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CNC Manufacturing, Rigging Haas VF6ss Machines, Rasks, and a HARD Question You May Have Never Thought To Ask Yourself As An Entrepreneur!
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CNC Manufacturing, Rigging Haas VF6ss Machines, Rasks, and a HARD Question You May Have Never Thought To Ask Yourself As An Entrepreneur!
"There are no PRIORITIES, only one PRIORITY."
During this weekly conversation about manufacturing, business, life balance, obstacles, solutions, and super technical, nerdy machining stuff, a lot is going on.
The SMW shop just got a little heavier. 45,000lbs to be exact. On Monday, twin Haas VF6ss machines arrived. Saunders shares his initial impression, what it was like for him and his team to rig the machines themselves, and the next steps in the process.
Proof that Everything is a Noodle Since the machines arrived, that also meant the VM3 (SMW's first VMC) had to move. Now, the Z-axis automatic coolant switch needs some attention. They were able to get the machine leveled in thanks to two great videos: Haas video & AT-man Unlimited.
The ONE Thing Grimsmo's been programming on the KERN but while trying to run a part yesterday, it didn't cooperate. Today, he's digging in to figure out why. While thinking of the barrage of parts that eventually need to be made on the KERN, it's easy to get flustered and overwhelmed; however, Grimsmo has determined the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT thing he can do for Grimsmo Knives right now---and yer gonna love it.
Living By The Modified Nike Slogan: Just Do It...NOW? Saunders admits he's been a lot harder on himself lately when it comes to completing tasks from the infamous to-do list. For him, the list allows too much time for procrastination or some other negative emotional reaction. So, he sees it and does it immediately. The question is, is this sustainable and scalable?
WHO ARE YOU? Some entrepreneurs never consider when starting a business, they should put themselves as the head of R&D and hire in a boss that handles the day-to-day operations & management of the company. Pocket NC did just that!
Bring Back The Million Dollar Question Grimsmo's surprising answer to the limitless question, "What would you do if someone gave your company a million dollars?"
SYSTEMS & PROCESSES MetalQuest left a lasting impression on Saunders. Behind the robots and machines is software and processes that culminate into one high functioning organizational system. On the same note, ALEX, the SMW custom inventory tracking, purchasing, & maintenance schedule software is evolving!
Click Image to Watch MetalQuest Tour
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Transcript
Introduction to Business, Life, and Machining
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 174. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. This is the podcast where two friends just get to have a weekly conversation about business and life and entrepreneurship and challenges and problems and especially machining. Yes, especially machining.
Heavy Machinery Addition and Logistics
00:00:21
Speaker
Our shop got a little heavier. It got a little bit heavier, hey? A little bit heavier, about 45,000 pounds heavier.
00:00:29
Speaker
Each or combined? Total. There's 20 something each, I believe. Wow, that's big. I mean, the VM3 is probably $15,000, right? Just like memory? Mm-hmm. These guys are big boys, chunkers.
00:00:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's the ship, the rigging weight. Sure. I had to chuckle. The pallet that it comes on is probably 10 times heavier than my first machine. Yeah, yeah, totally. The Kern was the same way. It just comes on this. It came in like two or three giant crates. I'm like, oh, man. So are they what you expected? Have you ever, I mean, I'm sure you've seen a VF6 before, but seeing them in your shop, is it different? Is it weird? Is it cool?
00:01:11
Speaker
I had a moment when they rolled in on the truck where you know they didn't send the wrong machine. That just doesn't happen, but I was like, oh my gosh, not only are these things small, but there was this big question of whether they could even get both machines on one truck.
00:01:28
Speaker
And that's one of the things you wonder is, oh man, I'll get a better deal because I'm buying two at once for freight and rigging. And I mean, you can always try to negotiate, but that really doesn't work because there's only so much space on a truck that's coming from California to Ohio. And if it wasn't our machine, it would have been a machine for somebody else in Ohio. So it's not like you get economies of scale style of discount.
00:01:55
Speaker
But there was big debate was whether they could fit two on one truck and I mean we were joking when they pulled in I was like we get a fit of you have to on the tail end of that thing come on.
00:02:04
Speaker
But we actually rigged these ourselves. I talked to our local rigger with whom we've had a good relationship and so often the stress with rigging has been around the timing of the deliveries and we're really hands-on anyways. We've moved a bunch of machines and the shop is sort of down anyways. All of us are helping
00:02:29
Speaker
Um, so we all huddled and thought about it and they, the rigger was, was, was happy to, to, um, rent us their forklift and give us some pointers. And honestly, it was the best rigging that we've ever done.
