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#239 - Week Of Programming & Dealing With Knockoffs
155 Plays3 years ago
TOPCIS:
- Saunders chats about LEX and what ERP systems cannot handle.
- Grimsmo had a week off from the shop and was able to get tons of programming done.
- Willemin is almost up and running!
- Saunders received the Shapeoko HDM.
Share the podcast! Email proof to businessofmachining@gmail.com to win a sit down chat with Saunders & Grimsmo!
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Transcript
Introduction of 'Business of Machining'
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode number 239. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. John and I have talked every week for four years about the candid stories of our love of CNC machines. You got it. Yep. It's like we can't stop doing it. Yep. And how's it going? Running hard. Yeah.
00:00:26
Speaker
It's running right now, has been for quite a while. Let me quick check the cycle time. Just because it's always curious. 13 and a half hours so far.
00:00:38
Speaker
It's just a VNC, like a remote desktop on your laptop. Yep. Yep. That's cool. So I can see the hide and hide screen and I can control it too. I can click on various things. I can't cycle start, stop, things like that, but I can look at stuff. Yeah. So it's really cool. And I can change the pilot management order program.
00:00:57
Speaker
I can schedule pallets from there, from home. That's the one that you wrote though, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. It's epic.
Running Machines Remotely
00:01:05
Speaker
Angelo, because I was gone last week, I was at home and Angelo ran it the whole week, learned a lot, ran into a bunch of challenges and hurdles and, you know, had to like figure things out. Just kind of wrap his head around the machine. It's different when somebody's there kind of holding your hand, but when you're on your own,
00:01:24
Speaker
You're like, oh, what do I do? Yep. So yeah, he had some big issues on Wednesday. We talked about it briefly on the podcast. And then I never heard from him Thursday or Friday, which was great. I didn't even VNC into the machine. I didn't check it. I was just like, you know what? If it's a big problem, he'll tell me about it. Otherwise, I don't need to know. Yeah. So it was really good. Thursday and Friday, I actually got to relax quite a bit. It took me that five days to be able to kind of pull back. Yeah.
00:01:53
Speaker
But yeah, Thursday, Friday were really nice. You stay local? Yep. Yeah, we just stayed around, stayed home, swimming the lake a whole bunch with the kids and went hiking and just hung out. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, it was beautiful.
Lex Implementation and Communication Challenges
00:02:07
Speaker
I think
00:02:09
Speaker
To the extent we focus this year on implementing Lex, which is the story of creating processes and product setup sheets and responsibilities and redoing our revamping, our fixturing and flows, and that's gone really well.
00:02:28
Speaker
In hindsight, I actually think less, which is a whole other subject to talk about if you want to talk about it. But I think we almost went too far of siloing things. And I want to start bringing that back, making sure, obviously, if you're on vacation, it's great. But when we are here talking more, communicating more, we don't do the daily meeting like I think you do. We do it as a formal weekly meeting. And I don't know what the next step is, but maybe it's
00:02:55
Speaker
Tuesday meeting as well or something else. It's so good to get everyone on the same page. Yeah, because I guess what you're saying is all of the information is within Lex, but as a team, you don't go over enough.
00:03:13
Speaker
overview stuff. It's just good. I mean, there's a social element of it for sure. Part of me is like, man, I've had my head down so much that it's, it's like, it's okay to enjoy what you do in the sense of like, Hey, like, you know, this is this is great. Like, and last Friday at lunch, they kind of talk was like, Hey, we're busy. But it's a good pace. It's like, I can't quite
00:03:38
Speaker
get to the point where I have nothing to do, so you're just like, but it's not, but it's totally a good, like, staying busy, stuff to do, stuff's moving, stuff's ordering, which is awesome.
ERP and Inventory Decisions
00:03:50
Speaker
Yeah, but like today, I think I'm overriding a
00:03:54
Speaker
quantity of one of our parts, because I think we might have a bulk order coming in. And so I was talking to Julie and then Garrett about what that means. And there's things that an ERP can't handle, like, hey, well, we're running another product right now, which we need more importantly. So it's kind of like, well, we don't need to stop that, but let's think about
00:04:15
Speaker
switching over when we can and looking at trailing sales, but then also knowing, hey, what we normally make 40 of at a time, I want to make 100 this time, but talking about why that is. I think that's fine to have that as a conversation. Absolutely. Yeah, that's the kind of stuff we will bring up in our daily meetings, whether it be inventory or what needs to be made next or issues we're having. Everybody's aware. I want to make sure that everybody
00:04:45
Speaker
realizes that everybody else in the company works hard and has challenges and struggles and otherwise you just assume that they're doing nothing. It's good to communicate those things back and forth. What do you do your meaning?
