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#250 - "Whenever we buy new machines, obviously there's learning curve but not a fixing curve!" - Grimsmo
188 Plays3 years ago
TOPICS:
- Bootstrapper VS Life Style Creeper: Which Gets a Seat at the Table?
- Production Hurdles at GK - Machining - Heat Treat - Surface Grinding - Processes - Tabbing Strategies: AutoDesk...we need a 2D Contour Tab Finishing Strategy PLZ!
- Shift Toward Cycle Time Improvement
- SMW Pipe Dream?
- New Stabilization Product Sells Like Hot Cates at SMW
- Quality of Life Improvements
- Jib Crane
- Plate Inventory Storage Crates
- CDI Meters: WHY DIDN'T ANYONE MENTION THESE BEFORE!?
- Optical Comparator
- Can High Demand Be Dangerous?
- Willemin Repairs #worthit
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Journey Reflection
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining, episode 250. My name is John Grimsmo. My name is John Saunders. And this is the podcast where two friends from the past five, six years, 250 weeks in a row have talked about the challenges of manufacturing and growing a business from nothing to where we are now, something. To not nothing. Yeah, exactly. You don't want to brag, but also we're like, holy cow. Sometimes I look back and I'm like, yeah, we're not a small business anymore.
00:00:28
Speaker
It's very cool, right? We're not like I'm not self employed. I am employed by the company.
Company Growth and Maintaining the Original Spirit
00:00:34
Speaker
Like, yes.
00:00:37
Speaker
But I do still have that mindset of, of course, of, and it's just a complete different perspective. Like if we, we just brought another intern on board and when he or she is coming to the shop, they don't think that I was in a garage. Yeah. You know, a few years ago, like on a Tormach, like it just looks like another kind of another company that could be 50 years old to them. Exactly. To them. But to us, it's like, it still feels like a little garage shop that's just expanded. Yeah.
00:01:04
Speaker
But it's not anymore. But I love that hustle, that curiosity, that kind of drive. And it's a weird balance of not trying to talk about yourself in the kind of Dale Carnegie. No one wants to hear them just ramble and drither on about their own story. But on the flip side, it's relevant to the culture and how we got here, why we do what we do.
00:01:24
Speaker
I
Investment Decisions and Lifestyle vs. Business Needs
00:01:25
Speaker
actually actively shared a story at our Friday lunch about, I know it's not good to be a bootstrapper in a lot of regards anymore. So things like the jib crane, which has been awesome. It's like the silliest thing that's been incredible. There's plenty of crane options at $500, $1,000, $2,000, $3,000. And the one I want is the $3,000 one that has a very easy to use adjustable speed dial on it. And that's one of those things where if I, the way I envision that
00:01:52
Speaker
tool being used, it will be used all the time. That's not where the John Bootstrapper gets to have a seat at the table anymore. Mm-hmm. Yeah, because now the John with vision and with direction and knowledge and experience of the company says, if it has this feature, I know it's really expensive, but we will use the heck out of it. Yeah. Absolutely.
00:02:14
Speaker
But I also said to some of the team, like, Hey, it seems so weird. Like I shouldn't be allowed to talk about this, but I want to build a shop. Um, I've talked to, I know I told you kind of offline. I think I told you, I think I mentioned it once in the podcast and I have this running list of things I would want in the shop. It seems like a pipe dream. And the more I think about it, I'm like, man, I want to get to this point.
00:02:36
Speaker
period. The reason I brought that up is if the $1,000 jib crane would have worked, I would still have absolutely done it. It didn't. I want the adjustable one, but it's still worth remembering that form of lifestyle creep and investment decisions because, hey, that difference is $2,000 that I can put into a
00:02:58
Speaker
building savings account. You can dip into it if you need to for some reason, but otherwise, that's how you get to a building is you don't magically wake up with money in the bank or the comfort to make that kind of a commitment. You have to develop a plan. It's too early to even have a plan, but it's never too early to start chewing. Yeah, absolutely. To keep it in mind from now till it happens, if it does happen, to keep in mind the lifestyle creep, like you said, the
00:03:27
Speaker
That $2,000 extra that you just spent, you could do 100 of those a year on various different things. You get the really good chip conveyor instead of the crappy chip conveyor. Or you buy really good end mills because you need them versus whatever gets you by kind of thing. It's
Overcoming Production Hurdles and Process Improvement
00:03:41
Speaker
a balance because you want to run the best business you can, but you also want to save and plan and save for growth for the future, but not run out of cash. Yes. Still eats it for breakfast. Absolutely. Lunch and dinner, man. Right?
00:03:58
Speaker
Yeah. How you doing? Doing good. Yeah. Now things are flowing pretty good here. Getting over a bunch of production hurdles, whether it's with machining or heat treat or surface grinding, all these little things have been kind of nagging at us for quite a while. So we've been picking away at them and just
00:04:19
Speaker
getting them off the list. Parts are coming off really consistent and we're finding good process for everybody to work. Problems with the output of the machines themselves or just building a process around the flow of these? Both, yeah. One example is when we make the lock bar inserts for our knives, it's a little piece of hardened steel that becomes the locking surface. When the knife opens up, the lock face engages with the blade.
