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Business of Machining - Episode 94
244 Plays7 years ago
THAT STINGS. Verbal agreements feel warm and fuzzy at first but have nasty side effects. While it feels awkward to request a written agreement from a friend or a service provider you've worked with before, be assured; there are far worse consequences.
"Free is the most expensive price you could ever pay for something." Offering "blem" products at a discount to the public initially sounded like the obvious thing to do; however, when customers started relying on blems instead of purchasing a full priced product, it robs your business.
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas...including an Urban Technical Gear pen. That means, someone's in the market for a new pen--eagerly awaiting the commencement of SAGA production.
Nerding Out Level: Business Operation The guys discuss the benefits of FREIGHT SHIPPING.
Alarm Bells The anodizer discovers corrosion on the fixture plates. Will the plates be saved? More importantly, can the SMW team solve the mystery?
After a day-long bearing cage setup, GK is rearing and ready to make tons of them...but there's a problem: Tiny way oil tank runs out way too fast. Production screeches to a halt during the night and at daybreak, with half of the expected quantity in hand, the guys formulate possible solutions for keeping that oil level in check.
Linear Scales and Servo PID Loops Anyone know how it works? Saunders is curious to find out whether the scales or the servo's loops take precedence.
ERP. DO YOU EVEN KANBAN, BRO? If you think procurement is the same as purchasing, think again. Grimsmo continues to utilize ProShop for purchase orders while Saunders scratches his head at his current kanban problem.
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Transcript
Introduction and Off-Air Chats
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining episode 94. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. Good morning. Good morning, sir. How are you? I'm better now. That's funny. Saunders and I just, yeah, we just had like a, I don't know, 20 minute chat about the things we don't want to air on the podcast necessarily. And I feel a lot better.
00:00:26
Speaker
I think we, well, I don't think, I know we have done 94 recorded podcasts and I think maybe two or three times we've ended up getting just, normally we just hit record literally within 30 seconds of launching Zencaster and so forth. But it's actually, it's funny. You really helped me a little in Vegas when we had
00:00:49
Speaker
whatever that was for three 30. It's like, it's like a Las Vegas. What do you call the meal in Las Vegas at three 30 in the afternoon when you're eating and maybe having a beer, but, uh, it was good to just sit down and just two of us and talk for awhile and then, uh, getting you through some stuff this morning. It's good though. Yeah, that was really nice. Yep. Good friend. I don't ever.
00:01:07
Speaker
I don't ever root for drama or root for not. It's inevitable. Energetic subjects, but I also, if this podcast turns into this happy go lucky, everything is perfect in the world and that's hogwash.
Importance of Written Agreements
00:01:20
Speaker
Exactly. Because yeah, the truth is, I mean, I'd say most of the time things with me are great and then sometimes they aren't and that's life and how you deal with it and how you manage it is part of that. Right.
00:01:36
Speaker
I'm a teddy bear. I avoid conflict at all costs. I will avoid that hard conversation for days or weeks or months just because I'm a wuss like that.
00:01:51
Speaker
Sometimes you just have to take. Right. It's funny because John and I both got bit this week by effectively the same thing, which is you you just in business, you just don't do verbal agreements even when they're with past people you've worked with or friends or acquaintances or it's just in my example. Luckily, it wasn't that big of a deal, but we had a some service, some some relatively significant work done with an existing person that we've worked with.
00:02:19
Speaker
And they were like, hey, do you need a formal contract written up for this? Otherwise, we're kind of good to go. Let's keep working. And you're kind of feeling good. You're getting this project kicked off. And all I needed was a, because somebody else is now telling me, you really need to make sure that they have a written statement that they are not claiming future ownership of the work they're doing for you, basically a standard release. And that was clearly the understanding and the implied relationship. But the reality is what I just said, the understanding and the implied relationship.
00:02:49
Speaker
has no meaning or bearing. And so I had to go back and say, Hey, can you guys just sign a thing that clarifies this? And while it wasn't a problem, it's unprofessional and it's awkward because you're now sort of, it's, you're sort of saying, well, why do you need this now? Like, what are you, what am I giving up? What are you needing this for? And it's just not how you do things. Yeah. Like why are you clarifying this now? Right. What's going on? Do you have an ulterior motive? Exactly.
Risks of Informal Agreements
00:03:15
Speaker
So the sooner you can establish
00:03:19
Speaker
Basically a he said she said the better so that you don't come back later you know halfway through the project or after the project and then you go well he said this I don't remember him saying that and you know whether it has to do there must be some magic number of like I don't know anything over a thousand dollars yada yada you know what I mean like inconsequential things are kind of no big deal but at a certain level it becomes real important and not hard
00:03:49
Speaker
Right. And I would probably argue with you. I mean, I understand the point you can't monitor, you can't document necessarily every little thing, but sometimes it's not the money. Sometimes it's, you know, this is silly, but, um, if we spent $75 for the business of machining logo and the podcast, you know, it gets big and then somebody comes back and says, well, I created that logo. I want royalties off of it. Or this is just a crazy example, but it's kind of like, I'm not, no, you know, like that was never part of the deal, but
00:04:19
Speaker
Yeah, what was the deal, right? If you hired somebody on Upwork and you paid them $75 done and dusted, like contract over. But if a friend of a friend did it for free because they're buddies, and then that's when it gets sticky.
