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Business of Machining - Episode 13
268 Plays8 years ago
Grimsmo's back in the swing and a new addition to his repertoire of tools is a gamechanger. Renishaw installs an OLP40 probe on his lathe that measures parts and puts it into text format. TRAKHOUND, a FREE software that interprets data from MTConnect to create a snapshot of machine data. Saunders has concerns about his Renishaw probe but is determined to rule out operator error before contacting tech support. He shares some problem-solving ideas to reduce operator time and lean take-aways from Pierson Workholding. https://www.trakhound.com/
Pierson Workholding: https://youtu.be/B8MQhX3QPEE
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Name Discussion
00:00:00
Speaker
Today this is 13A. Yes. I never hear you do the Canadian A. I think I do it a lot. I'll have to pay attention to that.
00:00:11
Speaker
Good morning, folks. Welcome to Business of Machining. Is it Business of Machining or The Business of Machining? I don't know. I don't know either. Let's switch back and forth just to confuse people. Yeah. There's no way to interact with us. Is there any way on a podcast to interact with our audience? I don't even know on comments. We'll have to learn and figure that out. Welcome to episode 13.
Grimsmo's Routine and Wellness Journey
00:00:31
Speaker
My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo.
00:00:34
Speaker
Good morning, bud. How are you? I'm doing fantastic. Awesome. You? Why are you fantastic? Last week was a frustrating week, and this week was kind of ups and downs, but the past few days just been on fire and feeling just really, really, really great.
00:00:52
Speaker
Good for you, man. I remember after last week's podcast, you texted me and said, was it? Yeah, it was last week's podcast. You immediately went and resumed your meditation. You had gotten out of your rhythm with the kids on spring break, which is reality. That's life. Yeah. Yeah. So our kids were on two weeks of spring break and I worked a lot and I kind of lost my morning routine.
00:01:13
Speaker
And I've been on this morning routine, on and off, but mostly on, for like two years now. You know, where I either do some sort of meditation or journaling or something and exercise, you know, and I watch some good stuff on YouTube.
00:01:29
Speaker
but the past three weeks or so I kind of lost that until last Friday when you're like, dude, just go meditate right now in the shop, take a few minutes, and it really helpful. And then I, Wednesday, two days ago, and today did my workout and just feel like I'm getting back in the swing of things, you know, and it's really nice to wake up and just be pumped instead of think of the problems that are always present.
00:01:58
Speaker
It's funny because meditating has almost absolutely nothing to do with machining or even business, but I would also argue it does because, and I'll throw it out, like when I was going through my business breakup in 2000, when was that, 13 or something? It was pretty much one of the lowest points in my life. I wasn't depressed, but just like it was really tough. And I actually started going to yoga with my wife.
00:02:22
Speaker
And it was great. So for any of you out there that are thinking that you're too masculine or yoga is, you're too good for yoga or meditating or exercise. Let me tell you, having the right attitude and energy and mindset is huge. It's critical. Yeah. Otherwise you just go crazy. Yeah. And likewise, it's good. Well, you don't even realize that you're going crazy until it's too late.
00:02:47
Speaker
until you go full Grimsmo. Yeah, until you go full crazy and then you look back and you're like, whoa, that was dumb. No, full Grimsmo only relates to using machines to do things far more precise in bonkers than they're meant to do. Right, it's a daily occurrence. John Grimsmo will never own a sandless grinder because I'm just using my lei to do equivalent tolerances. Yeah, true.
00:03:10
Speaker
No, but the other thing is serious too is routines. It's not only the disruption in the routine, but it's the fact that you didn't anticipate how detrimental it would be. So it's not only the outcome of it, it's the fact that, oh, I don't even know. And sometimes you don't even realize it in the present.
00:03:27
Speaker
That's tough. No, basically like spring break. So normally my routine when the kids are in school is school starts at 8.30. So I want to stay around till 8.30 so I can bring the kids to school and be part of that routine. And then I'm in the shop for 9 o'clock.
Balancing Work and Family
00:03:41
Speaker
On spring break, I can come into the shop at 5 AM. So I did often. And that killed my routine. I'm not eating as well because I'm just eating like a quick thing of cereal before going out the door. And it all compounds. And you do that for a couple weeks and you ruin it. Yeah.
