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#281 - Getting The Most Out Of What You Make
246 Plays3 years ago
TOPCIS:
- We finally get closure on Judd
- Mama Grimsmo is visitng for the first time since 2019!
- Grimsmo starts getting great results after a much needed training sesisons from the CMM.
- Saunders dives into endmills and surface finishes.
- Metrology!!!
- Grimsmo has been on a rabbit hole to try to make their saga mechanisims better.
- Saunders chats about probing issues.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Theme
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 281. My name is John Grimsmo. My name is John Saunders. This is the friendly podcast where two good friends chat every week about manufacturing and the ups and downs in our lives. How are you doing, my friend?
Coping with Loss and Family Support
00:00:19
Speaker
Good. I feel inclined to apologize for last week. I'm not sorry that I was ... It was a very difficult week.
00:00:30
Speaker
But to put some closure to it, Judd is up in doggy heaven as of Friday. And it was without hesitation the right decision at the end. And it's funny, if I can share this just to anybody else who may ever go through this, that part was actually a relief. It actually was not the hardest part. Tuesday and Wednesday when we recorded, and even Thursday were some incredibly challenging days for me.
00:01:00
Speaker
which just goes to show what an awesome, you know, dog he was in life. He's lived as part of our lives and that was great. And we actually did a quick tribute video that we're gonna air tomorrow, or today actually, sorry. So two days prior, if you're listening to this podcast, it'll already be out on YouTube, which isn't so much about Judd, but really about our story. Like it was kind of a quick chance to retell why I got into manufacturing in those New York days, in the apartment, in the basement.
00:01:30
Speaker
I really enjoyed that, and I'm glad I did that, but I'll continue to grieve personally. It's not like I'm just over it, but it's time to move on. Thanks for lending into your last week. Yeah, that's good. I mean, that's what we're here for. Yeah.
00:01:50
Speaker
But he's, he's, uh, he passed away. We put him down Friday and we, uh, the, then picked the kids back up and the kids were willing and happy to participate. We took him down to the farm and we buried him. Uh, and you know, it was great. We were actually in a good mood. Yeah. We were at a good mood when we did that. We were saying fond memories and remembering him. And, uh, yeah, on, on we go back to the shop. Good. How are you? Sorry. Good. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Things are good. My mom gives her convolution condolences. She's been visiting for the past few weeks.
00:02:20
Speaker
Um, how's that going? It's been great having her here. Yeah. She came to the shop last week and got to meet everybody finally. And she'd never seen the new shop and she, uh, you know, it gets to be proud of her boys. She was telling everybody, she's like, these are my boys. And I was looking around at everybody and I'm like, these are my boys. Like that's funny. Right. Um, but yeah, it's been really good having her here. And then I'm taking tomorrow completely off to just spend time with her and the kids and everything. And, uh, that'd be nice. That's great.
COVID-19's Impact on Time and Business Decisions
00:02:48
Speaker
Yeah, that's so crazy. I've lost, I think for anyone listening, I'm suspecting you can agree that the COVID has caused us to lose just like a significant concept of time. We don't have that anchor points, like things like IMTS or traveling for holidays, like so many of us often did, or seeing family. Like I have no idea. You've been in your shop now two and a half years? Yeah, exactly. Okay, okay. But that's crazy.
00:03:18
Speaker
Yeah, like two months before COVID started, basically. Right. That's nuts, John. Yeah. Huge leap, got the current, spent so much money, put hundreds of thousands of dollars into the shop to renovate it, and then COVID hits, and we had to shut down for a little bit, and it got weird, and then it's like, we made the right choice, right? Yeah, we did. We did. But yeah, things are good. Wow.
00:03:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's nuts. That's great. Well, I'm glad that she's able to visit and see. Does it feel good to show? Because I know you're not. Yeah. Okay. Not Yeah. So after my mom, like, look, look what we've accomplished. And the kids are quite a bit bigger than they were last time she saw them, you know, Claire is 12. So she's almost a teenager, almost as tall as my wife. And yeah, that's crazy, john. Oh, my god. Last time you saw Clara, she was
00:04:13
Speaker
eight. I don't know, like, yeah, a child. Yeah. Oh, wow. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's weird having these markers, especially with kids because they change and they grow and the business too, it changes and grows. So somebody like my mommy,
00:04:28
Speaker
you know, gets to see it in pieces when she comes to visit. Um, it's neat. I think we need some, uh, some John Grimm, some baby pictures up on Instagram. It's probably some good ones, tons of good ones. Um, but yeah, so she's been bouncing between my house and Eric's house and, uh, staying a couple of nights here and there and it's, it's great. It's wonderful. That's awesome.
00:04:50
Speaker
Yeah, I found a lot of time last week going through old photos for Judd, which is like a form of self torture. Like it's wonderful, but it's also like at some point you got to stop and found a photograph on one of those military ships. I don't know whether it was a battleship or an aircraft carrier from when I was quite a bit younger.
