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#356 Knifemaking Tuesdays are back!
493 Plays1 year ago
TOPICS
- Knifemaking Tuesdays are back!
- Multi color 3d printing
- Breaking drill bits
- Fusion Trim toolpath
- Days Off In The Shop is difficult, but wonderful
- Grimsmo's Speedio and Erowa are hooked up!
- Heat treating pullstuds
Recommended
Transcript
Balancing Work and Life
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of the machining episode 356. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. This is a good reminder that you can't take it with you. At some point, in some way, this journey will be over. And I am a person that defaults to grinding and working hard and focusing. But if you're not having a little fun along the way, you're doing something wrong.
00:00:30
Speaker
I agree. Do you want to know what inspired me to think that way? Yeah. Your knife making Tuesday.
00:00:40
Speaker
I saw that video and I wasn't, I knew you back when those were out, but I wasn't a knife maker and I was, I don't know, kind of like doing my own machine journey. So I would watch some, but it wasn't like I was one of your, who clearly you have these passionate fan base that will, you know, watch anything that comes out. And I saw this, I thought it was an hour and 18 minutes. I thought, okay, well I'll skip around.
00:01:02
Speaker
Watch the whole thing, John. That's fun. Even I watched the whole thing when my editor, Ryan, sent it to me to review. It's like 9 o'clock at home. I can either chill, get some work done, whatever. I reviewed this video. I watched the whole thing. I didn't speed through it. I'm like, I watched myself. This happened three days ago for me, but I watched it anyway.
Filming Techniques and Challenges
00:01:20
Speaker
Good. I'm really glad to hear you enjoyed it.
00:01:22
Speaker
Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I know you and you had an energy. There's the whole, I mean, to be like, just address the elephant in the room. There's the whole, is it the right focus and how much hassle and stress and adding videos do to it. But John, you're like your enthusiasm. It was fun to see you that way. Good. Actually, when we talked last week, we talked about this filming and distraction and things like that.
00:01:48
Speaker
And at that moment when we talked about it, I was like, yeah, of course filming is distracting. But on that Friday, also because I had the goal of making the video, but I stopped thinking about the distraction of the filming and I just picked up the camera and I just the camera followed me and I just talked to the camera and I think out loud and I'd update it and that whole night I didn't think of it as a distraction. It was just part of the process and it was cool. It was like back to my roots. You know, it's really fun. And I haven't
00:02:15
Speaker
looked at any of the comments or anything like that yet, but I've had a lot of messages from people directly and hearing from you and things like that. I think it went over quite well. Do you just fill with your phone? No, I have a Canon R10, I think. A DSLR. Is all that on a R10? Mm-hmm. Okay, interesting.
00:02:37
Speaker
Yeah. Hashtag nobody really cares here. But I have a go we sold our DSLRs right there. The GoPro was so much easier and easier to work with. And then within it's kind of funny, I just use my iPhone more for more stuff now. But I'm not I feel like I'm too old to be one of the people that just does everything with their phone. Like I can't I cannot comprehend filming a 12 minute video on my phone.
00:03:00
Speaker
Like it's just like I feel like 10 second things on my phone. I think so. I think I'm just old or weird for that. But the phone does such a great job. Like I was taking a doing a quick
00:03:11
Speaker
mod vice gen three mod vice instructional video and I had the GoPro and then I was like, this isn't what I want to try to get. We have the DSLR still here, but we don't use it. And I set it up. I'm like, this is paying the button. I was like, Oh my gosh, no, I keep forgetting the phone is like the iPhone. I just got the new one. So I have a 15 whatever that has three cameras. Um, and yeah, it's great shot. Oh my God. It's great. Just does everything right. Love it. Yeah. And with our DSLR, I've, I've got it on a little, um, Manfrotto tripod, like a little shorty.
00:03:40
Speaker
And batteries are always right there. A little light on SD cards. I wish I had a couple more just to make it easy. But it just needs to be there and be available. Flick it on, start filming. And I got those DJI wireless mics that you told me. And they're fantastic when they're turned on. Oh, I'm sorry. I lost about 10 minutes of footage because I didn't have the one turned on. Yeah. That's fine.
00:04:07
Speaker
That's the key. If it works like that, that's great. There's been points where I'm like, oh, the mic was wrong, or it was out of focus, or the SD card errors out. Every little hassle is just a total unsubscribe. It's like, I don't need this hassle. I don't need this. I don't need to worry if the SD card's full or not.
Exploring 3D Printing
00:04:30
Speaker
I actually don't have an editor anymore. It's kind of- It changes things for you. Yeah. The shop update video I just posted, I actually filmed it in December. I was going to edit it on vacation. It didn't. I don't really care.
00:04:46
Speaker
But it quickly became awkward timing because I'm talking about like stuff for next year, but it's I've aired it like through January or whatever, whatever, whatever. Those are quick to edit. But, you know, I miss having an editor, but it's also I don't know. I'm not going to feel bad about.
00:05:02
Speaker
I'm, you know, it's not part of our business anymore. And so I don't want to bring somebody I've been thinking about getting an upward person to help us some of the Saunders videos we need to make like that on for true marketing and instructional. In fact, I don't think I will do that. But it's nice that you have Ryan, I think you have a guy that can. Yeah, man. Yeah. And he's good. And he's hungry. And he's busy with a lot of customer service and a lot of
00:05:28
Speaker
website management and videos so he doesn't have enough like as much time on videos as we wish. But also I'm not having been spending a lot of time filming videos lately anyway. But that might turn around and change now that I've gotten back into the knife making Tuesdays. And it's cool. I have this project. I have this passion.