00:04:36
Speaker
So somebody just, I think I saw this in a movie actually, or maybe it was, I'm watching the wire right now on like the old HBO. It's good. It's very different than my normal life. Um, but somebody who's like, somebody was like, free is the most expensive price you can ever pay for something. Yeah. Ooh, that's deep. Yeah. Um,
00:04:59
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. The whole, like, no strings attached and... Right, right. What are you going to do? Are you going to scratch my back later or...? Exactly. Oh, it's so... Right. Yeah. That's why I've stopped trading for things. Yep. Like, you know, like, I'll sell you a tool and trade for a knife and oh, yeah, that's a good idea. No, just... Just pay for it. Pay for it. Like, cash for cash. Yeah. Or at least value for value. Right.
00:05:29
Speaker
But man, yeah, it gets really tricky. And you know, it's especially in the beginnings of business, not so much now, but a couple years ago, I remember this used to come up quite a lot like, like, I'll just tell you this and you can owe me that later or put me on the list for a knife or owe you this and then you feel kind of guilty because you haven't paid them back yet or you haven't given them that thing. It's you don't realize in the moment how long term effect kind of just nags at you. Yeah.
00:05:56
Speaker
It's funny. One of my first big, that I remember, big blowups with my strike mark partner was he wanted to be able to basically buy targets, assembled, machined, assembled, finished good targets at our cash cost of materials. Which was from your company. Yeah, exactly.
00:06:16
Speaker
And he wanted to do so for his personal use or to give to family and friends for gifts or in the spirit of growing the business. It wasn't as if he was implying that he was going to spin them off at a profit. But my response was no, because there's a lot more work that goes into it. The business has to occur beyond just the cash cost of materials. But it's also like at this point in time, it's just the two of us.
00:06:41
Speaker
just pay for the target. You're making half the money and I can do the same. We can then buy as many as we want without worrying about that. It's something that can scale up if you have more people involved. I was fine with a discount off of the retail price, but looking at it that way, not this idea that you can just basically take a business. It wouldn't have been sustainable. You could argue that it was a
00:07:08
Speaker
nitpicky thing, but I would say, no, that's a fundamental concept of just don't rob from the business. You want to buy it, pay, we can get a 10% or 20% discount off retail, but buy the things. Gosh, he was furious about that. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard Elon Musk says he pays full price for his own cars. Oh, really? He can afford it, but also, it's his business. If you wanted to take a car, he probably could.
00:07:37
Speaker
But it's his mentality. It's like, no, I'm going to pay full price. Nobody gets it for free. Nobody gets it at a discount, really. And the way we do it now, every now and then, we have an uncle or a cousin or a brother or something that you want to give a knife to, but we have this pile of bad parts.
00:07:57
Speaker
that I don't want out in the world publicly. So we call them friends and family parts. Yeah, got it. And usually we label it as friends and family. And I'm totally fine with that. Like these are parts that are going to be sold for retail. So it's kind of that little loophole that it's like, well, either they sit there and do nothing or they go to my uncle, you know, and I'm cool with
Balancing Business and Personal Gifting
00:08:15
Speaker
that. But I didn't realize you ever like ever make a mistake. You know, hilarious. Um,
00:08:24
Speaker
No, I didn't realize you ever allowed consciously allowed a blend because I'm assuming that your mistakes are minor compared to what most people mean. It's not like the knife has a giant gouge mark through the side of the handle. I'm assuming that these are relatively minor blends there. Yeah. Cool. That you're assuming that I wouldn't even finish a knife with those blends.
00:08:43
Speaker
No, no, no. Well, I actually talk about good lessons learned. We don't do BLEMS anymore. Number one, we've gotten much better at not making BLEMS, which is a good thing. But also, we had a problem of then people would just say, well, I'm not going to buy their product. I'm going to just sit until BLEMS comes up for sale. And that's not fair to the business, not me personally, just to the business because the business should have a relationship with its customers when they need a product, they buy it, right? Should be priced fairly, a good value.
00:09:11
Speaker
And you're always going to get some bargain hunters and actually today's probably today should be black Friday, right? So we are going to do a discounts sale, probably the only one we do throughout the year. So we'll offer a little sale, but otherwise no, like the blend thing doesn't work, but for a little bit different reasons. Sorry. Good. So with us, we don't, we don't offer them publicly. I mean,
00:09:33
Speaker
friends and family means literally friends and family like you or my uncle or my mom or something like that. Right? Yeah. Actually, which are people that that probably wouldn't buy one anyway, they're more like a, you know, gift. Right? No, I bought Hey, I bought my Norseman. You did. Yeah, I appreciate. Yeah.
