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#232 - Business and Product Nomenclature, Willemin Oil VS. Coolant, and More
179 Plays4 years ago
TOPICS:
- Naming Products and Businesses
- Willemin Update: Oil or Coolant? While the machine can run both, after a 17- year run with oil, the experts advise Grimsmo not to change. Fire suppression is a must!
- CHANGE THAT WHEEL! Grimsmo creates an alert for the KERN.
- CNC ALARM: Tool Radius Too Large & Cutter Compensatio
- Fusion 360 View Toolpath, Show Points, and Smoothing
- Rodico Putty - Green > Blue?
- Machine Tool Weldments VS. Castings
- Resonance VS. Dampening by Spencer Webb
- Tornos: Cracked Guide Bushing
- Communication for Small Businesses
- Liquid Nitrogen Generator?
- Shipping & Freight (we assure you, there's nothing too large for a freight carrier to lose).
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Business of Machining Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining, Episode 232. My name is John Grimsmough. And my name is John Saunders. And this, being the Business of Machining, is the podcast where John and I talk every week, every Friday about manufacturing and business and everything that's going on. Kerns, Willemins,
00:00:20
Speaker
Yes. And 5ax is everything, all of the things. We have the best podcast name. Yes. Yes. The business of machining. I remember coming up with, I think you finally came up with that one and it was like, yeah, it just makes sense. And I'm like, yeah, go, done. Don't overthink it.
00:00:41
Speaker
And like any name, there's a peculiarness, an unfamiliarity at first that doesn't necessarily sound right. And for me, and I've named a lot of businesses and products and stuff, and I will never forget the band Smashing Pumpkins.
00:00:58
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. If you say destroying fruit or some analogy of each one of those words or synonyms of those words, it sounds quite strange, but you and anyone who lived in the 90s won't think a thing about the name Smashing Pumpkins. In fact, you don't even visualize the Smashing Pumpkin, I'm guessing.
00:01:17
Speaker
Well, if anybody at Halloween says the word, I'm smashing a pumpkin, you think of the song, the band. No one can't leave the event. No, right.
Challenges in Naming Products and Businesses
00:01:27
Speaker
Strike Mark, the first real company we started was the hardest one because it was a little bit of a trickier or more saturated space. There's so many buzzwords and keywords and overused words in the shooting sports and the tactical world, even back then.
00:01:45
Speaker
And I'm very particular on how a name sounds, how it rolls off the tongue, how it's spelled for a domain name, how it's searchable, how it looks on an embroidered shirt, and most importantly, the number of syllables. Strike, mark, two syllables, right? Proven cut. Proven cut was
00:02:06
Speaker
Also tricky, but as soon as I saw it, it's just perfect. There's no question afterwards, but yes, there is an awkwardness to naming everything from your kids to a product to everything. You're like, you say it a whole bunch of times. You're like, it just doesn't feel right. Like when we named the Norseman, my wife came up with that name. It made sense. It just kind of like, I like that. It suits our Viking heritage. Everything works. When we named the Rask, we worked really hard to like,
00:02:37
Speaker
come up with that name and we didn't like it for the longest time until it got comfortable. Interesting. It's an old Norse word that means fast or quick. I'm like, yeah, that works. You Google Nordic words and ancient texts and all this stuff and you try to come up with a cool name. But now it's been around long enough that it is what it is. You don't question it, it just is.
00:03:06
Speaker
but when you're in the beginning of a naming something, there's so much second guessing and so much doubt and yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know if you did this consciously or not, but saga, rask, Norseman, they're all one or two syllables, short and sweet. That was not conscious, but yeah, that's cool. That does work. And yeah, saga, I mean, writing a saga, an ancient Nordic story,
00:03:33
Speaker
Oh, is that true? Is it also a Nordic derivation? It's like storytelling. I know the word saga is like the Disney movie told a saga of whatever. So a pen will write that. It just all worked. It made sense. I can't come up with another pen because I can't come up with another name. Yes, you can. But yeah. Good.
The Willemin Machine: Oil vs. Coolant
00:03:59
Speaker
How's the Wilhelmin? Good. Not too much progress since last week, but I'm glad that it's situated in there. A bunch of back and forth with the Wilhelmin technicians and apps guys and just getting our feet wet with what it needs and what we need to do and what's next and stuff. I want to run coolant in it, but they're telling me not to.
00:04:23
Speaker
Because it's lived a life of 17 years of running oil. And they said, look, it's your machine. You can do whatever you want. But you might run into like seal failures and rusting and things like that from a machine that has been happy with oil. And then you're introducing a water-based, rustable solution that's thinner than the oil. And it could get into places that the oil wouldn't normally get. And I was like, dang, you guys are right. Probably should just stick with oil.