00:05:03
Speaker
12 o'clock. Okay. You do it as a lunch. Yep. Got it. How was the rest of your week? I mean, I kind of already answered it, but how was your week off? It was nice. The first half, up until the podcast we recorded, it was just awkward in my head. It was like, I should be working right now. I feel like I'm missing something. But then the second half of the, not trip, but at the time off was just, I kind of got into the groove.
Balancing Time Off with Work Engagement
00:05:33
Speaker
It's great. It was really nice. I did get to pull off a lot of small projects, computer work programs, designs that I've been putting off for so long. Just had that time at home to no stress, no nothing. Just spent a couple hours on this and still feel productive, but not pressured. That's interesting because it sounds like you didn't really take a vacation. It sounds like you did a version of days off in the shop. Yeah, kind of.
00:06:00
Speaker
I mean, I love to work, right? But there's kind of two different sides of it. There's the thinking, planning, analytical side, and then there's the physical doing stuff, being in the shop, doing all that. And sometimes it's nice to separate them. And this was a hard separation. I'm not thinking about what happens in the building, but I'm planning and programming.
00:06:21
Speaker
I wrote a bunch of programs like logic stuff that I've been putting off for a while, so the past few days here I've been testing it in the shop and figuring out what little mistakes I made in the code kind of thing.
00:06:33
Speaker
Yeah. No, that's, I mean, I whole, like wholesomely love that. It's very difficult. You know, as the 30, am I 38? I think I'm 38. 30 year old John, like, or even back in Babson, when they would talk about like, what's difficult as an entrepreneur, you can, you can hear it, but you're not listening or you're not, you're not processing. I mean, it is, it is incredible how, um,
00:07:00
Speaker
difficult it is for me to spend an hour during the day adding value, like what you're saying, like, hey, let me write a program on. We're doing it right. I've been on a post-processor role. It's awesome.
Post-Processors and Maintenance
00:07:13
Speaker
We just posted that thing on Instagram. We'll do a whole video on it of just, we had a problem. We had a couple of rogue chips on our Renishaw tip.
00:07:22
Speaker
And, uh, Ed came up with this on his own and he was like, Hey, you never want to go in with a dirty tip. So we have a little air blast routine that cleans the tip off and we have modified. I'm right now it's an NC pass through, but, uh, I'm showing a way that we can do that as not only a post processor mod, but an optional.
00:07:40
Speaker
post property so you can turn it on and off in your post settings or NC program. Sometimes you wouldn't want it. It takes a little bit of time. Where's the air blast? Many, not all the Haas machines that we have, have a solenoid air gun. That's what would be required. If you didn't buy that from Haas, I'm 99% sure you could just rig your own and hook it into one of the 110 bolt M-code relays on the machine.
00:08:12
Speaker
I feel like a table mounted air blast would be better, but I'm four seconds into thinking about this. Why? I don't know. It's consistent. It's repeatable. You just jog the probe to it through the air blast, kind of like the tool setter on the table kind of thing.
00:08:30
Speaker
That's not that idea. You would have something else that's taking up table space and or itself could accumulate chips. If you think about it, you just have an extra lock line. Your probe Z height doesn't change. True. Yeah, exactly. To each their own. Either way, you do whatever you want. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Neat.
00:08:47
Speaker
That's one of those things you don't think about, like the tip being dirty and having a grit on it or a chip or something like that. Right. I certainly think about that in the hole that I'm probing. Oh, sure. So I will often, like now in the current, I'm using a through coolant drill with an air blast to go into that hole, clear it out. Yep. Because I've definitely hit a chip there and made a bad hole or something.
00:09:13
Speaker
Yeah, we do that with a lot of our products and it's actually funny because sometimes when you clear out one hole, the chip blows into a different hole. Interesting, because you've got 6,000 holes on your plates. Yeah, it just depends on what you're trying to do, but it's funny the things you learn.
00:09:29
Speaker
Speaking of that, we had a small hole in the sheet metal on the Haas that I needed to enlarge for, we're adding one of the Royal Miscollectors to the VF3, and the machine was running, but I'm just drilling, opening up a hole with one of those triangular drill bits, you know, the stepped sheet metal drill bits on the back of the machine. And so it was running, and I was like, well, this isn't any big deal. And I drilled it out, opening up like a 32nd of an inch.
00:09:57
Speaker
And the machine, he stopped immediately. And Ed didn't know I was doing it. This is probably faux pas on my part. And it literally said, alarm spindle load vibration exceeded. And Ed heard the noise from me and saw that alarm and thought immediately that we had blown a spindle.
