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#314 Shipping mistakes led to innovation
274 Plays2 years ago
TOPICS:
- Willemin progresses from both teams!
- Shipping mistakes led to innovation
- Lifestyle creep
- Bambu 3D printer
- dedicated tools in machines
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Transcript
Introduction and Missing Pi Day
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to Business of Machine episode pi. My name is John. My name is John Grimsmo. And yesterday was Pi Day. Did I seriously miss it? Oh, I'm ashamed of myself.
00:00:15
Speaker
I also missed it because I took a legit sick day with what I'm pretty sure is that norovirus. So I'm kind of back at the shop this morning, but honestly, I'm going to head back home. Good idea. When you get sick, it stinks. But look, it is what it is. So I came in just to get some paperwork done, keep my distance and then get back out of here. Yeah.
00:00:39
Speaker
Yeah, but the intro is the normal, that this is what John and I talk each week and move on. Yeah, exactly. But you know, you can't miss a podcast, so I appreciate you showing up. No, no, absolutely. Cool.
Willowman Machine Progress
00:00:53
Speaker
Well, yeah, if you want to take a break, I can carry the burden of some good topics here.
00:00:59
Speaker
Yeah, I got a couple things, but by all means, lead us today. I mean, the bigger and more exciting is Willowman Progress. Like it's been, I've been absolutely crushing it on our Willowman. And last night I had a milestone breakthrough. I made two parts in a row sequentially. Oh, yes. And they're both in tolerance.
00:01:25
Speaker
Yes. And that's the first time I've ever been able to successfully transfer, drop, go to the next one, keep going, and have it just everything works out. There's no errors. There's no alarms. There's no problems. It turns out there's a button that says it's called bar feed auto. And that allows the bar loader to connect and do its thing. Now my bar loader is not connected at all right now.
00:01:55
Speaker
And I ran into the same problem months ago, but basically as you're making a part and then the vice comes up to grab the part and then it grabs the part and then it goes to pull it, the main call it's supposed to let go, you can pull the bar and it's not letting go. So the vice is just slipping on the part and scratching the part and whatever. And you don't want your cutoff tool to come in on a bar that didn't move because that's bad.
00:02:19
Speaker
And so anyway, I did this a couple of times and I did it again and again. It wasn't working. And then in MDI, I type M 63, which opens the call it no problem. The call it's not sticking. It's not stuck or whatever. So I texted Marcus and I was like, ah, something's wrong. Like something's mechanically wrong. He can't be me. You know, it's, it's gotta be the machine is the problem. And he's like, did you click the bar feed button? I'm like, yeah, I did because I only wanted to make one part. So when that button's off, your call, it will not open up during a cycle.
00:02:49
Speaker
It like at all. It ignores the M63. Exactly. It does everything else. The vice comes out, grabs the parts, slips off the part, chaos ensues. If I wasn't watching it, I would have broken an end mill for sure. Oh, man. Anyway, I'm glad I figured that out. Stupid little thing. Basically, that light needs to be on all the time. Yeah, right. If your guy doesn't know about this yet, he's going to figure that out. No, this is very good to know. Thank you.
00:03:18
Speaker
So that's exciting.
Data Server for Program Management
00:03:20
Speaker
And then, you know, I put an M99 in my main program and I can cycle through parts now. It's super exciting. So that M99 just loops indefinitely? Yeah. So I've got a master program, which basically just says M198P1 calling subprogram one.
00:03:37
Speaker
and then M99 after that or M30 if I want to do just one part. And then Willeman also has a part counter built into the thing. So anytime you call an M102, that defines, reads the part counter.
00:03:52
Speaker
counter minimum and maximum or current and maximum. And if you say, I want to make five parts and it's at four, then when it gets to five, it won't make another part. It'll just have awesome. Okay. That's kind of built in, but it's a screen I hadn't really played with yet. So now I look at it and I go, okay, it's parts required to parts made zero. And then it'll basically yell at you when it hit its limit. So that's cool. Awesome. Um, but yeah, it's pretty, pretty exciting last night. Just,
00:04:21
Speaker
Sweet, I'm in two parts. Well, I got to say, it's not lame at all. I was really, really happy to see how much progress Grant was making. And then I saw your Instagram where you turned apart, you pivoted the vice up, you grabbed the part, you did more work, you puttered off, you tidited it down. I'm like, oh, good for grim smoke. He's back in the driver's seat smoking us, which is a good thing. I'm happy for you. Yeah, absolutely.
00:04:49
Speaker
but I'm still actually really happy with how far we've gotten along. And I'll tell you John, oh my God, I love this machine. I absolutely love it. Holy cow. We've got the data server up and working. Grant's been making parts, testing out different code. Is he using FileZilla to transfer?
00:05:08
Speaker
Yep. Perfect. We actually can't get the compact flash card to work. I figured out yesterday you don't actually need it because I figured out how not to use it basically. I couldn't get it to work either, but yesterday I have before. I was using the CF card to load local programs onto the machine.