00:04:54
Speaker
You don't like oil because it clings to your small parts? Not just that. It's just sticky and gross and I'd rather use coolant, but because the parts are small coming off that machine and
00:05:06
Speaker
It'll be fine. And, and fire suppression too, because we've cut titanium and stuff, which is a flammable thing. Um, cost us 10 grand to put fire suppression on the tornos. Yeah. And I've been trying to avoid doing that on another machine, you know? Um, with coolant, you don't need to do that, but. It cut titanium in his former life, but no spire suppression. Correct. As far as I know. Um,
00:05:34
Speaker
I saw that post of you found a chip. It's absolutely awesome. Oh yeah, there's chips everywhere. It mimicked your style of cutting. Yep. I think it's titanium. It's not magnetic, so I don't know. Hard to tell exactly, but put it on a grinder. See if it goes white. That tiny little chip. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, it'd probably go with oil, probably
00:06:01
Speaker
figure out fire suppression again and just do it and move on from there.
00:06:07
Speaker
That's it, exactly. You've got a phenomenal opportunity to have this relationship with these experts. Don't waste time debating something. They're probably right. It's going to take you a lot longer to come to that realization, so don't just oil, move on, fire expression, move on next. Yeah. You can debate it all you want, but all the stars are pointing to that right now, so stop thinking about it and just move on. Yeah.
00:06:36
Speaker
Otherwise, we'll get the electrician in, I think he's coming in this week or early next week to kind of power it up and then we can start her up and see what, I don't know, jog it. There are axis brackets in the back, two of them.
00:06:53
Speaker
you know, like shipping brackets. Obviously those have to come off. When we cracked open the back cabinet, you think it'll be the electrical cabinet, but it's not. It's the rear of the machine, like where all the servos and ball screws and everything are. Like you can see the column of the Z axis and everything. And then there's another electrical cabinet on the side of that.
00:07:15
Speaker
But yeah, we see these two bright yellow, orange, like little brackets. I'm like, are those shipping brackets? Those probably are shipping brackets. Okay. Yeah. Obviously those have to come off. That's actually solid that they had them. Yep. Yep. So when we take them off, we're going to, I don't know, zip tie them inside the enclosure or somewhere like obvious, just, just because they need to be around, you know, not in a box hidden somewhere far away, especially because they're so small and tiny.
00:07:45
Speaker
Oh, that's funny. Yeah. Um, so will you, um, I wasn't going to ask you, haven't powered it
Exploring the Willemin 408 S2 Model
00:07:51
Speaker
on. What have you been talking back and forth with the service tax on? If it's a cool, that's one thing. Um, getting a quote on replacement windows for everything, just for fun and just, uh, what else?
00:08:02
Speaker
I don't know, not too much else I guess. They gave us the manual for the machine which is awesome. I mean obviously they have that but it's kind of still cool that they have that for a 2004 machine. So going through that, figuring out what tool holders we still need to buy.
00:08:19
Speaker
It's about it, really. So far. I was going to ask, you have a 408 MT? Yes. Okay. So it's the MT is mill turning. It basically has the turning ability that a 408B doesn't have. Right. Yeah. The B model is what? Milling only? It doesn't do turning, I think. Yeah, I think that's right. For some reason. And then somebody on Instagram DM me and said, oh yeah, we've got a 408 S2.
00:08:43
Speaker
And I was like, whoa, whoa, what's an S2? What does that mean? It's got a, it's like a fourth axis, but vertical on the bottom. So where the vice would normally be, it's like a spinny table as well. And I think it was all kinds of weird stuff. I didn't quite wrap my head around it, but it was the same, but different, you know, like she still comes up to do the pick. I think so. But I think it was an actual spinny spindle. I wonder why you would want
00:09:09
Speaker
Because I know the 508 machine, the bigger machine has like where the vise comes up and grabs, it can rotate another 90 degrees and there's a spindle and then another 90 degrees and there's a whole other attachment or something. It's got more crazy stuff.
00:09:29
Speaker
The jaws, is there a name for the arm or the vice or that sub coordinate? I don't know. Well, we'll call it the vice. What are the jaw interfaces? Can you just make your own soft jaws or inserts or whatever? It's like a slotted two bolts.
00:09:47
Speaker
So the slot's located and the two bolts hold it down. So I think it's cakewalk and you could tell they made the ones that are on there. And I think CJ sent me the CAD model for his. So yeah, you just make your own. If you buy a new 408 MT, do you know, is it kind of like that's just what you get or is there four, 10 different options for that? I don't know. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, obviously make your own jaws.
00:10:14
Speaker
and it's a hydraulic device, so it's fairly integrated into the machine. Yes. Right. But maybe there are options. Oh, that's cool. I'm not sure. What if you can control the clamping pressure with an M code or just a valve? With a valve in the back. Yeah, there's these stickers that says, do not touch on where the adjusting valves are. Why wouldn't you want to touch it? Not Wilhelmin stickers, like previous owner stickers. Oh, got it. OK, that's fine. Like at the shop kind of thing. Got it.
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, in some of the things that I've been hearing and learning that are really checking the boxes are on the higher end machine tools are things like adjustable, like programmable pressures on clamping stuff, but then also even on the higher end through spindle coolant devices where you can control
00:11:05
Speaker
variable flow and variable psi. Flow and psi? Because on the current I can do whatever psi I want based on per tool. So that's cool.
