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#323 Kern update, it is running!
203 Plays1 year ago
TOPICS:
- Kern update, it is running!
- Planned downtime
- Lost packages in shipping
- Lapping and flatness
- Saunders air conditioner fix
- Fixturing Ideas
- Haas purple grease
Link: https://saundersmachineworks.com/products/smw-zero-point-system
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Purpose
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 323. My name is John Grimsmo. My name is John Sonders. And this is the opportunity that we've created for ourselves to kind of get together every week and talk about what's going on in our businesses and help learn from each other and vent to each other and just figure out what's going on.
Origins of the Podcast
00:00:21
Speaker
And I'll throw in a tip of the hat to our friend, Rob Lockwood, because we had this conversation privately for quite a few years. And he's the one that said, I think it was him. Yeah, I think so too, yeah. Genesis of the conviction to say, you guys should just record that. So we try to keep this as candid and private, like direct. Right, right, raw. Yeah, we're chatting with each other. It's what it is. Yeah.
Improving Machine Performance
00:00:47
Speaker
So how is things in your life?
00:00:49
Speaker
I got to ask you about the current though. Yeah, exactly. Let's get a current update. Things are going pretty good. The current is still running just fine. I was able to take your advice from last week. Once current helped me bypass the warm up routine, it's basically percentage based. You set a max RPM in the PLC backend settings like deep, deep, deep in the backend.
00:01:10
Speaker
And max is 42, I set it to whatever, lower 17, 18,000. And then it's percentage based off of that. So I set the warmup routine to be lower. And now I can warm up to only 18,000. And then it gets past the alarm of over temperature on the warmup. And then I just reprogrammed all of my programs, 20 plus programs, to be max of 17 or 18,000 RPM. And it's run nonstop since like last week.
Open Source Knowledge & Peer Support
00:01:40
Speaker
I'll tell you, that's what I love about this conversation and it's the kind of validation of having friends and peer groups and actually the Gridfinity videos. Guys, I was watching those this week. They were talking about the power of open source, which I'm not even necessarily like Mr. Open Source, but just this idea of you're a really sharp guy. I would look up to you as much as I would love to share my life with you, which I guess is what this podcast is, but still that perspective of like, no, John, you can get this running. That's awesome.
00:02:07
Speaker
Yeah, I get tunnel vision like everybody does right in their own thing. And I'm creative. But when I'm stressed, I'm less creative. And then an outside perspective, even from somebody who knows what they're talking about, like you or somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about, like my wife or other people in my life, sometimes I'll just, you know, tell them technical problem. And they'll be like, Have you tried this? And like way back in the day, we were on a car trip with my wife in my old like Volvo that I kind of built. And
00:02:33
Speaker
The car was having a problem and she's like, did you check the flux capacitor? And I was like, well, let me check. And it was a capacitor problem on the corner. Okay. That's a little crazy.
Adapting to Machine Limitations
00:02:45
Speaker
Yeah. It was hilarious. Wait, where does a car have a capacitor? So the, um, uh, ECU, the engine management system. Um, and I built it from scratch. Like I saw it on together with digit key parts way back in the day. And yeah, it was a capacitor. That was bad anyway.
00:03:02
Speaker
So yeah, the perspective of friends and peer groups and the manufacturing community, you post something on Instagram, you get feedback kind of thing. That's been amazing. So I had to slow down. I was like, either I change it all in Fusion and I repost the code, or I just go through and I hand edit all the codes, copy the good ones into spare ones.
High Spindle Speeds: Pros & Cons
00:03:23
Speaker
So I went the copy route and I was confident to do it, but it was a lot of work. And I was going through like, okay, what's going to run? You know, rascal.
00:03:32
Speaker
back sides, rask top sides, rask engraving, rask blade, rask soft blade, rask hard blade, on and on and on and on, 20 plus programs. Copy them, find replace, find every spindle speed that's over 18,000. And so I cut the spindle speed down and the feed
00:03:48
Speaker
down accordingly, percentage wise as well. And everyone's fine. So you saved, you copied these as new programs or you overwrote them and you're just going to repost once the current's fixed. I copied them and saved. And when it's fixed either, I probably won't repost them. I'll probably just go back to the copy versions. Okay. Minus the like, let's slow the machine down a little bit, please. Yeah, for sure.
00:04:13
Speaker
actually, that's a good point. Because I, this was a really good exercise for me to realize how many instances I'm using 40,000 RPM when I don't really have to. Yeah, because I've learned that the amount of heat generated at 40 or 42,000 versus 36,000 is significant, like huge more heat generation and where at that upper RPM. So I will actually
00:04:38
Speaker
reevaluate whatever it's done to like, yeah, I got to slow these down because it's not necessary for me to run that high RPM for that long period.
Extending Machine Lifespan
00:04:48
Speaker
Yeah, reading what Rob, Lawrence, and Dennis, I think those are the three main guys to talk about with bearings and spindles. I don't know a fraction of what they seem to know, but the point of it's that balance of marketing versus engineering. The marketing team wants to say it's a 42K spindle.
