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#303 Dedicate tools for dedicated parts
266 Plays2 years ago
Topics:
- Surface grinding blades, milling fixture plates, flatness flatness flatness!
- ISO9001 certification
- Implementing procedures through the shop
- Dedicate tools for dedicated parts
- Inventory count
- Foam
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 303. My name is John Grimsmough. My name is John Saunders. This is the weekly fantastical manufacturing podcast where we talk about all things from inventory levels to scrap, to future plans, to all kinds of other stuff. So let's jump in.
The Essential Role of Surface Grinders
00:00:21
Speaker
Your surface grinder, who makes that? Okamoto? It is the forgotten machine, Joe. Yes. It is literally in the corner of the shop. And I even forget that we have it sometimes. And Angelo runs it, so I don't run it at all. And you forget that I have it. You put up something of it on Instagram. And I actually literally laughed out loud because it is the forgotten machine. But it's a workhorse. It just does the stuff. Just grinds blades. Yeah. That's awesome. It's funny, yeah.
00:00:51
Speaker
Yeah, we don't really hype it up. We don't really talk about it too much, but it's good. It's been a good purchase, I think. It's huge. Go ahead. Go ahead.
00:01:00
Speaker
It's not, I mean, we're super picky with our surface finishes and everything. And the way the wheel breaks down and the certain grid and the composition and everything, it can lead to some gouging that is not visible to the operator running the machine until we like heat treat it, lap it, get it down to perfect. And we're like, there's a deep gouge there. Where'd that come from? So we have struggled with that for sure.
Blade Machining and Processing Techniques
00:01:22
Speaker
I think it's mostly good or now, but it's still like,
00:01:26
Speaker
It's not perfect every time, you know? It's funny. So you buy a water jet cut, whatever, steel, like nice steel, whatever that is. And then you don't have a double disk anymore, right? We don't do the blades. No, we surface grind them. We bought the machine so we don't have to have outside processing. Yeah, so they come in like 0.156. We surface grind them down to like 128, leaving a few thou for lapping. Any warp from heat treat or whatever, yeah.
00:01:55
Speaker
So what's the, it's just been so long since we talked about this. It's what's your, so water jet, Okamoto surface grind, then machine, then lap, then heat treat. So we machine them soft, almost all the features on the blade, except for the bevels and some of the lockup features. And then we heat treat. Okay. And then cryo cool and quench and temper and everything. And then
00:02:23
Speaker
Then we put them back on the Kern to machine the, the lockup features. Okay. And then we lap and then we put them on the Maury to machine the bevels. Oh, and then to get a lot of hand finishing done. So it's like a complicated, there's a lot of blade. What happens in the Maury, the, the, the blade bubbles, the cutting edge is hard milled on a three axis. Why, why is that not current?
00:02:48
Speaker
Ah, Kern doesn't need to, and the Maury just does it well. Yeah, okay. Fair enough. Yep. Hold on. Because I don't tilt it. It's all vertical. Like, the blade is sitting upright, so edge is pointing to the sky, and a 3.8 ball mill just comes in and machines those lines on the blade. Got it. Now, for the Rask, we do use the Kern to hard mill the blade and hard grind the blade as well, but the Maury just works great.
00:03:12
Speaker
Got to keep that machine busy too, right? No, totally. Would you move it to the brother since it could be pallet ties? At this point, I'm not planning on that. More rask blades on the brother. Yeah, the mori has time, so I want to keep it busy.
Ensuring Flatness and Quality in Manufacturing
00:03:31
Speaker
I mean, digging deep here, maybe two years ago, laughing was kind of a quote unquote problem. But did the surface grinder solve the need to be lapping forever? Yes and no. It helped us increase our consistency and thickness that outside double disking was not able to.
00:03:49
Speaker
be accurate so we can hit like a tenth or two thickness accuracy but any of these hidden scratches become a big problem in the lapping process. So we've been constantly refining like let's leave one and a half thou per side. Now lapping takes off one and a half thou. It's still not enough. Let's leave two thou per side or whatever the numbers are and not only that but any warp from heat treat
00:04:12
Speaker
that does not get bent out or flattened out or whatever, lapping has to take that out. Imagine trying to take a taco and make it flat on both sides. Welcome to Saunders Machine Works. Yeah, exactly. But with only less than 2,000 material to remove on both sides. How do you guys deal with flatness? Because your plates are huge and 4140 is probably not the most stable, flattest material ever.
00:04:37
Speaker
There's very few things I will take a position of confidence in to this level, because I just find that it's better to listen and learn. Let me tell you something. We're good at this now. We're good. Yeah. And it's everything from how we order the grain structure of the material to how we prep it with demagging it to we have now built a lot of three-point gauges. So take a picture.
00:05:07
Speaker
picture a 12 inch by one inch stick, like a, like a, like an old grade school ruler that has three points on it, two points on the far end, one point on the third end. And then the middle of it is an indicator that lets us quickly determine whether material is we say hill or lake because it just works better than concave or convex. Like a dial indicator in the middle of that, you made a fixture for it or something. Yep. So you can slap a fixture on it and quickly know if it's hill or lake.