00:09:53
Speaker
And I actually have a... And that's why yours is perfect, not a blem. And I know it's perfect because, John, later... I didn't know you nearly as well when we did this. We weren't doing the podcast and all that when I bought the Norseman. And later, still didn't know you as well as I do now, but later, you sent me a couple of handles and an old blade just to play with for tooling and material testing. And one of the handles is the blemmed SMW logo. Yep.
00:10:23
Speaker
I practiced your logo on that, on a BLEM handle. Yeah. Because I didn't want to practice it on a perfect finish knife. So yeah. It's awesome. Anyways, I lost my urban, what's Kelvin's business name? Urban technical gear.
00:10:38
Speaker
Yeah. Awesome pen carried it for, jeez, year, year and a half, loved it. And I lost it in Vegas. So on that note, I'd love it if you could get the saga production cookie so I can next week so I can purchase my pen.
Efficient Freight Shipping
00:10:55
Speaker
I'm looking forward to it. Good. Awesome. How's that going? Yeah. On that note, we're currently, it was awesome. When I was in Vegas, you know, for four or five days,
00:11:06
Speaker
Angelo was keeping things humming, kept the mill humming, kept the lathe running. Our big order material finally came in. It's so funny. If you put your fingers together in a big circle, we bought this much titanium round bar. It came in this crate probably three and a half feet long by two feet wide by two feet tall, like two by four wood, not plywood. The crate probably weighs 100 plus pounds.
00:11:33
Speaker
So like the antelope needed two people to like, uh, deliver this off the truck and carry it in. And he's like, wow, John got a lot of titanium. And then he opens up the top and he grabs it with one hand. It just picks up the titanium in one hand. And he's like, why wouldn't you just send it in a poster tube? I don't know. That's what every other metal supplier does. Like this was ordered directly from Carpenter titanium. They make it. Um, I don't know, man.
00:12:00
Speaker
They also get rid of their old crates by sending them to customers. Exactly. I think you're absolutely right. This is a really nice, heavy box. We're going to put some wheels on it and use it for something. Oh, there you go. But if you pay for shipping per pound,
00:12:17
Speaker
Like literally two thirds of the weight would have been the box itself, if not more. Yeah. But I'll tell you, we're starting to learn this, which is kind of exciting to nerd out on a business operation level. Freight shipping is way cheaper than you think as a layman. So when you start doing it in bulk, like shipping a lot, and we're not shipping that much, but we've negotiated good rates. I think on pallets. Yeah.
00:12:46
Speaker
Basically, we can ship a fixture plate with the crate and a big plate would weigh like 200 pounds. I can ship it to the West Coast for under $200. Retail freight, if you just walked into a freight place, it would probably be between $700 and $900 to do that, which is part of the freight industry shenanigans where our discount is like 78% or 82% or something.
Managing Inventory and Quality Control
00:13:13
Speaker
So that you're talking about retail versus commercial freight? No, I'm talking about the fact that I have an account. So it's actually, it's kind of cool. It's like instead of pulling up to the gas station, like here in the US, everyone just pays the pump price. But a lot of companies have negotiated prices where they pay their own negotiated rate with the provider. Really? Yeah, you can. For like a commercial gas filler up where you have the card and everything. Yeah, exactly.
00:13:36
Speaker
Which makes sense, right? And so when we do, and so that was actually a stress point of getting Shopify integrated with the LTL freight app to quote certain products freight and certain ground. And then if obviously once you have a freight package, you're not going to send anything ground because it can all go with the freight shipment. So we finally got it sorted out. Do you ship to the customer freight? Yeah.
00:14:01
Speaker
We just launched those Haas plates. We've got Robo drill and brother plates up on the site as well now. Those are all too big to go by anything other than freight. They have to go freight. What about the aluminum plate? We don't do aluminum in the bigger sizes. Okay. Yeah. We do the aluminum for the Torvox and the smaller ones. Sure. Fun fact, super stressed.
00:14:25
Speaker
Gosh, we had this recipe nailed down and then yesterday I got a phone call that sounds like what happened was, well, I don't know what the mistake was. No one's fault, but nevertheless lesson learned. The plates
00:14:41
Speaker
Have some corrosion on the surface and the anodizer discovered this and so we think it could be from Tap water on the plate top as a as a as a tap water got on them But it could also be a whole another variety of things like did they get packed wet? Did they we change we packed them with paper? Liners instead of cardboard did they say that the anodizer longer than normal sealed up some other little nuances to it and
00:15:10
Speaker
to figure out, but very stressful, very disappointed. I think they'll all be okay because they're going to send them back and we can just deck them off like one thou.
