Introduction to Episode 345
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business and machining episode 345. My name is John Grimsmo. My name is John Saunders. There's no way we've had 345 sessions. It's sessions. It's amazing. This is the weekly podcast where we talk about all things manufacturing and issues and ups and downs and growth and all versions of business, which is good. It's our little therapy session.
00:00:29
Speaker
Yeah, I'm thinking about like, this doesn't really make sense. But like if each one of us had put $100 into our own jar, every time we talked as like, hey, this needs to be worth something, it needs value. This isn't just like two buddies
00:00:46
Speaker
patting each other on the back, we would have $34,500 in the jar. I don't know what to take of that, except maybe the power of small things in repeated doses is the way to live a good life. Absolutely. Sometimes we're always looking for the silver bullet and when in fact it's just showing up consistently, having a plan, executing the plan over and over and over and over again.
00:01:16
Speaker
How are you doing? I'm good. Actually, definitely good. How are you? Good. What's definitely good? I'll let you start.
Choosing Discussion Topics
00:01:27
Speaker
I've got a few things. Again, to give a tip of the hat to Andrew, Henry, and Jay Pearson on their podcast, they have a wheel they spin of topics. Now, of course, it would be uncool to just steal that idea. I don't actually want to steal that idea.
00:01:45
Speaker
There's things I need to talk to you about, like I want your opinion on, but it's also kind of a, what do you want to hear what I have to talk about? So I'm going to read you my list and then you get to buyer's choice, pick what you want to hear more about. And if I don't get the chance to talk about it, I want to talk about it, I'll squeeze it in. You know what I mean? Yeah.
00:02:05
Speaker
Okay, here's my list. Selling, proving cut, electric bill, quality of life around organizing tools, moving away from through spindle coolant drills, changing our storage carts, custom made step drills, managing cashflow about, this is a silly point, but like,
00:02:23
Speaker
not being overthinking things, but also watching the little expenses that are recurring, dealing with a burr being raised by face melt, and then overall thinking about consolidated equipment. That's a solid list.
Cost-Saving Drilling Choices
00:02:39
Speaker
I'm going to stick with the standout of why would you go away from Thrucooler drill bits.
00:02:44
Speaker
Okay, yeah, awesome. That's a pretty shortish one. Garrett had put a Lex ID tool T1610 in our order queue this morning. I saw it. And what I've realized on a couple of our steel products that we make is we were purchasing through Spindle Coolant, call it quarter inch or six millimeter sized drills to drill through half inch deep material.
00:03:11
Speaker
And you just don't need TSC for that. For steel or aluminum?
00:03:17
Speaker
The scenario that triggered this was steel. The drill this morning happens to be aluminum. And yes, TSC is better. It can drill faster. But the juice ain't worth a squeeze. In this case, we were able to go from a, the cycle time change was negligible. And we went from a $75 drill down to a $20 drill going back to a solid carbide drill, but just not TSC.
00:03:45
Speaker
I don't, I'll buy TSC all day long. And frankly, I was a bit of a disciple around TSC for years. But now I'm like, wait a minute here, let's not tie up, you know, because we usually will have three or four extras. So it's like $350 in a little drill. And, and you don't need it, like it just doesn't do anything for you. So the drill was sworn in though was aluminum. And I was going to ask,
00:04:08
Speaker
question both of you and the audience, but I actually had some time to do some Sandvik speeds and feeds research, which even if you're not using Sandvik tooling, I find that their digital speeds and feeds tool guide isn't, frankly, it could be a little easier to use, but it is worth it. It's very valuable. In aluminum, we're drilling sometimes one inch deep, so that's four times D. In aluminum, you like Sandvik sort of,
00:04:37
Speaker
this feel will double your surface footage and triple your feed per rev. So what is that? You know, six, sorry, double and triple. Yes. That the juice is worth the squeeze. Sorry. Yeah. So I think on the aluminum and the drills in aluminum last effectively forever, like, you know, well into the tens of thousands of holes, the steel don't. So it's again,
Managing Rising Electric Costs
00:05:01
Speaker
it's more like we've been stopped by in TSC.
00:05:04
Speaker
Interesting. Well, a lot of our use of TSC is for very shallow holes, like eighth inch material. Yeah. But still, I don't know if I can bring myself to get rid of it because chip evacuation is good. Like it actually flushes the chips away. I don't know. I think they just break less for me, cutting stainless steel and titanium and stuff.
00:05:33
Speaker
Yeah, I can't speak to those two materials, which is hugely relevant to this, but I would hesitate to use emotion and not data. How is chip evacuation and how is tool life on a regular one? What's the price difference? Yeah, because through spindle drills are not cheap. I've got one that's
00:05:54
Speaker
59,000, I think it's 1.5 millimeter through coolant. And it's, I don't even know the price of it. I just keep buying them, but we use it to drill where the detent ball and the handle gets pressed in and one hole per handle. Like I think that the total, the total tool life is 18 minutes, but that's like six months of use. Yeah. And look, part of it also has to remember like, don't save 50 bucks. If it's a tool, your place once a year, like, yeah.
