Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
#307 Distractions and losing time
175 Plays2 years ago
Topics:
- Distractions and losing time
- tool life hacks on Haas machines
- Grimsmo's router works!
- Grimsmo's Willemin works too!
- Henry Holsters visited SMW
- Inventory and sub assemblies
- Detent ball dropper designs
- CAM help for Saunders
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Hosts' Backgrounds
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 307. My name is John Grimsmo. My name is John Saunders. And this is the podcast where two now very good friends have been chatting for like six plus years on the progression of our manufacturing businesses like at the moment. This is not a recap. This is like happening week by week by week and it's been
00:00:24
Speaker
Hugely therapeutic and fun and helpful and technically helpful to keep doing this. I love it. Yeah, good. Awesome.
Personal Life Lessons and Business Reflections
00:00:32
Speaker
That's it. I'll get this out of the way. You're going skiing next week, so we're going to take next week off. I'm out. So we're not going to do a podcast next week. Everybody knows upfront. Sorry.
00:00:42
Speaker
Not sorry. It's okay. Sorry, not sorry. Yes. That's kind of the thing. It's like, like you talked about the other day. I was thinking about this a lot yesterday. The ability for us just to not show up one day to like, I'm taking a day off. You know what I mean? Yeah. And that kind of happened to me yesterday. Like I plan to take the morning off.
00:01:02
Speaker
Those plans when haywire when my son did not want to go to school So I spent the next four and a half hours trying to convince him to go to school Because my wife wanted to go ice skating in the afternoon and like have a day to herself and she doesn't want to you know Watch him and things like that. So I'm like I'm taking him to school Who's gonna win am I gonna wait him out and we chatted we had conversations try to figure out why is he scared? Whatever but anyway, so I took him to school four and a half hours late and I sort of had this
00:01:32
Speaker
you know lesson with him it's like don't try to be late for things obviously but good things can still happen if you are late because i told him the story of when are.
Manufacturing Processes and Challenges
00:01:44
Speaker
On my first date with my wife twenty years ago i was four and a half hours late.
00:01:49
Speaker
to that first date. This was 2002. I didn't have a cell phone. We had email. I had to go to an internet cafe and email her. Stop. Yeah, in the big city to be like, I'm so sorry. A lot came up. I got lost, et cetera. And then wait for her reply. I'm sitting there at the internet cafe. Stop. Wait, so I'm trying not to laugh to ruin the audio. Please.
00:02:13
Speaker
Also, sorry, I just realized if there sounds like an M249 in the background, it's because we switched from a half inch rougher or maybe three inch rougher. We're doing some custom plates. We're actually doing 22 custom plates for Automation Cell for somebody and we have to lock off the corners of these plates for their pallet tombstones design.
00:02:35
Speaker
and switched from the rougher to a Sandvik 419 high feed mill and the chips are some of the most beautiful chips in my life. But it sounds like a belt fed machine gun. So apologies. Nice. Okay. Rewind 2002. No cell phone internet cafe. This is really bringing it back.
00:02:51
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, this is hilarious. So like, my wife, Meg could have totally written me off at this point be like, screw this guy, never gonna happen, whatever. She saw the email, I waited, we met up, had an amazing first date, and 20 years later, like all good stories. And we still joke about it to this day, like, it's unacceptable that I was
00:03:12
Speaker
so late. Can I try more on this? Four and a half hours, who waits around or did it get soft rescheduled through email? We met close to her apartment at a cafe basically. She was close enough to come back. She waited for half an hour, an hour, whatever, and then just went home and said, screw this.
00:03:40
Speaker
Anyway, I was 18 years old, didn't want to tell my family that I was going on a date in a city an hour away.
00:03:49
Speaker
So I'm just like, I need the car, you know, I'm just going out. And so I didn't want to tell them they roped me into stuff that I had to do that morning and yada yada. And that's part of the reason I was late. And then I also ended up downtown. I was supposed to be uptown in Vancouver and I didn't know Vancouver and I got lost and no maps and like, it's just bad. Yeah. Terrible. But anyway, the point is I told my son this story. Um, and I was like, good things can happen even if you show up late and he showed up late and, uh, had a great day for like an hour and a half.
Personal Growth and Parenting Philosophy
00:04:19
Speaker
And it was great, but it derailed my day. I had a huge day planned at work and it couldn't do any of it. So I was kind of late in present time. Yes. Okay. I was kind of the girl down in the dumps yesterday. You know, you feel like a bad parent and all this stuff. And I'm like, but today I'm going to, I'm not going to be the guy that's like, sorry, life. I don't have time for you. I got to go to work right now. I'm going to spend the day with him. Um, but then.
00:04:49
Speaker
I worked from 6 p.m. to midnight on a bunch of computer work, like really big important tasks that I really wanted to get done. I could focus. It was great. I felt really productive afterwards. And it was like, ended up being a great day. Yeah. But for a while there, I just felt like my day was ruined, like, blah, blah, blah. Didn't didn't feel great about it, you know? Are you like sitting down, having a showdown with your, you know, toddler or not toddler, you know, his school son? Yeah, sometimes. OK.