00:05:08
Speaker
The reality is what's, what's it rated at? Well, there's no like binary failure. It's not like it's going to fail at 42,010 RPMs, but apparently the heat and what you're asking of the overall system goes up a lot from like 39 going to 42. Yeah. And I'm sure, you know, the spindle manufacturer has
00:05:27
Speaker
Definitely run them for hundreds of hours at 42,000 nonstop in a perfect lab condition, ideal scenario, right? Not with vibration in the tool holder, long stick out, run out. The odd bump here and there will affect the bearing life, which is, in my case, one of the things that happened, et cetera. And I was talking with Mike from Miltara, and he's got 42,000 RPM spindles, the Stemtech spindles.
00:05:53
Speaker
And he's like, I've got a job right now that takes 60 hours to machine this component and the whole thing's at 42,000 RPM. And he's like, we just run it. We've had good spindle life from our stepped-ex spindles. I feel like I don't know him at all, really, let alone, how well you know him. But I feel like that would also just be like, OK, so we're going to expect 5,000 hours out of that spindle because we're maxing it out. And we'll just build that into our cost. I agree. Typically, he's like that. But through texting with him, he's like, we've had
00:06:23
Speaker
We've barely had to replace any spindles. We've been lucky, I guess. But yeah, and then I've got 9,000 hours on my spindle and talking to a lot of people, including Kern, but also users of spindles, like actual machine shop owners of machines, different machines, DMG, everything. 9,000 to 18,000 hours on a high RPM spindle is not uncommon to have to replace it.
00:06:51
Speaker
And I'm at the low end of that, but because I have bumped it a bunch of times, it's I'm no longer surprised. You know what I mean? Like I didn't realize they had a finite life like that. I don't know, John, I don't.
00:07:06
Speaker
Without anything to back this up, I feel like we all mature. That's what you do. You get a machine. You get more confident and capable of running it. I feel like if you get this replaced, why couldn't you get 15 or 20K going forward?
Maintaining Production During Downtime
00:07:19
Speaker
Exactly. I totally agree. I have no data to back this up. Exactly. That's exactly what I said to Tony at current. I was like, OK, now I have a benchmark. 20,000 hours on the next spendal. I can do this. And it involves don't bump it and don't max it out if you don't need to.
00:07:35
Speaker
And I can, you know, be better at controlling those aspects. And honestly, most of the bumps were either unforeseen or a slight programming error or, you know, just running before you can walk kind of thing. So what's the status though, the actual spirit? Is it right? Yeah, the machine's running. So I'm stable. I was talking with Kern and they said, if it's running fine now, it'll run fine for a couple of weeks. Like most likely going to be fine short term. Um,
00:08:04
Speaker
Spindle is now in stock in Chicago. It sounds like they're growing and usually keep some on hand, but they didn't have some on hand. So they got one, they have one now. And he's like, either we can, you know, get sloppy and rush and be there this week. But that's super tight for us. And it's tight for us too, at Grimsmo. But he's like, or three weeks is much better for everybody. And I'm like, that's kind of better for me too. So they'll be here in three weeks and they'll be here for the whole week.
00:08:30
Speaker
And, uh, if we can limp the machine along till then, then totally happy, totally winning. Um, the cycles are longer, like a five hour rask cycle or four hour rask cycle is now five hours, but I don't really, wow. Just because of the feed rates, huh? Yep. But only on.
00:08:49
Speaker
grinding the blade is one of the things because that was at 30,000 RPM. Now it's at 17,000 RPM. So that got almost twice as slow, like 1.8 times slower, things like that. But the majority of all toolpaths are like 4,000 RPM, 9,000 RPM. So those didn't change at all. Right. It's
Debating Lean Manufacturing
00:09:07
Speaker
just the engraving and the grinding were the end of some of the tiny, tiny tools, you know, one 32nd inch. They were at 27,000 32,000 RPM. So but yeah,
00:09:19
Speaker
So that's good. Everything's good. That's great. Like what a different, uh, what a different position. Yeah. A week ago. Yeah. A week ago was very, um, damage control, freaking out, uh, try to keep my head on straight, like, okay, what are my options? What can I do? I can, I can not sleep for the next week and I can put parts on other machines and blah, blah, blah. And yeah, once this started to work out, I was like, Oh my gosh, it's working. Let's say so much effort off of, I can focus on other things.
00:09:48
Speaker
I really didn't like the idea of like, all the work you're going to do, tooling up and programming and fixturing to start moving this stuff on to different machines. I would have done it. I would have done it. Oh, and current telling you three weeks would have been fuel for you to justify that. I still just hmm.
00:10:06
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. So I asked you that question and I don't mean this as like a cute wise question.
Supply Chain Challenges
00:10:12
Speaker
I mean it sincerely like, okay, now you're in the position where you have the machine back today, but you also know it's going to be down. So like if you knew, if you knew it was going to be down planned or unplanned, or you wanted to build more of a buffer or, you know, risk mitigation, reserve supply, chain, internal, like whatever, how would you do things differently?
00:10:32
Speaker
Well, we do know it's going to be down in three weeks for probably the majority of the week. So that's a small term example. Kind of a planned downtime.
00:10:44
Speaker
Here in the shop, we kind of make parts for each other. We machine parts for the finishing department so that they can put knives together. And it's sort of like Angela's team versus Eric's team. Not versus, but together. So we try to keep a flow of inventory, but a lot of it is hand to mouth. It's like daily production gets fed to the finishing, gets made knives daily. And we haven't been able to overproduce what they can consume.