Improving Production Efficiency
00:15:20
Speaker
The thickness tolerance is very not important relative to the parallelism and flatness, but stressful nevertheless. Anodizing takes so long and is sensitive and hard coding and tolerancing that we're going to keep it for the tormach plates, but going forward,
00:15:39
Speaker
We're focusing on the steel and hopefully by buying more steel will get better pricing and we'll see cool. Yeah Yeah, I was stressed though. I mean it was it was different kind of stress. It wasn't the Overwhelmed kind of stress where you just want to throw your hands up like I can't deal with this It was more just like wow I've got like we've got back orders right now and we were relying on this to come back today with with 27 plates to go out and now
00:16:08
Speaker
not only are they not ready but i gotta pay extra freight to get back here and i gotta rerun them which takes machine time. And it's not i mean i our mistake but it wasn't as if it was. We were trying to cut corners to be reckless right like it was worse yeah i guess i just happened right. Yeah so yeah.
00:16:34
Speaker
Yeah. Sorry, you were saying so so stuff ran well when you were gone. You got Yeah, so we've been banging out. We got the titanium rod finally. So we've been banging out knife screws and spacers. And now we're doing the plastic bearing cages with the 10 holes for the balls. And man, that took the majority of yesterday to set up and get running right. Wow. It's a pain in the butt.
00:17:02
Speaker
So we're like, okay, it's working great. Let's just make thousands of them. Um, so we're about, I don't know, probably 200 parts in right now. Um, I ran the lathe all night. I was expecting it to still be running when I came in because I did some quick timing calculation. I'm like, okay, 224 parts per bar, three and a half minute runtime, 12 and a half hour run. Yeah. It should still be there when I get it. Um,
00:17:26
Speaker
Except there was a lubrication alarm halfway through the night because the way oil like runs out. And then it stops everything. So I'm like, no, that's like half the run I was expecting just because nobody checked the oil yesterday, or it ran through it. The oil tank is like a quart. It's like so small. And it runs through it pretty quickly. Hack that. Yeah, I'm thinking about it. So either like an auto feed to like fill it or just a bigger tank.
00:17:54
Speaker
Because it's dumb. Yeah, I'm no fluid dynamics person. But that whole property of water that maintains equilibrium, shouldn't you be able to just put a second tank right next to it and it'll always maintain the same height or something? Yeah, I'm going to have to think about that. Because it's a problem. Especially, I mean, imagine if we got a bar feeder and we ran this thing nonstop, that would happen every day.
00:18:19
Speaker
Yeah, or you could do, I mean, this is not, that's a better solution to increase the, well, let's be all lean analytical. You could increase the reservoir, which is sort of having the same problem less frequently, right? Because you could still walk away the night that it happened to be low. And sometimes making things only be required to be checked in three month intervals is worse than checking them every week because you just forget.
00:18:46
Speaker
You could do a sensor, pretty easy to do, like an Arduino light sensor that just checks when the level gets low, not disrupted. Oh, yeah. Doesn't, go ahead. That's a great idea. And then what if we do like a flashing white light that just anybody can see? Yeah, could send you a text message. Something simple. Or an email. Although I don't want it to send just one person an email. You send it to everybody. Put a task into. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah, that's a cool idea. An Arduino light sensor would be easy because you can clearly see through. Sure.
00:19:15
Speaker
Now, we're like, we just need our cleaners can fail. Is that getting too complicated? It's one more device. It's got to be powered up, blah, blah, blah. Or you just have sky every night. Check it. I mean, literally like just routine. To some extent, that's I think that stuff just has to happen. And we tried to like Sky and Angelo are pretty good about checking the cooling levels and the oil level. But it's like,
00:19:40
Speaker
You run the lathe for a while and then everybody's used to checking it and then you don't run it for a while and people get used to not checking it and then you run it a lot and then people forget. Right. Which is kind of the five gallon reservoir problem. It helps it but not really. That would make it worse less often. You may still want to increase the reservoir. It sounds like it's undersized for a lathe that just eats oil.
00:20:02
Speaker
Yeah, it does. But so once we've made a healthy amount of bearings, then I think we're good for a while and we can finally make pens.
Strategies for Workflow Improvement
00:20:12
Speaker
Okay, awesome. That's really good to hear. So super excited about that. That's going to help a lot. It's going to bring in a new product, new revenue stream. Very excited about that. The fixtures that I had Amish make came in a week or two ago.
00:20:27
Speaker
They look amazing. Awesome. He's a good machinist. We give him a hard time. He's a very good machinist. He does wonders with that. I know. He can machine aluminum far better than I can and it's clear just looking at the parts. Wow, these are really nice.
00:20:50
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm super excited. A little bit of like we got to press in these locating pins and dowels. Okay. And we're going to thread in these threaded adapters that I made. And if they don't sit perfectly flush, then the next piece going on top doesn't sit flat. So we're getting a little bit of like rocking on the center palette that goes on top. So Angelo and I are kind of going back and forth trying to figure out, okay, what's sticking up? Where? How do we fix it?