00:05:27
Speaker
Okay. Like the master program, the warm-up program, kind of the simple programs. And then I couldn't get it to read, couldn't get it to transfer. So basically now I can drop any program I want onto the data server through FileZilla and then read or punch from the viewing the data server on the Wilhelmin. Okay. And so I'm like, sweet, I don't even need the CF anymore.
00:05:52
Speaker
I feel like it'd be nice to have, for whatever reason, like, hey, it's probably a good way of a backup way. But yeah, I'm not going to waste so much time on it right now. I will say, like, the 90s computer geek game you was enjoying, like, hopping into disk utility, be like, OK, let's format fat. Let's do fat32, ex-fat. Kept trying all these different iterations and still couldn't get it. Literally yesterday, I couldn't get it to work. So I pulled it out and I blew in it like you would an old Nintendo game.
00:06:20
Speaker
This is awesome. And I was like, this has got to be it. It didn't work. And the error was like memory card 1010 or something. And you Google that. That's a common phanic error. And the basic consensus is it's not plugged in right. Assuming it did work before is the thing.
00:06:39
Speaker
Yeah, the Willowman guys were saying that they're FANUC branded and I don't know whether it's the complex flash card or the adapter. I would assume big assumption that the adapter is a dumb passive device. It's literally just routing the wires. It doesn't have an integrated circuit in or any batteries, if you will. Again, could be wrong on that.
00:07:00
Speaker
Anyway, move on.
Tool Changer Solution
00:07:02
Speaker
Grant's been loading programs, cutting parts, doing everything on the main, but then he put soft jaws on, finished the soft jaws. And we manually put a part in the soft jaws to do op two work. So we have not done that key kind of op one, op two workflow, but then
00:07:19
Speaker
Our tool changer threw an alarm and got stuck last week. Then it did it again. And so we emailed Willem and our Alex service team and they actually had four hands out here at the moment when it was out yesterday. And there was a timing error in the tool change mechanism, which was giving this error not every time, but again, enough that we thought, Hey, this is, we should get this fixed. But then it was funny because when I walked in this morning, not having been in this morning,
00:07:46
Speaker
Grant and Florian wanted us to let you know that our Willyman did a 17-hour overnight run. Granted, it was just practicing tool changes, but nevertheless. Did it really? It did tool changes for 17 hours? Yep. That's cool. Yeah. That's neat. So we hold the false record of being you and the Willyman lights out unattended machine running. Congratulations. Yeah. That's cool.
00:08:12
Speaker
Yeah, I was running the warm-up program yesterday and I tweaked it to use multiple tools, so it changes to Tool 1234 within the warm-up program and it spins up and up to 20,000 RPM with various tools.
00:08:27
Speaker
So I could run the warm-up program for days. There you go. But yeah, that's cool. I'm curious to see what the thermal growth of this machine is like, because there's got to be something. And I think I'm already seeing a little bit of it. I feel like once it's kind of warm and stable, it'll be quite good. But cold
Oil in Machining
00:08:44
Speaker
machine, first part is going to be, is it going to be under or over? And then how long is it going to take to catch up back to 10th accuracy? Yeah. I did program a,
00:08:55
Speaker
stepped round thing. I've got one inch A2 in the machine right now and I just made a step thing that was 200 thou, 300 thou, 400 thou, 500 thou, 600 thou, 700 thou so that I could turn the whole, the OD of everyone and Mike each step and see if the diameter holds consistent across the whole range and it does.
00:09:20
Speaker
That's awesome. Every single step was within, I think within three tenths, but half inch and above was all within half a tenth of each other. There might be some material deflection or other things. What a hardened A2 or soft? Soft. Soft. Okay. Yeah, we will heat treat them after. Can you fit one inch through your spindle bore? Yeah.
00:09:48
Speaker
Okay. I think maybe I can, but I think you might have the newer, better.
00:09:55
Speaker
A-axis design because I do think we might be limited to 25 millimeter, which is just under one inch. Really? I think so. Yeah, it was a big kind of a, but it was like, ah, there's no way I'm going to spend buku bucks to get that extra little bit. And actually the part that we thought we were going to make on that machine that was out of one inch is for the quick change system, which we're kind of iterating on and pretty easy to kind of remedy that.
00:10:24
Speaker
But I'll worry about it. I probably made six or seven parts yesterday and I kept blowing turning inserts on every part. I've got this V insert like quarter inch ICV turning insert and we use it on all of our lathes.
00:10:46
Speaker
And the tip of it would chip off every single part. And I'm like, what the heck is going on here? I'm doing super light cuts. It shouldn't do anything wrong.