00:11:18
Speaker
Yeah, but like if you have a really small orifice and you want the high PSI, you don't necessarily always need or want the flow rate. You're going to create, I think a lot more heat and back pressure. Um, but in, in, I actually should go revisit that section. It was in the area four one nine video that I first saw it. And then I've kind of had a couple of other snippets where I've learned and heard about it since I think it's, I think it's a chip blaster that they had, but I could be wrong, but, um, it was like, okay, yes, it's that, it's that next step up, but totally, totally makes sense. Yeah, super cool.
00:11:48
Speaker
Yeah.
Custom Warning Messages on the Kern Machine
00:11:49
Speaker
Awesome. Yeah. How's the current? Excellent. A couple weeks ago, I posted a thing on Instagram that showed a warning message that I custom made. When my grinding wheel gets from one inch down to 0.46 radius, when it gets smaller than that, it tends to bump into a clamp.
00:12:15
Speaker
because the arbor actually hits a little clamp. I can't go smaller than 0.46 radius. I create a warning message that at 4.7, it pops up a little temporary warning while it's machining and it just says, hey, your radius is currently this. You should replace that grinding wheel real soon.
00:12:35
Speaker
And so I was like, sweet, it worked. And then I ignored the message and then I didn't replace the grinding wheel. So last night it alarmed out because it actually hit the hard limit of 460. It was like two tenths under is what it measured at.
00:12:54
Speaker
Which is good. It's good that it stopped. It was kind of bummed that it did stop. Also bummed that I hadn't replaced it. I cleared the warning and then it never came back. Why can't you just mark the tools expired so it won't even- Because I want to continue machining at the warning. I see. It's more like an operator.
00:13:12
Speaker
thing. So I re texted the warning message to say, look, put a sticky note on the door right now on the window that says, you know, in the next couple of days, you got to replace this tool. You have five days to do it or something. Um,
00:13:26
Speaker
You have extra pockets, just build a sister tool. That is true. Done. Yeah, I should absolutely do that. It's the two toilet papers. The arbor is customized right now, so I only have the one arbor, and I actually want to redesign it completely so it doesn't bump the clamp kind of thing. But yeah, in that scenario, I should have two tools. You're right.
00:13:47
Speaker
But otherwise, it's working phenomenally. Can you... Go ahead. No, you finished. I was a changed subject. I was too. Well, I'm going to throw my question out. You can choose to field it or ignore it. Can you explain what you were talking about a few weeks back with the CutterComp arc error? I think we were talking about that on WhatsApp, right? Correct. So every now and then on the Kern, I'll use CutterComp a lot, CutterCompensation.
00:14:17
Speaker
So it uses the tool's actual diameter to finish the profile or the hole or whatever. It makes it much easier to hit that exact tolerance you want. Every now and then, the current will say, tool radius too small, too big, tool radius too big to fit this arc.
00:14:34
Speaker
Yeah, the air that everybody gets. Yeah, I get it on my FANUC machines. I get it on the Heinlein, you've gotten it. Sometimes I've traced it back to be like, oh, for some reason the tool probed bigger than it actually is. There's a piece of dust on it or something. I've definitely had that before.
00:14:49
Speaker
And then sometimes I go through the cam, and you have your minimum corner radius, and you look at that. And sometimes it makes sense. You're like, oh, wow. Yeah, this adds up to be wrong. But in this particular scenario that you're talking about, what was it? Fusion was adding a weird little line due to my tolerance settings and my smoothing settings and everything that was like a nothing radius. So it didn't fit.
00:15:18
Speaker
Yeah. And that's why I wanted to bring this stuff back up because it looked like there were a couple of good takeaways. If I can sort of summarize it, you had a shape that was a, what would you call it? Shape, not a nerdle, but like a slot along a curve. Yeah. It's an arced slot. Thank you. And you would think, well,
00:15:43
Speaker
As a layman, you would think that that's just a series of arcs, but the way tessellation works and CAM works is it will convert subject to your arc filtering or smoothing tonics. It'll convert that into straight lines or, but it's only straight lines, right? It doesn't do a mix of lines and arcs. Is that correct? Sometimes it does. Okay. Yeah, for sure. And it looked like that was one of those micro radii was doing that. It was doing a lead-in on that point or something, and that was what was violating it. Yep. Yep.
00:16:13
Speaker
And bumping my tolerance up by like a couple of millions or something fixed it. When you say bumping it up, you mean making it a cruder or a looser tolerance? Yes. Yeah. This is a 2D contour, so you're in the actual smoothing setting? Yes. Or it should be tolerance setting at the top. Tolerance. Oh, okay.
00:16:35
Speaker
And I think turning smoothing on would probably fix that as well, because it would smooth and give you arcs and lines at a greater step. But I've definitely I've had this for years, even on the Maury. And sometimes it's just you play it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth until it goes away.
00:16:54
Speaker
Well, I don't like it because, like you said, sometimes you have a proven process and then all of a sudden seemingly out of nowhere this creeps in, which is below me. When that's happened to me, like on a code that I haven't changed in weeks or months and it just happens, the tool measured bigger than it was. If it's an 8-inch tool and it measures 0625 normally or less, usually less, I look at the radius and it's like 0625.