00:05:33
Speaker
Hill or Lake? Yep. Oh, that's cool. Okay. They can be 3D printed. The whole thing could be 3D printed. We're not checking for any accuracy here. We're just simply saying, hey, does it go three thou or 13 thou dip or 13 thou Hill or whatever. And from there depends on what we're doing. So you want to think about, do you want that part to be
00:05:57
Speaker
It depends on where you're holding it, where your end customer is going to be holding it. Do you want to have it be a lake where if you're fixturing on the outside, the part will sort of rock? Yeah. And so you're clamping on the outside, we'll pull it down or there's other reasons perhaps like vacuum that might be better. I'm making this up like might be better to have a hill.
00:06:22
Speaker
Number one, we want to know and we want to be conscious of the decisions as to how it affects and how we load the material. Interesting. For fixture plates, it's not like a secret at this point that for about the past year, we've been able to avoid grinding altogether and the results have been
00:06:43
Speaker
I could not have asked for better results. The parallelism spec that we're holding is absolutely industry-leading period, like full stop. In fact, one of the manager meetings we had was huddling up on, can we increase our publicized spec without creating a problem?
00:06:59
Speaker
And this is a whole other rabbit hole that could be addressed rather simply by saying, let's say we want to hold, I think our current number is half a thou total, not plus or minus half a thou per like 18 inches. We can do way better than that. But I'm going to be careful because if we publish a different spec and let's say one, you know,
00:07:22
Speaker
One square inch corner of one plate has six tenths tape or fall off or something. Right. That is totally trivial and not impactful, but but it technically will be outside the scope of our claim. I don't like that. So I totally figure out how to handle that. But that's a little bit more marketing nuance and so forth. But we're good at it. So I brought that up because Hill Lake, there's another reason I brought that up.
00:07:51
Speaker
Oh, so it matters more so how we hold. So what we're doing isn't all that different from what you'll see if you walk into a hardcore old school blancher shop or full blown surface grinding shop. All they do is grinding. You'll see guys with lots of shims, colored markers. They're blocking things up. They're basically kind of like lapping or kind of like hand scraping. You're trying to get the material
00:08:20
Speaker
held in a constrained state that's not impacting any sort of bow on it. That's the key.
Managing Material Constraints and Precision
00:08:29
Speaker
If you think about having a part that looks like a lake, you want to hold it in your opposite road like a lake, so that way you start decking off the left and the right side, or you start decking off the shores of the lake, and the whole thing becomes a plane.
00:08:44
Speaker
Technically, you would have theoretically an unconstrained flat top surface because you're adding shims to the side. When you constrain it, it's not actually flexing it, you're just holding it in place. Then you're decking the top so when you take off the clamps, it should theoretically be unconstrained flat-ish.
00:09:03
Speaker
When you take off the clamps, if you had indicators every three inches in every direction, when you release the clamps, nothing moves. Really? Yeah. So when you flip it onto a flat machine table or a fixture plate or whatever, that's easy then. It's also then flat-ish. And then you deck the second side. Does the material, so it might be parallel throughout the entire thing, but does the material itself want to bow, even though every point is exactly half inch or whatever?
00:09:33
Speaker
Yes, we use hot rolls, so it's not like a cold roll where as you start peeling off sides, it really wants to flex. That is flatness or unconstrained flatness, not parallelism. So you can still address that. It's a lot easier. We are looking for, you know, our emphasis is on parallelism because our product is using a constrained state, but unconstrained flatness sure helps us and everything else. So yeah, it's fun.
00:09:58
Speaker
That's cool. Yeah. No, it's funny. We go through the same thing. Like we want unconstrained flatness for the blade because it's unconstrained in the knife. And every process we go through in the shop has to be relatively unconstrained. So we built a light box with a hydrogen. The hydrogen light sodium. It's not that that's that's for like light band flatness. So we have that as well.
00:10:27
Speaker
So let's use light beams to see how flat the surface is. But no, this is just an optical. It's got orange LEDs in the back of it. It's a white 3D printed box. And we have a vise parallel, basically, or a vise jaw, actually it is. But it's got a super flat top surface. So we just slap the blade on top of this vise jaw. And we're looking for a light gap underneath so we can see if it's a hill or a lake.
00:10:50
Speaker
And then that's our visual indicator and we've got it right next to an arbor press. So right before lapping, it's Steven's job to like bend every single blade from heat treat, like just tweak them a little bit. And it doesn't take a lot of force, but it's very easy to overdo it. And we can tell a bad heat treat will bend the more or less or harder or even a different steel comes in and we like they feel different.
00:11:14
Speaker
So, sometimes he's chasing his tail and then creates a little S-shaped and now the parts like not saveable anymore. Yeah. So, it's fun. So, what we're doing, it's kind of a good segue is...
Process Improvement and Efficiency Strategies
00:11:30
Speaker
we're wrapping up our year and we're starting off 2023 on a really strong process oriented focus. And we use that word at the risk of overusing it, but I'm doing so consciously. So today we have a Uline cart ready to go again, which preparatory purchase slash growth eats cash for breakfast. Our Uline orders are never not four figures these days. Yeah, totally.
