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Business of Machining - Episode 131
216 Plays6 years ago
Work/Life Balance
Saunders had a great time at Autodesk Fusion 360! Now it’s onto the Field Museum in Chicago with his family.
“Your business and personal life has to go hand in hand!” - Grimsmo
Grimsmo moved into the new house over the weekend, and it already feels like home.
When can an entrepreneur start to give themselves a salary?
Saunders talks about putting your profits back into the business in order to guarantee success, but at a certain point everyone needs to pay themselves. And there can be practical tax and insurance benefits to having a regular salary too. Saunders and Grimsmo talk about this, and what it means to borrow money from your business.
Start by asking, “what would your business do if you needed to borrow money?” This question can help you define where the value of your business lies, and help you make better decisions when it comes to purchasing decisions.
“Don’t buy sh** that depreciates” - Saunders
“Lifestyle businesses”
Saunders encourages Grimsmo to take the next step with his business, and hand the reins to the employees of the company.
Text and Email are SO last decade.
Make the recipient of your message fall of their seat: send them a video response to their query.
Saunders uses https://screencast-o-matic.com/ to do this.
Other topics in this episode:
- When to help people
- Automation and systems in place to make it happen
Recommended
Transcript
Introductions and Personal Updates
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining, Episode 131. My name is John Grimsmough. My name is John Saunders. Good morning, buddy. How are you? I am excellent. Awesome. What's going on? I have moved in to my new house. That's awesome. It's been so good.
00:00:24
Speaker
It's so weird taking like three entire days and hardly thinking about work at all, just cause I'm so busy moving and like settling and stuff. Um, so then Tuesday rolls around and I'm like, man, I haven't like,
00:00:38
Speaker
haven't worked at all in like days. It feels weird. I bet you were so busy though. Exactly. I was either active or like completely chilling out. Just like either playing with the kids or just watch some Netflix or something because I'm like, I don't want to do anything right now. I was so sore after moving. Dude, it's got to feel like a million bucks. It's got to feel awesome.
00:01:02
Speaker
The house is amazing. Immediately, like first night, it felt like home, which was surprising. And then I go to the old place and it's all empty and echoey and weird. And I'm like, oh, we lived here for four years? Man, it just feels like a dream now. It just feels different. Weird.
00:01:19
Speaker
But yeah, the place is awesome. We're settled in. Still got a ton of unpacking to do, but I'm happy Meg's happy. We've been in our house in Ohio for five years and there's still, I think, one box. I don't feel any pressure. Yep, exactly.
00:01:36
Speaker
I think that's the funny thing about when folks talk about business and entrepreneurship and starting up a shop
Interconnection of Personal Finances and Business Success
00:01:45
Speaker
and all that. Everyone likes to talk about the stuff that happens inside the walls of the shop and this includes it like curriculums at business schools.
00:01:53
Speaker
And darn it, that's not how it really goes because the emotional high you get off of feeling like you have a new home, being happy with your wife, with your kids, the home front feeling, the inevitable progress you feel as an adult human being when you have found an awesome place for your, like that is, you are going to be more motivated this week doing the work you're doing at Granite because of that stuff.
00:02:18
Speaker
Absolutely. And I mean, the our ability to buy this house is the first house we've ever bought. I'm just about 36 years old. The ability to buy this house is directly because of our business and the success that we've achieved so far and they completely go hand in hand. So they're, you know, while business and personal are separate things, they have to travel along the same path together and they have to both succeed, you know, in order to have a happy life.
00:02:45
Speaker
Yeah, when there's a there's a the reality of also understanding how the quote unquote system works. And, you know, for me, I didn't pay myself in the business for quite a few years because I just made the conscious decision to
00:03:03
Speaker
Reinvest what profits we had into growing the business which which to me is an absolute recipe for success and kind of the way the people that I've looked up to have generally done things and My wife works which is again kind of tying back into the stuff they don't teach you in a lot of books or school Which is you know, hey, what is the family structure? How are you guys pulling in revenue and income? You know, we just had to cover our mortgage and our generally low relatively low living expenses, but then I had a point where
Navigating Financial Systems for Growth
00:03:32
Speaker
you wanted to think about, well, wait a minute here. How does the system work? Well, the system in the US works that if you want to fit inside of a box to qualify for traditional loans, for more aggressive loans, for grants or other sorts of things, you may need to have what we call W2 income. I'm assuming there's a Canadian equivalent where you can show like a pay stub style thing.