00:17:22
Speaker
3.0 or 0627, bigger for whatever reason, even with the bloom laser on the current. I'm not wondering. You could do something that basically every time the tool measures over, it's nominal and throw a flag and say, hey, clean tool, or actually program a routine that brings the tool down to, doesn't the laser have an air blast? It does have an air blast. So I've gotten into the habit of using the Rodico putty.
00:17:51
Speaker
the goop to like touch the flutes and make sure there's no dust or oil or anything on. That's a human intervention process. As I replace the tool, it usually happens on new tools, like not on old established tools that are in the machine. But yeah, you can imagine if you had a piece of human skin or a booger, you know, on the thing, especially with the laser, it's going to, it might hit it, you know?
00:18:20
Speaker
We just use poster putty. I don't know what Rodex is. Rodeco is the watchmaking.
00:18:27
Speaker
It's green and the blue poster stuff works great too but the cool thing with the Rodico is it actually absorbs oil whereas the blue stuff does not. I've got them both and I use them both but I'm really, really liking the green stuff better. How do you spell that? R-O-D-I-C-O, Rodico. I'm sure you can buy it on Amazon for cheap. I've just come to the conclusion that it belongs in a machine shop and the blue putty is fine but this is just better.
00:18:56
Speaker
I didn't know there was a better. I know, right? I didn't know that either. I thought they were the same. I used to use them interchangeably until somebody was like, Oh, you can't, you know, you can't call them the same. They're much different, but so what was the thing that you were doing in fusion?
Troubleshooting Fusion 360 Toolpath Errors
00:19:11
Speaker
So that's the other thing I really dislike about this air is it, I feel like it's one of the few recurring errors with cutter comp where, um, you, you get a pretty hard, hard stop, like a issue at the control that you never will see in fusion.
00:19:25
Speaker
Well, and the machine, especially the current, the spindle turns off, but the cooling keeps spraying. So you look over at the machine, you're like, oh, it's still running. It's still running 30 minutes later. Oh, it hasn't moved. I should go look at that. Yeah.
00:19:42
Speaker
You can do a thing that I don't know that is well known in Fusion where you simulate the toolpath bringing up the points and you can look by point the line of code. Is that right? Yeah. That's what I ended up doing. You go view toolpath. You right click on the toolpath. You go view toolpath and it shows every line of code that is going to be posted. It doesn't go through your post processor yet, but that's what Fusion will post.
00:20:12
Speaker
Lawrence was asking, oh, what's the radius of this line? And I was like, it doesn't show. And he's like, yeah, look at the bottom of the screen. There's a little tool dialogue. And I was like, oh, I didn't know that. I didn't see all that. So it shows x, y, z radius, lead in, lead out, some basic line parameters. And looking through that made it clear where the error was and what it was actually doing. Yeah. That's awesome. And sometimes, man, you bang your head against the computer trying to figure this stuff out.
00:20:43
Speaker
You dig deeper and deeper and then you look at this and then it makes sense. That's the thing with CNC is everything should make sense. It's all logical, it's all math or process or tool pressure or whatever. A lot of times we're not smart enough to understand what it is. Why does this tool keep breaking? Well, it could be 52 things and I'm a new machinist so I only know three of those things. Yeah.
00:21:12
Speaker
I love those discovering those resources. I think that view toolpath and scrolling through the points and lines of code should be mandatory for everybody who has had 365 days of camp under their belt.
00:21:27
Speaker
before it, you know, but afterwards, like, now you start to see it's deeper. Yep. Yeah. And you can start doing compare, duplicate the toolpath, change the tolerance or change the arc filtering and look at the differences between the two. Well, it's the same thing, especially for a 3d toolpath or any contour that you want to look beautiful. Um, in your simulation dialogue use show points. Yes. Right. Because that shows you what each arc line straight section is going to do. And
00:21:53
Speaker
Man, I've had faceting on the outside of my parts, and then you hit show points, and you're like, that's the same. It's identical. It's fascinating at every point. That's not the end of the story though, because that's just what gets dumped into your machine control. On the Haas, it's G187. Is it 68.2? I forget. Yeah, or is it five or eight or something?
00:22:15
Speaker
And like Heidenhine I'm told loves all the points you can get and it will filter them and smooth them itself. Yeah, they have their own cycle. I can't remember what it's called. But yeah, it's some smoothing thing. Yeah, I know. Yeah.
00:22:31
Speaker
Well, three years ago, I'm going to guess, four fusion broadness was doing these like Friday lunch webinars. They were actually great. I don't know if they lasted for like six months and Lockwood did one of them where he put up that triangle of like when you're looking at a high-end machine tool, there's a triangle of three options and one of the triangles is speed. The other one is accuracy and the other one is service finish. Like your Venn diagram of? Yeah.
