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#320 Removing yourself from the company
268 Plays2 years ago
TOPICS:
- Removing yourself from the company
- Okuma tool load monitoring
- SMW purge of old stuff
- Gridfinity!
- Process bins
- Haas lubrication system
We're selling some equipment, workholding, etc! Info at https://www.nyccnc.com/for-sale/
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Transcript
Introduction and Entrepreneurial Goals
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machine episode number 320. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. And John and I try to push each other to be the best we can be as entrepreneurs, machinists, and in trying to improve our quality of life to run our shops. Constant improvement. My son has been saying, practice makes progress. I'm like, oh, I love that.
00:00:26
Speaker
Somebody was jokingly telling me that his kid trolled him on like, hey, dad works smarter, not harder, which is all these cliches. Yeah, yeah. It's funny what they pick up, right? Yeah. And how
Balancing Work and Family
00:00:40
Speaker
true it can be. What are you up to?
00:00:49
Speaker
Lots of stuff, lots of like random stuff, nothing, no huge projects but lots of just honestly pulling back a little bit from the day to day which is nice, kind of forcing myself to do it. Like I mentioned, homeschooling the kids now with my wife so that's a bit more time at home, a bit more attention there, a bit less attention at the company and it's kind of forced me to
00:01:14
Speaker
not have the company rely on me so much, which has been really fascinating. If I step out of my skin and I look at it from an outside perspective, I'm like, oh man, everything's going without me. That's really cool. It's causing me to kind of rethink my day-to-day activities in the company and where I want to become in the next several years and then what that's going to be like. I don't have any answers for you yet, but it's
Reactive Work vs. Planned Tasks
00:01:40
Speaker
been interesting.
00:01:42
Speaker
So are you spending less, I mean, at the risk of just being nosy, are you just literally spending less hours at the shop? Yeah, literally. Yeah. You know, sometimes I'll stay late, but really it's right. Sometimes yesterday I was at the shop for two and a half hours. Oh, wow. And I'm like, this feels like nothing. I got to the shop. I caught up with everybody. You know, I answered a couple of questions. I did like three emails and I went home. I'm like, whoa, that's so weird. Like I want to do stuff, but.
00:02:12
Speaker
And are you both yesterday and in general, how much of your life work life is reactive, like just walking in and being like, okay, who's got what things that I need help with or weigh in on versus versus like, Hey, no, I'm coming into the shop to do a few things. I'll also give you guys some time.
Trust and Team Processes
00:02:28
Speaker
You know what I mean? Both, both. Oh, that's a good question.
00:02:34
Speaker
If I had to just totally randomly make a guess, probably 50-50. 50% of the time I'm working with other people and 50% I'm completely on my own just working on a project or a machine or a new program or something. It is a nice blend of that capacity. I trust a lot of the guys here to do what they have to do. It's nice to check in with them and be like, you struggle with anything? Can I help you? Do you need something?
00:03:01
Speaker
And there's still several things that only I can handle or fix or decide on or buy, things like that. So I was thinking last night, I'm like, what's the long-term play there? Like we've talked about for years, is somebody else going to be buying equipment at some point? Yeah, right. That's weird. But maybe. I don't think it's as, I see a much easier path to that now in terms of,
00:03:31
Speaker
like saying, okay, this is what we need. This is why we need it. I mean, look, I'm still going to be involved in like financing it or where's it going or the like the process, but I could now see somebody saying, Hey, uh, we need this machine. Let's go research it. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Somebody else put in the legwork to be like, I think this is the one, you know, I went to the dealer, I looked at it. I, you know, did my homework. This is what it'll cost. Blah, blah, blah. Found a lender. I don't know. But like,
00:04:01
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting the whole, everybody likes to say, you know, I trust the shop or the team or the girls, the gals and girls, all that. But trust doesn't necessarily mean it's
00:04:21
Speaker
has the right process around it. And so this is biting us right now of balancing the need to let the team do what they're good at, but also communicate if and when we've got a problem or a change or a mistake or just even a minor change.
00:04:42
Speaker
So for example,
Problem-Solving and Manufacturing Consistency
00:04:44
Speaker
if a drill is drilling oversized or holes oversized, is it the problem with the drill and the speeds and feeds or is it the wrong drill, which was the case this morning and frankly wasn't even, I'm not even sure it was a mistake. It was deliberate and it was deliberate by me. A couple of weeks ago, I programmed a new part. We already had one in a drill in the machine that was a few thou oversized, frankly, not a big deal for that application.
00:05:09
Speaker
But this is great because it's funny, the fact that the team noticed this is actually like 10 out of 10 awesome. But then, well, what's your policy? Like if somebody notices something they don't like, do they just kind of fix it themselves? Or do they bring it up at a shop meeting? Do they come to you? Do they go to Angelo? It is
00:05:34
Speaker
A delicate balance, I got to say, and it's different based on the individual's experience. A lot of it goes through me or through Eric or through Angelo. Specifically, Eric handles all the finishing side and Angelo and I handle all the manufacturing side. Say there's a drill that's drilling oversized or like Pierre keeps breaking these through coolant drills on the Swiss and we're like, it shouldn't happen. It's like an $80 drill or whatever it costs.