00:10:57
Speaker
And then I finally stepped back and I was like, what's different here? Well, what's different is A2. I never machine A2. What are my surface feeds? What's my SFM? What's my intrepid tooth? I'm feeding it 2,000 inch per rev, which is faster than I normally feed for a little finishing tool. But my SFM was at 250, and then I googled it. I actually went on proven cut, and you don't have any A2 recipes. Sorry.
Hiring for Shipping Department
00:11:23
Speaker
Not really enough returning. I don't know about milling. Yeah, I didn't see any milling either.
00:11:29
Speaker
Apparently, surface feed is supposed to be like 500 to 600 feet per minute. What? Surface SFM? Really? Yeah. That seems high. It seems high, but it's soft A2, so I put it up to 500. It works great now, and it's way faster. Yeah, sure. Wow. Okay.
00:11:50
Speaker
with oil too. I'm excited to finally do work with oil. Are you sure? Well, sure. I guess there's some drawbacks, but my understanding is it's just the best lubricity from a service finish to a life standpoint. It's wonderful. Yeah, pretty good. It smokes if you get it too hot. It is very clingy. Do you know what oil you got?
00:12:20
Speaker
Yeah, the stuff that it was kind of, it wasn't like with the machine, but it was what the machine had used before. It's what they recommended, which is the brand. I'll look it up here. All right. I'm assuming it's not Blosser or Qualicum. Yeah, correct. Not. Well, I don't know if I have it handy here. Motor X. Okay. Is that what you're using or no?
00:12:47
Speaker
No, we have MotorX spindle lube in the Kern and it's like really fancy, good expensive stuff. Is there a number with it? I'm just curious what weight it might be. Yeah, it's a MotorX Swiss cut Deco AP10. 10, so 10 is pretty lightweight oil.
00:13:03
Speaker
I think, I forget if in the Wilhelmin I'm using 35 or 22. I think I might be old 35 weight from the Tornos. Oh, I'll just hold out of the Tornos and just put it in the Wilhelmin for whatever. It's just pretty thick and goopy.
00:13:18
Speaker
Yeah. Ours is almost looks like water. I'm actually curious because it's quite clear,
Shipping Label Incident
00:13:23
Speaker
but oftentimes it seems like the oil turns into a golden hue. I'm like, does that just happen as it gets discoloration? Yeah, it oxidizes over time. Our oils are the same thing. They're almost crystal clear when they're brand new and they get golden over time.
00:13:38
Speaker
but the thickness of it and the washability of parts. So next to the Swiss, which runs, I think we're on 22 wait now, Pierre's got just a little Tupperware container with isopropyl alcohol that every part that comes off, he just kind of dunks it in there for five seconds with these long tweezers, shakes it around and then that gets most of the oil right off of it. Okay. Otherwise,
00:14:03
Speaker
You got to be careful because that oil will travel through your entire shop and you'll find it on the faucet handles in the bathroom before you know it. On all the micrometers, on the computer, on the keyboard, on the mouse, you got to watch it. I don't like that about oil.
00:14:21
Speaker
Aren't you or this is maybe CJ doing like tumbling to dry or oil rinse or bath or something ultrasonic? I don't know. CJ has an ultrasonic setup that he uses to clean. I mean, we do too actually. Pretty sure Pierre will soak an isopropyl to get most of it off and then we do an ultrasonic wash. I think he's just got one of those cheap Amazon ultrasonics. Maybe I'm thinking of him doing a drip dry.
00:14:52
Speaker
Because that would be the nice way to think about it is not needing the parts just in time where they need to go right into inventory, but rather let them sit for a day and drip off or something. The oil will not drip off ever. Oh, really? Ever, ever. Interesting. That's the difference. Coolant will evaporate, right? Then you get a bit of residue, whereas oil will stay oily forever.
00:15:13
Speaker
Okay. Well, maybe I'm going to eat my words here. Yeah. That's why I don't like it. It's just, yeah. I mean, it's slippery, but it's just yucky to work with. You get it on your hands, it drips on your arm, you try to wipe it off. It doesn't wipe off. You just kind of like soap and water a lot.
00:15:30
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. I'm so used to cooling. It's like, yeah, it's, it's wet and a little oily, but you blow it off and you're mostly, it's mostly all off, right? Yeah. Yeah. You can't, I mean, maybe I have the 30 weight, 35 weight oil in the tornos or in the Wilhelmin, but a air gun does not blow it all off. That's crazy. Yeah. So your 10 weight might be more betterer. I wonder,
00:15:56
Speaker
I'm thinking back to the few YouTube videos on you on Wilhelmin where they show the they show a little like pipe cleaner nylon brush coming in.
Buying a New 3D Printer and Lifestyle Creep
00:16:06
Speaker
I think that's to deburr the peak parts or maybe not even deburr, but rather than like make sure that there's no remnant sort of chips or stuff in the parts. I'm wondering like, man, could you put a tool in there that like somehow helps coax the material off the oil? Yeah. Hmm.
