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#332 SMW bought a HAAS UMC350!
343 Plays2 years ago
TOPICS:
- Fusion 360 across a team
- DSI Fusion Summit Aug. 22, 2023 in California
- SMW video on coolest unknown trick.
- Cutting through the heat affected zone
- Speedio sub micron option works!
- SMW bought a HAAS UMC350!
- Financing options
- Reverse Osmosis water
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Transcript
Introduction and Weekly Focus
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining episode number 332. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo.
00:00:07
Speaker
John and I talk each week about coolant and testing tools, buying machines. But seriously, joking aside, we try our best to treat this as the private conversation it is to give folks an insight into what it's like, the highs and the lows, the good and the bad of running our...
Team Expansion and Morale Boost
00:00:23
Speaker
Each of us have approximately 10 employees and 10,000, 15,000 square feet and a bunch of spindles and make stuff. It's a lot sometimes and it's nice to be able to decompress and to bounce ideas off each other and
00:00:36
Speaker
Yeah. It's just part of the week now. It's like, you've got to do the podcast. I got to tell John what's going on. Yes. How are you doing? I'm doing quite fantastic. Things are going really good. Yeah. Everything's flowing really good. Quick thing, past couple of months I've been buying more computers for the shops. The guys have access to laptops. And then just the other day I closed the deal on three more fusion licenses, which has
00:01:06
Speaker
instantly improved morale and access to fusion and excitement and guys are working on projects together and I'm like, why on earth did I wait so long to do this?
00:01:18
Speaker
I rather than dwell on that, let's look forward.
Skill Growth in Fusion Programming
00:01:22
Speaker
Absolutely, yeah. But notes for the future like I don't know. I've done 99% of all the programming forever and Angelo has a full license but he's busy managing the shop so he doesn't get a lot of time to play on it and now we got more guys playing on it and I'm like I can see the immediate near future and it's going to grow and everybody's going to learn and it's working. It's really, really cool. Good.
00:01:46
Speaker
I want to join you alongside that because this is the sucky part of our jobs, but I want to hear where you guys struggle with that because moving into having multiple people, access to files, changes, CAD, CAM, a $220,000 chamfer, is that modeled?
Design Language and CAD/CAM Teamwork
00:02:06
Speaker
Is it
00:02:07
Speaker
Sure. Is it Justin Cam? What if somebody doesn't like the tool? Do they change it? What if they want a bigger chair? These are things that we're doing fine, but ooh. It happens, yeah. I'm not there yet. Yeah. You're going to put your hair at some point on something. For sure. That's interesting.
00:02:24
Speaker
And it's already starting to see it establishing a, what do you call it? A design language for the company. You know, where it's like, yes, we model those chamfers. We don't model those chamfers. We let the cam do it.
00:02:40
Speaker
We do it like this with components, not just bodies everywhere. I'm a huge fan of as-built joints instead of grounding an object. The correct time to ground an object in Fusion is never. I agree. Yeah, but I used to. I still have some old files and I see a ground in there and I'm like, oh, you ancient dinosaur. I guess I haven't changed that one yet, but it doesn't matter.
00:03:02
Speaker
If you want your guys to spend some time on our online fusion class, just let me know. I'll get you access to that. That sounds cool. Because you don't have to follow the whole thing along. You could just go like look with like a fixed blade knife demo, a screwdriver demo. Yeah, it'd be helpful. Just like basic stuff. Yeah. Yep. And I know once Grayson got the laptop at home, he did a couple online tutorial demos and just followed along. He built a Lego piece. He built a wine bottle with Revolve. And it just taught him a lot of cool stuff that you don't figure out on your own, you know?
00:03:31
Speaker
Yep. I shall do that.
Fusion Summit and Networking Opportunities
00:03:34
Speaker
Actually, that's a two fun segues there. Number one that I got to mention is that in a few weeks, we've got the fusion summit. So if you can get to or live in California, it's in the middle of California. So it's kind of halfway between LA and San Francisco, which is wonderful, except it's halfway between LA and San Francisco. But I'm going to be there. I'm on a panel for talking about five acts of summation. You're coming as well, John. Yeah.
00:04:00
Speaker
Yeah, so it's similar to I would say like the Portland fusion event years ago, the Charlotte event we had last December, but I like it because it's a chance to spend a couple of days with machine CNC machine focused fusion users. So like, not only the seminars, but just like the banter, the coffee table conversations, the dinners like being around the energy of everybody and a little
00:04:24
Speaker
Yes. The little stories you're going to hear and so many times everybody there is going to be like, you're struggling with that? I'm struggling with that too. Yeah, right. You said really good. Some of my favorite ones have been the ones where I think it was at AU, which I think these are events are better than AU, but Lostwood and somebody just ended up going down this rabbit hole talking about design stuff. I could have sat there for an hour. Yeah.
00:04:53
Speaker
The other cool segue is talking about learning fusion.
Exploring Fusion's Calibrate Feature
00:04:57
Speaker
We just did a video, it came out this week on the coolest unknown trick in fusion using the calibrate. I told you there's a fusion calibrate feature. Do you know what I'm talking about?