00:11:14
Speaker
So it'd be great to have inventory of everything. And that way, if there's a problem where, you know, two weeks ahead of time, but there's also downsides to that, the whole, you know, lean manufacturing over production thing. If there's a problem with those parts, you won't spot them for two weeks.
Innovative Manufacturing Solutions
00:11:32
Speaker
And if you're really good at inspecting everything,
00:11:34
Speaker
then that's possible, but we're not quite there yet. And we do make bad parts sometimes. And the quicker they are noticed, the better. So I'm hesitant to overproduce too many things. But like in three weeks when the current is going to be down for the week, yeah, we're going to have to be ready. Yeah, which is tough because we don't really have the spindle time to overproduce in that time. Like it's just going to run like it normally does. Well, I disagree because you
00:12:04
Speaker
It's a little bit hard to be articulate here, because I don't know your individual product lines, but that idea last week of, look, ditch the Norsemen, focus on rasks, which are a portion of the current time. So you should be able to overproduce rasks at the cost of Norsemen, or maybe it's vice versa. Yeah, it's vice versa. Yep. Okay. And then that lets you overproduce, lets you build up a buffer, because... That's a good point, actually.
00:12:36
Speaker
Yeah, so say the week leading up to the downtime, we didn't make rasks. We only made Norsemen. We could overproduce. We would have the time to make a lot more Norsemen. Yeah. So that the week we're down, the guys are only finishing Norsemen. They have plenty of parts. And that would actually work. That would work really good because Norsemen machines faster than the rask does. There's just less detail on
Trusting Vendors & External Help
00:13:01
Speaker
it.
00:13:02
Speaker
You can even do staggered shifts. So, cause I obviously it's automated, but you may, you still have to reload the machine and you might have to do it more often because that's okay. When I start at six and then you might come in and run or 4PM to 8PM, like whatever, no big deal. Yeah.
00:13:20
Speaker
Yeah, to be honest, that's the look ahead and planning that I'm not super strong at, I'm getting better at. Angela's much better at that, but the two of us together become a pretty powerful team. Yeah, I don't naturally think that way. Interesting. I'm like, oh, let's do it all.
00:13:41
Speaker
I guess I do, but I only think the way I think, so I don't even know that I think the way. Sure, yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. But I believe in you, John. You can. The brother works, the more he works. So think about how those two machines can complement the current knowing that it's going to be down. And frankly, man, I don't know. I have never liked, I have always
00:14:08
Speaker
disliked, I should say, the ideological admiration of lean manufacturing. It's not that I don't like lean or try to embrace elements of it, but I will never forget one of the first factory tours I ever got to do. I think I've talked about it before on the podcast. It was the coolest thing. Yes. I wish I knew what I knew now about manufacturing. The guy that run that factory in Fairlock, Austria was like,
00:14:32
Speaker
Basically, in 2003, there's a different manufacturing and MBAs. This stuff was different 20 years ago. He was just like, to heck with you MBAs. I don't know why. He thought we were business students. He's like, to heck with you MBAs. He's like, I keep two years of steel. That may
DIY Solutions: Home Repairs
00:14:48
Speaker
be an exaggeration, but it was some crazy number of steel under my roof in my factory. This blows through all return on assets, working capital, inventory, cost of storage. All those metrics go out the window, but guess what? I got steel.
00:15:02
Speaker
Yes, exactly. Obviously, it doesn't have to be that extreme. Glock is a hugely profitable private company, so there's ways that they can play by different set of rules. But exactly under that same logic, if they run out of steel for whatever reason in the world, they have hundreds of employees that now aren't making parts.
00:15:26
Speaker
Right. They're also a defense company. So they've got contracts, governments, like when steel gets hard to get because of war, you could argue that sales go up, blah, blah, blah. So I love that idea. And you and I have now seen that to this day with, look, the world fell apart with
00:15:42
Speaker
COVID and there's arguments that the globalization is kind of quote unquote over and stuff is weirder. Luckily, I never seem to really get bad about like you can't like there was talk from our aluminum suppliers of rationing aluminum and not taking on tumors. Yeah, exactly.
00:15:58
Speaker
Yep. So I don't love me. Of course it sounds great on paper, but that lots of things sound a great paper over the history of time. It's proven to be terrible ideas. Um, I, I like having a little buffered cause you know what? We're going to be good. So on that note, um, we've been trying to keep inventory and order ahead of time and okay, that takes two months to get in. Okay. Let's order it three months ahead of time or something. Um,
00:16:24
Speaker
So that said, we're running low on Norseman pocket clip material. And the package coming from our supplier is missing. Uh-oh. And then same thing for Norseman handles. We got one batch. We have 500 handles. It was fairly poorly packaged, and two more hours on the truck, and they would have been falling out of the package. We could see them in the box when the box was delivered.
00:16:52
Speaker
And the second box, apparently UPS said, we found the box empty. And I was like, who's tripping on 500 handles in the UPS depot and not doing anything? Like, I guess they wouldn't know if they're literally loose. It's not like that, John. Yeah. I don't know. Like, I kind of imagine in my head if the box is flying down a conveyor belt and the parts go everywhere and the box ends up at the end and the two hands don't meet.