00:05:18
Speaker
Impressive. He just didn't want to go to school. Yeah, he just did one of those. He was scared, he was nervous, couldn't figure out why, yada yada. And then once you're a little bit late, you don't want to show up and you're like, write it off and we're pretty flexible with school anyway. Like, we're not that rigid, but I was like, today's the day you just got to go. I'm not going to let you win this one. It's funny you say that because I was listening to, you know that music producer Rick Rubin?
00:05:44
Speaker
Um, yes, maybe produce like everybody. Yeah. Anyway, uh, I do music. So got it. Yeah. I'm not like a huge music guy. I'm not even a huge Rogan guy, Joe Rogan, although I know I've brought him up a few times, but I was listening to Rogan's interview with Rick.
00:05:59
Speaker
Rogan's interview with Ruby and all that stuff. And it's a little bit difficult to paraphrase this because it might sound a bit out of context, but Rick became overweight. He became overweight as and when he converted to being a vegan, which is not something that we know about here. And then that quickly segued into conversations about diet and nutrition and doctors and personal decisions and discipline. And they started talking about this idea that
00:06:25
Speaker
The worst thing that's happened to you in your life is the worst thing that's happened to you in your life. For some people, and they bring up the idea of a spoiled kid, your car getting a scratch on it might be the worst thing that's happened to you in your life. Whereas some folks have grown up with more strife and adversity are going to have a different sense of that.
00:06:46
Speaker
non humanistic things to automatically relate to each other because we all kind of have our own barometer for what the worst thing is in your life. Sure. And what he sort of said, and I thought it was wonderful to see somebody as successful and frankly could be arrogant as Rick Rubin is because of how successful he's been. Be introspective enough to sort of say, look, I was raised as a spoiled kid on fast food with no discipline and no structure. And that was a mistake for these reasons. And
00:07:16
Speaker
I enjoy hearing those nuggets and data points because my grandfather was very strict, my parents were very strict. And I think sometimes there's a natural, that generational thing where you end up embracing things that are the opposite of how you were raised for obvious reasons. But sometimes you identify with things and for me, the discipline of being forced to work on the farm on Saturdays was a big part of my work ethic. On the flip side, it also makes me wanna
00:07:43
Speaker
encourage my kids to be involved in team sports, you could go on with that. Yeah. All I'm saying is it's interesting to hear those negative points about like, when do you be a father to a daughter or son and, and just blow off the morning with them and have fun versus when do you put your foot down? Yeah. And there's some strong parallels to like business here, but I know. Yeah. So it's tough, but
00:08:09
Speaker
At the end of the day, you try to be the best father, business owner, boss, et cetera, that you can. And sometimes you win, sometimes you don't, sometimes you have to be flexible and fold, and sometimes you have to like, I'm not very good about putting my foot down and being like, this is the way it is. Yeah. And especially with my children. Actually, I'm a bit...
00:08:28
Speaker
I don't know. I can be firmer with my kids than I can with my staff. Just because we have this parent respect. I don't know. Yeah, sure. But for the most part, it's all fun and games. Look, that's a great... God, who knows what book this was, but it's like, look.
00:08:49
Speaker
to, why do you work here? What can I do to help you do your job better? Those sorts of questions. And ultimately, like, hey, why do you continue to work here? I want to treat you fair. I want to give you these opportunities.
00:09:00
Speaker
And it's a choice ultimately, and that choice will continue to be a thing as it relates to building a team and a culture. Not so much there for a 10-year-old. Sure. Exactly.
Business Updates and Equipment Insights
00:09:12
Speaker
That doesn't mean you abuse that, but yeah, I know what you mean. Yep, yep. That's a lifelong commitment, whereas employees can come and go. Yeah.
00:09:20
Speaker
Yeah, we had a situation this is quite a while ago, which makes me feel a little bit more comfortable bringing it up, just in keeping it a little bit vague. But I tend to be very casual and cavalier about innocent mistakes. But that doesn't I have to remind myself that that could be misinterpreted as not caring at all. Because
00:09:40
Speaker
the same mistake happening twice is a much bigger deal. Just because I wasn't necessarily, I just don't find the value, especially in the first time of raising your voice or getting mad or disciplined or yelling. Just no, but there's also, it's also my job to make sure that everybody realizes, okay, you kind of had your chance. Now you need to be on your A game for some undefined period of time. Like that doesn't happen again. Yep. Yep. Yep. And just to
00:10:07
Speaker
to prove that you've noticed and you're still watching. You know what I mean? That these things get noticed and we're kicking an eye on it and we're trying not to do it again as a company, as a team. It's like I saw that. Don't do it again. Yeah. Well, look, I guess the failure in that is the hypocrisy of recognizing we're all human. But
00:10:30
Speaker
There's a balance, but I think I needed to make sure it wasn't just like, oh, it doesn't matter if this happens. There's no, it's okay for it to happen. It's not okay. It's just that it's not getting moving on. But yes. Yeah.
00:10:45
Speaker
On that note, two quick housekeeping type of things I wanted to mention. Number one is we figured out and are doing a video right now on how to stop your Haas machine from operating and throw an alarm if you try to call a tool that has zero gauge length. Or you can adjust this to a low valued gauge length. So just when you're installing a new tool you've never installed before, tool 72 or whatever, and the default is zero. Yeah.
