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#210 - Dude, I think you solved my problem! Education, Hiring, Macros for Probing, and MORE!
198 Plays4 years ago
TOPICS
- Does a College Education Matter? Grimsmo and Saunders share their different paths and initial interests BEFORE they got into CNC machining.
- Someone is looking for a new machinist---could it be you?
- Optical Flat & Monochromatic Light for Part Flatness @laneymachinetech
- Grimsmo and Saunders offer each other workable solutions for tool break detection and other quirky issues.
- Renishaw probing macros and lathe part off techniques
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining, Episode 210. My name is John Grimsmough. And my name is John Saunders. And this is a podcast we have every week for 200 plus weeks where we just talk about business and manufacturing and entrepreneurship and hiring and machines and all kinds of cool stuff. Exactly.
The Costs of College: A Humorous Take
00:00:21
Speaker
On that note, can I read you? I love this. I have a product to sell you.
00:00:29
Speaker
and I wanna see if you'll buy it, okay? You ready for this? Okay, you might wanna take some notes here. It's gonna cost you over $100,000.
00:00:38
Speaker
You can actually get it for free elsewhere. It doesn't guarantee you're going to have any results. Unfortunately, there are no refunds under any situation. You're probably going to want to use debt or loans to buy it. If you file for personal bankruptcy in the US, that doesn't actually wipe this off and you will get a receipt. You're welcome to hang that receipt on your wall. Okay. College.
Educational Backgrounds: Choices and Influences
00:01:09
Speaker
Now, a little bit satirical, but I do love the way it's framed of the world of academia, not sort of long-term, you know, not letting itself, the rules apply, right? Like it's a social construct. There are real skills, there's real value to many different degrees for sure, but I like the way that pushes you outside the way you normally think about it.
00:01:33
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Some things are so ingrained in our society that to hear it phrased in an odd way like that without knowing what it is, you're like, what is it? What is that? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I did not go to college or university at all. So I guess I have a different
00:01:49
Speaker
perspective of it. I'm good with not having gone. I don't miss the experience. But a lot of people I know have gone, you and my wife and other people, and really enjoyed the experience. It was good for them and their careers. Different for everybody, I guess. Could you talk more about that?
00:02:11
Speaker
We've talked about it before. I know you didn't go, but did you think you were going to go? Was it a point in time where you made the decision not to? What's the back story behind that? Sure. Going to high school, I didn't have a lot of ... I mean,
00:02:26
Speaker
I wanted to go into video because I like to mountain bike and we filmed ourselves mountain biking and video was like my thing in high school. I took video class as much as I could. And so I applied to go to the Art Institute of Seattle, which is very expensive as I found out. And so my dad and I went down to Seattle and, you know, took the interview and stuff and
00:02:51
Speaker
sitting in that room and showing them my demo video and being proud of it, walking in and being not proud of it as I'm showing it was humbling. It was really interesting. But also it was just too expensive for us at that time. So I didn't go. And that was the only desire to go to college that I ever had was that.
00:03:15
Speaker
And after that, just no, no desire. And then I started working for my dad and then doing websites and internet stuff. And it evolved from there.
Identity and Early Influences
00:03:23
Speaker
So there, there wasn't like a controversial, you didn't spurn your parents by saying, I'm not doing anything with a two year degree or four year degree. No, it wasn't anything like that. They were, they were cool with it, I guess. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.
00:03:38
Speaker
It's funny what parts of my history and your history that we just know because it's us. We don't talk about much. Maybe you didn't know that about me. I didn't. I did know you lived on the West Coast, which always throws me because I think of John Grimsnoe in Toronto as just one and the same. Yep, yep.
00:03:57
Speaker
Yeah, I've only been here for 13 years, I think. But yeah, Eric and I grew up in the basically northwest corner of America. You know, we're born in Canada, but spent our childhood our entire like grade four to, I don't know, 23 years old, 22 years old in Linden, Washington. Have you spent more time on US soil? Oh, I don't know.
00:04:23
Speaker
I need a couch. It's probably more now here in Canada, but for a while, yeah, for sure. I mean, literally my entire childhood that I remember after grade four is American. And now I'm like been in Canada for 15 years and I'm back to being super Canadian.
00:04:43
Speaker
So I have a similar-ish story about my career choices in life, which is in a very oddly funny way. You were into computers, so was I. And I think, my gosh, if you were born, I think you and I were both born around 1983, what an awesome time. Because by the time we were, say, 10 years old, mid-90s,
00:05:04
Speaker
computers were at this point where they were still very less user friendly, but they were not at the level of say five years before where maybe you had to solder or buy components where they had no idea how to do things like almost like a build your own motherboard. The stuff that predated us like the 8080s and just the stuff where you had to read technical diagrams to set jumpers. That's a little bit above a
Career and Problem-Solving Insights
00:05:27
Speaker
10 year old, but
00:05:28
Speaker
I distinctly remember convincing my parents in probably sixth grade to let me try to build my own. Again, the internet existed, but it was very loosey-goosey. It was dial-up. There just wasn't what it is today. This would have been like 94-ish? Probably a little later, to be honest. I'd have to check.