00:06:03
Speaker
What's going on? Is it the setup? Is it the tool? Is it the speeds and feeds? Same speeds and feeds we've had for five years.
00:06:12
Speaker
you know, where's the issue and a lot of times it is set up and there's, you know, on a Swiss lathe, there's a lot of manual, like it's got the runouts got perfect. The XY has to be bang on your overhang, the way the tool holders mounted to the block, the way you're through coolant seals. We went to a different collet that actually has the four coolant hole jets at an angle. So they jet at the flutes as well as being a through coolant drill. So it's
00:06:38
Speaker
through the tool and then also now jetting around the tool and evacuating bird's nest on the drill bit itself. So that was a cool little upgrade that we came up with.
00:06:49
Speaker
To answer your question, I don't have a good answer for you. Does the individual, the employee, solve their problem, experiment, try new things to a point? It is very nice to be roped into that conversation because we've seen guys spend far too long messing around with it.
00:07:09
Speaker
when Angela or I could have answered that question in two seconds. There's a balancing act like letting them grow and learn and get better the way we did versus just solving their problem for them and holding their hand and saying, oh yeah, we did that two years ago and here's the answer. Well, you didn't know that. That's on us that you didn't know that. That's what we are trying to set as just a policy, which is we need to do a quick huddle on something like that because
00:07:38
Speaker
if it's wrong. In this case, frankly, I'm the culprit. I'm the most egregious offender in this area because I chose to program it with a 27 64th drill instead of a 10.5 millimeter drill. But I'm the one then that knows, oh, I did that one other place as well. And there's nothing wrong. The machine's actually doing exactly what we tell it to. There's no problem.
00:07:59
Speaker
But we need to order this tool, or maybe it's OK. But I want to be more formal about how it's kind of like, OK, when something like that happens, we need to do kind of a pencils down. We need to talk to the people that are either programming the part or doing the dimensional drawings and say, hey, what do you need to do here?
00:08:21
Speaker
uh, sort of thing. Yeah. I like that. And some of our machining, uh, I'll call them errors, but it could be features, um, end up, you know, on the finishing side, like we think they're fine. The past forward, the guys put assemble it. They noticed something's weird. This thing's not fitting together. Um, sometimes they kind of sheepishly bring it back and go, I think it's bad, but I don't know. Or sometimes they assertively go, it's bad, you know, fix it, which is fine either way. Um, but.
00:08:52
Speaker
It just slowly puts more checks and balances into place. Like, Oh, we need to pin mic though, or pin gauge those, those holes like every time, or at least until we know the process is dialed.
Precision and Tool Life Management
00:09:03
Speaker
And on that note, uh, on our blades, the, let's see. So when you make a blade, there's the pivot hole that the pole blade rotates on. Mm-hmm.
00:09:15
Speaker
I want that hole to be exactly when it's 7-5-0 at the end of the process when it's done and heat treated and we barrel lap it with diamond lapping paste.
00:09:25
Speaker
Plus or minus $50 million. Yeah, exactly. On the Maury, we used to use a Cog's Dill burnishing tool with little bearings. And we stopped using it because it literally doesn't fit in the current. It's too long of a gauge link. So I haven't been using it for years. So on the current, we interpolate that hole with a pretty good end mill. And we're getting pretty good repeatability, but it does walk out slowly over time. And I'm not auto-probing it to compensate, blah, blah, blah. So it is kind of a tweak that we have to make every few weeks.
00:09:55
Speaker
that sometimes doesn't get made. The blades get heat treated and then the holes are like a foul undersized and they have to be hard reamed by hand and then they go crooked and then yada, yada. We've had some issues with that.
00:10:10
Speaker
Instead of interpolating, I put a Harvey reamer in the current, and as of today, I think they're going to test it out and see if we get exactly the result we want, leaving five-tenths diameter for barrel lapping by hand anyway, so we can get a nice shiny perfect. Oh, yeah. Sure. Right? But it should be a lot more consistent process than we've been getting before.
00:10:35
Speaker
Sure. That's a
Toolpath Strategies and Automation
00:10:36
Speaker
process that has now involved like five different people from machining to finishing through heat tree, through lapping, through everything to kind of huddle up and come up with a quite simple but good solution.
00:10:48
Speaker
We were just talking about that on the Akuma where we do like everybody does the rough and then separate tool to finish. I'm thinking on some of like two different parts of two different features that we consider critical. I'm thinking about doing the rough semi-rough finish. Yeah, I do that a lot. Yeah, then the finish tool is...
00:11:09
Speaker
It isn't even programmed to take anything other than a true spring pass. It depends. Either that or I leave five thou or 10 thou for each subsequent tool. The rough leaves 15 thou, the semi-finished leaves 10 thou, the finished leaves five thou or whatever the answer is.
00:11:28
Speaker
Yeah, I'm thinking about it a little bit differently and the more of the finished tool being almost like a true backup. Yeah, it almost is like I wish I could know.
