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#326 Kern updates, running great!
293 Plays2 years ago
TOPICS
- Family stuff
- Kern updates, running great!
- Saunders Puck Chuck, heat treat, tolerances
- Surface grinder
- Coolant management, foaming, water management
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Hosts' Background
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining episode number 326. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo.
CNC Enthusiasm and Personal Stories
00:00:08
Speaker
And John and I talk each week as good manufacturing partner friends about, today we'll talk about machines actually. Yeah. Yeah. CNC machines. Yes. I like it. Yeah. I like CNC machines. I saw driving into work today, I saw a license plate that said,
00:00:26
Speaker
I forget CNCRSTK or something and I'm like, does that mean CNC Repair and Service Tech? I don't know. I need to ask. And I'm like, he's taking an exit. Should I follow him because I don't know. Yeah. The joke that is not true. All I wish it was is that my son's middle initial is C. His first name is William. His last name is Saunders. No way. His initials are WCS.
00:00:52
Speaker
It was not planned.
Reflections on Family and Life Priorities
00:00:54
Speaker
Yeah, but a hilarious coincidence. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Well, he is the, you know, he's your oldest kid. He's the center of the universe. You know, it's like, yeah, right. He's your origin.
00:01:07
Speaker
On that note, I will take a selfish moment to do a tip of the hat to my grandmother. She passed away last week and it's a relief because she was not well. Her name was Carter and that's where William's name comes from. And we chose that because at the time when we had William, I didn't think we'd ever move back to Zanesville and that was my way of remembering.
00:01:24
Speaker
her and how good she was to me as a kid. And her husband, my grandfather is the one that I'd say is largely responsible for my interest in the treatments. He was the fabricator and the one that I've mentioned so many times in the good and bad ways over my journey through this life. But it was easier to treat it as a celebration of life than a sad moment because she had been so sick and was 95. So that's all great. Yeah, exactly.
00:01:52
Speaker
She was not robbed of anything in that sense. We had the service Friday and spent the weekend with family, which is a real change of pace. You're not thinking about other things. Even if we were just hanging out with family doing fun things, it just wasn't thinking like, oh, I could sneak into the shop or I could pop up an infusion file. It was just some change of pace. Interesting.
00:02:18
Speaker
That's a good way to put it because on Friday, I think I went to Fraser's wedding. Oh my gosh. He doesn't work here anymore, but he's still like, you guys are coming to the wedding like the kids and everything. It was wonderful. Like you said, it was total change of pace. I'm here for him to celebrate their marriage and his wife's super awesome and they have a little kid, one-year-old Parker running around during the ceremony and making Fraser crack up while he's trying to give his emotional vows. It was hilarious.
00:02:47
Speaker
Um, and yeah, as you said, total, total change of pace and total, like I'm, I'm completely here. I'm not, my mind's not anywhere else. You know, I don't, I don't have a lot of those times in my life and I'm pretty focused on work or family. And this was like, just I'm here for a couple hours and get to enjoy enjoying myself. It's awesome. It was nearby. Yeah. Close enough. Yeah. That's awesome.
00:03:08
Speaker
It's almost like being a surgeon except when I normally use that phrase, be a surgeon, it's a discipline like work or like effort. And this is more like you're being a surgeon in a relaxed way. Like you just don't, like you realize that there's more to life than some things. And it was nourishing in a sense. I don't know. It's been a weird adjustment back this week for reasons I can't totally put my finger on. But yeah.
00:03:37
Speaker
Yeah, you still have your grandparents or they were they part of your life? Are they part of your life? So my grandfather was probably close. I was closest to my grandfather, but still not super close. You know, I'd see them a couple times a year for Christmas or whatever. Um, but he's very much like my dad, very much like me. Like it's, it's the lineage. You know, his name is John as well. I get my name from him.
00:03:59
Speaker
And apparently going back in our family, it goes John Ingvar, John Ingvar, John Ingvar, John Ingvar for like hundreds of years. And then I broke the system by calling my son life. But I was, you know, closest to him, he passed away at 70, mid 70 something. Oh, wow. A while ago, 20 years ago. Okay. But, you know, coincidentally, my dad's like 72 now. And I'm like, Whoa, that's, that's like,
00:04:25
Speaker
My dad's much healthier than he was, I guess. Otherwise, I am actually going to visit my grandmother, his wife, his second wife, I guess, in a couple weeks. She lives on the west coast. Oh, fun. By Amish, but on the islands. Awesome. My dad and I are flying out there to visit her and go to another wedding, my cousin's wedding.
00:04:49
Speaker
I think I'll still hit the podcast cause I'm leaving like Thursday to Monday. So shouldn't affect the flow. If you want to do it, John, we should do it. And if you don't want to don't like, this is not, I'll still be here. I'll still be working that guy's what I'm saying. Um, otherwise that's no, I'm not super close to my grandparents. My wife was super close with her grandmother and, um, she was, I was actually driving to your first open house in like 2016.
00:05:18
Speaker
When, uh, I was going to go there when mom, my wife's grandmother like took a turn. And so I turned around mid drive to your place and I was like, okay, I'll come home. And I didn't make it to that first open house. Yeah.
CNC Machine Maintenance and Performance
00:05:33
Speaker
Yeah. So that bad hit her really hard and that was close with her as well. But yeah, family life, people get away. Yeah. So it shares what you can when you can. Yes. The key there. Yep. Yep.