00:05:47
Speaker
I don't know if I can figure that out or not, but there was e-commerce and there were websites. So I figured out a company up in Cleveland that sold components and I bought a AT maybe or ATX. I don't know if it's something like I remember that as a word, but the motherboard size and there were ISA, ISO cards, PCI, I think was new. This could all be wrong, by the way, details, but this is kind of what I remember ish, but I bought a whole bunch of different components and I remember my dad being like,
00:06:18
Speaker
You really like kind of a I'm really gonna spend hundreds of dollars on this like you really you can do this and son of a gun it was windows 95 I actually spent a lot of time playing with doss and stuff like that before and I got it working in like it was such a cool time to be
00:06:33
Speaker
Doing that stuff and I love computers. I figured out basic networking and Just troubleshooting and that was easy to be a kid in town helping as like a little side business solve people's problems on their computers USB wasn't around so there was like there was scuzzy there people were used parallel ports like all these fun fond memories. Yeah
00:06:53
Speaker
And so I thought I wanted to do something like computer science. And that was my video interview moment like you had, where when I saw what other people, the skills and knowledge they had in the programming, I'm like, Oh my God, this is not, you know, and it may have been a bad thing because I don't, it's not that I couldn't have handled, I just felt like I was behind relative to what was out there. You know, making up an example, I'm like the farm kid from rural Ohio and you know, you're,
00:07:22
Speaker
thinking about, hey, what has it been like if you've been in San Francisco throughout this whole time? Anyway, it wasn't necessarily a bad thing, because I remember distinctly telling myself, it's OK, here's what I'm going to do. I want to use computers and the fact that I'm disproportionately good at them for the time to help me do what I want to do. And that's why I ended up going to undergraduate
Hiring and Company Culture
00:07:45
Speaker
school at a business college, because I thought, that's the stuff I don't know that I do want to learn.
00:07:50
Speaker
and I'll use computers to help me do well at that. In a funny way, as much as you and I are quote unquote machinists, we're very much- Oh, yeah. We're super computer nerds right now. Yeah. I mean, that's a huge part of it. You modifying your post. Heck, I spent ... I was going to bring up this week reading through Renishaw PDFs on coding stuff for a probing routine we're doing. That's
00:08:12
Speaker
That's awesome, right? Yeah, that's super fun. And the fact that we can do that and not fall asleep and actually find it kind of interesting and like read it in bed sort of thing is kind of takes us back to those times back in the day, like we've kind of been doing this forever. And it's like, where as a kid, you think you're going to go into this route, and you end up not going into that route, and then you kind of swoop back and now you look back and you're like, Yeah, I'm still doing that thing that that I've always done. Yep.
00:08:40
Speaker
Yeah. But to be contrarian, because there are so many people who kind of rag on colleges, and heck, I open the podcast with a thing that's kind of challenging it. I want to be upfront and clear and say, I do not regret for one second the path I took.
00:08:56
Speaker
I found a scholarship that helped reduce the cost. It also kind of told me, hey, this school really wants me because that made me feel good, like, okay, this is awesome. And our curriculum as a freshman, which is, God, you're young, you're whatever, 18, 19.
00:09:13
Speaker
They split us into groups of 30 and gave each group up to $3,000 to start a business. It wasn't optional. It was part of your curriculum in this freshman year class. It forces you to dive in with accounting, with HR, with operations, with product, with fulfillment. You get a lot of sympathy purchases because it's a ...
00:09:34
Speaker
You're trying to start a young business college and everybody knows about it. But boy, that was if there is one thing I'm thinking about as we sort of we've started to film some chip break type videos again and to share the passion and things that we're actually pretty good at. It's trying to help reconcile or teach not only just the manufacturing side of things, but how that ties into to running and growing a business. Yeah, any kind of business basically. Absolutely. And what you're what you were saying before about
00:10:04
Speaker
going in with some experience and some, some passion and then seeing like the experts out there and feeling like absolutely nothing. Some of my wife and I talk about all the time, especially in, you know, in her niches and in our niches.
00:10:17
Speaker
We're surrounded by experts because that's what we like. We like to see people that are better and smarter than us and surround ourselves with those people, but it kind of makes you feel less. It doesn't put you down, but it's like, man, I got a long ways to go. But sometimes if you allow the negative thoughts to win, you always feel less valued.
00:10:39
Speaker
than everybody around you because everybody around you is so smart. When in fact, your base knowledge is so much higher than the average person. You're actually at a very far point, but you're looking at that last 1%. It's all relative. I love it. It's the world I want to live in. The other half of that equation is how many people look up to you, John, or know you, or want to be you. The thing I
00:11:02
Speaker
Fundamentally care about is in love is trying to show share and help, you know It's not just looking upward from our point of views to push ourselves It's also bringing as many people's along as we can with us. Yep. Yeah
00:11:19
Speaker
On that note of bringing people along and running a business, we are hiring for another machinist position. Exciting. So it is in Zanesville, Ohio. What I like about it is you've got to love machining. You've got to have that eye for detail of like, hey, why is this tool doing this? Or what's going on with this? Or how do I adjust it? You've got to have that curiosity. That's part of our team and our culture. I don't think we necessarily need somebody with a ton of experience.
00:11:47
Speaker
And I say that because being comfortable with the basics of fusion or like a Haas control or running a machine is all probably a good thing. But we can teach some of that. We can teach, frankly, a lot of it.
