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GRINDING WHEEL GRITS, RASK BLADES ON THE KERN, SAUNDERS CALLS GRIMSMO OUT, CHAMFER PSA, 2D CONTOUR VS. SWARF, FRUSTRATING FREIGHT FEES, GEOMETRY SELECTION HACK in FUSION 360, HIRING EMPLOYEES, FIXTURING FOR THE NORSEMAN, 3D PRINTING, AND NEVER TRUST ZERO  image

GRINDING WHEEL GRITS, RASK BLADES ON THE KERN, SAUNDERS CALLS GRIMSMO OUT, CHAMFER PSA, 2D CONTOUR VS. SWARF, FRUSTRATING FREIGHT FEES, GEOMETRY SELECTION HACK in FUSION 360, HIRING EMPLOYEES, FIXTURING FOR THE NORSEMAN, 3D PRINTING, AND NEVER TRUST ZERO

Business of Machining
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202 Plays5 years ago

This podcast is GOOD VENTING and BAD VENTING all things manufacturing and entrepreneurship.

Blade to the Grindstone After taking Saunders's advice (perhaps a bit too literally) Grimsmo takes a Zedaro Miltera Endmill to a knife blade and ends up with an incredible surface finish but the grinding wheel was another story...

Throughout the talk of grit, mesh, and desired results, Grimsmo casually drops a bombshell---and Saunders calls him out immediately.

PSA CHAMFER OR CORNER ROUND YOUR DANG PARTS A prospective hire for SMW finds it surprising to see how much deburring is done inside the machine! The guys highlight the benefits of chamfers and creative ways they've used different types of endmills to get that beloved edge break. Plus, Saunders shares his process for the SMW Diamond Dowel Pins, which come off the lathe a fully finished product.

BUT, BUT....I WANTED IT TO BE COOL! Grimsmo laments the fact that he's using something a lot more simple than a Swarf toolpath but he knows the more simple, less exciting one still gets the job done. 

FRICKIN' FREIGHT Without rhyme or reason, a national freight company adds limited access fees or lift gate fees that really aren't sustainable for SMW long term. Obviously, it's a problem that will need solving but how much action does it require? Saunders decided to take action based on an interesting strategy.

THE BIG GOOD VENT Saunders shares his thoughts on things he's learned about hiring people and buying machines.

HACK IN FUSION Selecting multiple chains of a sketch or contour can be a hassle, especially if you want to use that same geometry for multiple operations. VIDEO COMING SOON! Grimsmo's been learning better workflows, component structures, how to organize and lay out sketches all while keeping in mind future Grimsmo Knives employees.

Fixturing & Tooling Standardization Grimsmo gives an update on the Norseman and while they're still able to make 6 knives daily, he's thinking about redesigning the fixture. The 2 long dovetail clamps on at each end causes the fixture to bow. The Johns discuss possible solutions and luckily, this is what SMW is all about!

Standardizing tooling doesn't sound exciting but once you've implemented it, it's like seeing something you can't unsee!

MINDS THEY ARE A CHANGIN'--and that's a good thing! RoboDrill replacement was going to be a Haas DT-2 but another consideration is MUCH more important to SMW than the fast rigid tapping.

 

 

 

 

Transcript

Introduction to Episode 188

00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining episode 188. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. This is the podcast where on a weekly basis, we get to vent with each other about all the things we're learning and figuring out and et cetera about our manufacturing businesses.