00:11:42
Speaker
as soon as the finish tool actually does take a cut or more than a spring cut, which the Akuma is not sensitive enough. I think that Karen software probably would be, but we're realistically not going to get that. And then the finish tool kind of comes in, saves the day, makes the parts still perfect, which is great. And you then get a notification of, hey, by the way, your semi-roughting tool needs either comped or replaced.
00:12:11
Speaker
But, well, to sort of change the topic, we do have awesome progress on tool load monitoring. Ooh. On the other side. It's really good, yeah. And Lawrence was giving me a hard time in WhatsApp. He's got some truth behind it. I'm saying, like, dude, why have you not fixed this yet? Well, the honest answer is because I do a lot of things and wear different hats. Yeah, totally. Obviously, you and I stopped everything we did and focused on something
00:12:39
Speaker
I think it's done, but nothing else gets done. Well, sort of, but where I push back a little bit on that is, first off, we're fine. We're trying to implement a process kind of over time. I'm not going to drag this out for months, but well, it's probably been a month around at this point, but you get my point.
00:12:56
Speaker
First off, the machine is so darn busy and productive and still making great parts that, again, this isn't a fire drill. But also, I actually enjoy the way of, okay, got some paperwork, brought it home, read about it, and then realized what to do. And then I had to install some software. When I installed the software, the Okuma needed an update, so I had to email them back and wait a couple of days to get that update. And don't get me wrong, sometimes I'm super annoyed by all that stuff because you just want it now and done. But it's actually nice to be like, okay, I'll wait for them to send me back the
00:13:23
Speaker
software update to fix that. So Akuma has some machine alert software. It's free. I'm going to install that. It sets up email alerts based on alarms. That works fine. So now it's actually really cool, John. I get an email from the machine any time there's any alarm, and it automatically attaches a screenshot of the control to the email.
00:13:47
Speaker
Yes. So now what we need to do is tie that into level D alarms. So level D alarms alert you, but don't stop the machine or do anything otherwise. And so we've got the code. I've got it. It didn't work last night. I figured out why I'm going to run it again this morning to set. And it's not actually what I expected. We're not going to use the tool life
00:14:13
Speaker
values out of the tool table in the machine, we'll be using them as Fusion Passengers, which is actually kind of nice because it means we can set up different thresholds for every CAM operation that we care about.
00:14:26
Speaker
I also think that there's a way you could set masters to like tool four is a facelift. Tool four ever goes over 30% something, let me know. But otherwise, every time tool four is called up in Fusion, we would have to specify what threshold we want for that specific cam operation, which is true because tool loads are dependent on not just the cutting tool, but what you're doing with it.
00:14:47
Speaker
in that particular CAM operation. So what it'll start with is just a couple of the key operations where we'll say, hey, generate a level D alarm. If this operation violates a limit, it'll email us, which is perfect. I've got then an email in my inbox that I can deal with when I want to, but the machine will keep running. And it puts a timestamp on the alarm. Yes. Because it emailed you. Oh, actually, I didn't even think about that. Yeah, the screenshot will tell me what was running and where. This is actually great. Yeah.
00:15:18
Speaker
Really awesome. Nice. Yeah, on the current, I can do a custom design pop-up message and I can either have it stop the machine or just display the message and keep going. For some of our little grinding wheels, if they get too small diameter, I want to warn the operator like,
00:15:40
Speaker
two days ahead of time, so they give some time to whatever. And it literally says in the message, write this information on a sticky note and put it on the tool door, because you'll need it next time you look at the tools. And then you can close the message and not care about it. Yeah, exactly. But it's cool to be able to customize those pop-up messages with time and date, and the program running, and the tool diameters, and various information you want, even text-based stuff.
00:16:08
Speaker
point four inch radius, then that's bad. So your limit is that and the current radius is point four one five, whatever. So you have you have two days to do this job. And that works out really well. Do you do anything where you just like you were talking about that 316 precision bore? Yeah. Why don't you just have a reminder every seven days or two weeks to just replace the tool?
00:16:38
Speaker
It's not just that. It all has to do with how much stock is left from the roughing tool and how well the diameter of the finishing tool probed with the laser. And there's a weird relationship there. If there's 5,000 stock to leave because the roughing tool is worn out versus 4,000 stock to leave, it will affect the finish board to a point. That's kind of what I'm thinking.
00:17:10
Speaker
I think the reamer will work great. Yeah. Well, reamers wear too. Yeah, for sure. But I can put a tool life on it. And I have experience with other reamers and the tool life on them. Not so much in stainless, but in titanium anyway. One of ours, we replace it every 100 minutes of reaming. Okay. So I put a, what did I put? 65 minute limit on it, just so that we'll look at it at least at 65, if not just straight up replace it.