00:05:48
Speaker
that I want to finish this knife and already started the journey of filming the rest of it. So I'm like, okay, I can bring everybody along with the conclusion of this knife next next hour of many weeks it takes. And it's gonna be fun. Good. Glad to hear. Super cool. Yeah, it's funny. Like you can tell, you know, I don't I would never even remotely imply that you ever fake it. But like you could tell how in through how genuine your enthusiasm was if that makes sense. Yeah. Cool.
00:06:17
Speaker
Do you have a different bamboo AMS than like the normal one? I think so. Okay. I think I saw yours in the background and I was like, why does that look different? It's tilted up. The guys printed the little spacer that tilted up 10 degrees or whatever. Yeah, I think the front of ours isn't even clear. I didn't even honestly go look at ours. I should because I've been Googled it and the Google photos look more like yours. I thought, ooh.
00:06:45
Speaker
Yeah, Eric printed this whole riser tower that has drawers and stuff under the AMS that lets air vent out of the top or what everybody said. It took like 70 hours to print. Oh, wow. It taught him printing as one of the first prints. That was fun.
00:07:00
Speaker
Yeah, and then Grayson just printed these little 20-minute door stoppers that tilt the glass up and get some air air fan out, whatever. Do you have one of those? I should actually come close the circle on that. We actually have a shocking number of folks reach out with suggestions on multicolored print techniques.
00:07:20
Speaker
I feel like many of them include some more amount of hassle than I wish. But I want to spend some time and I think I actually should make a video to figure out the three, four minute rifle shot video because the stuff out there on YouTube is currently mixed in with other. It's not a good pool resource if you just want to find a video in three minutes.
00:07:39
Speaker
what to do with fusion plus bamboo for multicolor. But what I did not realize and I think it was Grayson through you that actually I'm embarrassed to say I don't know why I missed this is there is a Z level fill height option.
00:07:56
Speaker
Okay. If you take a brick or object in Fusion, you extrude text down 10 thou, you import that one single file into Bamboo that the way you would normally would, so long as you've got two multicolor options turned on in Bamboo, you can zoom in and instead of painting or selecting, you can choose fill height or fill layer height.
00:08:24
Speaker
And it lets you- Interesting. So it fills the cavity, the negative space? It only fills the floor. It does exactly what you want. So like, let's say that's at Z of minus 10 thou, every single plane that's at Z minus 10 thou gets filled with red, which is completely perfect with one caveat that it also fills the outside border of your program. Right. Yeah. I don't really care about that, but I can see why.
00:08:52
Speaker
people wouldn't like that. Now you couldn't easily go take the paintbrush and paint that back to the normal color. And that's for sure a win a trade off win if you've got 75 letters, you know, get them all read and just quickly fix the outside. I still would prefer like an interior only option because I want to print 30 things and I don't want to be doing any tedious mouse clicking. I just want to go fill that layer with red print.
00:09:21
Speaker
I think what I got out of it was most people are extruding two bodies, your thing with the negative and then extruding the text as well and posting them as two separate bodies the same or something like that. And then you just select the whole body as different color. But honestly, I've done very little two color text printing.
Prototyping Mindset and Techniques
00:09:41
Speaker
I've got Eric printing me a set of tool tags for this video right now, and I've got some specific requests, and he's having fun trying to meet my desires. He's printing a sample and shows it to me. It's really fun. And those are two-color prints, and they look really good. Yeah. I don't know how he's doing it, but...
00:10:00
Speaker
My days off in the shop last week was at the VF3 and we did some, we had four, it's nice that Caleb had four gauge pins that he used on that machine and they were just in a shallower bin. And I was just like, wait, just quickly print a block. It's a Gridfinity compatible block and it's white that has red lettering, which it looks nice. It's visually identified. Like it just, it's great.
00:10:25
Speaker
Nice. Yeah. So I have bamboo open real quick. And if I choose height range, then that lets you pick the floor of the text and everything. That entire layer. Just like in PrusaSlicer back in the day when you could do a manual filament change and do layers. Yeah. Okay. Well, I actually shouldn't say, yeah, I don't really know that, but yeah.
00:10:49
Speaker
I wish, I guess, if I'm being greedy, that there was a height range option that didn't include the outside most border. That would be perfect. That would be great, actually. Can I ask you a drilling question? Sure. Can you drill titanium with high speed steel? Probably. I'm just curious. Don't say why not.
00:11:14
Speaker
I'm sure I did back in the day before I could afford carbide. Yeah, we're right. Yeah, probably just get your speeds and feeds. It's probably like 40 SFM or something. Well, I don't do stainless anymore. But when we were job shopping and came across stainless, you don't want to drill stainless with high speed steel. Maybe you quote unquote, you don't. You can do it with cobalt, which is cheap too. But I saw your, I felt, I think we all felt the struggle we were watching along.
00:11:43
Speaker
Yeah, it does look like chips. Yeah. Have you learned more? No, I haven't made another one since last week. But I think I switched to peck drilling and solved it. I don't know. Yeah. It drilled three holes successfully. Yeah.
00:12:02
Speaker
And what you said about the downsides of pecking is, to my knowledge, the only downside is, aside from time, is that, yeah, you're re-entering the cut, so it wears out the tool more, whatever. Yeah, whatever, yeah. The other thing somebody told me, we don't do a lot of small hole stuff, is that 500 psi through those tiny holes isn't going to be 500 psi. Now, I don't know how your hide and hide or your coin system works. Right.