00:05:13
Speaker
And I remember the tour, but I don't remember taking this exact picture. And it was it's a scanned picture from an actual like film cameras. Also funny. And it is. I took a picture of the ship's
Evolution of Machining Techniques
00:05:27
Speaker
machine shop. You can see a bandsaw and a manual laid. And I it bothers me because I remember those days in New York of thinking, well, wait a minute here, you can.
00:05:39
Speaker
drill steel. So is there a tool that lets you cut steel on the side? Like I didn't know, like an end mill doesn't to me intuitively exist. Like you wouldn't think that that would be a thing that should do something. And I remember renting those DVDs off of smart flicks that were like manual Bridgeport instructional DVDs. And I remember thinking there's no way you turn those hands. Like I felt like a bandsaw, like you turn it on and then gravity pulls it down. I thought with the Bridgeport you, I didn't know the word power feed, but I assumed everything was power fed. Anyway,
00:06:08
Speaker
fun memories. Oh, that's fantastic. I mean, in the general population, everybody probably knows what a drill bit is. It's like so ubiquitous. Yeah. Anything beyond that, a reamer, you know, an end mill. Like even in the shop, we hire a new accountant and it's like end mill. And he's like, what? Yeah. We have to teach all these
Role of CMM in Manufacturing
00:06:28
Speaker
things. The name doesn't even, it should be a side mill. You don't. Yeah, it's true. Even shallow cuts, you're actually cutting with a side. You don't really cut with your hand. Unless it's a plunge. Like, yeah.
00:06:39
Speaker
But that's funny. Yeah. Well, that's great. It's good. What else you up to? Um, so Angela was in the CMM training class last week and has come back with a whole bunch of spit and vinegar and he's like, okay, I got this. You know, I got this machine figured out. Um, it's been awesome. So while I had watched a bunch of YouTube videos and I could do it mostly, I was missing a couple key, um, notes, you know, of like how to orient the park and things like that.
00:07:09
Speaker
and he learned that and much more. So between the two of us, although mostly him, he's able to create programs and datums and establish reference points. And he's got a lot of metrology background and inspection and CMM aerospace work under his shoulders, under his belt from the past. So he actually quite a bit knows what he's doing, which is fantastic. So he's writing up all these programs and measuring all these features.
00:07:35
Speaker
angular relationships on the blade and whole diameters and cylindricity and parallelism and flatness. And, um, it's pretty cool. Is it doing what you needed to do? I mean, we're almost there. Like at this point we have, you know, most of the blades that we make work in the Norseman specifically, and some of them will fail. Like Eric will have problems putting them together for various reasons. We don't exactly know what the problem is. So the CMM,
00:08:02
Speaker
One of the big reasons we got it is to find the source of that problem so that we can avoid it, whether it's a fixturing mismatch or a clamping pressure or just the process we're doing is wrong, something like that, like the way we make these things. And so Angela's got a bunch of blades and he's tweaking the program so that it gives him the data, the comparative data that he wants to be able to give us the answers we want. And he's like playing with it there. He's at that point.
00:08:31
Speaker
That's great. Because it's funny. It's like what's the overlap of the mix of, hey, we have a new toy. It's fun to learn it. We can go deeper than we need to go versus like, no, no, no, stop. Let's go back to the basics. We actually need to do a couple simple-ish things to solve a real problem. And then we can go back into grimace mode of. Exactly. Scanning everything. So there's one feature, the lock face on the blade that the lock contacts on.
00:08:58
Speaker
It's technically a cylinder, but we 3D machine it hard. It's a 60 Rockwell. So we're 3D machining that surface with a really tight step over. And in the CMM, we're trying to measure. It is a cylinder, so we're measuring a cylinder toolpath kind of thing, but also a form, a 3D form. So it's just kind of scanning the whole surface with a million points and comparing the CAD model to the real life and telling us how far off we are.
Ensuring Consistency in Manufacturing
00:09:26
Speaker
And the whole surface is within two-tenths of where it should be, which is fantastic. Even with the upper edge bulges out, when you magnify the error by 100 times or something, it looks terrible.
00:09:39
Speaker
Yeah. But you're magnifying it so much. So even with the upper edge being weird, it's still the whole thing is averaging within two tenths. Is that good enough? I think that's good. I don't know. But I think that's fantastic. There's no way three tenths is going to make a problem, bank or break kind of thing. And if so, then
00:10:00
Speaker
We have an unsustainable design that is saying that, no, that's good point. It's a very good point. I'm learning a lot about tolerances, the relationship and dimensional quality control and things like that. And you need the interchangeable parts. Yeah. Yeah. And we, we feel like we're there, but we're clearly not there because I'm sure our actual tolerance ranges are sometimes tighter than we think they should be. And sometimes looser than we think they should be.
00:10:28
Speaker
And my goal for the CMM is to have us have it tell us where we're at and the consistency we're holding part to part. Yeah, right. Right. It reminds me of that. I think it's statistical process control emails that we got in from some viewers a few months back that were wonderful and paraphrasing that if you go to like the tolerances between a
00:10:48
Speaker
It's a bore cylinder on an engine and the piston. They need to be within this bell curve range so that would make up a number. 99% of each one are within this range, but the truth is that you could have the situation where one of them is on the cylinder
00:11:07
Speaker
is on the low end and the pistons on the high end and so it actually in theory could violate but it wouldn't fit but then you could do some very simple statistics to see that the odds of those two parts being together are you know one in a million like it's basically an acceptable outcome if that happens you know we will handle it
00:11:28
Speaker
I'm making this up. Like I'm assuming that that happens. They just, they'll either see it through some other issue. Like when they, uh, assemble the engine and run QC or the customer gets it there's problems or, you know, um, it's not as.