00:06:23
Speaker
But yeah, I will keep that in mind because sometimes you fall down the rabbit hole and feel like, well, we just always do that. And at the end of the day, 20 years from now, I don't want to be the shop that goes, well, we've always done it like that. I'm taking this a little bit of a mental approach of hunkering down
00:06:42
Speaker
both from an economic outlook, but then also like, no, let's get real. I don't want the culture to be, oh, we always buy the $100 TSE drill versus the $20 drill that would work just fine. I'm going to invest those dollars in the business. They're not leaving the business. I'm going to invest in elsewhere though.
00:06:59
Speaker
Yeah, and that came to me yesterday. We have this Harvey end mill that we buy, Harvey tools. That's like, I forget if it's 60 or $90. It's like dumb expensive. It's a five flute, big shank, small tip. And it works. It's the tool that lasts in this application. But I don't think we need it anymore. And I could easily accomplish the same thing with a $9 end mill.
00:07:25
Speaker
but it would involve some testing and some and I'm like, I know this one works, but it came up because it was like time to order more of these. I'm like, do I really want to order another like four to have on stock when I could not spend that money? I don't know.
00:07:40
Speaker
You do know, and we're now, I'm happy that we're at the point where it is good for me to have this be a focus in the business. It's a passing focus, but part of it is to get us teed up with Lex, with our tooling database, with our
00:07:58
Speaker
team also so that I can really start to walk away from the purchasing because some of the stuff I don't handle, some of it I still do. That's where it's like I want to make sure if I didn't buy it too late for a year, I don't look back and be like, oh man, we spent four grand. That's not crazy to think that we spent four grand on TSC tools that we didn't have to. Yeah, it's true.
00:08:21
Speaker
Interesting segues into my other full point, which you did not ask to hear about but electric bill and I was wondering about that TSC our electric bills Gone up a lot. It's like actually not use but but cost Like the price went up
00:08:38
Speaker
I don't bother. That's a great point. I could easily look at the kilowatt powers. I think both. There's been some hubbub in Ohio, AP, our power company, and rates going up for a variety of reasons. But I think our use is also way up. I used to joke for years. Every time I would see the power bill, I was like, sweet, the power bill went up. That means we're making parts.
00:09:01
Speaker
Well, there is some of that. For sure. Our bills almost as
Staffing Changes in the Shop
00:09:06
Speaker
much as our rent. What? Well, ours is probably 30%, 40% of our rent, something like that. Yeah. But our rent is high, and your rent is probably a lot lower than ours, because we're actually renting. You're paying a smaller and smaller mortgage payment. Yeah.
00:09:26
Speaker
Our power bill, it's been a while since I've looked, but it's thousands of dollars for sure a month.
00:09:35
Speaker
First thing I did was I decided, again, kind of pointed out to Andrew Henry's and Jay's discussion, I'm like, can you fix it? Fix it if not move on. Don't create to-do list. And I was like, OK, two things I know we can do, better management of the machines themselves and the compressors. So we made sure that our Haas, if you go under Settings, Power Settings, there's a couple of really simple Haas settings that can automatically shut off the hydraulic
00:10:06
Speaker
uh, hydraulics and servos after X number of seconds. Um, the machine goes to sleep. Sort of, you don't see it. And actually what I'd like to do to be a nerd is go put an ant meter before and after to see how much that changes it. Um, you can do M thirties shutdowns, but that doesn't work for us because we're running them throughout the day. Um, like shut down at M 30.
00:10:30
Speaker
Yeah, we do that on the Maury at night. So the last cycle shuts it down because we put a good four to six hour run after we go home. So how does that shut down at night but not during the day? There's a button on the control panel called APF, auto power function. OK. So when we go home, we make sure that's clicked.
00:10:48
Speaker
Yeah, the Okumas have that, which is perfect. The Hases don't. You have to go change a sub-menu setting every night, which doesn't work. They also have auto off.
00:11:00
Speaker
But we don't, I guess I could set that to like 30 minutes. I don't want them to turn off in the middle of the day. Yeah. And there's times where we walk away. It's a sleep function, right? I think our Maury does that. The internal light turns off after 30 minutes and you can either jog the handwheel or just like do something and they turn on again. I'm going to go do that and I'll report back next week of what the, so what the power. It would be sweet to put an amp meter on it before and after though.