00:12:28
Speaker
adjusting to do that, but it did look like those chips were just slammed in there. Yeah, yeah. I think I will send that. I'll send the whole video to my guy at OSG. Obviously watch the whole thing, but no, watch from minute 12 to 15 or whatever it is and just get their thoughts on it because yeah, it looks like the chips are not getting out of the hole. It's interesting to be able to not only see that under the microscope, but share it.
00:12:55
Speaker
I could have easily just thrown another drill and moved on, but I was like, no, let's dive down the rabbit hole here. Do you know what your feed per rep was? OSG spec, bang on. I don't. 2,000 per grab or something. Not crazy, but it's like by the book is what it was for titanium. What I was thinking about
00:13:25
Speaker
way where I've had to rethink about a mindset is making sure you have a consistent standard across the team of when if I prototype and break a tool, making sure I would react the same way if
00:13:44
Speaker
Interesting. Pick a Fred. Let's say you have an employee named Fred and you said Fred, go make a prototype blade. Well, if he comes back, don't micromanage. Let Fred go do his thing. Great. Then if he comes back and has multiple scrapped pieces and multiple broken drills, it can be awkward to know what was understandable versus what was like, hey, no, you should have thought about that differently.
00:14:11
Speaker
Yeah, and that's where the trust versus micromanage competency comes into play. And I've seen that a couple of times in the shop with some of our guys. I'll let them go, and they'll come to me with some broken tools. And usually I'm OK with it. If it gets excessive, then obviously it's like, well, maybe this also happened last month. Yeah, yeah. Right. It's good. I'm glad I still make part. I mean, the first off,
00:14:39
Speaker
coming full circle back to like just enjoy what you do. I'm not going to write a full stop. But like, you know, we were setting up a new Sandvik tool. I actually legitimately don't know why it broke to this day. I thought... What tool?
00:14:52
Speaker
It's one of their 320. Actually, ironically, it's a 327. So it is a solid carbide head key seat cutter. So you know how in that knife thing you're using, you're holding up those big slotting things you don't want to use. This is like a mini monolithic carbide one that screws on. I have an Iscar version of that.
00:15:14
Speaker
And one of the five fingers on that broke and I thought maybe it, I have a classic like, did you get the lead in and lead out wrong? I didn't, in fact, I took the tool that had one broken thing, fingers just missing and checked the run out on it or screwed it back on. It cuts fine with my finger, which in the same camp, which further confuses me as to why I broke it. But regardless, it's good to remember like,
00:15:46
Speaker
I, we don't do like tons of proving out and of truly new stuff, but I do make sure to take off my normal hat and put on the whole like, look, all your, you know, I'm not trying to, this sounds like I'm trying to tell you what to do. I'm not, but like, I'm agreeing with you.
00:16:03
Speaker
It's like, okay, let's go cheaper tools, go slower. I don't give a, yeah. That's about, about PIC. I mean, look, I don't know why that drove over here because it doesn't seem crazy, but like, yeah, you get the point. But also just the mindset of prototyping. It's, it's like, sorry guys, I'm not here right now. I need to like, I need to focus on this. Yeah. It looks cool though. The integral line. Yeah. The integral line. Yeah. It looks super cool. Super happy with it.
00:16:35
Speaker
So it's Wednesday today, I was hoping to have a bit more progress on the blade, because that's the next big challenge, but nothing yet. But later today and tomorrow and Friday, because the blade the blade is the most complicated thing we make because there's like so many steps involved with heat treat and lapping and hard milling and all that stuff. So I have to rely on everybody else to get me the process of the finished blade. And the sooner I can do that, the sooner I have a finished blade.
00:17:04
Speaker
A genuine question, can you not just skip the complicated parts I keep treating and just build a knife that's obviously never going to hold an edge, but otherwise perfect? Even like a soft mill, the blade is the first thing we do. We cut the outside, cut the hole, the pivot hole, the slot where the stop pins go. So it's almost near net shape pretty much.
Machining and Toolpath Strategies
00:17:25
Speaker
And the first one that I come off the machine is definitely going in the knife and just test fitting. Because the steel soft, it's going to round where the button locks and everything is going to round and deform very quickly. But I think within the first few flips, I'll be able to have some more answers. Because I guarantee it's not going to go together perfectly. So I need to know what to change the sooner, the better.
00:17:50
Speaker
Button lock is too open and close, or just to close? Just to close. So if I can pull it off, I want to have a detent feel, just like a regular knives, with the button lock barely hanging in, and then it pops out of the way. Yeah. But you could also push the button, and then it's totally free, free flipping.
00:18:11
Speaker
Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. It feels very much like the old days of high end triggers and competition shooting up. You want that seer and that disconnect to just be like Geisty does a great job actually, a willing user. Geisty does a great job at having ARs, which are semi-autos. There's a lot more going on where I think it's the SST trigger, like you have
00:18:35
Speaker
ever so slight, see our engagement, but it will never like, it can never fail. It can never actually have had a couple of SSDs effectively bump fire on me accidentally, but that's more my fault. But like, it's so good and so crazy. But but it does always does a shot. When I was at your place, I actually got a Geisley trigger on one of your rifles, right? I'm sure. Yeah, most most of my ARs didn't have a
00:19:02
Speaker
I think I think I have like a triple shot. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. It was cool. Yeah. The trigger fun. Great. And it's that like that point. I don't know what you call it that the trigger point, whether it's a knife or whatever, it's like, go, go, go, go, go, go, pop. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Love it.