00:05:10
Speaker
Calibrate what? I don't know. A photo? OK. You might have mentioned it. It's not ringing a bell. Oh, good. OK. So we need our DeLorean, because I'm talking to you on Wednesday. The video comes out this afternoon. OK. So we'll be out by the time this video ends. But basically, if you have an object of a known dimension, you need to take a picture of it. Easiest way to take an object picture of an object of a known dimension is a tape measure or caliper or something. OK.
00:05:35
Speaker
If you insert it as a canvas, right-click and choose calibrate, you can pick the two points and say these two points are nine inches or six inches across, and it scales the photo, which makes reverse engineering at least on 2D parts, 3D no. I've had to manually do that before. I know that edge is 10 inches long, so draw a line that's 10 inches and shrink the sketch, the canvas to be... So this sounds like a faster way to do that. Faster way. We threw together a super quick YouTube video because our...
00:06:05
Speaker
Here's what happened. This would be a good segue to cool it. Actually, we changed a couple of different things in our coolant that I'll talk about in a minute, but we needed a new sump pump to pump RO water into the top off tanks over in
Coolant System Adjustments and Safety Innovations
00:06:20
Speaker
training building. We didn't have an RO sister over there. The better sump didn't fit into a old quality cam barrel without cutting the top, but it already had water in it.
00:06:31
Speaker
And even if it was empty, I didn't want to sawzall or make a bunch of metal chips in a drum that could then get into the toilet. And you could tip the barrel over to minimize it. But basically I was like, hey, just cut it with tin snips if you can. The guys had no problem cutting with tin snips, but then it left this janky, sharp edge.
00:06:48
Speaker
So we took a picture in an hour and a half, 3D printed, a nice insert that looks nice, and obviously safety protects the edge. So that was the video that we did. Just, hey, this works, and it works because the bamboo is super fast, easy to use, fusion is super easy to use here, and the calibrate function means we get it apart correct the first time. These are new solids, but yeah, it was good. I love it. I love when a plan comes together. Yeah, it really did.
00:07:17
Speaker
Yeah, it finally hit me. I was like, we've been joking around about buying a bamboo or two for the shop. And then it hit me. I'm like, they're useless to us without more guys having fusion and being good at fusion. Yeah, sure. So let's do that first. And then within a month or two, there will be immediate need for more faster. And then I'm like, oh, no brainer at that point.
Delegation and Trust in Machining Tasks
00:07:37
Speaker
But it's a stepping stone to get there. And I'm glad it's happening. I'm glad it's finally. It's not just getting this off my plate. It's literally teaching.
00:07:46
Speaker
getting more knowledge and skill in everybody's hands and it's exciting. Yeah. It's probably been one of the... I don't know how to say this. It's kind of a personal comment. One of the hardest things to deal with is
00:08:01
Speaker
knowing that it is success when so much stuff is happening without you knowing. Yeah. And so like Vince's took over running the pucks for our puck chuck prototypes or beta units on the UMC 500 over in training. I had dialed in a new tool, worked great, did exactly what I was trying to do. It was kind of like last checkbox before we start making 50 more of these things. And then Vince had an idea to change a face mill to get a better finish. From what I've run through a finisher, I'm kind of like,
00:08:29
Speaker
I don't even need to weigh in. Full trust, go ahead, handle the cam, handle the changes, handle the QC. I heard from somebody else that they're looking even better and better. It's a really good thing. In some respects, him not even asking me that would be better except there's this awkwardness of like,
00:08:46
Speaker
communicating around, hey, the workload, we talked about this a while back. The guys running the machines, if they want to make a design change, a cam change, maybe even a tooling change, big tooling change. We need to have a conversation on the engineering side about that. On the flip side, it's like, no, this is great. Yeah. Yeah. It's such a
00:09:06
Speaker
I don't know if it's a fine line or a muddy line between we need to review every major change or I trust you, go for it. I trust your judgment, et cetera. Because sometimes we've seen changes in the shop that the machinist wants to make, but that literally changes the design feature that no longer works or makes it an unperfect kind of thing. Yes. The machinist doesn't know that knowledge from the design side, yada, yada.
00:09:31
Speaker
And it's not really been a huge problem, but it's certainly like, no, don't just go changing everything to try to make something work, like find the source of the problem. Yes. Bad batch of drill bits or something. Oh, yeah. Did you ever figure out what was... Sorry.
00:09:48
Speaker
Yeah, when we're drilling the tips on the pens, a quarter inch drill bit, it was blowing up all the time. And I think it kind of might've been a bad batch of drill bits. We switched to a higher performance within the same company, OSG, and a higher performance drill. Both of them are through coolant and the new ones are perfect. They're quiet, they're great, they have no problem. I mean, a drill should last for months, not one part.
Communication in Tool Changes
00:10:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:14
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Well, glad that that's kind of fixed. It's one of those things like I've forgotten about it, you know, it's gone. It's over. Yeah. No, that's sometimes the hardest thing is to realize like, no, don't, don't, don't fight this battle. Like it's okay. Yeah. Yeah. We had a really good, um,
00:10:36
Speaker
I was just sharing this in our shop lunch yesterday. Really good experience. So we are using a different brand tool. Very expensive, in my opinion. Too expensive for what we were using to cut through the has on our fixture plates. Like when they come to us. So like hot rolled material?