00:22:56
Speaker
And it's a trade-off between all of them and at the risk of making an assumption, a lot of folks think that they want accuracy, but really accuracy means you're hitting every datum, every point, and really what most people want is actually surface finish, which means you may be making minor tenths or millionths of an inch tool pipe variations, but it's giving you the aesthetic of a smoother or flowy thing. Yep. I love learning these things.
00:23:25
Speaker
Speaking of machine tools, I have an email to share.
Understanding Resonance and Dampening in Materials
00:23:30
Speaker
This is excellent. Remember when we were talking last week about weldments versus castings for building machine tools? Yes. And the kind of question of what's better? Why is cast iron good? How has that changed over the years? Spencer Webb, who's a solid guy, emailed in and said, listening to the bomb triggered this.
00:23:53
Speaker
Resonance is when a system, aka a thing, absorbs energy at a specific frequency, whereas dampening is that loss of energy per unit time associated with the resonance. So if you ring a bell, the bell has resonance, meaning it's absorbing energy, but it has low dampening because it rings for a long time.
00:24:15
Speaker
If you're wearing a beer bottle, it has a resonance, you hear the ring, but high dampening doesn't last for very long. If you push a table that is on really well-designed, smooth urethane casters, there's no resonance, you don't hear anything, and there's low dampening because it keeps rolling. But if you, he said poke a jut, if you poke a dog, no resonance, it doesn't, he may just be joking here, high dampening.
00:24:41
Speaker
Resonance is energy changing between Connecticut and Peninsula back. It's a pendulum. Dampening is energy dissipating. Steel bar has low dampening. It doesn't do a great job. It's like a bell. It's going to ring for a long time. Cast iron is high dampening. It's good at not ringing for a long time. Then the resonance though depends on the shape.
00:25:05
Speaker
You can have so much dampening that the resonance is not measurable and that pushes into the world of epoxy or sand.
00:25:15
Speaker
That helps. That makes a lot of sense. Right? So my question is, OK, so when we, as society, started thinking about the ability to do weldments, which I got to think, cast iron still feels like a very old industry that is just old, for better or worse. It's so active. But I think weldments with the advent of more modern things like, well, not super modern, but CNC plasmas and more
00:25:44
Speaker
There used to be 100 years ago that there were a relatively small number of big, big, big manufacturers. Whereas now you've got lots of nimble manufacturing that's using technology that's trying to come up with stuff. All that kind of speaks towards pushing toward weldments. I guess I'm curious if
00:26:01
Speaker
You've got these abilities with the different materials. How does that reconcile with our modern software to do, I don't know if it's finite element analysis, but similar kind of math to look at how gussets or mixed materials or granite can help make a weldment equal or better. Yeah.
00:26:20
Speaker
load simulation, but for resonance and dampening based on material properties and shape and all that. There might even be software out there that does that. When you build a skyscraper, which is weldments and bolted things and all that, and a bridge, they're meant to wobble in the bridge and have resonance. I think Veritasium on YouTube post this video, I think it was him, of this bridge in London.
00:26:46
Speaker
that they made in the 2000s or something. The wibbly wobbly bridge? The wibbly wobbly bridge, right? Yeah. So everybody gets on it on the first day and it starts shaking out of control and throwing people around and stuff and then they closed it until they fixed it and they got that wrong. I think it's not me if I talked about this with pretensioning concrete.
00:27:13
Speaker
You mentioned it. Yeah. Upwork guy. Yeah. So that's going great. We've got our drawings in and I got a little contractor, but I've been watching YouTube videos and it's interesting about how concrete needs rebar, but the kind of drawback is the rebar doesn't do its job until the concrete starts to flex. Really? And that's when the rebar. That makes sense.
00:27:34
Speaker
wake up and say, oh, okay, you're flexing. I'm here to stabilize you. That's not good because once the concrete starts to flex, it doesn't handle, let's say it handles compression well, but not tension or lateral. I can't think of the word. Once it starts to flex, you're toeing the line between, I'm going to fail right now. Well, or you start to crack. Even if it's minor cracking, that can allow water in and not a good subject right now, given what just happened in Florida with that building.
00:28:02
Speaker
It's interesting. There were two sort of takeaways on this, like very pedestrian explanation on YouTube. One is pretension concrete, which I think I've heard in passing over the years. And what that means is you actually stretch the rebar by putting threaded fasteners on the ends of it as you cast or pour the concrete. And then you take the fasteners off and thus the rebars already tension state.
00:28:29
Speaker
That cool? Okay, that makes more sense. That's how they do those crazy bridge sections that you want to be kind of good in their steady state, not wait till they get stressed out. Sure. Added. Or this really cool thing where they can start pouring in, I think I mentioned this, but they can start pouring in like fibers. It almost looks like the glass things that act as minor binders that help handle the minor stuff before the rebar would really be. You're making a carbon fiber concrete.
00:28:59
Speaker
Yeah, right? Yeah. So it's fun to learn. That's awesome. So speaking of stresses, we found out this morning as I came in, we were making pen tips yesterday at a copper, which is like a soft material.
Addressing Manufacturing Defects: Cracked Carbide Pad
00:29:17
Speaker
And all of the tips that were made yesterday have a scratch pattern in them.