00:19:24
Speaker
So speaking of prototyping and fusion and all that, didn't we end last week with talking about Trim Toolpath or did we hang out? We talked about it. Is it on the podcast? Well, you said you were going to talk about it this week. Okay. So we were making one of our Stimptworks Porsche timing chain covers and op one
00:19:47
Speaker
is made out of a piece of aluminum that's about the size of a standard piece of printer paper and half inch thick or something. And the part sits inside of that with the exception of bottom left and top right come really close to the edge of the material, which is where the, in this case, talon grips are holding onto it. And it's not an issue for most of the part because we're staying above the talon grips are only like 70,000, but
00:20:14
Speaker
When it comes to the very end, we are finish milling the edge and tabbing it, profiling it, all that stuff. And I wanted to try to be more...
00:20:26
Speaker
uh, good, good fusion workflow and not, you know, superhero skills of like trying to create crazy sketches that aren't, that are paramount, but now, but may not be later. You know what I mean? And, um, I used 2d contour. So basically standard workflow. I rough everything down, leaving like 70 thou. Uh, that's plenty of rigidity left to do chamfers and other final stuff. Then it's kind of like, okay, now you're in focus mode to get the rest of the,
00:20:54
Speaker
profile cut, keeping the part rigid, making sure it doesn't flex out because this is a pretty big part relative to the clamp. So the vice can also just pop it up if you compromise integrity. And that's something you just have to test with. But I did a 2D contour, leaving only
00:21:13
Speaker
a very small amount. And then I think I came back through and punched all the way through with tabs. The punchline of this comment is, for the first time ever, I actually spent the time to use the Fusion trim toolpath. One major good thing, one major bad thing. Major good thing is it's awesome. Major bad thing is it's part of the extensions, which is kind of a disappointment, to be honest. But it's awesome because I
00:21:42
Speaker
I could create my own sketch or I could just use the fixturing if you have that in your part as you go into the trim toolpath and you say, okay, I have this 2D contour, which 2D contour was not previously really editable because it's just a toolpath that's built up on whatever you select. So yes, if you go through and create more detailed sketches and in production, sure, I'm not gonna argue with you on that, but I've done that and I tell you over time, it can be frustrating of like,
00:22:11
Speaker
you know, you break the tool path or you want to change something. This is nicer because once you keep a true 2D contour, it creates a full 2D contour and then
00:22:20
Speaker
afterward, you have a trim toolpath pop up on your design tree. You now have a CAD style design tree along your CAM toolpath. It's like, okay, Fusion created this full 2D contour. It has the tabs. After that, Fusion looks at what you selected as your trim toolpath zone, plus you can choose a buffer. I picked the, I think, of the 20,000 more than the radius of the tool.
00:22:45
Speaker
because I really didn't want to machine into the clamps. And it's funny, as a CAD nerd or CAM nerd at first, you're like, well, this is so easy for Fusion. It just deletes the tool. Well, no, you've got to figure out, from a CAM kernel standpoint, how to lead out, link back in, et cetera. So you can create a 2D contour. And then in Trim, you can select a feature to avoid or something.
00:23:08
Speaker
Yes. An exit with 20,000 clearance. Yep. That's cool. So simple. It's sort of like tabs. Well. But better. But different, yeah. Tabs actually kind of stink. They're great, but they end up being a little bit harder to control than you'd like. I guess what I'm actually thinking of is 2D chamfer, where you can chamfer a non-chamfered edge and go up to a wall and have it miss the wall by 20,000 or something, which is such a cool tool path.
Handling Shop Emergencies
00:23:38
Speaker
It is. It's also solid model aware to a fault because sometimes you will be limited. So if you're trying to chamfer something and there's a different feature, you actually can get, you can have a problem forcing it closer than Fusion wants to let you. You ever ran into that? Yeah.
00:23:55
Speaker
I like to simply put a simple way to explain this to trim is machine a 10 inch straight line on 2D contour and just put a one inch circle in the middle of it. Use that as your trim tool that it'll machine up to that one inch circle plus your cushion link up and then lead back in. The only thing I found, which I suspect is a bug. I don't really want to deal with it because I've kind of given up on successful bug reported infusion.
00:24:22
Speaker
is I was using the ramp and the ramp seems to, well, it doesn't seem that the ramp leading on 2D Country will violate your trim toolpath, which is total fail mode. Interesting. It's still worth it. Basically, in this situation, I was able to quickly, confidently run this part and avoid my talent grips on the two areas of the profile part.
00:24:47
Speaker
I will have to try that sometime. I think I just turned on Trim toolpath just to see what it looked like. The design tree for Cam showed up. I was like, whoa, this is crazy. I didn't have a need for it, so I moved on. Very cool. I had some other little stuff to share, but I also wanted to jokingly but seriously share about how
00:25:13
Speaker
wonderful days off in the shop is, but how difficult it's just being super honest, how difficult it's proving to do.
00:25:25
Speaker
Friday, they're all good excuses, but that's the problem. They're all excuses. Friday, we had a water pipe burst and we are so lucky we caught it, but I'm frustrated because a AA battery and a thermostat failed and that caused the heat to go down somewhere. I didn't really realize that was a thing, so that's on me.
00:25:51
Speaker
We're lucky that we were here and caught it. It's funny though because I didn't panic, but I had the wrong first instinct. My first instinct was to get a 33-gallon rubbermaid because the water is, I mean, gushing out of the ceiling. Through sheetrock. Out of the ceiling. Way more water than you would get at in any shower. It is gushing out.