00:11:30
Speaker
Yeah, that takes two minutes. Like the clampy kind that just go on the outside of the cables? I've never had one of those. Yeah, they're cheap. Yeah. Yeah. Dumb, super dumb point. When I first got one, I just put it around all of the cables and I realized you can only put it around one thing. Around one of them. Yeah, okay. So just asking for a friend in some of that situation. Nice. The Akuma's already have APF and then, or auto show up, and then the compressors,
00:11:58
Speaker
I had just quite a given up out of laziness on what a system already in place, which uses Alexa's with 110 solenoid ball valves with two compressors. And I had just sort of like, what was happening is we were running the
00:12:13
Speaker
horizontal super late into the night. I just didn't manage it. I re-managed it. One turns off an hour after the work and the other one goes until the horizontal is going to be done. Then they turn on in the correct stagger in the morning so that we are not running compressors. You're just not bleeding air anywhere to a machine or whatever throughout the night. The compressor is still on, but it's locked. It's blocked off.
00:12:40
Speaker
Correct. The weakness in the system is that the compressors still do the 10th drain, so they will cycle because the tank will drain enough throughout the night to retrigger it. But at least you're not, like you said, charging the overall system where inevitably there's going to be a leak of some kind. I'll see if it does anything. I don't know, it'd be hard to, I could monitor the key.
00:13:06
Speaker
I can look at the kilowatts over the month. It's not that I do or don't care. It's more just like, I'm not going to spend a bunch of time on this. I just want to make sure we're not. Are we wasting 250 bucks a month on silly machine and compressor time? Yep.
00:13:24
Speaker
It's very easy for business of our size and bigger to lose track of these things, especially as I find more people have delegated more responsibilities. They don't know the whole picture of like parasitic losses of power throughout the shop. My accountant would never think of that. Do these machines all have to be on all night doing nothing? I don't know. Never think of that.
00:13:51
Speaker
And again, it's not an issue today. I'm just hunkering down to make sure that we're not wasting money. Yeah. All right. I'll throw it back at you. I'll give you three or four choices and you can pick one of them. Great. Grinding wheels, speedio smoothing, Pierre being deported, or detent ball dropper.
00:14:21
Speaker
Okay, being on the other side of this, my response to that would be yes. Well, okay, let's do this. I was just at a local community foundation board meeting and we agreed to redo the agenda to save the meeting topics for the end of the meetings because otherwise people talk for 40 minutes and we rush this stuff that was easy.
00:14:49
Speaker
Can we go through at least one or two of those that are quicker points? I'm assuming that's not the BP or B2. Yeah. I need to mention that now that I've said it, but I'll start with that one. Long story short, he's a French national, been here for school, did three years of school, did three years of work with us. His visa has expired. He wants to go home anyway at some point, so it just kind of speed tracked the inevitable, but it's happening in two months.
00:15:18
Speaker
Oh, John. I don't know if deported is the actual proper term, but he's going home. So we are actively looking for a replacement expert lay of the machinist right now. So we've got a job posting going up by the end of the week, and I'll do some social posts and hear my podcast announcement, too. But basically, we've thought a lot about it. Me and Angela always spent quite a good time. How do we want the culture of our machine shop to grow?
00:15:41
Speaker
Do we want to train? Do we want to hire talent? Do we want to poach people from other companies kind of thing? And I think for the next hire or two, I think we're looking for some real fire power, some rock star status within reason. But I want to shake the tree and see what comes up. So I think we're going to give it a good heart shake. And I'm very curious to see what comes up.
00:16:04
Speaker
There's our audience for the response from that which is more global than it is like Toronto area. I'm really looking forward to seeing the responses from the Indeed posts that we're going to put up locally because for some of the other job positions in the company, Indeed has dropped some fantastic applications.
00:16:24
Speaker
We have three at least three people we've hired from in the post that had no idea who we were before that moment and that's great. That's awesome. It's fantastic. So that's that's exciting. It's a good progress. That's like the best for me. That's I'm sorry. That's a that's a crummy situation, but that's the best outcome of the I have a person being deported that I guess could be
00:16:48
Speaker
Oh man, that's tough though. He was running the Swiss primarily. The Swiss and the Nakamura for the past three years, I don't touch them anymore. Angelo doesn't touch them. He's been excellent. Fantastic. So it's like we need a replacement. We need somebody else. I mean, I can pinch in. Angelo can too. And if there's a
00:17:09
Speaker
gap. If we can't find somebody by January, we can make it work. He's definitely hustling right now to load up inventory so that we have parts. Maybe we're good for another month, a couple months, whatever. We've got 15, 20 different lathe parts that all need to be in stock at all times. It's a lot of work.
00:17:31
Speaker
The NOC only makes pen caps? It makes pen tube, clip, and slider, the little ring that slides down. Yeah, that's right. OK. So it makes those three components rotates through all the time. And then the Swiss makes all knife parts and all the rest of the pen parts. Got it. OK. Well, yeah. Cool.
Machine Accuracy Challenges
00:17:54
Speaker
Next one, speedio smoothing. So I'm making carbon fiber inlays on the speedio.