00:17:36
Speaker
And that's your predictive look ahead so you don't get caught. The machine doesn't stop at 2 AM type of thing. Exactly. Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, I'm with you. That's awesome. And I want to start doing this kind of stuff on the Maury as well. So far, we've been tracking tool life on the Maury based on pallets. So like one pallet, then tool monitor goes plus one. And it's all macro based like,
00:18:04
Speaker
For tool 10, it'd be 810 plus 1. I want to move away from that to go to time-based. OK. Because that's what I do on the current, and I really, really like it. Yes. But I will have to do a lot of converting from like, oh, this tool lasts for 15 pallets. How many minutes is that? I don't know. So there's some logging to do. But I've been trying, literally for years, to get the mori to export the macro table to a computer.
00:18:34
Speaker
Oh yeah, I can't seem to do it. I thought somebody on
Data Export and Networking Challenges
00:18:38
Speaker
the WhatsApp said that there was a way to do the dprint to his file server or whatever. Yeah, it doesn't work. Oh, really? Something about this version of the control with the Maury maps on top of it prevents this. I was talking to DMG Maury. I was talking to my guy at Elliott Matsura. Some things should just work, but they're just not on this machine. I can do it to a USB stick just fine, but I do have to change some parameters to be able to
00:19:03
Speaker
write to the USB versus run normally. Oh, that's annoying. And apparently you can do that with code like a G10L50 or something will write to a parameter and change it. So I'm going to play with that today just a little bit to see if I can change it to write the USB stick and then change it back right afterwards automatically. But then they're still like physically on a USB stick on the machine. I want them on a computer. So I have these Wi-Fi SD cards that I put in the USB adapter, put that in the machine.
00:19:31
Speaker
And I got that network to the machine just fine, except the Maury won't write to it because it's formatted as fat, not fat 32 or something, something like that. So that didn't work out. And then I'm like, okay, let me format a raspberry pie as a USB gadget. They call it.
00:19:48
Speaker
which is acts and looks just like a USB stick, except it runs for Linux. That's awesome. Finally took hours in late night trying to get this stupid thing written as a USB gadget. Finally got it to work, except Windows won't recognize it as a proper USB drive, some driver issue, something, something. I hit the limit of my both patience and knowledge there.
00:20:13
Speaker
Just share the Raspberry Pi as a network drive and map it from a PC across the network. But when I plug the Pi into the Maury, the Maury won't recognize it as a USB stick. Oh, I thought you meant. Sorry. OK. Right. Because the Maury actually runs Windows back end, just like your Okuma kind of thing. Yeah. So anyway, I put six, eight hours into that dumb project and it didn't work. And then I found this guy online that
00:20:43
Speaker
He makes these little electronic circuits as a product and he uses them for his embroidery machine business who makes a USB stick but that has Wi-Fi pass through capability. Any file that goes on it, it may immediately shoots right to your network shared drive.
00:21:02
Speaker
So in either direction. So you can drag a file from your PC through the USB to your computer, to your machine, or vice versa. So I bought one of those. It was $275. And I'm like, if this solves my problem, I don't care how much it costs. So that
Streamlining Operations and 3D Printing
00:21:20
Speaker
should be coming on Friday. So I'm kind of configuring some more stuff to be ready for that.
00:21:25
Speaker
On the Maury, can you actually access Windows Explorer and network stuff? Yeah, if you plug in a keyboard and mouse and hit the Windows key. Yeah. And so if you plug a USB stick into the Maury, does it show up as a drive on the Maury's computer? Yes.
00:21:42
Speaker
Let's just share that. And you see it in Device Manager. You can see a regular USB stick, but with the USB gadget on the Raspberry Pi, it would see it in the Device Manager, but it wouldn't fully recognize it. It says driver error or something like that. No, but if you just take a USB stick, plug it into the mori, that becomes the F drive, right, on Windows? Probably. I guess I haven't looked at the Windows Drive menu file system to see that. OK.
00:22:09
Speaker
Well, if it does, you should just be able to right click on it and share it. And share it is, I mean, the more is plugged in with Ethernet, but I don't know how much of that is FANUC and how much of that is Windows Networked. You know what I mean? Look at your, you know, CMD, IP config and Windows. That's not a way to do it. Could be some gnarly Windows sharing permission limit stuff, but I don't think you'd be screwing anything up here by trying this.
00:22:38
Speaker
I'm holding a USB thumbs drive in my hand. If I plug this in my computer right here, it's a drive. I can share that drive. And then from a different computer on our network, I can map that USB stick as a drive. Interesting. I haven't tried that. I don't want to try that. Write that on my list for today.
00:22:56
Speaker
while you're writing, we are doing gangbusters on our purge. So I'm gonna put a full blown page up here in the next month, but with more details and specifics, but I'm just gonna throw this out right now for anyone listening.
00:23:12
Speaker
This is all stuff that we use, but just aren't, or excuse me, have used, but just aren't using right now. And so it's time to go. We've got a Pearson ProBase, Pearson MiniBase, some orange vices, our boss laser, a couple of 3D printers, some mid to a quantum mics that are fine, but we're just going to replace them rather than send them in to get. Maybe. Yeah, right. But like what else I have on here? I literally just bought three new quantum mics and I'm waiting for them to come in.