00:11:13
Speaker
Yeah. Or even on a new machine, so forth. It's not like, may not be something that everybody needs every day, but it's also a really dumb way to crash a machine, especially a new machine, and so forth. And it's free, like, I'm cautioning to do this, so it's a good use of macro variables, and so forth. The other thing I wanted to mention is we have a Haas HRT210 fourth axis.
00:11:36
Speaker
thing is barely used. We were going to use it for a fourth axis training class. That's not going to happen. We're going to five axis training classes and it's been sitting here. We bought it in 2019. It's been sitting here again, basically unused. We are selling it. If anybody's looking for an HRT 210, please reach out through, you can get to it through contact with me, john at sondersmachineworks.com. Sounds good. What are you up to?
00:12:00
Speaker
Uh, having a lot of fun. So the router is fully operational. We've run it for many, many, many hours so far, probably a dozen hours of production. Um, it's, it's rocking. It's so cool. It's so good. It's fast. It's good. It's zippy. The vacuum table is phenomenal. It sucks so hard.
00:12:20
Speaker
That's right. Last week you were wiring that up. You've got a lot off the list. Yeah, exactly. That's a distant memory when it didn't work. Now it just works. We're using the Datron vacuum card paper. Slap it on top.
00:12:35
Speaker
I put a vacuum gauge on the manifold so I can see like big open table, 24 by 24 pulls about 10 inches of vacuum with the vacuum card on top. As you start putting stuff on top, the vacuum pulls harder. When the table's pretty much full, we're pulling 25, 26 inches pretty good.
00:12:57
Speaker
And then as you cut into the part, into the paper a little bit, I lose a little bit of vacuum, but not much. And that's kind of the whole reason why we got the oversized vacuum pump was to be able to account for all this stuff. Yeah. So it's been great. So yeah, we're cutting 15 pieces of foam at once. Takes about an hour 15. Surface finish looks good. This foams a little weird. It's like gummy. Ooh.
00:13:20
Speaker
It loads up the tool with this stuff that looks like bubblegum, but then it still works just fine. It must heat up through it. It must heat up during machining and just move, but it dries fairly hard. Like hold them and I don't know, but it works whatever.
00:13:39
Speaker
Are you doing any air blast? We're not at the moment, but I did run an airline to the spindle area. I just have to print some sort of bracketry thing. And then I'm also going to eventually do some dust filtration, dust suction at the head, which when you Google dust filtration for a router, nobody has a tool changer. And that actually throws a lot of monkey wrenches into the boot style that everybody puts around the router spindle head.
00:14:08
Speaker
Because the tool changer has to... Is it PDX, PXD on Insta? I thought he... Have you checked out his stuff? He might. Somebody sent me his stuff the other day and I looked briefly, so he might have a good solution. Yeah. He's a good guy. I got to hang out with him a while back. Nice. Different, totally different worlds. It's funny how different... Yeah, Justin, PDX, CNC. I'm pretty sure they do a lot of...
00:14:35
Speaker
If they don't make it, I bet you he's the guy who would know. Yeah, he is making some sort of thing for a dust filtration, like dust sucker upper setup with a printed thing. So I'm going to have to look into that more.
Technical Resolutions and Machining Details
00:14:48
Speaker
Well, good. But yeah, awesome. It's great. Super good.
00:14:51
Speaker
So what is it rather just done like ToolChanger works vacuum? I've got three tools. We just vacuum up afterwards. It works fine. And like yesterday, I didn't show up at all. And this is probably day two or of production kind of thing, day three. And I was like, guys, here's how to load it. And I texted them and I was like, granted. So they ran 45 pieces of foam yesterday. That's like 45 cases. And it worked out great.
00:15:20
Speaker
You, I'm thinking about process bins. What about 3D printing a negative of the shape of the foam as a QC gauge?
00:15:36
Speaker
for fit, for size, for what? I'm just thinking the last thing you want to do is make a bunch of foam parts. Yeah. Wrong or bad. And not being there, awesome. That is the whole not showing up the next day. Yeah, exactly. Well, I think with foam, we've got enough experience, even though this is a new kind of foam for us. It doesn't really go out. It doesn't go bad. If it visually looks good and there's no big tears or anything. That's what everybody says, John. Yeah, maybe. Keep an eye on it. Yeah.
00:16:08
Speaker
named Rachel Whiteread who did these pieces that were the inverse, like huge, like room sized pieces that were like the inverse, almost like you filled a room with a mold agent. And so you saw the inverse of a space and it's kind of an interesting way of working in the physical world. And so just like, hey, you should be able to take the grims from a foam piece that comes off the router and it should fit in almost like it was molded as an easy way. Every batch that comes off just test one and make sure we're not
00:16:33
Speaker
There was this really cool artist.
00:16:38
Speaker
goofing on something silly. Yeah, good idea.
00:16:42
Speaker
Sweet. Awesome. Yeah. I got to ask, because I saw the all. I didn't see every Instagram story, because I don't think I can get through them all. But wait a minute. Is the foam dead now? Or is it? What's this new? So the new plastic case made by Nanook. Yeah, we've been working on that for quite a while. And so the foam is going into that to hold the knife or the pen or the other knife or whatever. And the cool thing with that, the new case is a bit taller and the new foam.