00:11:41
Speaker
black and white, like we see this on the mod vice, just being very honest about it. There's some dimensions that we really, really, really try to keep tight. But one of those dimensions really only matters if you happen to be using two mod vices right next to each other in a really tight, you know, trying to keep them both parts. And don't get me wrong, I want the mod vices to be able to do that. But the odds of that, that happens infrequently. So yeah. Yeah. Hmm.
00:12:12
Speaker
So you're trying to measure, it's a board feature or cylinder. So why is that a 3D tool path? It's not a circle. It's a little half circle. It's a little semicircle of lock face contact area on the blade. It's an OD feature. It's an OD feature. Yeah, exactly. I got it. Okay. Well, still, why can't it be a 2D contour? Because the surface is curvature vertically. Oh, so it's like a partial section of a cone.
00:12:42
Speaker
Yeah, kind of. Not a cone of cylinder. But a cylinder doesn't taper. Not taper. I'd have to show you. But either way, we're getting it. It's close. It's real close. Cool. Do you think that's what's... I think so. Or it's something else that we're not looking closely at yet. But yeah, he's getting it really good. We have a kind of a similar...
00:13:12
Speaker
thing we're seeing and realizing, which is that as our face mill tool wears, we use a Mitsubishi to get exceptionally good finishes on 4140. We're really happy with it. And the inserts by no means, they don't last forever, but they kind of wear in, they last for a period of time. And then as soon as they're
00:13:36
Speaker
start to go. Frankly, it would be okay for most many applications, but we don't we either rotate them because we like the really nice look of the finish. But what I've also now realized is we're really hyper focusing on a couple of dimensions is that even as we roll on the part, as those inserts where it creates more tool pressure in it, it changes measurably by a few tenths.
Probing Techniques and Tool Wear Analysis
00:13:59
Speaker
And it's fun because you kind of know it shouldn't be that way because of how we're
00:14:04
Speaker
able to, it's a simple measurement to make. And you're like, wait, why is the part thicker here than not here? And it is very repeatable and frankly, very annoying because I would actually like to get, um, I'm kind of, I guess on a dimension that I care a lot about, I'm giving up two tents that I don't want to give up. Like I'd rather that just be good. Um, and we might actually end up switching to a Sandvik face mill that we've also gotten really good results out of. And I suspect would be,
00:14:30
Speaker
We'll see. Is that something where as the tool wears, not only are the inserts physically getting shorter to a certain degree, but also it's duller so there's more tool pressure in certain cuts? That's what it is. I believe it. Yes, because even when we adjust the Z height, it's not the nominal
00:14:50
Speaker
dimension that I'm talking about here, which does change. It's the relative dimension through the part. So as we're, it's a, it's, this is for our jaw. So as you, as you Mike, the thickness of the jaw, um, it's moving by two tents in either a hill or a cave consistently because of the tool pressure. Well, because of something. And I believe that's the pressure kind of makes, it does make sense. So, um, it's been fun to deal now that I know at least to think about, okay, I got that.
00:15:19
Speaker
Well, and then once you get to your CMM eventually or sooner, um, you can 3d scan the surface, the flat plane and see everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like we're, um, so imagine a finished Norseman blade with the bevel and edge and everything. Um, Angela puts it up right now. We just have simple magnets to mount the blade on, um, two, two magnets. And at some point you're like, is one magnet pulling it down? I don't know. We gotta think about that. So we don't care right now.
00:15:49
Speaker
But anyway, so he scans the visible flat surface of the top of the blade. And for the most part, you magnify it on the printout result, and it looks crazy. You're like, wow, it's dipping right there in the middle of the blade. But it's like 2 tenths flatness over the whole thing. And we're like, dude, that's totally acceptable. I'm sure it's warping that much when we hard mill the bevels. It's like, that's nothing. That's good.
00:16:13
Speaker
You're using a magnet on a CMM on the same. Yeah. Do you use magnets to kind of prehold a part in milling fixtures before you actually clamp it? I don't. Okay. I would.
00:16:29
Speaker
love to have light duty magnets or even like a little vacuum or a way of kind of like you, kind of like you see, I guess, with a robot where it puts the part in and then drops it and then actually comes back and pushes a little force evenly. Um, but I hate magnets in that environment too, around chips and everything. Yeah. And even on the CMM, like it's magnetizing our parts. So now we have to demagnet before they move forward. Um, because we don't really,
00:16:58
Speaker
magnetize the blades anymore. On the surface grinder, it does kind of an auto demag feature where it fluctuates the power because it's an electromagnet. But it'll turn it on and off and off and off and off and off and tape right down to kind of demagnetize the part at the very end of the cycle, which is really cool. So they come off almost magnet free, I think. And then once they go through heat treat and everything, it kills any residual magnetism.