00:10:18
Speaker
I was like, oh,
Late-Night Machine Programming
00:10:19
Speaker
I'm really sorry. That was just that was cool. I should have just waited till it's done and definitely told him. Anyway, I just thought that was funny. Okay, so now you're thinking, where's that sensor mounted in the machine that is detecting that? Well, that's crazy. Yeah. Well, how's the weekend since you're back?
00:10:42
Speaker
Busy. I've been taking a week off. I'm working far too much. I was going to stay home Monday. I went home early to pick up the kids, but then I noticed I had made a programming mistake on the current probing routine, and it was stuck. Apparently, you can't add logic into the programming routine. I was like, you said your minimum, maximum values.
00:11:10
Speaker
On the current, I'm trying to probe a feature and I changed it to add, instead of adding like 2.5 inches for the minimum value, I added variable plus 10 thou in the probing routine. It doesn't like that. You have to define the logic outside the probing routine and then call that variable.
00:11:30
Speaker
Got it. Inside the routine. So I VNC'd into the machine Monday at 9 o'clock and I'm like, oh, I made a mistake. Okay, fine. So I'll go in and then I ended up staying till like 2 o'clock in the morning. It's insane. I don't know how you do that. It's incredible. Not because I had to, but because I got sucked into projects and all the ideas that I had over the week
00:11:52
Speaker
of being off and then I'm in the shop and nobody's here and I can just focus and you know, it was kind of amazing. But it's catching up to me. Doesn't Heidenhein have an online simulator?
00:12:06
Speaker
There is a – yes. You can run some code but it's – I've tried it. The free version is limited to like 100 lines of code which can be enough for probing but without the feedback of getting a result from probing and variables and I don't know. I haven't really played with it too much.
00:12:29
Speaker
I'm doing the post processor mod stuff I've been playing with lately. I totally now get why it would be useful to have a simulator. I don't plan to buy one, but it's silly to go try to wait for a free spindle just to play with some variable routines. And that's something I notice on the current a lot because it's almost annoying having the current run so much because I can't play and test. And I said that in our meeting yesterday, you know, Eric asks everybody, is there anything standing in your way from doing your work?
00:12:58
Speaker
And I said, yeah, the current keeps running too much. I want to play and tweak. But do that. I mean, it's running 13 hours a day, 18 hours a day. So pause it for three hours during the day. I do, typically. But it's busy. I hear you. I have a 3D printing question, mostly for the audience.
3D-Printed Auger Extensions - Seeking Advice
00:13:24
Speaker
We had made in the past some auger extensions for our Haas augers and we documented it. I've seen folks mention them and they were on our mark forged out of the reinforced carbon fiber at the time. So definitely more expensive material, but they did great. They held up for
00:13:43
Speaker
quite a while, I would guess over a year. And then they did eventually kind of wear out. So we don't have our Mark Forge anymore, but we really want to put them back in because we're looking at ways that we can improve everything here. And one of those things is improving
00:14:00
Speaker
the wash down on our Haas machines. So we've been 3D printing some inserts, testing with those. I don't have any updates yet of like shareable files, but we'll share them once we get them. But these auger extensions are really going to help. So what do you mean auger extension? Can you just give me a visual mental? So the, our VF6s, for example, have four augers that run from the back of the machine to the front. So along the way, they're just corkscrews. They're corkscrews. Yeah. They work.
00:14:26
Speaker
like an auger ship, they work quite well. I don't have any issues or criticism of that. The issue is felt the probably four inches at the back of the machine is where the auger is coupled onto the motor shaft and there's no auger on that four inch section. It's a straight shaft. And so the chips build up there and they're- And they don't do anything. They don't do anything. Yeah, you could leave them there, but it just would be nicer to have them washed out as part of the flow.
00:14:52
Speaker
So when we created this auger extension, it just kind of bolted on there and worked in green. But it's an auger, so it's kind of grinding against the ships. It needs to have some strength to it. So I looked on the online 3D printing services. It's too much money to get them printed, certainly out of metal or anything. We could machine them, but it's a little bit overkill. What I want to do is something I've always had on my mind. I want a reasonable workflow to make these stronger
00:15:19
Speaker
involving 3D printing. And the beauty of this is there isn't a high tolerance requirement, finish requirement, anything of this sort. So I'm printing one today on FDM just to get one in my hands again. But what I wanted to ask is, does anybody have any suggestions on here's the list of things I've got on my plate or option list. Number one,
00:15:39
Speaker
3D printing a mold and using that with a mold release and something like Great Stuff or the Expanding Foam. I don't think Great Stuff alone would be strong enough, but it's super easy. If that does work, there's also things like Smooth On that make it securely in different products.