00:17:11
Speaker
lets us do a Norseman rasp combo or a Norseman saga combo color matched or like all three products would fit in the one case. So there's a lot of little intricacies coming together in this product that
00:17:26
Speaker
maybe going to take a while for everybody to really understand, but that's fine. It's like we needed to get to this point so that we can then go forward with the rest of the business. And this is now staple. You know, these cases are good. We're going to be using them forever. We've gone through thousands of the old case that we've been using for like eight years and it's okay, but the new one is so much better. Were the old ones also Nanook?
00:17:50
Speaker
No, they were made by a company called S3 in the States. Got it. Well, I saw your Instagram. Yeah, go ahead. They do legit like you have an it looks like it's injection molded with the Rimsman knives. It is sick. And we worked with them on not only the entire mold, but the insert for our logo. So the top logo is raised with our logo on it. And then the inside logo says Grimsmo X Nanook. It's like the the makers stamp, you know, on the inside of the case.
00:18:20
Speaker
is with the date and the made in Canada and proudly made in Canada and all this stuff and their injection molded in Canada. And yeah, we got to be part of the whole mold making process. Well, not part of it, but we advised kind of thing. And yeah, that's really cool. It's cool. So cool.
00:18:39
Speaker
And they look good. And we're probably going to do, we had a thousand made in this batch in black ABS and they have different plastics and different colors. So every batch, we're probably just going to order a different color and we'll just be silly with it. Like, yeah. Yeah. There's some really nice colors. We can custom mix certain colors too. There's some, some colors that they don't offer that you can't get normally that would look really sweet with our products. So that's awesome. Yeah.
00:19:02
Speaker
Yeah, for the folks that haven't checked out the Instagram or maybe if you could put it up as a post and not a story, like the seeing that new case is big leagues. Yeah. Yeah. On the Grimsman official page, the guys put up a really nice studio photography of the cases themselves. But yeah, I went back and forth. I'm like, I need to film something today to announce these cases. Should I do a story? Should I do a post? I just did a story. I'm a big fan of stories. I know it's going to disappear in a day, but that's part of the fun of it. Yeah, I hear you.
00:19:33
Speaker
Awesome. What else is going on? Okay. A couple of things. The Willyman is finally fixed. Awesome.
00:19:49
Speaker
probably half a dozen times back and forth with Wilhelmin, like, okay, try these parameters, check these parameters. Yeah, those are good. Okay, change this from a zero to a one, change this from a one to a zero. Check this, check this. I'm kind of surprised there were so many to change that didn't fix the problem. But eventually, one of the guys, Florian there at Wilhelmin suggests, okay, change these four things.
00:20:14
Speaker
I was like, the first two didn't need to be changed, the last two did change, and then I restarted the machine. The whole thing is the A-axis, the turning spindle, won't clock. For some reason, you can't say spindle 59 degrees. The whole machine just alarms out, which means you can't do any milling at all because the whole milling tool change cycle requires that.
00:20:40
Speaker
And that's how I restarted the machine, and it worked. And then I tested some other codes, and I'm like, it worked. And then I tested my dummy program in there, and I'm like, it works. Holy cow. I don't want to put the horse before the cart kind of thing, but I was like, cart before the horse. But I think everything works. Then I ran a couple more programs, and I was like, yes, everything works. It's back to where it should be.
00:21:02
Speaker
So what happened though? When we did the Inch conversion, I don't think it was the Inch conversion itself. It was the FANUC software update, which imagine a Windows update from Windows 7 to Windows whatever we're on now at 10. Things change. Got it. And when we updated the FANUC, something, something, something, that's the reason. Got it.
00:21:29
Speaker
So I told Willman, I was like, you guys documented this, right? Because this is like a month of slowly playing with this. I wasn't in a rush to get it done. But boy, am I ever excited to get this thing back. It just works now.
00:21:42
Speaker
Oh yeah, that's going to feel liberating. It feels amazing. So yeah, now I'm like, especially the past month, while it hasn't worked, my mind's been in overdrive. I'm like, I've got parts I want to make. Okay, how am I going to make them make them like this? Okay, do this, do this. What am I making first when it runs? Okay. What are you making first? So what I made
00:22:00
Speaker
What I was making was this tiny little restrictor bushing out of brass, like 80 thou diameter, really tiny, with a hole drilled through the middle, a 20 thou hole. That's going to go into my dosing pump setup that's going to help fill the new oil bottles, the nano oil bottles that are going in the new cases.
00:22:22
Speaker
So I'm going to be able to fill 10 at once. And the way I built the thing with tees and hoses and everything, I thought I calculated in my head the manifold and runner ratios and everything so that it would fill the manifold and then spit out all 10 holes. But I was totally off. And then I did the math and I was like, no, no. The math says it's only going to spit out the first two holes because if you add up the two exit holes, diameter wise, it's the same diameter as the manifold.
00:22:53
Speaker
Is this fluid dynamics, John? And air, like how a car engine works too. But it's really just area. If you have 10 small holes that all add up to one square inch, and you have a manifold that is also one square inch,
00:23:09
Speaker
it might work, but you ideally want the manifold to be many times bigger than each of the small holes so that the manifold pressurizes and equally spits out all these tiny little holes. Because you have way more head pressure at the last hole or like loss. Exactly, and you don't want loss. I made the manifold quarter inch hose and the runners eighth inch hose and I was like, yeah, it should be fine. But then I did the math and I was like, no.