00:16:26
Speaker
Or you could put, does it have through air? No, mine doesn't, yours wouldn't either. Okay. Maybe you could have them dump right into a tank of solvent. That's true. Do you put yours just fall into the same little parts bin that mine does? Yeah.
00:16:45
Speaker
I was thinking this morning about making a carousel basket, like how we have on the Swiss, with the 10 things and every so many parts, it'll rotate to the next bin. Because I'm like, once I'm making tens or hundreds of parts, you're not going to know the first one or the last one. It's going to suck.
00:17:02
Speaker
Are you still using that tornos pie? Yeah. That's awesome. It's amazing. It's been totally reliable. Yeah. Probably four years old. And yeah, you set it to 10 parts and it'll rotate the bin to the next bin every 10 parts. How does it know when it's hit 10 parts? It's tied to the part conveyor. So there's just like, um,
00:17:26
Speaker
clamp or something. So it measures the amperage, whatever, going to the power motor on the conveyor. So it senses the power and that triggers the Arduino to say plus one. Yes. And since the conveyor only turns on and off for every part, then it just gets a signal and it does. I love that kind of dumb level of intelligence. You don't have to get fancy with integrated M codes or IO, just like, hey, when the conveyor turns, assume that that's one part. Exactly. I was going to ask, do you have
00:17:56
Speaker
a turning insert brand? Like are you loyal to you know, I can't think of Sandvik or kind of metal or? Not loyal but you kind of find what you like. I was using Tungaloy forever and then on the Swiss we got these Utilis brand tools and inserts. We buy them from a company called Gen Swiss.
00:18:19
Speaker
That's the same to help people to make the holders for the Willemin. Yep. Yep. Interesting. Yeah. Utilis. And so we buy their inserts for the some of the Tournos and now for the Willemin. But at the end of the day, it's just a turning insert. Unless your holder is special and has like a weird double-ended parting blade for turning tools, it's kind of all the big brands are good. Our main one on the Swiss now is a Seco brand. Yeah.
00:18:49
Speaker
because they have a cool quick change holder where the head comes off. Oh, man. That's probably been a year, a year and a half ago. Remember you bought those and worked on it? Wow. I've been through two or three different brands, and the Seacoast are favorite so far.
00:19:03
Speaker
Is the tortoise all good? I know it's been months since we discussed it with the pump and the oil and the production. Yeah, the pump, everything's been great. It's been running extremely hard. Good. Pierre's got that thing nailed. I think the pump still complains a little bit, but I think he removed high pressure cooling from some of the programs or parts of some of the programs just to kind of reduce the part,
00:19:29
Speaker
problem and then I think he put a dwell in so that the pump could...
UMC 500 Tool Library Plans
00:19:35
Speaker
take a break for like 10 seconds. Let the bubbles come out or whatever. And I think that solved a lot of it. But I wouldn't say the problem has completely disappeared, but it is a non-issue basically. Right. Yeah. At the moment. So that's good. Yeah. So we're doing great on production there. Good. We actually tried, um, the Tornos has this active chip breaker cycle that's meant to like kind of,
00:20:00
Speaker
like Citizen has their LFV, that low frequency vibration that will make microchips as you're turning basically.
00:20:07
Speaker
Amazing. Our version of the Tornos has a extremely rudimentary version of that, which kind of sucks. Yeah. It's basically as you're turning a diameter, it can go backwards and pause and then go forwards again. It's like the adaptor. Fusion can program it that way too. It's kind of like a dwell with a retract and then keep going. And we've been using that for a while, but you watch it.
00:20:37
Speaker
Whereas the LOV on the Citizen is like, yeah, you don't even see it. It's literally cutting the chip every rotation and cutting itself on the next rotation. So I tried to write a macro that would do that, that would go forward two thirds of a rotation, back off a little bit and then cut the peak of the next kind of sine wave end of the part. Yeah. And the machine can't think that fast. Right.
00:21:05
Speaker
That's crazy though. We experimented with that on Monday though and that was kind of fun. You're trying to deal with chip control? Yeah, because one of the parts, the button of the saga pen makes mountains of chips in the machine anyway. So I'm like, if we could make those little sixes and nines, it wouldn't be a problem.
00:21:27
Speaker
Don't laugh at me, but have you tried turning faster? Like a higher fee per rev to get the chip bigger going? I can't say I have, no. I don't know what we're turning right now. Pretty deep depth of cut, but probably one thou per rev.
00:21:45
Speaker
Yeah, I would definitely look into either just try it or read up or talk on apps guy but you look this is coming from a guy who hates lays but like you might not be cutting enough to activate the chip rig or give the you need to give the chip its own enough weight that it falls over on itself and then fractures. Interesting.
00:22:02
Speaker
Yeah. Cause I'm not very good about doing that. Cutting hard enough and activating the chip breaker. Um, I've noticed that on blades. I just don't, I'm not going fast enough, hard enough or something. I'm more for surface finish, which is slow rather than like, you know, roughing.