Education and Professional Growth
00:12:00
Speaker
And I say that because I'm trying to think of who's the right fit. What's that candidate that's going to fit our culture and excel and do well?
00:12:09
Speaker
If you're out there and you're interested and you're able to work in Zangel, Ohio, please, by all means, shoot us an email, info, I-N-F-O at sauntersmachineworks.com. Just the opportunity for a young guy or an older guy, whatever, to
00:12:24
Speaker
to grab that and at least try is incredible. Even if you don't have, you know, I see a lot of job postings that are like minimum five years late of experience or else we're not even going to look at you. And this position is not necessarily that. And that's the question that I've debated with many times for hires is like, do you hire for experience or do you hire for culture and for fit? And then you train for the experience.
00:12:48
Speaker
It depends on the role, but it's a mixture of both. It changes and it kind of depends on your personal mood at the time. We've done a bit of both and it's all luckily worked out quite well, but as we grow more, I'm not looking to hire anytime soon, but I know we will eventually.
00:13:05
Speaker
I'll be playing that game again. It's like, do I hire the guy with super machinist experience? But maybe he's a jerk. Or do you hire the guy that's young and eager or excited? Or is he too excitable? Can you focus him? It's fun to think about all these things, these paths. Curiosity is the word I keep coming back to. Look, there's an element of any job that is, hey, it's a job. You've got to do it, right?
00:13:33
Speaker
Overall, I love what we do and I love manufacturing, but you've got to be curious. That's the key thing. Why does this do this? How do we do this? How do we do it better?
00:13:46
Speaker
A big part of the job is problem solving, especially as a machinist or manufacturing guy, especially here in our shop. It's like, why is it doing this? As frustrating as it may be, you can't get too frustrated. You have to be curious. You have to be like, all right, there's an answer. There's something wrong. I can figure this out, like deep breaths. Don't start throwing things as much as we all want to.
00:14:08
Speaker
It's funny because this is the course that they need to force in all undergraduate curriculum from liberal arts to engineering. It's like critical thinking, problem solving. I was handed a pretty crude memo from the Navy of my first or second job out of school. My boss was a former Navy officer.
00:14:32
Speaker
And so this was something that had been probably passed down for quite some time. So it's like 1940s Navy tone, which is not the most modern in feel. But it's kind of a like, look, don't ask a question, propose an answer. Do everything you need to do to front load the work, to offer your boss the information he needs and solutions that could work. And that's not, I think, how any of us really want to be lead or be led. But in some respects, it's what we love is the people that come up to us and say, hey,
00:15:02
Speaker
It's that curiosity,
Precision Machining: A Growing Interest
00:15:03
Speaker
like, hey, I'm seeing those, like I was watching your grinding video, I'm seeing streaking. I know we're using a hard wheel, the 46H. I saw somebody talk about a 44J online. You know what I mean? Like, oh, this is awesome.
00:15:16
Speaker
Yep, try to bring solutions and just show me that you've thought about it before you start venting. Sometimes I'll be banging my head against the machine, sometimes literally. And then it helps to talk about it with other people sometimes. It gets me out of my head and it lets me see things a bit more clearly. And even talk to Eric, who is not a machinist, my brother.
00:15:42
Speaker
And I'll be like, I'm really struggling with this, you know, blade grind bevel or something. And he's like, well, a few, you know, he'll ask the dumbest questions, you know, like, is, is the, are you filtering the coolant or something? I'll be like,
00:15:54
Speaker
Maybe that would help, you know, and for, and remembering to not overlook, it's like the party blade question of I'm like thinking I have this complex insert grade surface feet per minute issue. And it's like what overcomplicated is the, is the bar tight. Yeah. Yeah. Did you, did you torque things properly? Yeah.
00:16:14
Speaker
I did some video back last April or something. I did a whole bunch of Swiss videos and I was talking about torquing an insert screw. Sometimes you have the fancy little torque flag wrenches and sometimes you don't, so you just kind of eyeball it by hand. I had this one guy make a kind of nasty comment but also very, very helpful and informative. He's like, engineers spend a lot of time
00:16:37
Speaker
planning screw deformation and thread, you know, pitch and all that stuff. And the screw actually stretches when it when it's installed and stuff so that you don't crack the insert and blah, blah, blah, he's like, you should really be torquing it. And I was like, rude, but actually very helpful. Yeah, right.
00:16:53
Speaker
And that's something that comes naturally to a lot of people, myself included, is that sometimes I don't love the way a message is delivered, but it's more important. Like the people I look up to, I know it's more important to let your, you know, it's not a personal attack on you. And what's more important is on a piece of paper, what's more important, your bruised ego or the lesson that you're being taught and the lesson that you're being taught is more important.
00:17:19
Speaker
if you can actually swallow it and sometimes the bruised ego like blinds the lesson so you don't even you don't internalize it, you know, you don't you don't learn from it. Yeah, I always try to be be aware of coming and going, you know, I had a phone call with a friend, a quaint, I should say, I felt like he needed to hear something. And I ended up saying it.