00:23:40
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the completely full disclosure on them is we measure so much half inch stuff that there's about a one to one tenth of repeatability variance right around half inch nominal, which for most people isn't going to matter. And they're perfectly good. We use Sarah blocks to check them at different dimensions. I just think we've used them so much at just half inch that they may have just a I guess where for lack of a better word. But
00:24:06
Speaker
rather than send them in to get calibrated, checked, or reworked for $250. I'm just going to buy new ones and sell these. Cool. If any of that stuff jumps out to anybody listening, shoot us an email, and we'll get you pictures and pricing. Sweet. That'll be good. I mean, not only will you recoup a little bit of cash from that sale, but you get to purge and feel, we don't need this stuff anymore. Yeah. It just needs to happen. Yeah. That's cool.
00:24:31
Speaker
I'm loving the Gridfinity. Do you see that picture? I put that up this morning. No, I haven't yet. Oh, it's in WhatsApp. So we've got like a third, not even a quarter of a drawer done, but the Gridfinity bins, the size, customization, and then the fact that they had that little flag tab in the top to put a label on them. Oh my God, it is, I'm loving it. I will be honest, even with the bamboo, it's gonna take,
00:25:00
Speaker
too long to print them. It's still problematically slow. I'm printing four of the bins we want is like seven hours on a bamboo. So you're talking about, I mean, I might have 30 bins in this drawer. So you're talking about two, three weeks to print one drawer's worth. That's not cool. So what are you going to do?
00:25:19
Speaker
Keep doing it, but like, you know, shallow, shallow bins, you can buy a whole box of them for cheap and they just show up and they're done. This is kind of a hassle. Sure, but.
00:25:30
Speaker
You got to pay to play. The shallow bins have their downsides. They don't stack. I know. They don't have a grid system. I bought a bunch of shallow bins 10 years ago, and I don't actively use them. They're currently full of end mills, but end mills that I never touch. Yeah, right. You use them for dead storage. Yeah, basically. We use them more than that, but they are also guilty of
00:25:53
Speaker
supporting dead storage habits. Sure. Yeah. So I got to say the solution is a second bamboo. Yeah. And I thought about it. I was like, no, no, no, no. It's just chilling here, Saunders. Yeah. And that's where I'm at with buying one or two bamboos at all myself. I want them. I don't need them right now. Although speaking of printing, as I said last week, more and more of the shop have been using the 3D printers. And it just feels incredible.
00:26:23
Speaker
One of our guys who is not computer savvy whatsoever, doesn't even have a computer at home, he just doesn't need it. This guy's phone, whatever. He took his laptop, downloaded Fusion.
00:26:36
Speaker
He wants to design a fixed blade for himself. And so he's got this design, he's got it sketched, whatever. I'm like, throw it in fusion, we'll 3D print it. So he's texting me back and forth late at night the other night. And he's like, I think I got it. And he showed me a picture. And when he extruded the shape, it just extruded a thin outline. I'm like, I don't even know how you did that. But OK, no problem.
00:26:57
Speaker
Tomorrow at work, we'll log into your account and we'll print it like right away. He's like, we can do that? Yeah, no problem. So anyway, he printed it just to be able to hold your design of your own knife in your hand. It was so cool. It really is mind blown. And he gets to work with this stuff all day long, but for him to actually go through the process and do it himself with his own product is just like, yeah.
00:27:21
Speaker
Yes. That's awesome. I even did the quintessential kind of comically basic thing, which was I printed one of the Thingiverse pen holders for your desk that holds eight different pens or similar objects at a 45 degree angle. And I love it because I have like a Sharpie, a pen, a highlighter, a pencil, a box cutter, and now they all have their little bins. It's wonderfully satisfying. Yes.
00:27:49
Speaker
hot glued it to my desk so it's locked in place but not permanent. Beauty. Yeah. With your cordless hot glue gun? Sure did. I still got to get one of those. I don't have one yet. Yes. We did buy a dual hot glue gun but it's a plug-in one that the guys just used as a station.
00:28:05
Speaker
Do you have a certain brand with a bunch of the 20 volt lithium batteries? Yeah, DeWalt. Yeah, DeWalt. Same here. We have, well, we have Makita and Milwaukee as well, unfortunately, but mostly DeWalt. What is it? If you're a woodworker, use Makita. If you're an electrician, use Milwaukee. If you're a at-home guy, use DeWalt. Is that right? I think Milwaukee is definitely electrician-like. Yes.
00:28:34
Speaker
That's funny. Our local store does sell that stuff. Hey, I saw your process bins story. That is legit. It is coming together. Um, so today actually I'm going to sit down with Angelo and Steven and be like, all right guys, I need you to make these parts. Like I'm here for support, but all the information should be here. Let's go through it. Let's talk about it. Um, there's literally dozens of individual components to be made for new fixtures and clamps and things like that. So.
00:29:01
Speaker
Let's just start scheduling it to the current, squeeze it into the current schedule. I mean, it's probably going to be like 20, 30 hours of total machine time over the next however many weeks, but let's start sprinkling it in.