00:02:41
Speaker
Yeah. And it's so fun. When you've got the right tools and the right equipment, I've worked, Jared and I have moved to rigged machines or stuff like that for years. And so you have to have that good communication. Jared's really good with the hand signals. Everyone's safe. And we've got a set of, we wanted to set a skates anyways for the shop, the good five. Yeah.
00:03:04
Speaker
leg skates and so those came about a month ago. We wanted those because when you have a couple of toe jacks or bottle jacks and those, it's actually pretty easy to move machines around as needed. All we needed was the forklift. The forklift picked them off the pallet. We scooted them just across the threshold into the shop and then the hardest part was probably picking
00:03:30
Speaker
underneath between the machine casting and the pallet to lift the machine off the pallet because I mean literally I bet you the pallet weighs a thousand pounds.
Floor Flatness and Machine Setup
00:03:40
Speaker
All wood. Yeah, all screws, wood, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then set the machine down onto the skates. And sometimes we had to use the tow motor to safely nudge the machine. But depending on the floor condition and getting a grip, once the skate wheels were aligned, you can actually, well, about probably half of it was done using the forklift to help steer and push. But then part of it is also just pushing the machines around.
00:04:07
Speaker
Right. So a couple questions. Did you notice how flat is your floor? Is it wavy? Because ours here is fairly wavy.
00:04:17
Speaker
Uh, I would say flat. I mean, you know, it's all relative, right? Are we talking, uh, no, Robin Renzetti puts a, uh, uh, blued scaled out. No, but it's, if there's no, there's definitely no intentional, significant drainage taper nor any, any, I've never noticed any big waviness.
00:04:38
Speaker
Because on ours, we got some new toolboxes and one leg is like a half inch up in the air kind of thing, should be square. Absolutely. And you put a ball bearing down almost anywhere, it's going to move a little bit. Oh, wow. Okay, no. We're grateful. I mean, this floor was poured in 91.
00:04:57
Speaker
very few cracks. That old trick of if you take something like a rigging skate and roll it over, you can usually hear when you have unsupported areas below the concrete just from settling. You want to be careful about not driving heavy equipment over that or putting a machine there. Honestly, at this point, if you're
00:05:16
Speaker
If you're serious about running precision equipment and over time, you would probably be well served to have a, it's pretty cool repairs you can do. I probably wouldn't DIY this, but like hydraulic folks will do it with backfilling and hydraulically resetting. Like if your outdoor patio has sagged, they can lift it back up. So I'm pretty sure there's stuff you could do there to kind of backfill it without having to blow out your whole floor, or you can pour your own pad.
00:05:43
Speaker
That's crazy. So for the forklifting, you've said before, you are a certified forklift instructor, right? Like you guys now brought that in house. I went to the training to become certified as a trainer, correct?
00:05:59
Speaker
Right. Between you and Jared, you have no problem running that bigger forklift? No. It's a big forklift, but it's a forklift. The little ones can kill you just as easy as the big ones. In fact, the normal ones I think are scarier because they're so much faster and you feel
00:06:18
Speaker
uh, more, more inclined to get cut it close. Maybe like, and you're going around corners and it's just something you use every day. So you always gain a little comfort level that is good, but not always helpful cockiness sometimes. And, but, um, the big ones, yeah, you're, you're just on point for sure.
00:06:37
Speaker
Hm, that's awesome, man. Yeah. Yeah, because we've only hired riggers for the big machines. And they're obviously really good at what they do. And they're comfortable doing it. And I'm sitting here as the owner going freaking out, just watching the machine tip a little bit. And I'm like, OK, you got this? Yeah. And if we had to do a plant move, I would hire it. I mean, then you'd need the flat beds and so forth anyway. Yeah, then it's just a bigger job. That's cool, though. No, I'm happy for you guys. That's awesome.
00:07:06
Speaker
Yeah, it feels good to have the right tools. We've got plenty of the wood drops, scraps, the shims. You want to have rubber between certain areas and that helps soak up any minor imperfections so that skates aren't popping out. And you never want to go into it overly confident, but on the flip side, it felt really good when we finished and everything went like we expected it to. That's what felt really good. That's amazing. That's so cool.
00:07:37
Speaker
So then the technician's going to come in soon? Yeah, so machines rolled in. I got to give them credit. They said 10 AM. They rolled in at 10.07. Freaking awesome. We had them off the truck in an hour, which is funny because you even think, how does it take that long? Well, untarping them and all that takes a while.
00:07:59
Speaker
but had both of them off by probably 11, 15 maybe. And then, and Julie filmed it, we'll have a video out. And then that was great because then the truck can leave. So we've got the full area to do our work and you don't have that kind of pressure of the truck driver who probably wants to get onto his next job.