00:22:22
Speaker
Oh, yeah. We had a huge win. So this started with a shipping mistake, which I'll come back to. But I wanted a way to have our shipping room with laser printer just always have the packing lists printed out. Like why can that not happen when you get an order? Why can't it not just have either Shopify or ship station?
00:22:46
Speaker
automatically print the packing list for that order. Full stop. This is 2023. Chat GPT 4.0 just came out. You can take a picture of your refrigerator and it will look at that photo and it'll start giving you recipes you can make for dinner that night. What? Why can't I have my HP printer just print?
00:23:07
Speaker
So, I spent some time yesterday when I was on the couch just perusing through options. And it's shockingly not an option. And there's all sorts of Reddit posts and forum posts being like, why can't you do this, Shopify or ShipStation? This same thing. It's like this is 2023.
00:23:22
Speaker
It's annoying. There were a couple of paid options, but like 20 bucks a month for more complicated order apps or hooking it up to Zapier. And I'm just like, no, this is ridiculous. So I found this guy, God bless him, who realized that
00:23:38
Speaker
Most HP printers have a web services where you can sign up for free and it gives your printer an email. Anything that gets into that email gets printed. He was perfect because his demo was actually with Shopify. I added that printer's email address to our
00:23:54
Speaker
Shopify order notification blasts just a setting in your store and we tested it out this morning. So now anytime an order comes in, the packing lists, actually sorry, it's not technically not the packing list, it's just the order notice, but it has the information we want on it. It's just sitting there waiting.
00:24:10
Speaker
That's cool. Right? Yeah. I like that. And that is going to go with each package. Like physically, that piece of paper gets shipped. So what happened, impromptu this was, right now we still manually go into each order and print the packing list. That actually takes a fair amount of time. I would say it probably takes 30 seconds because it just is a little bit slow to do the whole thing. That's wasted time. But what also happened is we goofed.
00:24:37
Speaker
Man, I got a sick up for the team because we've been pretty solid on shipping lately. And I don't think we've shipped a freight order incorrectly in probably three or four years. And we were a different company three or four years ago, for sure. Yeah, for sure. We're way better now. But one order was going to the Midwest. One order was going to the South. And they were incredibly similar orders. They were both double plate orders with a relatively small hardware box. We packed them up. Each order was packed correctly.
00:25:07
Speaker
And the labels got put on the wrong ones. So what I realized is that we were not leaving the packing list that we were using to do our own internal order checks on, which gets thrown away. It was never going over to the final pallet before the labels got put on. So I was like, we need to have that packing list also then sit there as that kind of final making sure you don't have the wrong order with the wrong things.
00:25:35
Speaker
That'll get fixed. It's actually not something I really get upset about. It sinks to fix it because it's cost. It's disruptive. I mean, you've heard this before. It takes time. We ended up doing the customers a solid with some, I forget what we did, but we hooked them up and they helped us get the order shipped. But it takes a lot of effort and time and risk. So you definitely want to minimize that. I mean, will we screw up a freight order in the future? Yeah, we probably will. Like I just kind of wanted those like,
00:26:01
Speaker
you know, but this was a fixable mistake. Yeah. And so it's why we're pretty adamant on like we need to have labels, boxes and parcels always need to have the order number on them. Just doing that sort of it's like the very checklist manifesto that Atul Gawande book about like, you know, it's just a, if you're gonna ship 1000 things, one of them is gonna get screwed up. It's just gonna happen. How do you stack the deck in your favor?
00:26:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's something Andrew from Henry Holsters told me a couple weeks ago. He's like, a thing like that is a completely avoidable mistake. And how do you put those systems into place to completely avoid them from happening in the first place? Yeah. But sometimes you have to go through your process and make a mistake to see that there was a hole, you know? Yeah. And you just you don't know until you know. Yeah.
00:26:53
Speaker
There's also a really, really, really small chance that FedEx did this, but there's zero chance I'm going to blame FedEx because I still think it was us. Um, but, um, we had that happen. Oh my God, that was hilarious. Now that I'm recollecting this, we didn't screw up, but
Hiring a Shipping Coordinator
00:27:08
Speaker
we had two, this is crazy. We had two of the same exact fixture plates shipped to the same relatively small town in Oregon. And I do think there was something where the last mile they got swapped or something crazy like that. Anyway. Huh.
00:27:24
Speaker
Speaking of shipping, so we're hiring another shipping coordinator person because we have a decent good volume. Like our one guy Ryan is totally slammed and he actually wants to get back into more media and like film and edit for us. That would be great.