00:29:22
Speaker
And so our finishing guys brought them over and we're like, I'm trying to get through these, like polish through them, but they're, you know, they're not fun. Is there a way to avoid this in the future? So we dig into it, we dig into it. It turns out our guide bushing, the carbide pad in the guide bushing is cracked. And it's the only one we have, of course. And it's from Switzerland.
00:29:43
Speaker
Yeah, right? Why did it crack? Yeah, so we were surprised and impressed that it cracked, and so Pierre has been running the Swiss forever now, and he was thinking, he was thinking, and he's like, man, I did bump the Swiss a couple weeks or a month or two ago, and it might have been that.
00:30:03
Speaker
It might have been that act of the bump caused that to crack and we didn't notice until this part came up and until this material and this perfect combination. It still functions, but it's not ideal and it's imparting scratches and things into it.
00:30:20
Speaker
Obviously, I'm going to buy like three more, not just one more. What's ballpark on a? Like a hundred bucks or something. It's not terrible. Are these diameter specific? Yes, they are. So it's a 375. And you can get them a hair bigger or hair smaller. I don't know what their range actually is, but if it's more than a thou, I'd be surprised. You know what I mean? But yeah, we put ground bar suck into it.
00:30:49
Speaker
But all we have really is we have quarter, three, eighths and a half, and we run everything from those three collets and those three bar sizes. Um, so I'm just going to make sure we have spares on the shelf because, duh. Sure. You know, first of all, this is okay. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, everything's fine. But this also introduces more run out into the guide, bushing, concentricity, because now one pad is lifted. Um,
00:31:16
Speaker
You can physically see the crack. Yes. Yeah. Under the microscope. You have to look inside the board. You can physically see the cracks. If the answer is under the microscope, no, you cannot see it. You can see it with your eye. Yeah. But only if you're looking for it and we haven't been looking for it until this problem came up.
00:31:32
Speaker
And then you put it under the microscope and you're like, dude, there's copper in this crack. Like, yes, it's scraping. Yeah, it was really cool. Maybe I'll get a picture of it. Although Pierre said he's going to try to barrel lap it with diamond lapping paste. Just see what we can do. Get by until the new one comes in.
00:31:52
Speaker
But yeah, the part we're making is the tip for the saga pen, which is from 375 bar and we're turning it to 375 pretty much. So we're trying to scrape the outside, but with the run out and with the scratches in it, it's not getting through at all.
00:32:09
Speaker
Well, because in theory, the scratch is downstream. So if you turn the OD down, that would be irrelevant minus whatever runout issues it produces. Exactly. But since we're trying to turn basically on size, or like half a thou under or something, there's no room for error. Right. And here's the error.
00:32:24
Speaker
So it's like at first, this was a good exercise in kind of human nature too, because our finishing guy Dave was like, oh, it's really frustrating. I wish they could just make better parts. And then he brings them over and we're like, yeah, it would be nice to make better parts, but sometimes you just gotta, sometimes it's tricky. And then we dig deeper, deeper, deeper and like, oh, there's an actual problem. It's like, this is frustrating and then good and still frustrating, but we have solutions now, it's great.
00:32:53
Speaker
Yeah. We had our Friday lunch last week and it was awkward. It was the first Friday lunch where it seemed
00:33:07
Speaker
like something was missing. And what was missing was the fact that most Friday lunches to date have ended up focusing around one or a couple of issues or problems. And we're good at fixing things. We're good at solving problems. We're good at having the team we have to think about what's the problem, how do we fix it. And last Friday's lunch was
00:33:26
Speaker
a whole lot of, how are you doing good? How are you doing good? How are you doing good? And I wasn't ready for that. And that book by no means are we done or settled. But it's one of the things I want to work on is making sure we are remembering throughout the week to kind of track what's good and bad and share and communicate because
The Role of Communication in Problem Solving
00:33:48
Speaker
It's, we have to go off on our own and do our work, but then we need to bring that all back together because otherwise you could have these little issues where somebody's like, well, hey, I just saw this problem and I ran over to the belt grinder and did something like, no, no, no, hold on. We got to rewind. We got to think about what's happening. Why is it happening? All that.
00:34:06
Speaker
Yeah, it's hard to remember those points from the day or the week and to bring them up in front of a meeting unless you write them down. It's not easy to keep them at the top of your head and be able to share them quickly and easily. We have our meetings every day and I still struggle with that, with what happened two hours ago to remember to say it at the meeting.
00:34:28
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and furthermore, sometimes it was a problem that was solved and maybe it solved pretty quickly and pretty well, but there's actually, I'd still at this point rather over communicate. We are not nowhere near the territory of meeting abuse where we're sitting down too much with abusively long pointless rambling meetings. Nope, we're not there yet. And I want to over communicate a little so that we all are a little bit more aware of
00:34:56
Speaker
These things I'm going to ask you about. How's your weekend? Excellent. Oh, I took the kids to Niagara Falls for the weekend. Oh, fun.