00:03:57
Speaker
And you've got to have that for at least some period of time. And so I did start paying myself.
00:04:05
Speaker
black and white rule, but there's a relatively firm rule from the IRS too that you can't not pay yourself forever because paying yourself is actually quite inefficient because of in the US withholding for what's called FICA, which is Social Security and a few other things. So I end up paying about 15% extra just to pay myself versus just taking distributions, but you have to pay yourself a reasonable salary if you're profitable at some point.
00:04:30
Speaker
Yeah, it is similar up here, especially to get mortgages or things like that. They often want to see two years of salaried tax statements. Right. Have you been paying yourself? For the past two years, yes. Okay, funny enough. Before that, it was just pulling out money as we needed it bare minimum.
00:04:55
Speaker
and sometimes not paying ourselves for months at a time and make work part-time up until Leif was born five years ago, six years ago. But even, I mean, we didn't start paying ourselves regularly until 2017, so that's two years ago. Before that, like, yeah, it's just enough for rent and food.
00:05:17
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and that's another point where Dave Ramsey's is far more good than he is wrong or bad, but there are some other side benefits to things like having a credit score. It's just for better or worse, it's a metric that a lot of the world uses to measure
00:05:35
Speaker
who you are as a person in the society, which is not necessarily a good thing, but like little things like our insurance, like on our primary residential insurance stuff is cheaper because we have a good credit score because that's just for them. The easiest way to realize, okay, these people aren't the kind of people that are going to have correlated to claims or fraud or lifestyle that is resulting in them having more claims. So it's not a huge deal.
00:06:02
Speaker
And I'm not advocating going and borrowing a bunch of money just to improve your credit score, just to reduce your insurance rates. But there is something to be said for understanding how this system works.
Transition from Lifestyle to Structured Business
00:06:12
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And it's a lot deeper than you think it is upfront. I've certainly learned so much more about it over the past, say, three years, both with trying to get mortgages and growing the business and
00:06:26
Speaker
Financing machines and such and such like you really got to wrap your head around the whole picture. Yeah Okay, so this is this is actually a good segue because I have had two kind of major thoughts since Last week at a not you but the Autodesk of whatever they call it Academy
00:06:45
Speaker
And one is about borrowing money with respect to the business. And then the second one is kind of about what borrowing money means and or the stages of it. And the thing that's occurring to me is is
00:07:01
Speaker
You and I, in my opinion, are still running what I would consider lifestyle businesses, meaning we haven't taken on outside capital and we generally run the business. The business is still very much driven by the people on this podcast right now.
00:07:21
Speaker
I'm going to go out on a limb and say, for you, I think that's a bad thing. I think you really need to start thinking about that because I think your business has more potential on the upside to just push beyond that. And I think it has a lot more significantly increased downside if you don't do this. And the example that jumps out to mind is you should be posting code less and less and less. It's one thing to get a new machine and get some up to speed, get comfortable, and then start pushing that out to the other folks in the shop.
00:07:54
Speaker
I feel like I need to push you to take this from, and I don't mean lifestyle business in that you're just running this business to be comfortable and cushy. That's not the intent of that phrase. What I mean is it's still John Grimsmough and it should be John Grimsmough leading a team of otherwise. You need to push for that. I could leave for six weeks metric and it would be okay. That make sense? I totally agree with you.
00:08:17
Speaker
I am probably one of the bigger limiting factors to our growth in exactly that sense because I still handle and control far too much. It is great. I can go away for days and days, probably a week and normal stuff happens. But for the business to actually do anything outside of day to day, new things, tweak code, even everybody's pretty good at troubleshooting, but I still have a heavy hand in troubleshooting.
