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#296 Deal with tough conversations like a pro
161 Plays2 years ago
Topics:
- Grimsmo's Willemin machine
- dealing with tough conversations
- Creating a metrology lab
- Mill-Turn machines, Tsugami, Willemin, Mazak
- Long term thinking
- Reverse osmosis water systems for coolants
- building an enclosure for Grimsmo's CNC router
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the Business of Machining episode number 296. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. My to-do list today with you, John, today includes discussing the Wilhelmin, discussing your Swiss stoicism, Tsugamis, Mayzaks, and monthly recurring fees, as well as two new Haas machines that we have coming. I love it. Let's go. Yeah. Different intro. Where do you want to start? Go chronological.
00:00:30
Speaker
Okay. Well, the Willyman in Swiss is a genuine question of you, but also, uh, we need to talk about my Willy. Yeah. There are endless stream of Willy jokes. It's so funny. Yeah. And Grayson, can you go turn on my Willy? Yeah, no problem. They are very stiff and rigid machines. Oh, they are. Yeah. Yeah.
00:00:52
Speaker
Um, yeah, I got to run it a couple of times. I had a part I needed to just quickly make. And I was like, I'm just going to use the woman because honestly, that'll be the easiest machine of all of my machines to make it on. And it's like, you know, looking for an excuse to be used. Um, so it was great. It was, I was like, I think I can make this whole part in one tool and just not even, yes,
Balancing Productivity and Perfection
00:01:15
Speaker
not even care. So it's got a whole, it's got like a key shape on the outside, um, like a keyhole shape.
00:01:25
Speaker
It's not a hex hole in the inside. It's like a three-quarter circle with two flats on the inside.
00:01:31
Speaker
you know, um, 2d pocketed the whole ID and I just 2d contoured the whole OD with some 2d adaptive. It's the same tool. And then I borrowed it off with the same tool. And then I had a tiny bit of handy burning to do. I didn't care for this part. And I didn't even use the vice or anything. I just looped it off and tapped it with tab. And like, it was great, but it was sweet. I'm like, all I have to do is put a call it in and load this one tool and then I can make this part. And it was sweet.
00:02:00
Speaker
It reminds me of one of those moments that's sort of seared into my brain. Look, I love CAM programming. I love having tool libraries and templates, and I love tackling parts. It's genuinely something that I would do to this day, retired in a cabin, you know, relaxing. I kind of love it. And Lockwood had mentioned years ago
00:02:21
Speaker
this idea that, you know, build a template and the Wilhelmin is such a great machine and example of this, like, Hey, you have a part and you can do everything with a three sixteenths end mill. It's massively inefficient, but that's only true if you're measuring efficiency by output and quantity. But for us, most of us entrepreneurs, efficiency is more about overall productivity. And so having a machine and look at three 1610 mill is probably not going to work for all toolpaths on most parts, but
00:02:51
Speaker
I'll tell you, when we had our UMC 750, we used a half inch or 3.8 inch end mill to do a rotary tool path to fake turn the outside of a, think of it like a wheel hub type thing.
00:03:04
Speaker
you could OD turn with a 360 10 mil, you can interpolate polar in different V orientations, you can swap, you can do ID features, you can do five axis angle chamfers. If you have a template that lets you just drop apart and do that and hit go, I don't really care if it takes, you know, 62 minutes because we're great.
00:03:23
Speaker
Yeah, there's there's a point and it depends on the product and the machine availability schedule. But there's a point where your involvement needs to be as little as possible, even if it takes an hour instead of 32 minutes. Yeah, if I can, if I can drag and drop and make a couple quick tool paths and not efficient, not perfect, not optimized,
00:03:44
Speaker
Ideally, make a good part and not have to constantly babysit it and tweak it. Keep the chip load reasonable. I'm not trying to hog material here. I just don't care. I just want to make a part. Then yeah, it's your personal investment that needs to be minimized in order to get the result that you want because sometimes this is a thing that doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be done. What did you just say?
00:04:11
Speaker
I am learning there are, you know, not everything has to be to the moon.
Entrepreneurial Reflections and Personal Growth
00:04:15
Speaker
Perfect. And I'd rather spend my time. I have to actively tell myself, it's like, no, this is fine. Just send it. Just put it through. Put your time, your effort, your, your brain power into more critical things. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Hey, on that note, why, why not tackle the, you know, head on stuff for
00:04:40
Speaker
last week was perhaps a little bit more direct than we often are. First off, John and I genuinely do our best to ignore the fact that this is recorded. Obviously, if it's a private conversation, it's a lot easier to have a healthy debate because you're not weighted down by the potential influence of publicity for better or worse or personas.