00:23:31
Speaker
Then I tested it with water and water only came out the first two holes. I was like, oh no. Anyway, I'm machine these little brass restrictors. I'm going to push in the end of the little hose barbs, plastic, T fittings, whatever, and they should restrict each thingy so that they go down. That's the first thing I was machining. Cool.
00:23:50
Speaker
Is it like a banjo bowl or something where you could just adjust each one and calibrate them as needed as you go? I just use plastic tee fittings for little vinyl hose as my whole manifold runner setup.
00:24:07
Speaker
Yeah, totally off topic, except it's not. I've gotten pretty addicted to this guy, Diesel Creek's YouTube channel over the past month. He's a Western Pennsylvania guy who repairs old industrial equipment and he's really good at excavators, bulldozers. Cool. It matches in with just the joy I've had over the last year of learning more about cars and equipment. Looking at fuel systems, injection systems, oil changes, starters, all that troubleshooting type stuff. He's just really good at
00:24:37
Speaker
showing how to troubleshoot things and think, you know, he makes you feel like Chris Fix does where it's like, oh, man, I can fix anything now. Totally not true. But like, it's just an engine. It needs to get fuel and spark and pressure and air until you start, you know, isolating those things. You know, again, it's kind of a bummer that modern cars are just gonna be electric cars are obviously irrelevant, but modern cars with the computer technology is
00:25:02
Speaker
and systems make it less easy to work on because, man, it's so satisfying to watch that happen and then learn about taking a bunch of good nuggets away of things like, oh, that actually is really helpful or useful to think about. It's really clicking with me. Yeah. There's so many weird little common sense hacks that old school mechanics will have where you figure out on your own as you're wrenching on the car that when shared with you, it's so obvious, but you never thought about it until that moment. Yeah.
00:25:32
Speaker
Same thing with rings call machinists. They're like, they just know stuff, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That's what it was like yesterday. He was adjusting a distributor timing to get the timing of the engine right. And like, he made it look so easy and he knew what he was doing, but it was really cool.
00:25:47
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I remember doing that on the old Volvos. If you loosen the distributor, you can just rotate it while the engine's running and hear it. Yes. Idle, crappy, or better. It's crazy. There's a technical way to do it, but if you just want to do it by hand and by feel, you can see
Inventory Management and Product Development
00:26:02
Speaker
a difference. It's really cool. Yeah. And then once you learn how the spark lags through the distributor, it starts to click. It starts to make sense. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's awesome.
00:26:15
Speaker
We had Henry Holsters, Andrew was in the area and he swung by earlier this week. Solid guy. Yeah, I don't know him like super well and definitely met him before, but we had a good time hanging out for a few hours and it was inadvertently kind of one of those things that you and I talked about of like kind of the like informal audit
00:26:34
Speaker
of each other's shops. And I'm paraphrasing, but I like machining. If there's one thing I like to do and enjoy doing, it's like sitting down with the park and camping. I really love that. He really likes processes. He kind of, I'm putting words in his mouth, he doesn't care about machining, but he asks for machining to make his product.
00:26:52
Speaker
He's clearly got a really good grasp. And it sounds like the company's got it going on, which is really cool. But we talked about there, they use an off the shelf ERP system, but they had to do a lot of custom, either custom development or just pushing the ERP company to make their own improvements for.
00:27:07
Speaker
for order picking and process control and documentation around all of that. You know, we were talking about, you know, do you track inventories of subassemblies and what happens if it's partials? And, you know, it was fun to talk about that. It was fun to have him at our shop. But now I really want to try to swing by his place in the end of some time. Because, you know, that's what we're not doing on, especially on the order picking side is we're not scanning each item as you pick it.
00:27:38
Speaker
And I'm not sure that that's going to ever make sense for us. Like they were doing color coded bins that also had QR codes to scan. I believe this is correct. So like if they're assembling a holster, you have to scan, but that's what it was. When you assemble a holster, that particular skew of holster is always going to contain these 14 sub items, if you will.
00:28:04
Speaker
And so when that's done, it should reduce the inventory of each one of those appropriately. That was something he had to work with on. That's something that we're intentionally not doing. Like when we put together a mod vice, yes, we know that we use six of these screws, but we're still doing frankly, visual inventory on those screws. Partly because it's not hard, partly because I don't want to have bad information in our system and it's just so hard to track little things like screws that you can also over inventory. But I have a lot of respect for when that is done well.
00:28:34
Speaker
I think you're going that way with Kirk, right? Yeah, we're going that way too. When you make your own screws and it's like a big deal to not just order more from McMaster that be here tomorrow, it becomes a thing you actually want to track really well. Currently, we're still just doing baggies of 100 or 200. We have many baggies.
00:28:52
Speaker
The finishing shop has their own baggies. We have a backup shop in the machine shop, a backup section here. We track it by the 100 basically for machining schedule wise. We have a spreadsheet that tracks rough inventory of things like that so that Angela can plan the lathes basically. You have to be like, oh, in three months we're going to be out of screws, so in two months we got to make more kind of thing. Yeah, we've definitely talked and thought a lot about
00:29:20
Speaker
inventorying subassemblies and variants of products. If you anodize a screw blue, now is it its own product and now you have so many blue screws. How do you deal with that? I don't have the answer yet, but whatever we're doing right now works decent.