00:17:18
Speaker
Nobody would apply the handles. They would just sweep them into a corner. I don't know. But anyway, so we have there's a box of clips.
00:17:27
Speaker
tracked but stalled for three weeks, which is weird for UPS. And then the box of handles says it's empty. UPS has told us, we told the supplier, the shipper, that it's empty and nothing we can do about it. So I'm like, okay, that's like thousands if not $10,000 of material and work gone into those parts.
00:17:50
Speaker
This is coming from a supplier, like a raw material supplier or a value-added one object? Value-added vendor, yeah. Look, I'll put some blame on somebody like that for the packaging. Because the one package came in and we saw the poorness of the package. We have photos. We're showing them. They screwed up. You need a double wall box. You need to not overstuff it. You need to like...
00:18:16
Speaker
Yeah, so that's the past two days has been trying to figure that out. Like who's going to eat the cost here and how is it going to play out and are we out? So the money is one thing, but the we have 18 clips in stock right
Hiring Professionals vs. DIY
00:18:31
Speaker
now. That's like two days of production and like, oh crap, we are too tight on this. I'm not happy about that. So the current plan as of late last night was our water jet supplier
00:18:47
Speaker
is going to water jet 200 clips and zip them us to us right away. But that's raw hot rolled material. Um, not ground material like we've been getting. And, uh, so I put one in the speedio yesterday and just decked it with an end mill, just held it in a vice, this little blanket titanium decked it with an end mill and then flat sanded it with sandpaper just to see how good the finish was. And it was like, not bad. So I think we might end up getting these 200
00:19:14
Speaker
decking them on a milling machine and then either lapping them or flat sanding them or just calling them good or something. But yeah, that's our lapping plates. Yeah, I used them last night, actually. That's awesome. Yeah. First time I've been waiting for antelope to surface grind them so that they're flat flat. But I didn't have time for that. So last night I was just put some 15 micron diamond face on there or diamond slurry and wrap them together for a few minutes and then
00:19:41
Speaker
hand-lapped the part, and I was like, this is so cool. It's getting flat. That cool, the high spots? Yeah. Yeah. So that was fun. It was really cool to use those lapping plates. And it showed me already the investment we put into it, and it's going to be a cool part of our workflow at some point.
00:19:58
Speaker
I think we've gotten most of ours from Spencer Webb or Kinetic Precision, but the precision flat ground stones.
Managing Manufacturing Downtime
00:20:08
Speaker
We've got the round ones and we've got the little square playing card size kind of ones. I'll tell you, I was doing a new fixture and even after
00:20:18
Speaker
What happened? I drilled a hole, chamfered it, but the way the chamfer intersected with a form-tapped hole, I was like, I think that was, I think it raised up the material just a smidge. You can't really feel it with your fingernail because it's not a sharp edge, it's more of a rolled up. And it's not, it's just whatever. So I grabbed a flat ground, so sure enough, you get that high spot right away. And you know, it's just like, what a, it's like a wonderful visual and tactile feel. Yep. Yeah. The stones reveal all secrets is what it is.
00:20:46
Speaker
And I've had those stones from him for a couple years now. We've got probably four sets floating around the shop. We even got a set made for aluminum. We use them in our heat treat cell for our aluminum quenching plates. When the blades come out, they go through these water-cooled plates. So Sky uses those every day.
00:21:04
Speaker
And they work great for keeping flat parts flat and taking off little burrs on a part that is already flat. But they don't do anything to add flatness to an object. Correct. They don't move material, you know, whatever. So hence the cast iron lapping plates that I machine. Yeah. And the diamond paste. But it's like we have the flat ground stones, and I'm like, these are great. And then I needed the next step of like, OK, now let's get into hand lapping. So it's cool. Cool.
00:21:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think you could build a good workflow around... It might even be worth when you're in a good mood and not stressed about like, okay, here's 10 key either machines or products and what's the simple action plan? It doesn't have to get like 25 steps. What are three things we should do if the mori goes down, if the Swiss goes down? What should we look at? Do you have outside vendors? I know that sounds
00:21:58
Speaker
If you have to, yeah. Reach through the screen and punch me, but people can make parts. It's better than the extreme opposite of not selling anything. Yeah, exactly. Who do you call? Do you have drawings done and service stuff?
Reaching Out to Experts
00:22:17
Speaker
We're so used to making almost everything ourselves.
00:22:20
Speaker
that we get very picky with how it's made and the process and the tools and the order of operations and all that. Mentally, I'm like, that's too much burden to put on somebody else, but that's generally false because other people like to work as well. Other people are very good at their jobs. Every now and then, I do reach out to other people to have them do things. I'm like, wow, you absolutely crushed this, almost better than I could do. It always surprises me and I'm like, oh yeah.
00:22:49
Speaker
Plenty of people who are brilliant. You got to find a good vendor or job shop or machinist and they get to be a surgeon on your part. You're pulled 700 different ways. Even if you say you're going to work on the Wilhelmin, unlikely that you're going to get three hours with nothing on your mind other than like a week, me and an old 16 eye control and the part to make. Yeah, so I might get that three hours a month lately and you've been very clever utilizing Grant.
