Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
#331 Milwaukee Hermle tour!
362 Plays2 years ago
TOPICS:
- Coolant management, foaming, etc
- Milwaukee Hermle tour! - https://www.hermleusa.net/en/info_center_en/5axis-summit-usa (Hermle tour) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7Dygi8uGvA (Machining the James Webb Space Telescope Mirrors)
- Speedio Sub Micron option for Grimsmo
- Surface grinding deep dive
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Topics
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 331. My name is John Grimsmo. And my name is John Saunders. And this is the podcast where John and John chat about all things business and leadership and machining and end mills and coolant.
00:00:16
Speaker
Ooh, yeah, I actually have some cool stuff to talk about. Cool. But you probably have more. Well, yes. So we've both
Challenges with Coolant Foaming
00:00:25
Speaker
been chatting about coolant for quite a while. On our end, we've been using quality cam 251C for ever, for like 10 years. Generally, super happy with it. We've tried a couple other coolants. We tried a couple other quality cam coolants, didn't like them.
00:00:41
Speaker
I like everything about the 251C except that it foams in many of our machines and will foam so much it'll float on the ground often.
00:00:52
Speaker
We have defoamer, we can add it, but when we have to add defoamer like every week, it's not fun. And we add it because it's flooding on the ground and then we've got to clean it up and it's not fun.
Exploring New Coolant Technologies
00:01:04
Speaker
So I've been chatting with Blosser, I've been chatting with Quality Chem, I've been chatting with other people, other shop owners, a lot of people running this coolant, you're running this coolant. A lot of people have zero problems of my problem foaming with this coolant. So I don't know if it's us or if it's
00:01:22
Speaker
I don't know but we had Blosser come over last week and give us their whole kind of presentation like come to the Blosser family. We'll give you a good deal on this drum of coolant.
00:01:34
Speaker
They've got cool new technologies like liquid tool technology which will auto top up your tank and actually mix it and adjust the mixture ratio automatically as necessary to top it up at the right concentration. Keep the whole tank at 8% or whatever you want. That's pretty cool. It's a subscription based
00:01:53
Speaker
fee to have this piece of hardware in your shop. Yeah. Which is
Subscription Model and Financial Impact
00:01:59
Speaker
neat and neat-ish. No, that's weird. Yuck. Sorry. It's called what it is. Yeah, I agree. Not for or against Woz or whatsoever, but like yuck. But I guess that's a way for them not to charge a customer like $9,000 for a piece of thing, right? I don't know what it's going to cost.
00:02:16
Speaker
It's actually less my humble, so it's more just the fact that, and Blossers are a privately held company, but CFOs within a company or in a publicly traded company, stock market analysts and so forth, love recurring fee streams. It is like the godsend of the finance world for better or frankly for worse. So that's one reason why, look, we can get our air compressors as a service. You can buy air as a service from our Columbus, Ohio based,
00:02:46
Speaker
They take care of everything. They turnkey it. They maintain swap out maintenance, all that. But if you run the numbers, most of the times you'd be better off buying. Yeah. It's short-term, long-term play, right? Yeah. Yeah. I'll put it this way. Don't think that they're doing you a favor is my humble opinion to that. Totally agree. The technology sounds awesome, though.
00:03:11
Speaker
Yep. Well, and talking with John Wiley, who was just at your shop all day yesterday, which I want to hear about. But
Industry Insights on Coolant Measurement
00:03:18
Speaker
I chatted with him for like two hours on the phone last week. Super smart guy. He used to be the VP at Blosser, and now he's a quality cam. And super smart guy. And he said, the coolant industry has spent the past 30 years trying to do auto coolant measurement of bricks and stuff like that. And he's like, it's tricky. The sensor gets fouled. It's hard to keep it clean.
00:03:41
Speaker
Nobody's perfected it yet. Maybe Blosser has or this liquid tool company has. But he said it's been a struggle for so many years. But that's cool and stuff, but that's not why. Yeah, that's not the problem you have right now. That's not the problem I have right now. The problem I have is this foaming onto the ground and causing problems on the moori, on the Swiss, or sorry, on the moori, on the Kern. And even the speedio had it a little bit at some point. And it's just frustrating.