Rask Blade Progress and Techniques

00:00:18
Speaker
Anything to vent about today? I mean, there's good vents and there's bad vents. I can vent good right now because I had huge progress on the current in the past few days.
00:00:29
Speaker
I have grounded it at Rask blade. Cycle start. Yeah. And a lot of testing, like it's a really thin Rask blade, or sorry, a thin grinding wheel, like 100 thou thick. So I can do it. It looks like a woodruff cutter, or a key saw cutter. Like a little slitting saw kind of thing. It's one inch diameter by 0.1 inch thick. So I can step it down and do it nice.
00:00:55
Speaker
I end-milled the bevel with Zadaro Miltarra end mill. And holy cow, it left an amazing finish, measured on the Profilometer at 13 RA, which is like, really? It's so nice. And then going with the grinding wheel and zipped away just one single pass so we could make sure it hits everything and compare it to the end mill and stuff. And it actually made a noticeably worse finish than the end-milted.
00:01:22
Speaker
interesting with the first grit i had four grits to try and i was on the heaviest grit and it was like quite a bit worse what's heavy though for grit like 600 yeah it was there's two scales of grit there's like mesh grit and then there's
00:01:38
Speaker
Grit? Grit? I don't know. Mesh is micron, and grit is... I don't know the difference, but... It's called 100 slash 200. One 120, but it's grit, not mesh. And then the next one's a 320 mesh, and it's way finer.
00:01:55
Speaker
Got it. But is it in any way like the sandpaper? Because 120 sandpaper is brutal. It's pretty rough, yes. It's way finer than that. Okay. Yeah. But you look under the microscope and you can see the diamond chunks. And I've got my four grinding wheels lined up next to each other and you can see the rough one is like huge chunks and then it gets finer and finer and finer. It's cool.
00:02:19
Speaker
Yeah, and it turned out good. So then I tried the next finer and then I tried the next finer and it's starting to get really good. And then by the end of yesterday, I was able to sweep the whole blade and grind every surface. And I haven't gotten around to dressing the grinding wheel yet and making sure that it's not only concentric, but also square.
00:02:40
Speaker
um so because it's just a disc you put on an arbor it's gonna have some run out it's gonna have what you haven't and you haven't john john no it's not sure it is no
00:02:55
Speaker
This is where, this is where, oh man, this is where, and like, I'm, I would yield to any grinding expert here, but like, this is where you're, you've got the backwards things backward. You've got this Kern, you've got this amazing set up and then you're killing yourself by not doing something that was grinding one on one, checking the balance, dressing the, you've never addressed it once.
00:03:16
Speaker
No, because it's not like a six inch grinding wheel. It has a lot of mass to it. I know I will. No, it doesn't matter. You're sitting here just like dressing it will partially balance it except for the inherent balances in the mounting and the disc itself. But no, there's nothing
00:03:32
Speaker
This is like the Lockwood. Just because you're going from 4 tenths to 2 tenths doesn't mean it's a 2 tenths difference, which is small. It's a 50% difference. Yeah, exactly. It's a 100% difference, I guess. Sure. Yeah, yeah. True. But I was also going by your logic last week. Touch grinder to steel, which I did. Fantastic. Hold on now. I said get on just a block. Point is, other than I know I will get a better finish once I dress the wheel, there's no downside. It doesn't look horrible. It actually looks quite good.
00:04:02
Speaker
But it gave me the confidence knowing that once I dress it, and I'm talking like it's probably half a thou out of round or something. It's not bad. Have you measured that? No, I haven't. But John, this is why we do this podcast. You don't work for me. I don't work for you. Where you've gotten is amazing. But you need somebody to tell you, stop.
00:04:24
Speaker
Go be Adam Demuth, go be Robin Renzetti, go be somebody who's going to do, because the whole reason you're trying to do this is to build a long-term recipe that involves process reliability, finishes, surface life, tool life, and a huge part of that is the setup, the balance, the dressing of that wheel.
00:04:44
Speaker
totally agree. But there's 100 aspects to this project and which do you do in which order. And in this scenario, I chose to do one instead of the other and you would have done one instead of the other and you're probably right. But at the end of the day, I see it as that's my next step and I will get better results.
00:05:02
Speaker
But yeah, you're probably right. Especially if you were instructing an employee to do that, you'd be like clearly you're supposed to do this first, whereas I'm just kind of running at it. That's actually a great way of putting it because then you would be maybe frustrated because the employee's job is to be productive and not counterproductive. For that matter, if I were instructing an employee to do this, I'd be like, yeah, you should probably dress it first. Let's set our bases down straight. But I guess I live my life by a different set of rules. Right.
00:05:32
Speaker
Which you're allowed to, but I'm calling you out, damn it. I appreciate that. That's fine. I need that sometimes. And I actually have that here sometimes. Barry or Angela or whatever will call me out when I need it. And as much as I don't want to hear it sometimes, it's needed. Well, the thing is, you're going to have to dress that wheel and balance it. 100%. The one thing I
00:05:53
Speaker
take issue with is don't think for a second because it's a curve, because it's a small diameter wheel or because it's balanced doesn't matter. Good. I'm looking at it under the microscope and I can see what I guess I would call wheel hop or imbalance or out of round, run out basically. I can barely see it. So it just gets me thinking like obviously once I address it, it's going to be concentric. And I'm wondering like,
00:06:21
Speaker
you know, they have tool holder balancing rigs. And I'm like, no, what's, you know, you can balance a whole assembly up to like 1000 RPM. Yeah, it's just the thought process went through my mind, like, what is the full grimsmo way to do this, if it were insanely balanced, because it has a cap and a screw and that assembly.
00:06:43
Speaker
is not perfect either. So I'm not saying I'm going to go out and buy a $20,000 balancing rig, but the theory behind it is like, OK, that would be a better result. What's perfect here? And then work your way back from there. What concessions can you make?
00:06:58
Speaker
Well, I always thought of the balance. It's actually interesting. I've heard some controversial opinions on balancers. Really? Yeah. I should do a video guest episode because I am not smart enough or educated enough to opine on it. But when I heard it from the guy who was on the standards board for creating those, what is it, the G2 standard, it was interesting.
00:07:25
Speaker
But I always thought of balancing as kind of like a crankshaft. All you're trying to do is create weights at distances out to try to create a center, which crankshafts can be balanced, but they can also more quickly become imbalanced. And your situation, you're not trying to turn this thing into a crankshaft. You actually have the luxury of just making it a cylinder, like a balance through the center based on how it's mounted and how it's dressed.
00:07:49
Speaker
Yeah, but like I said, the cap at the end, I mean, it's aluminum, so it's not a lot of mass to it. But I'm currently running a 20,000 RPM. There's little things to consider for weight distribution. And I don't know, is it going to matter? I don't know. I'm getting a great finish. Yes. No, but I'm saying, do I have to balance these tool holders? Yes, I have to keep it in mind during assembly and all that stuff.
00:08:12
Speaker
But sorry. Yeah, I would guess you don't have to bounce the whole stack, the rotating assembly stack. But but I would think if I did, would it be better? I don't know. Would it be worth the squeeze, you know? Yeah. Well, dress the wheel, line the wheel. That's for sure. For sure. Well, so why not if the end mill is good? Is it not Grims mode enough to leave it there or is it just not going to be will not last?