00:08:47
Speaker
as necessary. You know this. I'm not going to let you talk about it anymore because talking about it gives you this excuse that you're making progress on it. You're not. We've been talking about this for over a year. You need, and you got to figure this out because I don't think you really want to add people to payroll today, but whether it's Angelo, whether it's Sky, whether it's, well, Eric and Yo are kind of their own thing, right? Yep. So you got to keep it, I mean, Angelo seems to be the natural answer here to just pushing more off onto him.
00:09:15
Speaker
That's true. The thing I was thinking about just in my own personal business sort of process is the more you move away from being a lifestyle business and then meaning you grow towards a true business that has its own infrastructure and team and processes and stand alone viability, the more I'm okay with using financing as one of the many tools within that business.
Comfort with Financing and its Risks
00:09:43
Speaker
And so I'm thinking about that at Saunders about, and I'll caveat this whole conversation by saying, this is also the danger of debt, because what you do is you start rationalizing it. So I'm keeping that in mind. But nevertheless, you also have to be somewhat competitive in terms of market forces. And what are you doing? How are you competing in an industry? And when I think about our fixture plates and those products, I think there's a real business plan around increasing the
00:10:13
Speaker
marketing literature and online marketing for that product line. We've got some stuff coming out for the mod vice that gets me really excited and taking it from what is effectively a lifestyle business where we just advertise it casually. We get sales that fluctuate but I think the sales could grow five to tenfold and I think that's a real legitimate opportunity and doing so means we at least need one more vertical spindle, not a big deal.
00:10:41
Speaker
But then it's other things like the process behind how you batch this stuff through how you sort inventory how you log it from a digital Standpoint and inside the shop with tool management with inventory All that stuff and I'm like women here. What if you put together?
00:10:57
Speaker
a plan and what if that was $300,000, $400,000 and that let you get more inspection equipment, another spindle, spend the time to have somebody who basically is going to become a full-time QC type person. Maybe they do some packaging as well. And all of a sudden, this is now moving away from the John Saunders who runs SMW lifestyle sort of business to a real standalone independent company that produces this product. Does that make sense? Absolutely. I think about this a lot.
00:11:28
Speaker
Yeah, you nailed it. Because, because at this point, you and I have put in the 10 years of work, you know, starting from literally nothing to, you know, putting in the slog and the learning and the, the time and the patience, and we've developed product lines. And now's the time where you fuel the fire, you know? Yeah. No, really.
00:11:51
Speaker
And I'm super sure it is like time to pour gasoline on the fire in some ways, you know Yeah, so the other the other thing I had that was a moment of clarity that I very much like is is this idea of are you in debt or not and People often just say oh I have debt or I don't and I think there's four phases of this the first phase is when you're in debt meaning you bought a a
00:12:21
Speaker
piece of property or a tool or an asset where day one, it's underwater. So this would be your typical, you buy a brand new car, you buy a brand new machine tool. If you finance it, let's say 80%, 90%, the first day out the door, you're underwater because you would not be able to sell that machine to cover the payment on the loan or the principle or the note in total. So that's kind of the first phase or the quote unquote worst phase.
00:12:50
Speaker
The second phase is when you have equity, you still have debt, but you have equity in the house or in the machine tool, meaning you either didn't borrow that much. Let's say you borrowed 70% and then you've already paid it down by 5% or 10%. So again, you're in debt, but darn it, if you had to sell the machine or maybe fire sale it real quick, you could cover the lender and pay them off. The third phase is when you have no net debt, which means
00:13:14
Speaker
You have debt on something, but you also have enough cash in the business or whatever you're considering cash, personal life, business, whatever. But you have enough cash where you could pay it off, but you choose not to because keeping cash on hand is an incredibly wise thing to do. And then the fourth phase is no debt at all. But I think that really helped me clarify and think about, because I think about, well, if we did borrow money, what phase would I jump into it at, right?
00:13:40
Speaker
and giving it some, it's not just yes or no. Yeah, some of it might just be justification to make yourself feel better, but some of it is definitely shrewd, you know, analyzing, which is what you really got to do in this scenario.
Approach to Debt and Asset Acquisition
00:14:03
Speaker
I guess I've looked at it as different types of debt. The machines generate money, which is much different than, say, a car that just depreciates the entire time, or racking up credit cards that have no value. It's gone. Credit cards are probably one of the worst types of debt. And we were in it deep a couple of years ago, but finally got clean of that.