00:27:42
Speaker
So, we did another indeed job posting. Spencer ran with that, did the whole thing. And I reviewed it, but he pretty much is running point on that. And we got around 30 applicants. So, right after the podcast here, I'm going to review his shortlist and go through it with him and start interviewing people. And on that one, are you
00:28:03
Speaker
looking for somebody who is just a worker or somebody who nerds out on shipping or somebody who might want to upskill into manufacturing? You want a solid worker. It doesn't need a lot of skill set or experience or background. It's kind of a weird, unless they've done it before, you can't look at a resume and judge them. It's like, oh, he'll be perfect for this because he worked at McDonald's or whatever. I don't know.
00:28:31
Speaker
So I don't know, I'll see what happens when we shook the tree, what people applied and really curious to sit through some interviews and see what happens. But at the end of the day, you kind of want a solid person that wants to work in a basically office environment in a manufacturing company and kind of put their head down and get things done, you know? Yeah.
00:28:55
Speaker
Yeah. I would love to piggyback off of what you learned there because we're in a similar place where we haven't had a full-time dedicated shipping person in a while now and we've had some sort of mix of part-time folks helping out and that's been huge but it's
00:29:11
Speaker
But we have a new guy, Caleb, who's come on as a machinist. That's great. Cool. He started two weeks ago. And I was told myself, OK, after I get that position settled in, we need to find a full-time shipping person that can help with outbound orders as well as receiving shipments that come in and so forth. So your shipping department is in the shop in the other bay? Yeah.
00:29:37
Speaker
Okay, so it's, I mean, that's like a shop environment because you're shipping big things. Like all of our shipping happens in the offices. Oh, that's interesting. It's different, right? Like Ryan doesn't have to step foot in the shop unless he wants to or has a question or something like that. So this new person like won't be working in a shop environment. Interesting. Right? Because our knives and pens, everything's so small, everything is stored in the offices and
00:30:03
Speaker
boxed up small packages, you know? Yeah, I know. We're using jib cranes with electric hoists and forklifts and pallets. Now, I mean, look, the majority of our shipments are still just parcel boxes, but they're not sagas and doors.
00:30:20
Speaker
I wanted to share just because I think it's an insight into a topic I've always cared about, which is the lifestyle creep. So we had specked out the bamboo. We did buy it. We bought it a few weeks ago. Actually, yeah, it just shipped yesterday. But I was I did pause one night and slept on it because, you know, that bamboo printer is relatively inexpensive. It's shipped with some accessories like eighteen hundred dollars.
00:30:50
Speaker
And in fairness, we were already planning to purchase the Prusa XL for not quite twice the
Decision to Purchase Bamboo Printer
00:30:56
Speaker
price. But I was kind of like, wait a minute here. Why do we need this? We have two 3D printers that work. We sometimes have bottlenecks, but we don't always have bottlenecks. And the problem is that you become a company where buying an 8D 3D printer is no big deal. You can just do it.
00:31:11
Speaker
And there's companies where $100 is a lot. And there's companies where $30,000 isn't a lot. I remember it's just all relative. And so I was like, why do we need this? And I was like, is this just gimmicky the coolness new thing?
00:31:27
Speaker
And then I was looking back, I was like, no, like having that as robust a printer as it looks, not only is fast, but it just looks very intelligent and capable and being able to get something done quicker would actually be really nice in a lot of situations. So we did end up buying it. But I do think there's something to be said. Again, you don't want to like sit here and overanalyze things, but I was like, no, don't, you know, it's by not buying those 10, $2,000 things that you end up with enough money to buy another. Exactly.
00:31:54
Speaker
Yeah. And I've definitely found that I've bought, uh, it's like in my personal life, I don't buy dumb stuff because I relatively like frugal at home, but at work, I definitely buy dumb stuff sometimes. Oh yeah. You're right. That's fun too, right? It's fun. Um, but yeah, and you learn, you learn like I didn't need those, you know, five separate $2,000 tools because I only use two of them. Um, but you live and learn, uh,
00:32:21
Speaker
However, that printer, I think you guys will have fun with some of the materials you can print with it, the carbon fiber, ABS, because it's an enclosed printer. I don't think you have one of those yet. You have one? I don't have one, no. Okay. No, I've tempted to buy one, but again, I'm in that point.
00:32:39
Speaker
$1,500 or over 2,000 Canadian. I just don't need to spend that right now. I've got two pruses and a Voron. But I don't have a printer that big, and I don't have any enclosed printer. And I'd love to print more of the engineering materials. I forgot the Voron though. That thing's fast, right? It's fast, yeah. But it's small. It's four inch by four inch work area. Oh, wow. So it's tiny. That would honestly work for most of our prints though.
00:33:08
Speaker
Yeah, and it's great. Like I have it at the shop now. So a couple days ago, I was mounting a toggle lever onto the router. And I was like, it's not bolting up. I just need a little plate with four holes in it. And some like
00:33:21
Speaker
whip it up in fusion in about two minutes, send it to the voron. It was done in 18 minutes or something and it's like done. Sweet. Yeah. No, that's cool. I still like that idea. I haven't done anything about it, but like, and I think the bamboo will satisfy what we want for a shot printer for now, but, but in the future, just like having many, probably not all, but many employees just having their own little mini Prusa at their desk, like kind of a cool idea.