00:08:18
Speaker
And we had both the machines in the shop by the end of the day. The first one was actually in place. And then the second one we finished Tuesday morning, today's Wednesday, we're just finishing up power and air right now. And Haas comes to our morning to commission them. That's so awesome. That's so fast. And then, I mean, you could be making chips by Friday. Easy. Yeah. So we've got to theoretically, I'm not saying you're going to push, but
00:08:43
Speaker
You know, it's funny, there's a lot of work to do. I don't know if they're going to send two guys. Otherwise, I bet you it takes them a couple of days because they're big machines. They've got to get cleaned out with every machine that we've ever gotten before. We've taken the time on our own to wipe out the blue grease they ship with like as an anti corrosion. We may try to get to some of that today, but we're so busy. We just haven't done that. And I think it technically falls on their responsibility, but it always feels good to do the right thing and help them out a little.
00:09:13
Speaker
And we've got to make some new work holding stuff, which we'll actually do on the UMC for those machines. Yeah. That's so cool. Killer. Thank you. That's fun. It's been good. Yep. Not at all. The other thing we did was when we moved the VM 30, which has not moved since we purchased it as our first VMC. So that was nerve wracking because that machine's been a good machine to us and you hate to move it and risk.
00:09:40
Speaker
risk mucking it up. And here's a crazy thing. We have a Z axis coolant switch. Have you seen that video we did? Yeah, yeah, it was awesome. So I'm pretty sure that's a roller contact switch to the casting. When the casting is a Z positive, the casting contacts that switch which depresses it as like a roller micro switch. When we move the machine, it flexed so much
00:10:05
Speaker
under just being on forkskates, that when the Z was up, it wasn't depressing the micro switch, which is crazy. So we re-leveled it. I give Haas credit. They've got a video. I'd like to say we knew how to do it, but it's always good to watch their video. We also watched Atman Unlimited, the guy who's done some really good fiddle kind of retrofit videos, has a good video on it.
00:10:31
Speaker
And we've got this, you know, you think you've got the level two now and let it sit, releveled it again, check the tram, and then did a indicator sweep. And my reading with a tense indicator is almost no measurable variation across a 10 inch circle. Now, I'm not going to say that that's, it's perfect, but I was pretty darn happy. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Our Maury was the same way. And, you know, the bigger, the bigger stouter machines, um,
00:10:59
Speaker
They're just good like that. You get it all leveled in and the table becomes flat and square. There's a lot of little tricks to it. I know we had to go back and forth and back and forth a lot on our Maury because the floor it was sitting on was significantly different than the floor at the old shop. So one corner had to move a lot to be able to get it. It was actually tipping, like bouncing basically on two feet.
00:11:24
Speaker
For a little while so once once we leveled it it was nice to be able to do it ourselves. It took a while, but Three of us here really gained a lot of experience and confidence in that and it's a good skill to have Yeah, I agree and to be clear ours is not Perfect and that may just I don't know whether it was always this way or whether it's from where or whether it's from the current level but when I sweep
00:11:49
Speaker
A 10-inch circle with the table centered under the spindle. I'm very happy with it, but when we move to the X extremes, we're still good. When we move to the Y extremes, it's not perfect, but I don't think that's going to be an issue for the work that we do. It's proof that everything is a noodle. Even these 20,000 pound machines, you can twist them up all sorts of different which ways. Good stuff. It's been fun.
Entrepreneurial Evolution and Leadership
00:12:17
Speaker
It's been fun.
00:12:19
Speaker
What have you been up to? Um, lots of stuff. Let's see. I've been programming for the current, but I haven't, I tried to run something last night, but it wasn't cooperating, but I'll be digging into that today. So I'm super excited. I got so many parts I need to make on the current, like probably 20 or 30 different things, which is great. I just need to, uh, I need to doctor fill this and I need to speed myself up. You, you don't have 20 parts to make on the current. You have one part.
00:12:49
Speaker
And then once you've done that one part, you've got one more part to make. Right. No, it's cool, though, because I do have work for it. I do have things I need to make. You're right. It's only one at a time. But it's nice to know that time dedicated to the machine will obviously pay off. Yeah.
00:13:09
Speaker
I've been a lot harder on myself lately about, and this is my own personal choice about how I handle my own responsibilities and discipline, but I don't even let myself. I told you this a week or two ago, it's not easy. I struggle with this on a daily basis, but when I look at my to-do list and there's seven things, I will read those seven things six flipping times and I don't do it anymore. If I read it, I either do it or
00:13:34
Speaker
That's they get crossed off but like no more this okay walk I can come back to that in 10 minutes That'll be a good task for after lunch. No, no, you're down to it You got a parts to make making thinking about 30 parts isn't gonna help you
00:13:47
Speaker
Yeah, and sometimes I do get bogged down by the scale of it, by the quantity. And that's only in the very short term. After that, there's going to be another 30 parts. And that's life. That's OK. But yeah, I do break it down into one piece at a time into, OK, clearly, this is the first one I have to do. Let's just put all focus into that.