00:14:31
Speaker
And things like a house, you know, you buy a house for whatever hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it's an asset and it kind of sits there and generally appreciate slowly. So there's, I don't know, everything's got a different way to look at it, you know? No, you're absolutely right. It's, it's a piece of advice I heard from somebody 20 years ago, which is that it's, it's, there's one way to achieve wealth in life, which is don't buy stuff that depreciates seriously.
00:15:01
Speaker
The machine tool very much depreciates, but what you can and should earn off of it more than overcomes that depreciation.
00:15:11
Speaker
especially with the new machine tool. If you buy a machine three, four years old, it's probably not going to depreciate so much quickly. But you bought your UMC and all your machines new. And it's kind of amazing just having a machine that's brand new. Well, but that was a big disconnect for me. So I grew up
00:15:32
Speaker
I did not grow up on a farm, but we have a farm and that's where I had to work as a kid and that sort of mentality of how you approach that sort of hard work and ethos of how you evaluate things and opportunities that led into college where it was very much about entrepreneurship and bootstrapping and then
00:15:51
Speaker
When I worked in New York, we did what's called value investing. We looked for opportunities where you saw value in something, and usually that meant not paying the shiny... It's, again, going back to that example we've talked about before here, which is you can make money buying something expensive or high price and selling it even higher, or there's the other approach of looking for what you think are opportunities where something is priced low or oddly low for some other reason that you can overcome or change.
00:16:19
Speaker
And I'm very much a value person. I very much prefer to see beauty in the eye of something that others may not think is great, which speaks to this idea buying used machines. The reason I bought the first machine new was I couldn't risk it. I wanted the warranty. I wanted the through spindle colon options and I was going to make money with it and I didn't want it to go down. At this point,
00:16:40
Speaker
With what we have in our shop a hundred percent absolutely would look at buying used machines So long as we can get the options we want and I will not compromise on that. Yeah
00:16:55
Speaker
Yeah, I've certainly bought my share of new machines as well. And we've got the two U-Mac machines coming that are somewhere between 15 and 19 years old. And I'm excited for them. They're going to be great. We're going to spend some money to get them fixed and dialed in, get a service guy to come in and just mess with them and make them nice. But they're going to be great spindles just to do all kinds of stuff.
00:17:22
Speaker
There's a few machines I would probably only buy new, but there's definitely a few machines that I would buy used. You know, we're contemplating buying a, actually buying a manual lathe. Oh my God. Like some, come on. Easy. Nice old hard end or something. That's a cheat. That's an easy. I know. That's for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Big deal.
00:17:41
Speaker
when look you you sort of bought the dmg the dirt vertical use because it was a showroom machine so you paid a little bit less for that which is great red grief no no brainer yep and that's i mean that's how you i should go look up gosh i don't know if i have those records readily available anymore but if i could find like the peak month back in the tormach basement days in new york i'm pretty sure
00:18:08
Speaker
we hit five figures of revenue in at least one month, if not more. Now that's not profit, that's revenue, but we had a pretty high margin product in those camera mounts. So you're talking about
00:18:20
Speaker
and that's what I love. I haven't seen as much tormach trolling these days, which is kind of nice to see that go away, but you can make fun of the all you want for the machine that I have. But when I bought a machine for 15 grand and you're pulling in 10 a month, that's a pretty darn good way to get yourself to a successful business and giving yourself options to take that business where you want, whether it's other machine tools or growth or just enjoying it.
00:18:48
Speaker
Yep. What's our favorite phrase of yours? Growth eats cash for breakfast. I think that phrase came from you. No, you told me you said it was one of your friends. One of your friends told you that at some meeting or something.
00:19:02
Speaker
I thought it was, yeah, I definitely heard it from somebody else. Maybe it was a podcast episode though or something like a book. Okay, that's funny because I thought, I attribute that maybe just because it was, you and I popularize it with each other, right? Because I probably would have forgotten it otherwise. Yeah, it was probably a year or two ago and I first heard about it, but yeah, I love it.