00:33:51
Speaker
The other thing we're having is Caleb joined on and is helping in the machine shop side of things. I'm going to have him take over the UMC 500. We bought it for a few different reasons. Obviously, the training classes in 5-axis and so forth, but also I wanted that idea of having a 5-axis machine again, an R&D machine, probably some production. I don't know. It's next door, which is super not convenient because it's in the training building.
00:34:21
Speaker
What I do want is to have a dedicated, it's like the simplest thing, but a dedicated tool library for that machine so that we know that there's 10 or 15 tools that are always kind of set up and available so that we want to program something. We could always, we can do it here and just know that we walk over there and we're pretty much good to go. So I'm going to have him kind of run with that, which is fun and good. Like it's kind of the least involved I am with that the better. Yes.
00:34:48
Speaker
So it's in the training class, have you used it for any kind of production yet or are you still playing with it? No, I mean, Vince has run it. I don't know that I've ever even touched it. Vince has run it. We're actually using it for our three-axis classes right now as well. True. And we have our first five-axis class scheduled sometime, I think, in about a month. Cool. Yeah. What are you up to today?
00:35:22
Speaker
I want to make more than two parts on the Wilman. Um, yeah, the part I'm making, it's a little fixture bushing and I want to make 20, 30, 40 of them, something like that, and then send them out to heat treat. We've got a local place. We could do them ourselves, but it's not worth the time. Um, send them to local place to heat treat them and then, uh, use them in our fixturing basically.
Nakamura Coolant System Issues
00:35:43
Speaker
So I want to make that and then,
00:35:47
Speaker
Just kind of keep flushing out the Wilhelmin, speeds and feeds to a life, see thermal growth, things like that. I want to spend some time. Like I said, go over the shipping interviews. Oh yeah. Sure, sure. A couple of things last night. So almost everybody's gone. Pierre was just wrapping up. I was still here.
00:36:05
Speaker
Grayson was around closing up the shop. So, Pierre, now we're chatting about the Wilhelmin stuff and then we walk over to the Nakamura because we had to look at something and then the Nakamura is making a saga clip and there's no coolant spraying. And I'm like, Pierre, there's no coolant on. He's like,
00:36:24
Speaker
Interesting. The button's on. It's, it's burbling a little bit of coolant, like a little bit of coolant coming out the nozzle. We go over to the pump, the pumps pumping 300 PSI like it's supposed to. Um, there's a bit of filter drop through the filter, like 275 coming in 250 coming out kind of thing. Um, but nothing's coming out the nozzle, which is definitely not good for tool life or whatever, whatever. So he's like,
00:36:51
Speaker
This part's almost done. I'm going to finish this part. I'm going to go home. We'll figure this out in the morning.
00:36:57
Speaker
And as far as I saw so far this morning, the filter bag that we have on it was probably a 20 micron bag. Nobody remembers the last time it was replaced. Probably years. And it was absolutely caked with stuff on the inside. Because on that machine, it just does last for a very, very long time. Yeah, right. So first point of failure is definitely like I saw it. Pierre pulled it out.
00:37:23
Speaker
It had mud on the inside like cake of fine fine fine chips right. So hopefully that completely fixes it but otherwise there's a clog somewhere else down the line that they got to figure out but.
00:37:38
Speaker
So it's funny that you mentioned that because I have and it lacks the maintenance reminders for the horizontal sock filters and we do it every quarter which is probably more often than I have to but it's there I think it's
00:37:54
Speaker
I can't remember if it's $11 or $22 for both of them, but not relative to what that machine does. And I have a note in Lex as the, I'm the assigned maintenance person on that task. And it's the link to buy more filters. So we always keep an extra set on hand. And then it's the reminder that, John, this is not hard. It does not take long. Like don't take yourself out. Just go do it. And then I just did it last week. No big deal. Yeah, exactly.
00:38:20
Speaker
and you're following the system. Lex is in charge and you just go, okay, no worries. I don't have to think about it. There's a weird level of comfort and no stress when a system's in place and you're just like, okay, I got you. No worries. You don't have to think about it. You don't have to worry. You don't have to judge. You don't have to like, do I have to do it? Do I have to not? Just do it.
00:38:42
Speaker
Hey, on the side of your Willem, and for us at least, there's two external devices. One is a small blue thing. The other is a larger, looks like a dehumidifier. Does that match up to what you have? Our blue thing, it's in a great
00:39:02
Speaker
like a blue powder coated sheet metal cover thing. Yeah, it's probably like 12 inches cube. Yeah, that's the hydraulic pump. Yes, makes sense. You hear it going, because it's always holding 100 PSI or whatever. That's the hydraulic pump required for all the clamping and everything and the vice up and down and grippy and stuff. Then
00:39:27
Speaker
The dehumidifier looking thing might be the chiller, which ours is mounted on top of the machine.