00:14:08
Speaker
It's good. Sometimes you do good work on it, but then you got to take a break and you'll switch to something else. That's totally fine. For sure. As you know, running a business, there's so many various things that we have to do in the business, whether it's on other machines or working with other people or doing business-y stuff, meetings and such. It does distract me from
00:14:30
Speaker
sometimes the playwork that I would love to do all the time, but can't. And it's not practical to do all the time. I wouldn't actually enjoy it 12 hours a day. Playwork? To an extent. But yeah, I like all of it to varying degrees, every aspect of the job. So it's just a balance. That's all it is.
00:14:52
Speaker
I don't know. I think you would be great at I could really see you Morphing into a role where you're like the head of R&D and you're on the like the board of directors because you own the freaking company or co-own it but like you're not the CEO I could actually see you kind of having a boss per se like a president COO, whatever you want to call it and Ultimately, you you've got the kind of trump card, but but as a daily
00:15:21
Speaker
It's like I talked to a guy briefly at Pocket NC. I don't know all the details of how they did this, but he kind of put himself into the R&D role and let somebody else, quote unquote, be his boss and take over the operations and management of the company.
00:15:36
Speaker
And I think about that sometimes and where we want to take this and if that's where I would want to go. And I think some variation of that will definitely happen because I love to R&D. R&D is my jam. Once it's figured out, I don't need to run production because it's figured out. We have team members for that. That's not for me because I can go on to the next thing and R&D the next thing.
00:16:01
Speaker
lead the business in a different direction. And that's what I love about it. That's super-duper fun. So I'm constantly not questioning myself, but wondering where I need to evolve myself in this business and the roles that I take on and stuff. And being very conscious of that has allowed me to step back on a lot of things and realize that I don't need to do that. I can easily train somebody else to do that. And that's leveling up for them as well. It wins all around.
00:16:30
Speaker
And yeah, it's me letting go, which is easy to do on paper. Unfortunately, sometimes more difficult than you think to do in real life. Yeah. But it gets easier. Yeah. And it totally depends on where grim's mode knives goes. And I think it's.
00:16:47
Speaker
I certainly don't know that you aspire, but if you took another company that moved, I always think of Spyderco. At one point, they were probably a company like your size and they certainly aren't nowadays. When you think about bringing in the CEO or whatever title you want to call it, at some point, you're going to want somebody who's best suited to tip the scales in their favor. If you start looking at resumes, yeah, the founder or the entrepreneur, they may have the passion. They may have the equity or own the company.
00:17:16
Speaker
On paper, you pull in a guy or girl who has years of experience in scaling from some X revenue to 10X or has implemented ERP systems or who has done broad based distribution systems or technology systems or managed multiple hierarchy levels within staffing and all this stuff that is everything business and nothing knife making. You know what I mean? Right.
00:17:45
Speaker
A lot of times, I don't naturally realize that those people exist. You know what I mean? Or are attainable for us and what we're doing. And I don't even think about it. I'm like, well, okay, I've gotten this far. I know how to do this. I've got a group of a team that can do this stuff. Where do we go from there?
00:18:04
Speaker
It's a stretch sometimes to think about hiring that kind of person and the kind of impact that they can make. And when you think about it from an outside perspective, it's like obvious sometimes. You're like, I can't believe I hadn't thought of this. And I think about something you said a while ago.
00:18:28
Speaker
Hypothetical scenario, say if some investor comes in with very favorable terms on all sides and says, okay, I've got $1 million or $10 million or whatever to give it to your business, what would you do? What do you need to get to make the goals you need to happen, whether it's people or machines or time or new products or processes or whatever? I think about that.
00:18:50
Speaker
It's a balance sometimes. Right now, it's not machinery. It's focus and time and workload kind of thing. And it's maximizing what we have and making the most of it before we jump on to the next thing. And most of that requires no money or the kind of money that we have. Isn't that funny?
00:19:12
Speaker
Yeah. Really? Because I think about that on my walks. I'm like, OK, if somebody said, here's $10 million, do whatever you want with it in the business. And I was like, right now, almost nothing. OK, we might spend 100 grand on tumblers and better heat treat of it and things like that. But we don't need any of it right now.
00:19:33
Speaker
It was a weird thing to think about because I like buying machines, but darn it, I have what I need right now. Let me maximize.