00:08:41
Speaker
I don't think it'll last, honestly. I think it'll microchip and it'll leave a gross streak and it'll look fine to the machinist, but then you put it in the tumbler and the streak like shows up like crazy. And I'm trying to reduce the amount of finishing work that Eric and Sky and the rest of that team has to put into these blades because if the Kern can make it perfect, so you can just throw in the tumbler or give it a quick swipe with sandpaper to make sure there's nothing you can't see.
00:09:06
Speaker
than better. That's the goal. I'd rather spend 10, 15 minutes on the current than have one of the guys spend more time than that doing that. That's the goal. We had a new hire who spent a day shadowing and working here to get a feel for both us for him and him for us. He was blown away at how much in the machine deburring that we do.
00:09:31
Speaker
Yeah. And it's like you're darn right. We want to pull parts off that are finished, that have good clean chamfers that are machine print precisely, that also don't require hand finishing, that aren't sharp. And chamfers have that kind of cool way of also giving you an inherent QC because if your chamfers are off, you know it's easy to see it and you know something went wrong.
00:09:52
Speaker
True. Or if you have, let's say your top surface is for whatever reason 10th out thick, your chamfer will now be bigger or undercut or something. Like, yeah, it helps to show. And something I've been thinking and known for like eight years now that I want to do some public announcement, like chamfer every edge or corner round is even prettier.
00:10:13
Speaker
And every time you don't, it leaves a little flappy burr or something. The parts look unfinished. And I see people post up parts that they make that are not chamfered or not cornered around it. I'm like, you have no idea the next level of beauty that it achieves just by putting a five thou chamfer on there.
00:10:30
Speaker
You ready for this? Axial live tool in the SC20Y, making our diamond pins. It has to machine the flat for your kind of finger, hand, wrench, thumb screw, just the two flats on it. Well, I don't have another Axial live tool set up as a chamfer tool, deburring tool. Don't really want one and don't really want to add the cycle time. So switched it to a YG1 that has a, I don't know, 10 or 15 thou corner chamfer on the end mill.
00:10:58
Speaker
Cool. The downside, I guess, or the trade-off is that we have a corner chamfer at the bottom of that flat, but that doesn't matter. It's effectively has no compromise. In fact, you could argue that stress reduces a stress riser crack, whatever. We use that same tool then to come in and chamfer the edges.
00:11:18
Speaker
Love it. I mean, many times I've used either a ball or a radius end mill or even a flat end mill to do a 3D chamfer on a surface because I'm like, well, that tool's already there. And yeah, it takes another 20 seconds, but it's done. You know, especially with the ball mill, it looks fine. It looks amazing.
00:11:35
Speaker
On the grinding the rask blades, is there any use in the knife industry or that you've seen of instead of doing what you're doing, which is as hard as it gets solid grinding wheel, is there anything for like a high durometer, hard rubber that's a little bit more compliant? It's almost like a small scotch brite wheel or a small belt grinder, belt polisher that you could use.
00:12:03
Speaker
to do what you're trying to do? There's a few options on there. There's like a flappy wheel. You can get a rubber backed sandpaper cylinder like Dremel come with this. It's all about consistency though, especially like with the grinding wheel, I'm stepping over tenths at a time. It's hard enough.
00:12:24
Speaker
We've tried the, what are they called? They're like these little finger bristle. They're almost rubber. They are the 3M bristle things. Yeah, they're like silicone rubber and they have embedded grit in them and you can get them in all different colors and they're like pink and purple and blue and red and stuff. And we've got those we use them on the lathe for for quite a while, but we haven't used them lately. They work okay.
00:12:50
Speaker
But I think you need the right amount of pressure and RPM and coolant and I don't know. I find they get torn up pretty easily. Yeah, they're really soft. So they're obviously worth playing with. But I don't know if they're worth playing with here because I do think since they're going in the tumbler and I'm trying to create the perfect surface.
00:13:09
Speaker
And with the grinding wheel, it should be all right. But I will say, because I didn't dress the wheel, even though it looks square, the sides, because the way they make it, I think they cut it with a laser or something. I don't know. It looks square, but it's not square. So when I step down 20 thou at a time, you can feel every little stair step, barely. But once I dress, it just proved to me, once I dress it like holy cow, it'll be square to the spindle.
00:13:35
Speaker
and then be good to go. But I guess had I addressed it first, I wouldn't have run into that at all. I look forward to next week's podcast. Yeah, exactly. No, it's awesome. Really, really cool. And I'm just playing on the one side right now. Like I haven't even milled the fixture and made the clamps for the flip side, but it's mirror image of everything. So it's like prove one side, get it working, and then go on the other side. Did you end up just doing a 2D tool path?
00:14:01
Speaker
Yeah. 2d contour tool path. I was all hot and heavy, excited about swarf because it would look cool and it'd be cool and to get to use the current and all that. And Ken talked me into the 2d swarf and or 2d contour and it makes sense. It's just easy. I can get my clearances. I can use tour radiance compensation. Um, and it works. It works great. Sweet. That's good. What's the, what's the bad rant or what'd you say? Yeah. Nothing. Oh, good. Good week. Good week. Yeah. I'm feeling great.
00:14:30
Speaker
I had two stressful things yesterday and I was reflecting on it. What's interesting is they weren't even that bad. It's more just our shop is a completely different shop and a completely different organization than it was two months ago. Three days ago, I looked at Ed and Julie and the team and I was like,
00:14:51
Speaker
This is as low stress a day as we've ever had here. Sales are coming in. I look around at almost every machine is running and it was just awesome. And so I think it's in a weird way. It made yesterday. We're stressed about
00:15:07
Speaker
negotiating for lack of a better word with our freight company because what's happening is that seemingly at their discretion with no recourse or real standards, they decide to add limited access fees or lift gate fees.
00:15:27
Speaker
And it's not sustainable or scalable for, you know, if the customer needs a lift gate that needs to be somehow dealt with upfront because the lift gate charge alone can double the freight bill and that just gets billed to us. It's not.
00:15:40
Speaker
building a customer. And then this limited access fee, which again, it could be 50 to 70% of the whole freight charge originally quoted price. And it's kind of like, well, what does limited access mean? And the last answer was, well, it's a school. And I'm like, this school happened to have a loading dock and a receiving department. No. So it's frustrating.
00:16:04
Speaker
For sure. Yeah. I guess when it's case by case and at the discretion of the, the planner, whatever, and it's not discussed up front, that makes it difficult. Hmm. Yeah. It's too bad. Yeah. We'll, we'll get it figured out and there's a relationship element to, to have it too, but there's also the pushback of like, wait, I'm here. Your API is giving us quotes. You know, the address. Sure. Yeah. That's not, that's not fair. Is this one of the big boy players like UPS FedEx kind of thing or more of a smaller
00:16:31
Speaker
No, no, a national LTL carrier. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. We've only done a couple of those things where we have to ship a small pallet. You guys do it all the time now, so you're used to it. For us, we got to ship it across the border as well most of the time.