00:04:10
Speaker
So it's it's like, you take a step back. Lots
Causes and Solutions for Coolant Foaming
00:04:15
Speaker
of people look and there's lots of good coolest buzzer hanks first trims all and whatever. Like, this is like, you have you have a funny issue. Not everybody else. You guys are wrong. And I feel like we can't ignore the elephant in the room of water.
00:04:33
Speaker
source water with the stuff growing in it. I talked about that with John Wiley and other people as well. In his opinion anyway, usually biological stuff is not a cause of foaming in his experience. However, it's funny. Some of my team members listened to the podcast last week or two weeks before when I mentioned the algae and they're like, it's not that bad. He made it sound so bad. It was just like a tiny little bit of green. And I'm like, well, it was there.
00:05:00
Speaker
Yeah. So some people will put in a UV lamp in the tank to kind of continuously kill it. Or I think a cool way would be an inline UV filter on the outlet from the IBC tote to the mixatron, whatever. If you UV it there and even quick filter it there or something, that could be a great solution just to like permanently kill whatever.
00:05:26
Speaker
So I mean, I think at the moment our tank is clean and good, but we will probably implement something like that to make sure it's good. But yeah, Wiley said it's probably not the cause of the issue, but it could be. I don't know. Yeah. And look, I'm not a cold expert, but it's also the weird thing with biological stuff is just because you see a small spot somewhere, it could be a sign that the smoking gun, if there's more elsewhere. And the other thing is the too good of water.
00:05:55
Speaker
You need... So this came up yesterday with the conversation because we were talking about de-foamers because our guys use it mostly on the DT and they just pour a little bit in. So number one, we're probably pouring in the wrong amount, hashtag too much. But two, John said that the de-foamer in particular doesn't really mix well. Like it's not a product that wants to mix in. So you really want
00:06:19
Speaker
to even take a gallon or five gallon bucket with some coolant in it and then pour the defoamer into that, agitate it with a drill mixer, piston mixer, whatever you want to do, and then pour that into your tank. Yeah, what we do is we have a little glass cup, like a drinking cup size thing with a lid. So we'll scoop up that full of coolant. We'll put a little splash of defoamer in. We'll shake it up. We'll pour it back in. So that's not quite five gallons worth, but it's a big cups worth anyway.
00:06:48
Speaker
But yeah, we try to do that as opposed to just like pouring it in unless we're in a rush or feeling lazy or something where we just put a splash in and it works but yeah, it doesn't mix as well. But boy, that stuff works fast when it works. Yeah, right? Yeah, it just kills the foam immediately and then it flows through the system then it goes away but yeah. So you guys are foaming or have foamed a tiny bit on the DT maybe?
00:07:13
Speaker
The DT has, and actually the UMC has a tiny amount, but both are what I would say are really small, tight bubbles. And the foaming is more of a like, that's odd. It never turns into the bathtub suds where it like floods, it's not floods, but foams up to the table or in your case, like overflow. Like I've seen that before once. And I think in the DT, it's just because when we're running that machine, a lot of times it has a pretty high,
00:07:39
Speaker
uptime on cycles. It's a high pressure pump with through spindle coolant, and it's a smaller tank. So it just doesn't the coolant uptime to settle down. Yeah, which is one of the arguments that the coolant companies always come back is the circulation of coolant that doesn't give time for the bubbles to dissipate. One of their standards
DI Water vs Tap Water for Coolant
00:08:01
Speaker
is the bubble break test. At the machining zone, it creates bubbles because you have a lot of agitation and stuff.
00:08:08
Speaker
But if those bubbles break and pop within five seconds or 15 seconds or something, then fine, that's normal. Got it. If they linger around and you have surface tension on the bubbles and then they last longer and then they travel to the cooling tank and then they travel to the pump and they can be bad for the pump and things like that.
00:08:25
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, the amount of times Coolant has touched the ground in our shop in the past year is probably dozens. Like it's too much. Yeah, you gotta fix that. So the Maury and the Kern both now have massive amounts of semi-used paper towels, like just strewn around the word leaks always to kind of catch it a little bit. We manage it as well as we can, but it's sometimes unpredictable, you know?