00:39:34
Speaker
Oh, interesting. Okay. Yes, that sounds right on both of those. Ours, one of those two, I don't know which one is making kind of a weird noise, like a groaning that almost sounds like you need some TLC. The hydraulic pump probably just sounds like that. It does. Okay. I don't know if that's normal. I don't know if that's normal. Florian is there, isn't he? I was literally thinking like, I don't know if his car is still here, but I might go ask him. For sure.
00:39:58
Speaker
I can hear it throughout the shop because it's a new noise. You know, when you add new machines, what's that noise? Oh, it's a vacuum cleaner. Oh yeah. It's a new vacuum cleaner. I'm not used to that. Um, but yeah, it literally goes like, yeah.
00:40:12
Speaker
Every five, 10 seconds or something. And there's a digital pressure gauge on it. You can watch that while it's making the noise. And you go, oh, it's just pumping up and then releasing and then pumping up. It goes to like 95 to 103 or something. And then it does that. So once you see the gauge and hear the noise, it all sinks in. It all makes sense. But when you have a fan belt go bad on a car, it makes intermittent noise or wheel bearing, you're like, that's not going to solve itself. It's only going to go downhill from here.
00:40:42
Speaker
So it could be one of those things like I'm familiar with it now. You ask Florian, he would just be like, that's normal. What are you talking about? They all do that. You're like, I don't know that. Yeah.
00:40:51
Speaker
Yes. But the other thing about this machine is it is so quiet. Even at 20,000 RPM, you can't even tell the spindles on. That hydraulic pump makes the loudest noise of all of it. And that's one reason why I walk up to it, because we just leave it on these days. And I'm like, oh, man, I hope that's not going to cause a failure or fire or something overnight. I shouldn't. But any reason to leave it on, like you're worried about it booting up again or something?
00:41:22
Speaker
Um, so we will be leaving it on when we, when we start running it forever. But then yes, when you booted up cold, if it's been off for a few days, you're more likely according to them. It's probably due to the 20 years age to get a B axis homing error that you just had that almost every day. Okay. And then I just restart the machine and it's fine. Bingo. Same thing. So I haven't asked them about that yet. I just don't care.
00:41:50
Speaker
Yeah, they said they can open up the band that considers it acceptable. Okay. But why not just leave it on?
Overnight Running Concerns for Willowman
00:41:57
Speaker
I don't know. Because that noise and it just doesn't need to eat that power.
00:42:01
Speaker
You know, yeah, for sure. I would rather not like waste power, but I don't know. We'll figure it out. I shut it off. OK. Pretty regularly. Like yesterday, I was playing with in the morning, had to go home for three hours and shut it off because I'm like, oh, really? Yeah, why not? It's not like it loses warm up, you know, whatever. Yeah, I heard.
00:42:24
Speaker
But even on the Kern, like it runs deep into Saturday night on the weekends. And if I come in on Saturday night and I'm like, it's just going to sit there till Monday morning, like just shut it off. It doesn't need to be on. Is it auto shut off? No. I might be able to do it.
00:42:41
Speaker
Yeah, we do that almost every night on our horizontal, which is great. The only thing that's weird about it is the way the auto shutoff works on the Akuma is it actually intentionally trips the main disconnect on the machine. Yeah. So it just feels weird that you have to walk over and switch this huge, heavy electrical dial thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we do that on the Maury. We do shut that down automatically every night. That works great. The Kern, I don't know. I'll just leave it on. I only turn it off if it's going to be off for another day or two.
00:43:12
Speaker
And only if I'm here on a Saturday night kind of thing, but yeah. Cool. Cool. Um,
00:43:23
Speaker
That's about all I got. You going to rest up today? I'm going to go rest up. Catch up on some F1 or something? Oh yeah. We were acting drive to survive right before the norovirus hit. Yeah. Yes. So I haven't seen that show at all. Like as a non F1 person, but I am kind of a car guy. I was thinking about it like two days ago. I was like, should I just start watching that? I don't know.
00:43:49
Speaker
You, I would say you can get into it if you want to, but it's more about the personality. So you do need to like kind of let yourself spend a season getting into it and learning who people are. Okay. Um, because it doesn't work. It's not isolated episodes on their own. Like you have to understand the personalities and the dynamics. Interesting tools.
00:44:09
Speaker
Yeah. I actually frankly enjoy the show more than F1. We watch F1 races. Usually we watch the first five laps and then we skip forward the last few, just because it's two hours. And I've watched F1 since 2005, but yeah, the kids like it now, which makes it more fun. That's cool. Yeah. Or William likes, I should say James is not so into it. Sure. Doesn't matter. Yeah. All right. I'll see you next week. Cool man. Right. Stop later.