00:10:54
Speaker
Yeah, all 4140 plates hot rolled. OK. And we order our plates oversized to make sure we have enough material so that the has is all gone. Oh, like the laser water jet outside perimeter is what you're saying. Yeah, so if we water jet, then we wouldn't have a has, but that doesn't work. So we have a flame cut. And so this has can be 50 to 60 Rockwell. Right, yeah. And inconsistent and like really rough and sounds like a murderer on tool.
00:11:22
Speaker
it. So yes, if you don't attack with the right way, it will murder schools. And the tool we had was working except it was just too expensive. And we weren't getting good removal rates into a life like this wasn't a great
00:11:38
Speaker
It was a process that needed some TLC. We've moved a lot to YG1. I found that it's good value and good quality. For examples like this, I called my sales guy. I was like, here's the application.
00:11:53
Speaker
Yeah, some tooling like it's kind of like Sandvik, I really lean on them to be like, Hey, just tell me what to buy here. I spent some time in the catalog to try to put my best foot forward say, Hey, I looked at your 4G and then there was one other brand or model line, but it looked really expensive. I'm like, here's what I want. I want a dedicated has tool. I kind of want it to be like a beater and kind of like a dump truck, you know, just like power through it. Good value, which could be either cheap and
00:12:20
Speaker
doesn't last a ton or a little more expensive and last longer. But like you said, there's too much variety or surprises in the material to buy a hundred or $200 end mill that might last or might not.
Enhanced Tooling Strategies for Efficiency
00:12:30
Speaker
They recommended a 4G, gave you some feeds and speeds. We had some thoughts that we knew on speeds and feeds from our experience. And Caleb just tried it yesterday and was just ecstatic. It's way better. It sounded silent.
00:12:48
Speaker
or conventional cutting, which is a strategy we've often used to get. So you're cutting, instead of shearing down through, like if you think about using a spade or a shovel in the ground, if you cut straight into the ground or the spade and the ground's really hard, that's no good. But if you can actually come from underneath and then poke up through the has, it's often better because the heat affected zone
00:13:10
Speaker
decreases as you go into the material. So conventional tends to work quite well. But it was silent, worked great. After the first plate, it was, its flutes looked pristine. It was just like it was a win all around. I was like, that makes me really happy. Not only did we get a good result, but we improved the cycle time drastically. And we had a good experience talking to the vendor, getting recommendation, getting tools to test. Here we are.
00:13:31
Speaker
I was just thinking of conventional like picturing in my head. Normally it goes as the end mill spins from the outside of the material towards your finished edge. Bingo. As conventional will cut from the finished edge towards the outside. So it's ripping from clean material towards the has layer, like the crappy outside. Yeah. Not cutting every single flute is cutting from the gross outside towards the inside dulling the tool. Is that kind of the theory maybe?
00:13:57
Speaker
The way I always think about it is climb milling, so the end mill's rotating around the material or over the material. If you think about a radial cut along the outside of a part, if your machine was no longer restricted by its servos, it was a perfectly free to move machine, a climb end mill would be trying to climb along the part.
00:14:19
Speaker
If you walk around this part with climb milling, it would actually literally be trying to walk in the direction on its own. Conventional reverses that, which means instead of the end mill flute kind of chopping down like an axe would on the top of the material, the outside material, it's actually scooping up from underneath. Right, right.
00:14:39
Speaker
Which as, you know, in my generalized experience, like never conventional mill, climb mill everything, all of the things, you know, with CNC and with carbine and everything, except for with foam, you conventional mill everything in foam, which is weird, but maybe the same concept, you know?
00:14:59
Speaker
Yeah. We climb everything except has. And now it's interesting time to measure how thick the has was. So that way we're only using this tool to get to the has. Then we can switch over to a regular in the mill and not waste our... It's still an expensive tool, but not waste or has tool once we've gone through it. It sounds great. Yeah, it's fun. Would something like a corn cob rougher be a solution here or I don't know?
00:15:23
Speaker
Corn cob would help except the corn cob tends to take a $60 end mill and add 20 bucks to it. I don't have chip control issues and I do want to treat this as kind of a beater end mill. A corn cob tends to leave a very lined finish, like a choppy surface finish, which will eventually wear down your next tool, your finishing tool.
00:15:53
Speaker
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. This gets passed, then roughed and then a separate tool finishes. I don't care about the corn cob lines, but yeah. Yeah. Is it chip breaker style? The fancy one? It's just a YG1 4G end mill. It looks like a regular end mill, generally. Yeah. It looks beautiful. I know that sounds silly, but the coating they have on them, it looks really nice, but it's kind of regular old end mill. Nice. Nice.
00:16:23
Speaker
Yeah, excellent. I think I told you last week, I had a tool break on the Kern, a 116th flat end mill on Rask clip, and then the same thing happened last weekend. So two weekends in a row, and we use this tool every day, many, many times a day. We've probably replaced it two or three times since every week because we go through it so much. But it gets used a lot.
00:16:52
Speaker
It broke in the exact same spot two weekends in a row and I'm like that's a pattern and like I haven't changed that cam in months or years kind of thing but maybe there's something about that hole that's overloading the tool that's causing a problem.