00:03:55
Speaker
But I feel like I actually had a great week too. And it's my wife, what happened? She just got stressed. Oh, she gets a little sick, a little stressed. She's, by the way, she's one of those persons where she doesn't exercise and she doesn't have that side of her life. It's not good. I can, I think for me, I'm more of a mental exercise kind of person. Like I don't, I don't, I play tennis, but like, I don't care about, I don't want to exercise otherwise.
00:04:21
Speaker
But for her, she needs it. And she had a rough week. And so I ended up picking up the kids a bunch. And in the past, Ohio John, what I've been doing since I moved back here, usually I get pretty stressed about disruptions in my schedule or pulling me out of the shop. And this week, I just had everything
00:04:38
Speaker
organized. I had the machines running. I just felt on top of it. I felt content with our accomplishments. And this is actually a pretty stressful time because we're right now we're recording this on March or April 7th. So we're about a month away from our open house. That's going to be a lot of work and stress. But I was like, hey, yeah, no problem. We got everything under control. We pick up the kids, hung out the kids. Last night I took them to the tractor supply and we looked at the chicks and ducks they had there. And what the pet store is fun. That's fantastic.
00:05:07
Speaker
Yeah. Sweet. Cool. So I did have a very fun week.
Advancements in Machining Technology
00:05:15
Speaker
On Monday and Tuesday, I had Renishaw here installing the new probe on my lathe. Right, the little OLP? Yeah, the OLP 40, which looks tiny compared to the one on my Maury. Yeah, so on Monday, they were here. Three guys came in to install one little thing. Three guys? Yeah, it was kind of funny.
00:05:33
Speaker
Holy smoke like two guys at first and then one of the boss guys came because he just wanted to come Like spent to spend a day here. So that was great. So they installed it on Monday We chatted a lot and you know about what it's gonna do for me and they taught me about all kinds of cool stuff and then on Tuesday to one of the guys came back and
00:05:49
Speaker
train me on the probe, what it's going to do for me, how it's going to measure the cycles, and how I can use that data. So this is just, explain to me again, this is just a thing that lives in your turret. It's just like a mill probe, but it's not. So it can measure, it only measures things that are in the headstock. It doesn't measure other tools. Correct. It can only measure a turn apart, basically. But it can also reference off of the chuck, which is a fixed
00:06:12
Speaker
a fixed surface. Right, off the Z face of the chuck, not the X. X. Both. Like the, it's not a chuck, it's a 5C call, it knows, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, but theoretically, aside from temperature difference and growth there, it never really changes. It's always the same diameter.
00:06:35
Speaker
Well, but that's not something, don't take that for granted. I mean, I've talked to, when I was talking to the folks at, I think it was Samsung Lay, they were arguing about how the motor mounts for the spindle are isolated via the casting from the actual headstock to keep the heat away from that area. No, it is important to me.
00:06:53
Speaker
Everything adds up and you really see it on the bigger layers for sure. But what's really cool about this system is currently I'm probing every single part. Like I'll make a screw or something, probe the diameter. It writes the diameter to a text file on my USB stick. So in a sense, I don't have to measure every part now because I have a text file that says every single measurement of every single part that comes off. And I'm having a little bit of problems with chips wrapping around and it probing a chip.
00:07:23
Speaker
Oh. We'll just get the vision system out. Yeah, exactly. Avoid the chip. You should know that.
00:07:34
Speaker
But yeah, it's really fun. It's really fantastic. It's automatically updating offsets to keep parts in line forever. So last night, yesterday I ran the lathe for seven hours, I think, before I left. And then I put it in a fresh bar, and it ran all night for seven hours again. Oh my gosh. And made great parts the whole time.
00:07:55
Speaker
So just to work there though, you don't know, it measures the part, but you don't have a way of dispensing the part in order. So you don't know which part is which. Correct. But you don't necessarily care if it's within spec, but nevertheless. Right. There's going to be the odd ones that are totally out of spec because if it measures a chip, then it thinks it's huge. And then the next part is going to be wrong.