00:05:47
Speaker
Well, sorry, I betrayed my own comment. Let's talk about CNC machines. We got sidetracked into like super heavy stuff. Family stuff. How's Das Kern? Running like a champ. It's been super consistent. It's run constantly since I even came in on Saturday night and I reloaded like everything.
00:06:10
Speaker
and then kept it running till Monday. And that gave us a whole extra 30 hours of run that we don't normally get on a Sunday. That's awesome. So I still have the slow programs on there where I limited the RPM to 17,000 to 18,000. I just need to spend some time and change those all back. And that'll save us a couple hours a day probably.
00:06:32
Speaker
What? Remind me though, are you going to go to 39 or something? That's my hesitation is I don't just want to put the old programs back on because some of them unnecessarily crank up to 42,000 RPM just for doing an engraving. I'm like, I don't need to. As I've learned through this and a lot of people DM me and commented, the amount of heat generated at full RPM versus 90% RPM is significantly more. If you don't need to live at full RPM, don't.
00:07:02
Speaker
You know, just because you're looking at the SFM calculations and you're like, well, to get the chip load I want, you got to like, it's such a tiny tool. You really got to crank it up, but you don't just cut slower. Yeah. So I'll be playing with that. And I mean, our engravings take like 30 seconds. So it's not like I'm losing or saving any time. Um,
00:07:21
Speaker
By going a little bit slower. Would it just be like a couple of toolpaths that were the one hour, like the grinding or the high RPM stuff? That add time, yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think I changed 25 programs on the machine for lower RPMs. There's a lot of like little tools here and there, but keep in mind my limit was 18,000. So everything over 18,000, all the 27,000, all the 30,000, which I can still go back to no problem.
00:07:50
Speaker
It's really just those 42,000 that I'm going to try to avoid. Yeah. And obviously, don't crash the machine. Yeah. Sure. Nobody wants to crash. No, of course not.
00:08:04
Speaker
Remind me, you're still doing new toolpaths and then go through Camplete or do you go through Fusion? Every post code goes through Camplete. That's my post processor now. I do have a Fusion post for it, which I'll use for like, if I'm doing weird pass through macro engraving stuff where I want to count up the serial number, I do post that directly on a Fusion.
00:08:27
Speaker
But that's rare. That's only a couple tool paths. Everything else goes through Camplete and I've modified my Camplete post to do what I want with tool breakage and things like that. So you're going to keep Camplete for this foreseeable? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's my post. Hashtag might be awkward if they start dwindling Camplete.
00:08:49
Speaker
I don't know what their plans are, but it's already an Autodesk product. You load it up and it says Autodesk. It's funny. I bumped into Jeff Fritch at the Elliott Open House. It must have been. I bump into him. I'm like, I recognize this guy. Where do I recognize? He's got an Autodesk tag. Where do I recognize him from? Oh, yeah. Saunders and I went to see him at Camplete. Yes. He's an Autodesk employee. But he left Autodesk.
00:09:17
Speaker
I don't know. He has an Autodesk name tag. No. I know this because I remember seeing it on LinkedIn. I don't know if he has a new job yet. Oh, wait. Oh, yeah. He's now at NextGen Solutions, like a reseller, I think, or something. Maybe that's what I saw. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Because maybe he's still a support person. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, cool. Yeah. Huh.
00:09:46
Speaker
I'm not saying as absolute up to date as I probably could, Vince is, but there's been so much fusion progress on simulation and there's even more coming and I believe the nuance of what's more coming has to do with not just simulating a program toolpath, but rather simulating the actual kind of posted code, which can matter for linking moves.
00:10:10
Speaker
Well, Autodesk bought Camplete for a reason, not just to keep it itself, its own little side project, but eventually to integrate it in. That said, because I'm mostly posting repeat jobs with little tweaks or change a toolpath here and there, I'm not even really simulating in Camplete anymore. I can't remember the last time I've actually watched a simulation and checked for errors. I'm just using it as a pass-through post. Got it.
00:10:38
Speaker
But that feels like the pain in the butt. It does, but I know the post is dialed and that's just my process now, but it is a lot of clicking.
00:10:46
Speaker
Well, and like, but that's the situation I'm in. You can criticize me all day long, and frankly, I deserve it. But the reality was I really struggled with machine configurations when our Kuma horizontal came in. And they've gotten better now, but I would still say there's some quirkiness to it. You know, multiple users and the cloud, the settings, the configuration, and I just couldn't get it to where it made sense. And so we just started posting programs without it. And now,
00:11:14
Speaker
to change to that just feels, it just feels, it would feel very overwhelming. Like I would need to be a surgeon for quite a few days, reprogram each reset of each file, verify it, run it off, single block, or not single block it, option stop it. And there's, you know, dozens of programs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So Kern left there. Good. Machine's good. Yeah. Team left on Friday. Um,
00:11:43
Speaker
Yeah, everything's good. Uh, we almost like she finished up Thursday night and she's like, do you want to run it? And I was like, we're both leaving now, Thursday night, like to go home and hotel and stuff.
Business Challenges and Product Development
00:11:56
Speaker
And, uh, like, I don't know if I trusted yet for like a night run. Let's save it for the morning. And then right when Angela comes in, you guys can run it and they did. It was fine, but.