00:23:19
Speaker
you know, one of your guys to to be the Wilhelmin expert. Yes. And hence the massive amount of progress you guys have made that that I haven't quite yet. And my late expert Pierre is busy with two other machines. Yeah, and he'd love to play as well. But he doesn't have that, you know, hours a day to play. We're getting there. Yeah.
00:23:41
Speaker
I have a, this is off topic, but I can't help but share like the pride of this. Our air conditioner at home stopped working. Classic condenser fan wasn't working, which kicked it off. The classic problem there is the capacitor blew or stopped working, which is start capacity or whatever. Bingo. Yeah. Um, happened on a Sunday, uh, afternoon, which thinks because you can't get, or it's actually a Saturday night. You can't get starter caps. Yeah. Like they just don't exist.
00:24:07
Speaker
Um, and so I ordered one for delivery Monday and, um, was trying to test it and I wasn't like, wasn't looking like it was bad, but I didn't have a lot of confidence in them testing the capacitance. So, and you just assume that that's bad. Like it just makes sense. Whatever.
00:24:24
Speaker
and fast forward replaced it with a new one still didn't work and I'm like okay hold on stop and this is where you get to in your head and it's like just go back to the basics I'm looking at this condenser fan and it's just like a AC probably pretty inexpensive pretty low-powered fan like it's just turning a three couple fan blades like a ceiling fan or a shop like just a portable box fan yep
Precision Adjustments with Shim Stock
00:24:48
Speaker
And I was like, well, let me look at the data plate on the motor because if it's 208 volt, I'm just going to figure out a way to hotwire this fan directly in and see if the fan motor works. So that maybe it burned up when the capacitor blew, which didn't make sense to me because this is where I'm starting to get too much in my own head. And then I look over and you realize this is just such a great lesson in life of don't overthink it. The fan motors wire, one of the wires had just rubbed against the
00:25:18
Speaker
body where it goes through the condenser out okay circuit panel and just wore through and then Once the installation wore through it. It shorted out or burned out. So wire was just cut that's all us Oh the wire was actually like cut itself the wire I
00:25:33
Speaker
I assume it blew through the installation, which was super thick. And then I think some of the strands started to get cut from that. And then as soon as the strands got too thin, there's too much heat or too much current. And then it just kind of melted the rest. You can barely see any black because there wasn't anything left to burn. It's actually really funny. It's like 18 gauge wire. It's a super thin stranded wire, given that it's a 200 volt or whatever, 240 pan.
00:26:01
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't even need the new cap. And I'll tell you, I was more than happy to call like if it was an AC issue in terms of the actual Freon or the refrigerant, dude, I ain't touching that stuff. But you know, these days, you know, it's like, I gotta take time out of my day, go back home, and it's probably a three to $500 service call to have a service tech come out, tear it apart, look at it, replace things, test things. And I felt great to know. Yeah.
00:26:25
Speaker
Yep. It didn't short circuit because the wire was rubbing a ground or anything. It was just rubbing an abrasive thing and broke. It just broke because the fan just didn't turn on. The breaker never tripped or anything like that. That's awesome. It's nice to be able to build our skill set to be able to fix things like this.
Preventative Maintenance in Manufacturing
00:26:46
Speaker
like same thing in our basement the other day. We've got an old house, it's almost 100 years old, but it's in really good condition. I was in the basement working out the other morning and then all of a sudden I heard water dripping. I'm like, it's eight in the morning on a Saturday. I'm not going to call a plumber.
00:27:03
Speaker
So I saw it, I figured it out. There was a piece of duct tape over the water spout and I was like, what? Previous owner has had this before. Just put duct tape over it. Obviously we need to use Flex Seal. Yeah. That's okay. So next thing. So I got Leif down here and I was like, Leif, we have an emergency. We got to figure this out ourselves. Nobody's coming to save us. It's up to you and me to figure this out. And he's like, get some Flex Seal. That's incredible, John.
00:27:31
Speaker
So I'm like, okay, I know what to do. We need to get a hose. We need to dump it over here to the sump. And then we'll do that. Let's go to Canadian Tire and do that. And he saw the Flex Seal and he's like, dad, I'm telling you, this is the stuff. I've seen all the ads on YouTube.
00:27:48
Speaker
Um, did it work? We didn't use flex seal, but we got a hose. We routed it to the sump where a pump, if it does ever leak, um, the pump would automatically pump it out. And, uh, yeah, it works fine now. Now I'm confident. I don't have to worry about it, but yeah, but it's cool not only to be able to solve those problems yourself, but to teach our kids like these are solvable problems. And yes, we pay experts good money to do this and they're great fields, but it's all logic.
00:28:16
Speaker
It's like that goes here, this goes here, wire broken, breaker tripped, go through the checklist. And life's definitely got an engineering mind to him, even without my influence. So he's a game for these kind of things, which is really cool.
00:28:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of one of those for me, I don't know how or why I'm wired this way, but it's how I'm wired. The amount of satisfaction I get from that sort of problem solving is all I need in life. It's just wonderfully satisfying. Up to a point. When I've spent about four hours working on a dumb project that I should have hired somebody to do, that's about when I'm like,
00:28:52
Speaker
why did I? My time is so much more valuable. No, totally. Right. So but where's the limit? I'm very bad about finding that limit of actually calling the plumber or you know, calling the expert or whatever. Yeah. But but still, it's it's fun to build these skills. If anything, just for knowledge.