00:04:43
Speaker
It's a really tiny little complicated part. It's like, I don't know, three quarter inches long by quarter inch wide by thin 50,000 thick or something. I think that's the bar stock that CJ buys to feed his Wilhelmin. Exactly.
00:04:57
Speaker
We make four at a time on a little round pallet and I think I've noticed that they're slipping in op two. So we like bolt this two by two plate down and then the op one is fine because it's rigidly held. There's grippers underneath that pinch into the material like it's not going anywhere. And then I put these little top clamps on with two little 440 screws for each insert and then we profile around it.
00:05:25
Speaker
And we're noticing a difference in the, like the whole location to the OD is different sometimes by a few thou if that. Oh, interesting. So the knives go together a little bit different. And I'm like, no, it's not the current, the current's perfect. I'm like, well, the fixturing doesn't have to be perfect. So I think they're slipping in the roughing up of getting the skin away from the rest of the material and profiling the part.
00:05:49
Speaker
And they're so small, and the top clamps are so small, and we're not torquing them very much because you can't torque a 440 screw that much, and et cetera, et cetera. So eventually, just last week, I put a tab in the finishing operation, like the profiling, so that it's held onto the outside skin for as long as possible. And then I just nip the tab away, and then I do a finished profile. And they seem to be bang on now. Sweet. Which is good. But this is one of those things that's probably been happening for the
00:06:19
Speaker
you know, eight, nine months we've been making lock inserts and not really known, you know? Yeah, you just figured it out from a problem that you then started measuring stuff on?
Solving Machining Problems: The Lock Bar Insert
00:06:28
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. From the finishing guys just kind of constantly noticing like, yeah, they're using different size
00:06:36
Speaker
we have a whole range of different size stop pins that affect how far the blade opens or closes in one thou increments. In a perfect world, every knife should use exactly the same size pin, but they don't. I'm like, where the heck is the variability? This is driving me crazy. Sometimes it's within one or two pin sizes, that's fine, but when it's three, four, five, six thou different, I'm like, okay, something is wrong. The pins can fix it, but that's wrong.
00:07:05
Speaker
I would love Autodesk to have a Fusion 2D contour tab finish strategy. It could just be within 2D contour, like some subset where it would, you'd pick your outside profile and then you would set a parameter, which is the kind of the brim height, like a 3D printer, like, okay, machine it all the way down, leaving 15 thou around the whole part. Then here are my tab spots. I pick those spots. So then you finish machine it.
00:07:34
Speaker
at profile size at full depth around it, leaving the tabs. Then you come in and you zip the tabs down, staying three thou off the sidewall of the part, zipping the tab down so that it's two thou tall or whatever dimension you think. Then finally, you zip all but two tabs off
00:07:51
Speaker
again, saying one pow off the part wall so that you're like, it's just this cascading step down. It doesn't take any cycle time on the machine tool, but I've done it on five axis parts when I really cared, but it's otherwise a little bit cumbersome and, oh man, if it were a workflow, I would just be, I'd love it. That's almost exactly how I do it. It just takes like four operations.
00:08:12
Speaker
Exactly. And it's not really parametric-ish because the way you can't really easily integrate between tabs and the physical tab and sequential operations, unless you're using 3D contour with solid model tabs, which you can do, but it's also just kind of as cumbersome, you know? Yep. Yeah. Or I draw sketches as to where the tabs should be and where I can nip it off at the end. I think that's what I'm doing right now.
00:08:40
Speaker
Vince has a video in the works, it's like a small but worthwhile discovery of if you already have a drill in your ATC to pre-drill your tab and that way when you come in to finally do the finish tabbing, the fusion tends to either want to plunge straight down or even the triangle it ramps, but either way, it's like all of a sudden this crunchy, not great,
00:09:06
Speaker
Yup, absolutely. Line, slot, Z depth, in the drilling, it's not always necessary, but it's a nice little touch if you're looking for that extra. That's exactly how I, full grip. I was going to say full Saunders. Full Saunders. Yeah, that's how I do it on this part as well. I have sketched hole locations where I'm drilling those entry holes and I make sure that the tab is positioned so that it ramps down into that hole as well. Yeah, that's awesome.
00:09:35
Speaker
And there's so many little things. I'm glad Vince is doing a video because these are not intuitive things. You invent them out of necessity, but only after you've struggled with it for months. Well, we just noticed it because we were doing great making some parts on the tormach, and then all of a sudden you'd listen and you'd hear this noise, and you'd think, oh man, did the fixture, did something go wrong? Did the tool break? And then you're like, oh no, but it's just plunging the tab off.