00:29:36
Speaker
Well, so I have an answer, I'm not sure it's the right one, but we have two different Saunders products that use the same screws. I believe it's the Mod Vise screws and the fixture pallet screws.
00:29:50
Speaker
But we treat them as separate Lex IDs. So if you run out of modified screws, you reorder new runs from the supplier. And if you save them with fixture plate screws. But in Lex, we have a note in the description area that is often not used. But it's perfect for a situation like this that just says, FYI,
00:30:10
Speaker
A1020 and A1079 are the same item. If you get right into a pickle, you can know, okay, I could rob from one to short become the other. Or if you had an accurate inventory and you're going to order more and Lex says you're all out of this one part number and you're looking at the thing and you're about to order more, the note will tell you there and then.
00:30:31
Speaker
also check the other inventory here. That's interesting. We don't do that. We don't worry about that at all, partly because I've had to bootstrapper away from worrying about
00:30:43
Speaker
shipping costs really. Henry and I were talking about this, excuse me, Andrew and I were talking about this where we've tried to move away from products that we just can't reliably get. It's a difficult screw to get. Yes, you could try to plan inventory or buy more, but it's actually frankly one of the problems with the Modvice. It uses a 7 16ths
00:31:05
Speaker
by 21-inch flathead screw, and I think I've jokingly said this before, we probably buy the whole of the United States out of those screws sometimes. And so when we're moving, we're going to move to the Gen 3 mod vice pretty soon. We're making them now, we're sort of bringing that on board right now internally, and we'll be moving to a
00:31:24
Speaker
metric flathead screw that is much more common. And the idea is that in the United States, it's simple to have metric fasteners and drivers and so forth. So every mod vice going forward at some point will be a metric driver type tool. But in the
00:31:44
Speaker
Yeah, so that those are being sold into countries that are metric, you can't get into stuff there. Yeah. So yeah. Might I suggest that on the part of the mod vice that has the threads in it, you engrave a little M6 next to it, or whatever. Why? I mean, visuals so that nobody tries to jam a quarter 20.
00:32:04
Speaker
Screw, I don't know. Oh, it's an interesting point. I mean, we provide the screws and they're only M6. There's no cord. It's a pretty good point though. It's just something I've tried to do on my fixtures specifically. Yeah. Because sometimes I use an M6 by 20, sometimes I use an M6 by 40 sometimes. So I try to write what the thing is designed to use on the fixture itself. Just it eliminates so much confusion. I don't have to open up fusion to be like, I lost the screw. Which one do I replace it with?
00:32:33
Speaker
even as building it the first time kind of thing. Yeah. Okay. We will engrave.
00:32:39
Speaker
And we're trying to consolidate skews, but a couple of the parts will have to have imperial and metric variance. And so on those, we are going to be engraving because there's otherwise visually no way. Totally, right? But it's more for us. I don't think, yes, you're right. A customer could botch up a screw and try to replace it with the wrong one. But it's a good point. Just so that they know, we take all confusion out of the decision-making process, you know? Well, then engraving takes four seconds. So cycle time is not.
00:33:09
Speaker
Well, you say that, but that's actually one of the areas I would push back on is we do engrave and we're good at it. I get it. But it has the possibility of raising a burr and they wear out and they can in certain instances
00:33:26
Speaker
you know, we're unwilling to sacrifice any sort of our parallelism, flatness tolerance, if you have any sort of a raised thing. And so you can engrave it and then redeck it. And you know, we're picky, like an engraving that is too deep looks not good compared to the engraving that is done well.
00:33:43
Speaker
Yeah, you're absolutely right. I don't want to just engrave anything all the time. Sure. I mean, we engrave everything all the time. We over-engrave. We engrave too much. And yeah, we go through all the same problems with the tool kicks up a burr or engraving. I just saw some saga pens the other day that were finished, but the engraving on the inside of the clipboard says grips when I was 23 was full of tumbling dirt. And I was like, this didn't get clean for our filly, guys. Okay. Yeah. What do you engrave with?
00:34:12
Speaker
Uh, Lake shore ball mill one 32nd ball mill to flu. Okay. Or they're tapered engraver. I really, really like as well. Yeah. The 20,000 tapered one. I've got some 10,000 ones. I think I have three 10th out tapered engravers in the current at all times. Like once for tie, once for stainless, something else.
00:34:31
Speaker
That was our go-to for a long time. What we found, we had a lot of luck with, is YG1 carbide center drills. They're dirt cheap. And they last quite long. They're double-sided. It just works. And they cut good. It leaves a good finish. Exceptional good. Really? Yeah. That's the first tool I ever engraved with, like 15 years ago. Carbide though. Yeah, mine would have probably been HSS, but still. Yeah.
00:35:01
Speaker
It works well. Nice. I was actually using a spot drill under the microscope the other day just to hand deeper a hole. And I'm like, I don't like it. The hole was too small for the tip of the spot drill, really.