00:17:46
Speaker
Pretty darn brashly and I and it wasn't like a bad thing or problem and I don't think I like massively overstep some boundary But I realized afterward I was like God that was Probably unnecessary John and so I just shot up a text like hey I need I owe you an apology like I was too brash like you know It's because I care but not an excuse for going over and he wrote back and he was just like look dude No apology needed
00:18:09
Speaker
you know it's what I needed to hear that kind of yeah I'm not I'm not saying that that makes vindicates me for how I said it but um anyway I've certainly had some of the worst lowest points in my life have led to
00:18:25
Speaker
to good outcomes in a horribly weird, strange way. And you would never think it at the time. But looking back, you're like, I needed that to grow. Yeah. Or it wasn't even that. It's just the cards you're dealt. And you know what? You make it work. You figure it out. And go forward, period. Yeah. Yeah.
00:18:50
Speaker
Um, what do you have to, um, lots.
00:18:57
Speaker
Learning a lot about precision lately. I've been reading a lot of precision books. This one that Robin Renzetti suggested called The Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy. The Bible. The Moore book. Yeah, the Moore. Yeah, it's like a $400 textbook that my wife got me for Christmas. And I'm probably two thirds of the way through. And it's lovely. It's fantastic.
00:19:22
Speaker
It's I got it for Christmas and you know, I'm sitting there with the kids and everything flipping through it and reading a couple pages and I'm like Yeah, this is cool But it's not what I expected really and now I'm reading it cover to cover like 10 pages a day and I'm like now it makes sense They're you know, they're they're they're weaving a story and the whole like the foundations of mechanical accuracy together linearly and it's it's really starting to click now It's really cool
00:19:46
Speaker
Where and when do you read this? I don't think I could lean over across and put it back on my nightstand. I don't read it in bed but I read it certainly in the evening.
00:20:04
Speaker
Interesting. Is it because you're curious, which is awesome, or is it more like, hey, you have a specific goal? No, it's becoming an obsession for precision and it suits everything that we do and it just lets me understand how the machines work better, how to design my parts, my fixtures and flatness and totally makes me want to buy an optical flat and a monochromatic light source.
00:20:30
Speaker
Yeah. So I can see light bands. Yes. I almost bought one last week, but I was like, no, I got other stuff to do. We've got.
00:20:37
Speaker
Let me see if I have an extra, I don't need two. If I do, I'll send you one. You need a monochromatic light. And from when I researched these, they are not super cheap or easy, but it was something you could buy, but it needs to be diffused. And so I think what you do is put it inside a ping pong ball to cause it to diffuse the light under like a hooded thing so that it's not contaminated with regular light. But Sue, I mean, if you haven't seen Tom Lipton, I don't know if Robin has done any videos on it. Tom Lipton definitely has. It is really cool.
00:21:07
Speaker
Yeah. You should explain it what it is. Well, there's a guy on Instagram, Laney's Machine Tech, I think is what it is. I just started following him a few weeks ago. And he works in like a university machine shop, I think. And he like rebuilds machines and everything. But he's like Robin Renzetti level precision kind of. And he explains monochromatic lights very well.
00:21:32
Speaker
in his posts recently. And he's like, here's six cheap sources for lights and how to build your own box for 100 bucks or something. So yeah, that's super helpful. But basically, the optical flat is a super precision piece of quartz glass that is lapped on both sides to a millionth of an inch or something in flatness and parallelism and perfectness.
00:21:54
Speaker
Then you put it over an object that you think is flat and especially with a monochromatic light source Which is one color not all of the colors that one color of light like say a sodium bulb is I don't know what the number is but call it 25 nanometers of wavelength or something so the you will see lines and bands on your surface of your part where the light is
00:22:19
Speaker
Deforming I guess it's like curvy. Yeah. Yeah, because of the hills and if it's if If the part is purely flat the lines will be straight if it's not flat They will start to curve in weird ways and you can measure how many curves it is in one light band or something like that I think it'll all make more sense once I have it in my hand, you know and can actually do it but
00:22:42
Speaker
fascinating part.
Innovations in Precision Tools and Techniques
00:22:43
Speaker
And now that we do surface grinding and lapping in-house and kerning, I just feel like I need this in my life.
00:22:52
Speaker
There's something about the distance between the lines as well. I don't remember what that was, but the curbing was the more significant thing. Yeah, because they talk about within two light bands, and I think from what should be a straight light band, if it curves over two of those, it's two light bands curved or something, and then you measure 25 nanometers
00:23:15
Speaker
is your distance. So you're actually measuring deviation from flat using light, which is the same.
00:23:24
Speaker
Yeah, Tom Lipton did a thing where he built a couple of different laps with pennies and was testing different lapping compounds and fluids. He's just such an awesome guy and the learning he shares on that. And then the idea that like, because we all use those indicators and you take a deep breath, you get the 50 millionth Brown and Sharp indicator out or the 10th indicator and you try to drag it across. But dragging a physical
00:23:51
Speaker
tip, whether it's a typical tip or even our Ruby tip, there's just so much noise from that mechanical motion and all these joints and however you're holding it. And then here you just take this, it's almost like a non-contact light beam. Oh, it's so cool. Yes. And we've been doing it with, before you put parts on the lapping machine, we have to bend them so that they're flat or, and so we have a,
00:24:17
Speaker
vice jaw with a ground top. So it's a surface ground top, and I think it's flat. A light optical flat would tell me. But we put the blade or handle on top of that. We put it up against the light, and we look through and see a light gap. And you can see if the part is bowed, concave, or convex. And then we've got an arbor press right there, and we bend them real quick. And so Steven's the one doing that now, and he's back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. So I actually had a friend 3D print a light box with a bunch of Cobb LEDs inside.