00:05:05
Speaker
Look, I don't, you know, you are a friend. I don't want you as a friend in this conversation. I want you as a coach or a mentor or a friendly adversarial person. And it's interesting because I think some of the, I got sort of two different unsolicited feedbacks on last week. One was kind of a one way and one was the other way. And it doesn't, to elaborate on those would imply that I have a side I'm rooting for. I'm not, like I'm not always right, but
00:05:31
Speaker
But you know just like a good coach or i was a sports kid my son is so i'm seeing a lot more coaching as an adult which is becoming more impactful than i expected frankly making you regret not playing a bigger role sports as a kid because it's it's really good it's cliche but it's really good life stuff you know.
00:05:50
Speaker
coaches aren't always there to be your friends. They're not always there to just tell you nice things. They're there to sometimes push you and get you outside your comfort zone. And boy, when you sometimes in the present, you realize it. A lot of times it's down the road that you realize, no, I'm glad I had these people in my life. And so, you know, it's not that I'm inclined to apologize to you because
00:06:09
Speaker
I've in some respects enjoy these spirited debates and what you don't answer to me like I don't there's no right or right or wrong here but I care about chin sorry I'll leave it that yeah and I I think you like being
00:06:29
Speaker
more adversarial and debate-y than I do. I try to avoid that stuff like the plague, just my personality style. And yeah, last week was tough to hear. And it got me to reflect and think about it, even after the podcast, and think, okay, do I
00:06:48
Speaker
Am I on the right path? Do I stick with it or do I realize that if it's the right thing or the wrong thing or whatever and you don't have to think about it a lot. I'm like, no, this is something I definitely want to do. I want to build this conveyor. I want it done. I'm having a lot of fun with it. I'm learning a lot of skills and I'm really enjoying the process and it's not really hampering
00:07:10
Speaker
the company or, you know, my time, I was still doing everything else I have to do. So like, yeah, very much enjoying the process of doing that. And waiting for the last part to come in either today or tomorrow, and then it should go together and start to function. So very excited. John, that's great. I don't, uh, I think you continue part of being an entrepreneur, just living life as a journey and
00:07:34
Speaker
being introspective is something I've often enjoyed. And I know that my personality will come off as chafing because it's unemotionally probing. I don't consider, I don't certainly don't look to be adversarial with intent. Like I don't enjoy stirring the pot like that. But I have this unemotional
00:07:54
Speaker
Not inability, but willingness to just say, that doesn't make sense, John. From the outside, I see you have this talent pool and machinery and equipment.
00:08:08
Speaker
you know, I don't know whether it's advisors, mentors, board of directors, blah, blah, blah. What I'm conscious of is you have to earn, I have to earn your respect so that, I guess what a life goal for me is that if I, whether I'm talking to you or anybody else, you know, if you talk too much, your input's no longer welcome, period. And I hope that it's in a place where it's like, oh no, if Grimsnoe says something or Sonder says something, it means something. Let's think about it, you know what I mean? Yep, absolutely.
00:08:38
Speaker
Yep. Well, hey, no, Willem is running. Yeah. That's the funny thing is like, I have to make a part for the conveyor, a stepper motor adapter to adapt the stepper motor to little gearbox. And I'm like, I need this little keyhole thing. I could buy it, but it's a couple of weeks out. I'm just going to make it out of titanium because I can. Yeah. And like.
00:09:02
Speaker
idea to part in hand was well under an hour of just playing with the Willyman.
Technical Challenges and Machine Expansion
00:09:08
Speaker
That's incredible. Total win. Yeah, because in the past, months ago, I got my post dialed down.
00:09:16
Speaker
It still tried to do a tool breakage check, which didn't work with the M50 commands. Maybe it's M52 or something. I don't know. So it kind of, it's pauses and gets confused at the very end of the program. So I quick tweaked my post. I'm like, okay, don't do a breakage check. And then, oh, it runs great. So yeah. Does M50 work in MDI? I don't know. There's some weird little rules that I haven't fully figured out. I think I've seen it work once.
00:09:45
Speaker
And then it hasn't worked. And then it's not a big deal. The program just stops there and it goes, I don't know what I'm looking for. Yeah. So one thing I still haven't done on the Wilhelmin yet is to actually use the sub vice and grab the part, part it off, flip the vice 90 degrees and do milling on that side in G55. Honestly, I think it'll be very easy. I just haven't done it yet, but I do have a set of vice jaws that I've made already that will clamp.
00:10:14
Speaker
this alignment pin that I'm making and, uh, it, it's all there. I just need to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Like the code would get output right now if you had it run. I think so. It does output. I haven't tested it yet, so I don't know fully. And I know, um, there's some weird bar puller, um, lines of code and mine's not hooked up yet. And it might get confused and stuff like that. Um, but.
00:10:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think that will unlock the whole new level of Willeman accessibility when you can easily make bistro, easily clamp the part, easily flip it over, easily do some work, drop the part into a bin. I'm even thinking about all these little parts that I want to make. I'm like, the Swiss is too busy and it'd be kind of complicated to wait a minute. What if I can make it on the Willeman? Of course I can make it on the Willeman. I would actually be really easy. Could I make two at a time? I think I could.