00:15:55
Speaker
You could print your master, use that to create a smooth on mold, like a latex style mold, and then a different smooth on product to cast is a really- A cast plastic, dense kind of thick thing, yeah. Because if these work, we're going to want like 20 of them or something. The other option that I'm going to try is 3D printing the actual auger, then
00:16:17
Speaker
I'd love to find some sort of a coating that would be like a thin two-part epoxy. How do you coat the thing in JB Weld or dip it or dunk it? That would give it more strength from delamination and tearing apart, and it would give it more wear resistance. The other thing, which maybe would be in addition to a glue or epoxy, would be I just bought some spray truck bed liner.
00:16:44
Speaker
Okay, which honestly should work pretty well. So I also thought about trying to do the 3D print more hollow, filling it with foam or something else or smooth on to give it core strength and then coding it with Rhino lining. Anyway, it just seems like there's got to be some folks out there that have done more of this type of thing. So if anybody has any suggestions, please reach out. Hmm.
Reinforcing 3D-Printed Auger Extensions
00:17:10
Speaker
So it is shaped as an auger, like it actually moves chips, this piece you're bolting on. It does. It's hollow to fit over the coupler. The hollow ID is probably two inches, the OD is four inches, and then there's a tube wall. So think of like a cardboard, a paper towel tube, and then it just has a auger strip, like a thread, if you will, around it that's about one inch crested. Sticking up higher than the four inches.
00:17:39
Speaker
No, no, call that from three to four inches. So it's like a one inch thicker. What if you printed the whole thing solid, like a four inch tube? So it doesn't do much, but the chips can't catch there. Basically a void fill. Yeah. Yeah. That was my other, another option we're thinking about. Cause that's also then easier to protect coat fill. And then, um, you're just, yeah, exactly. You're just preventing chips from getting there. And you could probably do it pretty tight tolerance to the bottom of the, um,
00:18:09
Speaker
sheet metal. Depending on how tight you want to go, chips are going to get in there no matter what. So the tighter you go, the scratchier it's going to be, right? I don't know. That's tough to say. Might be able to get some rubber, almost like an accordion that could adhere around it that would act as a wiper just to wipe because you're not going to want a rigid plastic on metal. It's just going to wear and dry and cut.
00:18:36
Speaker
I mean, unless you think of it as a consumable item and you just FDM print them for $2 every three months. Yeah, three months is a little much. If they could last six months or a year, I'm on board for sure. We'll get it. Yeah.
00:18:52
Speaker
Or there's that, I love this, kind of invokes the maker side. The Plasti dip, you ever played with that stuff? I've never played with it, but I've always kind of wanted to. Right? It's like, ooh, that could be fun. I think, I feel good about what a truck bedliner could do. Where I have a knowledge gap is there has to be some sort of a spray
00:19:14
Speaker
hard adhesive or a way of applying epoxy across a 3D surface without having to brush it on. That's what I want. Then you wonder if epoxy is strong enough, like what's on your floors, the epoxy coating, that wouldn't last too long if it was wrapped around your auger thing.
00:19:38
Speaker
Ooh, I don't know if I agree with that. I think it would. Well, could be wrong, but I think a decent, I mean, you could just, it wouldn't look super pretty, but you could take some of the plastic style two-part epoxy that comes in the dual tubes and you could brush that onto the auger portion pretty easily. You could form a layer that's 30 thou thick, coat that with truck bed liner. I think that's got some strength and weight resistance.
00:20:06
Speaker
Sounds like a fun little project.
00:20:08
Speaker
Yeah. Also on that note, I wanted to engage with our audience. Boy, what was it two years ago that we put out a share the bomb challenge? Yeah, right, right. It's one of the things we continuously get unsolicited emails from folks saying very kind things. And look, we appreciate that. I think anybody enjoys knowing that something they're doing is helping pay it forward and so forth. So I think what we did last time, what you want to do again is
00:20:38
Speaker
Do whatever you want to do as a podcast listener, as a fan of the business of machining. Do whatever you want to do to share or promote this. That could be a review on any of the podcast platforms. It could be posting on social media, tagging it. We don't really care how you do it. Do what you want to do. But so that we can tell that you did it, email a screenshot or description or link to whatever you did to businessofmachiningatgmail.com. What's here today is
00:21:06
Speaker
This comes out on November 17th. Why don't we say on October 8th? Actually, I think I'm out that way, John. So let's talk October 15th. So about almost a month from now, we will do a random number generator and pick a winner out of that. And you want to share what we'll offer for the winner.
00:21:26
Speaker
Yeah, what we did last time was, was it a half hour? Yeah. Kind of a video chat phone call conversation with the winner and just get to hang out with us. We get to talk about whatever you want, whether it be business questions or machining or anything.