00:26:14
Speaker
And my first instinct was to grab a barrel instead of reaching three feet across the room where the main water shut off for the whole building as we just shut enough water off.
00:26:24
Speaker
So I got the barrel and then I realized, wait a minute, John, shut the water up, shut the water off, and then open up the lowest faucet in the building to backflow water in the system out. So that's my embarrassing PSA to anybody out there who's never had a water pipe burst is nowhere your water shut off out this. Yeah, I was just thinking, I don't know where ours is. I know where the water lines come in, but
00:26:45
Speaker
I can't visualize putting my hand on the shut off. It's really good to know. Yeah. I know where it is at home. Yeah, that's good. That's good. It sucked. Yeah. Any damage? Like any lasting? We ripped out a carpet in one office. It was drying out, but I was like, I don't want to risk it. And then we got all of the water sucked up with a little wet vac and mopping. And then
00:27:15
Speaker
put fans down. So punchline no, but I never planned for a flood, but it is one reason why almost everything in our shop we put on either pallets or two by fours. I just I've learned over the years, whether it's a spill or a water burst or flooding or who knows what. Having stuff directly on the floor. Number one, you can't move it with a pallet jack, but also it's just it's somehow it's going to get wet or moist or yeah. Yeah, that seems to attract dirt more when it's on the ground. Yeah.
00:27:44
Speaker
We got to have some sheetrock repaired, but no big deal. Got lucky. Yeah, you don't expect to spend your day triaging that kind of a thing, but those days happen. Yeah. I think it's kind of telling, and this is just a super personal share of the difficulty of doing days off in the shop. It's showing how
00:28:08
Speaker
difficult it is in my role or your role to actually spend two hours doing something without a distraction or you should do we need to do and
00:28:18
Speaker
These have been, for sure, weird weeks. We were in the process of buying a new machine. We've had people here for that. Lots of immediate responses. We had a hot job on a custom plate that I did need to be involved in, which is abnormal. Somebody accidentally deleted our whole shared drive of NC files. Honest mistake, we actually got it fixed really quickly. But those are the things that, OK, doesn't happen. It didn't ever happen before. I got to be involved in it.
00:28:47
Speaker
rectifying that. So when those things happen, it's stop everything. And yeah, this is now the priority. Yep. Good. But I still love it. And it was fun. I was catching up with a friend and a mentor, and he was sharing. And this is humbling to me to have this person be like, hey, your day's off in the shops inspiring me to do a little bit of that. And those moments feel good. I enjoyed it. Nice, nice. I've had the thought actually the past two days.
00:29:17
Speaker
My desk is just cluttered with all kinds of little projects and little things. So I started 3D printing. I found a gridfinity drawer system that's like benchtop. It's about one or two feet wide, one foot tall, perfect for the corner of the desk. And I was like, this is going to take a little while to print, but you know what? I'm just going to print the first layer and just see how it goes. And then Pierre just pulled the print off a few minutes ago and he said, I loaded one of them upside down. So there was an overhang that just totally
00:29:47
Speaker
What do you call it? You know, spaghetti. I was like, why does that look so funny? Because you modeled it upside down. But yeah, so the grid finity drawer will allow me to put all my little scrap handles and blades and pen parts and stuff right on my desk where I want it.
00:30:05
Speaker
How are you or are you securing the Gridfinity grid base to a surface? In the drawers, the toolbox drawers, I think I'm spot gluing, super gluing the corners down. Okay. Yeah. On my desk, I haven't gotten that far yet. I might just, it's like a plastic folding table, I might just screw it in.
00:30:24
Speaker
Oh, yeah, right. Okay. Because I don't want it to slide off, or a double sided tape or something like Yeah, ours are none of us are adhered. I wish some of them were but it's not a huge problem. But you're right some of that thin, not like the not the thick, like just simply add double sided tape might be fine. Yep.
00:30:42
Speaker
I want to avoid magnets because they seem cool but it's doing hassle and they track chips. They're not cheap to buy a lot of magnets.
00:31:00
Speaker
So two minutes before the podcast, I got to see the Aroa successfully change a palette into this video. Do tell it works. It's done. They're fine tuning the install. You guys were here yesterday. They're here today. I was actually like.
00:31:25
Speaker
I had to rebuild the MX Aroa chuck because it wasn't reading properly and some other stuff. So I kind of stayed late last night, taking the whole chuck apart, cleaning it, tweaking a couple of things. I wanted to machine a few little features to make it clamp differently and better.
00:31:47
Speaker
and ended up ruining it and I had to shim it to make it fixed. What is this? This is the aroa chuck, basically, that the pallets load into. I got the MX version, the max tooling version, which is a quarter of the price of the actual aroa chuck, but it clamps a little bit differently than the factory aroa.
00:32:09
Speaker
when I put a row of pallets into it. So I wanted to lower the clamping taper ever so slightly. So I looked at it. I took it all apart. There's like 54 springs inside that do the clamping and six balls that pull on the pull stud. And I was like, you know, if I machine that little surface, I will get the clamping that I desire. So I did, and it got better. And I was like, you know, if I machine it a little bit more, it'll get me exactly what I want.
00:32:40
Speaker
And I was convinced like testing it, you know, I spent hours on it. And then I machine and they go to put put it together and it won't even lock up at all. Like the pallet just goes in and out. The truck is locked or unlocked. I'm like, What the heck did I just do?