00:08:17
Speaker
because it's going to offset wrong. But it still checks that part. It does check that part. Is it as simple as not having it? Couldn't you write a thing that has it not activate the parts catcher and just drops the bad part into the? Exactly. So that's something I'm going to work on next. It'll take me 20 minutes to figure out the macro. But basically, it's like an if-then kind of code macro variable where
00:08:41
Speaker
If diameter is smaller than this, spit it out. If it's bigger than this, spit it out. Otherwise, keep going. So maybe I'll do that today. Did you have to do anything in Fusion or did you just hand code to do, I guess, a spring pass with a new offset applied?
00:09:00
Speaker
I guess it tweaks fusion a little bit, but it's like one line of code that comes in and probes it, and currently it does a finish turn, and then it probes it, and then it keeps going. What I could do is do a semi-finishing turn, probe it, then a proper finish turn, that should be accurate. So for other parts, I'll be doing that for sure.
00:09:19
Speaker
You could also write the probing, because you're worried about a thou or two. Well, I guess the question is how big is a chip. But you could have it just alarm out if it thinks there's a chip there and let you come clean it up. Or throw the part away, because
Introducing and Utilizing Track Hound
00:09:36
Speaker
you'd rather it run. Exactly. I'd rather let it run. So I'd rather throw the part away.
00:09:39
Speaker
At 2am you don't want the machine waiting to clear a chip. To add to that, since I ran it all night last night, the Renishaw guys told me of this awesome program that I briefly told you about last night, Track Hound. This is amazing.
00:09:56
Speaker
T-R-A-K hound.com. We'll put that in the description, folks. We're doing better. Thank you for your patience. We're now writing descriptions, which is a reluctant increase in work for this podcast that is otherwise literally a lean podcast. Yeah. Let's not call it slapdash, but let's call it lean. Yeah, right. No.
00:10:19
Speaker
Yeah, so Trackhound is fantastic. I mean, you and I have been hearing about MT Connect and industry of things, internet of things kind of thing for a couple of years now, reading articles and modern machine shop and et cetera. But I'm finally implementing it because these Renishaw guys came in and they're like, you got to try this. This is the greatest thing ever. And it's free. What? Yes.
00:10:41
Speaker
It's open source. Explain what it does to me in machinist layman's terms. So both of my machines are on the FANUC control, which is one of the most widely industry big things. But it would work on your Haas. It works on pretty much anything, maybe not Tormax, but anything kind of industrial.
00:11:00
Speaker
All these machines output data, or can output data, through the ethernet cable, through RS232, et cetera. Empty Connect can read that data, and then something like TrackHound can interpret that data. So I now have a dashboard with pie chart and hourly blocks that say, in the 1 o'clock hour, you used your lathe 96% of the time, and you had 4% idle time, and you had 0% alarm time, where it's stuck on an alarm.
00:11:30
Speaker
at 9 a.m. you had a hundred percent down time and zero percent up time and you see this 24 hour period and you can see like wow I really don't use the lathe in the morning because I have to come in set it up or I do something else or whatever and you start to see this snapshot of
00:11:47
Speaker
when you use it, how you use it, how often you actually use it. Because these are expensive machines. And truth be told, they're sitting here most of the time doing nothing. And that's me. That's my problem. But thank you for saying that. Because I feel like there's such a, just like everybody loves to say that business is great, or we're always busy, or everyone likes to put on this game face. We always went to Vegas, and we always were up.
00:12:09
Speaker
Look, I mean, the reality is it's not that you don't want your machines to run more, but it's not always easy, although I do want to come back to this point with respect to Pearson, but keep going. Yeah. I mean, it's catch-tuning too, because like you're about to say with Pearson is you don't always have to have your machines running all the time. But truth be told, we have a lot of parts to make. And I would like to be ahead. Like, Pearson talked about six months supply ahead on Cirq. I would love to be in that position.
00:12:35
Speaker
and keeping the lathe running and just taking that 20 minutes to start it in the morning as opposed to ignoring it. But think about it John, I mean one of your big rightful concerns was making parts out of spec and this Renishaw is a game changer. You could now potentially run six months of pivots because now we have the confidence. Yeah, because now I know they're going to be good and even if it makes a bad one because it measures the chip it's going to spit it out.