00:19:45
Speaker
isn't it a it's like I love that and it's not an easy way of thinking but that whole like win the lottery if like literally if you woke up with pick a number ten million dollars in the bank tomorrow I mean do you do you do you quit your job I you know I think a lot of people now know that many lottery winners don't end up feeling like they have the
00:20:04
Speaker
you know, fulfilling lives. And that ties back to, you know, if you win the lottery, the first thing you need to do is go with go read Tony can never pronounce his last name, but the delivery. Yeah, thank you. The Delivering Happiness book because that really epitomizes it. But if you are fortunate enough to have the money for whether you've earned it, or however you come into it,
00:20:24
Speaker
how do you deploy that capital in a way that helps execute on a mission, but then also is rewarding at a personal level, but also with the people that are your stakeholders, the folks you work with, the team members, everybody else around you.
00:20:39
Speaker
Yep, because the whole thing is a symbiotic relationship. It's like every aspect of the business is intertwined. It's not just making the product. It's having a happy team, happy culture, hard work, dedication, happy customer base for sure, providing value for the customer in every single way humanly possible. And yeah, it's a balance. And I like that. I think it's fun. I think it's like a little recipe that constantly evolves.
00:21:09
Speaker
you know, without the salt, it doesn't taste right, you know, whatever.
00:21:14
Speaker
The whole like somebody else should be leading my company thing. First off, I was thinking through, it doesn't really apply to a lot of machine shops. The biggest shops that I've toured, Major Tool, S&H, Metal Quest, these are all seven figure or eight figure business. So tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, most of them I think are the tens of millions of dollars of revenue. They're still
00:21:42
Speaker
run by somebody who at one point was running parts themselves and or founded the company, meaning they didn't take that next level step, which seems to be more common in the product-based companies. I'm going to make up Spyderco as an example here. I have no knowledge whether that's true or not, but companies that have pushed out to true retail platforms and scaled way beyond the service industry, if you will.
00:22:06
Speaker
But the thing I think is interesting is that there's a phrase that I do believe is wholesomely true about being an entrepreneur and being comfortable with what you're good at and thus finding ways to supplement or compliment your own team with the things you're not good at. It's easy to say, well, I'm good at CAD, but I'm not good at HR. That's probably true for most of us.
00:22:29
Speaker
But what that, where it gets a little harder is when you're like, I'm not good to run the company. Like it's a whole another level of, wow, I probably shouldn't be the one doing this anymore. Or even if you believe you're decent at it, you know, I'm getting, you know, I feel okay, I'm comfortable enough doing it. But if somebody else could do it significantly better, and you could focus your time on the things that you're a total grand master at,
00:22:55
Speaker
then does it drive the company faster and quicker, cheaper kind of thing? The concept of hiring somebody like that for X amount of dollars could turn around and double your revenues or something.
00:23:14
Speaker
And if it works, it becomes a no-brainer. If it doesn't work, then, well, failed experiment. Try again, figure out why it didn't work. But yeah, being willing to take these kind of leaps in so many different ways, whether it's buying new machines or hiring certain kind of people or restructuring the business or letting go or whatever, it's part of the job. Yeah.
Systems, Efficiency, and Production Goals
00:23:36
Speaker
It's interesting. I was thinking about this this morning or before breakfast and it's actually very much inspired by metal quest, which was an amazing tour out in Nebraska folks with all of the, you know, the FANUC robots are what really stand out, but the reality is it's not just the iron, the robot, you know, machines. It's the fact that they've built these automation systems, but really this whole enterprise software
00:24:08
Speaker
level system that allows them to work the way they do. I would almost argue that they're a software company that happens to make parts with machine tools. It's like the argument that McDonald's is either a real estate company or McDonald's is a company that's in the business of teaching people how to make hamburgers. They're actually really in the business of selling hamburgers.
00:24:29
Speaker
Like, you know, at some point you're in the business of making the software that implements like, it's like a problem. It's kind of what you just said a minute ago. We don't need more machine tools. We need the systems and the processes in place to free up our time to keep doing what we're doing that we already know how to do. We just need better systems.
00:24:48
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Because when we don't have time to do critical tasks that will drive us forward, because I'm either bogged down on important projects or silly projects or work or just grind or distraction or whatever, then my value is not maximized. My value in the company is paused. It's stalled.
00:25:15
Speaker
I realize blatantly right now the most valuable thing I can do for the company right now is bring rasks on board to sell. And then we've added another product to our customer base, and they want it. And we will increase production based on that. And now I'm maximizing the current. And almost nothing else matters. I need to keep a baseline runningness of everything. But I got to pull back on a lot of things so that I can focus on that goal.
00:25:45
Speaker
Yep, that's what I'm doing. So my goal, I got 20 days. I want to have a rask finished by the end of June. Awesome. I know I can do it. And you heard it here. And I said it in my vlog that I filmed yesterday, that'll go up in a day or two. And I'm just going to blast it out there and everybody can hold me accountable.