Promoting the Podcast
00:21:43
Speaker
I remember the guy that we chatted with last time was amazing. He had a small shop with two or three employees and buying machines and kind of us six years ago kind of thing. It was wonderful and he really enjoyed it and we really enjoyed it and it was cool. It'll be fun to do that again.
00:22:00
Speaker
Perfect. So businessofmachining.gmail.com, and we will review those. Actually, I'm sorry, I need to clarify. We do this on Wednesday. So we will need submissions by Wednesday the 13th before that day, and then that will get publicly announced on the 15th. Sound good? Sounds great. Awesome.
00:22:20
Speaker
Excellent.
New Machine Equipment Setup
00:22:21
Speaker
How's the Willemon? Willemon is fantastic. It has power. It has certifications. We have our drum of oil that came in two days ago. Fire Trace got installed yesterday, which was much ahead of schedule. They called and said, you know, we've got a cancellation. So our guy is like bored tomorrow. I was like, yeah, okay, perfect.
00:22:42
Speaker
Let's do this. That's fully installed now. The fire tray still has to be wired into the machine to e-stop the machine in case of a fire, but that's something we can handle. I think all we have to do right now is turn the power on and we have to install the hydraulic system. Just plumb in the two lines and put fluid in it because I'm not sure what part of the machine is hydraulic.
00:23:09
Speaker
But something is, and I'm afraid to turn on the machine without it. The collet chuck actuator probably is. Probably. Yeah, you're right. Or it could be air. No, it's probably hydraulic. And the swivel B-axis thingy, the vise that tilts 90 degrees, that's hydraulic as well.
00:23:25
Speaker
I love how little you know about this machine. I know. It's kind of weird. You're going to look back and be like, oh, I was calling it the swivel B thing. And then three months from now, you're going to have an automation post mod that does crazy stuff with it. Exactly. Yeah. So I'm at that crux right now where I want to dive in and do it all myself, but I also want to step back and let Angelo and Pierre and Steven just turn it on. I don't need to be there to turn it on.
00:23:56
Speaker
I know I have to and want to do the programming and the post and get that
Acquiring Okuma vs Haas
00:24:00
Speaker
dialed. I'm happy to do that. I really want to do that. I don't have to do anything else. I don't have to level it. I don't have to align the bar feeder. I don't have to talk to Wilhelmin to see what parts were missing. It's cool to think like that. Yeah. I wish I could be there. It's so cool. It's hard, but I have other stuff to do. It's a good challenge for my guys to do as well.
00:24:23
Speaker
I heard a unsolicited feedback from somebody who operates a similar machine to that. Many of them, he's like, they're great when they keep them running. And this is just one person's feedback. But I tend to listen when somebody has many of them and has run them for a while. It's like, if you don't run them, they tend to get fussy and throw error codes and so forth. So just take that for what it is. Interesting, yeah. Be curious to see how you get along.
00:24:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's like our old UMAX, the one that works. It likes to be left on because it doesn't like a restart. It gets fussy and it throws an error code. Yeah. It's funny. What's funny, we're getting ready for this Akuma, which we're super excited for. Even that process is so different than buying a Haas. I've never bought a Haas, but Haas does a good job of
00:25:17
Speaker
You know, look, we sell now they sell you everything it's a little bit scary I mean your vice your tooling your everything. They make you coordinate rigging at least when our region, but otherwise, it is, you don't leave the Haas world.
00:25:33
Speaker
With Okuma, the machine is in Charlotte right now. We got the higher cyclonic filtration system there. Actually, that's delayed, so they're going to deliver the machine without a chip conveyor. We'll just shovel for the first month, which is not ideal, but it's fine. We're going to have a lot to learn anyway.
00:25:56
Speaker
In the insulation PDF they sent over, I have to buy two different types of oils. No big deal. We already figured it out, but it's totally different than... For sure. Yeah. I guess the Haas would come with the two pails or it would all be the same.
00:26:16
Speaker
It doesn't even need, I'm not sure exactly why. I've definitely had that too. Like the bar loader needs a certain kind of mobile one factor of oil, whatever. And the hydraulic pump needs this and the spindle pump needs this and you have to supply these yourself. Yeah. Well, one of them we need like five gallons of. The other one, I think the guy was like a court should last you three years or something. It was kind of one of those, no big deal.
00:26:44
Speaker
But at first I was like, Oh man, do I have to get like a drum of something? Um, not, not, not too big. Yeah. The current came with almost everything. I think it came with everything. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Like fancy German kind of brands of these spindle oils and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, speaking of new machines, we, we have a new machine.