00:11:08
Speaker
like this threaded insert and a screw. And I'm like, can I make them sequentially in one clamping? I think I could. And then drop. Yeah. Cause I need to make them two at a time or like one matching set at a time anyway. So I'm like, why don't they just make a pair? And then, okay. I think that could work really well. Yes. Yeah. So it gets exciting to think about.
00:11:29
Speaker
similar kind of conversation last week with me and Ed where we're turning the old what was used to be Julie's office, then it was a tormach proven cut speeds and feeds room, then it was Johnny fives room. And we're going to turn it into a metrology kind of internal tool crib metrology room. And I really want a
00:11:51
Speaker
CNC machine that can function as a tool room mill. I want one that's not really ever used to make Saunders machine works products. And right now we're at a great place where most of our machines have semi-dedicated setups. So they're not always running, but even if like say the VF2YT is not running, I'm not going to go set up to make a prototype something on it. I'm just not going to take that's kind of Garrett's machine. I'm not going to mess with it tooling, right? Right. Fixturing all that. So I don't know.
00:12:22
Speaker
what that machine is. I don't really want a three-phase complicated machine that has potential crash risk. You want it inside this room, this office basically? Yeah, I mean the office, I don't know what the
00:12:38
Speaker
Yeah, it could fit a speedio or drill tap or even a B of two would be a little bit big, mostly because of like, I don't really want a huge coolant tank and external pumps and blah, blah, blah.
00:12:54
Speaker
This is the room right off of the main shop. It's through the motorized doors. Arse automatic. I forget what that's called. Arse is gone. We blew out. Arse was part of a facade that we used before the shop was climate controlled. Now that everything's climate controlled, we wanted a bigger... It's actually a garage roll-up door that Arse had a sheetrock facade to. That's all gone now.
00:13:21
Speaker
Okay, so we can have palette jacks in between. Okay, but that's the room you're talking about. Bingo. Datron Neo's closer to the right machine, but I want a machine that's not a Neo. I want a machine that we could do steel. Sorry, you could do steel on a Neo. It's just not the right machine for this. Are you thinking like a 440 or something? Like an 1100 would be perfect, but I want
00:13:45
Speaker
a step up from that and I want wireless probing. Yeah. I was going to say take your original seven, your original 1100. Yeah. The first one. Yeah. That's closer to what I want than say a used drill tap machine or whatever. I'll figure it out. Yeah. Well, more importantly, what I want to talk about was
00:14:09
Speaker
I don't know, man, I really want to see if that use the 408 MT will work out, but unclear if that will. And so the two other machines that we've been having conversations about, one is a, let me actually pull up the name of it because I would love if you are a Tsugami. One is a Tsugami. Let's see, where are you?
00:14:41
Speaker
Yeah, TMA8F. So this is a small built milter, like a small moltus, if you will. So it's a... I think I've seen one of these. Yeah, TMA, like Tom, Mary, Apple, 8F as in Frank. And of course, I'm regretting that I didn't have the foresight to realize this is something I should be focused more on at IMTS, but nevertheless.
00:15:14
Speaker
traditional mill turn is not the right fit, is really two reasons. One is I really like the Willeman design that your sub spindle is a vice. To me, that gives you better part capabilities, the ability to use hard or soft jaws, the way you program it. I really like that. And it's very, it's like way easier to make non-round parts. Which is everything we're doing basically.
00:15:35
Speaker
to sort of rewind a second.
00:15:43
Speaker
The second reason is the Wilhelmin is designed to have very speedy tool changes, which I don't care about for bragging rights. I care about because we are doing medium quantities of parts that will have, you know, five to 10, 15 tool changes. So if you're going to make two, 300 parts a day, you're doing hundreds of thousands of tool changes a day. Traditional mill turns are like.
00:16:06
Speaker
four to 10 second tool changes. It's just the wrong way. Now it's fine if you're doing 15, 20 minute cam cycles per tool, but this is a... I mean, you've seen a willing to do a tool change. If folks listening haven't, go watch YouTube. I mean, they are like zip, zip a couple of seconds. Yeah. I think mine is slower than the newer ones.
00:16:26
Speaker
You start to get a little bored watching them after a little while because it takes seconds for sure. It's not like speedio where you blink and you've missed it. I like, who cares?