00:19:22
Speaker
Yeah. What's been going on this week? Yesterday was my first day back. So I just, I didn't even come in till afternoon. So I had a solid half day here, but everything's been good. Shop's been running really well. Had the Swiss lathe running. So I got this part, the spacer for our knives from, what was it? It was like two and a half minutes on the Nakamura to 54 seconds on the Swiss.
00:19:51
Speaker
Nice. That's awesome. Super happy about that. It's to the point where it's like, you know, they fall into a bucket and they make a little light thud so you can hear it. Yeah. Dink, dink. And, you know, so I'll pull a couple out of the bucket to measure them. And then before I can even get like, before I'm done measuring a few, there's more in there. It just happens so fast and they're like so dialed.
00:20:17
Speaker
Yeah, so tight it literally when it's warm, it holds a 10th or less. That's awesome. And I was thinking about that about how gargantuan your Nakamura must seem like how far that turret has to move the axes the rail links compared to that Swiss it's just just as tight.
00:20:37
Speaker
I guess it makes sense optimistically that it would be so much, it's just a totally different machine build style. Exactly. Yep. It's not to do with the quality of the build, it's to do with the architecture of the machine, the way it's set up. I mean, Nakamura makes a fantastic machine, but the C-frame and the turret and it's much farther distance between everything, so thermal growth plays a role. Yeah. Even still, the Swiss,
00:21:04
Speaker
you know, if I turn it off hot yesterday and I started cold today, the part is a thou smaller.
00:21:10
Speaker
Okay, so that that disappears in about the first hour of of warming up. So I'll just start making parts with a thaw offset and then a couple minutes later, a tenths, a couple minutes later, seven tenths, six, five, two, and then bring it right around zero. So I've set the the tool offsets to be have a zero wear value when warm. So when it's cold, I just do like plus one or minus one, whatever it is. And then I work my way towards zero, which is really nice.
00:21:40
Speaker
Can you not get that thing to turn on?
Efficiency and Communication Techniques
00:21:43
Speaker
What times do you first guys get into the shop morning? Seven. So can you not have it turn on at 615 and start doing spindle warmups automatically? I know some machines do. I haven't heard anything about this machine particularly, but maybe.
00:21:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's another example. I'm I'm not doing that. I'm pretty sure the Haas can and that's the thing where it's like going back to what I said earlier about you know lifestyle versus real like I'm holding myself to the same standard I need to stop talking to you about that stuff and start doing that and you know what we have smart guys our shop Jared and Alex they can just go through figure that stuff out if it's not possible it's not possible but if it is
00:22:22
Speaker
Let's stop talking about it and let's go do it. Do you find yourself having a brainwave, an idea, and just passing it on to somebody else quickly? Idea? Here you go, Ed. Take care of it. That's good. If it's routine, meaning it doesn't need a lot of explanation, I'll just put it in a sauna and assign it to somebody. If it needs more explanation, or it's going to be a two-way conversation, I'll either email it or
00:22:51
Speaker
Like I'm on I'm in Chicago right now on vacation and what I'll do sometimes is do a Effect of anybody has ever emailed me or corresponded with me You have probably gotten a screencast recording back because I love it. It's a I probably do Five to ten a week what when they're there what? Brit name like how do you do that?
00:23:16
Speaker
Just Google screencast-o-matic It's free. I actually pay for it now because I get a couple perks for like 20 bucks a year, but It lets me do a screen recording So I use the same audio headset that I have for things like this bomb and for video YouTube voiceover stuff and so within seconds I can be recording a video back to somebody and Even if it's just replying to an email it gives me the chance to explain something You can hear the inflection of my voice the explanation the passion the concern
00:23:46
Speaker
And then obviously, if it's anything related to CAD or CAM, that gives you the chance to show toolpath or setting. And when you're done, what I love about this is when you're done, you click stop recording. And I think I click one more thing, like upload, and then it immediately is uploading it. Before it's done uploading, it has already copied the link to my clipboard. So I just hop back into the email, hit paste. And even if it takes another 45 seconds to upload the video, I'm done with it. I've moved on from that task. Okay.
00:24:16
Speaker
So there's no, okay, I've finished saving the screen recording, I've got to find it on my desktop, I've got to go to the other site, I've got to upload the file, none of that stuff. Okay.