00:12:06
Speaker
It was down for, I think, three and a half days total. John, that's great. It was great. Yeah, not bad. But at the time, we were kind of hoping to like, well, on day two and three, can we run it at night? Trust level wasn't there in the tightness of everything. I'd rather be there and watch the high pressure coolant line not be tightened fully than have it happen when nobody's there. But everything was good. Everything was tight. And machine runs great. Sounds great. Looks great.
00:12:35
Speaker
What you just said, though, is kind of why I have these calls. And frankly, what I expect from you to me, it's not a friendly request. It's a demand. You need somebody to tell you, John, step away from the machine. You have brand new spindle, brand new components. If your business is so high strung that you need that night run to make ends meet, you got bigger problems. Step away. Run it the next morning with the team there. You're fresh. Do you have the chance to do things the right way?
00:13:02
Speaker
You just need somebody to tell you, I find that I do. When people say the phrase entrepreneurship is lonely, that's one of the things you think about. You got to make these decisions like, yes, it would be great to walk in to have a night run, made all these parts successful. You feel big and good, but oh, man, no, so much downside risk. Yeah, especially because we didn't have a chance to test it, to run a full cycle watching it. You have to. Right.
00:13:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's like I filmed a whole video of the process of taking the spindle out and everything. So that'll go up next couple of weeks probably. But it's like back when Eric and I used to build cars. And you got to take it for a shakedown run. You got to take it for a test drive. You're not going on a road trip immediately after replacing the engine or something. That's kind of the scenario there, which I have actually done in the past.
00:13:51
Speaker
But yeah, so it's good. It's good we left it. Everything worked out great. Machines have been running pretty much non-stop ever since. That's awesome. Yeah. That's great. I know you spent some money. I know it's sunk, but like- That's a lot of money. Somebody asked me if they're like, is this like almost the cost of a, or they said, what's more expensive, a new Toyota Camry or this spindle? And I was like- Yes.
00:14:15
Speaker
two Toyota Camrys or something. Like I don't know how much a Camry costs, but probably two or more. But as we talked about a couple of weeks ago, when I was totally freaking out about this in a couple of weeks, I won't even think about it. It'll be behind me. It'll be, you know, I won't be stressed or worried about it. The money will have come and gone. And that's kind of where I'm at now. It's like, okay, it's over. Like it hurt, but it's a, it's a memory now had to happen. So.
00:14:46
Speaker
Yeah, I have a, that's a great piece of advice that is easier to say than it is to embrace. But like, if you can't, if you can fix something, fix it. And if you can't, don't worry about it. Like, yeah, you're getting into a new spindle, like whether it just has to happen, like end of conversation. And then it's just logical decisions after that, like to stress and worry and things like that is a waste of energy. Yes. But again, I don't,
00:15:14
Speaker
I could be better about that. But man, that's not something that I think you just all of a sudden check the box of like, no, I'm good.
00:15:22
Speaker
The key comes down to learning when you are able to control something and when you're not able to control it. That's what I figured out. It's like, what can you control in this situation? If you can't control it, then why are you worried about it? There's literally nothing you can do. If you can control it though, then control it. Stop whining about it and do something if you can.
00:15:46
Speaker
Well, so a Grayzone example that's giving me some anxiety today and yesterday is, to back up a second, the Puck Chuck Zero Point product development, I think is going great. We're learning, we are making some, we've shipped out the first alpha units. I call them alpha units because they're not quite beta. We want to do a beta where we can actually open it up a little bit more.
00:16:08
Speaker
And by all means, I'm happy because of the progress we're making. I'm happy that with the progress that we're making, we're also kind of silently removing the whole like, Oh my God, we missed these something major that you couldn't predict. That means it doesn't work. Like we did the a quarter million cycles with the thing. All that stuff is great.
00:16:28
Speaker
where I'm at now, that's maybe anxiety is not the best word, but the probably is the honest word is we want to make the next batch of 50. And it's a question of do we take like one of the parts where we
00:16:43
Speaker
For the sake of being blunt, we want to have it heat treated. It should be heat treated. It doesn't have to be. Right. You can you could parse that a little further if you want, but that's kind of the late the. Yeah, that's where that's where the alpha units kind of work. It's like, well, you know.
00:16:58
Speaker
Yeah, so what I think I'm going to do as a compromise is order some most many of the parts are 40 140. I'm going to order some of the material as the more expensive pre hard version that puts it ballpark 30 Rockwell. Yeah, knowing that that's way better than an annealed or not hardened. But
00:17:17
Speaker
Then when we do the next, the plan is to get those in. We can work with that material here. We can finish machine it to the spec needed, and we can put those to use both here and maybe some painting units. Then while that's happening and we're learning, we can order the regular annealed material and then have it turned, sent out, key treated, and then
00:17:37
Speaker
And we just don't have as much heat treat experience, especially on some of these bigger parts to see if they're going to move or we're going to do any finish post heat treat processes or machining. I think most of them will be okay, but famous last words. So heat treat does weird things. They will twist and bow and warp and yep.
00:17:59
Speaker
Yeah. You do everything in house. I think I already asked you this. You do everything in house. Everything, except we sent out a batch a couple of weeks ago for some A2 fixture plates for the heat treating cell, actually, temper plates. It was too big and awkward for us to do normally, and then a bunch of little screws and stuff. We made out of A2. We can heat treat A2. It's just it's disruptive, you know? Yeah. So that's what I want to do. We do heat treat all of our blades ourselves, yeah.