00:11:57
Speaker
And we just ordered like 10 days ago. We have another one ready to go. But what we're starting is process bins. And we already use these. They're about a little bit bigger than a sheet of paper and about three inches high U-line bins. They're quite common. You've probably seen them in our YouTube videos or instances. I probably have a smaller version of that.
00:12:16
Speaker
Exactly. Well, they sell them in gray, blue, and red. Red is finished product. Blue is work in progress. Gray is miscellaneous or really doesn't mean anything. What we're going to do as a start is take the gray bins and put a
00:12:33
Speaker
a wrap of green tape around it to turn it into a process bin. The first two process bins, one is going to be international shipping. So that bin is going to have in it sample forms. We actually already have the sample forms, but it's not clear where they are. And we need this physical sacred object that shows anybody who walks into that room, oh, I know what's in that. That's a process bin.
00:12:57
Speaker
And so international shipping stuff will be there. And then the next one will be a couple of products that we have more peculiar processes around. And I talked about this a year, a year and a half ago, it never happened. And now
00:13:10
Speaker
It will happen because we've got more momentum around our own processes. Alex is here. We've got dimensional drawings that are being more focused around just growing up. So we'll have things like this three point jigs. We'll have laminated, laminated set up sheets, laminated dimensional drawings. And then we're going to do photos of examples of where we've struggled in the past.
00:13:32
Speaker
versus what we had thought of doing was including that defective product samples, but I don't want the defective products to be in the bin at the risk of them getting mixed in or long. And the laminated photos will just be a simple like, oh, hey, sometimes what happens is this,
00:13:48
Speaker
it gets chatter on this corner or this is an indication of the tool wearing out or so I am like beyond excited to it's kind of the things right it's already happened in my head like it's already happened it just literally just waiting for these bins to show up. We're putting them the product
00:14:07
Speaker
process bins will be on a rolling Sam's Club cart, so that we'll kind of have a library, if you will, to draw from that. But like international shipping, the 3D printing process bin, those will be interspersed throughout the shop in their appropriate location. Exactly. Which is another great segue, and then I'll stop talking, to an email we got from a viewer about you should do ISO 9001 without registering for ISO 9001.
00:14:31
Speaker
And it's honestly a pretty good idea. I don't know a ton about it, but the initial research I did this week talks about this idea of getting away from superhero operators and just, you know, you want to enable folks to make decisions, but that doesn't mean there isn't a limit to what those decisions should be. For example, aware offset might be okay. Well, coordinate system offset, what are you doing or updating cam? Hold on. You're not allowed to do that. Like rules are a good thing. Um, and,
00:15:00
Speaker
It's overwhelming, but it's not because you don't have to do ISO 9001 for the whole shop. Let's start an ISO 9001 style procedure for one product, period. That's the way we're going to start doing it. Interesting. I like that. We've got some friends even with small shops like Danny Rudolph and Dennis, and they're all ISO certified. I think both of those guys have an outside contractor come in and be like, help me through this process. They said it's totally worth it.
00:15:29
Speaker
I've seen some cynicism, but for the record, I'm not, either one of those guys, but it's, yeah. My point is,
00:15:38
Speaker
It seems like a huge daunting task that only mega corporations typically do. Here we have friends with either very smaller, a little bit bigger than our shops that are doing it. Not that we have to do it because you and I make our own products and we sell them to our own customers. We don't need the certification, but it's a neat idea to go through that process. When I was looking into ProShop for the ERP system a couple of years ago, one of their big selling features is
00:16:04
Speaker
pro shop is meant for ISO 9000 certification. So the way it's structured and the way it's laid out and the way they make you track everything kind of gets you ready for that process, which I thought was really cool.
00:16:17
Speaker
Yeah, that idea that I've heard you can't not be compliant so long as you don't cheat their system or something. Yeah, exactly. But there's stuff. I want to learn more about it. But there's stuff that I don't think we'll qualify for. We're not necessarily going to have the systems in place to do lot tracking of material that's inbound like you need. But that's OK, I think, at least for now. Yeah, for now, it's probably OK. And then maybe a year or two from now, you're like, it'd be really nice, actually, if we did track source material with the spec sheet.
00:16:45
Speaker
per batch number based on our product, uh, serial number, et cetera, et cetera, because we've had a batch of blade steel come in that is weird. It like he treats weird. It's weirdly bendy. And we're like, I don't know what's going on. It's measuring the right hardness. I don't know. Blah, blah, blah. And, uh, this is a new, new blade still that we don't normally do. And we're like, I don't know. Yeah. Little things I don't want.
00:17:12
Speaker
things to pop up. The more tracking, the easier it is to hone down on what's going on kind of thing. Yeah. I'm just excited about the idea that I need to switch over to the leadership part of our conversation.