00:10:01
Speaker
at feed
Innovation from Necessity: Plug Jacks
00:10:02
Speaker
rate, right? And you're like, yuck. Yep. Can't have that. Yep. Yeah. I've been obsessive lately about toolpaths, finishing toolpaths, you know, being nice to the end mill, plunging, um, delicate little cuts, whether I'm taking little nips down like one thou at a time, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, or, you know, doing a purposeful full depth hogging pass, or I'm just been very conscious about every toolpath and, um,
00:10:31
Speaker
It's getting to the point where for the past year, I've been happy to add cycle time in order to increase reliability and to solve the problem and make it work. But now I'm looking at the cycle times going, holy cow, I wish those were way shorter.
00:10:45
Speaker
Too funny because we also have never been a cycle time shop. We've never had the volume or Margins where you need to be making it x seconds or you're gonna lose your shirt what you hear about in some shop now all of a sudden I'm like man, we got a look at our cycle times. Yeah, like our mod vice washers are
00:11:04
Speaker
two to three minutes, mostly because it just wasn't an issue. They go, they run 15, 20 at a time uninterrupted. And so we just walk over every hour to run more. And now I'm like, man, we need to crank these things out because we need more of them and we need the lathe for other stuff. The shameless PSA or humble brag, the plug jacks we came out with are selling like hotcakes. Good.
00:11:32
Speaker
It's such a cool little stabilization product. Again, came out of like just we needed it, so we made it. We're like, this is a really good product idea. And it doubles as an end stop or work stop, but really I like it. It works with the rubber fixture plate plug and you can use it to support either just support for true support or actually like support in the sense of adding pressure to like big plate work. If you need a way of supporting it throughout where you can't normally get advice, it works awesome.
00:11:58
Speaker
That's so cool. Yep. Yeah. I saw the post, you know, releasing it and I'm like, Oh yeah, that works. I like that. It was our first, uh, actually I think they're, I think right-handed now. Um, at one point we were, and we may still try to do them as a left-handed on one. There's two threads. There's a thread that threads the base into the fiction. Okay. And then there's the Jack portion itself. Um, but it was kind of fun to figure out are we,
00:12:25
Speaker
Cut tapping that, form tapping it, single pointing it, and I honestly don't even know what Grant's doing right now because I am proud that the team is working like that in that way. Making their own decisions on toolpaths and strategies. Yep. That's really good. Yeah. That's awesome. Is this a product you've had in mind for a long time? We have had it ready to launch for like five months.
00:12:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's my own kind of just, I'm not going to get out of your own way sometimes. But I don't know if I regret that in the sense that kind of what interesting way of changing the conversation that's still relevant. Two days ago, I can't remember if it was Monday or yesterday, regardless, earlier this week, the single best
00:13:13
Speaker
day in this two to three year journey, if not 10 year journey of saunas machine works coming together. All of those fixture crate organizers that we had built by Woodshop came in. They look like Santa's sleigh. It was literally like an eight foot long wrapped in red saran wrap, like six feet high. It was awesome.
00:13:31
Speaker
They came in turns and the team got him on box we got laid out we got almost all of our inventory off the palette racks off of makeshift racks off of carts rolling around we now have our anodizing milk milk run crate set up in a location we are inventory stored and labeled we've got some more clean to do what done but like.
00:13:52
Speaker
All of a sudden, it just really came together. The shop looks great. Ed's crushing it on getting the Akuma up and running, which is a big part of this strategy.
Shop Reorganization and Infrastructure Enhancement
00:14:02
Speaker
It sounds silly, but that jib crane, having the electric hoist on that, and that's now our main station of when we need to flip a plate or when we need to load a plate, we go over there, we lift it up, we can move it onto a table, into a crate, onto a storage container. That's how we do what we do. Yes. Love it when it all comes together.
00:14:22
Speaker
Yeah, it felt great, really did. So my point is I'm glad that we focus on all that. I want to execute on delivering products, showing the value of the fixture plate and what we offer. That's like, I can't begin to, you can't overemphasize that on the flip side. A lot of what we've done is kind of building the company in reverse, trying to build the infrastructure, the systems, the team, the equipment, the processes so that we can now really scale the right way.
00:14:49
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think that's the reverse way. I think that's the clever way to do it, but it might be the unintuitive way. Yeah. Because we're kind of doing that the same thing. Like we could scale, we could hire and buy more equipment, but we're not, I don't want to yet because we're not there yet.
00:15:04
Speaker
We have more capacity in us and we have problems to get rid of and I want to smooth those things out before we get silly with growth or different products or different plans or stuff. There's never going to be a perfect, especially for us, but there's better than we're doing right now.
00:15:24
Speaker
with pretty much what we have. I want to find that before we go throwing money at the solution. You control your ... I never really thought about this. You control your sales in the sense that you can't purchase a Grimsware product unless it's available, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's the total difference. I don't have any control over that. Okay. Yeah, we are production-based. Our revenues are directly tied to how many things we produce.