00:18:29
Speaker
asking for a friend, the heat treaters that use a vacuum furnace, that means you don't need the foil bags because they're kind of accomplishing the same thing.
00:18:39
Speaker
Yeah, they can still come out discolored if they don't temper them in the vacuum oven. The A2 parts we got came back blue because they kind of open atmosphere quenched or tempered them at 400 degrees, whatever, not the full hot. They did vacuum heat treat them at 1900 degrees, but they must have tempered them in a different oven.
00:19:00
Speaker
Interesting oxidized, which is fine. They look amazing blue. They're like, cool. Right, right. But they basically said vacuum temper will cost more money. And do you need it? And it's like, no, not really. If you if you drop this on the locomotive and ground three thou off, would they clean up? Or is that so? Oh, the blue is like tents.
00:19:21
Speaker
Okay, not even. Yeah, it's not like a black scale or anything. It's just like a color. Got it. They look anodized. They're funny. That's funny. Yeah. But yeah, have you found some heat treaters to send some stuff to? Yes. We have the Peters heat treat in Pennsylvania. We're also going to probably consider trying solar atmospheres. That's a Renzetti recommendation. Yeah, they make ovens, right?
00:19:49
Speaker
I don't believe so, but I could be wrong. Solar something makes these big vacuum ovens, which I've priced out in there outside my league. Yeah, right. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. There's one in Columbus or more than one in Columbus that could be nice because the other complicating factor with the heat treat is now you've got to deal with a hole. These are parts are heavy enough to where we'll probably freight them. So now it's like how are you freighting them to and fro.
00:20:18
Speaker
I'm not sharing this for looking for any sympathy it's more just like okay now it's like all the sudden you got all these different things on your plate of decisions to make and so even literally yesterday i grabbed a total outside hey i'm just going to triage list like this is what we should do make sure i'm not.
00:20:34
Speaker
making a mistake or overlooking it. Let's order some material today. It'll be pretty hard. It should be fine. That'll let us learn more, do more simultaneously. We'll order regular material. We'll get that stuff sent out. And it's also what kind of was like, don't worry if it's inefficient on how we handle the freight for now. We'll figure that out better. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Prototyping phase is just, you know, make progress. Right. Get it all done. So I guess when you do heat treat them, you're going to heat treat them full hard, like 60, 58, 60 Rockwell. Yeah.
00:21:04
Speaker
It'll be, sure, high fifties. Yeah, yeah. Or whatever. We'll want to temper on it. 41.40 allows you to. Yeah.
00:21:12
Speaker
That brings me to my other question, which is finally getting to the CNC machine side of it. The original set of prints and goals were to have this assembly, have the two main components that are stacked on top of each other, the base and the puck, have those tolerances held such that the final assembly meets our spec.
00:21:34
Speaker
Really hard. Yeah, I can see that proud to say that we actually do that with the mod vise the half-inch base the half-inch jaw We're really good at that like the tolerances that we're regularly holding I actually put a note in my calendar Just randomly once a month to walk out crap three parts is like each one of them and I've done that twice now just completely random Yeah, and both times I've done that over the last month
Machining Tolerances and Surface Grinding
00:21:57
Speaker
all six parts that I checked were two-tenths over half an inch, which is perfect. That's exactly what we're looking for. That's the wrong way to think about this product for what I mentioned in just some other reasons long-term. What I realized we can do is we can relax the tolerances significantly on both of those parts.
00:22:19
Speaker
Again, it's just the right thing to do. You then end up with an assembled part that's way out of spec, and then you do an op three. The op three gives you the chance to make it perfect, and that feels good. It's just one of those things like, okay, this is right, even though I don't wish I had to do an op three. That's okay. If you take it apart and put it back together, would it still be aligned?
00:22:38
Speaker
it would that you wouldn't be able to mix match, but that's not something that correct about here. Yeah, yeah. They're going to be off, you know, some number of tents, maybe even a couple now. Right. So I suspect that means we're going to purchase a surface grinder. Because we
00:22:59
Speaker
We can and will and have machined that off three, but it's just, it's a grind. It's actually really simple. It's effectively a four inch square base part. We can use the zero point system to use with a pull stud. Basically we'll have a magnetic chuck, but we'll put a fixture on it that has pull studs on it. So you actually mount the zero point upside down. Like think about taking your chunks and like flipping it up and putting it on a pull stuff that's mounted to your grinding table. And that presents, that gives us the,
00:23:29
Speaker
But the XY datum is not in any way important here. You're making up a parallel face. Bingo. A nominal and parallel face. Would you grind both sides? Just the backside. Yeah. Leave the top side milled flat. Top side will be done and we don't want to change some relative datums on walking that top side down. Yeah. So we leave the top side alone and then grind the backside and you end up with the correct
00:23:59
Speaker
which is great. Interesting. Yeah, I like that. Otherwise, you make every single part perfectly flat, perfectly parallel, perfectly tolerant so that they always, always, always fit together, which is a challenge.
00:24:13
Speaker
Yeah, john's under telling it talking to another, you know, young hungry machinists would tell them they're full, like to know. Yeah, I know. That's like, you know, people out there can tell me they're not they don't act this way. But if you have a print that says minus zero plus three tenths, which is a crazy machine tolerance, and you get a part that's three and a half or four tenths, you scrap it, like, yeah. Yeah.