Balancing Operator Autonomy and Process Adherence
00:17:31
Speaker
I have
00:17:32
Speaker
Um, the reason, uh, the reason I like, it's easy for me to take a week off of work if I'm on my laptop and low stress, casually involved in decisions as needed. Like no big deal. It could be sustainable forever. I could be in a line at Disney world or I could be hanging out like whatever, but it would be hard, I think for me to take two or three days
00:17:57
Speaker
where I shut my phone off, period. And I suspect folks that are listening could maybe agree with that. So it's those kind of edge cases, if you will, that are never going to get solved and perhaps
00:18:13
Speaker
Well, they're never going to get solved unless I go out of my comfort zone to solve them. Perhaps they'll always exist. I mean, look, if we get a roof leak or a hydraulic pump fails on a machine, that's probably going to be a question for me forever.
00:18:31
Speaker
a lot of these cases could much better be solved with that stuff I'm hearing about like, hey, you're allowed to update this offset by up to 3000. If it's more than that, you need to tell your supervisor. And if it's more than that, you need to log it here, like just giving folks a roadmap to follow. Absolutely. Which I think for the operator as I'm learning how people like to work is helpful, super helpful. It gives them a guiding parameters. Be like, okay, here's my will go room. Any more than that, I need some help. And we've seen that with our leads to like,
00:19:01
Speaker
You know sometimes peers and they're changing a couple things that maybe you shouldn't be or you know a little bit too much offset or something like that or tweaking a tool path and I'm like why are you tweaking the tool path like it worked before but it's not working now okay there's maybe there's another reason maybe the inserts chipped out meaning your radius is not sure cutting properly yada yada.
00:19:21
Speaker
There's always a reason, and it's not the operator's job to know every possible solution, combination of errors that can cause these issues. But if the process is pretty dialed, then it should all work. And if not, something's wrong. So yeah, giving them operating parameters to work within.
00:19:38
Speaker
It's like that like lose-lose scenario where you've got a great team member who's doing creative thinking and problem-solving to get things working, and then they become reprimanded for stepping outside. Yeah, I know. That's got to end because that's not, but it's such a natural end result without more stuff in place. Yeah, just need a bit more structure. You want to encourage that, but you don't want it to go too far.
00:20:05
Speaker
I don't know where the line is. Fix your own problems, but consult with me first. Well, to your point, you don't know where the line is. Well, then draw a flipping line. And if they want to cross it, then hey, say, OK, let's move the line a little bit. First step, let's draw a line. Exactly. I like that. Yeah.
00:20:25
Speaker
which is a good segue to have also goal of I just this morning bought more holders for the Akuma because we're we have too many
Tool Management and Machining Accuracy
00:20:38
Speaker
tools. This was deliberate. I'm okay with it, but it needs to end. We have too many tools that are getting mixed use across multiple parts. And so now having dedicated tools that are reference dedicated finishes for every part. It's so nice.
00:20:52
Speaker
Oh yeah, because I want to make an adjustment to one tool, but that brings up the whole fusion, not having linked libraries issued in complication, but also I just want the machine isolated. This tool 110 is only on this product, and if I don't want to deal with that right now and I like that tool, I can run a different palette and not worry that that same tool is going to
00:21:14
Speaker
have its streakiness or chippiness affect a different product? Yeah, another product. Totally agree. Yeah, we do. I mean, I do have a lot of shared tools on the current, but they do same things on different products. Got it. You know, like profile the outside of a handle, and it does that on different knives, different processes, but with the same speeds and feeds, the same depth of cut, the same everything. So if you change an offset to that tool to fix a rask handle, it's going to affect a Norseman handle as well.
00:21:42
Speaker
Right? I've got the speeds and feeds and the offsets and the wear comps and everything dialed for both. It just works at the moment. If you start spreading across, if we throw fixtures on there and I use a knife handle rougher to make a fixture, that's a no-no, not allowed.
00:22:04
Speaker
This is like machining 201, but it's kind of mind-blowing of like, okay, we are dialing something in. You can change the machine's coordinate system location. You can change the tool. Well, you could change the tool diameter and fusion. That's kind of dumb, but I'll explain why we do that sometime at one time in a second. You can change the wear comp. You can change the radial stock to leave, or you can change
00:22:29
Speaker
something else. There's all these different ways you can fudge it. That goes back to this ISO thing of like, hey, let's figure out why we're doing this instead of just changing stuff. At the end of the day, you need a standardized procedure. There's three different ways to change your tool diameter, wear offset, whatever. Which one are you going to choose? Which one is the operator going to choose at
00:22:54
Speaker
the moment when he needs it. Where's the limit? Because wear comp on the machine is only effective for that exact tool. And when you put in a new end mill and touch it off again, your wear comp goes away, which can be very good if a new tool on a new part is dialed. And you need the wear to dial it in. But if Fusion is making an undersized feature, you need stock to leave. You need negative 2.10 stock to leave in Fusion. Therefore, a new tool in Fusion gives you the result you want.
00:23:23
Speaker
and then the machine updates the wear offset as it needed with the probe or whatever.