Delegation and Team Empowerment
00:29:13
Speaker
What does that have to do with process pins? The process pins are how to make these new fixture clamps.
00:29:22
Speaker
Got it. OK, so you're doing things. So it's not for like daily production. This is currently at the moment for new stuff that I need made. Interesting. Well, it's kind of repeat stuff we've already made, but I just need more of it.
00:29:34
Speaker
Or, but the people that are going to make them haven't necessarily made them before. Exactly. Interesting. Out of my hair. Right. And I mean, all these things, the files are already on the current, but they're kind of, you know, buried. Yeah. In massive folders. And somebody who doesn't know what they're doing would not trust themselves to pick and choose. It's too dangerous. So my initial concept with the process bins is to outline this entire process to be like,
00:30:01
Speaker
You've seen this clamp, you use it every day, but this is how you make more. You know, so if you mess it up, we can make more. Yeah. And like the Aroa palette changer is still, I mean, on the big pallet side, it's more than half full, but on the small pallet side, it's like 10% full. We've got 55 small pallets and we're probably only using 10 of them. I want to do more. And as the speedio becomes online soon with the Aroa, like we need the ability to make more of these pallets quickly and easily.
00:30:38
Speaker
That's interesting. I had never thought about a process bin as a way of kind of handing off. I mean, you're not moving into that shop that was always so strange to me of like this idea that you've got cam programmers off site that never see the machine and just create toolpaths, tool libraries, and a tool crib person sets up tools and then a machinist, you know, it's so different. Just follows the instructions. Yeah.
00:30:57
Speaker
and not just out of my head because even I forget how to do all this stuff.
00:31:05
Speaker
I think that's unfortunately the way we're going to go at some point. You want to empower and train everybody to do everything to a degree, but some guys are meant to do programming and some guys are not as the core of the company. I'm happy with everybody learning it, but some guys are going to excel at it and some guys are not. You have to be able to shift.
00:31:28
Speaker
and share information this way. But yeah, as the do-it-yourself solopreneur for so many years, I'm like, I can't even imagine a room of programmers and a shop of machinists that never talk to each other, but just do what they tell each other. That'd be so weird. But maybe that's our future. I don't know.
00:31:47
Speaker
It's a nuance that I hadn't thought about, but we're only using process bins to either kind of reconvey or reaffirm existing workflows, whereas you're almost using it as a de novo, like, hey, this is a new part. Here's the recipe, the instruction book for something you've never touched or seen before, which is not how we're using them. Not so much brand new stuff, because it is like, like I said, we've made these fixtures before.
00:32:18
Speaker
Yeah, I would be hesitant to do it for brand new like prototype, like this might crash, I don't know. Certainly hesitant to do it for that, but like these are stable processes, we just don't do it often. And it's not part of the daily workflow. But are you making these clamps regularly? Not regularly, no, exactly. Okay. You're right, so the Angela and Stephen have never really made them before. Yeah, no, I'm just being nosy.
00:32:47
Speaker
It's like even on the stuff we have in R&D right now, it's great. The first thing we do is create a process bin just because it's that perfect place to drop in the 3D printing samples, the snuff jaws, even the scrap parts for now, although we're trying to be pretty quick to throw them away once we've iterated past that.
00:33:04
Speaker
And then, I'll tell you, it's been great even over the last month of somebody saying, hey, what's the tolerance here? We've got the laminated drawing. We've got a laminator permanently set up. We used to have to plug it in. Now it's just set up with an area. And then we just put either a Sharpie right on the lamination or put blue tape down to mark up the drawings, because it's kind of a pain in the butt to reprint drawings. And you're just like, hey, nope, I want to add a tolerance range or change something to this drawing. And so you mark it up, and then eventually you change it.
00:33:33
Speaker
So, I actually skipped the laminator step for now and just use like a three ring binder sheet protectors. Just get me started because I'm like these are not permanent. Totally. And I've been using them more and more like when I took my car to the mechanic, my old Amazon to the mechanic yesterday.
00:33:52
Speaker
I wrote up a one-page document. I was like, here's my name, phone number. Here's my known issues. Here's my goals for the car. You got to check the brakes. It leaks here exactly from right here. And I put it in one of those sheet protectors and I dropped it off. I printed
Car Repairs and Maintenance Challenges
00:34:07
Speaker
off the 1968
00:34:09
Speaker
Volvo green manual for brake repair. I have the PDF online, so it's like 30 pages. Put that in the sheet protector and I felt so professional dropping this off in an old dirty shop. I was like, yeah, I'm that guy, but here's all the information you need. Am I crazy? I thought you drove that car home.
00:34:27
Speaker
I did drive it home from when I bought it last summer. Um, and then the, I'd never checked the fluid level of the brake reservoir and it got low. So it sucked in air. Um, and then they got super spongy. Like I was literally going to drive the kids to school for the first time. And then I got in, slammed on the, like pushed the brake to start the car and the brake went to the floor. So we tried to bleed the brakes in the, in the driveway, me and Pierre,
00:34:55
Speaker
and ended up rupturing some fitting. So I'm like, I'm not fixing that under the car in my driveway. So it sat all winter. And now I just towed it yesterday to the repair shop. And they got to do a full safety inspection on it and fixed up the brakes. And he told me, he's like, good luck finding parts. And I was like, I know where to get parts. And he's like, good, you're buying parts. I'll tell you what to buy. Sweet. Great. Yeah. I will machine custom rotors. Yeah. That's awesome.