00:35:06
Speaker
And we're just like, you know what? We haven't gone anywhere in a long time. So let's just splash out, get a hotel for two nights, and do everything we could possibly want to do in the falls. And we took the ferry that goes down to the bottom of the falls, and we get soaked, and we have our rain ponchos on. Took the huge Ferris wheel, played all the arcade games, and swam in the hotel pool. It was amazing. Awesome. Door to door in 47 hours, and we did everything.
00:35:36
Speaker
So, uh, yeah, all of us are still kind of recovering from that a couple of days ago. Good. That's great. But yeah, so it's been good and then shops going good. And yeah, we, um, we needed a spindle liner that we didn't have.
Using 3D Printing for Practical Solutions
00:35:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:56
Speaker
And ends up, they didn't make, and there's, of course, there's a little bit of an asterisk to that, but I'm doing something that I actually think could be a real win. I'm going to keep it under wraps because it works rich or she had a whole thing on a video, but I want to hear that 3d print to spend the liner. Not quite, not quite, but there's, but you're not on the wrong path. Cool. Yeah. Um, and if it does work, I'm, I'm thinking there's some good.
00:36:24
Speaker
There's direct and indirect benefits to this. It's been fun, but I'll tell you that PSA,
00:36:30
Speaker
If you've been on the fence, frankly, like I was, get a Prusa or similar. I'm just going to say get a Prusa, because darn it, they're so good. The build plate works well. The slicer works well. You can fit the $400 version or the $1,000 version. I don't care which one. Get PLA. And make everything. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I use mine for fun at home with the kids. But I'll tell you, we are doing more and more stuff here that is super useful.
00:37:01
Speaker
Yeah, and the freedom of design is so much crazier than it is with machining because you're like, I'll just put this hole in the middle of nowhere at a 42 degree angle and it's cakewalk.
00:37:14
Speaker
Yeah. We've been overhauling our coolant skimmers to change how they're mounted, where they're mounted and came up with this crazy bracket that there's no, I'm not interested in machining it, but we've been 3D printing them and it takes four hours, but it's like four bucks of material and they work every time. It's great. Yeah. I printed these little table racks to hold my small 72 millimeter pallets.
00:37:38
Speaker
Yeah. Because I go to the rack and I take two, one in each hand, and I go to the table and they tip over and they don't sit up. After doing that for a couple months, I was like, okay, screw this. I'm just going to design something. It took me like, I don't know, eight minutes to design. I have the CAD file already of the palette, so you just design around it and give it 15 thou clearance everywhere, wall clearance, and everything slips together and fits perfect.
00:38:03
Speaker
He worked so good that the next day I was like, okay, print. Then a second one came out. Right? Yeah, I love that. Actually, I think Leif was in the shop and he just hit print for me. He was like, cool. It's funny. Good. Yeah, that's what I'm focused on. It's a theme that's not new to our conversation or this podcast.
00:38:26
Speaker
Like it or not, our jobs have less to do with being as good as we can as machinists and a lot more to be as good as we can at this business. The jib crane is just a jib crane, but really the elegance of figuring out that flow
Planning and Installing a Jib Crane
00:38:43
Speaker
and where it goes and why it works is critical. The change I'll say I've made is pushing a lot more toward the doing and not the overthinking direction. I don't spend as much time challenging yourself. It's not even a form of self-doubt. It's like, hey, multiple iterations of trying to think through it. And sometimes you just know. And even if you don't know,
00:39:12
Speaker
you'll figure it out. Things like a jib crane give me a little bit more anxiety because that's a physical construction project and it's a permanent location, but it ain't moving. It's going to go there. The debate here is Ed thinks he wants one over by the other machines and he was thinking, well, maybe we put it here. I was like,
00:39:30
Speaker
No, what I will do if this one works out is give it at a second one. But the one I want needs to go by the door for this reason. And everything else is on wheels or relatively flexible. So we're just finishing up all of the electrical and plumbing to move our air compressor to get it away from that area. Because it's funny that that area right by the man door and first bay door
00:39:56
Speaker
which we used to think of as kind of not important space is now actually incredibly valuable real estate. Big throughput area, right? Yeah, absolutely. And that's the job of the owner visionary, you and me roles in our companies is to step back and to say, okay, that works really well. Instead of having one on wheels, we're just buying two. Like this needs to be there. Like we use liquid nitrogen for cryogenically treating our blades.
00:40:22
Speaker
And every three to four weeks, we have to drive down to Praxair and get a fill up and drive it back. And it's dangerous to have it in the back of your car sloshing around on the bumpy roads coming back. It's fine. But I'm like, my long-term goal is I want a liquid nitrogen generator here that just gives us a leader today. Just have them deliberate. The cost is too weird. I don't know. Yeah, maybe I should actually look into that.
00:40:51
Speaker
But yeah, there are options. Same thing. If anybody remembers the scrap metal saga, which is sort of better, but not over. Same thing with propane tanks for our forklifts. For our local welding supply store, it was like, ah, we can't deliver. And I was finally like, this is ridiculous. They have trucks running around town all the time. And so I just was like, hey, I just called him up and said, hey, Saunders Machine Works, we have an account with you. We need two LPs delivered next week. They're like, yep, no problem. I got the invoice and it was 25 bucks for the delivery.