Review of Shapeoko HTM
00:27:08
Speaker
Ooh, exciting. Um, the shape local HTM.
00:27:12
Speaker
So this is very much up Vince's world. Vince just keeps crushing it on doing the work he's doing on Provencut and video stuff on the hobby machines. The HTM though, so if you know Shapeoko and you're like me, you probably think bridge or gantry style machine with belts.
00:27:32
Speaker
a noisy-ish router, wood, plastic, kind of flimsy, especially if you're coming from the Tormach or Haas VMC world. HTM is legit. Yeah. Ball screws, 15 millimeter linear guide ways, 200 inch per minute cutting speed right now, potentially more. ER20 spindle with a 1.5 kilowatt spindle that's controllable speed. It is
00:28:01
Speaker
Awesome. I'm looking at pictures right now. It is going to be a machine to contend with. Interesting. You can just feel it in the acceleration, the movement, the cuts. I don't think Vince has anything public yet, but it's going to be a good machine. That's awesome.
00:28:26
Speaker
Yeah. So is Vince doing curious, what's his role these days as part of Saunders machine works? Yep. He focuses mostly on proven cut recipes and testing out tooling the machines so forth, responding to requests. He is helping with video. Is he doing that for every machine like mill lathe?
00:28:49
Speaker
Starting on the Tormach 8L, I think we have a little bit on the ST20Y. He's done some on the Haas. We seem to be seeing more of a good flow on ProvenCut with the hobby users. It's not shocking because I think there's folks that have those machines are both more impressionable. They're more willing to say, hey, help me out. And on a Haas, or VMC, I keep saying Haas. VMC for better or worse.
00:29:16
Speaker
on a lot of free cutting materials, you can kind of run it fast, low, you know, higher in low RPM and you can get away with it. The hobby machines have a tighter band of where you can really cook. So he does that. He's been helping a lot with some video projects. So for example, we've got a tabbing workflow video. We've been making these challenge coins for a local nonprofit that look really good. Yeah, I saw the picture this morning. They look amazing. And so it's not hard, but it's a process of
00:29:46
Speaker
How do we fix to them? How do we make 130 of them? How do we fix to them? How do we engrave them? Are we doing a color fill? Are we re-facing them? We're clear-coating them, chamfering them, backside chamfering them. Once you get it down, it's not too bad, but it took some learning. Curious. That's a project that
00:30:07
Speaker
So it's for a nonprofit. So it's like a side gig kind of thing. How much of the planning and process implementation did you handle or did you give to everybody else on the team?
00:30:18
Speaker
So I mean, at full disclosure, this is my wife's new job. She's running this nonprofit. They're doing a golf outing. She's like, hey, would you be willing to help make something? I was like, what can we make? And then we agreed on challenge coins. I'm like, we can make challenge coins for sure. So I got the logo from their graphics person. I threw it into Fusion. I modeled up three different sizes. 3D printed them, showed them to her. She showed them to her.
00:30:45
Speaker
peers. They agreed on one and then I literally handed it to Vince and I said, can we do these as brass color fills? And he had a couple of questions about do we want to buy 12 by 12 squares of brass or do we want to buy strips? But otherwise Vince is running with it. That's fantastic. That's really, really cool. Yeah. So it's, I mean, he's a guy that's, I guess you're saying has the time to run with a project like that.
00:31:16
Speaker
Yeah, this one is important to me personally because I want to help my wife and it's a good cause. And it's kind of one of those things like, oh, we can do this because we can do it. But then it's like, well, how do we really make it sing is let's turn it into a video. And that's actually interesting. We've already had a couple of folks be like, hey, we want to see how you're doing this, which is great.
Challenge Coins Project for Nonprofit
00:31:35
Speaker
That's the win.
00:31:38
Speaker
And your Ed used to do this stuff. It did a great job at it. He is solely focused on Saunders stuff now production and Yeah, and growth of that side. I like it. Yeah. Yeah, it'll take over the Akuma Cool. Yeah, it's
00:31:57
Speaker
It's hard to take away from production. It's really hard to take away from production in order to do something like that to do or whether it be a time consuming improvement or something like that. Like a lot of the guys in the shop are busy, just very busy all day. And I spent a lot of my time playing on stuff like that.
00:32:20
Speaker
Rock on. I may be full of myself here. I'm trying to get to that point. I was chuckling. It's like if anybody cares about the day in the life of John Saunders, which I don't know that anybody would, but I spent probably four hours on the phone this week with FedEx looking at new shipping contracts.