00:21:15
Speaker
Got it. And that's probably not Amish's fault. That's just like a combination of parts put together. Like these bushings from McMaster are 70 thou lip, not the 65 that I thought they were or something, right? So yeah, my goal for today's Wednesday, my goal for Friday is to have two of his fixtures on the machine running at the same time. We've only ever had one running at a time.
00:21:43
Speaker
Oh, because you have two, but you hot swap? No, I have one. I swear you had two. Wow. Nope, I've never had two. That's going to be a huge gain just even going to hot swapping one. Hot swapping one and then running two at night. Yes. It's going to be amazing. Yes. And then we got two new orange vices about two weeks ago. Very excited about that. The new gen ones look amazing.
00:22:11
Speaker
So the goal very probably for next week or the week after is to get four vices on the table or pallets on the table to move all production to nighttime run and profit. Okay, too aggressive. Let's back that down to hit reasonable goals, right? Because you're going to run the first dual palette during the day, right? Yeah. There to watch it. You should.
00:22:39
Speaker
Well, yeah, of course. And I'm not too concerned about it because we're running so much steady production right now that like I know what I know what it does. OK. Yeah. Your cam is changing. Tooling is changing. I would be there. It's not. It's the same. I mean, it's.
00:22:58
Speaker
The way I'm going to loop the program is I'm basically going to run the program once, rewind it to the beginning, step over eight inches, whatever it is, run it again on the new offset. I've got to watch the transition for sure. Fixtures, it's a cam issue, it's a machine issue, but it's also a fixture. Fixtures have behavior. Fixture one will always act a little different than fixture two. Yeah.
00:23:22
Speaker
You know, going from two to three is less crazy, but going from one to two, I would assume that's why we're stepping it. We're going from one to two and then I'll be a lot more confident to go from two to four. Right. Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. And my, my raspberry PI tool life monitoring, Google sheet program, custom solution is working almost flawlessly. There's a little bit of, um,
00:23:49
Speaker
upload, download, mount, unmount USB issues on the Pi side that we're just trying to finalize because it literally has to, the Maury writes to the Pi and then it has to unmount from the Maury.
00:24:06
Speaker
to be able to sync to Google Drive and then mount again to the Maury. And it does that every minute. And if the Maury tries to write, well, it's a mounted, then it's a problem. And such a minor, that last little 1%. Other than that, it's freaking amazing. Is there a way, like it's a debounce. I wonder if there's a way to check state before it tries to mount, unmount, or something. Because I kind of know what you're saying. That's a good idea. I don't know. It's outside of my realm, for sure. Yeah.
00:24:35
Speaker
Yeah, so the sky has been really good about digging through that writing little high scripts and things like that. So he's doing it on that side, writing the Maury fanic scripts to make this all happen. You're lathe, you're Nakamura, the oil, way oil consumption should be correlated to spindle on time, not machine on time. So you could also consider doing it that way.
00:25:05
Speaker
Cause you could be conservative, right? You, you just want to fill it up when it's, you know, 40% left or something, 30% left. Um, just an idea. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a big deal if, like, if I leave at 6 PM and I look at the level and it's at a third and I'm like, Oh, that's probably fine, but it's going to run for 12 hours at night. It's probably going to eat through it. Like, you know, 12 hours of run is a lot of run. So, um,
00:25:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's like it needs to be full before I go home. I didn't think to check. I'm literally editing this morning the coolant hack we did on the Haas machines where it shuts off the coolant ring when you're Z home, which means you can use the coolant hose without having to manually turn a knob. It's a bit of a pain to reach and it's just annoying.
00:25:56
Speaker
But one of the things i'm proud of in that is that we started thinking arduino's or pcs are more complicated solutions and we ended up finding something that was incredibly simple and fail safe. Using a normally open solenoid so our system fails in any way the result is the corn is still on.
00:26:15
Speaker
So the analogy here would be instead of using an Arduino with a light sensor, you could potentially do something without where you have, I don't know what the switch type thing would be or maybe not exist without using Arduino. But if you think about it, if you had the light beam shooting across your way oil container, it would be normally
00:26:37
Speaker
open because the light beam can't go across the whey oil, right? But then as soon as the whey oil drops too low, it closes the switch. And as soon as that switch is closed, it just turns a light on, a red light. That way you just can't, you don't have to get complex with arduino's that are computers that aren't necessarily long-term reliable. The whey oil isn't the most critical thing, but I admire simple designs.
00:27:02
Speaker
Exactly. Something that's like you don't need a lot of programming to say, if light sensor is active, it's fine. If it's not active, light the light up. That's a simple circuit. No logic involved. If there's room to put a float valve inside of there, then you don't have to worry about the light sensor. I don't know if you want to put a float valve inside of there. It sounds like this thing's the size of a thimble, so I'm not sure you want to have room, but something like that as well. I'll have to check.