Automation and Shop Management
00:32:55
Speaker
So that panic moment, where it's like,
00:32:57
Speaker
did I ruin it? Okay, how do I fix this? I don't really have any shim stock to like, ideally, I need a shim washer that's 30,000 thick and exactly this diameter. If I had a fiber laser and some shim stock sticking around, I would just make my own. But so I ended up chopping up a
00:33:14
Speaker
shim feeler gauge because I have a set of feeler gauges in every, so I found a 19 thou feeler gauge that I don't really need and I just took some tin snips and I chopped up four little pads, put it under this thing that screws in and it shimmed it back up and now it works perfectly. And then I also, the guy was here yesterday installing the Aroa and
00:33:38
Speaker
he's got the pallet gripped in the aroa and the doors are open in the speedio and it's going in and it's very close to the top of the door that we custom made and custom designed and then it's bringing in this pallet and now the pull stud so the top is really close to the door and that pull stud on the bottom
00:33:57
Speaker
is going to smash into the aro check. You don't have enough. I don't have enough clearance. The person can't walk into the elevator, basically? Exactly. Yeah. So I need like another inch and a half of clearance. Do you still have those tin snips? Exactly. And so we looked at it the other day yesterday, and I'm like, we can't really easily cut the door without ruining the linear rails and all this stuff that we built. I should have designed the door about four inches taller. But I was like, no, it'll be fine.
00:34:26
Speaker
Because a speedio is one of those machines where you can't machine the table. You need to rise everything up pretty much. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's got like seven and a half inches of gauge to table or whatever. Not like a tarmac where you can literally lay the spindle onto the table, which is really nice sometimes. Anyway, so I had the aroa chuck spaced up with about a two inch spacer. And this morning I had to shave that down from two inches down to half inch.
00:34:55
Speaker
So that gave me the inch and a half lower. And I looked at my shortest tool, and I was like, even with that so much lower, I think I'm still fine. Maybe I can't necessarily machine a pallet, but I can machine whatever's on a pallet, if that's the case. Or I just use super long tool holders for machining a pallet itself, and then you mount stuff to the top. Yeah, right. So it's fine. And if that's the only solution, then that's the only solution.
00:35:20
Speaker
So it is 10 39 in the morning. Uh, I went home for dinner and then I came home. I came back to work and I've, I've been at work since. Wait, since like eight, nine PM. Yeah. Overnight. Yeah. I have no idea how you do this, Sean. I don't do it normally, but I needed to get this done. The tech drove in five hours. You know, he's going home today. I'm like, darn it. I want this done. And I got into some rabbit holes, like I said, with the truck and, uh,
00:35:50
Speaker
Man, it just dragged on and dragged on and dragged on. And I was like, ah, I'm still going to do it. I'm going to do it. I got my podcast coming up. I guess I'm staying. Dude. I'm kind of dragging. You come first. I enjoy our talks, but good grief. Totally. So yeah, this is not normal for me. And I can't remember the last time I've done a complete all nighter.
00:36:08
Speaker
I remember it was like making Tuesday a week ago when you're at like 3am in the shop filming. Yeah, that was 4am. I got sleep that night. It's up till 11. It was a Saturday. But yeah, I don't think in this shop I've actually stayed till the next day.
00:36:26
Speaker
Which is weird. I don't recommend it, but yeah, it's nice. I got a lot done, but it wasn't as fun as like making the integral handle where it's like, cool. This is just like headache on top of headache and trying to get this thing done. However, you know, the goal is, uh, right now the speedio and a row talk to each other and they work and.
00:36:47
Speaker
The two techs are here and I said, okay, I'll be back in an hour doing a podcast, um, which lets them fine tune and button up hoses and communication parameters between the two machines, getting everything synced. And the, the one guy from speedio is building a subroutine that will do all the, like all the weight codes and open the door and wait for the signal. And then the robot comes in and then wait for the signal and close the door and then continue machining.
00:37:14
Speaker
But yeah, the whole thing's going to run on a basic subroutine that's like, I forget what it is, M888P5 for palette five. Sweet. Yeah. Whatever it is. And so I just call that in my calling program and then it's going to be awesome. That's great. I'm glad to hear that. That's a workflow that is now in the repertoire. Exactly. Two years in the making.
00:37:41
Speaker
Your door, so it sounds like the doors would be fine except that because your aroa chuck has been intentionally lifted up to accommodate the middle table. That means your aroa chuck is always living in a Z positive four inch or something which means that that's where the door issue would come up from. Am I visualizing correctly? I think so. I think so.
00:38:08
Speaker
And it's like when I spec'd the door a year and a half ago, you know, I have a CAD model of the speedio and I probably had the risers on the table, but you're just guessing. I didn't think about the actual stack up of the Aroa arm with the beam and the pulse that's hanging out. And then I like, I made the door the same size as the current door. Yeah, no, yeah. It's not another current, it's a speedio.
00:38:36
Speaker
It reminded me of a conversation you and I were having with an acquaintance about some work they had done, frankly, three years ago, and the customer called him last week saying something like, there's a minor amount of residual glue or something in some of the holes. And I don't know why there was glue in the hole to begin with or whatever. But this customer is basically just like, even though this is way past the point of
00:39:06
Speaker
what would you call it? Like whatever, like we want you to take all these back and do all this work on them. And they haven't ordered in three, like they, they for other reasons don't order any more from this person. And it's like, I enjoy the conversation with you as well as in this, in that group, because it's sometimes it's good to get like some perspective in the ground, but like, you know,
00:39:29
Speaker
If it's something where Saunders, like, I did something that's truly a mistake, and it's two years later, usually it's pretty easy to think about doing the right thing, but it really, maybe this is a fault, frankly, but like, it just comes down to the counterparties attitude, the customer's attitude. It's just like, hey, we're pretty bummed to see this. Is there a way, like, well, I can work together, but like, when it's the whole like, you need to stop what you're doing, you need to fix this, and you need to send a courier to pick all these up, and you screwed this up from three years ago,
00:39:57
Speaker
You know, it's just kind of like, sorry, but like, yeah, yeah, not my problem anymore. Like you accepted the parts and yeah. Yeah. I mean.