00:32:43
Speaker
We're going to consider changing things up. We use them for our ground, but we're considering changing up our international and our freight. It's insane how much time that takes to learn to negotiate. If we go do it, new training on how to create stuff, the interfaces, the website, e-commerce,
00:33:05
Speaker
And that's just one of the other things on the like, when people say you get overtaken by paperwork, that's, I can't claim any sympathy because that's, you know, buckle up, that's what doing a business is. But sometimes I think, just like you were joking, like sometimes you're like, what's everybody doing? Sometimes I think people are like, what are you doing in your office, John? I'm like, I assure you, it's not that I don't want to do it because I
00:33:29
Speaker
I like doing it because it is what the business needs to do well, but man. It doesn't look productive. It doesn't feel productive. It's just time consuming and it has to happen. Yes. Yes. But I don't know if that's realistic to think like, okay, I'll eventually be able to phase out of more of that. Well, unless somebody else can do it, like between Barry and Fraser, all of those kinds of things get handled.
00:33:57
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and Julie does a great job with a lot of it. Nobody else handles new, like, hey, let's change up our process on something like a new vendor or whatever. The other thing we've learned, we've had a couple of shipping quirks that were not our fault.
00:34:18
Speaker
Meaning, we didn't say the wrong thing. It's just somebody got lost or misdelivered or delayed. I found a reminder of how wonderful it is to call the customer myself and talk them through what's happening. I forgot how helpful that can be in this day and age.
00:34:37
Speaker
The customer's value that we're calling them, we're talking to them, we're telling them honestly and directly what's happening. We care. At first, I was like, that doesn't solve the problem of the fact their shipment got lost by a freight company, but it does help a lot compared to what services like these days of
00:34:57
Speaker
you know, if you'd like an update, please call this number and you know, wait on hold. Then you can get a case number and then you can have somebody tell you what may be happening. Like no, that's been a really good, it feels good to do that. Excellent. More importantly, let's stop that from happening, which is why we're talking to a different freight company. Yeah, exactly. Do you ever find your freight?
00:35:20
Speaker
Yes. No way. Well, not no. Yeah. So weird situation. But UPS basically lost a third of our shipment because they repackaged it or something weird. Anyway, so Barry was able to get them to reimburse us for the value of that shipment. Wow. Yeah. And he worked very hard and spent hours and hours on the phone like you did and just told us yesterday. He's like, yeah, got they paid up.
00:35:51
Speaker
That is surprising. Yes. If you asked me if we quote unquote ensured our freight, the answer is no, because it doesn't. We didn't either. Yeah, I'm surprised. Maybe there was some
00:36:06
Speaker
Like they didn't lose it. They were actually at fault for like literally trying to like repackage it. Maybe that's a level of some faux pas on their part. They're like, yeah, we screwed up. Um, maybe, but, but Barry is a force of nature. So don't get in his way. Good for you. That's great.
00:36:25
Speaker
Well, that was like the call with my FedEx rep. Um, I just asked her more about her background and she was like, look, I've been with FedEx for 22 years. That alone is a big difference from, um, the laundry list of folks we've had from our other company. Um, so continuity of, of tenure on a relationship is huge, I think. Yeah. Yeah.
00:36:49
Speaker
Hey, totally random change of subject.
Dealing with Knockoff Norseman Knives
00:36:53
Speaker
You mentioned something a while back offline about knockoffs. Do you want to talk about that? I guess. I don't talk about it. But yeah, a couple of years ago, a random company in China made knockoff Norseman knives and rasks and started selling them on eBay.
00:37:18
Speaker
unless you really know what you're looking at, they look pretty much the same. Really? Yeah. Like the same reverse honeycomb pattern, the same in gray, our logo, all over it, our serial number, except they were all 936 or something. They just made tons of them. Oh, that's hilarious. Very similar font style, if not almost the exact same, you know, placement, everything. All the screws were a little cheaper, not nearly as nice as ours, but like they got to save money somewhere.
00:37:47
Speaker
But I'm looking like I have one because a customer bought it unsuspectingly and paid way too much for it and then reached out and said, everybody's telling me this is fake. Can you confirm? So anyway, I struck a deal with the guy and I was like, yeah, I should probably have that just so I have it so I know. So I've had it for a couple of years.
00:38:12
Speaker
And I picked it up yesterday because we were chatting about it at our WhatsApp chat. And I was like, man, I haven't felt this thing for like a year. And it feels like garbage compared to our normal ones. So there was no, I guess this is a naive question, but they weren't admitting in any way that it was not yours. They were literally just representing it as a Norseman. They might not have used the word grimsmo in their text, although it's on the knife. Yeah.
00:38:39
Speaker
But yeah, they were selling them for $330, I think, so a third of what we charge.