00:17:25
Speaker
Did we talk about magnetism a month ago? I don't know. So we have had. Yeah, you want to have the handheld robot magnetizer thing. So we talked about that, right. We got a Gauss meter.
Magnetism's Role in Manufacturing
00:17:42
Speaker
Okay, explain what that is. Oh, it is awesome. It is like a profilometer. It's kind of a- Making a note of this. It's kind of the shape of a, it's like a two inch cube, like a little bigger than a one, two, three block, or square, like a one, two, three block. And it has a little digital readout and it tells you the magnetism of the part you're over. And it is incredible. Googling right now.
00:18:10
Speaker
So we have been creating, we've had this process now where we will lay out grid lines on steel like our fixture plates and we will run the DMAG over it and we've been running it over it in different, with spacing like mowing the lawn with different step overs and cross directions and twice. And you can see it's like so cool to DMAG it and then measure and see, well, is there a hard spot in the middle or is it the edges?
00:18:33
Speaker
If we did something, when we pick, we use magnets to load the steel into the machines. So as soon as you put that magnet on it, which is like a thousand pound capacity lifting, that re magnetizes that area. So you can see what that looks like. And then you can see how, how quick we could demag that. And it's been great. So it was a, it's from a company in Chicago. They're like 500 bucks. And we found one on eBay for a third of that used.
00:19:03
Speaker
Nice. Okay. So looking at the pictures, I see some with a wand looks like, um, or, I don't know.
00:19:13
Speaker
Ours was from the DMAG, oh no, sorry, it's from, I'm reading an email here, the El Matco, E-L-M-A-T-C-O, Gauss meter, it's called the Residuumeter 2, digital handheld Gauss meters, industry standard for DC magnetic measurements. Cool. Digital Gauss meter standard features. Nice, yeah, I'm gonna have to get one of those.
00:19:44
Speaker
Cause it was like, that's one of those, now that we have it, we'll never go back that there's no more, I think it's magnetic. And we were having these situations where our drills would often last for say 3000 holes. And then all of a sudden they would last for 325 holes, which is a significant cost issue in production for us. And so why is that happening?
Metrology and Measurement Techniques
00:20:10
Speaker
Yeah. And you think it might be magnetism?
00:20:13
Speaker
I do not I know.
00:20:15
Speaker
It is? Well, actually, a few years ago, we found out that these are insert drills. The body itself can have some runout, whether that was run out from the start or whether it's run out that was induced because you've been using it a bunch or whether the holder changed. Basically, we measure runout in the soft body, the steel holder, and we will actually physically bend the holders into low TIR. That helps a lot.
00:20:44
Speaker
And that's generally a variable that has been isolated. But if anyone else is listening and pondering, I would suggest that you first check the holder TIR in the soft body. And then we have now done enough testing to know that, yes, when it's magnetic, it compromises drill life. Why? I don't know this. I think it has to do with the magnetism having enough strength to
00:21:13
Speaker
impair chip evacuation and thus recutting, but it could be some other property of magnetism about how it's actually able to shear the material or something else I'm not aware of. Interesting. I don't really care. I just know it works. Yeah, demagging it is the key.
00:21:28
Speaker
Fantastic. Yeah. The, the ability to measure what you're making in all different forms, including now magnetism is, um, I'm getting so fascinated with all that stuff. And like being able to measure flatness, not only with the CMM now, but with the optical flats that we we've had for about a year and all these different measurements and ways to do it. And like, I, I'm really liking meteorology a lot, nerding out about it so much. Um,
00:21:54
Speaker
I was playing on the Wilhelmin and I had to physically measure how long the probe was from the gauge length, from the contact flat of the taper to the tip. And the Wilhelmin guy was telling me I had to get close within like one millimeter or less kind of thing. So it's not a caliper operation. That's not hard. One millimeter? Yeah, or less. But it's not something you could just throw calipers on there and eyeball it and be like, yeah, it's 4.2 inches.
00:22:25
Speaker
So what did I do? I could have put it in the current and used the current to touch it off somehow, but the current was busy. And I'm like, what else can I do? So I tried the height gauge, which would have been easy, but apparently the ribbon cable inside of our height gauge is broken. It's a really old one, the tutorial one. Because I went to use it, and there's no batteries in it, so I put batteries in it. And then it still doesn't work. And so I text the team, because it was like 7, 8 o'clock at night. I text everybody, and I'm like, how come this doesn't work? Oh, yeah, sorry. I still got to fix that.
00:22:53
Speaker
Okay. So I'm like, okay, how else can I measure it? I could turn on the CMM and I could use the CMM to measure it somehow. That would work. And then I looked at the optical comparator and I'm like, I could use the optical comparator like super easy. And that took me no time at all. So I just put the holder in a V block sideways, measure, measure, got it. Perfect. Done. Yeah. Good. That was cool. It's cool to be able to see and use and know all the different measurement ways to get the same results.