00:18:02
Speaker
Learning a lot. Runout is critical for something like this because otherwise you wear out one flute more than the others and it shows very quickly. One thing I noticed yesterday is I finally got a whole sheet of parts to work great. CVD diamond coated end mills, everything worked great. They look great. I got holes or tolerance perfectly and then I take them off and I put them into the handle and they kind of rock a little bit. They kind of don't fit like they should.
00:18:31
Speaker
And according to what I measured and probed, all features should have clearance. It should pop right in, no problem. But there's a couple spots that are rubbing. And in my pursuit of trying to keep these end mills with a higher chip load, like a thou and a half chip load for an eighth inch end mill, it's feeding a 96 inches per minute for tiny little details around little corners and pockets and contours and stuff. And I think this video is just kind of
00:18:59
Speaker
smoothing, forcing the default speedo smoothing settings into it. In a bad way, I think it's cutting corners basically. Literally. Ever so slightly. You can't see it by looking at it, but when I put it into the handle, it's rubbing in a couple little corners.
00:19:16
Speaker
Like I've got one feature that's a pocket, circular pocket that works great, measures great, pins great, but I've got another one that's a circle with two flats on the side. So it's the, you know, as the tool's going around, it's hitting little radiuses and corners and everything. And I think it's just rounding them.
00:19:32
Speaker
Now, the speedio has multiple too many high accuracy settings to the point where one of the guys at Yamazan actually had to write a PDF article and make sure everybody reads it because it's fantastic. It's confusing because you have mode A, mode B, you have M298 and I'm like, which one? Just tell me what to do.
00:19:57
Speaker
Yeah, so that happened as I was leaving yesterday and I was like, huh, yeah, I think I just need to force the super highest accuracy setting for this feature or slow down the feed rate significantly so that it's hitting all these points properly. Changing the feed rate, I don't think feed rate drives are filtering though. Oh, that's fantastic. Well, I would assume to a point you feed the machine too fast.
00:20:23
Speaker
not going to be able to hit every little acceleration and curve and everything. But that's going to be the speed but not the actual geometry. Okay. Because it's like Locke would explain this great one of the old school fusion Fridays of like you can have
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah, shoot accuracy, speed. Here's the third point. Or smoothness, like machine, but you pick two. Most people want good looking smooth machines with good looking parts that are then going to mean they're actually not accurate. You're actually not sure. Your foreign profile, kind of. 50 million's tessellated point of the geometry, but we don't care. We want it to look good. Right. Interesting.
00:21:14
Speaker
That's interesting. So, slowing it down, the speedio could still apply its own arc filtering or whatever you call it. We're going to get a lot of text from Lockwood about this come Friday, aren't we? Yeah. That's interesting. What's the problem? How is this manifesting itself?
00:21:31
Speaker
A inlay that should have at least a thou of clearance in all directions or more is not. It's rubbing in a couple tight corner features and I think it just doesn't fit like it should and it should just pop right in. I think it's a combination of the high feed mode and maybe the higher feed rate.
00:21:54
Speaker
So I'll definitely apply the high accuracy mode and then consider slowing it down a little bit. But I also want to watch the feed rate as it's doing all those features. Like is it, is the machine struggling? Is it slowing down on these little features? Um, and see what that is. Is it, you don't think the material's moving on you? I don't think so. Nope. They're taped down, but they're still solid. They're, they pop off. Well, it might jiggle tape. Yeah.
00:22:25
Speaker
It can, in my experience, you can have ... I mean, if you're talking about a thou not fitting, it could be that the part is actually doing a seismic shift left to right. Which feed rate is not helping that situation. Chiplo is not helping that situation. I'm really fighting the balance because the end mill manufacturer said it's diamond coated, feed it as hard as you can.
00:22:47
Speaker
Otherwise, you're just eating up time and wear. And if you go super slow, you're wearing out the end mill with less work done because you're feeding so slow. Because the first way I was doing it was I would just profile around, go down 5,000, profile around, go down 5,000, profile around, no cutting load, no whatever. But that wore out the tip of the end mill and it made it no fun.
00:23:13
Speaker
Well, to eat what we kill, last week's episode talked about what is it? Smooth as slow as slow as fast. Like, just go make a part that fits. I don't care if it's slow, if it ruins a tool or what, I do care. Then start building up. Yep. So these parts fit and I think they're passable, but the next parts are going to be better. Yeah.
00:23:40
Speaker
So you can't just have 2,000 clearance, Sean? This is kind of like... I probably could, but it's... I don't know. It's not supposed to be. You actually start to see if there's too much gap. You see it's off-center. It's like no 1,000 on one side, 2,000 on the other side kind of thing. So you don't want it to be good. It's got to be excellent. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. What were your other two?
00:24:07
Speaker
I have a long list of things I've made meaning to bring up and I just randomly picked a couple.
Enhancing Grinding Consistency
00:24:16
Speaker
Might have been grinding wheels and ball dropper. I forget if I mentioned this recently.