00:16:37
Speaker
But they have a, so Willem and have a swing arm, I'm assuming yours does, like a hostile swing arm, whereas most mill turns, they move the whole spindle up, they stuff the spindle into a sheet metal door housing that then changes the tool out of sight. And it's just slow. And most of them are huge anyways. So the Tugami is a little bit of a hybrid. It's
00:17:00
Speaker
It's still not nowhere near Wilhelmin fast, but it's faster and it's smaller in terms of being the right spindle bore size and machine size for the parts we want to do. So that's one option. The other option, which is more like a Wilhelmin, is the Mazak Integrex A150, I think. It's a bit of a, wouldn't call it a unicorn,
00:17:28
Speaker
they're out there, but I don't think they're nearly as common as like a general multis. I see an I-150. I-150, thank you. Frankly, it's
00:17:41
Speaker
from a layman standpoint, quite similar to a Willamyn and that it has a sub spindle. It's actually pretty cool. The sub spindle on the ones I've seen is like a turret. So one side of the turret could be the vice, like you have. The other side could be a tail stock. So it's interesting. I'm just not an amazing guy. I don't know a ton about them. So I've sort of started that conversation. So I'm just impressionable.
00:18:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think, I mean, both the Mesak and the Sugami, they have a, a Chuck, like a three jaw Chuck and probably have a much bigger through board than the Wilhelmin does, which is like an inch and three eighths pretty much on yours on all of them. I think all the four, the new four weights are bigger than your and what might be. Yeah. It's an old or not old. It's like a 10 year old spindle design change that gave you an extra quarter inch, maybe, which is significant. Yeah. Um,
00:18:38
Speaker
That takes into account what you want to do. Willamans are meant to be barfed, whereas these two machines can be either barfed or chuck fed from the front. Oh, I see. Yeah. No, they would be both are well suited for barfed feeding. Yeah, okay. But I'm saying a Willaman is probably not as ideal as a front feeding chuck kind of lathe. I don't even know if I've seen one with a three-shot chuck on it.
00:19:05
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, both these machines come with the Royals as factory options. And you're planning bar feeding it anyway. I guess my point is the pictures I'm seeing, I'd see like a three inch slug, a five inch slug in these jugs, which makes it capable and cool and good for demos and stuff. And certainly if you need that kind of work, that's great. We make tiny parts, so I don't even think about that stuff.
00:19:29
Speaker
Yeah, look, it's not black and white. If this machine could support, say, inch and three-quarter round bar, there's some parts I would move over to it. And if we end up with the Willemin, we'll keep those parts either on the SD20Y or the horizontal. I'm not going from a position of
00:19:51
Speaker
having a mandate where the machine must do everything. It's like early days of business. I'm going to buy one machine and it's going to make all of my stuff. Now we're spreading it out across multiple machines and it's quite nice.
00:20:05
Speaker
And even like having this video available to me has been wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. Like the Maury is, it's variably available, but we pretty much have one set up. We pretty much just run one set of parts on it every day. I don't want to screw with that. I don't want to put in new tools. I don't want to ruin it. Um, even though it's got available time, I just, I don't want to break down a set up. I don't want to.
00:20:28
Speaker
mess with it. And this video, for one, I'm building it to be more modular with like really good easy quick change, fixturing.
00:20:38
Speaker
thinking about the tools that are in there and what I can use for all kinds of different stuff and learning how to program it and all that stuff. So it's been really fun to run that machine and do whatever on it. Yes. It's going to be a production machine, but I'm going to make sure that there's available time and quick change fixturing to be able to do stuff as needed. I was going to say, I mean, is it going to become
00:21:03
Speaker
Are you just delusional right now? The speedio is going to be fully booked with legitimate Grims Van Nuys work. It's not going to become a machine that you can just play on because it's got plenty of work to do. Absolutely. And being hooked up to the aroa, it's absolutely going to be busy. But maybe that becomes, eventually we got a second speedio, and then that becomes the prototype machine. And then once a product is past prototype stage, it goes into the production cell, and then it works.
00:21:33
Speaker
Yeah, I'm trying to think more about long term thinking, which I intentionally don't often do. And I'm not thinking about it. Right. I'm thinking about a very selfish reasons. I'm not thinking about it for the sake of benefiting Saunders machine works, which I probably should be. And I, that's why it sounds bad. It's about what I'm thinking about is more of like when 50 year old John looks back at 40 year old John today, what did I, you know, regret?
00:22:01
Speaker
being too cautious, too conservative, not doing. And I think there's more to opportunity costs than you and I both acknowledge.
00:22:10
Speaker
you know, letting the team flourish by having access. You know, I love what you're saying about, don't mess with the mori, let it do its thing. Like, yes, like, God, five, 10 years ago, I would kill to have a day on that kind
Shop Improvements and Enhancements
00:22:22
Speaker
of a machine. And now it's like, no, if it's idle for two hours, that's not how I'm judging my business. Right, right. But I'm also thinking, that's one reason why it's like, hey, the tool room mill, that's something that
00:22:32
Speaker
could benefit us and help us be better at what we do. And then there's other things that are not sexy. Like I really should install automatic, like a powered garage door on our bay door because we're in and out with the forklift quite a bit and it's winter now and it takes a lot more time to manually raise and lower the door. You have the chain thing, you pull on the chain to lift it up or?