00:15:52
Speaker
No, that's not really what I mean. What I mean is somebody could go on Ryan right now and order six fixture plates and 20 mod vices. I can't stop them from doing that and anyone is welcome to do that. All of a sudden, our predictive inventory levels are no good and we may have to scramble, whereas you don't allow someone to buy a Norseman or a Saga unless it's already ready for sale.
00:16:17
Speaker
Correct. Except for our buyer's choice system. But we control how many of those go out and how many responses come in. So basically, we pick x many names a day to pull from our list. And we send them the option to fill out a blank form that says, I want honeycomb, acid ash blade, yada, yada. But we can turn that on or off every day. So if we get 10 orders one day, we're like, OK, that's enough for a day. Let's slow it down.
00:16:44
Speaker
And we can scale that accordingly. But yeah, you're right. We don't have that sort of potentially unlimited orders coming in. Right. I mean, that's what I saw. And I think it came through in the conversations with John in area 419, the shop tours, the business update video we just did. And I'm putting words into his mouth here. But they were having days or weeks where they were just
00:17:09
Speaker
Their sales were just blown away and so you just beyond their product like they were taking pre-orders kind of or didn't have a story.
00:17:21
Speaker
I'm pretty sure that there were points where they very much had a hard time keeping up. I don't know if that was back orders they had to fill or whether they just knew there was demand and had to get stuff available to distributors and so forth. I remember he was looking for help on something. I said, hey, I know a guy who has a machine who might be able to help you quote these parts thinking like he may want
00:17:45
Speaker
X amount of them And he was like, oh no, we're already ordering them in in 200 X that quantity and I'm like, oh, sorry And that's like the it's kind of like the thing I always think of there's something happened on Oprah that TV show where one times Oprah gave away as a prize in her show some like Etsy woman's craft or something or persons thing and it was bad because the demand went from
00:18:14
Speaker
a hundred units a week to 20,000 in one day. And basically they failed. And it's kind of, you'd think it's good, but it's not good. Yeah. Like people don't actually want those problems so quickly. Yeah. Right. Right. Crazy.
00:18:29
Speaker
We found a new tool shout out to P3D.
Optimizing Compressor Usage with New Tools
00:18:32
Speaker
He hooked us up with a link and actually used one of the CDI meter. I think CDI is the company. It's an airline CFM, cubic feet per minute measuring device. I was a little bit disappointed that none of the sales folks that were trying to sell us five figure air compressors meant
00:18:51
Speaker
ever thought to say, hey, for 300 bucks, you could buy a meter, which will tell you how much air your shop is using in CFM. We all know PSI because it's like how hard the air gun's blowing at your hand, but CFM isn't something you can think about really.
00:19:06
Speaker
You can pull data sheets off of machines, but our machines aren't running at the same time and blah, blah, blah. Anyways, it's this red box that has two metal pins. You drill holes in a piece of metal pipe and you permanently gasket mount this device into your airline system and it tells you what your current CFM consumption is with a little LED output. Like at the air compressor.
00:19:33
Speaker
Well, so that's the question is you could put it at the input of a machine to see kind of how close or how much that machine is using itself, I think, or you could put it at the output of your air compressor and kind of get a proxy for your whole shop consumption. Have you not mounted it yet?
00:19:51
Speaker
So what I did, I wasn't a hundred percent sure how and where we wanted to use it. Um, partly because we added that second compressor, which is working great. Uh, but we added that second compressor on the other side of the shop. So I think what I'll do basically what I did for now is I mounted that.
00:20:10
Speaker
CDI measuring device on a quick set thing so I can put it in line anywhere I want to. That also let me test it to make sure it works before I had to cut my airlines to permanently mount it. I think what I'll do is probably put it at our new compressor, shut off our old compressor for a day. New compressor should be able to handle our shop under a normal load. That'll help tell me, hey, what is our air consumption, air usage really looking like?
00:20:33
Speaker
Cool. That's cool. Okay. I think I get it. Yeah. This screams Grimsmo. Yeah. Yeah. It's data, right? Well, it's like you have these $10,000 caisers or whatever, but you don't really know. Are you at 60% utilization or are you literally almost about to your half a machine away from needing a bigger compressor? Exactly. Or at least a tank. We don't even have a secondary tank to buffer the pressure. Right.
00:21:00
Speaker
And maybe we should. But yeah, you buy a bead blaster and it says what kind of CFM it needs or you buy an air gun or something like that. You could actually put it right on an air gun and look up the specs of that air gun and be like, oh, it's a 10 CFM air gun. Yeah, it's pulling 10. Sweet. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
00:21:20
Speaker
Because I feel like shop wide, it's kind of an arbitrary number that won't feel right. You can't make sense of it because it's such a big number, I guess. But with a one device or a machine or a singular thing, you can at least compare it and be like, OK, yeah, I see it now. OK.