00:12:59
Speaker
Right. And then my parts catcher, my pill bottle, only has good parts in it. And I can check them and verify and all that, but I'm relatively confident that they're all going to be exactly what I want them to be.
00:13:12
Speaker
That's awesome. I need to spend more time with our Renishaw because I've had two things happen now that I assume are my, you know, most of the time in CNC it is user error or operator error, but I've had probing inconsistencies in both tool diameter and tool height that I find frustrating. And then we've been using the offset, angular offset G68, so it's where it rotates your coordinate system. And I find it to be
00:13:38
Speaker
inconsistent. And that bothers me. Even testing it to the point where, let's say, I know I have a part that was held at a little bit of an angle, but there's internal features and external features. So in theory, those all should be the same angle because they were machined in one operation. And I'll do G68s in different positions, and I'll get different angular readings. And that spooks me a lot.
00:14:02
Speaker
So, and it's kind of one of the things I don't like because it's kind of a black box and it's angular and it's counterintuitive because I think negative is, I got to go back and look at my notes, but which way is it offsetting it? Because then it's kind of like, well then I'll sweep it in with an indicator, I'll check it and make sure it matches. I just need to get back to some basic trigonometry or something to figure out. I want to be able to prove if over 18 inches it's four and a half thou how, what should my value be? And does that match?
00:14:31
Speaker
call Renishaw. That's a good idea. I'm blown away at how helpful they've been. You're a paying customer. You have a Renishaw probe. Call them up and see. That's a good idea. If you have a question, that's the funny thing in this. Now that you and I have paid real money for big machines,
00:14:53
Speaker
We're allowed to abuse their tech support kind of thing when needed. I feel like I know it's got to be something on my mind. Well, maybe not. I want to get smarter. It's a good lesson where it's like if I'm going to impose on somebody, I want to make sure I do that when I've got my ducks in a row. Because I know when someone calls me or gets a hold of me and they're like,
00:15:13
Speaker
Didn't you do a video once on something? Can you spoon, and it's like, come on dude, do some work on your end first. But what someone's like, hey, I've watched this video a bunch of times, I'm trying to replicate it. Would you mind pointing? And then it's like, you are lockstep, like I will totally help you because you're helping yourself. You're gonna do well. Yep, very good point.
00:15:31
Speaker
So it's funny you mention this, because I came in this morning, and we had a part. We run the Maschine every night as well. We leave it running for just one part usually, but for one set up. Well, I remember just a couple weeks ago, you were nervous about the first time you were going to do that. Isn't that funny? Oh my gosh. Since then, I wrote my first Renishaw custom macro. I downloaded the Renishaw Inspection Plus and figured out how to do multi-position board checking.
00:16:01
Speaker
I want to say it's not hard. It's hard in the sense that you need one to start with and look through it, but they give examples and as long as you stay in that protected position move, I don't think you're going to break a probe tip. It was super rewarding.
00:16:17
Speaker
But what happened last night was, I don't know this, but I'm pretty sure by reason of deduction that what happened was we dropped the seventh out of ten parts on the machine and we failed to obey the process. And I think we forgot to pick up the offset.
00:16:37
Speaker
They are held in a vice with parallels. So your Y and Z would remain the same, but X will change a little bit. And X was off on this part. And so that's really the only thing that makes sense. Every reason to believe that the material was cut to size correctly, which would be the other thing. So here's my point. This is silly. Yes, the process matters.
00:16:59
Speaker
These are CNC machines. This should do this for me. So there's two outcomes. One, what I'm doing right now is when we hang up on this call, I'm going to go figure out how to store my G54X value as a variable. And then when it runs the next part, I'm going to write something like it. I've never done this before, but an if statement that basically checks the new G54. And if it matches the old G54, the machine's going to stop.
00:17:26
Speaker
Because there's no chance down to the tenths that parts get dropped on the vise in the same position. Yeah, you could totally do that. I think Haas is different than Fannock in the way that they do it. But I'm sure there's macro variables and you can look it up and it's all. But yeah, I could do that on my machine. I think I would know how pretty easily. Right? It's so smart to me. Don't run the program if the X value hasn't been updated. Exactly.