00:24:47
Speaker
So that light will only come out the gap and it originally mounts the block, the metal block into the thing. So you slap the handle on top and now there's a slit of light coming out the bottom. And then I was like, okay, let's take this a step further. If white is all of the lights and all of the colors are different wavelengths of color,
00:25:08
Speaker
Let's go with a thinner color as well. And red is the thinnest normal color of light beams. So a red light beam is way thinner than a purple light beam, let's say. What do you mean by thinner? Well, theoretically, if let's say your part is super flat and no light comes through, and then if it's a little bit bowed, red light will come through, but only red light. Interesting. And if it's very bowed, then purple light will come through.
00:25:35
Speaker
So I was like, OK, let's build this with a white light and then also a two-way switch. And let's do, I chose orange instead of red because I did a bunch of research on color, and red is an angry color. And orange is nice. And they're almost the same wavelength. And so I chose orange. I can't tell the difference visually in light gap thickness between orange and white, but whatever.
00:25:59
Speaker
it's still pleasant to look at. But yeah, this little, this little box, I'll post a picture of it sometime has been awesome. Yeah, because before he just had a fluorescent tube on the table and he'd be staring at this huge fluorescent tube like blinding himself all day. Or we used to lift it up to the ceiling light. And like, he's like, you know, many times I've dropped a handle on my face. So let's fix this.
00:26:23
Speaker
Not funny, but funny? Yeah, exactly. Dude, we use flashlights. It's actually phenomenal. You can take a flashlight, not as sophisticated as your thing, but just shining it underneath between a part and a parallel, and you can still start to catch that reflection or that little slit of light. Yep.
00:26:41
Speaker
Yep. The one complaint that the guys have above my new rigid system is before they used to hold the block and the handle, and they could use their hands to tilt it and get the angle just right. And now it's rigidly mounted, so you have to move your head front to back to see it. And they're like, I feel like I'm just like a rooster here, you know, moving my neck all around. But after about a week or so, Steven's like, okay, I think I like it now. I think it's better.
00:27:06
Speaker
I wonder if you could put the light on almost like a rotisserie or a little thing that causes the light to move and rotate a little because you just want to stare at it steady and then you'll see if it catches at a certain point. Or I thought about putting the block on a slight swivel. Just let it rotate 10 degrees. Yeah, sure. The light is not the LEDs. The LEDs shine in the white 3D printed housing. So the whole thing is just like a
00:27:35
Speaker
bulb. I don't know, like, it's just bright inside. And there's a slit that comes out that the light exits. Oh, post the picture. I'm kind of well, yeah, kind of follow the video. That's cool. The was a say. Oh, to then you backbend them or just bend them flat. We bend them. Yeah, it's like titanium. So you have to overbend it to get it to to stay.
00:28:01
Speaker
And if, you know, Steven's really good, so we can usually hit it first or second try, but sometimes you're like back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Well, so this is how they do, like it's super common in the manufacturing of shotgun barrels, which are relatively thin, long tubes that have to be very straight.
00:28:16
Speaker
And so if you've ever watched, I think there's like a Beretta or a Browning or somebody has a video on YouTube showing the manufactured process of shotguns. And they're taking these like 28 inch long tubes and these guys have, they're so good. Like they have dial indicators and they just, they see where it's out and they just put it in this, um, it's like a vice that's holding the barrel on each end. So it's just free clear below it. And then they, I think move a,
00:28:40
Speaker
They've got a push rod on a rail so they can slide the push rod where they want, not always bending in the center, and then they just push down. Hand strength is enough to flex this, and they'd know how far to push it. I mean, you could think of a better way to do this with a mechanical backstop so that you overbend it to a specific distance. But everyone might be slightly different. I don't know if that specific distance would work every time.
00:29:04
Speaker
Well, that's what I was thinking with your knives. It's like, do you have a shim set where you can just pull, it's almost like a feeler gauge where you could pull shims in and out. So it's like, Hey, I want to back bend it 12 thou or 44 thou this time. We find that sometimes they're curved in different areas, like just on the tips or not just always right in the center. So you
00:29:21
Speaker
we've got a little grid on the bottom with grooves in it that we use the rods. So you have two rods, and you can move the handle, you know, a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right. Or we bend the blades, which are already machined after heat treat. So they're a weird shape and everything. So they bend in weird spots. Interesting. Yeah. And so we find them having them flatter going on to the lapping machine just is better because otherwise the lapping machine is like grinding
00:29:49
Speaker
grinding it flat, which takes tolerances out and stuff. Was this all this is all something that may change or get reduced because of how you're grinding now though? A little bit. Yeah, for the
00:30:02
Speaker
the way we're surface grinding the blades now they do come out flatter and flatter than the double disc grinding that we were using before. But we still have, you know, two handles for every knife and only one blade. And we're still double disking the handles. So they're still like, got it. Yep. You said you are thinking you'll grind or try to grind titanium at some point.
00:30:24
Speaker
I don't know if we can do it on the surface grinder. I mean, there are wheels that do it, but I don't think it's ideal. Maybe I need to look into it more or something, because you can't magnetic fixture it, so you need a vacuum or glue or something, which is just complicated. I don't know. I'm sure there's good ways to do it, but I've had experience with vacuum fixtures holding like 18 parts at once, and if one pops, they all pop.