00:23:19
Speaker
which was fine. Yes. I still enjoy seeing good creative uses of a surface plate granite or otherwise with one millimeter, you could just use a combination of regular
00:23:34
Speaker
one two three or two four six blocks plus some Gauge blocks to stack up and then a indicator on a what do they call those? Stands that you can sweep parts with a height gauge like an indicator height gauge Yep, you can sweep over a stack of blocks that you've built That's five two two four and then you go to your part and you're like open up need to change it by a few tents or whatever and There's some online
00:23:59
Speaker
You still have an iPhone app. I think it got out of dated, but there's a good website. If you Google like gauge block calculator to get like what mix up do I need to 5.4421 height of gauge blocks, but every set of gauge blocks has different combinations of.
00:24:15
Speaker
It's pretty standard. Yeah. Do you have a full set? We have a full set that we keep out for general shop use, and then we have a different set that's not as numerous that we keep. It's never to be used in the machines or rougher. We still basically try to treat that one a little nicer. Yeah. Did you buy them new or did you get eBay specials, old ones?
00:24:37
Speaker
The shop use one is Shars, just being honest, or Chinese. And the black one is our quote unquote metrology set, which is used but of higher quality. And then we buy individual mid-to-toyu sera blocks and mid-to-toyu, we have some one inch mid-to-toyu granite parallels, which are hyper accurate. We had one pair of them. Fun fact, you can end up with more of them if you drop them and then they fracture into multiples.
00:25:05
Speaker
The good news about granite is that when you drop it and break it, it doesn't raise burrs. So as crappy as that outcome was, it doesn't compromise their use for metrology tools. So wouldn't encourage it or advise it, but hey.
00:25:19
Speaker
Nice. Yeah, I got in a local Craigslist sale with a whole bunch of other stuff. He had a set of gauge blocks, metatoria ones, and I was like, I want that. Turns out they're metric, and we measure everything an inch. They're still useful, but they're not as useful. You can leave them for the Wilhelmin in metrics.
00:25:40
Speaker
I was just looking into it the other day. I was looking on eBay. I do want to buy a full-inch set of gauge blocks. I don't think I need to buy new ones because it's like a lot. I could go Charrs, but you can get used, stare at Mitsutoyo, do all. You just got to look and wait for the right kit that's not missing 15 of them.
00:26:00
Speaker
Yeah, there is I mean, you can go down the rabbit hole of reading, you know, even the good kids, the better kids aren't so much that they're necessarily more accurate, but that each one includes its own deviation search. So basically, as you're stacking up four or five of them, you need to add and subtract the deviations because that stack up can be legit, kind of like how a really good indicator, excuse me, micrometer, that's a one inch mic actually has really terrible
00:26:29
Speaker
accuracy values across the full range compared to what the tool is able to measure. So if you're measuring a 0.8 inch feature, you really need to zero it on a 0.8 inch gauge block or a gauge pin because I don't want to quote this without having the paperwork in front of me, but it's a gross amount of deviation across the full travel. Interesting. And you can physically see that with gauge blocks to compare with.
00:26:59
Speaker
I can't speak to that. We measure a lot of half inch features for my devices, so we zero or check them on deltronics that way. But no, it's not like we use quantum mics. Those things are amazing. When they're zeroed out and I go to a half inch nominal deltronics gauge pins, which is 10th gauge pins, the quantum mics are always within 50 millions as we're using them as a hand tool. So for us, we're not doing more than that. Yeah, yeah, fine.
00:27:30
Speaker
Yeah. Maybe one of those things where the range from the manufacturer's range could be up to this much. Maybe most of them aren't, but they still say that. Fair. It's that whole tolerance range again, right? Yeah. I was looking at the set of engagements and there's different grades. There's grade B, grade A, grade one, two, something like that.
00:27:48
Speaker
My next step is to look at what all those mean, which one's which. But I did find a certification for a grade B set, which I think is the crappiest set you can get. And it was like 50 millionths plus or minus, which is not bad. And that's that's like you can get a Char's full set for like 200 bucks or something.
Manufacturing Tolerances and Quality Control
00:28:08
Speaker
So while that is tempting, I also, you know, I like nice stuff. Yeah. And the point of a gauge block is to be within millions.
00:28:17
Speaker
So it's accurate. So it's the standard. It's the most accurate thing in your shop, physical item kind of thing, if they're the right gauge. But I mean, you can now go down. Are you doing this at whatever it is, 68.2 degrees? Yeah, exactly. Are there temperature gradients in your shop? After you touch the gauge block, are you allowing the temperature to come back down? I mean, we can get into a long conversation about all flaws in this process. Yeah. But it is fun.
00:28:50
Speaker
While finish your thing, I'm changing. Me too slightly, but then you can go. Putting a tenths indicator on a precision straight edge that's big enough to hold an indicator with a mag base and then just turning it around and like rotating it in the air like you're trying to turn a birthday present over to unwrap it from the other side. If you can do that slow enough to kind of watch the indicator needle, you can watch gravity
00:29:09
Speaker
It is fun, right?
00:29:17
Speaker
pull it around. And like that to me is such a great example of everything's a wet noodle, you know, yep, yep. Everything is forever.