00:26:06
Speaker
I don't normally like to do that because it's nerve wracking, but why not? We can hold you accountable, but all we can do is antagonize you with peer pressure. I mean, it's up to you to self-impose that discipline of you don't have to finish a rasp by June 30th. That's the goal. What you've got to do is execute on the steps or break it down into morning and afternoons across the next five days and then reevaluate that. Exactly.
00:26:35
Speaker
Just shifting the priority. I mean, one of the books, Gary Keller, the one thing I think, he says there's no such thing as priorities. There's priority. You can only have one priority. Priorities is a misnomer. It's not possible. That's how we started off this whole thing. Yeah, exactly, right? You only have one part to make. Yep, yep. That was awesome.
00:27:00
Speaker
The thing I'm focused on is the support system around that. I had to do some roof repairs, which became the priority period. We had this biblical rain yesterday, which managed to expose a roof crack that would have been fine in an otherwise 100-year era. Literally, the rain was raining sideways inside our house. We've never had a house leak in our life. It was crazy.
00:27:26
Speaker
And so that made me think about, okay, this will not be the last time I repair the roof. That's just, that's okay. The rubber ballasted membrane roofs need some work every once in a while. So create a box labeled roof repair stuff. You got some screws and rubber and whatever you need. And then that box gets filed somewhere. And this is what's going to tie in with Alex, which is starting a shop-wide
00:27:52
Speaker
simple organization. So no, every little screw in hardware and faster is not going to get a separate database entry, but we're going to be able to create a database entry that says things like roof repair box. I don't know where I'm going to keep that, but when we do put it somewhere in Alex, we can say, hey, that's on a cart and we can label carts and toolboxes in the utility closet.
00:28:15
Speaker
And yeah, sure, there's a small chance over time, a couple things get moved or not obeyed. But generally speaking, when my priority becomes making up machining apart or measuring apart or setting up the lathe or repairing the roof, I want my priority to be the focus with at the least amount of stress and that sort of like shrug your shoulders like, Oh, I have to go do this now. Well, it's not that big a deal if you can say, Hey, well, there's the box. I know everything, everything I need is in there. Even if I buy an extra socket driver that has a five 16th dedicated for roofing nails.
00:28:44
Speaker
Done. Great. Yep. Love it. But again, time into Alex, because that's the key, searching, hey, where do we keep extra files, literally like bastard files and mill files? Yeah, that stuff. Yeah, I spent just a minute or two yesterday, but looking for a tape measure. And I'm like,
00:29:07
Speaker
Why can't I find a tape measure? There should be one or two right here, but obviously somebody used it and moved. And it's like every little thing like that, it's just wasted time. And bigger things like once a year, once a decade roof repair things. Yeah, I love it. I love it. Put that information in a consolidated place so that you don't have to think. You just do it.
00:29:29
Speaker
I think we're going to, so Alex is what we're using to create our new internal Kanban PO system, which will also generate work orders when we need Saunders products machine. I think it's also going to work for our maintenance system because I've been wanting a maintenance scheduling system that will allow us to create a list of items, set the intervals. And when that interval comes, it generates something. Well, that something can just be a work order. And that work order is check the TSC filters on the,
00:29:59
Speaker
each host machine or whatever, and that work order can then be turned in or completed. It's a trackable physical thing. It gets printed out. Love it.
00:30:07
Speaker
So how does it get triggered? Not triggered, but does it get printed out? And then those are your daily work orders kind of thing? Is that your goal? That's the goal. I don't believe Alex has built Alex into a system that will let Alex automatically print. Anything is possible with scripts. Yes, for sure. But it can at least trigger the PO or the work order that could be an email or get pushed into a work order list.
00:30:36
Speaker
We're not all digital. I don't necessarily need to go all digital right now. I like paper systems runners for now. If we grow out of that, great, but I'm okay with that. Yeah, I mean, I'm a huge fan of digital, but I see the value in paper because the physical object that you have to deal with, whereas digital, I don't know, it can get lost. But so we, what, six months ago, eight months ago or something, we came up with the buyer's choice system. So when somebody fills out the Google form online,
00:31:05
Speaker
and it goes into the Excel spreadsheet, the Google Sheets document, we have a script made up that automatically prints a formatted document to our printer. So every time somebody places an order, within seconds, the printer fires out an order and then those get put on a clipboard downstairs.
00:31:21
Speaker
That concept works awesome, because now you have work orders, basically. You have these runners. And if, man, if maintenance documents were automatically printed there, time to change the filters on the Maury, it would just get done. Because it's a physical thing, and it would get passed to Angelo, or to Sky, or whatever. And it's kind of a to-do list, but it's hands-off. Things happen automatically.