00:24:39
Speaker
Yeah, depends. And then you have multiple parts going together, so your assembled stack-up tolerance is $0.03. And it gets out of hand pretty quickly. Yes. The way we've solved this on the key products that we make here, number one, both of those products are generally being done in the Akuma machines, which are thermally stable. They're just high quality. We still do warm-ups. We still have to pay attention to them.
00:25:06
Speaker
The bigger thing is you isolate variables, so the criticals are done in the same op, same setups, sometimes even the same tool, just so that you're not, for instance, the top jaws, you can't make those to the torques we make them if you're not able to deck two different sides of the same setup, full stop. It wouldn't work. We've done probing, we've done more complicated setups and fixtures. You just need to be able to make
00:25:33
Speaker
So we have a woodruff saw cutter that's able to come in and cut the occluded feature. And it keeps it nominally correct and parallel. And it just puts a smile on your face. Nice. You can't do that here. So I want to know if you could give me the beginner's guide to the grinder you guys bought. Size and spec. So we got the Okamoto something something SA1. Yeah.
00:26:00
Speaker
Pretty big table. This 12 by 24? Yes, that's the one. And then the one that Spencer Webb got, and somebody else got it too, is the smaller table size, the AC one or something. It's actually got a fan of control, which is a little different. ours has like an Okuma, or Okamoto control. But I mean, surface grandders are pretty,
00:26:29
Speaker
It's not like you're running code. You're just building a little program on the thing. Um, I don't actually run the machine. So I'm just making up this from what I've seen Angela tell me, but, um, yeah, ours was like 70 grand or something like that. Okay.
00:26:44
Speaker
Do you know I thought I watched your video where you and then Angela kind of went through it and showed some and I've watched a couple of Spencer's videos. I thought one of you had the quote unquote CNC version and the other had the quote automatic version.
00:27:00
Speaker
Yeah, ours is the automatic one. Spencer's is the CNC one where he could grind like a wave if he wanted to, I think. And he can dress the sides of the wheel and do like weird step grinding sideways and weird stuff. And his price was, I just remember it being surprising, like his was cheaper or something for more functionality, but ours was bigger and better suited for what we needed.
00:27:26
Speaker
I definitely price them both out and spec them both out. If you're thinking Okamoto, which I have nothing but good things to say about it. Yeah, right. I cannot fathom we would need anything other than an automatic because we're really just grinding four inch squares like super simple. Then the one that Adam the Machinist has, I think it's a Parker Majestic. Yes. I know it's zero about that other than he's brilliant and I trust him.
00:27:53
Speaker
It seems like that's more of a dye maker, like tooling, like kind of a more creative, you know, we just need a kind of dumb, high quality, dedicated thing where it's just going to run this one thing. And that's kind of where we're at.
00:28:10
Speaker
watching your and then Spencer Webb's videos where it just like because we have had manual and automatic service grinders before or semi-automatic and like you still both those that we had, we had the Tormach and we had an old, old, old Okamoto. Both of those you had to manually move the machine over to dress the wheel. The fact that these new ones just you can program in the dress cycle. Oh my God, that just is like
00:28:32
Speaker
So cool. Yeah. So every, say you come down two-tenths per pass, every thou, dress the wheel. And then just do that while you're taking off 5,000 material. And I don't know what magic Angela has done to program that, but it's all on the screen to make it happen. And it's just various little numbers that you've put in. Yeah. The control does not know what you're making. It just kind of knows your size boundary.
00:29:01
Speaker
Yeah. And I forget if it's manually, like you unscrew and move the little end stops to have it flick back and forth. I don't know if that's manual or automatic. I don't know. Okay. But either way, the machine just knows, okay, either manually or automatically, I'm moving 10 inches by 12 inches and just go back and forth and I'm moving what it really knows the Z.
00:29:24
Speaker
Okay. Well, it's actually Y apparently on Spencer. It's Y because it's a horizontal. Same, same as ours. The Z is technically like your spindle axis and your grinding wheel spindle axis is forward. Right, right. So that's Z. So Y is then up and down by gravity and it's whatever. Up and down is the answer. But it controls, you know, up and down very, very tightly. Very tight. Yes. You can move half a tenth and have it be accurate. Like it listens.
00:29:53
Speaker
We ended up putting a mist collector on it actually because it makes mist. Yeah. So we put an arrow X on there, even though it's an opening closure, it still helps, helps some of the dust and the stuff. So that works great. There's two kinds of dressing, dressing the wheel automatically. There's like the table mounted and then there's the top mounted that amounts above. We got the table mount and that's the one that we use. And I remember Angelo telling me he didn't like the top mounted for some reason.
00:30:21
Speaker
So there's a whole bunch of like grinding expert commentary about how you're grinding like 180 out of phase and it can be, if it's perfect, it works great, but it has significant probability of introducing other sorts of errors and so forth. I suspect we would get the table dresser because it sounds better. Although I suspect the grinding work that we need done while I'm excited to have it be excellent, I suspect it's pretty easy work.