00:35:25
Speaker
different back to the machining world, but similar sort of thing. We have a, we've had a kind of,
00:35:31
Speaker
periodic alarm on our VF6A machine about the Haas lube system. And this is like, I don't know all the details behind it, but it was a pretty big kerfuffle over the past few years with the Haas, like the purple grease that could harden and clog lines, which is a bad day. And then I think there was an intermediate oil and then there's now a new oil. I don't remember all the details of it, but the VF6A,
00:35:58
Speaker
pretty confident was built and purchased after the grease. The grease was the purple grease, I think was the bad stuff because it could truly harden in the lines. But we're still getting an issue that implies there might be a clog, but we did the test. There's a video and a test where you can plug. There's four lines out of the manifold at back at the control or back at the box that you could open the door to and nothing there. You don't want it to
00:36:28
Speaker
You don't want to stay pinned at a high PSI because that means there's a block, like it's not able to push the loo out. You also don't want it to fall too quickly because that means you've got a blown line. None of those actually looked like they were bad, but the alarm comes up every once a week maybe. So it's kind of like, look, it's not worth the risk period. So we're pulling the weight covers off and going to start.
00:36:52
Speaker
taking, we'll look at the easiest axis first and sort of look at, okay, when you manually do a way loop cycle, you can do the control, like we should see the oil be flowing out of each one. Right, right.
Machine Maintenance and Safety Systems
00:37:05
Speaker
So you're not changing or updating, you're just removing the way covers to confirm that they're flowing properly? I think so. Let's just see what we learn and prevent maintenance kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Have you even had to do any of that stuff?
00:37:22
Speaker
Like anything? Not really. It's not where he's been. I can't say I've checked the flow of the way lube on the mori, but it hardly ever goes through a way lube, whereas our Nakamura like drinks gallons of it. Yeah, yeah. Oh, this is going to ask you, does do you have or use a mist collector on your Wilhelmin? It came with one.
00:37:51
Speaker
whatever is a little mounted on top factory special and it kind of sucks. Okay. I'm glad you said that because we had our training this week that came with a machine. It was actually perfect. Josh. I don't know Josh. Okay. Josh is out of Noblesville. It was exactly what I had hoped it would be. Like we got the machine installed, whatever, two months ago, a month ago. Grant's been killing it, good to go, making parts, testing it. But then he was like, okay, I'm ready for some
00:38:15
Speaker
trading. I've got some questions and they spent most of the time going through control stuff. So by all means, if Grant gets notes put together, whatever, I'll have him copy you on that stuff. But man, I should have written down what Grant said. It's a missed
00:38:31
Speaker
filter, but not a collector or something like it pulls the mist out of the unit, but then it just dumps it into the shop or something. Um, so I don't know if we're going to put a DIY like box fan filter next to it, or it's a little bit of a small machine to get like a second full blown, you know, miss collector on it, but, um, yeah, I mean, and it is low pressure coolant, but it does absolutely like create a mist when machining it's too. Right. Um, yeah.
00:39:00
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's got a turning spindle that goes what, 6,000 RPM. Um, so that creates a lot of mist by itself. But, uh, so we are either going to get a standalone mist collector for it from arrow X, which we have literally every single machine. We have one on our surface grinder and on our lapping machine. Like we have them everywhere.
00:39:22
Speaker
or the guys were just in the other week, the AeroX guys, or we're going to tie it to the big one that we have on the Tornos Swiss Lathe, which we asked them, is it big? It's working great on the Tornos. I don't want to reduce its performance on the Tornos. But he said no. And if you put a VFD on it, you can overclock it to 130% fan speed, and it will suck enough. So that's a cheap way to do it.
00:39:48
Speaker
probably just tie, you know, you've got a six inch PVC hose going to that. So we'll probably tie into that.
00:39:55
Speaker
That honestly sounds perfect because it's such a small, volumetric enclosure. I just want something to... We put that box fan over the load station of the Akuma. That DIY Amazon fan that has furnace filters around it. My wife just did that at home, like four furnace filters vertically and a box fan on top. Does she have an Akuma? Yeah, at home. No, for like just...
00:40:21
Speaker
house air quality and we got a cat a couple weeks ago and I'm allergic to everything. But it's like a hypoallergenic cat so it's pretty cool. But I'd never seen like that for furnace filters or a box fan on top of like this. Oh yeah. It's brilliant. It's great. Yeah. My biggest complaint is I had to do woodworking to build it. We just use tape. Oh okay. Not for on top of an Okuma.