00:29:27
Speaker
for our saga pens, because the mechanism, the click button, we're actually holding really tight tolerances and really tight surface finishes on that. So the past week or so, I've been deep diving into what we're actually doing, because I've sort of been hands off on it for quite a while. And we've had a couple issues pop up, whether it's assemblies that aren't going together or surface finishes that are rough, that it's given me the opportunity. And I've had a lot of fun with diving into
00:29:55
Speaker
everything that's going on inside that mechanism again and kind of questioning the tolerance ranges and bands that I had set for it a while ago. I was like, why is that tolerance plus or minus a foul, but that one's like three-tenths and they don't stack up properly. If one's at the min and the other's at the max, it's not going to be good.
00:30:19
Speaker
I'm still doing that, and I need to sit down and compare everything and figure out what the ranges need to be. But I've learned now what critical tolerances affect what result. If this one's too big, then the button won't go down all the way. Or if this one's too small, then it doesn't lock. And if you push on the tip too hard like you're writing, like you're angry kind of thing, the tip will come back. The ink will retract.
00:30:46
Speaker
That's one of the failures that we have sometimes where it's like the mechanism is not locking it on enough. It's on figuring out all these tolerance ranges to do that. It's actually quite a tight feature on some of these parts.
00:31:03
Speaker
But I'm having a lot of fun with it. And it's kind of helped me dive into this whole gauge block metrology like surface finish RA thing all over again, which I love. Love, love, love. Are those tornos parts or knock? Both. Oh, interesting. Yep. Yeah, the knock makes the clip, the tube, which we're not having a problem with the tube, and the slider, that's the little ring that you pull back to release the mechanism on the outside.
00:31:29
Speaker
Okay. And that slider ring, um, I don't think we're holding very tight tolerances on, but now that I've seen the mechanism, I did split view, you know, sectional analysis and fusion. I'm seeing what happens when it goes up. The balls do this. That surface is much more critical than I originally thought it was. Got it. And, you know, if we're holding a thou or more of tolerance, it needs to be tighter than that. And, uh, yeah. Is the knockup for that? Like, is that? I think so. Okay.
00:31:59
Speaker
Some of it is strategy, the way the toolpaths are need to be tweaked. There's a part where it's a full corner radius and I want to take it into a chamfer and lead off the part. That'll be a good one. Just little tweaks are going to make a big difference to the consistency of the part. This whole concept of interchangeable parts where if you make everything within your tolerance bands and you trust your measurement styles, then everything should fit with everything and give you the results you want.
00:32:28
Speaker
And in playing with all this is putting together, you know, dozens of different mechanisms and switching parts around and feeling them and listening to them and like looking under the microscope.
00:32:38
Speaker
I happened upon one assembly that was, it met all my criteria. It was absolutely perfect. It felt good. It did everything I wanted it to. So I'm like, I'm taking this one for my pen and now this is my gold standard and I'm going to measure everything and I'm going to figure out what works and then how to deviate away from there in certain ways. What's your plus or minus from that, but that's my zero, you know, and this is my.
00:33:03
Speaker
We've talked about that and frankly have not really implemented this well. We're coming back to that surface finish on the Mod Vice products. It's a subjective thing and it's a frog boiling in water because if you're sitting there pulling them off, you don't see the, okay, this is what we love and this is perfectly good cherry finish versus like, oh man, this thing is foggy or streaky a little. What we've talked about is
00:33:31
Speaker
you know, super gluing or building like a shadow box thing that could live with the setups and tooling where it's like, okay, this is good. This is okay, but starting to fade. And this is now where we would want to say, replace the inserts as a way for the operator to just, it's such an obvious thing to do.
00:33:49
Speaker
I have a good answer for why we have it. Yeah, we've started doing that for some things, like the starburst milling pattern on the rask. Well, sometimes when the tool gets dull, it kind of looks hazy and fuzzy in certain areas. So we've got one sticky tack to the front of our loading area beside the curtain. So that's good. And then I mean, you suggested a couple of years ago for us, when we have a knife that is like the perfect one,
00:34:15
Speaker
to keep it as the reference. The way it feels, the way it sounds, the way it clicks, the way it locks, the way it everything. But there's a cost involved with that. It's like a fillable product. I don't want to sit on it too long. We could rotate it through every month or something like that, but the point of having a standard is that it's a standard. It's an asset. I mean, you can make more, right?
00:34:40
Speaker
Okay, I have a question for you on probing. This should be simpler to isolate a little bit better, but I'm just wondering if we have a really long probe on the Akuma right now, the horizontal. I'm gonna guess it's five inches long, carbon fiber with a larger shank and a larger tip. If I had to guess, it's a four and a half millimeter shank with a five or six millimeter tip.
00:35:07
Speaker
But again, quite long. And I'm wondering if that length is causing some kind of going back to that, like, hey, two tenths variation isn't a big deal, but I don't want to throw away two tenths of variation if I don't have to. The simple test, I guess, would be to just start re probing the same part and seeing how it moves. I've done that casually. It seems to only move one, maybe two tenths, which maybe that just answered my question. But
00:35:38
Speaker
I do measure a gauge block, measure a no perfect surface. And if it measures small, then your probes wrong or something, or there could be some other reason. But if, um, if the thing is deflecting cause it's so long, you know, you want to assume that, oh, this is how it came. So it's meant to be.