00:27:31
Speaker
In the cap, there's probably vertical room to do like a vertical float sensor. Like a cylinder stack floating thingy. That could work. Yeah, I'll play with that. And then with your coolant shutter offer, what if you just had a mechanical flow valve with like a lever switch?
00:27:53
Speaker
That's just on or off. Say again? A mechanical flow valve. So like you put the tubing to it and cooling goes through it. Except when it hits the limit, like this arm on the valve, it just shuts off. Interesting. Like a guillotine. Sorry. Basically, when it Z goes home, it literally physically moves a
00:28:20
Speaker
thing in the way. A stopper in the way. And you know how ball valve works, right? Just a ball valve where the handle is tied to your z-axis somehow. That's actually correct points for being simpler than I had realized. I'm not sure how I would... It seems like there may be some more mechanical difficulties to that. And one of the things I like about our system is the solenoid is down
00:28:47
Speaker
low and easy to get to. We didn't modify the machine in any way. I have no problem modifying the machine because that's what you own it for. Make it do what you need it to do. It's always nice when you don't have to go hacking in and drilling holes. The solenoid should last hundreds of thousands of cycles. Yeah, exactly. You're separating the valve and the sensor in two different locations. Exactly.
00:29:16
Speaker
switches at the top of the Z column, has a little adjustment built into it, and it just picks up a piece of sheet metal when it lifts up. It comes down and closes the valve when it should shut it off. It was fun. Cool. What else you got to work on? I'm trying to.
00:29:38
Speaker
curious to see if you know anything about this or maybe viewers do, but when you step up to,
Benefits of Linear Scales in Machining
00:29:43
Speaker
well, on machine tools that have linear scales or any scales of any sort, so I'm a
00:29:50
Speaker
No enough just to be dangerous. Scales, as I understand it, are generally a glass etched object. I guess you can have other scales that are non-glass, but the ones I think of are glass. The reason they're glass is I think both wear resistance, but also thermal stability.
00:30:09
Speaker
and you can etch really small lines in them. And so you put linear scales on one or many axes because then, as I understand it, your servo no longer... And this is, I guess, what I kind of want to know. Normally servos have, I believe, what's called a PID loop. So it basically says, go to 100.7 revolutions. And it's constantly saying, go a little bit, check to make sure you actually went that far, meaning,
00:30:39
Speaker
there's an encoder on the back of the servo that makes sure the servo is able to rotate that far, which is why if you lost a position or something happened, it would know. I think it's funny because people say servos are better than steppers, and that's not always, I think, true for the reasons people realize because
00:30:56
Speaker
even if a servo, let's say a tool, let's say it hits a hard spot. It's easier to think of this with like, let's say you are machining wood and you hit a knot and it increases the tool pressure and a stepper might, quote unquote, lose steps, but a servo
00:31:11
Speaker
either powers through it or if it loses, quote unquote, it knows it may have lost position, but it has to figure out how to make up for that, which is not always easy if you're not going in a straight line. Anyways, the question here, I guess, is does a machine with linear scales abandon or rather put the PID loop as second to the scales? Because basically, if you have a linear scale, the servo is just going to use the linear scale as the encoder to say,
00:31:38
Speaker
Instead of going 100.7 revolutions, go until you hit this point on the scale or this many tick marks along the scale. Is that what makes them more? I guess that's what I'm trying to understand more. Sure. I actually have no idea. That's a really good question. Yeah, I know almost nothing about linear scales, other than that they're super accurate and all the best machines, you know, above our weight class have. I was going to ask, one of your machines having them? No?
00:32:07
Speaker
Cars don't have them. I think they can be added to most any machine, but at a substantial cost, like tens of thousands of dollars.
Procurement vs. Purchasing
00:32:16
Speaker
And I think some machines don't necessarily need or benefit from them, and I can't really speak to why. And I've heard some people casually make comments like, scales aren't all they're made out to be. So that's kind of one thing to understand. But for sure, when you start looking at bigger machines,
00:32:35
Speaker
where there's more movement in the casting, there's less thermal, there's less intrinsic thermal rigidity because you just have a different profile of a machine or that's spanning a bigger area of the floor. Or you've got more error in the screw. You know, lead screws are not perfect. Ball screws are not perfect. They have error. You think about, it's kind of cool this idea that you can make the glass scale as kind of the perfect device and everything else is just slaved to it.
00:33:01
Speaker
I'm just trying to, Haas actually offers them as an option on the VM6. Really? Yeah. But it's like 15, 20 grand. And I was talking to a machine tool rep for one of the big boy brands. And they were like, oh, we offer them, but we've really never sold one, which kind of surprised me because maybe it's not a good use of the money, right? Maybe the machine's good enough without them. Just trying to learn more about it. Yeah. It's like one of the things I always think of right after IMTS.