00:08:50
Speaker
I would, if we had that going on here, I would buy from like a local water company, buy some, buy 50 gallons of DI water or 100 gallons of DI water. It's probably cheap. They'll deliver it like done. It's totally good water. What's the smallest machine, the speedio probably? Probably, yeah. And then you would, this would stink, but you clean that out. You'll need to put the,
00:09:13
Speaker
clock it makes or whoever makes whatever the cleaner stuff. Bingo. And then like, just try, make sure you're not using old dated coolant concentrate. Right. Because that that has defoamers in it. And if you think it has a year shelf, I don't know how accurate the year shelf life is. But if it's super old, then what john was saying this coincidentally came up was that the concentrate stuff
00:09:37
Speaker
the de-foaming part of the concentrate could actually settle to the bottom of the drum. And so I guess, I don't know if you mix the whole drum concentrate, if that helps, but like, I don't want to mix that stuff. It's like syrup, you don't want to mix that stuff. Or even buy like, they'll send you a new gallon or five gallon pail, just like give it a fresh clean start. Because if you go to another company, it's fine. Except if you end up with the same outcome. Exactly. That stinks. And boy, that's a lot of work.
00:10:06
Speaker
So if you bring in DI water, you want the initial fill to have some minerals in it, some solids. Usually you do tap water too, right?
00:10:16
Speaker
half-tap, whatever. The initial fill doesn't even, well, it's not that it doesn't matter. Yes, it's actually funny. Spencer Webb said, hogwash, start with DI water, the cold cement for that. I'm not here to argue with Spencer. I like him. He's a smart guy. I've heard both arguments, yeah. There's also a lot to be said for what are you starting with? I wouldn't start with a ton of our
00:10:39
Speaker
water here from Zane's, Ohio, because it's got, oh, I've put the TDS meter under it lately, but I want to say it's either 250 or
00:10:47
Speaker
That's not 450. That would be high. Obviously, the big difference between starting with tap water from a city that has pretty decently refined water versus if you're on a well water, it might be like a thousand or something. Yeah. Our city water is 140. The RO system brings it down to like two. It's good, really good. Yes, that's a concern or a consideration for sure is the water.
00:11:15
Speaker
It's certainly a standard that we've had in this shop. We've had the RO system in there for like two or three years now. But we did have foaming even before we used RO when we were just using tap water. But it's still the same city water, like same location we've been in for eight years now. Interesting. So either, in my eyes, either it's water, either it's
00:11:39
Speaker
For some reason, the 251 for us, so I could go to a different quality chem product. Wylie suggested a couple, one or two others that he really liked for us. Or I switched brands to Blosser, which adds another variable. It's like new, might be fine, might give us the same problem. I don't know, worth a test. So where I'm at right now is I might take the Maury and the Speedio, do the full clean like you said.
00:12:03
Speaker
If I really want to go at it, I'll fill one with Blosser and I'll fill one with a different quality chem and just run them and like do a kind of head to head, see if either of them have a problem. And that's, you're just buying a five gallon pail of Kool-Aid, not a big drum. And then run them like that. So probably end up doing that. Are you going to stay semi-synthetic?
00:12:25
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Okay. So you're not doing the synergy stuff? No. Okay. No, that didn't even really come up. Okay. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, we did talk about it actually. A lot of people like the synergy stuff. Now, I think originally in the beginning, it had a lot of problems with resting the table and stuff like that. But from what I've heard, both from Blaser and from some people who use it, is that nowadays, anyway, if you use good quality water and you manage it well, then it's fine. It's great.
00:12:55
Speaker
But both companies were pushing a Esther based coolant where it's not made from rotted dinosaurs. It's made from like vegetable oil in a way, vegetables or gas. They take a gas and they make it into an oil somehow through some weird process. Esther is a fuel. Yeah, right. I don't know.
00:13:21
Speaker
but something like that as opposed to an oil oil. I call this semi-synthetics are. Anyway, both different options. I feel like I love, love, love learning and talking about water and coolant until I hit a certain point and I'm like, yeah, I'm out. Like at some point I'm a machinist. Right. The one takeaway I would share is
00:13:45
Speaker
Agree. The Blosser stuff doesn't seem to have the problems it had a year or two ago. It's still a full synthetic. We also tried the Colliken 355 full synthetic. Frankly, both were no good for us. You did try the Blosser, what's it called, Synergy? Yeah. Okay.