00:22:55
Speaker
It's actually easier. It's just a it's got a spring. So it's just hand, you can just pull it up or down with a rope in hand. But like, be smart, be lean, like be deliberate about what ways that we can improve what we do. But things like that they cost
00:23:12
Speaker
money and time and you have to be mentally able to allocate, okay, it's going to cost $1,000 to get a power door in there. I'd rather buy three new face mills for the one machine. But sometimes you just have to go, no, no, I want it. It's fine. It makes sense for the business. It's going to benefit everybody. Make the mental decision, move on, stop thinking about it.
00:23:33
Speaker
Yeah, like I'm, you know, I'm impressionable. I built this by conversations with business of people with you and shop tours and inspiration. And, you know, if I were to go to her shop tomorrow, and they were like, Oh, yeah, like, of course we have garage door openers on our forklifts. Like, I already know that. But I seen that external impetus would probably push me
00:23:57
Speaker
further than I, why can't I push myself there today? I actually should hang up this podcast, call up, there's a garage door company down the road and be like, please give me a quote to put in an opener. I will do that, John. I didn't even tie it together. When you said garage door opener on the forklift, I didn't have that mental image through most of that conversation. And now that I do, I'm like, oh yeah, that'd be amazing. You drive it into your garage at home and you click the button and it's like,
00:24:21
Speaker
Yeah, that'd be cool. Yeah. But there's so many little quality of life things, like when we put pressurized coolant throughout the whole shop. So feeding every machine now is.
00:24:32
Speaker
a no-brainer. We're not mixing coolant and five-gallon buckets with a drill. You put up with that for as long as you need to, but once you invest the time and the money into a sizable system, you never regret it. You never think back on it. As long as the garage door openers function perfectly, you're never going to regret it. You're going to be like, sweet every time. I agree. Yeah, we'll stop. Agree.
00:24:57
Speaker
Are you doing RO or do you pay for DI or what do you do? We are filtering our own RO water. Okay. We also do that. Our system is great with the one exception that it's relatively slow to fill up the IBC tote and the filter system that we have, it's your typical aquarium RO filter, which are luckily so prolific that they're cheap and great.
00:25:24
Speaker
But I think our system is supposed to be 75 or 100 gallons a day. It doesn't do nearly that amount. And so on the bucket of quality life, hey, let's be better at what we do, I spent a few minutes researching it. And luckily, it's a pretty easy solution. I bought a pressure gauge for $10, put a pressure gauge on our city pressure water. It's too low for a good RO system. And Amazon has an RO booster pump under $100.
00:25:53
Speaker
Pretty simple to hook up. It has an on-off sensor to not have the pump run when it doesn't need more RO water. And it now runs our RO membrane at 60 or 65 PSI, which is perfect because the science of an RO filter is pushing water through a membrane. So the better pressure you have, the system works better, lasts longer, I believe.
00:26:19
Speaker
fills up quicker. That was in the bucket of quality of life wins. I thought that might be a Pandora's box of, oh man, I need to buy a new $300 RO system and change a bunch of stuff. No, simple. What was your pressure before? Do you remember? Yeah, it's about 30, 35. It's not terrible. Yeah, I think ours is 40-ish, 45 maybe.
00:26:43
Speaker
So that's a bit better, but ours was slowed down to a trickle and it would take like a week or two weeks to fill up the IBC tote. Turns out our sediment filters were completely clogged. Even though we were getting good RO, what do you call it, not the bricks, but the
00:27:02
Speaker
PPM is like one or something like that output. It was good, but it was just not flowing anything. So I think what I've heard is that as the RO membrane goes bad, you lose either clogs up to a trickle or you lose parts per million filtration, right? It filters worse, but for us, it was the sediment filter. Yes. Yes. And I think it just ends up diverting a lot more to the waste line. Yeah. Anyway. But yeah.
00:27:31
Speaker
When it works, it works great. Like when we replace all the filters and everything's good, it fills up the IBC tote and like, I don't know, a day, like, yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. We also making this up, but, um, we filled up our IBC tote that way for well over a year more. And so we've been putting RO water in all of our machines that long, actually half filled up our.
00:27:55
Speaker
Uh, tote with, with our relatively hard tap water, I think it's about 230 TDS. Um, because I just figured, you know what, um, coolant needs imperfect water. It needs those minerals and stuff to emulsify or stay mixed well. Um, and.
00:28:14
Speaker
my understanding again is the reason you use RO water is that as the water evaporates, the minerals are left behind. So if you're always topping off with hard water, you're massively increasing the hardness concentration within your coolant. But I also think if you only ever use RO, so your initial fill is supposed to be somewhat hard water or tap water and then RO top off. But I feel like at some point,
00:28:35
Speaker
we should, uh, add in some total, total dissolved solids, which I guess is also bringing up the point that our code has been lasting for super long time. Yeah. Like we haven't had to do full swap outs. Like, uh, are you checking your Lex notes right now? Uh, no, no, it'd be amazing. Um, yeah. Ours lasts for a year or two.