00:41:21
Speaker
which as a bootstrapper is super obnoxious because I could drive down there or drive by it, but no, no. This happens probably once or twice a year. No, I'm not there. I feel like when we go and pick up liquid nitrogen, it's like $42 for a fill. I feel like delivery was like a hundred or more and we need that every three weeks. Interesting.
00:41:48
Speaker
I mean, it evaporates as we use it.
00:41:52
Speaker
The mentor of yours that I'm aware of would say the $100 charge for an hour of your time is a hard pass. Exactly. Well, I don't go pick it up anymore. I did for the longest time. Touche. That's fair. That said, Barry is the one who picks it up now, and he ain't cheap either. I've seen videos on YouTube where people literally make a liquid nitrogen generator and pull it out of the air because it fills, I don't know, 90% of the air around us or something.
00:42:21
Speaker
It's not difficult. The geek inside me is like, well, I shouldn't do it and I don't want to do it, but should I just find a nerd out there that wants to build a project for us that can generate liquid nitrogen? Let's round numbers. If it's 100 bucks for delivery once a month, that's 1200 bucks a year. That is not a small amount of money, but you're going to spend more than that on the design. A couple of grand, at least. Yeah.
00:42:50
Speaker
But is that the solution that we want? Just to have it generated right here. I'm willing to put, not today, but theoretically, I'm willing to put a couple grand into that. Easy. Yeah, sure. Just to have the right solution. So what this came up yesterday. Three weeks. Does it get consumed or does it just warm up? It evaporates. It evaporates, OK. Yeah, as it warms up. So every time you open the lid, it leaks. And it can't be a sealed system. So it naturally off gases by itself. It'll explode if you seal it.
00:43:21
Speaker
Oh, is that right? Yeah, because it expands so fast. Interesting. Yeah. Huh. That's really cool. Yeah. And there's commercial systems that are 10 to $50,000. And I'm like, nope. Yeah. And that gives you commercially pure medical nitrogen, which we don't care about. Yeah. We just want cold. Yeah.
00:43:41
Speaker
Fair enough. Any update on what we were talking about a while back on the whole like, which shipping carriage we use, stuff stuck in customs, clearances, or exemptions as a company?
Dealing with Lost Shipments and Tracking
00:43:54
Speaker
Nothing new. However, Barry told me yesterday, he's like, I think UPS lost a pallet. Oh, what? Oh, no. Of handles and blades coming from our material supplier. Oh, no. And I'm sure it'll turn up.
00:44:11
Speaker
Don't be so sure of that. Yeah, exactly, right? Our pallet to a customer is still lost. I actually do think it might show up, but it may be weeks and maybe none. Obviously, the customer has already received their replacement, but oof. Yeah. Luckily, we're not in a rush for these parts because we've gotten one delivery already, I'm pretty sure.
00:44:37
Speaker
But, uh, but yeah, it's just funny cause you and I were talking about him. I'm like, how did they lose a pallet? Barry's like, we lost a pallet. Yeah. Just coming from New York state across the border to us. I don't know where or how or whatever, but, um, yeah, that's not fun. No.
00:44:54
Speaker
It's another plus one for those little air tags in every shipment. Right? Yeah. I see it's in Rochester, New York. It's inside of a big steel building. It's right there. It's beeping as we speak. Yeah, exactly. I can speak to it. So if you just walk by, I'll call your name. Right.
00:45:14
Speaker
There's no one else is responsible than you for this. That's one of those tough lessons here. But when I was talking to our freight company about the lost shipment, I realized we had been invoiced for it, which threw me because usually we don't get invoiced until it's delivered. And they were like, yeah, you can go through a claim process to claim not or whatever. And I'm just like, I haven't dealt with it yet. But I'm like,
00:45:38
Speaker
there'll be zero chance I'm spending my time filling out paperwork for a shipment you lost. So I told our bookkeeper, you know, we got billed for the replacement shipment. I'm just like, don't pay that invoice with the caveat that we tend to treat our partners very well and have a good relationship with them. But you got to put your foot down somewhere and I'm not, you know, that's your problem, not mine. Yeah. Yeah. Sweet. What's going on today?
00:46:06
Speaker
working on, I bought a Shunk KCS KSC vise, something like that. I'm installing that on an Aroa Palette. I've been doing that. That would be sweet. It's a really nice looking vise. It's what Dennis recommended. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it's really happy with it. Good.
00:46:24
Speaker
That's my big thing and then just keep the curtain running. Awesome. Maybe stare at the Willyman, figure out what's next. Cool. Awesome. Finishing up some 3D printing projects and working on that jib crane project and that's it right now. What would we do without projects? That's what we do. I think we'd go crazy.
00:46:49
Speaker
No, I love it. Yeah. Without projects. I mean, yep. Yeah. I need it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm in. See you next week. Have a good day. Take care. Bye.