00:17:50
Speaker
The other thing I'm going to do that's the next level, which totally makes sense, is for so much of what we do, for the six months we go in this machine, we've been able to keep the vices in the same
Optimizing Machining Processes
00:18:01
Speaker
orientation. And I plan to do that for the foreseeable future. So we have machine position.
00:18:06
Speaker
So rather than moving, jogging over to a corner and running one of the Renishaw probing routines, I'm just going to write a little program that I paste to the beginning of my Fusion Cam that jogs the machine over to the machine position of the right corner and then automatically runs the Renishaw probing routine that I want, which will save a huge amount of operator time. Jogging on these machines, I think PathPilot on Torbok is way faster, it's safer, and easier to jog than the stupid hand wheel.
00:18:36
Speaker
Yep. But again, it's like, why should I have to jog all the way over on all three axes, line it up, check it, go into the edit menu, pull up the probing routine, apply the probing routine with certain new values. Yeah, that's stupid. Yeah. Yeah, you should be able to move it like, say, two inches away and have the probe move safely for two inches until it touches, and then it can start. And then everything's referenced off of that and start from there. Yep.
00:19:03
Speaker
we're even thinking of to take that like three steps further for, well, say for our mill. If we have a pallet of knife parts and we want to make, we want to easily choose between a starburst pattern, a crosshatch pattern, and an angled pattern, you could have a pin that goes in three different spots that you manually place. And the probe comes in and goes, OK, there's no pin here, no pin here. There's a pin there. Run, code, starburst. Yep.
00:19:31
Speaker
I've seen guys who have really good variables in their program where when they don't want to run, let's say they have an eight position fixture but one part is missing for some reason or just not there. They just have a quick little value system in the beginning of their code and they just put a zero next to that one and it skips that one. This is how they do the trade shows with variables where it keeps making progressive cuts along parts.
00:19:57
Speaker
We had a guy just buy a Tormach who wanted our help on the Tormach USB I-O device that lets you do things like what we're doing with our automation project. And he, what did he want to do with it? He wants to flip switches that are read by the USB I-O device and based on what flip switches are flipped, certain holes are run or not run in the code. And we can totally do that.
00:20:22
Speaker
You're literally limited by your own creativity in what you can do. It's amazing. Anything is possible if you put your mind to it. You obviously have now watched the Pearson video? Yes, we saw it together a couple days ago. Isn't it amazing what he's doing with the simple automation? It's fantastic.
00:20:42
Speaker
I'm blown away. And I want to just throw it out there. I mean, he is a college dropout. He's incredibly motivated, but he's also self-taught. His dad was a sheet metal guy, so he didn't have the true machine upbringing. And I think it's just amazing. Yep. I didn't realize how many different machines he has. He has like six or seven machines, like just run by two or three guys.
00:21:05
Speaker
Yeah. Two, three guys. And he's very much bootstrapped and he's, he's poured his profits back. Somebody asked me, somebody asked me that on Facebook the other day or something. It was like, how much of your, how much of your business revenue or I mean, profit would be more of the correct term, but how much do you put back into the business? And I'm like, are you serious? A hundred percent. Yeah, that's two. I, I, I don't buy clothes. I eat generally pretty, I mean, like I don't do anything except spend money on my business.
00:21:31
Speaker
I'm exactly the same way. I want to grow from that point, but for this time period, for sure, that's all you can do. I also loved his process control board, a little magnet board. That was just amazing. It works for them as a product business, and it could work for you, John. Yeah, because we have a lot of similarities to their product business.
00:22:00
Speaker
They'll lay little parts, inventory, things you can batch up. I thought it was commendable how he was sensitive about those larger plates that they make. I mean, that's physical space to store them. It's expensive raw material. And so he'll go make, I think he was making those Venturis, which are those tiny brass parts. Okay, I'll make 500 because it's very little space and money. But the plates, we only keep four or five in stock and they're no stress. Oh my gosh.
00:22:30
Speaker
Yep. Yep. And he's got the process down. If he needs to make two more today, he can do it immediately. Yep. Yep.