Logistics Challenges and Solutions

00:16:46
Speaker
We're not good enough at it that it's easy yet, but we're getting there.
00:16:50
Speaker
It's a good point because I did the sort of, okay, John, stop. How much money have we spent this year on LTL? Got that report within 30 seconds. And then how much of those, how many invoices do we think are getting overcharged? And we can tell by the dollar amount and you're like, okay, you know, really this is a four figure problem. So I want to fix it, but I'm not right now. I'm not about to, I don't want to tell them this, but I'm not about,
00:17:17
Speaker
I'm not ready to go call the other carriers because frankly, the way this is happening, I suspect it's common in the industry. It's like, okay, your best bet here is to try to improve things with your existing relationship, not just for sure, not just jump ship and nuke it. Yeah, which is a huge infrastructure change on our website and API and relationships.
00:17:38
Speaker
That's a good point that you actually step back and looked at the monetary value of this problem and tailored the potential solution based on that as opposed to just being like, this is a problem. This sucks. We got to change it. Let's invest everything in this. I fall into that sometimes too, yeah. So I'm trying to get better. I am getting better at stepping back and being like, what is the value in that and what is the effort involved in that? Where do those two things collide?
00:18:05
Speaker
Well, there's an irony because one of their answers is we'll just increase your freight rates
00:18:13
Speaker
over the board everywhere, like we'll reduce your discount. So the freight industry for reasons I don't know, but for years has been this weird thing where like we'll get a $1,500 invoice. That's a 91% discount. I'm making that up, but that's a ballpark, right? So like it's $172 for us to ship a pallet from here to Tulsa, but the gross amount on the bill is $1,500. And then we get our discount. So these discounts are crazy. It'd be like a
00:18:41
Speaker
It'd be like a house costs a million dollars, but you pay like $105,000 for it. They're like, we'll just reduce your discount so you pay more and then we'll reduce those fees, which in a weird way solves the problem because then
00:18:58
Speaker
So part of the issue is that the quoted rate doesn't match the invoice rate, but then everybody pays more, which is our pushing that onto our customers, which that's not the goal. So we'll figure out.