00:14:02
Speaker
really poor experience, but the full synthetic seems to be the case regardless of what brand. Two things for us. Number one, your water has to be insane. Like it's not even realistic. It's not like a good forgiving. No, this is a gross generalization because full synthetic
00:14:21
Speaker
is a big category with lots of different products lines within it. But nevertheless, apparently some of the machine tool companies have banned it or avoided their warranties because it can react weirdly with paint, which is also a gross overreach, but whatever. Yeah, great. It was like that.
00:14:37
Speaker
Yeah, right. But if you don't have perfect water, perfect operating environment, it just requires a lot of hand holding. And the other issue we had was no good for form tapping. This didn't work. So going back to some unfortunate pterodactyl oil and the semi-synthetic
00:14:56
Speaker
that's what we like about 251 is it's just been super it's super tolerant like it's not fair for us it just has been you know for the amount of work that we put into maintaining it which is some but not tons it's been great
00:15:10
Speaker
Yup. For a while or a little bit like years ago, I want to say tormac days, we did use Qualcomm 291, which is more suited for the super alloys, the titanium and stainless, which is 99% of everything we run. So I texted Wiley yesterday when he was at your shop. I was like, what about 291? We didn't really talk about that too much. Just let me know. Haven't got back yet. Or the other one he suggested was Geocool 855 or something like that.
00:15:41
Speaker
which he's had great success with in other aerospace shops making titaniums and stainless stuff like that. I might try a sample of that in one of the machines and then Blaser 6000 in the other machine.
00:15:56
Speaker
I think the 291 is better because you have a more, your production shop with a niche material. It might be better. It's more expensive. The only thing I would throw out, and I have no idea how prolific 291 or Basra 6000 is, is I would be pretty hesitant to buy a super niche coolant because supply chain stuff got weird during COVID. If you can't buy the coolant you need and you now all of a sudden have to switch over,
00:16:21
Speaker
What a night. Yeah, exactly. Oh my gosh. Like I'm fine having the Honda Accord of coolants because... Exactly. Well, that's what they both are. 251C from Kollicam
Improving Coolant Mixing and Quality
00:16:31
Speaker
and Blaser 6000 apparently have been around for 10 plus years and are the Honda Accords of coolants. And then there's more fancy stuffs that are like new and technologically advanced and like that's all great and stuff until you can't get it. And then you're like, oh no. Right? Yeah.
00:16:50
Speaker
Yeah. We were told to do a better job, which is what we probably needed to hear this. We just pour in top off straight water and pour and concentrate. It works. I know lots of people do this. It doesn't make it right, but lots of people do. Colloquium seems to take it. The 251 seems to handle it well. But that's just a combination of ease slash laziness, slash how we do it. So I need to think about if we had to pick up a mixatron or a dosatron or something.
00:17:20
Speaker
So we have one and that was the idea was mixing it into the barrel cool thing. So maybe I just need to spend some time on that. But the other thing that I learned was more the defomer of not mixing that in straight. It went to the extent we use it. What else did we learn?
00:17:38
Speaker
I don't know. I'm really happy that we have that coolant cleaner to pull coolant out periodically, run it through a sock filter. The guys just cleaned the horizontal sump for the first time. It was way worse than we thought. I thought the May Fran would do kind of a better job. Interesting. Interesting. There was a solid somewhere between 3.8 and 1.5 inch of fines on the bottom of that tank. Whoa. And that tank is hard to get into and clean and all that. Did you have to roll it out and like?
00:18:08
Speaker
They left it in place. It would be awkward to move it out. That's weird. When we got our Genos, I want to say that the conveyor that came from Mayfran also included a new coolant tank from Mayfran, I think. It could be wrong. The horizontal is an Okuma coolant tank where the Mayfran conveyor just integrates with it.
00:18:40
Speaker
We goofed when we installed that machine because we had the wrong matrix. Basically, when the riggers showed up, we thought it was going to be like a foot over from where it ended up needing to be. It's not the end of the world, but there's less room that we want between it and the BF3. So it's not easy to move that coolant tank out, plus it weighs a bunch a lot. We got into it with it in place, but yeah.