00:24:26
Speaker
But basically I'm learning that the grinding wheels I've been using on the Kern for a very long time are way too fine and are wearing down and loading up through use in a very, probably predictable manner, but still in a very annoying manner, giving us more variation than we'd like on the grind of the blade. And with the way I'm doing it, I'll grind and then I'll probe and then I'll comp the diameter of the grinding wheel for next time.
00:24:54
Speaker
But this one's whatever it is, next time will be better. And it's constantly chasing itself for the next time, for the next time. And it's back and forth and back and forth. So we're able to re-grind a lot of these blades, even once they're kind of done, to get the accuracy that we want. But it adds a whole lot of time and manual setup and like load a blade, grind the one.
00:25:15
Speaker
machine stops, you're having lunch, it's not right. So I've ordered a bunch of rougher grinding wheels and they're all the ones I could buy are CBN diamond resin bond grinding wheels that are measured in microns. So like 20 to 40 micron range is the grit size that I use. And
00:25:40
Speaker
The manufacturer basically said most guys are grinding with 120 micron or more, not 20 micron. You go into fusion and you draw a 20 micron circle and you draw 120 micron circle. The mass of it is like 12 times bigger, even if the actual diameter is only five times bigger. The mass is massive. They just look like a boulder and a couple. That's high. Yeah, exactly.
00:26:09
Speaker
And the more I think about it, the more I'm like, well, a small grit can only stick out of the bond so much before it's scratching action that your depth of cut is more than your grit stick out, basically. And then the chips coming off are attacking your resin, the bond holding the wheel together. So if I got bigger grits that stuck out more, then they have some clearance. And then there's some chip evacuation.
00:26:37
Speaker
So I've played with a rougher wheel, and even though the finish might be slightly better, Sky and our finishing department, like I said, I can't even tell the difference. They polish up just great. So that's a big one. I'm close to nailing down, and I feel like I'll actually start removing the probing check, or at least the auto comp. That's my goal, is to just be able to grind, dress on schedule, and not have to auto comp the wheel every single time, because it's chasing itself.
00:27:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's that iterative, bad iterative loop thing. It's like on a surface grinder, right? You don't dress the wheel every time you dress it after a while, a little bit, right? You don't dress it every pass. Close. Close. You go down a couple though, right? You dress a lot. I've never been able to understand why your regular old surface grinder dresses a ton, but then
00:27:30
Speaker
I remember touring one of the tool grinding companies. Yeah. Those wheel packs will grind numerous end mills like from straight carbide blanks to like the whole gullet or flute of the tool, numerous of them and they don't dress. I'm like, I want that.
00:27:45
Speaker
I know and I'm using basically the same technology wheel and I was at I think Lakeshore 10 years ago or something and they're like I asked them how long does the wheel last before dressing and he's like six months. I'm like what? And I think about that and I'm like what am I doing wrong? Yeah.
00:28:04
Speaker
I will say the Okumoto has been, the workflow there has been great. Building in the auto dressing and hitting the tolerances you'll want is great. Nice. I watched your chip guard video last night. It was a fun little project. I enjoyed watching it.
00:28:25
Speaker
Thank you. It worked out great. The only change post that is the glue, the super glue on the left side where it gets more coolant and stuff. It did fail. And I could sit here and argue that if I cleaned it better, the hot glue, I should say, sorry, not super glue, would work, but I realized, stop John. And I 3D printed that same piece with a magnet cavity. And then now it's like, oh, that's perfect. Yes.
00:28:52
Speaker
Yeah. But yeah, the video was, was cool. It was like, I've got an idea. I'm going to cardboard aid to design this. Maybe it'll work. Maybe it won't. And then you get the parts and then you test it. And then there's problems, cool it all over the floor. And then you fix that. And then you're like, this is done. I didn't think I was going to do this, but it's done in like little effort. Like just cool video. Yeah. The goal, if for those that haven't watched it, I didn't want to do it, but on projects like this to hire an outside designer, like an upward person, you have to.
00:29:20
Speaker
There's too much hand holding up like, well, this is the sheet metal on the machine. These are the angles. These are the clearances. So that is less efficient to like outsource. Like what you're maybe going to talk about the ball dropper. It's like, you don't have to tell them he's like, have a cat 40 spindle. I want to drop balls, balls in your court. Yes.
00:29:38
Speaker
Yeah. So on that note, we mentioned this, I don't know, a year ago, probably multiple times over the years. And one of our podcast listeners, Brent Wells from Wells Design, basically took the idea and ran with it a good while ago, six months, eight months ago.
Innovative Machining Mechanism
00:29:53
Speaker
And all of a sudden in the mail, I just got two ball droppers with a completely wild, simplistic design that I never... My idea was so complicated and I've tried to make it for many years now and I just couldn't do it. And his idea is so ridiculously simple and so effective. And the first ones he made for us hold 18 balls. So it's good for like two days or whatever.