00:38:46
Speaker
and people were buying them. I doubt they sold hundreds. I don't know how many they sold, but still, they're out there and that kind of sucks. And there's a couple of rasks too. I've seen some pictures. And then eventually the company stopped using our logo and kind of tweaked it to their own version of our logo. The knife shape stays the same, but it's actually engraved on the inside proudly made in Canada, exactly like ours are. Hilarious. Have you ever knowingly shipped a knife to China?
00:39:17
Speaker
Yes, but not a lot. Like a dozen over the 6,000 we've made. I don't know. Not a lot. Yeah. Oh, man. Well, look, as your friend, I'll tell you, it can be really tough to see that period. That can hit you in the feels.
00:39:39
Speaker
Yeah, I've gone through different emotions over the years. Before it happened, it happened to other people in the knife industry. And everybody's like, oh, that means you've made it. They see you as a threat. So they're trying to take from your success. So that's actually a good thing. And when it actually hits you personally, sometimes you feel like that. And sometimes you feel like, screw these guys. How dare they? Yes.
00:40:05
Speaker
When our customers would see the eBay listings, I got DMS and emails constantly. They're like, have you seen this yet? What are you going to do? I've got, um, you know, my uncle is a lawyer in Beijing and you know, he can hook you up. And I was like, I don't care. It's, I'm not going to fight this. I don't care. It's not, it doesn't matter to me. Um, it's not worth my energy, you know?
00:40:30
Speaker
That's it. It's not that you don't care. It's just, it's not, there's no path to like squashing this. Right. And like Torx head screws, like anodize everything. Yeah. I think the screws are stainless. Um, they're, I forget hex head, maybe what Torx had. They're just not as nice. Um, but they're very similar, very, very similar. Man.
00:40:53
Speaker
And you go through and you look at the detail and I'm actually kind of impressed by quite a bit of it. Like the machining and it's not bad. It's obviously not the 10 years of dedication that we've put into this one product. But yeah, if I squint, I'm kind of impressed by a lot of it. Yeah. That's tough. You said they got, they kind of stopped, but they just changed. It changed enough of the things that it's clearly not yours now. Let me Google.
00:41:24
Speaker
Hilberg knives is what they call it. Oh, don't say it. Don't tell it. Don't feed the troll. Doesn't matter. While you're looking at your share, I remember. First Google results. HilbergKnives.com, not Grimsmo. Hilberg Norseman M390 blade titanium, $275. Ship from USA, not Grimsmo. It's so funny. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.
00:41:51
Speaker
China knocked us off on the strike mark Picatinny bounce 10 years ago, which those things are not Norseman. Those things were one piece of machine aluminum, not difficult to do. I put you alone in a room for a day and you'd have them made from scratch. Same reactions at first, you're like, oh, wow, we're popular enough. Then you start realizing this is a real... For us, then it was a real issue because we didn't really have a point of differentiation like you do over
00:42:17
Speaker
over everything and there are some legal things you could kind of pursue with trademark and utility, excuse me, design patents and naming, but like it's what I think is still wonderfully hilarious is to this day, if you go on eBay and you look up GoPro Picatinny mounts, not all, but many of the mounts are my exact Alibre design, like the way I radius the
Experience with Knockoff Picatinny Mounts
00:42:39
Speaker
rate reducing pockets and many of the pictures are my personal firearms.
00:42:45
Speaker
Like the pictures I took back in my New York basement, when ARs were legal in New York, of these on a white cardboard background with a specific muzzle brake, like it will forever be floating around for folks to make these mounts. Yeah, you just know that's my picture. Like I took that picture. I still have the gun in my house. It's just kind of funny. Up there with one of those things. Nobody else cares, but it's just one that you've got to chuckle. Yeah.
00:43:16
Speaker
What do you do this week? Well, my gut says get that Wilhelmin started, but that means do I do some of the work or do I get my busy guys to get busier? I don't know yet, but I want to see it. I want to turn it on. I want to see that thing. I've got parts to make. Only I would say if you're looking for unsolicited advice is
00:43:42
Speaker
Front mode. This is going to sound way analytical. Turn it on to make sure you don't need to order a part because then if you need to order something, you can wait three days for it. Yeah. The sooner we can do that, because I know we're missing something. We need to call it for the spindle. We're missing some piece that goes between the spindle and the bar loader. I don't know what's supposed to go there, but clearly there's an empty spot that something goes there. Don't make it buy it. No, of course. Yeah, you're right.
00:44:07
Speaker
But I guess this is, I've been meaning to get on like a video chat with one of the Willman service guys and just walk around and be like, this, this, what goes here? And you know, what am I missing? And how does this plug in and things like that? Yeah. Yeah. Have fun with it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good. I'll see you next week. All right, man. Take care. Take care.