00:30:51
Speaker
Ooh, I wonder, oh, so I think you would do, well, a combination of magnetic with a blocking fixture so you could have a laser cut jig that holds the magnetic that holds the profile in. So that kind of arrests the XY motion and then you could have that with a vacuum
00:31:12
Speaker
pulling down. And if you do this, look into the Datron vacuum card. It's that stuff we had when we had the Neo, and it's amazing because it's directional cardboard. So if you lose a- I was wondering about that. If you lose a part, it's not like a traditional vacuum system that's binary. Like it's either everything is sealed or the whole world's
00:31:33
Speaker
All bets are off. All parts are off the table. This stuff, you lose some pressure, but it's pretty tolerant. If you had 18
Tool Breakage Detection and Machining Accuracy
00:31:44
Speaker
blades on there and you took one off, I bet you it would still work. You start losing two or three, it may be too much surface area that's exposed, but it was cool.
00:31:53
Speaker
But you brought up a good point too. Vacuum hates sideways force. It's very good for vertical pull, but sliding is not awesome at sliding. So if you had a steel grid that magneted to the table or something.
00:32:09
Speaker
It could be 30,000 or it could be permanent. It could even be a magnet. It could just be a permanent aluminum thing. Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. An aluminum pocket and you have your vacuum under each pod. You're right. It'll arrest it from left to right movement. So then you only have to use the vacuum for vertical, which would work. So yeah, these things are possible for sure.
00:32:32
Speaker
I like it. Cool. I wrote a pretty cool Renishaw code that I was proud of. It's interesting because it's amazing that this stuff isn't maybe a little bit better documented. Like the Inspection Plus PDF and the Haas PDF, which are kind of complimentary, are great resources. They give examples and they're pretty user-friendly.
00:32:57
Speaker
We're using the Renishaw 9853, which is the built-in length or diameter check macro. So it's like a parent macro because it queries things even deeper that makes it easier that you don't have to reinvent the wheel if you're just trying to do something kind of semi-automated like this. And there's a bunch of parameters that you can choose which ones you want to pass through or which ones matter. And one of them is the B value in B1
00:33:25
Speaker
means that code only works for the length, B2 is only for the diameter, and B3 is for length and diameter. But there's a B0. And so that wasn't in the PDF, and I found it on a forum that that's, actually it was an Autodesk forum that, because that's what Fusion pushed out for tool break detect. So if you check break detect in Fusion for a,
00:33:49
Speaker
You know Renishaw based FANUC ish control and it gives you a 98 53 it's gonna have b0 I'm like what the heck is b0 so b0 kind of turns it into a check but don't Rewrite because yeah, the other ones are meant to say write or rewrite the update the tool table value b0 just checks it and in this case what we had at least what we think we've had is we've had a couple of instances where a tool has
00:34:15
Speaker
made a machine a very much incorrect feature by like a couple of foul, which is super unusual in an otherwise stable process. And I think Ed found a chip marked on the taper. So we thought, ooh, maybe there's a chance that over time we're somehow getting contamination on the spindle taper in the form of a chip.
00:34:38
Speaker
And that's not good. We really want to fix that or avoid that as much as possible. We also want to avoid that happening. So what we're trying is an optional test that will just bring the tool over to the TablePro and check to make sure it's not
00:34:54
Speaker
two, three, fourth out over what it just was. Yeah. It's a breakage check, but not really for breakage, just for confirmation. Exactly. It is kind of breakage. It's not like fractured carbide breakage, but yeah, like something is broken, if you will. Things are wrong. Yeah. So it works. What I don't love about it is because it's diameter checking, it does two touches on each side. So it's four total touches. And the second two on each side are really slow. So I really would rather it do
00:35:21
Speaker
It has to rotate for diameter, but I'd rather rotate, touch one, frankly only one, because that's probably better to tell us. Yeah, because if that diameter is, oh, you're saying does the length change? That's a good question. Because a chip on the taper or a pullout or something would just be length really.
00:35:41
Speaker
No, John, that's genius. This is why I talk this. This is okay. You fall down the rabbit hole and you're like, I've got to do it like this, right? Make it work. Um, but sometimes there's easier ways. Um, yeah, I've been, I mean, it's funny. We're both diving into breakage detection. Um, we were chatting about this on WhatsApp because on the current, I'm trying to figure out tool breakage as well. Cause I came in on Monday to seven broken end mills.
00:36:09
Speaker
59, that drill bit blew out the next six tools. It was broken in so it didn't. Yeah, it didn't, it didn't drill holes. Then a 1 16th end mill is supposed to plunge into that hole and it can't. And then the chamfer tool and then the 1 32nd and then, um, so it's no big deal, but it was like a forced, like, okay, John, you are figuring out breakage detection today. All your other plans go out the window. Um, so I've almost got it tiled. Hashtag surgeon.
00:36:37
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I was in the shop by myself too, which was great. It was a holiday here, family day. I think your president's day. Do you guys take that off? No. Monday? We do. Okay. But yeah, it was a day off here for everybody. So I was like, sweet, I get the shop to myself.