00:24:25
Speaker
So if I want to sit like I was emailing Alex about, um, actually it's funny. We talked about all this debt stuff. I want to do some new articles on NYC CNC about what I think this stuff is to get people, you know, that's the beauty of entrepreneurship. You don't have to agree with me, but you have to at least have a position. You either have to understand my point of view and articulate to yourself why you think I'm wrong and you're going to be different or let that influence you. That's the beauty of it. I love that part of it. So I want to give people more content. Uh, that's, that's very much real.
00:24:55
Speaker
around what we're doing there. So I was actually emailing Alex about setting up some of the framework for this stuff and just send him a two minute screencast. Perfect. Love it. I'm going to start using that. I know you've been talking about it for years. And I think I've done it like once or twice to customers and they always just freak out. They're like, you know, it's so much fun for them to get that. Even just an audio recording.
00:25:20
Speaker
Yeah. We had a guy last week who was like, wait a minute. I listened to the video once and then I just thought it was a generic thing and then he's like, I fell out of my chair when I realized you were talking to me. That's so perfect. Do you find a downside to not having a text-based history of that conversation? You know what I mean?
00:25:43
Speaker
No, because it's usually not a multi. So we're not tech support. And this gets awkward because I like helping people, but we're not. So usually what I'll do is if somebody has a question and they're nice about it the way they ask it. In other words, it's not a, hey, I have to do this homework for school. Will you do it for me by showing me how to do this toolpath? It's like, dude, no. But if it's somebody who's like, hey, I'm really gonna pickle, really enjoy your content.
00:26:11
Speaker
just can't figure out the setting and it's not something that they could have immediately Googled and helped themselves on. Yeah, if I can answer that question in 20 or 30 seconds, it's a win-win because it helps them and darn it, it's part of my reputation in business and then what they'll then do if they reply back and they want more help is then I'll give them the sales pitch on joining NYC CNC as a pro member and I'll say,
00:26:32
Speaker
We have a community over there that will help people on quick questions and Q&A, and it's a value-added service. It's not the open, free forums, interwebs. It's a paid thing. And we've got folks where you really can chime in, share a little bit more, consider signing up over there. And some people are more than happy to do that. Some people are so totally offended that you're asking them to ever spend money on something, which is great. That has just solved itself. Yep, yep. A lot of it.
00:27:03
Speaker
Um, where's it hosted then on the, their website, like screen, custommatic. Yep. They hosted for a period of time, I guess, or. And definitely, I think, I mean, I'm literally up to like number 500 or something. Dude. That's cool. That's super cool. Yeah. It's great. I'm going to put on suit. The other thing that's really been on my mind is, um, how much automation is needs
Automation in Machining
00:27:30
Speaker
to happen. Yeah. I'm.
00:27:32
Speaker
It mostly came about talking to Amish last week about how he wants his DMG to have automation. Even if it's for the simple reason of if he had the DMG3 platter, I think it's RP3 maybe, that's just three different, these are pretty large platters, but it could mean he could keep different jobs set up.
00:27:56
Speaker
And so it's actually not really automation like you're thinking, but rather just, hey, I want to go from set up one, two, and three by just hitting a button and having it drop in there, locate, boom, done. Yeah. It's, it's the essence of zero point fix during where, but his, his things are like hundreds of pounds. Um, so you're not just going to like lift it off and, you know, throw another one back on, but, um, yeah, being able to have, you know, setups and different.
00:28:24
Speaker
different vices and different setups just to automatically get thrown on and off at the push of a button, basically, or if they're small and light by hand. That's kind of not a big deal, but it just speeds everything up. You can halfway machine a five-axis part, and then take it off and put your gravy work back on, go back to program, and keep machining it.
00:28:48
Speaker
I mean, it's what we saw at two or eight other shops last week that was just, you know it, but when you see it, and I'm in the most happiest way possible, jealous for you with the aroa on the current that's coming. And Haas released the UMC 500. They don't have the eight, I think it's the same, I think it's going to be the same sort of format as the
00:29:12
Speaker
automation option they're now offering for the UMC 1000. Okay. And I'm like, God, I wish you would come up with a 500 first, because that's such a better machine for most people. But part of me is just like, hey, I'm going to get a 500 with that automation, because that is going to be key for us. Yeah. What options do you have to put automation on your 750?