00:17:07
Speaker
So I think the video is going up today actually. I kind of filmed a little fusion, you know, deep, deep dive on like, what's going on in that hole? Oh, there's too much load on that end mill as it enters the hole. It's basically plowing into the bottom V of a drilled hole. Normally I try to interpolate down or something like that.
Precision Drilling Techniques
00:17:25
Speaker
Plowing into that bottom V is overloading the tool too quickly kind of thing. It's able to handle it 99% of the time, but every now and then it's not happy with it. In the video I just talked about how I'm using flat bottom drill to make the bottom of the hole pristine.
00:17:45
Speaker
I still don't like to use flat bottom drill bits as the only way to drill a hole. I still like the tapered regular 140 degree drill and then I'll come in with the same diameter flat bottom and just kiss the bottom because I've broken quite a few flat bottoms trying to overload them or something. I'm sure they're great. I'm just doing it wrong, but it's a good workflow we have where we drill a whole regular, tap it with a flat bottom and
00:18:07
Speaker
now whatever tool, thread mill, end mill, whatever, can go into that hole and there's like half a thou left on the floor just to clean up, you know? Yep, I know exactly. Yeah, yeah. We did that on our puck chuck. We have this ID hole feature right here. And we happen to already have an 11 millimeter drill in the machine. So we use that to pre-drill the feature, but it's a 140 degree drill tip. So the bottom, and we leave like 10 thou,
00:18:36
Speaker
drill tip to bot it because I don't want the drill tip to ever risk compromising. So when I do a boring operation to open it up, I separated it. So the first boring operation does everything that the drill touch and the second one comes in at slower feeds and speeds to do the helical ramp and open it up just because you want it to just be
00:18:57
Speaker
And you want the tool to last, too. I think about that a lot. You try to put your mind in the eyes of the tool like, okay, this tool is deep down inside a pocket. The chips aren't going anywhere. Coolant splashing around the outside, not really getting into the hole unless you have through coolant. How do you minimize the load, the chip load, the chips coming out? How do you make sure they come out effectively? All these little thoughts. Do you have enough on that 1.16? Is there any ability to do a tapered ramp?
00:19:28
Speaker
Um, no, it's a tiny little hole. Okay. Well, I think it's, so it's a 60, 60 thou diameter end mill in a 93 thou hole.
00:19:36
Speaker
Oh yeah, that's plenty of room. Yeah, if you're doing adaptives would work for this. I have found that last page of the adaptive, which is the linking page, there's the helical ramp diameter and you can put an angle and diameter on there. And it forms a little funnel or cone down. And even 10,000, a small hole like that can really help you allow for some chip evacuation. Okay. I see what you're saying. I don't think I do much of that.
00:20:06
Speaker
I should try. Yeah. That's our go-to on the horizontal production. We drill a hole, then we helical ramp to open it up, and then we go do the finishing whatever. Yeah. Good tip. I like it. I think last week I got the speedio chip, or it was just about to arrive? Oh, yeah. You were looking for the FedEx truck.
00:20:32
Speaker
Yeah, so it came that day and I installed it the next day and I needed the super secret password from Greg to unlock it.
Installing the Speedio Chip for Precision
00:20:41
Speaker
This is his borrowed chip. I'm borrowing it from him and I will have to return it at some point and get my own if I want to, which after some test cuts, I definitely want to get my own because this is amazing.
00:20:57
Speaker
It does literally exactly what I want. All it does is it gives you five digits. It goes from four digit. You're moving a tenth at a time. Now you're moving 10 millionths at a time. The servo still have enough accuracy to still have, what is it, 23 pulses per movement, per 10 millionth movement, which is still accurate enough. And it basically lets me post five digit code. And with the way I'm chop grinding, it's so precise that it will show machine error.
00:21:27
Speaker
and then tenth movements like visibly in the grind in the finish. And so at one tenth movements, I could see steps, at ten millionth movements, it's pristine. It's like fantastic. It's so good. And I got this great side by side picture and that shows the difference night and day. And I'd say there
00:21:48
Speaker
almost as good as the Kern blade. It's doing the exact same operation, like perfect, just so great, so awesome. I mean, they shouldn't be as good, right? Greg has yelled that to me many times. He's like, it's not a Kern. Stop trying to make it a Kern, but still, I think it's totally accomplishing what I wanted it to, which is sick. I mean, does everybody need it? I mean, why not at some point? It's a couple of thousand dollars, but
00:22:17
Speaker
It's, I don't know how much it'll show on like features and holes and accuracy and things like that. Maybe it'll help, but maybe it won't, you know? So if you didn't have this chip, your brother only moves in one thou increments? One tenth. That's fine. Almost every machine. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's why it's called the sub micron option. Yeah. Super happy with it.
00:22:46
Speaker
Oh, that's great. Got a couple more test cuts to do, and I got some more tweaking to do on the toolpath. I'm using that preview geodesic toolpath, which basically lets me go down, over, up, over, down, over, up, over, down, instead of the reaming toolpath, which goes down, up, over, down, up, over. So it's literally cutting more than twice the time from my grinding time, and leaving a fantastic finish, and good wheel wear, and it's just
00:23:15
Speaker
This is coming together. It's great. That's such a win. How do you dress in this video? I have a little, I think it's tantalum material, but it's this little, looks like a quarter inch carbide end mill that I have to mount somewhere and I have it mounted side to side and the grinding wheel comes down and dresses against it radially. I just pass it down. I wrote a little subroutine.