00:36:58
Speaker
It was also conveniently, well, not conveniently, it was my 19th anniversary from the day Meg and I met. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. Congratulations. We met the day after Valentine's Day. So I talked with her before and I was like, I kind of want to go to work today. Are you cool with that? And she's like, yeah, it's fine. It's good. You don't have to be here.
00:37:18
Speaker
What did you conclude on break detect? Or have you? It's not easy on hide and hide. Like, it's easy to do it. Except, okay, so you call the break detect routine, the bloom routine, it's super easy, and it probes a tool and it says, oh, it's broken. And then it locks the tool in the tool table, puts an L there, and it cannot call that tool again. But it continues machining.
00:37:44
Speaker
It'll just call the next tool, keep going, keep going, keep going. So I was talking with Rob Lockwood about it. And he's like, yeah, you have to, you have to write a script to jump to a certain label that gives you a warning and a pause to stop the machine, if that's what you want. Or you can have it, you know, call the sister tool and flag that palette is dead and switch to a new palette and
00:38:06
Speaker
There's cool stuff you can do with the logic there. But I got a little stuck on that after messing with it for all day. And this is all Camplete post processor stuff. So Phil helped me out with that a lot. And then eventually I just send an email to Camplete and be like, this is as far as I got. I need help. Can you help me figure this out? And I'm waiting for a response right now.
00:38:28
Speaker
So it's as simple as because your your G your cam creates G code. G code gets pushed into the machine. A G code command like a G or an M code. Well actually it's different in hide and hide but bear with me. Can tell the bloom to say take and I know hide and hide doesn't use tool numbers they use names but never like tool 22. Okay tool 22 go check that but it if it passes a variable back couldn't you just say if
00:38:53
Speaker
If L comes back go to a sub and the sub could be an M30 to stop the machine and just I mean if anything for now just stop it
00:39:02
Speaker
Not ideal, but you'd rather it stop than keep going and you can improve it later. I think you're right. Absolutely. The problem I was having is like in FANUC use line numbers to go to line 50. I think you could do that on high nine too, but say you have a program with 10 tools. Each breakage detect has to have a different, a unique line number.
00:39:28
Speaker
No, but can you call like so we call aliases because like that so that
00:39:36
Speaker
that code I just wrote that the 9853 to check the diameter. We don't want to put that as an NC program because let's say we find we want to change the length value that what triggers it to the diameter value. I don't want to change that across hundreds of fusion files where you have no idea pushing through. So we write it as a program on the Haas control like 9992 whatever and then on the Haas control you set up aliases so you can say M154
00:40:01
Speaker
is calls program 9-9-9-2. And then in our pass-through in Fusion, we just say M, whatever I just said, M142. Anytime you call M142, it runs that program. So in this case, you could just say call
00:40:15
Speaker
And one, and one for you to do, and that is, that is an M 30. It just shuts the machine down. And what's funny is I'm doing exactly that for, um, whether I replace the tool or not. And I, whether it has to probe the tool, I'm calling a separate program every time, every single tool change, calling the same program and it runs that logic. Yeah, of course. I could just do that.
00:40:38
Speaker
I think you just solved the problem there. Great. Well, look,
Efficiency and Technique in Machining
00:40:41
Speaker
it's super cool to think about sister tools or better logic downstream, but good grief. Just stop it for now. Just have it, yeah.
00:40:47
Speaker
Yeah. I have this exact same debate with a good friend who's trying to get a dual spindle laid up. It's like a bunch of people have bought these, which is awesome. And there's this question of how do you deal with the fact that the parting tool, we had this problem. Basically the parting tool wears out or you goof. How do you stop it from continuing to run? And there isn't a great solution. You could check it each time. And on the Haas, the autumn,
00:41:12
Speaker
The tool arm is automatic, so you could do a brake control check on it. But the tough thing is you'd want to use spindle load. But spindle load, when I'm parting, if the spindle load is 20%, like 18% of that is just the spindle turning. So the actual percentage of the spindle load that's attributable to the cutting force is quite low. Now, if you knock the insert out because it really wears out and gets knocked out, then your spindle load will be higher because you're going to friction weld the bar, which
00:41:41
Speaker
I have done that a few times. I think the better answer is to get a better spindle load of the next operation because once you part it off, you do some sub-spindle work and then your first roughing pass with a CNMG on the main spindle, if that's messed up, it's going to be off by a bunch, but that still stinks tonight.
00:42:05
Speaker
And it made me think about your, on your, on your Nakamura, you shove a piece of tool tip into a Torx hot hole, right? And if the Torx hole didn't get machined, you're, you're able to detect overloads. Yep. I don't think I have load sensing.