00:35:58
Speaker
It's meant to be perfect, but our job is to question everything and to understand the how and the why. The other thing you could do is you could slow down your probing speeds by like half or more, the actual touch speed, which might make it more accurate, might deflect it a little bit less. I've read the Renishaw book on the, what do they call it? The word for that, like the interrupt. I can't think of it. Yeah. The skip signal. Thank you. Yes.
00:36:25
Speaker
If it's, I'm not worried about accuracy here at all. I'm worried about repeatability. Because we have either a wear comp or a sock to leave setting so that I don't really care. If it measures a one inch gauge box two tenths over, I don't care about that. I wanted to make sure it's doing it every time the same, which you would think it should.
00:36:45
Speaker
So that's what I want to go play with because I suspect, I just have to think like it's a, it's a triangle. It's a hypotenuse as it breaks that flexure or whatever, however, activates the, the inside of the probe. Yeah. It's like the three arms that kind of tripod onto there and deflect to lose contact. So if that shaft is flexing different amounts as it's being in different directions,
00:37:12
Speaker
I don't know. Yeah. Just wondering, like on the bloom probes, their standard is to always probe on the same point of the ball. It'll rotate 90 degrees in a hole. It'll rotate 90 again and 90 again, 90 again, so that you're always hitting the same side. Whereas at least some of my Renishaws keep a probe stationary and it just does a four point touch inside the bore. And you can compensate for that with things like run out and
00:37:38
Speaker
offset calculations and things like that. Is one way better than the other? I don't know. You could also just make a loop that probe the same fixed surface sideways 100 times. That's what I mean. You just have it right to all the variables. Right to the 600s or whatever you're not using. Just 01, 02, 03, 04. That's a great idea. You should be able to get
00:38:06
Speaker
like six digits of probe results, whether it's not that accurate. Yeah, what's the pattern? Yeah. When I'm struggling to visualize these things, I usually go to the extreme. If we had a one-inch probe length that was all solid carbide, sure it weighs more, so it's going to be affected by gravity because it's a horizontal, but that doesn't matter. You would think that that would be much more of a
00:38:33
Speaker
a little less deviation in how that functions versus if you took a two foot long carbon fiber probe tip. And I've actually heard of probes that are longer than a football, like crazy length probe. If you think about that, I mean, you're actually having to deflect that probe tip
00:38:51
Speaker
a lot more linear distance to actuate the, it's the rise over the run. It's the rise of the triangle that's causing the probe to actuate. So that kind of tells me that Syria has some validity. Interesting. That sounds like carbon fiber is pretty stiff. Carbide is pretty stiff, but we've both seen carbide bend.
00:39:18
Speaker
Oh yeah. Before it breaks, like there's a, there's a bending point and carbon fiber is also can be flexible, but can also be very stiff. Like.
00:39:25
Speaker
Are your probes, most of our host probes are that white ceramic, I believe, or do you know what you use? Most of mine are tiny, so they're carbide shaft. Okay. I don't think I have any ceramic ones anymore because I've got like two millimeter tip, one millimeter tip, I think maybe a three millimeter in the Maury with a carbide shaft. Got it. Yeah, I'm pretty sure ceramic is like
00:39:52
Speaker
Doesn't bend at all, just breaks. Whereas carbon fiber, I'm not going to try flexing it, but carbon fiber flexes, right? The benefit is it's lighter weight than ceramic. Can you get a ceramic tip? They're like a tube, right? A tube is longer than a solid.
00:40:08
Speaker
I've been buying them from Qmark, which I don't really know those guys anymore, but we did go out and film their four or five years ago, really cool video tour. So I might call them up and see if they can validate this before I spend some bucks on another tip. Or another three hours of your time just theorizing when they can answer your question with experience. Actually, that's exactly what I should do is write a quick program that probes the
Machine Setup and Shop Improvements
00:40:31
Speaker
same feature 50 times, writes it to the variables, deprints that out or whatever, and then switch it to
00:40:36
Speaker
You would probably have a program here that I could just steal real quick. A short stubby one or something. Bingo. Yeah. Interesting. But the Kern is too busy for you to use it. I don't really want to take Okuma time. Right. You have to find that balance of like, this is important. I'm going to take the time. It's going to get done. We will benefit from it long term.
00:40:59
Speaker
So actually on that note, one of the things we've realized is, and it is a great problem to have, but we have been pushed mostly on the horizontal, some on the live device machines, which are the VF2 and the VF2 IT. But we've been pushed a lot this summer to make the Langmuir products for that machine that we're providing fixturing for. Right.
00:41:23
Speaker
And so their order with us was just about what our normal sales would have been, I think, of thinking about it on most of the products. So we kind of had to double up, basically, on a lot of the products. And so that has put some stress in mostly a good way. And look, we've crushed it. With
00:41:45
Speaker
Few exceptions. We've been there. We're going to be, I mean, on a huge order like this across multiple months, we're going to be probably a couple of weeks late on a couple of the minor side accessories. I'm not worried about that, but I bring that up because from a kind of operations and planning standpoint, we're looking at the end of the tunnel here. So the light at the end of the tunnel. So come two, three weeks from now, we can slow down a lot and still be making the just in time products we need.