00:21:37
Speaker
Well then air guns or pneumatic tools or a blast cabinet, those are almost easier if you're using them regularly because you know when someone's blasting apart, it's literally consuming 10 CFM. The thing that are much harder is it's like the Okuma or the Willeman or the Haas. It's like it only needs air for the tool changer or when you're doing an air blast. It's not like a blast cabinet where it's truly just dumping air all the time. And I think it easily leads you to over buy
00:22:05
Speaker
your system needs because it's like, hey, we have nine Haas machines. They all want 10 CFM. Well, no, not even close to that. Right, right. I'm making those numbers up. Yeah, you know. Yeah, like our mori's got an air through the spindle bearings, like an air oil spindle bearing lube thing. So it's constantly bleeding a little bit of pressure. They're current to out the spindle bearings, whereas the Nakamura uses no air whatsoever. Really?
00:22:29
Speaker
Yep. You don't even need air hooked up to it. The only reason it is, is because I have an air blast nozzle for one operation on bearings. Don't you have that air driven tool as well, Speeder? Not on the Nakamura. Oh, I'm thinking of the Swiss, sorry. Yeah, on the Swiss. And it's actually an electric spindle, but it has an air purge through the bearings. Got it. That's cool. That's really cool.
00:22:54
Speaker
Yeah, some machines like the tornos eats a lot of air, the current eats a lot of air. It's just idle, just sitting there. Interesting. I think CJ said his Wilhelmin does too, which I'll be curious. Was there any update or worry on that? Yeah. I haven't touched it in a few weeks, but Pierre has been digging into it. The entire
00:23:16
Speaker
spindle chiller unit had to be rebuilt because all the fittings were corroded out and it was just a giant gross mess inside the tank because it sat for 15 years. The shop
Rebuilding the Willamann Machine's Spindle Chiller
00:23:28
Speaker
that had it had a central chilling system like shop wide so they didn't use this. Interesting. It just sat and got bad and leaked. The first time they poured
00:23:39
Speaker
antifreeze into it, it just leaked all over the machine. They bought stainless steel fittings on McMaster because they're like, screw this, it's never going to happen again. Let's do it right. Stainless fittings are not cheap. Those are all in place. I forget if they've put antifreeze in yet or if they're about to. Willaman told us this specific kind that
00:24:03
Speaker
brand they recommend, but we were able to pick it up at the local car parts store. It's just a German coolant brand. But our new air, all the air filtered regulators, some of them were leaking or cracked or broken or stuff. So we got everything we needed to replace that. They just got to throw it in. There's this one plastic component inside one of the filters that cracked. And there's like a spring sitting on top of it that I guess regulates something.
00:24:33
Speaker
So that part cracked. So Angela was like, should we just 3D print one or should we talk to Wilhelmin and see if they can get us one quick or something? Because that's the last component we need is just this stupid little plastic part. It'd be a bit of a complicated print, doable, but I don't know if I'd trust it for 20 years kind of thing. What's the consequence of it if it failed? I don't know. There's like 10 air canisters in this air system. I don't even know what they all do, but various stages of filtering and regulating.
00:25:05
Speaker
And I know there's a spring on top, so it's doing something. Yeah, right. But for a quick and dirty test, I'm happy to do whatever. But I don't know if it's worth the effort to redesign that and to print it versus just waiting a couple of days and seeing if we can get one in. But otherwise, just button that all up. We got two more windows to put in, the new glass we got, Plexi, whatever.
00:25:34
Speaker
And then I think it's good to go. And then it's already leveled. So then I'll just start programming and playing in brass and then align the bar feeder and get that all set up. Um, as I'm playing, like I can program and play and the guys can align the bar feeder, um, you know, over a week or so. Did you ever figure out how you're going to take a posted G code file from fusion and get it into the control?
00:26:02
Speaker
No, I haven't even thought about that yet. Okay. Because I don't know if there's the USB port, but there's a CDI card or whatever it's called, CF card. Yes. I'm going to guess there's not a USB port. I might be able to network the machine actually, because there is an Ethernet cable. Really? Oh, that would be awesome. Right, it'd be sick, so I'm going to push for that if I can.
00:26:24
Speaker
Part of me actually think it would be awesome to see a floppy drive sitting on your desk with a three and a quarter. Yeah, exactly. Old school. Right? You mean a save button, right? Somebody 3D printed the save icon. Yeah.
00:26:39
Speaker
Oh, that's awesome, dude. I think Ed and I are going to drive over to Noblesville after Christmas and meet those guys and take a look at hopefully what ends up as our machine. Yes. Cool. Yes. Part of me is hoping to
00:26:57
Speaker
once I get this thing up and running and start using it, just to light your fire a little bit and give you more context as to what it's like owning one and running one. You can add fuel to it, but the fire has been lit. I think it's taught me if I shared this, the only major bummer was that that vintage of machine or that specific machine doesn't accept as large of a diameter bar as I was expecting it to.
00:27:24
Speaker
And that is a real issue for one of our parts, maybe two of them. But it's not going to stop me from buying it because there's so many things we want to do on it. What it means is it just changes up some of the workflows. And if I'm being honest, it's hard to say this out loud. It makes me think about wanting to get to a place where we can get a newer vintage one or newish one. But yeah, baby steps.