00:29:11
Speaker
It reminds me of the little concrete pad we poured between Saunders and the training building. And I watched some YouTube videos of guys doing like backyard sidewalk like little like two by two foot sections and they showed the wood they dug it out the wood form some rebar. And I was looking at that and I'm like, okay, that's not so bad. But then you start scaling that up for a larger pad. And you realize the amount of wood you'd need the sizing risk if you're wrong, how you cut the concrete, how you polish it. And it was like, okay, I feel like I'm doing a pretty good job at my age of being like, okay,
00:29:40
Speaker
I now know more what would be involved in that easy pass. And we had somebody else do it because I watched how they did it and the tools that they had to polish it and saw it afterward and to get it right. And when the concrete truck showed up, he was talking to the driver about, I want a little bit more wetness in that mix. And then they're like, just, I was like, okay, I was totally right on. Yes.
00:30:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's like the epoxy floors in our new shop. Eric and I did them in our old shop and they took weeks of us pressure washing the floor and trying to get the oil grease out of it and everything. We did it in the old shop and then we move into this new shop. That was 1,000 square feet. This is like 7,000 of shop space.
00:30:23
Speaker
And it was like, let's hire a guy and watching him work and he bought the grinding machine to grind the concrete and he's done it before and he knows where to buy it all from. And it was like, yeah, it was a hard pass and I'm glad I did that. But that's exchanging money for your time. And you and I are both getting to the point where our time is actually worth
00:30:45
Speaker
more money than paying the contractor to do the work.
Enhancing Product Visibility Online
00:30:49
Speaker
Our value is more valuable in our business rather than working on dumb stuff. Yes. Yes, agreed. In general. It doesn't mean that I don't work. Yeah, totally. Can I change topic? Yeah, yeah. OK, I want to get your, this is kind of random and it's half a question for you, half a question for the audience. I have this idea for how we fix your product to make it and it would be a way of shimming
00:31:17
Speaker
If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But you can buy shim stock. We have that. I know that. All good. $1,000, $5,000, all that. And you can buy gauge blocks. And gauge blocks aren't that expensive, but they're not as cheap as a piece of shim stock. You can also buy deltronic spins in 10 increments, super cheap. So here's my question. Can I find or can I make? And it could be either true shim stock. So like almost foil thickness stuff. That would be one option. The other option would be
00:31:45
Speaker
to move up to an actual product that has thickness and structure to it. So it could be a hundred thou thick or a quarter inch thick block. Either one of those I want to be able to purchase in increments of ideally one tenth, maybe two tenths.
New Product Launch Excitement
00:32:02
Speaker
Quickly, like the research did over the last few days, shim stock all day long in one thou increments, but not seeing stuff sub one thou increments. This isn't going to be fun or interesting trying to go buy one off gauge blocks in every 10th size because gauge blocks are too expensive for that purpose. For the application, yeah. Yeah. Just a thought I have right now, since you can buy gauge pins in one thou increments, could you integrate that into your design? One 10th.
00:32:32
Speaker
Yeah. Could the pins go in sideways and be the shim? So you're pressing your thingy against those shims or not really? Short answer is no. I want something that's more like. To try to create an adjustable height. Consumable or semi-consumable. You get a permanent assembly where you need one-tenth shim increment to adjust the press-in thingy and whatever permanent height you want.
00:32:58
Speaker
Yes. Think about when you surface grind stuff, if you're the way big boys do it with big... This actually isn't exactly how we're using it, but it's kind of close.
Work-Life Balance
00:33:11
Speaker
They'll use colored pen
00:33:13
Speaker
and shim stuff up, and they'll look at how the grinding wheel changes the pen color to see how they're coming down. I want to be able to shim support something. Instead of screwing a screw up to support it, I want to be able to switch out to different shims and get the feel that I want. But I want them to be, it's not that they're consumable, but just like, it's not fun if it's two bucks or 10 bucks per product. It doesn't make any sense. I'm looking to like, can I buy a roll of this stuff? And then I actually would just build a little cutting die probably if it's the foil thickness.
00:33:43
Speaker
Yeah, but I don't know if the rolls will come in one tenth increment of sheet metal. That's the problem you're seeing. The other thought I thought was say you buy washers from McMaster precision washers that are 100 thou thick and then get somebody to surface grind them in one tenth increments. That doesn't seem crazy to do. It doesn't, no.
00:34:05
Speaker
Somebody needs to have the time and be willing to do it. Not surface grinders are us, but one of our friends on Instagram. Does that domain available? Like we mentioned, kinetic precision already. Spencer would probably be up for this job, but you want hundreds of these in dozens of different tent increments, right?
00:34:29
Speaker
You need somebody who'll be like, that looks like fun. You know? Yeah. Well, that's exactly what I'm wondering is, I mean, a surface grinder should be able to hold a couple of tents. No big deal. So if you take these washers, drop them down on there, go machine them. Yeah. You're done. Like that's, that's exactly what I'm thinking. Um, yeah. Like we, we could do it on our surface grinder. Um, politely I declined. I'll give you a note quote on this, but, uh, but Spencer might be up for it.