00:29:37
Speaker
I mean, right now, I would say not really that many, partly because the machine doesn't include any sort of air or hydraulic through the table. There's a guy who did it and I screenshotted it because I wanted to kind of know how to reach back out to him if we ever really think about it. So the closest option I can think of would be
00:29:58
Speaker
Like Fitaxis has a relatively new system where you can use a UR, which is pretty weight limited or a FANUC arm that's not so weight limited to load either material or smaller vices onto their rock-lock. And then the rock-lock itself is pneumatic, so you don't have to run the pneumatic through the whole table. Or like Lang has a QAM system, I think. Why don't you have to run the pneumatic through the table?
00:30:26
Speaker
Because you'd be running a quarter-inch airline straight into the rock-lock base, so it'd be kind of janky. Yeah, but on the table, it would twist around and stuff, wouldn't it? Oh, so you'd be C-axis-limited, I guess, I'm not sure. Yeah, I've got to think about that, how that would work.
00:30:49
Speaker
I think I forget the exact number of ports, but on the current, there are several air and several coolant lines through the table. Oh, really? Yeah, to do all kinds of crazy stuff. Like they had this one video of a fixture that was a, you know, a five axis fixture, but then the whole thing flip flopped around halfway through the machining up. And I'm like, what just happened? Yeah. And it's an air actuated extra little, like flip the part over.
00:31:18
Speaker
And I was like, whoa, that's insane. It's sick. Yeah.
00:31:23
Speaker
Even watching some of the high-end five-axis machines last week on shop tours, there's this constant little bubble. It almost looks like soap coming out of the seal in the trailer. It's just this constant air purge to keep things clean. It's so salivating. Tell me about your week last week.
Experiences and Networking Events
00:31:43
Speaker
You went to the Fusion Academy. It was awesome. I think we talked last from the Fusion Academy.
00:31:49
Speaker
Yes, we did. And I think I had just taken that really good class the last day. Did I say that? I think I did. It was excellent. I've got to figure out what Autodesk is going to do next year. I think the rumor is that they're going to keep doing those each year, which would be awesome. But it's a complete no-brainer to attend that, in my opinion, now, especially compared to the... Yeah.
00:32:17
Speaker
And then after that I actually didn't really do anything other than flew down to San Diego And I've gotten to know the guys at fifth axis who said that we could come do a shop tour and film it which I'd heard they have not only of their line of Excuse me voice here not only do they make all the products that we use or know for five axis stuff, but
00:32:44
Speaker
They got started as a full blown job shop. So they have an insane shop for making parts. I mean, two groves next to each other on our automation cell that they completely built themselves. Hermlas, microns, Haas machines, grinding, just everything. So to me, that was awesome because it's that kind of like homegrown entrepreneurship story. They literally started the work holding because they bought, in 2004, they bought a Haas VFX.
00:33:12
Speaker
to TR. That's like a VF2 that has an integral five axis in the table, which is effectively a unicorn. And I would discourage anyone generally from buying it these days. But they were like, but there's not really options that we like. And that's what started it all. So I like, it's always interesting to see when companies create a product out of their own demand and end up using it and then selling it
00:33:36
Speaker
It to me is what happened with strike market and the camera mounts. We never meant to make camera mounts. It just, we started making them and then people wanted them and then boom, like that's the fun way to grow a business. So film there on Thursday. Can't wait for that. Yeah. I think that'll be a good video. And then actually had a little bit of quiet time in the afternoon and got to check out the USS Midway, which was a aircraft carrier built finished right after World War II. And it was just amazing.
00:34:06
Speaker
Um, especially as an adult with no, just on your own to go explore for two, three hours was very, very satisfying. Was that headed home? It didn't come with you down to San Diego.
00:34:22
Speaker
No, he headed back home and then I went down for just that and then I came back on Friday. That's a good trip. Yeah, it was awesome. And then we're on vacation in Chicago this week. Again, no agenda. Actually, I say no agenda. I am actually going to go meet up with the Making Chips guys this afternoon and do a podcast.