00:30:47
Speaker
Yeah. So maybe it's overhead dresser would be adequate. I'll learn more about that. Yeah, I'm trying to remember what, like why, what the reason was, and I'm blanking right now, whether it was an accuracy or tolerance or maybe
00:31:06
Speaker
It can only handle so much wheel diameter before the overhead doesn't reach anymore, whereas the table mounted lets you move down. Now, there's a more fundamental kinematic complaint about that. Maybe that's what it is. It's not
00:31:24
Speaker
I suppose a bad analogy would be like we touch off tools with the tool matter mounted in the machine probe versus if you had a tool matter that wasn't part of your kinematics of your CNC machine. You have the risk that there's error and how it's touching off that tool. I think you're right there. It's kind of like that weird stuff. I'm sure someone's going to yell at their radio right now. Yeah, somebody really does. No, but I think that's about right. And you obviously want to grind a perfectly flat plane.
00:31:47
Speaker
Whereas the upper mounted dresser has its own little axis that moves back and forth that drags the diamond across whereas table mounted uses the machine kinematics like move across which will be theoretically more square.
00:31:58
Speaker
I would kind of that by saying, let's say you ground 30 million of taper along the wheel with your overhead. So long as you're traversing completely on and off the part, it's almost functioning like a high feed into the tool. Now you're going to wear the high side perhaps differently depending on how your lead in goes or which way that taper is relative to the feed traversing. It seems
00:32:21
Speaker
It doesn't seem like something I'm too worried about. Yeah, exactly. Do you change wheels or bounce wheels? Yeah. I mean, Angelo does. We got the balancer from Okamoto. He likes it, he said. Yeah, he balances them really well. Got little weights on the outside that shift around. And I think the diamond dressers last for six months, a year kind of thing.
00:32:49
Speaker
That's true, yeah. But they're cheap enough, like have to, you know? Yeah, right. Apparently, you can rotate it and have different edge exposed to the wheel and like get more life out of it.
00:33:00
Speaker
Cool. I mean, it just works, you're happy with it. It just works. Yeah, it takes time. Like, if you're doing that, you're adding a procedure, you're adding an expert, you're adding like, somebody's got to learn it, somebody's got to run it. Angelo is trying to teach one of our other guys and it's taking a good while because they don't have like weeks to, you know, it's like an hour a day, a couple days a week kind of thing. So it's, it could be viewed as a bottleneck in our company.
00:33:30
Speaker
if just because it's time, it's like it's time to run that upset it, clean it, dress it, everything, you know, it's like it's another machine. Yeah. No, I hear you and like, you know, how how open you dress the wheel and your speeds and all that. I respect that. I also think because the way we're going to be able to to fixture the product in situ and not even use the magnet and how simple it is.
00:33:58
Speaker
Again, I'm not trying to be cocky, but I'm just not nervous about it. You should figure out the right wheel, the right speeds and feeds, not have wheel hop, figure out ways we can balance. That's a skill for sure, but I think this is going to get it going.
00:34:14
Speaker
So that's the other question that was weighing on my mind. Do we just go buy a real cheap $3,000 six by 18 right now so we have one in the shop that we can start playing with and doing it? Right. Just the end grind. Exactly. Maybe. Because I'm not, I have no hesitation to buy one of these, but we need to learn more. My stopgap is I've got a
00:34:35
Speaker
to your town that has a grinder. I think I'm going to either ask him if I can kind of rent some time or just get his help on it. I would start there. Yeah. That's zero effort, you know?
Coolant Foaming Issues and Solutions
00:34:47
Speaker
Yeah. Cool. Well, if I get to the point where I have more questions, do you mind if I pick on you or Angelo? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I should learn more about it too. So it'd be interesting to pass along some answers. Yeah.
00:35:05
Speaker
Uh, yeah. Um, let's talk about cool it. Cool it. Okay. We talked about a brief last week. Um, still having foaming issues in the Kern, the Maury, and sometimes the Nakamura. We run quality chem 251 C and everything, including the surface grinder and, um, still foaming and.
00:35:33
Speaker
trying to learn more about water hardness and what the coolant needs and what it does. It's like a black hole of information. I'm trying to research online. Everybody's got a different opinion. Everybody's got a different perspective. Practical Machinist has answers from all different sides of the argument. I don't know what the answer is. I mentioned to you this morning on WhatsApp that
00:35:55
Speaker
We filled the mori with pure RO water. Normally you fill with tap water to get some minerals in the thing and then you top up with RO. That's kind of the standard procedure. That's what we've been doing. We're like, screw it. Let's just fill it straight with RO and see what happens. Um, and then you mentioned that, what was it again?
00:36:16
Speaker
Well, you had done, and I'm right here alongside you as a humble learner, not a professor of expertise and knowledge to be clear, but you had mentioned that the total dissolved solids, the TDS- We measured it with a little resistance meter thing. Yes.
00:36:34
Speaker
So these are $20 things you buy on Amazon. They usually read out in parts per million or PPM. That works for measuring the water. So you can sort of say, hey, is my RO water beam correctly RO? Like it should go from
00:36:49
Speaker
a high hardness, or should be a high, I've got to be careful here, should go from a high PPM, ours is 250 to 300 out of the tap, down to three. When the RO filter is brand new, it's like zero, and then the membrane starts to get clogged up or fatigued, and then it'll go up to five or six. And then I find that it stays at five or six for a while, and then it tends to spike to like 20, 30, 40. And for us, it's almost every three months exactly. Wow. We have an inline meter, it gets checked every Monday, and then we just replace the RO filter.