00:28:58
Speaker
More or less until we're like, yeah, it's probably time to replace it. But it doesn't go bad or nasty. It just gets thicker. And some of our machines are harder to keep down. They just kind of raise up like 12%, 13%. We just end up throwing straight water in it sometimes to try to pull it down because it's evaporating. Just some of the machines seem to evaporate more than others. And then I guess some of your total dissolved solids in the coolant is coming out with the chips. And they're actually leaving the machine to a point.
00:29:28
Speaker
Um, so to your point of adding more, you know, halfway through the life cycle of the coolant, maybe it's not a bad idea. Yeah. Yeah. What have you been up to? Um, the router parts came in just after we hung up the podcast last week. So very excited about that. Uh, today I'm going to be putting it together, uh, start, put the motors on, plug it in, test everything. Our electricians coming on Friday to, um,
00:29:56
Speaker
run proper power, which will give us power for the dust collector, which we already have and are using. Um, and then power for the router, power for the vacuum pump and whatever accessories I need for the router as well. So, uh, yeah, I want to have that router up and running, um, pretty much as soon as possible. Is it all three phase? It's single phase, but it's two 20. Yeah.
00:30:22
Speaker
Got it. That's exciting. It's living. We're going to go? I think so. We know where it's going to go for now. And then once the UMAX sell, it'll probably go there-ish somewhere. Got it. So we'll plan the wiring accordingly. So we can just have it on a big extension cord, move it around kind of thing. Yeah. I hadn't thought about those UMAX in a long time.
00:30:44
Speaker
I know. I had a guy from the podcast, I don't know if you're listening, who was super interested, even sent a small deposit, and I haven't heard back. That's not good. I have your money, bro. Do you want the machines? Do I refund you? I don't know yet. I got to get a hold of a column or something. Otherwise, if anybody is interested in these two UMac machines, they need work, but
00:31:09
Speaker
give you a good deal. Yeah, right. They should go. I mean, yeah, oh, yeah, they said absolutely go. Yeah. And we're at the point now where, you know, the one that we use has developed a slight tool changer issue, like we got to rebuild the cylinder or something, the pneumatic cylinder.
00:31:27
Speaker
I don't think it'll take that long, but it's like we use it to make the foam for our knife packaging. And we just ran out today and that machine's not functional at this exact moment. And I'm like, okay, the router is how fast can I get this router together?
00:31:43
Speaker
Or do we try to fix the UMAK or we're at that kind of crux of like, where am I going to put our time? Me and Pierre pretty much in Grayson to, uh, you know, which machine gets the attention? Oh my, you know, you know the answer to this. Well, it depends if, if we're out of foam right now, we can't sell a knife until we have foam and the router could take a
Outsourcing and Vendor Expertise
00:32:03
Speaker
day. It could take a week. It could take a couple of weeks to put it together. Really? I don't know.
00:32:10
Speaker
I don't know yet. Arguably though, so could fixing a unknown legacy issue of a machine that needs to be gone. I'm spitballing here. I haven't actually thought through this process yet, but I think the router could be together quickly. There's a bare minimum. It's like, okay, everything works, everything's on.
00:32:32
Speaker
We throw cardboard around it to keep some chips in and somebody stands there with a vacuum and like makes it work. Like we could probably do that. Yeah. That's most likely what's going to happen. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. It's super exciting. I was just asked, are long-term will it be enclosed?
00:32:49
Speaker
Yeah. So I'm building an 80 20 enclosure with, um, acrylic and, uh, white side panels and everything. And I was thinking about that. I got, so the guy who built my electronics cabinet, um, Sam from Versa CNC, uh, he's been great. It, uh, it's been, I forget how long we've been working together for five months. Like it's taken, it's taken a good while, but that's, that's okay. And it's all here and his work is fantastic and impeccable and the price is like totally fine. Um,
00:33:20
Speaker
So he designed an enclosure for this size of machine. And I'm like, instead of me re-engineering the wheel, can I just buy your enclosure, the plans for it? So he sent it over. And so I'm like, OK, either I can pick through and I can order all of the 8020 pieces and get them all custom cut or whatever. And I sent a quote to 8020, and they're like, here's your Canadian distributors. And I had two Canadian distributors reach out.
00:33:44
Speaker
And I'm like, okay, these guys stock it like half an hour away. And they also engineer and build and design and can like, should I just have them build it? Like send them the fusion file and be like, okay, drop this off next Tuesday. Yes. Yeah. Right. Like we have so much other work to do now, not to mention building the router itself, that if somebody else can concurrently build the enclosure for it and deliver it around the same time when the routers like.