00:40:08
Speaker
Like you said, it's all about the
Heat Treating Methods
00:40:10
Speaker
tone. I had a customer last year or something reach out and he said there was a problem with his knife or his pen or whatever. He just sent me a message on Instagram and he's like, I didn't want to bug you about it. I got this three years ago and this little thing is weird. I didn't want to bug you about it, but since we're chatting now, I'll mention it. You should have told me right away, I would have fixed it. I'll fix it now, whatever it is.
00:40:34
Speaker
Yeah, attitudes everything. Yeah, both ways too. I mean, do you do any, are you familiar with the phrase gas heat treating or temporary? I think I've seen some videos. Okay.
00:40:54
Speaker
really don't know what I'm talking about. What is your goal? Say again? What is your goal? My goal is to not sound like an idiot. No, like for heat treating. So, well, we're having these pull studs for the puck chuck and we machine up a batch of them with serialized them and we were going to send them out to have them heat treated to measure different sort of expansions and changes to the material. And kind of started going down a rabbit hole and was made aware of
00:41:21
Speaker
So, let's say we're debating between 4140 and A2. A2 is going to be a better option, but just for the sake of like talking things out loud. With 4140, you heat treat. So, my knowledge is you heat treat with heat full stop. Like you put it in something like has electric coils and it gets up to really hot period. Then the question is how do you quench it? Old 440 is oil quenching so you dunk it in oil. That has a big impact on distortion and surface finish and everything.
00:41:51
Speaker
Yeah, like if you think about you cannot like jumping off a diving board into a pool, you cannot submerge your whole body at the same time. Some part of your body has to go in first your head, your head or your feet or your butt or your stomach.
00:42:04
Speaker
But there's a vacuum gas heat treat option. Excuse me. Sorry. A vacuum gas temper option. More for tool steels, not so much for, I guess, the alloys. And this is where I need a full stop. I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm guessing what it means is there's a high flow rate of gas that allows it to be tempered without having to do a traditional air or traditional
00:42:33
Speaker
Yeah. If we're talking big ovens like vacuum ovens, I don't know if they're typically electric or gas, natural gas or whatever. Probably, I would assume natural gas because that would take a lot of electricity. I don't know. Yeah, good question. Basically, the vacuum ovens are
00:42:53
Speaker
Light vacuum and then usually an inert gas inside like argon or nitrogen or whatever. But that's just to get rid of oxygen from oxygen. Right. True. But then the heating element itself, whatever heats up the oven, whether it's electric coils or whether it's gas flame or whatever, is that what you're talking about? Are you talking about literally a flame going over the material?
00:43:20
Speaker
So again, I don't know. I think, though, the heat treats the heat, whether it's electric or not gas. Then there's the quench, which I guess I don't know. How is it? How is it? So do you do A2 at all? Just for little fixtures and tools and stuff, but I've done a decent amount of it. So it's air hardening. So you heat it with heat. Let's assume it's electric, whatever. Then you temp, excuse me, no, quench it. How do you quench A2? Because you quench it in air.
00:43:48
Speaker
Yeah, so either you just leave it out, depending on how distortion warp, things like that. So we've done some A2 ourselves, heat treating, and then we've sent, there's a shop down the street that does some of it for us too. They rack everything really well, and I think they have a vacuum oven too. So I think they just
00:44:10
Speaker
What does Skye do? I can't remember. I think he just puts it on a big aluminum plate and lets it cool down. Unless it's going to bow into a taco, then you choose a different method. But yeah, air cooling seals, you just let them air cool.
00:44:24
Speaker
Okay, and that's what I need to go read again is I don't know if it's a faster air quench by doing a high flow rate in a vacuum of gas or whether it's the temper that happens with a vacuum gas.
00:44:41
Speaker
It's considerably more expensive, but it also has some really good benefits. The parts will look like a bright turn. They don't look any distortion of color. They don't look purple. Our local place did a vacuum heat treat for the A2 and then
00:45:03
Speaker
atmospheric temper and they turned purple, which was fine. I didn't care. But he said they can do a vacuum temper. That's what I'm talking about, John. But it's like way more expensive because you're doing two heat treat batches basically instead of. Well, it was like the quote I got was eight to 15 times more expensive. Really? Like 200 bucks to four digits. Wow. From the same place?
Project Updates and Transitions
00:45:29
Speaker
Yes, but I wasn't mad. I just like, okay, I need to learn more about this because like, why is this so good? What is it? Is it because can you fit a bunch in there? We can bring the cost down long term, but I don't know if it needs to be that expensive, but yeah, agreed. I'm just like, the other thing is like temper, like when we heat trade our knife blades, they go in the hot oven, 1925 degrees Fahrenheit for
00:45:51
Speaker
I don't know, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. But when they go temper, they temper twice at two hours each. Yeah, a long time, right? So a very long time. So if you're pulling a vacuum, if you're pumping all this gas into it, it's a lot of cost. I could see actually how the cost would go up quite a bit. Yeah. But you want pretty parts.