00:35:00
Speaker
Okay. I'll talk to him too. He'd be a good idea. Yeah. His, his surface grinder is actually more accurate than ours. I believe. Um, it's just the, the fancier version of the Okamoto. What's first? Does he have the Okamoto? Yep. Okay. Oh, he has a sharp mill. That's why I was confusing. No, no, he's got a Haas mini mill, I think. Okay. I might be wrong. Yeah.
00:35:24
Speaker
Okay, so like classic mistake, you try to find the perfect solution right away, like rewind, like get a solution that works and then you can figure out can you value engineer it or like anything, what is it? We don't use this phrase enough, COTS, C-O-T-S, you know what that means? Yeah, consumer off the shelf. Yeah, we use it a lot here. Okay, that's far better for like for springs or for stuff like this or screws than trying to go custom.
00:35:54
Speaker
I'd love to talk to, I might just call a shim, there's like a company that actually is a Warren Buffett hash. It's a company that makes all the spring steel is a marmot sub precision something. And it's a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary. Anyway, I'd love to get a phone on the phone and then be like, you're never going to find the foil and like it can't be made in sub one valley permits. Well, and then the other thing is, do you want that workload?
00:36:20
Speaker
of of punching your own shims now you gotta get a punch now the edges are gonna roll now you gotta figure out a way to not you know to manage that i got inventory. 20 different size thicknesses of shim stock and now you gotta do that whereas i mean you hired out to pay your money to have somebody surface grind these cheap off the shelf washers right right so you just buy the solution but it's still your solution you know.
00:36:47
Speaker
I am inclined to defend my idea. Sure. We've made a couple of different stamping dies before. The last one was for COVID face shields. Yeah, you just got to take a little piece of tool steel. It's easy to resharpen it and control your tolerances, put some tape on it so it cuts like scissors. It doesn't cut straight up and down and cuts along an angle. The edge rolling that you mentioned is legit. That could be an issue for what we're trying to do.
00:37:18
Speaker
I don't know, like to have somebody once a month spending a couple of hours to replenish inventory. It doesn't bother me. Yeah. Okay. Hell, I guess you could surface grind shim stock. You could. It has limited magnetability and depends on what your material is too. Yeah, right. Because with it being so thin, there's not a lot of ferrite or whatever it is, iron to suck down.
00:37:47
Speaker
Oh, interesting point. Okay. Fair enough. Like it will, but not a lot. Or maybe there's other... I was looking at the plastic shim sock. We don't keep talking about this. I was trying to think, am I going about this the wrong way? Is there... We'll try and get plastic in the 10th increment. It's not going to happen either.
00:38:04
Speaker
Right, but like I did stumble across the kind of quote unquote old school horizontal arbor mill bushing spacers that come in pretty precision increments. Remember like old school K and T or Cincinnati horizontal mills where you put arbor cutters along them?
00:38:19
Speaker
No, no, not really. I love how little you know about manual machining. It's me. You know what I'm talking about the kind of machine generally I think so but not really you'd like a habit you'd have like a shell mill or a key slot cutter style mill on an arbor. What you could stack multiple of those either touching each other or spaced apart spaced apart if you wanted to say let's say you wanted to machine a precision cooling fan or like radiator fan, heat sink fan, you could have
00:38:47
Speaker
a cutter and then a space gap and then a cutter and then a space gap. Well, the space gaps might need to be precision, like subject down to a thousandths of an inch. And so you'd use these spacers to space them across it. That's almost exactly what I want. They still come sub-thou. Yeah.
00:39:07
Speaker
And to finish up, it sounds like your design can utilize either shim stock, like $10,000, or $100,000 space, like washer. Yeah, exactly. You can build that into your design. Whatever is the most measurable. You just make our posts shorter to support a thicker nugget. Any teasers for what this is for? Just for the fixturing plates. Sorry. Dot, dot, dot.
00:39:35
Speaker
That's what we, like, I mean, it's not really a secret. That's what we've gotten really good at is taking material that we get in that's not flat. And this isn't parallelism, this is flatness and trying to minimize the distortion in your op one or your op zero to get a good date. This is like 99% surface grinding methodologies, but we're doing it in a mill. Yeah. Yeah.
00:40:02
Speaker
The other thing, speaking of mill, I kind of wanted to just share this as a PSA, is one of our Haas machines was getting the 2082 alarm, and I don't know certainly all of what's going on, but there is some big thing going on across many or all Haas machines about the purple grease. I'm guessing some people listening don't know what I'm talking about, and I'm guessing some people are probably punching the air right now.
00:40:30
Speaker
The best I understand it is the purple grease, which has been discontinued for some time, but is obviously still out there. The purple grease can dry up or harden in your lines, and then you'll get this alarm and you possibly could be starving key components like trucks and rails and so forth of grease, which will... This is like the weight lube? Yeah. This will drastically... This won't work after some period of time. Okay.
00:40:55
Speaker
So we got it on one of our machines. And so we just sort of hit, hey, let's get in front of this. And we have a mix. We had some machines that were purple grease. That was replaced by a tan grease. And then the tan grease has since been replaced by Haas by a true oil. But the oil is more of like a honey. So it's pretty thick. I think viscous is the right term.