00:37:15
Speaker
Nice. Pressure helps push the water through the membrane better to make better use of the otherwise expensive RO membrane. But long-winded way of saying that your RO water will be very low on a PPM, TDS measure. You cannot use or you don't get meaningful data using that same TDS, PPM, total dissolved solids meter with coolant because your coolant does have lots of stuff in it. So the output of that meter is not meaningful.
00:37:44
Speaker
Because we figured that out pretty quickly. Our incoming is about 140, and RO takes it down to one or two. Yes.
00:37:53
Speaker
And so we put in this clean RO water into the tank. We're like, sweet, 2 PPM. And then we measure the coolant in the tank of the machine and measured 600. And we're like, either the machine is putting in so much minerals from old coolant and things like that, or you just can't measure coolant. And then I measured the tank in the current, and I measured 1,000 of running coolant. And it's probably just not working.
00:38:16
Speaker
A couple other things, total dissolved solids is actually not the same as hardness. That's all I'm going to say because that's all I know and I'm not going to try to talk about something I don't know tonight. Is hardness more like calcium and like specific stuff?
00:38:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. And there's a test you can do using a true soap. We had to buy this off of Amazon because most things are figuring out what it needs to be to be a true soap. There's only one specific one that works. It's like eight bucks. And if that soap
00:38:46
Speaker
liquid. If it dissolves in water, it tells you, I don't remember on the top of my head whether it is or isn't. But we've done that before as well. I'd probably use my home water software, which is another reason why I got smart on this. But you also got to remember, if you fill your initial charge, your empty tank with RO water, number one, there's nothing
00:39:07
Speaker
There's not enough minerals or other goodies, as my quality camera says, to allow the coolant to emulsify or to mix in. Okay. Kind of reminds me of that example that true, pure hydrogen dioxide, true water, pure water isn't even conducted. It's the contaminants in the water that make it conductive. But the other thing is that water
00:39:27
Speaker
pure water or clean water, RO water will leach other things it comes in contact with, which is a big problem on some machines if they have exposed zinc or other fittings or copper or brass. So that can cause problems as well. Yeah, like RO water running through pipes or anything becomes less RO, the more metals it contacts with, right? Because it's actually leaking, especially deionized water, which has like zero PPM. Yeah.
00:39:56
Speaker
which we do not have in our shop. Yeah.
00:40:01
Speaker
I don't really know that any of that answers the foaming stuff. I really want to figure out if it's a chemical issue versus a propulsion issue, like is the co-op not getting having enough time to relax or is it getting too turbulent? The fact that it's happening in several of our machines is, I don't know, it's a common problem. It foams in a way that it leaks on the floor and makes a mess often. It's happening some but not all.
00:40:27
Speaker
Um, not the surface grinder, but yeah. So I guess we have four machines running coolant and it happens in three of them. Which one does it not surface grinder? Oh, that's different. I'm not sure that that's exactly right. So it's, so it is happening in three of our machines. Um, I think less in the, uh, Nakamura laid. Okay. I don't know why, but so our two mills that we run coolant in, like it's a problem. So it's happening in the Kern, the neck and what the
00:40:57
Speaker
You're right, the brother does have it as well, but it has foamed for sure. Okay, so four out of four CNC machines. Enough. Yeah, so is it a water thing? What's the common denominator here? Well, if you just did a refill and use RO water, that frankly could be part of the problem.
00:41:21
Speaker
Okay, so we put RO water in the mori and it is not foaming at the moment. Okay. A typical clean fill doesn't seem to foam for us. It foams after a little bit of time, weeks, months, something like that. And is it, do you know if it's, oh, well, mori doesn't even have three spindle. So it's, is it just regular flood coolant or is it three spindle coolant? Yeah, it's regular flood coolant. All the other machines have three spindle, so they're more high pressure, but so
00:41:49
Speaker
I don't know. That said, like an RO fill on the Maury seems to be working great. Like the coolant seems to be emulsified from what we can tell. Um, might not be totally ideal or anything, but I don't, yeah, I don't know what a expert would tell you, but I would encourage you to rectify that like this week because it's just not good. Um,
00:42:10
Speaker
Quality cam, I believe, is a more forgiving coolant in terms of how it mixes. If I'm being honest, a lot of times we just put in water and then pour and concentrate into the tank versus using the piston mixer to properly force that mixing. Some coolants, you can't do what we do. It just doesn't take it well. Look, you could just change coolants. I feel like, and if that works, maybe that's the right answer.
00:42:37
Speaker
I'd like to understand why though. I know, I know. And this has gotten worse?
00:42:45
Speaker
Let's say it's always been a problem. I don't know if it's worse, but it's, we've just dealt with it and I'm kind of sick of dealing with it. Yeah, sure. You know, and if you, you and many other people are running the same exact coolant with seemingly no issues. And so is it something we're doing? Is it, you know, I don't know. It's changing coolants, brands, everything, like not going to solve the problem because our core is us or the water or something else. I don't know.