00:23:39
Speaker
dresses against it, up, down, up, over, down, up, over, down, up, over, and then I touch off again. That basically rips away free material. You're busting the diamonds out of the bond or the CBM particles out of the bond and then exposing new diamonds. Yeah. Okay. Does your subroutine have to comp how the wheel gets smaller, but does the tantalum get smaller?
00:24:04
Speaker
It does, so I have probes the end of the tantalum. I think it's tantalum, don't quote me on that. But the dressing stick, I probe the end of that and then I use the tool radius to macro my way over so that the first cut is always like an air cut and then move over a thou cut over a thou, half thou and a quarter thou and a tenth and then touch off in the laser.
00:24:27
Speaker
Cool, that's awesome. Yeah, so if this all works, then I can take hours of grinding off the current every day. Yeah. Because it's getting the same results. So like... Yes. So Skye was able to polish the bad blades with the one-tenth movements, which had choppy lines. He was able to polish that out with mediocre results. He hasn't tried to polish yet the really good ones, but he looked at it and he's like, oh yes, all day please, yes please. Yeah.
00:24:57
Speaker
What was your bottleneck last week? Was it just a machine mistake?
00:25:06
Speaker
I may have misremembered this. I don't remember. Okay. We're talking to the grinding folks about the diamond dressing and how diamonds are consumable, but I don't think the diamond wears, I'm sure that my understanding is that the diamond doesn't wear such that when you run your daily or even multiple times per week dressing routine that you need to update it because
00:25:30
Speaker
The diamond may need to replace every six months or something if it's being used daily, but it's not like this. It's not like tantalum where you got to redo it every... Yeah, exactly. Every single time. You're right. Based on what Angelo has told me in passing, he's able to rotate the diamond dresser on the Okamoto. He gets like three rotations out of it. If I had to guess, he's probably rotating every two or three months. I think he's replacing it every six or plus.
00:25:58
Speaker
Perfect. Yep. That's an easy Lex, just do it. Yeah. I think he can hear it or tell that the dress is bad. Oh, interesting. It starts to burn parts. There's a reason that he knows it's time to dress it or to change the diamond. I probably hear it because you can hear it dressed. It's actually a super satisfying sound. Yeah.
00:26:21
Speaker
Oh yeah, I feel like it's like snow and boots like hearing a diamond wheels, very sound machine shop ASMR, except the problem with that is machine shops are incredibly loud and you can't just isolate one sound. Yeah, yeah. We were we're doing to do a
00:26:39
Speaker
Instagram Live on Friday with Fusion 360 at like three o'clock East Coast. Cool. Everybody enjoy if you want. Talking at the Fusion Summit. I was like, I want to go out in the shop because I haven't really shown the willow men and some other stuff. I was like, I'm pretty sure my AirPods will be fine for an Insta Live. We'll see. Yeah. Every time I'm on my AirPods on a phone call, I'm like, can you hear me okay? Like in the shop? They're like, yeah, I hear you're just fine. Yeah. Okay, because it's loud, but I guess you can't hear it. Yeah, it's awesome.
00:27:09
Speaker
Which on Friday on our Instagram live, we're going to announce what we're announcing right now to you, which is, it all came together. We bought a Haas UMC 350 HD. What's HD mean? It's the 40 taper version of the UMC 350, which is otherwise a DT slash 30 taper machine. I do think they're also different travels, but the majority, well, we should pull up the specs. The big difference for sure is a 40 taper.
00:27:39
Speaker
So, I had the two things on my list for this year were grinder and another Haas for training. We need a second vertical for the three-axis class both for students but also as a backup and then with five-axis
00:27:55
Speaker
We want more, two machines to have more students in the class, full stop. And so our dealer emailed us and they had a showroom unit that they were parting ways with for a great price, like great price. And it was the first time in my life where I was just, I mean, it literally matched the spec of the built, the machine I had built online, except this one had P cool. I wouldn't have spent the two grand on P cool. All right.
00:28:21
Speaker
but otherwise was perfectly matched. They're shipping it to us two hours away for no charge. Nice. And I literally just told my salesman, I was like, Hey, can you get it to this number? He did, or close. And then I just, like, it was just the most like, yeah, it makes sense. Good timing. Yep. So now still have to pull the trigger on a grinder, which I think I'll do this week. And then I need to get the rigging. They're both,
00:28:49
Speaker
They're both about 200 pounds over our forklift capacity, which means, John, just rent the forklift. But you're so close. If I were doing this as a hobby on my own, on the farm, I would figure out a way to add a little bit of counterweight and make sure. Because usually that's what it is. It's not the hydraulics. It's the counterweight. And that's where it gets dangerous, tipping a forklift. You don't want to do that.
00:29:17
Speaker
What you can't do, there's really bad videos of people trying to hop on the back, because then it tips, you fall, and then it falls back down on you. Oh, geez. So we're at the forklift, but I do want to get the machines delivered at the same time. That'd be cool. And that'll be awesome. Nice. That's my big news. That's exciting. So you pull the trigger on the grinder. What have you learned in the past two, three weeks of painfully trying to research and choose between these two brands?