00:27:48
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's the bootstrapper versus throw money at problems solution. This machine's been sitting on my floor for six months and that bugs me. No, it doesn't. You're fine. Yeah, I know. I want it working. I want to make more products.
00:28:10
Speaker
It bugs you mostly because I tease you about it and others expectations from. It bugs me because it's, I don't know, I just want it done. I want solutions now. I don't want projects. I like projects. Fair enough. I think about the thought of, not that we could have afforded it, but if we bought a new one, it would have been running.
00:28:32
Speaker
within the first month, not six months later. That five months of production is worth so much money. Hey, Willamond to come up and bring it home. I could have. It's almost done, so we'll finish it now.
00:28:46
Speaker
still do it. I mean, so even less of them to do. I think I was a little turned off because it's a little weird with COVID and crossing the border and stuff. So I didn't even really think about that as a valuable, valid option. But the bootstrapper in me is like, nah, we got tons of guys here and they're all smart and we could just figure it out and it'll be a fun project. And those are all true, but it's been months. And I'm not mad about it. But
00:29:09
Speaker
I think of the alternatives, either having Wilhelmin come up or hypothetically, whenever we buy new machines, obviously there's a learning curve, but there's not a fixing curve.
00:29:18
Speaker
That's a great quote. That's a great quote. It's like our UMAC machines. One functions, it's great. The other one needs a tool unclamp sensor replace. So all I got to do is call the repair guys that we used last time and have them come in and for like a grand and a day, they can fix that. But it hasn't happened yet because I don't need the machine and blah, blah. It still bugs me that it's sitting there broken.
00:29:42
Speaker
But that's the rude side of me is just going to tell you, I don't care about you complaining about it anymore. Fix it or stop talking about it. Yeah.
00:29:51
Speaker
call, literally email them when we hang up this podcast and have them come fix the U-MOC. Because frankly, you're going to fix it anyways, even if you sell it. It's better to fix sell it. I agree. I totally agree. Per Dennis Raffi. No, it's totally true. The Wilhelmin is weird because it's like, wait a minute, what you paid for that machine versus a new one, the math ain't even realistically close. I don't know, eight times more or something.
00:30:12
Speaker
Yeah. And look, I hear you paying someone to come in and fix it is, it could have been an open ended five figure tab and you guys bootstrapped it, but it's also time away from doing what you do.
00:30:29
Speaker
Well, having somebody here to fix it is not time away from doing what we do. We get to do what we do and pay them the dollars. Yeah. No, what I meant is like, for example, rigging. Now rigging is a little bit more nuanced because there's times where you need experts at rigging period, like no questions asked from a safety and equipment standpoint, but our Akuma, we just rented our forklift, picked it off the truck, skated it in. It really wasn't hard. There's no safety issues. Cool.
00:30:57
Speaker
period. The rigging quote for that thing was insane. Really? Just to unload it off the truck into your shop. Insane, yes. Are we talking like $5,000 or $10,000?
00:31:09
Speaker
Yeah. My point is, look, they're either just the cost of doing business these days or look some of it's, hey, they got to drive equipment in and maybe get road permits for stuff and two or three guys at X number of hours and they've got to book so much time, it may go quicker, it may not. Just like if you're like, hey, I've
00:31:28
Speaker
If you're a machine tool builder, you got to fly a guy to a foreign country to fix a 20-year-old machine. Who knows what that can of worms may be, or as you guys can tackle it with McMaster orders here and there. I get it, but darn it. There's all this stuff about processing and bootstrapping and all these fun words. At the end of the day, it's also about making money. Sometimes making money means not signing big checks for repair stuff. It doesn't need to be that much.
00:31:56
Speaker
Anyway, that's my rant. Yeah, and
Impact of Time on Business Efficiency and Growth
00:32:00
Speaker
to end my rant, I think it's time is the biggest thing. It's how long something takes versus how long I think it'll take, which never matches up. Yeah. But you don't get your time back, you know? You don't get your time back. Business especially, time makes money or should make money.
00:32:19
Speaker
And if something takes way longer than it should or, you know, like Wilhelmin Sydney for six months costing us money, um, not making any money, like you don't get that time back. You're getting there though. I had a new idea that I'm loving for Lex on inventory. Okay.
00:32:43
Speaker
So the problem we have is whether our physical inventory is a good number. So like we have now those crates that just came in. We have a crate that just has like Tormach 1100 plates. We have just a crate for VF2 plates because we all have different variants and sizes. And then we have like a generic Haas crate or a generic brother plate crate. For finished goods? Yes. Yeah.
00:33:08
Speaker
customer facing products, products that are ready to pack up and ship out the door. So what we'll do is periodic inventory audits to make sure all that numbers are good. So if you walk over to the VF2 crate and there's, let's just say there's four steel plates, keep it simple.