00:41:18
Speaker
So we had all of our machines retrofitted to the new oil, which is supposed to be the fix before because the fix if you've got the grease hardened up in your lines can stink like taking tables off and Haas has some 3000 PSI pumped that they can try to blow the lines out with. It's a sounds like a pretty crummy situation. But
00:41:39
Speaker
The simplest PSA that I have is don't ignore it, get in front of it, get it fixed. I don't know how much we're going to have to pay. I'm kind of thinking and hoping that they're going to cover some of that because even though these machines are all out of warranty, I think Haas has kind of a bigger issue on their hands here. So it's been fixed. You haven't been billed yet?
00:41:58
Speaker
The guy just left yesterday. I'm planning on having to pay for the new oil and the rebuild kits. That's not that expensive. I'd like to not have to pay for a lot of the labor. I've heard some chatter that this is something that's going to... There's more news coming on this overall at a legal standpoint. I always hate to give any fodder to the Haas
00:42:23
Speaker
crowd that likes to crap on them because these machines have been great. They got a grease that was either mismanufactured or had an unforeseen bad design, it stinks, getting it fixed, they've been great, kind of wander under the bridge. Where it will stink is if folks end up ruining six figure machines because they didn't realize it or just like a switch went bad, they weren't getting the alarm and you get it. Yeah, totally. Yeah, it's that preventative maintenance which were
00:42:51
Speaker
me specifically, I'm getting better at in general. I'm not Mr. Preventative Maintenance, whereas Angelo is typically Mr. Preventative Maintenance with his car, with our machines, with things like that. I'm very, very glad to have him in my corner on that front. If your machines don't have an issue, the next thing about doing the conversion now is you can just use the new oil to pump the system out of the grease and you've solved the problem. There's no more risk, which feels great.
00:43:21
Speaker
doing it early is better than doing it too late is what you're saying. Yeah, right. Sweet. What are you up to today?
00:43:30
Speaker
Um, Yvonne actually got Instagram and Facebook shopping all set up, which is no small feat. I think I saw that on your Yeah. And John is weird because I don't I've always have enjoyed our, you know, our huge social media presence as just like a byproduct of my joy of this trade, like sharing the fun stuff. And even if we're leaving money on the table, I don't want to I'm not going to turn us into like some
00:43:55
Speaker
whatever corporate shell. But the reality is, it's a good thing to have some calls to action. And like when we're reposting product photos of customers using
00:44:04
Speaker
stuff. Let's show if you want to improve your fixturing or products or make you take advantage of the mod mice, it's good. And the zero point stuff is coming really well. We have the first kind of what I think is pretty close to a lockdown rev machined out of the right materials, not test materials. And we outbuilt an Arduino based testing rig and we did a quarter million cycles in three days on it, which would be like the equivalent of
00:44:34
Speaker
15 years of daily use. Yeah. And it was really good to see how the machine how it held up the gasket surfaces where functionality automatic system. Mm hmm. That's so cool. And so we have quite a few people on the sort of alpha beta request list. I'll put the link in the just podcast description if other folks want to be on that kind of list of when we first release it. But I am
00:45:02
Speaker
It sounds cheesy. I'm more excited about this than any other product we've ever released. It's also more complicated. It has more parts. Yeah, exactly. So we're definitely... It's such a good evolution for your brand to be able to do that for the company, unless you flex your muscles a little bit on technicality, on coolness. It's a great product. Yeah, it's going to crush. And on the note of call to action, I think it'll be really good for you because you repost the customer's picture and then
00:45:29
Speaker
reduce all effort for the customer to go to your website and say, how much is that? Tell me more about that. And that's all it is. We're kind of turned off by ads nowadays on everything. And I'm like, I'm not going to click on an ad, because the second I click on an ad, all I'm going to see is more of that ad. But you're a cool, small company. And I think your following and customers know that. And the call to action makes it easier, that's all. Right, exactly. Totally good.
00:46:00
Speaker
Well, how about you? What do you do today? Uh, so I'm playing hooky today. I came in for the podcast and I'm going home and the kids and I are going to the Toronto science center. Oh, so we're going to go. We're going to nerd it up for the day. They got one of those IMAX theaters. We're going to watch a nature thing in IMAX. Um, cool. And yeah, it's going to be super cool. So awesome. Well, have fun. I will at the expense of, uh, the guys are having a huge barbecue at work today with some, um, do you know the speed academy YouTube channel?
00:46:28
Speaker
They build cars and they're actually really close to us. So they're coming by. They've got, they've got a RX7, the FD1, they've got a Nissan Silvia S15. Oh, I think you sent me their Insta before. Okay, that's cool. They've got a Supra, like a nice red Supra and they're going to like bring some cars over and have a thing. And I'm like, well, I'm going to the science center with the kids. So have fun dudes.
00:46:51
Speaker
I can't wait for that barbecue to happen next year, and they've got all those amazing Japanese souped up cars, and you just roll in in the Volvo Amazon. Yes. You know I will. Yeah, that's awesome. Which is actually at the shop. I haven't heard updates yet, but I'm very excited to hear. They're going to tell me what it needs, and I'm going to order parts, and they're going to put them in. Awesome. So that's cool. All right, man. Have fun. It's a nice video. I'll see you later. Bye.