00:23:29
Speaker
So that's why, that's the scenario that started this. It's not that we were making a bunch of bad parts, it was that we need a better process to replace a tool or replace an insert without kind of, hey, what are we doing now? Are we just, are we having to fudge a bunch of stuff and dial it in? No, you should, we have a very accurate machine tools that are either new or high quality. Like you should be able to either probe the part, the feature or touch off a tool
00:23:58
Speaker
And it's good period. None of this like, it just shouldn't be another way. Now there are reasons again, we want to do negative stock to leave and those are like the petty like, Hey, we modeled this feature at half inch, but we actually want it to be clear inst or something. And the reason we, the only reason we ever lied about a diameter was we're cutting these
00:24:18
Speaker
three sixteenths gaskets, um, on those valve covers. And fast forward, we actually switched to an undersized tool. We bought like a four and a half millimeter metric tool, such a better way to do it. But, um, fusion wouldn't run correctly, calculate the tool path for a three 16 slot with a three 16th tool. So I had to go in and lie to it until it was one 10,000th of an inch undersized. That might be like a tolerancing thing, but I actually couldn't.
00:24:46
Speaker
couldn't get it to fix itself. So lying to it about the tool diameter by one tenth is no big deal, but it's still like weird. Yeah, I think I've done stuff like that too. And different materials cut at different rates. Like if I'm boring a 375 hole, you could 2D pocket and finish the walls or you can do a bore operation that'll give you two totally different tolerances. And then titanium versus like rich light. I just bored a 375 hole in rich light.
00:25:12
Speaker
and I gave it no extra stock to leave and it made a 370 hole on the speedio, like 5,000 undersized. Wow. And I'm like, I don't know exactly why, but whatever. I gave us some negative stock to leave in fusion and it made a perfect hole. Done.
00:25:27
Speaker
Yeah, right, done. Like move on. And I do like stock to leave in Fusion because it's one of the few adjustments that conveys operator intent. Fudging and offset is bad because if you re-probe it, you've lost that. Yeah. And you don't know why. And it's similar with wear comp if the tool's worn is fine, but wear comp for the sake of correcting something else. Exactly. That's no good. There's so much nuance to all this. Yeah.
00:25:56
Speaker
It's fun though. It is fun. Yeah. What have you been up to?
Inventory Management and Financial Planning
00:26:05
Speaker
So with our new account on board this year, he's insisting on a full inventory count of the shop, which we've never officially done. We have some stuff on the book. Some things get written off as we buy them, operating materials, blah, blah, blah. But he's like, no, we should count everything within reason. So him and I had a big chat yesterday. What's within reason?
00:26:28
Speaker
Every screw and nut and bolt, no, not necessary, but everything where money is sitting there. We have tens of thousands of dollars or more of material of titanium and stainless and blades and handles and stuff sitting around, and we have numbers for our own use case. We need to order more if we get under 100 or whatever, but we don't exactly have a dollar value, especially for bookkeeping purposes of
00:26:54
Speaker
material that is in our shop that has not been touched yet, that's ready for process. Then what's the big things that are in process right now? We probably have one or 200 knives on the go flowing through the shop at different stages right now. That's significant amount of money too. That's one of the things I'm working on is counting and calculating and figuring out what's important to track and what's not. Yeah. That's a lot of work.
00:27:21
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm trying to keep it simple and somebody else is going to do the counting.
00:27:27
Speaker
Are you going to then keep it more of a live monthly update or are you going to wait and just buckle up at the end of the year? No, we're going to keep a more live update for sure. Something we're building out in GURP that's going to keep track of everything because we have been keeping track of tons of things and the finger on the pulse has been so nice of knowing how many round parts we have.
00:27:52
Speaker
I want to run a project and I have my project materials, my fixture blocks, whatever. How many do I have of those? I've only got three, but I need to make six or something. I know I have some, but it's getting there. Yeah. I think we talked about this six or nine months ago, but for us, it's
00:28:11
Speaker
It smooths out on quarterly or annual basis to the point where it's fine, but sometimes it'll mess up. I don't look at the numbers really, but monthly numbers can get messed up if we just happen to buy a lot of extra material one month and it's not been allocated, costed within a month period. Let's say we bought a bunch of material for a job or running next month. You can manually make that adjustment. For a while, I was making
00:28:36
Speaker
I do do a monthly summary and I was looking at outliers and kind of doing my own version of a variance reporting where it's like, okay, wait here. This month, we spent $5,000 on more holders for the horizontal. That's a item that can get moved as a capitalized, if not capitalized for tax reasons, at least noted as like, hey, that's not really part of the run rate of Sondra's machine works. Exactly.
00:29:05
Speaker
And it helps give some clarity around, look, how are you doing? Although the funny thing is like month over month, amortized over the year, like there's always those weird purchases. Yes. You know what I mean? It's kind of funny. It's like, yes, that's a one-time purchase, that $5,000 of holders. But next month will be another $5,000 of something. It is variable, but it's, I don't know, growth eats cash for breakfast. This is the slogan of this podcast.
00:29:34
Speaker
Yes. Speaking of that, how's the router? How's the Willemin? How's the router? Router is awesome.
Advancements in Foam Packaging Technology
00:29:43
Speaker
We've got the router in the enclosure right now. Our electrician came in yesterday, helped us button up a bunch of the wiring. He's in here today, actually, wiring up the vacuum pump. We got this huge bush vacuum pump. And I made my first vacuum table, one of four, finished that yesterday. So that's getting put on today. So we should actually be able to suck something today with the new vacuum pump, which will be sick. I've got that Datron vacuum card material.