00:33:23
Speaker
Well, Lex should tell you there's four and there should be four. The problem is if an order came in and the order hasn't been picked yet, you may really only have three available for sale, but there's four there. Now that lag usually isn't too long because we usually pick an order certainly the same day. So I don't want to create an issue where there really isn't one, but this has been an issue. So my thought is,
00:33:48
Speaker
Because fixture plates are relatively low quantity, we'll have well under 100 finished ones in stock, especially the ones that we want to really track is to build or have somebody build for us a digital inventory tracker. These have unique numbers. A VF2 steel plate has like an S number, what's called S1277.
00:34:16
Speaker
So you'd have quantity for S1277s and you'd stick a 3D printed little device on each one of the plates, which serves as the S number barcode thing, which is good. And it has a little green or red LED in it.
00:34:33
Speaker
And it's green when it's good to sell. As soon as somebody on our Shopify website buys a plate, one of those goes from green to red. Yes. Which tells you that's the one that you're going to pick. It matches the serial number to their order, which ties into the whole laundry room. Okay. That side of things with the quality control sheet. And then when you walk over, you know which one's red. So you can see that VF2 plate is the one I want to pull. And we now have much better control over live inventory.
00:35:02
Speaker
Yes, that's cool. Right. And that kind of device doesn't have to be that expensive. I've been looking into the Raspberry Pi's Pico. It's like a $5 board that I guess it's not Wi-Fi. But there's pretty cheap option. I forget. I know the Pico is like super bare bones. A regular Pi is like $30 to $50. I thought there was like $20 Raspberry Pi's. Yeah, probably.
00:35:32
Speaker
The worst thing about it is the battery, but again, you're right. The Pi 4 that we use eats battery pretty quick, like a pretty fat cell phone charger battery bank thing, 10,000 milliamp hours or something, gets eaten up in a day or so.
00:35:51
Speaker
I don't need a screen though. I just need a simple, and I don't know the Arduino wireless stuff these days, but like an XV type thing where a little 12 volt gel cell cell battery would probably last a couple of years and you can have an LED for low battery light on it.
00:36:11
Speaker
Cool you gotta think of the scale of it like how many in the end are you looking to make like ten fifty. Twenty and that'll help you decide you know what route to go how to power them if you want to hardwire them in with actual power. Right not hard to do you know.
00:36:27
Speaker
Actually, okay, so now that I'm talking, the better thing to do would be instead of putting that on the plate. Right now, we take a piece of painter's tape and place it on the plate with a sharpie handwritten S number, serial number, plate description. Not a great solution, but it's a step to the next solution.
00:36:49
Speaker
On steel plates, we write Sharpie directly on the steel plate because we don't want tape to potentially cause long-term surface rust if you leave it on there for months for some reason. What we could do is have these Arduino or whatever they are devices clip into the crate just to the side of the product, which means they could all share one battery. Yeah. That's the way to do it. That's easy then. Is this on the rack, like on the shelving rack?
00:37:17
Speaker
they're on pallets so we can put them on the floor or up on racking. Because I mean on racking you could build like stations, you know, station one, station two in the rack that's hardwired for power in and then each one's controlled like that. You could network them for that matter.
00:37:38
Speaker
Oh, yeah, you could. I bet you we could just use a 20 volt, dude. Then it has a built, you just swap it out in two minutes. You probably have a coin cell battery that serves as your backup if you swap the DeWalt test, you don't lose power. I'm going down a rabbit hole right now, but it's fun. That sounded like a crazy idea and I was starting to break it down. I'm like, no, we could do this. Then obviously what you do is you have Lex monitor the battery life of the battery and then email you when it's time to replace it.
00:38:07
Speaker
Right. Obviously. Right? Oh, yeah, it is fun. The other thing we've been doing is just killing it on these quality of life improvements. I got all of our thermostats programmed on daytime, evening, and weekend schedule, so we're not heating the shop. Nice. We don't need to be heating it.
00:38:25
Speaker
We've finally got a design nailed down for our Haas chip augers that I'll be sharing on the YouTube channel, but it's a 3D printed FDM snap-on thing that covers the auger section, really helps with chip evacuation. We found a cardboard cutting table. Did we tell you about this? I don't think so.
00:38:46
Speaker
Remember two months ago, we were talking about ways. It's called a Fletcher. They make different sizes and types, but ours is a wall-mounted cardboard cutting drag knife.
00:39:01
Speaker
They're like a thousand bucks new. I found one on eBay. It was 200 bucks. The guy kind of misrepresented the condition of it because when it showed up, the aluminum extrusion was all janked up, so I swapped out the aluminum extrusion for it.
00:39:17
Speaker
some 12 millimeter linear rail off of eBay. So it's like the nicest moving sweatshirt out there. And it just has a lever that lifts up a bar, the bar holds down your cardboard or foam.
00:39:32
Speaker
and it has a built-in scale on it and it mounts on the wall so it doesn't take up any space. So you slide your foam or cardboard up with the built-in scale where you want to drop the lever down and then it has a drag knife that moves on that linear scale and you just pull the knife down across like a panel saw but with an exacto blade instead of a rotating blade saw. So just as like a one straight cut. Bingo, yeah. Cool. It works great. Very cool. So not quite as advanced as making your own custom foldable boxes.