Training Interns with Practical Skills
00:34:12
Speaker
that's worth whatever price they're going to reasonably charge us. So I'm going to call them just after we hang out for the podcast. And one of the quotes that came back, it was a quote, just contact from the local distributors. One of the guys was like, we're the biggest sucker of 80-20 in Canada. We can hook you up, no problem. And the other guy was like, I've been watching your YouTube channel since you made your DIY Tumblr in 2011. I'd love to help you out in any way that I can. Like, guess who I'm calling.
00:34:45
Speaker
There's such a force multiplier around letting vendors who want to do that, apply their trade, also then solve all these little like, you know, you don't need to become, I'm not mansplaining here. Like you don't need to become an expert on how those little 80-20 clips go together and like, oh, this plexiglass is an eighth inch too long. No, you have to. Exactly. You go to what you want to do.
00:35:08
Speaker
I've started doing some 8020 projects, and it is a bit of a rabbit hole to figure out all the angle brackets and all the supports and how to design it. And this company in Canada, and they have these places all over the place. That's what they do. And they have it all in stock. And instead of me figuring out where the design is wrong, they would see it immediately and just fix themselves and be like an extra $6 part. And yeah, I solved that problem for you. Yeah. And I'm using some 8020 for the conveyor.
00:35:35
Speaker
that I'm building for this video. And I don't know if I've ever actually built something myself out of it. And there's a bunch of different kinds of tea nuts. The one that I bought a whole bunch of has a spring on the back and then the tea nut that drops in. It doesn't slide through the whole spot. It just drops in from the top and the spring keeps it in place. Neat concept.
00:35:57
Speaker
kind of finicky to use. And then the second kind that I just got from McMaster has a ball detent like pressed into the back of it, which is a bit cleaner and a bit simpler. And, uh, I like that one better. Yeah. But there's so many little like details to building thing. And like you said, I do not need to be the expert on how to build 80, 20 projects and enclosures and stuff like that. Like it's good to have a surface understanding, but, um, yeah, so I'm, I'm quite looking forward to, uh,
00:36:26
Speaker
having a company build the enclosure for me, especially if it can be done in like days, which they say on their website, they typically can. So we'll see. Awesome. Sick. Cool. Yeah. I'm fond memories back to Herbie. I just didn't have the means to build the enclosure in Manhattan. The original tag CNC machine.
00:36:46
Speaker
And so the guy in Texas that I bought it from, I just was sort of like, Hey, will you do this 80 20? And he had some experience doing that. And the way he, he built it, disassembled it into like flat pack panels that were assembled, but flat. So I only had to put together the three dimensional joints, if you will. But like he had hinges that were things I wouldn't have been aware of, of how they worked and pegboard in areas that like hit pegboard sections and instead of the clear so that you had tools built into the enclosure was great. I love it fond memories.
00:37:17
Speaker
The other reason we want a tool room machine is I want to be a little bit more deliberate with how we onboard and help train our interns. I would say we've done a great job of having over 20 interns at this point over the last four or five years and there's plenty of stuff to do and I very much am of the mindset that
00:37:42
Speaker
The folks that have done well are the folks that come in here that are curious and passionate, but also willing to work, like you're willing to, hey, we've got to sweep the floor, we've got to sweep the floor, we've got to strip parts, or DMACC parts, go beat, that's what we do.
00:37:56
Speaker
But I don't have a great way right now to say, okay, I also want you to go spend some time making this part. And that tool room mill could fit that role pretty well because what we, yes, interns help us with our overall operations. That's part of being the new guy in the shop.
00:38:16
Speaker
I want interns who over the course of six months or a year are having successes and mistakes on a machine and they're setting up parts and they're making parts because that's what the dream is. Well, we've got folks that have built that confidence and skill set that when I have an idea or a part or we need a new fixturing part or something, it's like, hey, there's the fusion file. Let me know what you need. Otherwise, that's the win. I love it. Here's a question for you.
00:38:47
Speaker
Do you, as far as training new people on how to do machining, how to get a feel for it, I'm trying to think of the difference between a CNC machine with a jog pendant and hand skimming something versus a bridge port where you get to see it and feel it. And me as a CNC guy who's never really used a manual machine, I hand jog my CNC machines all the time, just deck it or face it or do a little cut, whatever. What are your thoughts on that?
00:39:16
Speaker
No hard pass on which oh not like I don't care if you jog at my hand, but no, I'm not
00:39:22
Speaker
To give the extreme example, I do not care if a modern day CNC machinist understands what a reamer feels like on a bridge port. Exactly. It's just, it's not relevant. It could be cool, it could be good to know, but the reality is the way tool libraries and modern programming in the future work, we are gonna tell you, or you're gonna know, hey, we wanna leave 3000 radial, we wanna run it at half the RPM twice the feed, or we have examples preset.