00:43:12
Speaker
Right. You're not using expired quality chem, are you? I don't think so. Buy pretty often. Yeah. I don't think these are likely issues. I'm just thinking of it. It kind of reminds me back to like the end of the day, most of these companies that produce most things are in the business of sending junk out. So like, yeah, that's a crazy oddball thing, but like something's going on here. Exactly. I mean, I've used quality chem for 10 years now, you know? So part of me is like brand loyal, but the other part of me is like, well,
00:43:42
Speaker
I don't know. Maybe there's other stuff. Have you told your rep, like, hey, fix this or else we're going to have to have our competitors' products come in? Haven't had that conversation yet. But our local rep is the distribution place. Got it. They're a local company, not quality camp. They've come in. They've tested the coolant even just a couple weeks ago. I saw the results. They're like, it's fine. The NAC is a little heavy on whey oil because the NAC just pees whey oil into the coolant always.
00:44:11
Speaker
You still have that, uh, colosseur? Yep. Okay. Yeah, that's fine. But otherwise they can't see the problem in lab analysis.
00:44:22
Speaker
If I were to walk into your shop right now and just manually turn on the flood cone on the mooring, no cutting, just turn it on, it would foam immediately? No, not immediately, but after a little bit of running. That would. That's crazy then. I don't know. Maybe we'll try that. And then see if it doesn't settle down.
00:44:42
Speaker
It tends to get worse. If it starts to foam and we see it and we're just about to go home, if we don't put defoamer in it, there will be a large puddle of foam on the ground. I'm sorry. It's just part of the process.
00:44:58
Speaker
If your TDS is only 150, that doesn't strike me as crazy bad or hard. I would for sure, if not using just straight tap water for a fill, maybe 70% tap water, 30% RO, piston mix. You've got one of those fancy mixes.
00:45:17
Speaker
that's how I would do a clean start and you want to have like our give them a shout out our rep our quality can rep that is distributed like for actual guy who works payrolled from them. No, I need to add. Okay, there was last name.
00:45:34
Speaker
He came in, he helped us, I give that guy props, he came in and he helped us scrub a tank, clean it out, put a cleaner through the system to help stack the deck in your favor that you're doing the best you can to make sure we're starting to refresh. And then we did a new fill. I would try that. Yeah, we didn't run the cleaner now that I think about it. We have some, I think. And we have used it before. I don't think we used it on the Maury this time.
00:46:01
Speaker
I don't know how it happens because you're in Canada, but I would have no problems reaching out to them and saying, hey, where am I? I'm at my limit. I need to figure this out. Would you guys be willing to come in and have them help me in the tech? First off, it's nice to have someone help you and it gives them the chance to say, hold on. Here's what we've seen. Yeah. I'll reach out to John Wiley at Quillicum. We've chatted for years.
00:46:27
Speaker
and kind of give him the, I mean, he used to work for Blosser. Like, Oh, really? Yeah. That's funny. I really like it. He's a nice guy. Yeah. He's super nice guy.
Community Collaborations and Upcoming Events
00:46:35
Speaker
Um, I'll reach out to him and I say, look, I'm kind of almost at my wits end here. Like I need to try something drastic because I'm sick of this. And then, you know, he's been aware of our foaming and he's sent us defoamer and the deformer works, but not forever. Um, so like he's the kind of guy that knows
00:46:53
Speaker
what foam is. It's like, oh, it's because your calcium is too high or something. He can give me that answer, so I got to bug him. Actually, I'm going to give a shameless plug out. They asked, John Wiley asked us last week if we'd be willing to film another video with them and talk about some cool topics, which is not like the most like YouTube success story clickety topics, but I said yes.
00:47:16
Speaker
I said, here's what I want though. I don't want anything out of it. I want to do it because we want to share it, pay it forward, but let's figure out a way that we can then take, you know, whatever you guys would have spent or cost to like, cause I just, I so much dislike the influencer marketing side of this stuff. I was like, let's come up with a way that you guys then make a contribution, some amount to paying it forward. And I don't know what that is yet. Like buying machinery, handbooks for local schools or something that helps get more kids into the trade. And they were like a hundred percent in.
00:47:45
Speaker
Yes. So they're going to, they're going to come up later this summer and we're going to talk about nerdy, cool stuff. So maybe we'll try to take what we learned out of this example for that. The other thing I want to mention before we hang up is, are you going to the August, August oddest thing? Yes. California. Yes. Awesome. Cal Polytechnic University. Yeah. San San Luis Obispo. Right.
00:48:17
Speaker
Maybe a little bit behind, but apparently it's now a DSI summit because Autodesk is going to let DSI run it. I'm not sure that really changes much, but I think registration is going to be open pretty soon. It's a two or three day event for like 200 bucks. That includes some food. It's very reasonable. And John and I will be there. I think some other known folks are going to be there talking about
00:48:41
Speaker
Fusion 360 manufacturing focus stuff, so CAM focus stuff, five axis, those sorts of workflows. I'm excited to see everybody. Yeah, I'm super excited to be there too. I don't know what to expect. I mean, it's been a lot of years since I've been to an Autodesk event, but it's super fun, always super fun. So yeah, if any of you listeners are showing up, then John and I are going to be there. We're going to have a lot of fun. I think Pearson is going to be there. I mean, it'll be good just to have... I did this one in Charlotte.
00:49:08
Speaker
in December. Great turnout sold out. Just a good energy, a good vibe. Cool. I think West Coast is going to be easy to get. Yeah. I think it'll sell out quickly. Very cool. Sweet. Looking forward to it. Sounds good. I'll see you next week. All right, man. Have a good week. Take care. Bye. Later. Bye.