The Impact of Hiring on Growth

00:19:10
Speaker
My positive rant is something that I hope I can say with enough gravity.
00:19:19
Speaker
And it's that some of the most important or impactful things I've learned are the things that you couldn't necessarily predict or extrapolate and think if I do this, that will happen. Or I know this is good, so I should try to do it and this will come of it. It's more of the when you happen to get kind of lucky and are forced to do something,
00:19:45
Speaker
And the benefits of that are frankly far greater than you could ever contemplate or predict or even plan. And so I was trying to think of.
00:19:55
Speaker
how to give some real-world examples, and some of them are hiring. The ability to hire people that end up becoming phenomenal parts of your organization and team and force multipliers, it's more than just, if I add this person, they can take pictures or make videos or run a machine. It's more of those unforeseen benefits. It doesn't always happen with every hire or in every situation.
00:20:18
Speaker
It's also just when you get more machines or when you free people up, the ability to then have that spur the next thing. The best example is a theme that you and I have talked about all the time, which is the balance of us being technicians. I was in fusion all morning trying to tweak something, which guess what? I love doing it. It's fun. I'm not going to apologize for that.
00:20:45
Speaker
totally, but I think there's an element of that you just can't appreciate until it's happened of how much
00:20:54
Speaker
It's hard to put into words, but it reminded me of the Mark Twain quote, which is a little bit of a play on it. But what gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so. And it's like, gosh, the ability to take that step back, you don't have any idea how much
00:21:20
Speaker
I'm not saying it's you, just general. How much freedom it gives. Yeah, I'm starting to think about that in our future of hiring and growing and where I want to take the workforce and what work I want to take off of my plate and distribute it among more people.
00:21:39
Speaker
Because as much as I love doing all the designing and programming and stuff, it is not scalable whatsoever. I mean, I spend probably twice as much time on Fusion at home outside of working hours than I do at working hours, and I love it. I'm not complaining, but I can't double that. There's no way. That's the problem, and I'm totally guilty of this as well. It's like, well,
00:22:02
Speaker
What you just said, it's not sustainable, but I'm making it work and we're making money and we're shipping products. And so you kind of think like, okay, I should change it in the future. Not like you have no idea how much you're missing right now. Like what if that flashlight was selling? What if you were selling 45 flashlights a day today, John, guess what? The flashlight probably won't even get touched for nine months, right?
00:22:28
Speaker
Right now, it's solely on my plate and I have too many things on my plate. Therefore, the flashlight is basically never going to happen as much as I want it to happen today. But these are exactly in my thought process too. If I made the right hires or distributed the project among key people, oh my gosh, I could hold a flashlight in three weeks.
00:22:49
Speaker
Like, yeah, this is not that hard. I know exactly what's required. It's just work. It's just time in front of fusion time in front of the machine that I can't invest. And I need to be able to hire and invest that time. Because the sooner we're selling 45 flashlights a day, the sooner like all problems were solved.
00:23:09
Speaker
I was only mildly concerned about buying those VF6s, partly because I signed the PO like when the country was getting shut down for COVID.