00:29:47
Speaker
I've learned a lot. Let me save that for next week. Okay. If that works. Yeah. I'd love to hear more about it. Yeah, absolutely. There is a, I mean, there's a very, I mean, it's down between your exact model though and the Chevalier. So that's what, that's where I'm at right now. Cool. But by next week you'll have, you'll have it locked.
Financing Machine Purchases and Business Growth
00:30:07
Speaker
barring something unforeseen. The truth is that either one is going to work. Absolutely. They're going to do what you need. And it's just cool that you have the product, the need, the manpower, the space, the capacity, the ability to buy it. It's just like almost a no-brainer. It's not quite like an impulse buy, but it's like you're ready for it now, you know? Yeah. Well, so that's funny too, because folks that have followed us over the years,
00:30:35
Speaker
I don't want to talk. Nobody wants to hear me talk, ramble about this. But basically punchline, I was a Dave Ramsey, don't borrow money, stay out of debt to avoid bad things, risk, changes in the economy, all that stuff. And now it's funny because now I'm at the point where the business is growing up so much to where some like the payment on one of these machines
00:31:02
Speaker
is usually the whole monthly payment usually would be what we sell by lunchtime on one day. It's just so minor. Now the flip side of that would be like, okay, well then just pay cash for it because you're whatever. But I'm also looking at it as from an overall working capital and capitalization of the company.
00:31:20
Speaker
punchline though is what's ironic is I'm at the point now where I'm finally like, no, I think it actually is healthy and appropriate to have some amount of borrowing and financing on some of this stuff. And it's ironic because now money's expensive. Like, you know, nine months ago or two years ago, money was so cheap. So more just comical than anything.
00:31:40
Speaker
Yeah, I know it's fascinating. I think people absolutely want to hear perspective on things like that, especially changing mindset, but it comes from a maturity level, not just like your internal maturity, but the maturity of the business and the, you know, the steadiness of the cashflow. And we're seeing that too, you know, leveraging lending in a very smart way, even aggressively in our case, a little bit to get what you need to produce the things that you need. Bingo.
00:32:08
Speaker
And if you have a finance team that's got your back and can help you manage through the cashflow and the working capital and things like that, because it gets real dangerous real fast if you don't know enough. And borrowing too much too soon in a business, yet alone without the machining skills to be able to maximize such a tool, it does get dangerous. So lending has its place, but it's a tool like any other and it's got to be treated with respect
00:32:39
Speaker
Agreed. Full stop. For anyone else that's listening, I would love talking about this. I also know that not everyone wants to hear about it. One of the things I remember learning that was really impactful was probably in my college year somebody sort of saying, dividend companies
00:32:57
Speaker
you need to think about why a company pays a dividend. So this would be for folks that are buying stocks and publicly traded companies. The big Coca-Cola is the world proctor gambles the world. Why does a company pay a dividend? And why is that bad? And I was sort of stumped. I was like, I don't understand dividends. Great. It offers you a current return. So you buy the stock. Not only can you long-term potentially participate in the stock's share price appreciation, but every quarter you get a check because that company's distributing its retained earnings in the form of a dividend to you as a shareholder and owner of the company. That's great.
00:33:27
Speaker
But if you think about it, the answer is unbelievably simple.
00:33:31
Speaker
the company is distributing a dividend because they don't have anything else to do with that money. They can no longer invest that money into their own R&D or growth at a better rate of return. Now we're going to quickly dive into theoretical finance stuff here, but the point is true. Procter & Gamble can't get any more tubes of crest, whatever. Interesting. What I'm thinking about now is worth this company now, we've got
00:33:59
Speaker
A bunch of new modified accessories coming out. We've got the puck chuck coming out. Training classes are doing great. Us paying cash for these machines would be kind of like a dividend. We're taking that money and not able to invest it in other forms of R&D, if that makes sense. So financing the machine leaves that money there to buy the material, the testing, other stuff.
00:34:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's like you are putting the money back into the company because you're buying a tool asset for the company, but you're taking the working capital away from doing little things, the cash things that have to be cash. You can buy machines under big term finance.
00:34:43
Speaker
If you buy it cash, then you have no more cash. I don't know exactly. It's how you describe that. It's exactly how our company is set up with shareholders, our family members, and then dividend payments. If we choose to distribute, we don't have a schedule yet to distribute dividends.
00:35:00
Speaker
But for the most part, for the past 10 years, we've just left the money in the company and let the company grow. And it's painful to pull out personal money, like fun money or family money or something like that. And we're trying to allow ourselves a little bit of that. It's like, no, we do deserve this as shareholders to the company. But also, the company needs to grow and buy more cool stuff. No, for sure. It's a balance. It's a balance.
00:35:27
Speaker
I think you and I both had the chance to talk to mentors that have companies that are either more mature or frankly more successful than either one of us where it's like, no, you're at some point doing yourself a disservice if you're not offering yourself a return on what you've poured into this.
00:35:44
Speaker
I heard that two weeks ago, a guy who had a small job shop, kind of like you and I four years ago or whatever, and was ultimately like, hey, I don't want to deal with this anymore and I can go make more money under the W2, like just go work as a job, whatever. I don't even know what he's doing. It's weird.