00:30:20
Speaker
before we have to reload it, but that's fine. As opposed to loading every single, you know, drill a hole, machine pauses, put the ball in, close the door, hit go. So we ran the 18 ball ones for many, many months, had some issues, cool intermised or whatever would get in them, they'd stick, things like that. And then he developed a 200 ball dropper that holds 200 of these bearings. And I think we've been running that
00:30:47
Speaker
Um, everyone is a little bit different length, even if it's just a foul, it has to be kind of accounted for in the machine, but not only does it drop the ball, it presses it in for you in one motion, one operation. I want to do a whole video on this and I feel like I'm close enough to like, it's running production right now that I actually want to really, uh, you know, give him a giant E high five.
00:31:12
Speaker
Because he just crashed it and then oh, what was it I crashed one last week somehow, I think there was already a ball in the hole or something and so another ball dropper came in and it tried to push a ball onto a ball and There was just white powder around the hole and the ball dropper was messed up. Luckily. He sent two of them and
00:31:34
Speaker
and these ceramic silicone ceramic bearing balls explode into a white powder. They're so hard and so brittle and we didn't even believe it. We're like, okay, something's wrong, but there is a fully formed ball at the top of this handle and white powder.
00:31:51
Speaker
And I'm like, the fully formed ball didn't break. Is there another one under it? So Angelo took it to the grinder and he like ground the handle away halfway until he got to the ball. And then we can see inside the hole underneath. And there's just more powder inside the bottom of that hole. It's like a blind hole. And then I'm like, no way. First of all, there's no logical reason why it would have put two balls down. We can't figure out why it happened. This is the first time it's happened in so long.
00:32:20
Speaker
Anyway, so then I took one of these 1 16th inch ceramic ball bearings between two hardened knife blades, scrap ones, and I put it in the orange vise and I just crushed it. I just wanted to crush the ball and see what would happen. I'd hear it pop and everything. So I had glasses on and paper towel over top and it just makes a loud pop and then just dust. Really? Yep. That's kind of cool. No fragments, no nothing. It's like poof. These are like one millimeter diameter. A little bit bigger, one and a half.
00:32:56
Speaker
Yeah, they're cool. What was I going to say? Is there a way? I keep thinking of the Herbal. Herbal has a proprietary Z-axis crash mechanism where it has some mystery material that means if you crash in Z, you might be able to only replace this $1,000 instead of a spindle? Micron does too. There's step-tech spindles, I think, have that. Is that right? Okay.
00:33:22
Speaker
And I'm thinking like on your, I haven't seen your ball dropper design, but is there some way to make the tip of it interchangeable, replaceable, or even just like have it. If it does that again, cause my approach is kind of like it failed for some reason, like don't worry about it. It's going to fail again. Yeah, exactly. Right. Like no big deal. Yep. Thankfully I had a second one, so I was able to, with some tweaking, um, replace it. And I actually approved my whole process for how I do it because the first time was,
00:33:47
Speaker
weird. So now it's, you basically quickly take it apart and now you can probe the center pressing shaft, just probe with the laser and then quickly put it back together. And now the new tool is set. That's awesome. But basically I'm trying to drop a ball bearing on top of a hole and also press it in halfway, not to my final distance, but just enough to keep it in. And we're talking five thou here. The difference between five thou it's falling out and five thou it's pressed in and not too far.
00:34:16
Speaker
So it's pretty tight. And then that gets the rough press out of the way. And then later or whenever the machine comes in probes, it has another pressing tool, presses it to the theoretical final depth and then press it again for confirmation. And I'm getting like a 10th of repeatability on this ball height. And we've been doing that for almost 10 years now on the Maury and everything. That's awesome. But, but now to be able to have the ball just automatically drop has been super fantastic. So awesome.
00:34:45
Speaker
I know I've shared this before. Gen 3 mod vices have embarrassingly been in the works for 14 months now. It's not easy releasing a new product.