00:22:38
Speaker
I've taken away so much from that video and I'll keep rewatching it, but one of the things I've done is it's made it even easier for me to order saw cut material. We had to run 120 parts this week and it's parts that we've run a lot before and I've always bought the bar and we've just had Noah or Jared's saw cut it up because it's not hard to do, it's pretty quick, it's thin stuff.
00:23:01
Speaker
And I was like, no, why do it? Order it saw cut. It's not that much more money. And it shows up, and literally it goes straight from the truck next to the machine, and we hit cycle start. Yeah. It makes so much sense.
In-House Manufacturing Debate
00:23:16
Speaker
Yeah, we're battling with that too, with how many more processes do we bring in house or how many things do we leave? We're paying good money for it. Some of our stuff could be... What are you thinking about? Lapping as one thing.
00:23:32
Speaker
I know there's a lapping machine used one like just in town for not much money but I don't know it might be a long-term thing it's not going anywhere but things like that like like for one of our knives were paying $30 to get two handles lapped.
00:23:48
Speaker
And, you know, over the course of a thousand knives, that's $30,000. Right. Right. So how much skill and risk is there? Very little. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. We've got our service grinder running, and it's awesome. And I am trying to grind some larger parts just to learn. And let me tell you, that is not a turn the magnet on and hit go process at all. Really? Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Holy. I mean, because I'm humbling.
00:24:17
Speaker
Because it's so big or just surface grinding in general?
00:24:20
Speaker
more surface grinding in general. And this idea if you've got a, think about if you've got a large plate that has a bow in it and that bow may not run along either the X or the Y, but maybe that bow runs at a 30 degree angle through the part or something like that. You know, you will suck that bow out with a magnet. So how do you grind apart flat and square and perpendicular and all that? Yes, shim it up and all that. There's a lot to it.
00:24:50
Speaker
Whereas other machines, like we bought our tumbler, we just got a new plasma, that to me is a no-brainer. Those machines are very, very easy to, I wouldn't say master, but like, well, the tumbler we bought through that MC Finishing, and they've been great about helping us, just basically telling us what the recipe is, or we can send them our parts, and they'll run the parts, they'll work up a recipe for you, send it to you, and you're done. That's a no-brainer.
00:25:18
Speaker
What's on tap for today? Today I'm going to change over the lathe to make another kind of part. I've got to come up with a new probing routine that'll measure it a little bit differently, offset a few different things, read a lot of macro variables. And it's so cool to have that text file of all the sizes. It's just awesome. More handles and stuff on the mill. We got 400 new rasp handles, water jet cut.
00:25:43
Speaker
Whoa, nice. This time we decided to skip double disk for now and see if we can figure out a way to work with the thicker handles and save that kind of $30 cost per knife. I think we're getting it good. I'm fixturing it up and then I'm pocketing the backside of the handle down to thickness. And it's working pretty good. A little bit of warp in the parts, which we're trying to figure out how to get out. This was funny enough, right, what I was just saying. Exactly.
00:26:13
Speaker
It's so easy to look at these processes and these machines from an outsider's perspective and be like, oh, CNC, you just put stuff in, hit go, and it's easy, right? No, it is so far from the truth. Once you figure out the process, Pearson has it pretty dialed down. He can just go in and work, but I'm sure he's spent the past five years figuring it out.
00:26:34
Speaker
This G68 probing thing I mentioned earlier today, so the alternative is we've got an edge that we can trim in, but the edge that we can dial in, the machine surface is only 10 inches long, and I care about, and the part's quite long, three or four times that length.
00:26:53
Speaker
if I may only get three tenths run out along that edge, but I'm like, but that could be a thousand and a half. And I'm like, I don't want that. I mean, it's not that a thousand and a half alone would blow tolerance. It's almost like my best case scenario.