00:42:17
Speaker
It's been a lot over the last few months. Yeah.
00:42:22
Speaker
What do you do today? Today, so I was just talking with the speedio sales distributor that I'm working with. They have the machine. I got pictures of the machine today. I got to see it. Nice. Sweet. It does exist. It says Grimsmoor on it. Love it. The guys were joking here in the shop about putting a vinyl wrap on it, red, and calling it little bro.
00:42:48
Speaker
That's hilarious. The burn, B-E-R-N. Yeah. Oh yeah. There you go. But yeah, the distributor is currently working on making the auto door for the Aroa. Yeah. And so I had a long phone call with them yesterday and today about how they're going to configure that. Like, is it going to go up? Is it going to go back? Is it going to go down?
00:43:10
Speaker
Is it going to do what? And there's ups and downs to all of those. And it's not as easy as I thought. Like I thought it would just be pun intended. I thought it would just be a brother option that you just like order it and it comes. But no, it sounds like it's custom made. Either Yamazan in the States will make it or the guys up here are making it for me.
00:43:30
Speaker
So we decided to make it like sliding French doors, like two doors that go side to side, left and right. Cause I only need like a 12 inch opening to get anything I would want through it. And then this way we can do it actually mounted inside the machine enclosure instead of outside. Got it. Save a lot more clearance and it's going to be pretty sweet.
00:43:50
Speaker
Cool. The guy was saying it's a removable panel that he's removed and he's going to replace with the door that he's making. So he's like, I'm trying as hard as I can not to modify the machine in any way whatsoever.
00:44:04
Speaker
So he's like, I don't need the machine anymore. Do you want the machine now? And I can build this and we'll install it at your place later. I'm like, yeah, I think I do. Because we've got some weeks of setting up and configuring and programming and planning and testing and things like that. We don't need the Aroa for it, the auto door yet. So maybe I do want it soon. And then we can start picking away at it.
00:44:27
Speaker
Humble pushback though. Have them deliver the machine when it's ready for you to run it. If he has to be in there tearing panels off or... Just a one panel. Yeah, I hear you. But it's electromechanical. You know a lot more about the situation than I do.
00:44:49
Speaker
I've been frustrated plenty of times by situations where then the guy's like, well, I got to charge you for my extra travel time. Or I've got to go back to my shop to get this part or this didn't work. And then I was like, no, dude, you get this machine running. You guys get this machine running, test what you need to, and then send me the, when it's ready to run.
00:45:05
Speaker
Right. Yeah. I mean, I'll clarify that. The thing is we still have, we still have to schedule a row what to come in to wire it all up and configure it. So that's, that's probably weeks from now. Anyway, we still have to schedule bloom to come in and get the pro ball wired in a mountain and things like that all has to happen here. So it's like a lot of work still has to happen here anyway. Okay. Yeah, I hear you.
00:45:28
Speaker
Either way, that's awesome. It's awesome. Yeah. There's cool to see pictures of it and be like, yeah, good. Great. Yeah. What are you up to today?
00:45:41
Speaker
We are dialing in some new parts on the Akuma. Actually, we did a cool posting. I'll save it for next week. So back to production on the horizontal, and then the Vince, Patrick, Alex, Ed, Grant, everybody. Me has been pulling weight to get everything buttoned up for our... Actually, a week from today, we'll be in training.
00:46:05
Speaker
Yeah. Um, so our first training class starts Tuesday. Awesome. Um, the shop, I gotta get a video ready for it. The shop looks great. The epoxy floors aren't happening until after the first class. We'll have to move some of the machines to the other side. No big deal. Um, but I mean, we have cranked, we've repainted it. We've got the compressor installed. We got lines and airlines installed. Um, machines moved over there. The classroom set up new laptops, TV artwork hung in the classroom. Like it's, it's, uh, yeah. Oh.
00:46:35
Speaker
Yeah, I'll say I don't I don't want I don't want sympathy and I've waddle bob around a lot of this on myself. Well, whatever. But I also feel like the point of this podcast is to kind of keep it real and between
00:46:49
Speaker
you know, some unrelated work stuff or unrelated personal stuff and then Judd and then, you know, moving into a second building, getting training classes going on, extra good sales behind things like the Langmuir. It's been a hell of a summer, John. I think that's probably also why last week was so hard on me was,
00:47:09
Speaker
I Feel way better now, which makes me realize it's okay to kind of admit this but there were some points last week where I just thought man I'm I'm been Yeah, I've been grinding for ten years trying to make this happen and it's happening and so yeah actually the good positive takeaway is we talked about this next week as well, but Yet again another
00:47:35
Speaker
reason and event to take a step back and let the team we have do what they do and like, just stop being involved in stuff. We've got, they can do it. It's good. It's hard, but I think you and I both need to do more of that. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. We'll see you next week. All right. Take care.