00:34:59
Speaker
There's, I could give you lots of good excuses. The truth is that most of the Gen 3 changes are not super impactful to the customer. So like we've had, I know I've teased it here on the podcast and I actually want to clarify, there's nothing wrong with Gen 2s. This isn't going to be a
00:35:19
Speaker
revolutionary step up. It does a couple things for us on the internal manufacturing side of buying more efficient material. They are going to have M12 metric compatibility. It'll be a separate skew, but we can make them so that we can make them both ways. I actually don't know how
00:35:36
Speaker
much we want to get into making metric fixture plates. We would like to, but we have yet to figure out, I guess I could put this out there. We have yet to figure out a sustainable, scalable way to handle international shipping on larger plates. Right now, it's both expensive usually, but also requires a significant amount of our time to call and get spot rates with carriers each time. The only way we would do this would be whether you're
00:36:04
Speaker
shipping to Great Britain or Germany or Japan or Taiwan is through e-commerce. Just automatic rates that get quoted and then get handled. We're going well enough to where I'm not going to burden the team down with these sorts of manual processes. On the flip side, there has to be something I'm missing. There has to be a better way to handle
00:36:27
Speaker
overseas Shopify, you know, overseas freight like this. Anyway, the mod vices, what we will do with Gen 3, and the question, one question is, do we offer a grace period with Gen 2s of offering some additional accessories? So like we never ended up releasing the round material jaws for Gen 2, we will do that for Gen 2. I hate to, the jaws are not, the mod vices are effectively cross compatible, so if you have
00:36:55
Speaker
Gen 2s, you can use Gen 3s on the same plate, but the top jaws themselves have some slightly different dimensions, so you won't be able to interchange those, which should be a big deal. Offering round jaws off the store would be amazing. We need to do that, but I don't want to – the goal is not at all to tell everybody with Gen 2s your SOL. I'm not against doing some.
00:37:20
Speaker
Like I've run for six months of those, but then I don't, we will in 2034 start to wind down Gen 2 and stuff. And that's the weird thing with product development is like, it's not that the old one's bad, it's just the new one's better. Yeah, no, totally. It helps us keep our costs where they're at. The big change that, again, this is something we came up with in like summer of 22 was pressing the pins in and that has worked great and we now got a process. That's what made me think of it as your ball dropper.
00:37:48
Speaker
of machining the holes to the correct tolerance with some correct little cheat features to get the pins that are ground to then be pressed in with the correct fit and sort of kind of like the no hassle factor.
00:38:03
Speaker
Lost you if you can hear me. And it's been, it's awesome. In fact, behind my monitor are two wire racks with all of the inventory bins and all the process bins. The only thing left on Gen 3 is a fixture for soft jaws, which are identical to Gen 2 except there's just like this minor geometry change. So we know how to make that fixture. It's actually on Grant's to-do list kind of like this week. And that's the only thing that I don't even have inventory of.
00:38:35
Speaker
The big change with Gen 3 is pressing in pins. So we figured out, it's actually really awesome to figure out a way to reliably manufacture the machine, the press fit female hole. And then we have the pins ground to the correct tolerance, which is great too. And then that means we're not having the machine away 90% plus of a plane just to expose a pin, but rather doing it in an additive way. Yes, I know what you mean.
00:39:01
Speaker
And that's been great. Yeah, it's been great. That idea has been around for about a year and a half. It's just time to get there. All that's left now is one soft jaw fixture to get on the horizontal and then everything is in place. We already have inventory. Did I show you our organization bins? I don't think so. Okay. Oh, I got to see this. Coming back. Here we go.
00:39:32
Speaker
This is us going next level. So we use the same size Uline bin as a process bin for all of our inventory we have for a while. Now, we have 3D printed inserts. Oh, yes. You do this with your pens already, right?
00:39:49
Speaker
It now keeps us organized, clean, free of rust touching each other. We know the quantity when a bin is full. It keeps the bin weight down by not having too many in a single bin. I just love it. That looks beautiful. So organized. Well done. Thanks. We had a buddy of ours buy not the Uline bins, but this German company,
00:40:17
Speaker
I can't remember what it's called. It's like an SH name. But they make bins like that. And he bought a couple pallet loads of them. And he's like, I bought too many. Do you guys want some for super cheap? It's funny. So we might end up. It's like Schaller bins for years. We love them. And shout out, still love them. But we both bought a lot. And we don't use as many as we used to. And we also move more to the
00:40:45
Speaker
The Gridfinity system. Yes. There's like a catch-all cardboard box in the back. It's like a box you could fit a small Christmas tree in that just has heaps of shower. Yeah. That's the problem with those good ideas. You're like, oh, I'm going to overbuy and we'll use them all. You do for a while, then you move on. You're like, now what? Don't worry about all this. Actually, I brought you up yesterday talking to Angelo about stuff. I'm like,
00:41:09
Speaker
we have some older machines that we should probably get rid of. And I'm like, yeah, that's understood that. He's like, I don't need these anymore. They don't belong here. They don't, they don't do anything for us. They don't do anything for our production. They're just in the way they're getting tripped on. Like, why are they still here? And I'm like, yeah, I've got a couple of those. Um, there's more of that coming. Yeah. Yeah. Big time. Nice. Yes. Also the purge.
00:41:34
Speaker
Um, this is not a purge, but rather it's going to be a refocus. Yeah, that's good too. Which would be good. Fantastic. Okay. Can I get your opinion on this? For sure. Okay. We, the trick of the super secret sauce trick of machining our mod vice top jaw to being so good and parallel and accurate is
00:41:57
Speaker
We cut the backside of the jaw, which establishes the datum, and then we cut the lip, which is the dimension we care about. We cut it in the same setup at the same, about the same time, sequentially one after the other. So the machine's thermally in the same spot because they have the same time.