00:33:31
Speaker
Yeah. So that's what I'm having fun with. For us, tomorrow is Thanksgiving, so spending time with the family. And I just moved my desk. I've still got my office. Yeah. But I miss being out on the shop floor, being right next to a machine, running little parts, test parts. I just do. And some of the work I want to do coming up
00:33:54
Speaker
I want to be back and forth more and it makes more sense to reintegrate myself in the middle of all this stuff instead of being where I am now. So I'm actually excited about that. Yeah. So it's like my desk is right between my lathe and my middle and in front of everybody and I'm very central. It's got its pluses and minuses. I like it for now.
00:34:19
Speaker
Part of me longs to have a more private office where I can actually get work done and have a quiet conversation on the phone or a podcast or something while machines are running. So I don't have to go and turn off every single breaker and air compressor and AC and heater and blower fan and skimmer just to do the podcast. But I still think I would want at least computers on the shop floor that I can go and play on.
00:34:46
Speaker
Like having a CAD-GAM computer next to the CNC machine is one of the greatest things I've ever done. Because back in the garage, I had my Minnie Mill and then my Tormac. The Tormac came with a computer, but you couldn't run CAD on it. So I still had my rig, my computer in my office in the house.
00:35:06
Speaker
So I mean, it's not far to walk through the living room, the kitchen, the hallway into the garage. But if you're doing that for every program, carrying a USB stick back and forth. Oh, there's the kitchen right there. I'll get a little bite to eat or oh, there's some beautiful kids right there. I'll play with them for a few minutes and all this back and forth just turns into like huge amounts of time.
00:35:25
Speaker
Well, it's kind of a culmination of what we're doing, which is we're putting in some racking to organize material, to organize cardboard boxes, the Kanban cards. We've kind of reached, I feel like, peak Kanban to where I'm getting a little frustrated with them. So what's the next thing we do? I saw a pretty cool idea from Brett Cottle, who runs the Vertigo, I think is the name, the CNC routers.
00:35:54
Speaker
about either digital Kanban cards or Jay Pearson's new, he's got a barcode scanner, but to be blunt, we have a real procurement problem. It was a fun challenge and something to think about in the past months. Now it's a problem. I'm getting six Kanban cards on my desk sometimes every three or four hours. Just like I gave you a hard time about, you shouldn't be running the machines, why am I
00:36:23
Speaker
redoing a lot of unnecessary work. Why am I not empowering the people to make these decisions on their own if it's a common card or automating the process altogether? So let's talk more do we're gonna we're gonna fix that. Yeah, we've got this some this WhatsApp group that we're calling I guess the ERP
00:36:45
Speaker
ERP group so Pearson's on it you and I are on it and Pearson made this interesting comment that procurement is different than purchasing and I was like what are you talking about I never thought about that well procurement is figuring out what the heck you're gonna buy
00:37:01
Speaker
And purchasing is just like, I need more end mills. I need this one to do it. I need more screws. I need more fasteners. I need more coolant. This is all rinse and repeat stuff. You know the recipe. You know the purchaser. You don't care about the price because you just take market price. You just buy it. And purchasing is actually quite simple, if laid out properly. It takes me 10 seconds to shoot off an email to buy more shipping cases or whatever we need.
00:37:30
Speaker
Then procurement is like, I think we should get this new thing. We got to figure out what it is and where to get it from and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Negotiating terms, price, selecting the model, research. That is way harder, but not the norm. I'm glad you brought that up. It made me realize, oh my gosh, a employee who's been at Crimson Eyes for approximately six hours should be able to handle all purchasing.
00:37:55
Speaker
Totally. With the right system in place, with all the information laid out. And I've been digging a lot of it into ProShop, like all of our vendors and all the purchasing requirements. And every time I make a purchase, I make a purchase order in ProShop that often ties to an inventory item in ProShop. And then when I have to buy that again, I just look at the old purchase order and I copy it and I make a new one.
00:38:19
Speaker
And it's not so much a direct thing like Pro Shop emails the vendor, but it allows me to track what I bought, when I bought it, what I'm waiting for, what's coming in. And then when it comes in, I check off the purchase order as received.
00:38:32
Speaker
And I've no regrets or complaints.
Enhancing Business Processes and Gratitude
00:38:35
Speaker
Some of these are necessary steps. We're better than we used to be. One thing I've started doing is saving, basically saving the draft email so that I, on stuff that we do over email, because why are you retyping it? Which is kind of a play on what Jay showed us privately about his system. Because sometimes like I'm material, I'm really specific about saw cuts and grain or specs or like just stuff.
00:39:00
Speaker
But it's always the same specs. Yes, generally. But that's where I'm freshly with Kanban cards, because if I change my spec, I've got to reprint a Kanban card or what's the order like right now we figured out a good way to, we've got three different products that are pretty close. And so we just standardize the material size.