00:31:51
Speaker
Yeah, we need to get there too. And we're working the way and I'm happy to see you building out Alex. I mean, Alex is going to be your ERP system. There's no question about it. And you guys are doing it and you're doing the work and you're evolving it into exactly what you need it to be. And I love to hear that.
00:32:06
Speaker
Yeah, I'm super happy about, I mean, that's what I would push anybody to do is to realize via places like Upwork or other online communities or forums, getting custom stuff done in the world we live in with APIs and web interfaces and if this then that and all these other resources, it's just freaking awesome. Yeah.
00:32:32
Speaker
Do you think it's for everyone or do you think you and I have a certain level of nerd inside of us that understands a lot of different things? We're not great at them, but we can direct people on Upwork to like, how about you make a script to do this and you tie in the spreadsheet and you tie in the WordPress and you and I can
00:32:52
Speaker
weave that net together and then have the experts do it for us. But I don't know if everybody is the typical machine shop owner is up for that. I don't know.
Software and Systems Adaptation
00:33:04
Speaker
I don't know either. What I will say is we are doing this
00:33:12
Speaker
reactively, not proactively, meaning we already need it. We already thus know what we need and we have sufficient need for it in terms of the shop volume and revenue and all that. So the counter to that is there were some folks talking over on the forum on NYCCNC and
00:33:32
Speaker
I always hesitate to critically comment on a situation I'm not fully aware of, but it sounded like somebody was maybe trying to think about doing this when their company was quite a bit smaller. And I think, and there's no absolute numbers here, but
00:33:50
Speaker
at a certain point when you're just getting started, yes, make use of all the really cool turnkey software. So much of it is free, Asana, Slack, whatever you think you may want to do. And sometimes the hardest part is just figuring out what's out there. So if anything, I would throw 50 bucks or a hundred bucks on Upwork as a research project to say, hey, this is kind of what I'm doing in my shop. Should I be using Google Docs or should I be using a database or Airtable or any suggestions on just helping me understand the landscape of software that's either free or paid or freemium?
00:34:19
Speaker
But if you're making gross of 70 grand a year in your side business, I don't think it makes sense to start building out custom software. Because especially at that point, especially if you're trying to grow bigger, there's just a lot to do. Your time is valuable and needs to be focused.
00:34:41
Speaker
But on the other hand, at that level, software, aside from the time and effort investment and money, it could start organizing you from the beginning so that you start on good footing, as opposed to, like us, we grew and grew and grew, and everything kind of stayed the same in some ways. And then we get to the point where it's just bloated and like, man, this is too difficult. We've got to simplify this.
00:35:07
Speaker
It goes back to your personality. I probably wasn't willing to make that investment. It didn't necessarily know what we needed and so forth at that point in time. I like to be conservative to the point where it probably does cause a bit of stress or perhaps slows growth down a little bit, but I'd rather get to the point where we are
00:35:32
Speaker
you know, bite off more than you can chew than chew. You know, rather than having a smooth sailing ERP system from day one, hey, we're at a point now where we are maybe a little bit stressed, maybe a little bit unorganized, but now we fix that. Yep. Yep. And you fixed it yourself, which is just so cool. Fix in the process, we should say. Of course. Building out. Yeah.
00:35:57
Speaker
What single thing are you doing today? What is your priority? Current. What on this? Specifically, so to mount the handles onto the tombstone, I need these clamps that I've got 41, 40 steel, mate, you know, chunks of steel. So I just, I need to make those. I'm going to dovetail them first and then I'm going to put them, flip them over and
00:36:21
Speaker
finished the toolpaths. I have most of the toolpaths for the clamp itself finished, so I got to spend some time on the computer and finish that. I was trying to cut the dovetail yesterday, and the machine was tipped over 90 degrees to the side, and the tool was two inches away from the part. And I'm like, what the heck just happened? Didn't reach.
00:36:41
Speaker
No, sideways. It's like X two inches too much. And there was a complete import error that I missed or something. Yeah. The vice wasn't seated on the table of the machine. It was hanging up in the air two inches. And I was battling that in the last few minutes before I had to go home last night and getting frustrated with it.
00:37:05
Speaker
and then I had to go home. So I will be fixing that immediately and figuring out a system. Like, do you ever have that issue with Camplete where the work origin doesn't import properly because you didn't set it right in infusion? Nope, because you never set it. You are always starting a five-axis program from an existing templated file that has that done correctly. Camplete, for as good as it is, is a little bit like, you know,
00:37:34
Speaker
Microsoft Paint 98 when it comes to some of the menus and settings and clicking through stuff and having to go in and click three points on a circle to reset your origin coordinate system. It's not that you shouldn't have to.