00:40:02
Speaker
No, not at all. But what is the purpose of this then? We still make custom boxes. We can do them on the laser. Sometimes we just want to cut inserts or pads or foam. It's better than setting up T, what they call them, like T squares and trying to use box cutters by hand on the floor on tables. A little bit safer in terms of not having box cutter blades getting moved all around by hand. And it's just nice. Yeah, absolutely.
00:40:31
Speaker
I loved it for, well, $300 with the new rail. I didn't love it at $1,000. Easy. Yeah, for sure. That's cool. How's that Zeiss? Excellent. Our 4K monitor came in yesterday, and it's real nice. Yes, quality of life on that thing has been amazing. I've already used it a bunch. Checking end mills, checking tools, checking surface finish qualities, checking for burgers inside parts that we make, even some of the lathe parts coming off.
00:40:59
Speaker
you know, now Pierre has our old Leica microscope for Swiss stuff and inspection stuff. So that works working really good. What's really taken off is the optical comparator. We're using that thing more and more. Really? Especially on the pens, there's a
00:41:17
Speaker
a bunch of features that are just absolutely perfect for looking on the optical comparator. And one of the features has, I think it's a 1,000 chamfer. And if it's a 2,000 chamfer, it will anodize weird and look weird. Really? So both sides of this mating part have to have the same size chamfer. Otherwise, it'll look wrong.
00:41:38
Speaker
And, uh, we found that out yesterday and, and Pierre just threw it on the optical and he goes, okay, I gotta change my tool 52 offset by half a thou or something like that. And, okay. Got it. No problem. You can see a one thou chamfer on that. I think so. Yeah.
00:41:54
Speaker
That's cool. That's awesome. Yeah, absolutely. And also yesterday we got, I think I told you about, there's a computer system we got for the optical comparator that adds a screen and kind of logging capabilities of all your touch points. So that came in yesterday and installed it yesterday. It still needs to, we got to have the guy come in and calibrate the machine properly so that the scales in the
00:42:18
Speaker
computer matched like actual movements and datums and stuff, but that's cool. So even real quick yesterday, I put in a RAS candle and I had to check a couple features and I'm able to stack up tolerances and measure within like feature to feature, hold to hold or line to line. And that became like I was able to measure things that I can't measure otherwise within like 10 minutes. So yeah, I'll do a video on that eventually because it's really slick.
00:42:47
Speaker
That's awesome. That was a third party or was that from the same Zeiss factor? No, it's made by Bowers in the UK. In the States, they're sold under the Fowler name. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I totally lucked out on that optical comparator. Local, it has
00:43:04
Speaker
What is it? Half micron, high nine scales on it. It's in really good condition. It's got a 10 times lens on it right now. And there's a couple times when they're like, I really wish it had like a 20 or 25 times lens. So I asked the distributor, local distributor, how to get a lens. Google isn't helping me. It's not telling me anything. I know they exist. I just don't know where to get one. Interesting. I didn't help you. Because I haven't asked him.
00:43:31
Speaker
Actually, hold on, is it Elliott Matsura, who I got the Zeiss from, they're now a stare dealer, like just recently. So I should ask them too, if I can't figure it out.
00:43:42
Speaker
Yeah. Have them go good on that rabbit hole. You can dig for it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, right? That's awesome. I'd say if someone is listening to this podcast and is young, hungry, looking for ideas, go build the next generation of metrology equipment company. I can't think of a good brand name comparison, but you could totally upend it with leveraging new technology interfaces. You don't necessarily need
00:44:10
Speaker
components that cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to have accuracy, build the software that works the way John and I want software to run, build a CNN, build a vision system, and there's opportunity to disrupt that whole market. Yeah, I like that because a lot of times the solutions that are out there are
00:44:30
Speaker
either mechanically amazing and digitally sucky or digitally amazing and mechanically sucky. It costs a hundred grand. Yeah, exactly. Someone go build the $12,000 CMN. You know what? That would sell like gangbusters.
00:44:47
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And it's not going to be able to do certain things. Although honestly, I think you might be surprised at what folks could get into. Even if it was just one foot by one foot working area, like small parts. Yeah. And it uses a Renishaw probe or something off the shelf. I don't know. Yeah. But CMMs are prohibitively expensive at 50 grand, 100 grand, 200 grand. Yep. Cool. Awesome.
00:45:11
Speaker
What are we up to today? I don't know. I haven't figured that out yet. Sweet. We finally got the Okuma Fixturing made. So it's on the machine. We've got to kind of finish it up. But that's our next focus on that. And then I've been doing a lot of the inventory overhaul of the new crates and steering that ship. So getting that stuff tied in, which just feels great. I love it. Helping with orders. Yeah. That's awesome. Sweet.
00:45:41
Speaker
Sweet. I'll see you next week. All right. Have a good day. Take care. Bye bye. Bye.