00:39:19
Speaker
But how do we, this is such a dumb question, but I, that's my, it's an issue of, I'm aware of the issue in my defense. I haven't put any time thinking about it. So maybe there is an obvious answer, but we would normally order like 50 pieces of material at a time, but we have three different products. So yesterday on my desk, I actually got the same, the same
00:39:44
Speaker
Material and I put it in the three separate lines. So it would have been 150 pieces I literally typed them as three separate lines because I'm not it's purchasing. I'm not thinking I'm just doing Right, right. So how do we handle that from a combine an inventory? System do you say I don't know. I haven't thought of how to deal with that Yeah, I can see so if you're like in your pen if you two different piece parts of your pen that use the same titanium How do you combine that or inventory it?
00:40:14
Speaker
Yeah, that's like right now I kind of bird's eye view the whole project. And I've got a little spreadsheet that says these are all the components. These are the bar sizes and it kind of shows them line by line. And you can visually see actually color coded the diameter per line. And then you've got like three green ones and two yellow ones and four blue ones. You're like, oh, those are the bars I need. And that seemed to help, especially buying,
00:40:42
Speaker
Like I bought enough material to make 500 pens and 500 knives. And I was like, okay, that's, that's a lot of calculation. There's like 15 parts between all of that that I got to make and some share and some don't blah, blah, blah. So I created this spreadsheet and it helps so much. And at the end, it's like, okay, I need 49 bars of this, 22 bars of this and 12 bars of this. And that's all there was to it. Like three items. I'm simplifying, but
00:41:08
Speaker
It's like how do you turn 15 products into those three items? So the spreadsheet helped immensely. Well, one of the first things or one of the things that we are playing or doing separate from the issue I just mentioned, although maybe they are related is we're going to just start a
00:41:25
Speaker
in this case, like the mod vice, we're going to just start an inventory rack of raw material for the mod vice with a picture of the finished part below the raw material. Because honestly, john, it's embarrassing. Right now, right now, this second, we've got material over next to the plasma, we've got material next to the first bay door, we've got material next to the VF two, and there's probably some material next to the crossover door. It just because it's just kind of where it is just kind of all over the place. We're not we're not like it. And is it getting so
00:41:55
Speaker
big that you can't just look at the material and be like, Oh, clearly that's for mod vice or that's for an 18 by 12 fixture. Or I mean, the fixture plate stuff is easy, but, um, the modify stuff is complicated for sure. Um, yeah.
00:42:08
Speaker
Because to your point a couple minutes ago was somebody who's worked at Saunders Machine Works for six hours needs to be able to look at a chunk of metal and be like, oh, that's where I'm on. Josh has no idea. Josh, our newest intern, didn't know what a mod vice was for a few weeks. We do give them an onboarding, but it's a lot to take in. Of course. Yeah, there's so much. So that'll be good.
00:42:33
Speaker
So that's what I'm doing. We got to just, we just got to, I enjoy talking about it, but I worry not worry. I want to talk less and just go do it. You know, make sense. Yeah. Well, and having your, your desk on the shop floor should enable you to just see things and feel them and enact them quicker. What's going on today? I just got a text at home. I have one sick kid and one kid that needs to go to school. So I'm on my way home. Um, it's like, we've been the,
00:43:03
Speaker
the fall season of sickness, you know, with the kids, but whatever, that's fine. So I'm just going to zip home, take them to school, and then come on back to work. We're going to keep cranking bearings, going to keep making pallets. We've been doing really good. Angelo and I are going to get those pallets set up to run by Friday. We got to make clamps. I'd say that for weeks now, but we're going to make the time. Cool.
00:43:26
Speaker
And, uh, we actually got this new parting tool from Sandvik that I'm excited to try out through coolant and like two nozzles on the blade and over the blade. Um, yeah, I, I weighed that decision for quite a long time. Um, cause I think we're on our like almost very last insert on the old parting blade and it's discontinued for some stupid reason. Yeah, it's annoying. So, um, so I'm like, if I'm going to make the change, let me go through coolant and then.
00:43:56
Speaker
I created a parting macro that kind of automatically defines everything it needs to know, speeds and feeds and all that. So I can use the same macro for every single program. That's awesome. Yeah, it's awesome. Lots of little things like that. That's cool. Sweet.
00:44:13
Speaker
I'm off to continue the desk move slash just going to town, like just doing it, which is exciting. I've gotten away. It's good. I've got some other things I want to bring up on operation stuff and stuff, but I think that may be a good topic for next week because I actually got to run too.
00:44:31
Speaker
Sweet. Well, for all the folks out here in the US, I hope everyone had a very, very happy Thanksgiving, and it's a good time to sit back and think. I know it sounds cliche, but to be grateful that we are able to do the things we do, and for certainly happy and grateful, I get to do what I do in the
00:44:46
Speaker
employees, the team, what we've built, the people I get to interact with, the opportunities we have are pretty darn cool. And I will continue to hustle and be hungry and work, but I also sometimes you just got to sit back and say thanks. And I certainly am grateful. Very well said. Agree 100%. All right. Take care, bud. I'll see you next week. Take care. Later.