00:46:11
Speaker
I actually not even sure we need it. The big question is going to be how much stock do we want to leave or is it a tolerance where we can actually intentionally machine it under or oversize and probably be undersized such that the heat treat consistently results in a part that's within spec. I don't want to fight that battle. The great example of like we'll parallel process this. We would love to end up there, but we're going to send out the first batch. No, we're going to have to hard turn them because I control that. And at the same time, we can start figuring out how to
00:46:41
Speaker
skip that step. Great. Yep. The a roll up pull studs, uh, are not hard turned. I believe they're softer and they're probably a two, um, or some sort of European version of that. Yeah. And, uh, I think they're blasted for sure. Um, some of the parts had a coating on them, like nickel plating or something.
00:47:02
Speaker
And I only know because I spent a lot of time with a microscope last night looking at all these parts. Yeah. It's funny. Growth each cash for breakfast. Yeah, exactly. No, it's good though. It's good. Um, what are you doing today? Well, going home, I hope. Yeah, soon, right? Let's see how much, uh, dude, take care of yourself. Yeah, totally. I usually do. I'm really pretty consistent with bedtimes and wakeups and stuff, but, um,
00:47:30
Speaker
kind of off my game with the integral late night. Yeah. We get that comment to the shop update video from last week and then a couple of the prior ones. It's wonderful to not care about the YouTube comments anymore. I don't care about the trolls, but numerous people have seemingly been kind to be like, hey, John, you really
00:47:50
Speaker
don't look good. You've really seemed like you've aged. I'm like, well, so for everyone that's like, Hey, I've watched you since the New York days. Fun fact, I hate to tell you, I have aged. That was actually 17 years ago. I mean, I run a business with lots of employees and I have two kids and exactly like, I have no regrets. This sounds weird. I think I look great. Like I don't, I don't know. I sleep almost every night from 10 30 till five something. So like, I get plenty of sleep. Like, I don't know, just
00:48:19
Speaker
I appreciate the folks that are asking and care, but I'm good. I think you filmed a lot less videos than you used to and the core image of John Saunders on YouTube is a younger version of you. Yeah. I won't be doing Botox anytime soon or ever. You look great. Thank you, John. You look good too. Thank you. Sorry. What are you up to today?
00:48:48
Speaker
I wrap up with the robo guys. And then we have our new employee, Pierre's replacement in for the first day today. Awesome. And today's like a intro day. And then on Monday, he starts officially. Great. So I got to say hi to him. But then that's about all I got to say so far. But Ansel and the rest of the team have him all taken care of. So doing the walk around and getting to know everything.
00:49:11
Speaker
Yeah, he brings a lot of skill and value that I'm super looking forward to squeeze out of him as much as I can and help him build his skills for the future, which is awesome. Yeah. So yeah, let's focus on those two things. That guy. Good to hear. What are you up to?
00:49:28
Speaker
I filmed the instructional mod advice video for Gen 3. I need to now do the voiceover for it. Cool. And well, no, to be honest, it sucks. But what I mean that is like, there's so many ways I want to make it better and different, but it's only an instructional video. It's not even going to be marketing, if you will. So I just need to get a version up and we can
00:49:50
Speaker
Then I'll re-film some footage. I'll send it out to an Upwork person. I want an Upwork person that's willing to send us back the Final Cut project so that we can still own it and make small edits. I'm sure I'll find somebody, but I know some vendors or freelancers don't like doing that, which I get, but I need somebody that will charge me whatever you want to send me back the full Final Cut project.
00:50:14
Speaker
or starting to switch the horizontal over to Gen 3 permanently on some stuff. We'll keep running Gen 2 for a while, but the nice thing is that you won't need, once we've finally made the switch, they're cross compatible enough to where we won't be leaving Gen 2 customers high and dry if in a year we say, hey, unfortunately we don't have any more Gen 2 inventory left to sell you. You have to switch. If you need to replace a vice or add one, you can just mix a Gen 3 in.
00:50:42
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, little stuff like you have a pop up on our website, when you add stuff to your cart that can say, Hey, do you want to upsell to this? I don't like it. I think to me, it's not Congress. It's incongruous. That's weird. It doesn't mean
00:51:05
Speaker
Like I was building a cart for a customer who wanted help with an order. So I put the fixture plate in, I put the pro kit in, it's like $3,000 order. And then I'm trying to get the cart populated. And it's like, do you want to buy a saunter t-shirt for 20 bucks? And I'm just like, I'm annoyed by this. Like, I don't know. I don't like, no, dude, I'm trying to give you $3,000. Like, stop. I don't know. Yeah. But that's not just me. I'm weird. Did you put that feature in? Or did somebody else?
00:51:29
Speaker
Well, no, somebody else did. That's where I have to take a step back to recognize. I get to see the ship, but I also don't want to cut people off under the, what do you mean? You know what I mean? Exactly. Stay in your lane, Saunders.
00:51:45
Speaker
I've noticed things too, because I don't look at the website very often. It's not part of my job anymore. But every now and then, I look, and I'm like, why is that like that? Or this little spelling mistake, like, oh, I can't have that. So either I'll go in and change it, or I'll let the team know, like, we should really wrap this up or something. But yeah, you don't want to micromanage, but you've got to lead the ship. Yeah. Sweet. Cool. Cool. Have a good week. I'll see you later.
00:52:13
Speaker
Urban, have a great day. Bye.