00:19:05
Speaker
That's the problem with having what looked like gigantic shops when we first moved in and then you start popping more and more machines in and you got to like keep room to roll the cooling tank out. Yeah.
00:19:16
Speaker
The other thing I need to, I've just opened up an Amazon to look for, I think I googled water agitation, agitation paddles, but the UMC that's in the training building, the little sheet metal hole that I looked through to see the top of the coolant tank, it looked like quality cam, coolant white, like I was like grim. Well, when the quality cam was here doing their filming, they opened up one of the other panels and it looked like
00:19:43
Speaker
You know, it looked like an oil. It looked terrible. Like the most horrid layer of oil skim on the top. On top, yeah. Coincidentally, that's the baffled area where the skimmer is. And what's happening is the skimmer just isn't, because it's baffled off, the skimmer isn't skimming anything other than like the few square inches that surround the skimmer. So I need to get something that just causes the surface to flow a little bit. Yeah. I don't know if you've ever seen anything like this.
00:20:13
Speaker
We have an aquarium bubbler in the Nakamura, which is like $50. And it's just a little air motor that goes to a rubber hose that goes to a perforated disk that just makes millions of little bubbles. And you just drop that in the cooling tank. And that helps just keep the coolant moving when we don't run it. Because we run that thing six, seven hours a day, but it sits the rest of the day and nights and weekends and stuff like that.
00:20:41
Speaker
That just kind of keeps the main big tank kind of moving. And then no more stinking, no more nothing. I guess that's what I don't know, is do I want, because I don't feel like I want a bubbler that just creates vertical bubbler. I want something like, almost like the coalescer balls that are like, I could make one, I'm not, but like two or three. You can put a coalescer on it.
00:21:06
Speaker
It's just two or three paddles that rotate at two RPMs. They just create just a little rowing motion in the top. Or maybe you could put the bubbler in a direction to make it like push or something. But yeah, you got some cheap options in front of you. Yeah, look into that. Yeah. Yeah.
00:21:26
Speaker
The other fun visit was, we just ran out of time last week, but it was because it was the week prior was, I was up in Milwaukee for a quick day trip and was able to swing by Hermlas facility. I'm trying
Visit to Hermle Facility
00:21:41
Speaker
to spell Milwaukee. I can't even spell Milwaukee. L-W-A-U-K-E-E, I hope. If anybody's from there, I misspelled it. Yeah, that sounds right.
00:21:50
Speaker
Okay, so you visited Hermely. You've never been there, right? Never been there. How was it? I've been to the Germany one, never been to the Milwaukee one. So I was really impressed. I didn't know how much they would have and they had seven machines, including two or three with automation. And I was just going to swing by to say hi and see it. And I did bring my camera and it ended up like, hey, I was like, do you guys want to film a little quick walk around? It ended up being great. Nice.
00:22:18
Speaker
And, and look, I've talked about, I mean, I have this kind of like, I love Herma machines, just, I like them. The difference now, having had the Aquila horizontal, having had the Willem and having to like, kind of swim upstream a little bit here in the value chain. I start to think differently about what Herma is, but it's also, I don't need one. Like I don't have a part or an application that's dictating it. So that's kind of why it's still like,
00:22:45
Speaker
Sure. I can just sit here and engage in admiration of what they can do. And so part of me is excited if one day we find a part that's like, no, this makes sense for a C-250. It was fun. We edited a video. We'll see if they approve it just walking around the showroom. But yeah, it was fun. That's awesome. Yeah, that's cool.
00:23:05
Speaker
Yeah, in the fall sometimes, current precision, current USA is going to have an open house because they bought a factory and they're renovating it. Oh, cool. Yeah, Tony, the president there, he's like, oh, we epoxy coated the floors. We made like poured big concrete pads so that the micro HD can be there and put
Upcoming Open House Events
00:23:25
Speaker
big windows in. He's been texting me all these pictures about the renovation process.
00:23:29
Speaker
And I'm super happy for them, but they're going to have an open house. And so I'm probably going to go and then some of the other current owners and whoever else is going to end up in Chicago. And that's going to be super fun. And then I'm like, well, I'm in Chicago and it's midweek. I'm like, who else do I head up? There's a couple other vendors in Chicago that you got to go to. Because when I go for IMTS, sure, I see them all at the show. I don't have time to go to their factory. Right. So a couple others, yeah.