00:34:41
Speaker
But but like Field Museum the aquarium the planetarium the u-boat at the Science Museum like just totally It's it's it's a nice break Nice. Yeah, you missed out on the u-boat when Amish and I and everybody else went yeah at IMTS Yeah, I got the IMTS crud before IMTS started which is a record. Yeah What do you have to this week
00:35:09
Speaker
This week, I got to strategize what parts going on the Swiss next, because I'm waiting for this big order of precision ground, centerless ground titanium to come in from Perriman titanium. And so until then, I have like a limited stock of much more expensive material, same stuff, but I'm, what am I trying to say?
00:35:38
Speaker
I thought centerless ground material would be like ridiculously more expensive, but buying it in these bigger quantities, you know, many thousands of dollars at a time, it's like many times cheaper than what I'm paying right now.
00:35:51
Speaker
Oh, really? That's awesome. It's awesome. It's like so good. So I'm like, Whoa, I can just order a lot then. Anyway, so I'm waiting for that to come in hopefully in a week or two. And then I can kind of go nuts with machining like the knife parts that we need. But but yeah, I think it's I got some pen parts to make. So I think I'm going to put the pen button on the Swiss and make a boatload of them. Cool. Should be sweet. I'm going to see. So we're gonna try out wiper inserts for the first time. Okay, excited for that.
00:36:21
Speaker
Wait, how does a wiper insert work on a static non-live tool? It's even better. So it's like a turning insert, like a VCMT turning insert, where it's a 35-degree point with a little radius, except there's an almost flat at the front of that.
00:36:39
Speaker
So it's like, it's like a, you know, two degree table. Okay. So it's, as it's turning across, it's basically wiping the surface with this almost grooving tool.
00:36:52
Speaker
Yeah, right. And supposedly an amazing finish and the button on the pen, especially we want the best RA finish possible, because otherwise you feel the ball bearings kind of dig into the into that button and kind of scrape a little bit. So it's better.
00:37:10
Speaker
And yeah, that'll be exciting. So we just have that and then we have threaded sleeves to make for the pens and then we have enough parts to assemble like 50 more pens. So we've been kind of installing on that but it's time to go. Good. Well look, start figuring out what opportunities whether it's this part or something else to
00:37:29
Speaker
to take a step back and have Angelo or somebody else start taking over and have you react to the questions or things they need or you hop in and check, double check the work before you hit cycle start. And quit posting, quit lotifying G-code. That's another example. You're a real business now. If you need to spend $3,000 to have a professional rewrite your post, go do it.
00:37:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's true because I have such limiting beliefs, but I'm so stuck in my ways for from so many years of doing it a certain way myself cheap, you know, from a broke perspective, that in some ways, I'm willing to buy a current and you know, do that and in other ways, I'm like, $200 for that. I don't know. Yeah, you know, so it's a weird don't don't don't lose that. Like I even Yeah.
00:38:23
Speaker
close acquaintance who's worth many millions of dollars and he flies coach and he's you know looks at restaurant menu costs when we go out and that's I love that about him don't lose that but also don't confuse where there's opportunities to invest in your business. Yeah exactly. And then the downside risk you already crashed the Swiss once let's not crash it again with a real problem.
00:38:47
Speaker
Good. Well, that Field Museum isn't going to tour itself, so I'm going to go, I'm going to go, I can't wait to take William. I remember, I think it's like selfish in some respects because I remember seeing it as a kid and like just how amazing it was. And so if he can have one tenth of the joy I remember of it, that makes you happy as a parent. What is it?
00:39:10
Speaker
It's probably one of the best natural history museums in the world. I think they have like the most complete T-Rex skeleton ever discovered. They have some really cool other like history stuff about humans and civilization and artifacts and all that. That's amazing.
00:39:27
Speaker
It's like 200 yards from the McCormick Center too. There's the Shedd Aquarium right next to the Adler Planetarium right next to the Field Museum. It's amazing. Sweet. Well, you go enjoy your family and have an amazing day. See you next week, bud. Take care. Take care. Bye. Bye.