Machining Essentials: VF6 Success

00:23:19
Speaker
And at this point, so the VF6 is the A machine is op one, the B machine is op two.
00:23:25
Speaker
Not only has the A machine basically not stopped turning the spindle since it got installed, but we converted the VM3, which is supposed to be like a mod vice machine. It has basically become a second A machine.
00:23:39
Speaker
Really? The A machine is the bottleneck relative to the B. Both A's feed the B. It's one of those things where here I was concerned or conservative or hesitant. You could almost say, not that we'd be out of business, but
00:23:56
Speaker
our business model would fail immediately if those machines were taken out of the workflow now at this point. And you've had them for like two months. Yeah. Four months, but yeah. But I didn't have that level. That's not how I'm wired to have that confidence. I mean, obviously that was a goal, but it wasn't like I just thought, oh, do this, this happens.
00:24:15
Speaker
Yeah, it wasn't an absolute no-brainer. Some decisions are, but those are big capital purchases that there's risk to them. As much as you know there's work, but it's still like, I'm really happy to hear that the plan worked. Like day one, probably six months ago, you're thinking, you know what? We could really use some VF6s. And you're probably crunching it over for a while, like thinking, if we did, man, we'd really be able to maximize yada, yada, yada. And it's so great to hear that it's actually working and paying off.
00:24:45
Speaker
Probably better than you had hoped. Absolutely, John. Yes. Same thing goes for both of our ERP systems. In three months from now, they're both going to be up and running fully, air quotes fully. I'm sorry, three months? Well, I'm saying there's more features you want to add. There's more features I want to add.
00:25:10
Speaker
But, and we're going to look back and be like, how did we live without this? We're almost at the point now of saying, how did we live without this? We're not quite there yet, but we are using it for tracking and milk quantities and we're adding more products every day and it's coming together great. We're there totally. That's so awesome. Yeah, absolutely.
00:25:29
Speaker
That's exciting. It is. I think I found a hack infusion that I'm super, super, super excited about with selecting. You know how it's a pain in the butt to select geometry sometimes? Like if you want to select multiple chains of a sketch or a contour.
00:25:45
Speaker
Yeah, you got to click it twice and three times and click the open sketch kind of thing. Let's say you want to use that same geometry for three different operations. Sure. I think I found a hack. I'm going to sit on it though. I'm recording the video now and there's a couple of different tweaks on it, but we'll put it out really soon because this is cool if it helps.
00:26:05
Speaker
Nice. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, it's good to come up with those things. And like, I'm thinking in my head, as I go through more fusion, and I, I'm getting better at fusion, even just the past few months, I'm learning better workflows, better component structures, you know, family tree kind of just how to organize and layout the sketch, I'm developing the system that I like the best and, and how I would then train future Grimsmo employees to be able to do which is,
00:26:32
Speaker
Which is kind of weird, because I've been on Fusion for four or five years now, and I'm still like redoing my main methods. But it's good. I'm getting happy with the systems. And as I'm working more in it now, I'm thinking about how I would train it and how I would distribute this work, which is necessary. Totally random. But how are Norseman's on the mori, the Amish fixtures, the oranges, like that's all just
00:26:59
Speaker
going it's business as usual, basically making six knives a day every day consistently. It's going good. The orange vices, the vices itself is fine. It's the top plate fixture, especially the way I've got it designed with the two long dovetail clamps on the ends.
00:27:17
Speaker
As they clamp, the fixture bows up in the middle. Not even hard. You clamp it with the wrench and you go to tight and the needle moves. You put an indicator on the top and you tighten it a little bit and it moves up two thou. That affects our parts. We've scrapped more parts than I want to admit because of poor vice tightening techniques. We're nailing that down.
00:27:40
Speaker
we're trying to figure out the way forward after that, whether it's a complete redesign, new fixtures, go to like a fifth axis or a laying rock clock system, or simply bolt the pallets down to the table, which we tried to do that, but now they're not flat anymore because they were decked when they were clamped, like dovetailed.
00:28:00
Speaker
So yeah, we're going through a lot of that right now. Like I said, we have just some that works. So it's like, why screw with it? Because it works. Just be careful. But I would really like to redesign it. But then I think to myself, it's the same thing with putting the saga clip on the Kern. Like we have a process that works. We can make it on the Nakamura.

Efficiency with Fixture Plates

00:28:19
Speaker
It works. We can make Norseman on the Maury. It works. We don't have a stable process to make rasks. Maybe I need to focus on that right now. Right. Come 100% agree.
00:28:28
Speaker
As much as I would want to do those fun projects. That's probably also a little bit more of a finite project that somebody else could be chewing on. You deck them under a torque wrench clamp. That ought to be fairly repeatable. Yeah, fairly. You clamp it to put the hill in it, deck it off, and then it's going to turn into a lake when you loosen it, but that won't matter. A 2,000 lake doesn't matter.
00:28:56
Speaker
Yeah, as long as it's tight in the same every time. But we've since pressed pins into it. So you can't easily deck it again now. Because there's pins sticking out of the surface. Oh, you can like, yeah, right. And we've done that for little sections of the fixture, which helped with quite a few problems, actually. But at the end of the day, it's like putting lipstick on a pig. Like there's a there's a problem here. The problem is that it moves, right? You know, we need a more rigid solution. So
00:29:23
Speaker
Well, proud plug, dude, fixture plates, like this is what we do. Super inexpensive relative to the general cost of precision ground vices. And it gives you that flexibility. So people are doing this now in something that we need to do, which is a better job marketing these use cases around
00:29:43
Speaker
photos, examples, just like a PDF, you put a PDF behind like an email sign up that kind of classic, Hey, if you're interested, we'll give you a fixture and tips PDF on stuff and super inexpensive to just bolt those straight down to pallets. And that lets you control where you're bolting, how many points of constraints, a motion. Um, and then you can hot swap them, which, uh, explain your stack again.
00:30:08
Speaker
Oh, so you use probably six inch by 20 inch orange top, right? Right. The vise is bolted right to the table. Right. In this case, you basically just get rid of the vise body and you can take that same six by 20 with two, three, four, however many low profile cap screws you need and just bolt straight down to a fixture plate.
00:30:28
Speaker
We have diamond pins and we sell different, we call them top plates and many folks make their own. We sell the diamond pins so that you can locate in one, two, three more degrees of constraint for locating and clamp down. Or some people are actually just putting them in and out of mod vices, which mod vices has the benefit of giving you the ability to
00:30:49
Speaker
hold larger like plate or sheet style work because you can put vices around the part in any area you need rather than a traditional vice that just clamps for the front and the back. Okay, yeah, that makes sense.
00:31:03
Speaker
Yeah, all options are on the table. And I have actually considered how I would integrate your fixture plates into some sort of system. Whether I do go the rock lock slash laying method and put a whole mess of those on the table, maybe on one of your fixture plates would probably make the most sense. And then, because I like the concept of having individual like, say, six inch squared top pallets that can pop in.
00:31:31
Speaker
anywhere and the probe comes in and goes, oh, it's this one. I'm making Norseman blades right now. Right. Well, and so that's why we do the colored plugs is if you're switching between makeup, Norseman and foam, I know the phones are separate machine. You'd have red plugs for Norseman, pink plugs for foam. So when the operator switches fixtures, they just know, oh, the pink plugs are where we put the foam fixture. Right. That's very cool, actually. How do you make the plugs?
00:32:00
Speaker
The injection molded, we made an injection mold. Yeah. We're actually in the process of, it was a two shot, two mold cavity. And I mean, this is going to be the first product that we ever make a million of. We're ordering them at a hundred thousand at a time now. And so we're going, we just last week started the process of moving it from a two cavity to an eight cavity, which means. Or like two shots at once kind of thing.
00:32:27
Speaker
Well, I think it's, I also don't know these terms. I think a shot would be, right now one shot does two. But you're making it two plus per fixture. Yeah, exactly. So it'll do eight. So four times quicker just in the time. Sweet. And so we do obviously mostly black and then we also injection mold the colored ones. That's awesome. But you can print, you can print them as well, which is fine for low volume colored if you want something custom. Yeah.
00:32:54
Speaker
That's a great idea. And then I guess would you color code the fixture as well? That's up to you. We don't. You can use Fusion setup sheets or in Jared's case, since he just knows them, that's probably not a great method, but it's the honest answer. Yeah, the honest answer and it works and we have those answers as well.
00:33:17
Speaker
I'll tell you though, we've standardized tooling across most of the machines, not all of them, but like the A machines now, we actually, we have the VF2 kind of set up as a hybrid A so that you can post code between definitely two, if not three of those machines with no changes.