Innovative Design and Machining Strategies
00:35:16
Speaker
So I got a little Jamfer mill, like an eighth inch Jamfer mill, and used that under the microscope. And this works so much better. Sweet. Yeah. I would like to say that people are very smart.
00:35:30
Speaker
I don't always remember this fact or I take it for granted. We've talked a couple of times over the past few years about the detent ball dropper device for us, the little 1.16 ceramic balls that we manually put into the machine and the machine presses them in. Two people built them.
00:35:55
Speaker
And they showed me their designs. One guy just sent me the design. I opened a box and I'm like, this is holy cow. This is the thing. Wow. And then another guy built one, sent me a bunch of videos on Instagram, and I had two other guys as well mention about wanting to build it, but I don't know if they ever did.
00:36:13
Speaker
But anyway, these two guys that built them both built it in completely different ways than I've ever thought of in the past six years of wanting this device. And one is incredibly simple and just beautiful and works so good. And he's the guy that sent it to me. And then the other one is 3D printed on a Formlabs SLA, SLS, whatever, powder machine.
00:36:35
Speaker
And the guy who 3D printed it, I was like, I'm curious to know what it looks like inside. And he goes, if you look up the patent for the original gumball machine, it's that. There you go. There you go. That's awesome. I wonder what that is. I bet you it's like a disk with a cutout and a rotating gate that just drops something like that. But every design I've been come up with was kind of a rip off of the winter gate and marble dropper guy.
00:37:04
Speaker
But I did build one, but it wasn't quite good enough yet. But yeah, this one that the guy machined and sent to me, it's out of brass and hardened M2. And it's small and it's beautiful. I thought it was a joke at first when I looked at it because it's so simple. I was like, there's no way this is going to work as good as he says it is. And it just is perfect.
00:37:27
Speaker
Secret sauce or you share? I'd have to show it to be really good, but a set screw and you can buy a set screw with a spring-loaded detent ball on the tip of it. He's basically using that as a gate.
00:37:42
Speaker
So you have a stack of balls, and as you press, they pop past the spring-loaded detent ball to shoot one at a time. OK. And there's more to it than that. But yeah, he's just bought the smallest ones you can buy and fit them into this thing. And there's a vertical shoot that holds 18 balls. And he's made a version two that holds 200 balls now, which is fantastic. Wow.
00:38:03
Speaker
And not only that, but he took it a step further and it doesn't just place the ball like what I wanted, it actually can press it in, in the same motion. Really? Yeah. So like the way we're doing it now, we place it in, we do a rough press, we're just pressing it halfway, put the palette away.
00:38:22
Speaker
And then when it calls it again later, it measures, probes, whatever, presses it again fully. So that initial half press is not critical. A few thou tolerance is fine. As long as the ball is moving and not too deep, or immovable and not too deep, then we're good to go. Yeah, so he combined these two logics together in this extremely simple design. And like I said last week, simple does not mean easy.
00:38:46
Speaker
It does mean genius though. It does mean genius and I give the guy like all the credit in the world. I was playing with it on the weekend at home. I was showing my wife. I was like, just check this out. This is so cool. Because your balls are tiny, right? My balls are very tiny. Yeah. Next to my Wilhelmin there.
00:39:01
Speaker
They're literally like... Oh, they're the one-sixteenth of an inch. Sixty thou, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Sixty to that. They're very small. Like grains of rice, but in a sphere kind of thing. Yeah. Way smaller for us Americans. I'm assuming that Canada land doesn't have BB guns. Way smaller than a one-seventy seven BB. Yeah, exactly. One-seventy seven. Is that point one-seventy seven? Okay. Yeah.
00:39:31
Speaker
I love that plunger idea. It reminds me of a spring over center. It just pushes it through. It pops it through. There's no intermittent state. It's either above the dimple or the pin or it's below it. What pushes it down? The shaft, imagine you're holding onto a half inch rod with the collet, and then that rod is neck down to 60 thou or 50 thou or something.
00:40:00
Speaker
And that is also the pressing rod. And then there's this brass, sleevey thingy that holds the balls and some springs and stuff that slides up and down. So when you hit the workpiece, the brass part hits and slides up. And then the metal middle pin is pushing the ball past the spring-loaded gate thingy and down the hole. And it's now covering the entry chute where the next ball is going to come. Walks it out of. Yeah. It's like so smart.
00:40:29
Speaker
And I was looking at it under the microscope. I'm like, how does this work? There's a set screw in it. I almost took it apart right away because I'm like, that's how you load it. Because no, that's not how you load it. Don't take it apart. He's added another spring detent hole screw. So you just put the balls in the side. And it's brilliant. I am going to make a YouTube video about these because they're awesome. Yeah. Like I said, people are brilliant.
00:40:56
Speaker
I know, thank you everybody for being brilliant. Keep being brilliant. Keep doing awesome stuff. You know, especially complex things that are my things, that are like my project, like I want to make this D10 dropper. My design has nothing on this. This is so simple and so perfect. Like this is, yeah, this is worth so much to me. So all you smart guys out there, just keep it going.
00:41:20
Speaker
I could use some smart help. I'm loving it, but the last few days have been a lot of hacked cam. No manual code, but we are adding, we had some fixtures on the horizontal that we just had two op ones and two op twos to get everything going totally fine, easy to do it, plenty of clearances, but it's time to get real. So they were always meant to hold four op ones and four op twos.