00:30:08
Speaker
That'll go on top of that, so it won't be the Venturi gasket-style vacuum tables that we've been using forever. This will be a nice little change.
00:30:22
Speaker
fine tuning the wiring and cleaning it up and using tech flex sheet thing on the wiring and making all the holders super clean and super nice. Plugging everything in today, we're going to turn it on. They're going to level it. I got to tune the clear path motors again now that it's actually not on a wooden box and shaking all over the place. Yes, we'll be doing that today.
00:30:47
Speaker
It's coming together. I'm hoping to cut foam by the end of the year. Through the holidays, I'm going to pop in and cut some foam. Our new foam from the local supplier should be here by the end of the week. Oh, good. I'm super excited about that. That worked out? It worked out so good. Awesome. From Norseman Foam Company. Couldn't turn it down. Yeah. So they're doing a custom three layer. It'll be black, and then a thick gray in the middle, and then a black again.
00:31:13
Speaker
The black and the gray are actually different densities of hardness. That's cool. It's the exact thickness we need. We don't have to face them down like we used to before and it ends up being cheaper than we were paying before. It's just going to be so nice. Do they glue them together to make up that laminate? They laminate it. I don't know what that process is if it's heat or something, but they have a laminating process that sticks them together real good.
00:31:40
Speaker
I went down a completely acceptable 20-minute YouTube binge of, or maybe a little longer, 20 minutes of how they make these foams. So polystyrene, the light white stuff that goes everywhere, and then also the urethane foams or whatever. That's what we use, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it is cast, but these things are done at such crazy scale.
00:32:04
Speaker
Even the, is it the polystyrene? I think they showed that they were making these, they look like they were like two or three feet by two or three feet and then like continuous cast. They were almost like they were 60 feet long and then they were like hot knifing them into sheets or something. It was crazy because I had this
00:32:21
Speaker
Admittedly, dumb idea that I wanted to make sure was a dumb idea. Raise your hand if you've ever done that before. Every day. Could we build a mold and cast individual modifies boxes instead of 3D machining them? And the answer is clearly a terrible idea or just not how it's done. But nevertheless, it was interesting to see and learn. There's not a ton of video content out there on it, but some people do show in like Smooth On makes
00:32:48
Speaker
Like, homestyle, individual kits. But I'm sure you've seen those package fillers that's like a bag with this foam. It must have some breakable epoxy inside. It's an activator that conforms around the part. Yes, the seal stuff, whatever. Yeah. So couldn't you do that, but on a more production basis for your own packaging? I don't know if you'd want to.
00:33:13
Speaker
That stuff is so like perfect example. Hanging my head in shame here, we had to replace a hospital. We crashed it. And the new spindle came in a surprisingly small casual UPS box. I'm like, Oh my God, are you serious? And so sure enough, it was, what does that, I wish I knew what that stuff was called. It's not sealed air, but it's, it's like the great stuff, expanding foam, where you,
00:33:43
Speaker
The spindle goes in there, they crack the seal on this thing and it just perfectly conforms and hugs every ex-regulate. And they arrive totally fine. I mean, you could have probably dropped this thing five or 10 feet and the packaging would have been sufficient. My understanding is that stuff is like 20 bucks per bag. Sure. Which for a spindle is the right choice, but for a mod vice, no. Yeah, I know. Yeah, interesting.
00:34:05
Speaker
No, we've got a phone. Alex has been working on it. So I've only been kept up to date as needed, but we have a solution in the works with somebody making it for us. Nice. And it will be, I'm pretty sure, a machine. So yeah. Yeah.
00:34:22
Speaker
The only other thing I have to think of instead of machining is can you faster cut it with something like a water, not like a water jet, like a fast water jet that's only using water or something. On that note. And then laminate it together. Go ahead, sorry. Yep. So that's what Norseman Foam Company is doing. So we've got our base foam, which is the heavy duty polyurethane, like pretty dense stuff. And then for the lid, we've got that, it's dark gray and porous and like, um,
00:34:48
Speaker
open cell foam or it's like you can squish it into a ball. It's like really soft. You can breathe through it kind of thing.
00:34:54
Speaker
three-eighths thick and they are water jetting the profile of that and the late the sales lady I was talking to she's like oh yeah we have a water jet machine I was like I know all about water jets but she didn't really know that they normally have a sand abrasive so I was telling her that like yeah we use water jets you know outsourced to cut metal using sand as they were and she's like oh I didn't know that we just use water in ours and then we dry the parts and they're great
00:35:18
Speaker
So they're cutting the lid foam on the top side of the case from light polyurethane, like squishy foam. And she showed me a picture this morning because it's got a contour around some of the internal features of the case that we're using. And it looks really good. The sample she sent. So if all that stuff comes by the end of the week, we're getting a thousand cases worth of foam and it's going to be sick. Awesome. And then we've got a lot more
00:35:46
Speaker
hidden under wraps with this whole project coming forward. It's going to be super exciting. When I was in Charlotte, whatever, two weeks ago at that DSI thing, ended up talking to a guy who works for the army and currently does something with ballistics on howitzers, but formerly did something with retrofitting
00:36:10
Speaker
like military vehicles for IED type stuff and I sort of the light bulb went off in my head. Short version of a fun story for me which is the company that we found up in New England to help us with strike mark in 2007 or whatever a long time ago, the way they were
00:36:26
Speaker
They were killing it. They were a laser shop. They had a steel cutting laser, and they also had a bunch of water jets. They had found some relationship, and I hope this is the correct story, but they knew the guy who owned the intellectual property rights behind Drumroll, the old Reebok pumps. Okay. Remember those from the... Oh, yeah.