Workflow Improvements through Standardization

00:33:33
Speaker
The offsets are the same, where we store programs, the fixturing, and I know it's a cliched thing, but living it gives you a whole new perspective on how
00:33:45
Speaker
valuable it is as a shop to have standardization around streamlining changeovers, tooling, programming, setup sheets, the confidence. And we're looking at another machine to replace the Robo drill. And I think we're going to not do a DT
00:34:02
Speaker
I kind of wanted to, but the benefits were the tapping speed. But when you take a step back and we look at what's important to our workflows here, it doesn't do us any good to tap really, really, really fast if you then have a bottleneck of changeovers or setups or limitation of size. And what we realized is that probably a VF2 YT, so effectively a 30 by 20 machine,
00:34:30
Speaker
with 50 tools. Hasnell has that option because that lets us do all the tools for different product lines as well as some sister tools and much better travel for how we want to run a range of parts with no. We're switching between mod vice adjustable sides and hard jaws. We're switching over in, I want to say seconds, but very little time.
00:34:59
Speaker
That's cool. Yeah. And I guess a DT one with, with BT 30 holders and with, uh, she's different for you guys. It's 20 tools and that's just not enough. Right. Yeah, exactly. And the thought is, look, the DT twos would really shine on things like those shape Oco plates. But if we get to the point where we have a machine that is only making shape Oco plates, we'll just then buy with DT two and add it in. But the VF two YT will be more versatile now.
00:35:28
Speaker
It's logical. I like it. We also looked at it horizontal for like a hot second. I'm not there. I'm not there yet. Yeah. Yeah. What are you up to today and this week?
00:35:39
Speaker
Today, I've got a busy day. Go pick up the kids later. I've got a few parts to make on the Swiss. Just a quick mid-job. I'm making pivots right now, but I've got to stop it and make stop pins. I thought the Swiss was sold, another person in the shop.
00:35:59
Speaker
And that person was now sold to the finishing department. Oh, I buy them back. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I'm on the Swiss. But in my, as we mentioned earlier about distributing tasks and stuff that the Swiss needs to leave my plate. Yeah. So that's my, I don't know, six month plan or whatever, like, no, no, I don't have somebody right now to do it. Didn't you, I thought you had some, okay. Yeah. Got it.
00:36:29
Speaker
OK, but yeah. Yeah, so I'm playing on the Swiss today. Hopefully I can get to grind a little bit more on the Kern. The way that I ground now, I left a few thou still so I can tickle it again and try to get a better finish kind of thing. Play with more strategies, dress the wheel maybe. Too soon. I realized I don't have a hobby.
00:36:49
Speaker
And I'm okay with that. I'm totally okay with that. Like my work is my life and then my family and kids and wife. But I don't like go golfing on the weekends. I don't have.
00:36:59
Speaker
I used to have hobbies, but I don't anymore because I have work, which is awesome. But lately, I've been having a lot of fun having the Peruso 3D printer at home and do a little upgrades. And I realized, holy crap, this is my hobby now. It's fun. I go home. I still want to play with it. I'm making work stuff. It's awesome.