00:37:49
Speaker
You know, it's a cumbersome process. So I haven't done that for over a year because we just have it set in Fusion to the templates. Yeah, and I thought I had it all dialed. I know a month or two ago, I worked with Camplete and figured out, like, this is in Fusion. This is where you put your origin, and you save the template, and you work from there. And it worked in Camplete. And then I guess I started a new project, and maybe I pulled from an old template or something.
00:38:18
Speaker
Yes, I didn't have time to really understand why. There is a setting in Fusion called the fixture setup origin, which I can't figure out if that has any bearing on anything because in theory, that would dictate the point in Camplete. It certainly doesn't appear to affect that. That would be potentially nice. Yeah. Anyway. I'm pretty sure Camplete references from the design model origin. Yeah. Fusion. It's the parent component of the whole file.
00:38:47
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Not where you put your work origin in Fusion Cam, like in the setup tree, which is kind of unfortunate, but it works. Have you thought about getting some of these parts 3D metal printed?
Outsourcing and 3D Printing Exploration
00:39:06
Speaker
I don't know if I've thought about that, but I did have the thought the other day of
00:39:11
Speaker
farming some stuff out to other shops, especially now that might be looking for work. And that blew my mind a little bit. I'm like, wait, I could actually do that. I could actually have my friends, if they need the work, make some of these parts for me. And then a week later, I would just have them. And I get to do other stuff. It's how machine shops work, John.
00:39:32
Speaker
On one hand, I think it's beautiful. On the other hand, I think it's stupid because I have the technology. I have the tools. I've already started buying material. We've talked about this before. It's this mentality of I can do it myself, and I should because I have all this stuff. But yeah, I'm struggling inside to what's the line of what I need to make myself. And part of me argues with myself. And I'm like, your job is to make knives, not fixture clamps. Who do you look up to in life? Sports figure, entrepreneur, hero,
00:40:03
Speaker
mostly entrepreneurs, I guess. Elon Musk, Michael Jordan. These guys, Michael Jordan knows how to do a workout routine. You think he still uses a personal trainer? Elon Musk, flock of people around him. Don't think for a second, just because in any way invalidates or emasculates or weakens you because you get help from others. Good grief. Yeah, exactly. I struggle with that. I'm becoming more and more aware of it. It's good to have you reaffirming that as well and everybody as well.
00:40:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's just, I don't know. It's that internal battle, right? I could do it myself. I should be able to do it myself. I bought a current. I can palletize and make parts, and I should be able to make all these clamps myself. And you can't. If it just came to me in a box, I'd still be pretty happy. You'd be grinning ear to ear. I know. I'd be moving faster. You know what I mean? And that's the thing. I'm slow. And I'm trying to figure out ways around that.
00:40:57
Speaker
I just think we actually have a part I want to try. I'm going to get a quote through Xometry here in a second of uploading it because Tom Lipton did this a year ago on a mini, like a finger feed for fine drilling where you use like your index finger to push the truck up and down. And he had a part 3D printed out of something
00:41:18
Speaker
decent, like a stainless for like $70. And so I'm thinking of these clamps that you design and maybe the 3D printed ones don't last forever. Maybe it's not what you want, but holy cow, John, for two, 300 bucks, you may be able to have a bunch of them just show up in four days and you can be doing other work and then eventually you can make them and replace them or you can have other people machine them and send them, you know, source them. Yeah. So whether I send the, the file to, um,
00:41:46
Speaker
to printing house or whether I just post a little screen cap on my Instagram stories and be like, anybody want to make this for me? Like, I have people I think I think you'll have you think you'll need to build a whole like whole like makers choice system to process the inbound system. Yeah.
00:42:06
Speaker
I'm going to play with that. No, do that, John. Yeah, I will. I will. Not for everything, but certainly for some stuff. Right, but the support pieces that are clamps that are knee machined, absolutely. You make the tombstones. You make the critical parts, but ... Yeah, it's cool. Good. Awesome. Well, I'm off to finish. I'm actually really excited. I want to figure out if I can ... Do you think I can do this?
00:42:28
Speaker
Can I get something 3d printed in titanium that has like a real heavy, like a Albrecht Chuck style, knurling on it. I have no idea. I'm going to try. Probably. Right. I'll be seriously curious to see if it's cost prohibitive. Yeah. It depends on the size. I think 3d printing metal is literally mass based. You know, it's, it's the amount of mass of metal they put into it is what, what it's going to cost regardless of complexity or something. That's fair. Including support system.
00:42:56
Speaker
Uh, that shouldn't be too bad then. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Let me know how that goes. Cool, man. Good. I'll see you next week. All right. Take care. Bye.