00:36:48
Speaker
And so, you know, obviously, the shoes aren't selling anymore. So what do you do with this like rubber ball cushion technology, and it ends up if you put those two of those hemispheres touching each other with with laminated sheets on each side, it's a really, really good isolator of shock between two things. Okay, so they had these sheets, they were probably like an inch to two inches thick,
00:37:12
Speaker
That had the two hemispheres touching each other and they I mean John I have some photos from the warehouse or their factory they had You could probably stack that stuff eight feet high and it was as far as you could see and probably a 70,000 square foot room just
00:37:27
Speaker
And all they were doing was taking roamer arms, measuring Humvees, measuring fast boats, measuring MRAPs, and then taking those measurements back, water jetting with no sand, just like blowing through the stuff, these cutouts, and they glue it into the decks to help our soldiers not die from IED explosions. And so this guy kind of knew about what that stuff was. It was so fun to see like the thing come full circle 15 years later. Anyway, that's all.
00:37:55
Speaker
That's awesome. Well, this guy at the Charlotte event. He knew that story to some extent. It was kind of cool. It maybe added more context to your version of the story as well. Yeah, that's awesome. Just fun. Nice. Well, congrats on the phone. That's exciting to get that. Yeah, it's coming together. So yeah, it's a nice subtle but big change for us. Yeah, and there's other big changes coming.
00:38:20
Speaker
You going to keep teasing me or are you going to tell me something? I'll tell you one thing.
Innovating with Nano Oils and Team Collaboration
00:38:26
Speaker
I think I've told you a week or two ago, the nano oil bottles that we get, I've always been looking for a smaller bottle and I finally found a smaller bottle to use. I bought a whole bunch and I've been playing with them.
00:38:39
Speaker
I built an auto filling station and I bought the nano oil in bulk, a gallon of nano oils, like many thousands of dollars. My filling station is just about done and I'm going to fill 10 at a time and we're sending them to a local company to get pad printed with our logo. Our media guy, Ryan,
00:39:00
Speaker
We came up with the logo and a little artwork and outline what we want on the front. It's nice cute little tiny letters and everything. The samples came back from pad printing on Monday. They look absolutely mint. We're like, is the oil going to rub them off? I put a squidge of oil on it and left it overnight and perfect. It doesn't rub off at all. That's coming together. That's looking really, really good. The bottles just look so pro. That's coming together with the whole new cases and the packaging and everything.
00:39:30
Speaker
Yeah, it's fun. I'm having fun with these little projects that all build into, you know, once, once they're in place, I can move on to other projects. So yes. Good. It's fun. Yeah. And getting all the team, uh, involved in little aspects of everything. Any, uh, up to you on the woman, nothing lately now. Okay.
00:39:51
Speaker
Um, I over the holiday break, I think I want to come in and, uh, got two things I want to make on it, which will be nice. Just no pressure anywhere else. Just like, okay, today's going to be a willing day. What tools do you have in it right now? Can I ask? I probably have five and mills, like a quarter inch, um, five flute from Lake shore with the little corner radius. I really like that tool. Um,
00:40:17
Speaker
I don't know if I have a chamfer mill in there yet, but I want one. Just an eighth inch chamfer mill will be fine. I've got like a one-sixteenth end mill. I think I've got a thirty-second end mill and maybe an eighth inch drill. A couple little things like that. A mix of Rigo and ER-16? Yes.
00:40:37
Speaker
Yeah, Rigo, because we have the power grip station for the current.
Tooling Strategies and Compatibility Issues
00:40:41
Speaker
And that's awesome. I showed you the picture of the Rigo PG-10 next to the ER-16, which the ER-16 is pretty small. It's gigantic next to the Rigo. It looks like a monstrosity next to it. Exactly. It's not the same HSK taper as the current. Yeah, it is. It is? HSK 40E with no drive dogs. So I am switching holders between machines. But the Willeman
00:41:07
Speaker
has such a short total gauge length that if I put all the tool holders on the current are 80 millimeters, if I put that on the Willeman, I can have no more than 15 millimeters to stick out from a tool. It's just like half inch. It's typical for me. So it's fine, but it's just fine. Oh, yeah. That's nothing. That's crazy. Yeah. OK, it's good to know. And you have a turning tool just to do. Yeah, with one V-insert turning tool and then one part off blade.