00:41:49
Speaker
It's not even that tight in terms of the overall travel and work envelope, but some of the parts end up being relatively close to each other, at least as it relates to 1, 2, 3-inch or 2.5-inch face mills, lean-in patterns. You've really got to control your toolpath winking moves. Are you drawing a sketch to just face where you want?
00:42:14
Speaker
Yeah, that's some of it. Some of it was switching from the face toolpath to 2D contour and then picking, picking sketches that are already part of the part, so not new sketches, and then doing negative or controlled tangential extensions. So like say, okay, lead in negative 130 thou, and that prevents it from hitting the part to the left. Right. I don't want to like this fault fusion here, but
00:42:43
Speaker
You know, it's, it's, I don't, I, I program one part and then that's patterned across four different work offsets. I think it's a pretty common workflow. Yeah. Do you have it designed with all 10 parts? I could, I don't, but you don't. Okay.
00:42:59
Speaker
Interesting. I typically do just for visual happiness. And I'm also pretty quick to be like, pop open a sketch, I will draw this facing toolpath exactly how I want it with the lead ins and everything. And then I do a 2D contour on center with no sideways comp and I just I just do it. Yeah. That's how I do it. And that's what I ended up doing was ended up pulling in additional cut instances of the body as
00:43:28
Speaker
as visual guides. The reason that what you said doesn't work here is that I'm not, so if we have four parts that are left to right, like along the X axis, because in fusion, I'm only programming the first one and then just patterning it across four offsets, you don't get the simulation. Oh, they're not equal space. One and two are far apart. Two to three happens to be closer because it's a new fixture, but then three and four are the same space as one and two.
00:43:56
Speaker
And so you don't see the correct visual guides of lead ends and so forth. You should in the patterning if the part was there and you defined it as a part model stock everything.
00:44:10
Speaker
But I'm only, so pick your, put your four finger, put your hand up like four fingers. I'm only programming the part on my index finger. So you don't see. Do you have two sets of patterns, like a folder and then a sub folder again, too? There's no pattern. It's just in the, in the setup, it's pushed out to four coordinate systems. What if four work offsets? It's not a pattern. That's the key. Gotcha. That's okay. I don't do that normally. Right. The pattern could work. I would just do a pattern. Okay.
00:44:36
Speaker
And in fact, I guess I could, well, that wasn't a big thing. These are one of the pattern it because you want it to be the work offsets. Bingo. Yeah, interesting. Okay. Maybe play with a pattern for visuals so that you can actually see what's going on and then post it as individual ops. Right. Yeah, that's a good point.
00:45:00
Speaker
Well, adding in the components as visual copies and coloring them a weird color so you know what they are. They made it for a quick fix and for production work like this, no big deal to do that. Obviously, Job Shop, that's a lot of bit onerous. Where I also wish there were better control, though, would be that's for the everything I just mentioned was for OP2. OP1, they're laid out.
00:45:23
Speaker
One, two, and then below it is three, four. So they're kind of in a grid, square grid. Whereas again, op two is four, just four cross. I wish I could pattern things better. So for the first part, you want it to lead in from the top. On the second part, I want the same toolpath, but to lead in from the bottom. I know there's a mirror pattern, but mirror gets really weird with doing things backward. And I don't think a few, anyways, I can't do anyways, because I'm not patterning it.
00:45:50
Speaker
Offset. If you can draw a circle in the center of your square. Oh, circular pattern? Yeah. Yes, that is a great. I've done that before. Because then that'll keep your lead-ins outside to in on top and bottom. Yes, I've signed in. Forgot about that. But that still only works if I pattern. And maybe I just need to look harder at, especially on op one, where we have net stock everywhere. So I don't need a precision of probing the exact location. But on op two, you're probing the location of each.
00:46:20
Speaker
and going into four different offsets, and you're reposting the same. How are you posting the same code to four offsets? So it's G54, five, six, seven, it's hot, it's Okuba, so it's different. So it's four, five, six, seven, and then diffusion lets you control the patterning, so you can run all the facemails at once across all four offsets, or you can do all of the first one and then go to the second one. That's easy. So you're posting, you're patterning to an offset, not to physical movement.
00:46:51
Speaker
I don't know, I've never done that. I've never, I usually work with one offset.
00:46:57
Speaker
Yeah, so think about having four Norseman handles on a, let's lay that flat on a fixture. The first one's G54. You could just literally copy and paste that code to 55, 56, 57, and then on your horizontal or your more, probe the next, the one to the right is 56, 57, et cetera. So in fusion, you do have, if you had one operation, you have four of them.
00:47:24
Speaker
Only when it gets posted, you see it in the NC program. Really? Which you don't use. Yeah. Not there yet. Yeah. I should. Yes. You have a video on the NC programs, don't you? Of course, yes. Yeah, I don't think I've seen that yet. I will do it like that. If any time you want, I'll do like a seven minute Zoom tutorial. You'll get it. Yeah. Seriously, no big deal. Cool. It's very helpful.
00:47:49
Speaker
That's all right. I'll see you not next week. Not next week. We're taking next week off everybody. Sorry. Not sorry. See, bud. Take care later. Bye.