Exploring 3D Printing as a Hobby

00:37:18
Speaker
But modding the printer, and now I've got an endless stream of ideas like, oh, I want to build a DIY printer and bring the hobby further. But it's fun.
00:37:28
Speaker
No, that's awesome. I should say a thank you to quite a few folks that sent in some really good information on SLA printers. The best way I can think to paraphrase it is there are some really good options like the Form Labs 3, I think, but those are $3,000-ish printers and the consensus is
00:37:50
Speaker
seems to be they work great if you're using them but if you don't use it you know the the fluid or whatever they call it resin kind of needs to be put back or can develop some issues there is some i forgot this there's some finishing elements of curing it or cleaning it like washing it that you have to go through
00:38:07
Speaker
And the kind of ringer as well is that there's some design for printing aspects like you can't have a large cavity inside the part that would have uncured resin. So you have to add like bleed holes or weep holes in your part so that it falls out or drains out. I didn't know that.
00:38:25
Speaker
You know, the build quality for sure is way better. And I still think I'm still very interested and I'd like to kind of try to stay abreast of it. But to me, the answer is if I want something that's better printed, I'm just going to log on to one of the printing websites and get it sent out because too many other tweak things that are not, it's not a true force multiplier. Like right now with the Prusa, I can print something in low stress, high success.
00:38:51
Speaker
Yeah, and it becomes, as you always say, is the juice worth the squeeze? Are you going to use it enough needing that high quality? Or I'm sure you've got 42 fans out there that would print anything you want. I'm starting to leverage that heavily. Put a blast out on Instagram stories and be like, I need somebody to make this. And I'm going to double down on that.
00:39:15
Speaker
There are things that I just don't need to... I want it more than I want to make it. I'm like, okay, I will exchange money for that and support somebody to do that. I don't need to buy my own SLA printer if I want four things printed. We printed a hinge trying to figure out if a FDM hinge would work. Of course. I think that's my favorite.
00:39:38
Speaker
My favorite 3d printing moment is when I print something on the Prusa and you know, it takes three hours. I walk up to it. I look at it. I pick it up. I touch it. And I just, I'm like, okay. Yep. It worked. I just literally throw it right in the trash. Like it feels kind of wasteful, but like it has served all serve all roles. It needed to play and it is immediately done. And I move on. I love it. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you just need that proof of concept.
00:40:03
Speaker
Yeah. I'm working on a fusion video where I love that lay made like a, we made these spacers out of aluminum to stack our fixture plates. And then we realized, you know what? We need some out of Delrin because, um, it's better for how we ship or store, um, the aluminum plates, especially the unanodized, like whether they're different. And so literally I made like 400 fully automated sub spindle part off finishing. Just, just go, go, go. Yes.
00:40:34
Speaker
And then I finally scheduled, it's kind of funny, our, I don't even, oh yeah, we're like almost within the year window of our lathe training.

Lathe Tool Alignment Adjustments

00:40:41
Speaker
I only got a half day with it. I probably should have negotiated for more, but I've found that I'm bumping my why offset a few thou to get like perfect parts or avoiding tits on the part when you, when you sweep, when you face it. And so.
00:40:58
Speaker
That's some combination of the machine settling over time and me crashing it, of which the latter is much probably more significant. We realigned the turret and it is spot on. It's odd to me because the y-axis is effectively the face that the four turret blocks are mounted on, on the slant. It's odd. Why would you shift it there? That would be your
00:41:21
Speaker
That would impact the turret alignment and thus change your X, but why would the Y shift? It's like the height of the turret off of the slant bed casting. Is it the tooling too though? I've noticed different inserts have a different Y height depending on how sharp it is or what breaker geometry it has on it.
00:41:40
Speaker
Yeah, that could be part of it, but the fact that I'm on a couple of different pockets at different parts on the turret, it seems like adding this amount solves a lot of things, tells me, okay, maybe I just need to do something like re-update the center line master or something. That's what's complicated about laze. There's not that intrinsic. The only true home is the center line of your boar, and then everything's relative to that.
00:42:04
Speaker
Yeah. Including the probe location. Like maybe I just have to change the probe location offset master. You don't probe for why? The tool setting probe. Correct. Yeah. Yeah.
00:42:20
Speaker
No, but we do that too. We tweak because we can with the y-axis. Yeah, put 2,000 on y to get that tool centerline. I don't think about it. I just do it because I have learned to assume that different inserts have a tolerance range and they're consistent amongst a batch. Once you have a brand, they're pretty darn good. But if you go switching around and stuff or from
00:42:43
Speaker
I don't trust zero on a lathe. I just, I do what needs to be done. You know, even on the Swiss, it's like things move around. So I think that might be my best 2020 t-shirt idea. I don't trust zero on a lathe. Yeah. Awesome. Good stuff, man. Good stuff. I'll see you next week. All right. Take care. Have a good day. Bye.