00:40:45
Speaker
No, this was the design is really creative. It's you just buy like furring strips and then you don't have to do like complex mortising or soft cuts or routing. You just overlap like a lap. Well, like you overlap to foreign strips kind of the length and then you can staple or glue or nail or glue in place. And then it creates this little
00:41:05
Speaker
thing and the fans, it's nice, like the filters fit in there and the little McMaster swivel tabs. But it pulls out legit amounts of stuff, which is exactly what I wanted. It's great. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. How's yours working at home? Which? The new DIY one. Oh, it's great. It's loud in a quiet house. Oh, really? Fan going all the time.
00:41:32
Speaker
And I'm like, you know, I work all day in a loud, fans everywhere, spindles, motors. When I'm home, I want it to be quiet. So often I'll turn it off when I'm right next to it, but leave it on at night. It's cool. It's cool. I was going to say, oh yeah, with the Wilhelmin, one thing I noticed, if you are going to put something on it,
00:41:56
Speaker
On our Swiss, we had a mist, um, Eric's mist fit right on top of the machine. And it didn't, didn't function properly. Like we still had mist coming right out the top. And what hugely helped was, I mean, we upgraded to the bigger version from them, but we also put like 20 feet of six inch PVC line because we wall mounted the thing. So it had all this room to
00:42:20
Speaker
re-coagulate all the oil and drip it back down. Oh, interesting. And I think even if you put like a four foot section of hose, it gives it more time for the oil to just come back into oil, not mist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the filter works better. So keep that in mind.
00:42:37
Speaker
That's a good point. What's funny, because we have an extra missed unit somewhere. I was like, oh, that's so big to just put right on the Wilhelmin. But maybe you're right. Maybe we just hook that, mount that on the wall, run some ducting over and then you accomplish exactly what you were saying. Yeah, because I mean, when it's bad, like on the Wilhelmin once, you know, when the vice comes up and there's a hard stop with an air pressure thingy in it. Yes. And the air pressure measures if it's sealing properly. And if it's not, then it triggers an alarm.
00:43:07
Speaker
Our alarm wasn't set properly and there was a chip in the way. So when the vice came up, it sprayed air and oil everywhere and created clouds of mist, which got shot right out of the mist collector. And it was like a column of smoke came out the top of the machine. And Pierre and I were standing there, we knew exactly what was happening. We're like, okay, well, we'll let it finish parting off and then we'll stop it. And then Angela looks over halfway through and he like freaked out because he had
00:43:36
Speaker
the smoke coming out, and we had to clear out the shop. Oh, really? It was bad. Yeah. We had to open the doors and air it out. So oil is no joke. Oil missed. Yes. It's no fun. So do consider taking it seriously. Yeah. No more Willyman fires? No, more Willyman fires. Just the one. Yeah. That's enough. Yeah. Someone was asking me that, do you know if you're... Oh, Rob was asking, what's up? Does your...
00:44:05
Speaker
If the, first off, it's kind of crazy that the way those fire tray systems work is that it doesn't get triggered until the hose melts. Like you got some real heat going on then. And then does it, does that trigger all of the fire system to work or does it just end up basically flowing out where the hose melted? There's two ways to do it. And I'm pretty sure my hose, it's just like the quarter inch push to connect red or blue lines that we have everywhere. I don't know if the material is actually different than that, but it seems like it's that stuff.
00:44:33
Speaker
Um, that is pressurized with either a separate gas or with tank pressure. I don't know. Um, and then there's like a solenoid sensor thingy that when that doesn't have line pressure, it releases the tank into bigger ports, not through the little hose into like, like three quarter inch hose with a fitting on the end. There's two or three of those aimed, um, throughout the machine.
00:45:01
Speaker
that will dump the contents of that CO2 tank or whatever it is in seconds. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Like you said, it has to be heat enough to melt a plastic hose at the top of the enclosure. Yeah. It's going to melt other stuff too.
00:45:16
Speaker
Well, that's what I was thinking then. If you have a fire trace, do its job. Obviously, it's a bad day, but it's also better than the alternative. Yes. But you're not going to just hose out below out the machine and hit cycle. Sorry. You've got some parts to repair, some stuff to go through. It's probably going to peel paint at that point. But I've heard from other people, or maybe from fire traces marketing, that replace a couple of seals, make sure everything's good. But most companies are back up and running the next day sort of thing.
00:45:47
Speaker
Do you know if it's another, you know, whatever seven grand or do you, is there a much less expensive refill? Much less expensive refill, but technically you have to get the pro to come in and like run new hose and refill it properly. And it's,
Conclusion and Farewell
00:46:01
Speaker
it's like a certified fire thing.
00:46:06
Speaker
unless you go DIY and then you just figure it out yourself. It's not hard, I'm telling you. It's a tank with a pressurized line that has solenoid valve. If pressure goes down, release the tank. Maybe the mechanism to release the tank has to be all certified and all that stuff. I don't know. Yeah, I hear. I hear nothing. No, for sure. Cool. Cool, man. Anything else? No, I don't think so. See you next week.
00:46:37
Speaker
Sounds good, dude. Take care. Yeah, sounds good. OK, bye bye.