00:27:10
Speaker
but it's not, it's fun. I'm enjoying, as we're moving, we actually, we're not, ah, we're doing very little job shop work this month, which is great because, the open house and because of some of the products that we're working on, and I really enjoy
00:27:28
Speaker
going back to how I got started in the machine, which was with the Camera Mountain Target Company of really pouring yourself, it's what you do, John, like pouring yourself into a process, pouring yourself into a product. I realized, I was telling Yvonne, my wife, I was like, I am good when I really apply myself. And sometimes as an entrepreneur, a mistake that I make is I think I can do too much
00:27:50
Speaker
And it's not that I don't get it done, but I just bounce around to get it done and not to say, oh my gosh, if you could just clear my schedule and I could focus on this for three hours, it would be not done well, done incredibly well. And I try to do that as much as I can. But as the leader of the business running the show, there's so much else to do. Finding that three hours of focus and actually being able to focus is very difficult.
00:28:19
Speaker
I had a good recommendation on some books that I'm going to dive into and read. And I think what I'm going to do when we relaunch the NYC CNC website, which should be hopefully around the open house, is we're going to have some content like recommended books on entrepreneurship and machining.
Importance of Business Metrics
00:28:35
Speaker
But one of them we talked about, I think they were called the Rockefeller rules. But what made me think of it? I had been meaning to mention it to you.
00:28:42
Speaker
One of them had to do with what you're talking about, which is kind of real time or daily tracking statistics about your business. And I have mixed feelings because even right now when you were telling me about this MT Connect telling you the machine's idle, it's like, well, so what? That's just another distraction. I don't need you to tell me the machine's idle. Leave me alone. But at a bigger picture, I think it is really powerful. And information is key.
00:29:10
Speaker
pulling those parts off with the text file in that whole statistical process control thing. That is amazing. Like I'm thinking about that for us. I can't afford a CMM, but I'm like, I would like to be able to take a part off the machine, turn to the right, drop it onto something and have it automatically take and store measurements. You could do that with your Renishaw probe on the mill itself.
00:29:33
Speaker
Part of the thing I don't like is I don't trust that thing yet. I really don't, which is something I need to get over quick because it's an expensive tool that should work incredibly well. Right. Have you checked runout on the probe tip? I have not checked it in a few weeks and that's a great point. Maybe I should throw an indicator on it this morning. Right. Something I realized is there's two big set screws at the top that I didn't have tight for the longest time. Oh my gosh. I was relying on the little four adjuster screws to give everything tight and it kept walking on me.
00:30:02
Speaker
The nice thing about those two bigger screws is that once you dial in the four little ones, you use those two big ones to snug it up just enough to blow your tolerance. Yeah. But once I finally tightened those, I measured it just the other day after months, and it didn't move at all. But the other thing about the Renishaws is that because, in famous last words, but because it has spindle orientation and it always probes from the same orientation, run out actually shouldn't
00:30:30
Speaker
Especially for operations like a boring check, it shouldn't matter that much. Shouldn't matter. If it moves... Sorry, forgive me. Loose movement is different than run out. Right.
00:30:47
Speaker
But this is just like when you used to make the tormach tips yourself. It doesn't matter if the ball is centered in the rod, right? Yeah, OK. I see what you mean. As long as it doesn't move, then runout shouldn't matter. It doesn't turn or rotate. But runout would alter positional accuracy.
00:31:08
Speaker
only if it were doing what shouldn't, like if you were doing a, what they call bridge check or whatever, or something where you check the left side and the right side and divide by two. It shouldn't matter. An abortion matter. If you only probe one side, it would matter.
00:31:23
Speaker
I'm going up random, but I was thinking of Maha's AE, who's a good dude, who's helped me with some of that Renishaw stuff. And he invited me up next week. I'm going to judge a high school machining competition in Columbus.
Saunders' Role in High School Machining Competition
00:31:38
Speaker
Yeah. And you know what I like? Because it's like, this is, especially around here, probably everywhere in the country, there's so much emphasis on sports. And there's nothing wrong with sports. But it's not for everybody. And this is a chance for kids to compete in a
00:31:51
Speaker
have a real competition, a real event, a real chance to travel, and I don't know what I'm getting into, but I'm excited. That's fantastic. Well, let us know. Yeah, sounds good. Awesome. Well, good luck on writing those Renaissance. You got to do a YouTube video on that lathe probe. Yeah, I started one already while the guys were here, and I'll finish them eventually. Awesome. All right. Sweet. I'll see you later. Take care. Yeah, have a great day. You too. Bye. Bye.