00:39:54
Speaker
I honestly don't even know how controversial that is these days. I'm sure it will be controversial to some, but much in the same way that your 1955 Chevy user's manual talked to you about how to set your valve adjustments. Nowadays, it tells you not to drink the coolant. The reality is you're not going to be hand-re-immune in a bridge port, so no need to know how that feels. It's good.
00:40:19
Speaker
Now, I will say there's a lot to be said for setting up the machine, understanding what is logical on fastening a fastener. This is a tricky one, but knowing if a book or somebody miswrote down or bad information, it's like, hey, you should torque that quarter 20 to 40 foot pounds.
00:40:41
Speaker
You may not know that that's three or four times too much by just seeing the number, but as you start to feel it, realizing, hey, this doesn't make sense. Now, that's something that I don't know that we teach, but we nurture as we see things done well and we see mistakes. Maybe we talk about that a little bit. Yeah, even tightening a vice handle, like some of our
00:41:06
Speaker
The few times we use advice, it's like, okay, this part needs to be tightened delicately, like gently. And my version of delicate and your version of delicate are different, right? So that's where tour granches come in and helpful. But yeah, having that feel for it is hard to teach unless you make a point of it and to nurture it into your culture, like you said.
00:41:26
Speaker
Yeah. But that's what I want to do with the internship program is even maybe that's it. Maybe it's like, hey, as part of your, every week we have a different thing you kind of do. One could be like, hey, you're going to go break it, intentionally break off a quarter 20 and show you what that means. And get the broken part out. Welcome to easy outs. Day three, swearing not included. Welcome to every day working on an older car.
00:41:52
Speaker
Oh, have you started working on it? I haven't yet, but a little bit. Actually, I tried to bleed the brakes, but then we exploded the brake fitting. So, uh, Oh, I gave up for the day. That's funny. That's cool though.
Optimizing Tooling and Production Efficiency
00:42:05
Speaker
Um, the other exciting thing we're starting is, uh, we're starting to be more deliberate with the horizontal. So, um, a guy that machine is just incredible. Uh, the problem we have now is Lex issues work orders for like a hundred soft jaws, but that's not how the horizontal runs. We don't run it like, Hey, we're going to go make a hundred of these right now. It is slow and steady. It's not slow, but like the idea with the horizontal, every night it's going to run.
00:42:35
Speaker
It's full cycle of tombstones unless we want to adjust it down. And I think that's right now is 10 soft jaws on the one fixture. So to do a work order of 100, it just isn't how that machine runs. So what we're doing instead is, like if you were running a vertical, you would run five at a time and just keep running until you get to the 100 and then you'd complete that work order. So what we're doing is we're using the horizontal board during the day
00:43:06
Speaker
with manual decisions around, hey, we need to build up inventory of these seven SKUs. And then once we have enough inventory, then it can run its nightly run of stuff. And we'll match that with minor adjustments over time. You know, maybe Tuesday night, we don't run one thing because we don't want to overproduce. But we'll never hit that point where, oh my gosh, we're totally out of these. We need to stop everything and just cycle that machine on all day or all night for one part.
00:43:33
Speaker
Yeah, with our current, it's kind of the same thing because you can't just like if we say tonight, we're just going to make rasp blades. Well, for one, we only have enough fixturing to make like four. So we can't just make rasp blades. It has to like we're still going to make everything else. Maybe we can throughout the day make individuals to catch up. But yeah, we have to be conscious.
00:43:56
Speaker
So the other thing we're doing is on the soft jaws, for example, we slot them individually out of 20 inch piece of bar. So we're slotting, which is relatively slow compared to a lot of the other operations. And so I had been just.
00:44:12
Speaker
Today, it was like one quarter inch tool that did a ton of the work, kind of going back to the, hey, don't worry about it, just get them going. Now, it's actually pretty fun. We just put in the Lakeshore Taz, aggressive rougher, and it's awesome because it cranks. It lets me keep that finishing tool for more finishing stuff, which isn't as critical in aluminum, but nevertheless, I like that. But it lets us really help the daytime productivity so that, hey, if we do want to go for three hours and just crank one product,
00:44:41
Speaker
Hey, the difference between 16 minutes and 22 minutes on a cycle time for us matters now or it's worth it. Yep. Especially once things are more automated and you're compounding that 16 minutes over and over and over and over again with almost no downtime, uh, it adds up fast. Yeah. Yeah. What are you up to today?
Conclusion and Future Plans
00:45:04
Speaker
Uh, put that router together, call about the enclosure, just like we talked about. And, uh,
00:45:10
Speaker
Yeah, whenever else comes up. I like it. I'm going to call the garage door company. There you go. That's great. Like, seriously. Yeah. And I don't know, look at orders. I haven't thought of, I had meetings this morning, so I'm not even like settling in yet. Yeah, in work mode yet. Right. Perfect. Good talk though. All right, man. I'll see you. Have a great day. Bye.