00:42:22
Speaker
See on both the Nakamura and the Tornos Swiss during part off so the sub-spindle is in there grabbing the part and then it parts off both machines have a little subroutine that does a gentle tug and it moves back slowly and it's sensing the load of that
00:42:38
Speaker
Z axis, C2, whatever it is, sub spindle Z axis. It's feeling that and if it moves slowly and if there's no resistance, it parted off clean. If there is resistance, it'll alarm out and I've had it, it works amazing. I've had it alarm out a couple of times and you're like, oh, the inserts chipped or it didn't part all the way through or I goofed or something and there's got to be
00:43:01
Speaker
Z2 load sensing something. It's an axis motor, right? John, this is awesome. This is like our best podcast ever. Geekery. No, because you're right. Because I do have, so it's the B axis is the sub spindle axis on there. So I should be able to look and see if
00:43:22
Speaker
I don't know. I have to check because you just call Haas and you'd be like, I need load sensing for the B axis. What is that variable? No, it shouldn't be there. And I've, I'll have to figure out how I can access or query that variable in the, as a parent, basically everything is a variable. It's just question of how easy it makes for you to figure out what it is. Exactly. I'm going to work on that. So this, this is a,
00:43:47
Speaker
I don't know if I've ever monitored a constantly changing value. That's the issue, you're right. It's like a parameter is 5, not like 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. You basically need a interrupt where it's continuously monitoring it. And if it exceeds, it's like the tool management has a way of tracking the peak load, but that's on a signal. On your machine, can you watch the load of each axis while it's machining?
00:44:16
Speaker
I believe so. Maybe just watch that while it's moving and then see what kind of ... Because you'll need to know what the limits will be if it's 10% or whatever. Right. I mean, trial and error works too, but if you can just watch it machining and be like, oh, B usually 20% is normal and on a rapid move, obviously it moves fast and use a lot of load.
00:44:39
Speaker
But yeah, I'm very curious about this because one of the other tips we got from a couple of people is which is an awesome tip. It's so smart. On a dual spindle lathe, don't part to zero. Part to a 10,000 tit. The parts are still connected and then use the sub to rip it off because you're going to save that last 10,000 wears out. You assume is a significant contributor to edge wear because it has no surface footage.
00:45:04
Speaker
Obviously, if that adjusts that B-axis load, not a big deal. You could still figure it out. The other thing is to do it. I finished that. I've seen people twist the part as well, twist it off. So spin the B spindle and just twist it instead of pulling. Rotate it to 30 degrees, because we have orientation on it. M119 does R0. Our angle is the... Unless it starts at zero, so then it wouldn't turn, right? I would just turn it on 500 RPM.
00:45:33
Speaker
Come on Chris. Oh, you're better than that. I go m1 19 sets the angular things so you could go plus 90 minus 90 plus Yeah, but this reminds me of talking to the guys over at metal quests who got that index and this 20 always get that number wrong and like each each
00:45:55
Speaker
hydraulic chuck, collet, chuck, holder, et cetera. Every single thing has all measurable values. So they know, in this case, if there's nothing in the collet, like if it got ripped out because it didn't part off, and so the collet grabs onto it, tightens it, backs away, just rips it out of the collet, they know that that's not in an adequate state. Oh, so cool. So you use load detecting to check if that torch pocket happened.
00:46:23
Speaker
I don't anymore, but on the Nakamura, that's how I used to do it. Yep. Why don't you do it anymore? I make those parts on the tornos now, and I don't have that check. Got it. It hasn't been an issue, I guess. No, we actually switched. I want to do a whole video on this. We switched the type of end mill and the toolpath we use to make the torques, and I was getting 500 to 800 pieces per tool, and now I'm getting over 2,500.
00:46:50
Speaker
Yeah, like it just doesn't break anymore. It's awesome. So yeah, it's a super good method. It's basically ramping down the profile instead of before I would plunge in the middle and adaptive the corners.
00:47:02
Speaker
Okay, got it. So I'm ramping the star. Yeah, one degree or whatever point five degree maybe, and it works so good. That's the other thing is it's like when you like I remember vividly how much you struggled with this when the knock was new and it ends up that your speeder was running the tool backward, which was confused like a whole bunch of people, smart people.
00:47:24
Speaker
Um, and so it spooks you and you put in things like this check, which it's almost like you were poisoned by stuff that's no longer relevant. So I think it's good to sunset stuff, like put a calendar reminder a year later, be like, Hey, this is no longer an issue. Take it like we, we QC our fixture plates for something that happened three years ago. It has never happened since we need to take that off the QC sheet. It's not a good use of building a proper checklist because it's not a real problem anymore.
00:47:50
Speaker
But you need that time period, whatever it is, to make sure it doesn't come back, to keep it fresh. Yeah, we talk about that here in our meetings. Guys, think about how many problems are not problems anymore. Remember back when we used to do it
Episode Reflection and Conclusion
00:48:04
Speaker
like this? And remember back when this used to be a problem for every knife? Yeah, that's not a thing anymore. It's like, yes, we always deal with new problems every day, but hopefully we get over them and they stop being a problem.
00:48:15
Speaker
Vince did a bunch of slotting in titanium and just a bunch of titanium machining and small tools and little fonts and text and we so we bought some extras because I'm like Yeah, it's okay to Vince like tools are gonna break like this titanium. We don't we do this like you do it It's new tools blah blah machine the whole thing a floor a six inch by six inch titanium slab with a bunch of surfacing
00:48:36
Speaker
40 or 50 characters of text with two or three different stepped down rest machining tools. The smallest one was I think a 30, three 30 seconds or something, or at one 30 second, didn't break a single tool. No joke. Like that doesn't happen. Yeah. Awesome. Oh, we're way over. Yeah. Phil's driving around the parking lot right now. I'm sorry, Phil. Tell Dale, we apologize. Yeah.
00:49:28
Speaker
All right. Hey, I'll see you next week. See you next week. Okay.