00:41:37
Speaker
Okay, fair enough. I'm just, just, just chewing. Just planning. Yeah. Um, yeah. And I bought, I think I have another eight or so holders, um, PG holders, and then a couple ER holders for the Wilhelmin that are super, super short and stubby. Um, just for future planning, cause I'm going to need more end mills and with 48 tool holders on this machine, like 48 spots, I'm just, I'm going to strategically put in tools that I know I'm going to need.
00:42:03
Speaker
and then never touch them until they need to be replaced. Yeah. And it's, oh, run a job? Okay. Change college, change wise jaws, hit go, like tweak tolerances. That's going to be so cool. Like even Eric was texting me last night. He's like, you know what would be really cool is if we made a couple pivots out of damasteel or something. Oh, sorry. I'm blanking on what a pivot is. The center of the knife blade, like the hardware that holds the blade in place.
00:42:32
Speaker
Okay. Where the bearings are and everything. Yeah, yeah, okay. And he's like, that would look really cool in damasteel, because they're playing with some damasteel right now. And I'm like, it'd be great, but I can't buy it in 3.8 centerless ground, you know, 40 plus plus inch lengths. This is a forged, you know, hand forged. Oh, yeah, right. I'm like, but
00:42:50
Speaker
I could put it on the Wilhelmin and like use the Wilhelmin because it doesn't need centerless ground bar. It doesn't need long bars, whatever. And there's no remnant. Yeah. I'm like, I could theoretically make it on the Wilhelmin. Why do you think I like the Wilhelmin so much? Yeah, that's awesome. The. Oh, what was I going to ask you about that to the. I can't think of it. If I think of it, I'll bring it up again.
00:43:19
Speaker
Yeah. What are you up to? What am I up to? Really good progress on that horizontal. So like I mentioned earlier, so we have the script working that scrapes all of our setup sheets and gives us a list of all of the tools to use across, which I can pull it up right now because I'm curious to see how many. I just finished that this morning. I look on shared drive setup sheets right now. Who made the script? Did Alex make it?
00:43:47
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. Right now we have 20, I guess I thought it was more than that, but still we have 20 discrete programs that could run, not all of them would run overnight on one night because some of them are the same, a different program for the same fixture location, like at various variant of a part, but nevertheless, um, 20 different programs that are kind of locked down. Just for the Akuma. Correct. That's fantastic. So I want to know like tool 12, I'm having an issue with it's a,
00:44:15
Speaker
three-eighth inch stubby and I'm wondering why is it wearing out so quickly because I'm using it on something that's really light duty as a one-off to fix some things. I'm like, okay, what uses tool 12? This will tell me that now. What part? That tells you what machining program is using that part, right? Bingo. How does the Akuma name programs? Do you have to go 1001.nc or can you use letters?
00:44:37
Speaker
No, Kuma's alphanumeric. It doesn't care. But what I get from my... In my Google Sheets that the script makes, it just tells me whatever the name is of the HTML file and Fusion defaults that name to the name of the Fusion file itself.
00:44:55
Speaker
the whole, okay. So they're not great names. Like the first one is 8jawsredoV98.html. But hey, number one, we all know what that file is. And number two, if you open the file, the first thing you see on the setup sheet is a picture of the part. So it's easy to figure that out. Okay, cool.
00:45:12
Speaker
So now it's making a list of what tools we need to break out for separate programs. We just got a Sandvik, it was actually really, we're running out of time, but I got a Sandvik 327, which is an insert style woodruff cutter. We were trying to do a back cutting feature.
00:45:30
Speaker
and using solid carbide woodruff cutters, which are super expensive, it stunk because those tools just don't have the right back relief on the grind to avoid rubbing that we were seeing. It just bothered me and I didn't
00:45:46
Speaker
I actually kind of gave up on this a while back, and then I realized, wait a minute here. So I spent some time looking through different tooling options. It's easy to say now that we found it and it works, but when you're starting that journey, you're like, oh my gosh, is this going to work? These are not inexpensive, although we got one in on test. But nevertheless, it works freaking great. Is this the kind where the head screws on two turns?
00:46:08
Speaker
No, it's not that like EH system. It's just a, think of a Woodruff cutter if you EDM'd the very, very tip off. And so it's more like an insert drill where it has a clocking feature and then you just screw, it just has a set screw that. Interesting. Cap screw that holds it in. Okay. But the inserts are significantly less expensive than a solid carbide. What diameter are we looking at here? It's like eight, it's a weird size, probably metric, but it's like 864, just under one inch. Okay.
00:46:38
Speaker
And with individual cutting inserts? No. It's a solid. Solid head. Correct.
Year-End Reflections and Team Celebrations
00:46:44
Speaker
OK, cool. And it's working. Works great. So it's like building that process out, ordering the UI and stuff to get process bins started. We're going to shop lunch tomorrow, kind of a fun holiday lunch. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah, we're doing our holiday lunch on Friday, getting local Mexican food. Nice. It's a really good place, Maria, is down the road that's authentic, and we support their business, kind of thing.
00:47:08
Speaker
Yeah, that's awesome. Um, I'm going to run. I gotta do some things. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas to all. See you for one more podcast. The end of the year.