00:36:03
Speaker
I actually appreciate somebody coming to that realization because failure doesn't, being in denial about failure isn't, and failure can be a bunch of things. It doesn't necessarily even mean that he was going to fail or go bankrupt. It just meant like this doesn't make sense anymore. Okay, great. Call it, change things up. It's okay. Yeah, it's finding your own truth and everybody's got a different level of risk tolerance and stress and management experience and all that stuff to be able to handle whatever situation you're in.
00:36:33
Speaker
I'm never mad when somebody says that they've realized something that I wouldn't do. Because it's like, if that's right for you, go nuts. I'm super happy for you. Awesome. Don't feel bad telling me about this. I'm happy. But that's also the feedback loop of by that logic. Totally agree with you, John. But by that logic, it's just like, no, I'm really proud and happy of where we've gotten, which means everything I've done is correct. That is not true. Yeah, well.
00:37:02
Speaker
But big picture, it is. It's working for both of us. I mean, we've both worked incredibly hard to get to where we are and lots more in the future. Yeah, that's funny. I like it. I like these conversations. Yeah, they're fun. Okay, last update for me, then I'll shut up. We bought a new RO system.
00:37:21
Speaker
All the pieces are puzzle coming together. We bought the other PAS machine for the training class. We're going to start. We're going to hopefully have a lathe class scheduled the beta one in the fall. I know a bunch of folks have emailed for the wait list. If you haven't, please sign up because I suspect those beta seats will sell out in like an hour.
00:37:41
Speaker
We needed a way to generate RO water over the training classroom at this point. So I realize we take our current system, move it over there, and then I'll buy a system here that's double the size from bulk reef supply.
Upgrading RO Water System and Coolant Management
00:37:54
Speaker
It comes today, and then that gets us a better system here because we're going through a lot of coolant with just the production we're doing now. And the heat, it's summer and it evaporates faster and things like that.
00:38:06
Speaker
We're climate controlled though so it shouldn't be all that different. Any update on your coolant? Yes, lots of updates. I think you have struck a nerve with the algae conversation.
00:38:30
Speaker
which is very fascinating. And I've heard from a couple of people, they're like, no, algae doesn't really cause foaming. Biological doesn't tend to cause problems in gullet. And then we started pushing it, and we had a guy reach out to us, email both of us, who's a beer maker, a brewer. He's a great guy. Yeah, I've never talked to him before, but he sounds incredible.
00:38:55
Speaker
And he, in layman's terms, he basically said, in a form, algae creates foam and holds foam and the amount and concentration and like specific type of algae will hold the beer foam is exactly what you want, right?
00:39:09
Speaker
and like beer makers do this specifically on purpose and I'm trying to avoid this in coolant and he's like, I don't know, from my perspective, algae is definitely a contributor and if you can see any amount of algae, there's a billion invisible algaes that might also be causing a problem. So, I pushed back on quality chem a little bit and they're like, okay, let me talk to my water treatment guys, let me talk to my chemical guys and we're all starting to re-question our preconceived notions of everything.
00:39:37
Speaker
Yeah. Okay, okay. Maybe there's something. I don't know if it's the smoking gun, but it's like we have a shop with windows, which is probably pretty rare as far as many machine shops go. We have a clear RO tank that is getting light and bacteria likes heat and light and things like that. Maybe we have a Petri dish of scenarios here and maybe we're storing our water more than
00:40:04
Speaker
most people do because we don't go through a ton of it. I don't know. All these things. So maybe we do a full clean out. I might even move like you did move this whole RO system to our front shop because they need more water. Yeah, there you go. And then get a brand new system clean, paint it match easier so that no light gets in or whatever. And then kind of start fresh, start clean and see if that's the problem.
00:40:34
Speaker
Amen. And keeping the same coolant. I'm very happy with quality chem tips if you want, except for the foam. And if the foam is my problem, algae or water or whatever, then interesting. Yeah.
00:40:47
Speaker
I shout out to Blake. He's a scientist. He has, I think you've jokingly said, a litany of three-letter degrees in chemistry and engineering. He put into science what I had speculated, which is if you see a little bit of algae somewhere, you've got a problem. It's not just a spot in an IBC tote. And that nullifies anything. And good grief is so much easier to start fresh than worried about shocking and purging and wiping a system.
00:41:14
Speaker
Yeah, he said replace all of the lines and clean it out with nasty chemicals. And I'm like, Oh, I don't want to do that. But I understand his point. And yeah, it's fascinating. Good. What's next steps? Nothing immediate, but probably figure out the plan for buying another tote. And yeah,
00:41:38
Speaker
and go from there and probably fit, choose a machine. The more he's probably the worst offender with the current being a close second. Um, but the more he's easy to dump and fill, you know, it's, it's available and it's right there. Do you have an old quality cam barrel? The one we're currently using is not that old. No, no, but you have like empty one. Oh, empty one. Um,
00:42:02
Speaker
Maybe. Just go buy a new RO system for $200, $300 and mix RO water, put new RO into a brand new used or empty quality can barrel. Even if it has an inch of concentrate in the bottom, it's just going to make pre-mix for you. That's fine. Now you've got a new source without having to buy a tote. That's okay. I see what you're saying. That's a neat idea.