00:42:15
Speaker
Are you repositioning? Nope. Doesn't move. And we do that with a woodruff style cutter. So we're kind of reaching around and cutting that jaw with a back cutting tool. The problem is that the jaw lip that it's cutting, which is thin, it's probably millimeter and a half, call it 80 thou or 100 thou or something like that, has already been chamfered previously. So the
00:42:40
Speaker
the Woodruff cutting tool is really cutting very little. It's cutting like five or 10 thou axially and the width of that cut is even smaller because it already has a pre chamfered sloping side. It raises a burr. And I need to get away from us hand deburring that. And so if you think about the tool that we would need, it's almost like I need a coat hook style scraping tool.
00:43:10
Speaker
And it's a real bird. It's not a bird that you could remove with your fingernail or your finger. You'll cut yourself. It needs to have a, like we often use a file or a Noga scraper tool. Any thoughts? Is there a way to re-machine that feature from the orientation you're at? It's a back chamfer tool. I don't fully visualize. No, I wish I had one in front of me. Because actually, so the problem is
00:43:40
Speaker
The part is, this is the dimension I care about, which are listening. And we come in with a tool that cuts it. The spindle is my wrist. So the tool is like this. The tool cuts it right here. The burr is on the inside chamfer edge. Nothing comes to mind. You're on the dark side of the moon there.
00:44:06
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the easier way for folks listening would be to think about it, it raises a burr on a, like if you think about drilling an ID, drilling a hole that intersects another hole, if you wanted to come in and chamfer that. With our tools for fixing a hole, yeah. Actually, I could lollipop it, I didn't even think about that. That's like what you do that for. But is your burrs on the outer inner edge
00:44:32
Speaker
I don't think you're seeing it. It wouldn't be able to lollipop it unless I rotated it B. Right. Which you could. I could. Actually, I don't want to. Yeah, but if you did, it would give you access to that feature. There's no tolerance in that chamfer. Like really, there is. But you could lollipop or just straight up chamfer it from that angle, maybe.
00:44:55
Speaker
What I'm thinking about doing, which I need somebody to tell me this is a dumb idea, is you know the no good tools to deburr that don't have this spinny whirly deal, but they're actually like a rigid little 40 degree angle? I don't know. I just know the spinny ones.
00:45:12
Speaker
It's like a little, picture the spinny thing that's a little bit shorter and it's fixed rigidly on the shank. So I'm thinking I could mount that on a shank and use it as literally a scraping style tool and get it oriented to come in with the spindle orientation and then use it like a shaper or scraper and stay two tenths off the part geometry and just come in and strafe that thing. Seems much easier to rotate the bead.
00:45:41
Speaker
Yeah, okay. But good little challenge for you. No, you're right. To take my own medicine, we own lollipops. The machine can do that. That should be the first test because that's easy. It doesn't involve DIY tools. Yeah, exactly. But sometimes DIY tools are fun and they're challenging.
00:46:06
Speaker
Today, I want to work on that speedio smoothing, although keep in mind what you said about the part possibly shifting and even just jiggling a little bit. Either reduce to a load or speed or something like that, as well as do the high accuracy mode onto both. I feel like I'm coming really close to the absolute recipe that I've been looking for for carbon fiber, which is excellent. Awesome.
00:46:27
Speaker
And then I'm also going to print some TPU wheels. And have you seen like those airless wheels with all the ribs that like, you know, over bumps and stuff? Um, we've just got this cart at home that the wheels kind of exploded the factory wheels. So I'm like, okay, I got to print this like seven inch diameter, you know, flexible. Okay. Let's have fun with this. So, um, I found a model on Thingiverse actually. And I'm like, that's exactly what I need. It's for an RC car. I just scale it up and make that work.
00:46:54
Speaker
On the bamboo? That'd be cool. Yeah, on the bamboo. I realized we've had the bamboo. We've had two of them. Eric's printed hundreds of hours, and I think I've printed about three things on it, but the rest of the team has printed all kinds of stuff. I'm like, that's fine. I haven't needed it at the moment, but it's there when I need it. Like today. Awesome. Yeah. What are you up to do?
00:47:14
Speaker
Um, some, uh, tool life, like consolidating some of the tool life lists, checking, you know, I told you a while back was my fall was going to be also revisiting some existing programs and what do we need to do on housekeeping for those to leave us, to put us in a good place on those. So it's like, Hey, in our Python script of our horizontal, we have a couple of products that we don't make anymore. Getting those out of there, um, updating tools.
00:47:40
Speaker
On the TSC topic, Fusion is not good about Master Libraries. So let's check those and see where we need to update them. That's it. No, it's not. Yeah. Good stuff. I'll see you next week. See you next week, bud. Take care, bud. OK, bye.