just got some tags in. Yeah, I'd love to see it. Yeah, we'll work on it. Well, yeah. And like you were telling me, I think privately last week after the podcast, you said,
00:44:31
Speaker
I'm at that point where I'd like to buy everything I think I'll need, 200 tool holders and a ton of vices and all the pallets or do I step in slowly and buy what I know I'm going to need and then incrementally buy more after that. I see the benefits of both for sure and you're more the fan of like get to what you need, start slowly, don't invest in things that you're never going to use.
00:44:53
Speaker
It makes perfect sense. You and I are both guilty of like, OK, so if you're buying it when it's part of the quote unquote package and they just kind of apply, whether it's some form of a discount or just a package deal, it's obviously very exciting. But we did the simple math. And it's like, wait a minute here. I'm saving X, like a few thousand bucks total by buying more than I may need. Like, no, that's dumb when you look at it that way. Yeah.
00:45:22
Speaker
But yeah, that's going to be cool. How much do you use through spindle coolant on any machine? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I realized like last week that it was not on the quote for the current. Oh, really? And I was like, wait, did I not request? Did I forget to request this? Okay. We need to add that. How much is it? Yeah. Okay. We need, we need to add that. Surprised they didn't. Are you using oil or coolant? Oh, I'm definitely using coolant. Okay. Good.
00:45:52
Speaker
Did you see that Swiss fire on Instagram? Oh my God. Yeah. I'm glad that was all okay. Holy cow. Yeah. No, through spindle coolant is, uh, absolutely amazing. One of the things I'd like to start trying to figure out is more holders that use it because, uh, tooling does not always make sense. You know, the tooling doesn't exist with your spindle coolant because it's so small or, um, or it's just exorbitantly expensive. So the answer is no brainer week. You can run.
00:46:20
Speaker
An ER16 with through-spindle cooling, it actually works halfway decent going through the slits. But anything larger, ER20 or bigger, I find that the RPMs disperse it out. So I want to find some of those holders that have the directional jets. Right. Yeah, they exist, but they're obviously really expensive. That doesn't bother me because it's a durable item. It's the right tool. Yeah. Yeah, sure. But yeah, that's the name of the game, chip evacuation.
00:46:51
Speaker
And the lubricity of the fluid, but yeah. Yep. Sweet. All right.
Smithsonian Visit and Weekly Plans
00:46:57
Speaker
Uh, we're off to DC tomorrow, which will be on our way back when this airs, but yeah, I'm super excited for the Smithsonian thing. That's so cool, man. Yeah. Thank you. I'll see you next week. Sounds good. Yeah. Back to you next week, dude. Have an awesome time at Smithsonian, you know, make the most of it, uh, bring us along on the journey. Yeah, absolutely. We'll do.
00:47:21
Speaker
Cool. All right, take care. All right, take care. Bye.