00:42:25
Speaker
That's why I'm doing the training. That's why we did that whole project I mentioned at the beginning of this talk. I don't want to buy a coat yet. We don't need that much. We've got a plethora of empty quality chem barrels. So just put some more water for now and those and later we'll get fancy with the tote. Interesting. I will look at that because we do have two or three empty oil drums. What else? What else? What do you do today?
00:42:55
Speaker
Today, I am tweaking my complete post to add
00:43:01
Speaker
So I've had tool breakage detection in there for a long time, but all it does is stop the machine for the current. Okay. Just stops the machine, puts a warning up, and that happened again on Sunday, and I was expecting another eight hours of run overnight, and we came in, we lost eight hours of run, like whatever, but it's actually starting to add up, and I'm looking at that going, no, no, eight hours of product is a lot of money we just lost, because I haven't gotten around to doing the logic to exit this properly.
00:43:26
Speaker
So actually push me to consider this a little bit deeper some going through the logic i'm like what i wanted to do i want to break a tool. Put up a warning message put that palette away grab the next. Hopefully there's a sister tool if not it'll machine a bit more and then stop and then.
00:43:46
Speaker
and then continue, which we haven't had yet. And I think that would be fantastic. That's no small feat, John. It's no small feat, because I have to exit out of all of my subroutines with a warning macro that says, like, tool's broken. And then exit, tool's still broken. It comes to my main palette management program and say, reset that macro to zero, continue to the next palette, make sure there's a warning message that pops up. But I think I know all the logic to make that happen. And I should be able to do it pretty quickly.
00:44:16
Speaker
And that's the guide. I know what you're going to tell me. That's complicated, risky, and a lot of work. And that's the best use of the time right now. That's one of them. Yeah. I have many best uses of my time right now. I know we laugh about that, but no. It's true.
00:44:33
Speaker
Oh man. Well, I got a couple of big projects and that one and the grinding the rasp blades is going to save us hours a day. Yeah, that's awesome. That's the other huge one and then a bunch of other little things like the water system and various measuring tasks around the shop. There's all these little dumb projects like eat up your time. Grinding the rask should be good to go, right?
00:44:53
Speaker
I think so. That geodesic toolpath, I was playing with the tolerance, which made it better, but it also missed the section of the blade. I put the tolerance too tight, so I need to mess with the fine line there of good results, but actually hitting the whole blade.
00:45:10
Speaker
that Rob O'Neill Navy SEAL podcast that I mentioned last week, he talked about what he's tried to do now in the private sector and, you know, motivational speaker or corporate speaker, because you're the guy that, you know, shop in a lot and you get certainly carries a cachet with it. Anybody who's been that level of performance is insane. So he was talking about when he talks to, you know, any
00:45:36
Speaker
person that's taken a new job, low level or CEO. If you say you're not scared on the first day, you're either an unbelievably rare person or you're lying to yourself. Now, we can argue about what the word scared means, but there's some uncertainty or question of what it's going to be like, et cetera. Similarly, he's like, when I talk to a football team and it's third and 15,
00:46:00
Speaker
Yeah. Do you follow football at all? I don't know. I don't know what that means. Third and 15 is in the great third down and with 15 yards to go. Great place to be in. He just talks a lot about how it doesn't matter how you got there or why you're here. The fact is you're at third and 15. The fact is it is your first day. Yeah. And it reminds me a lot of the whole like go be a surgeon days off in the shops, like what you and I have talked about is that frankly, you and I both suck at John, which is pick a project,
00:46:26
Speaker
Shut everything else off for two hours, three hours, six hours. Oh my God, John, when you block out the world, what you come up with is insane, John. You deprive yourself of that way too often. The challenge is prioritizing properly and blocking off that time where you're in the moment, you're present. That's all that matters. Yes, I deprive myself of that because I have too many things on the go.
00:46:55
Speaker
But that's what we're here for. Exactly. Be a surgeon. What I do is I pick a task and then I go relook at my to-do list to make sure I like the task I just picked. Stop. Just go do the task. Yeah, exactly. If it does need to get done and you are ready to start doing it, just get it done.
00:47:13
Speaker
Then you block off all other concept of doing anything else and you're like, I'm doing this now. How many times have you walked through the shop with an intention of grabbing something on the other end of the shop and you get distracted halfway through the shop and then you're like, what was I doing? I was doing something. What was it? What was it? Oh, an important thing.
00:47:31
Speaker
Yeah, I hear you. I couldn't find our multimeter yesterday. And actually, you have to text our team. I was like, guys, it's not the bottom drawer where it's supposed to be. Who took the multimeter? Where's the multimeter? And Pierre's like, I think it's in the little drawer called multimeter, labeled multimeter. Crap, yeah, it is. It's labeled multimeter. It's just not in the big drawer where it always was. It's in the little drawer now where it has been for the past year. My default was looking at the wrong drawer.
00:47:57
Speaker
For that exact reason, I have a multimeter in my office. We have one in our electronics plant. We have one next to our oscilloscope. I have one in my truck, and then we have one general purpose one in the shop, because they are like $12 on Amazon. Yeah. Yeah. Life's too short to not have a multimeter nearby. Everywhere. Yes, exactly. It's actually not a great way to solve most problems, but these. But sometimes, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, I like it. All right, man. I'll see you next week. Have a great week.