00:23:56
Speaker
Actually, I didn't even think of it. They had asked if we'd be willing to kind of share just as a favor that they are, Hermely is also doing a fall, I don't think it's, is it public? Maybe it is. Yeah. They're calling it the USA five axis summit, October 3rd through 5th. Cool. We'll put a link. Do you have a link for current thing? We'll put both in the... I don't think there is a link yet, but... Okay. We'll put them in the description. There's like a website for the Hermely thing? Yeah, exactly.
00:24:27
Speaker
I don't actually know if I'm going to go, but yeah. Yeah, those kind of things are fun. So current in Chicago? I guess I never knew that. Cool. Yeah. Oh, but they don't have a showroom prior to this. I think they had a small unit kind of shop where they'd have a current micro in and out and somebody would buy it.
00:24:51
Speaker
But now they bought an HD for themselves. And they're like, I'm not going to sell it to anybody. As tempting as it's going to be. Because like, oh, there's a machine in stock. No, no, that's our machine. Right, right. Well, I want to say, is it like, does Heidenhein have one or Frasier? Somebody has. Yeah, Frasier had one or has one still, I forget, in wherever they are in the US. And yeah, they would send customers there.
00:25:18
Speaker
So speaking of, uh, speaking of high-end five axis, you remember Tyler Bond from Metzora? Yes. I don't think I knew him well, but yeah, I saw a video. I've gotten to know just as a friend over the years. Um, and he recently moved over to Mitsui Siki.
00:25:36
Speaker
Really? Which is, you know, I put it right up there with, I mean, I don't know what the specs are, but, you know, they're a Kern, like, super high Japanese current or whatever, wherever they're from. Well, apparently, they're boxed way hand scraped. So they're, I mean, they're they were talking about rotaries that are like arc, single arc, second positional accuracy. Like, I don't doesn't really mean anything to me, but it's
00:26:04
Speaker
The case study that they got to share was the James Webb telescope study. I found the video on that and each of those hexagon, hexagonal panels were the size of a card table. They're big. Really? What would that be? Somewhere between 25 and 45 inches or something. The tolerances on many of the features were plus two-tenths minus zero.
00:26:29
Speaker
And it was like one thou true position. That was crazy. They took something like 10 months for each one to go through the whole machining. They'd rough it, heat treat it, refinish it, stress relieve it. Pretty cool. Where did you learn about this? Is there a video or is there a? Yeah. I'll send you the video when we hang up. It's three minutes. And you can put in the description too.
00:26:58
Speaker
Tyler actually wasn't sharing about this because I didn't know he'd be allowed to and then I found a video after he left. He now calls on the Midwest and he was driving from Cleveland to Cincy and stopped by. It was fun to see. It's good to have people in the industry and it's fun to watch them evolve and jump around to different shops and then 15 years later, you're still at it. Just here now. It's great.
00:27:21
Speaker
Well, but it's funny because Metzur is sort of a boutiquey builder. Like they're not a huge, you know, Dusan or Haas type company. They're still prolific. Like Metzur's are everywhere. But yes. Sure. But they don't make it. You know, again, they're not the volume. Yeah. Mitsui is like, I don't even know, like they're kind of like we can measure the number of machines we make in a year. Yeah. Small quantity. Yeah. Kern makes well under 100 machines a year.
00:27:48
Speaker
I think they were bigger than that, but not by much. Yeah, right. This is kind of cool. Nice. So speaking of accuracy, for this video, I have a package coming today, which is a sub micron chip, which I'm super excited about. Basically, it goes
Testing Submicron Chips for Precision
00:28:07
Speaker
from four digits to five digits, gives you a fifth decimal place. I was playing with the machine last week, and I wrote a quick program that moved
00:28:15
Speaker
You know, it goes like thou 10th and then 10 millionth is the next, like the fifth digit is 10 millionth movement. So I made a program that moved, you know, 10 millionth and why pause for half a second, another 10 millionths, another 10 millionths up to a full 10th and then did it again. Cause I wanted to see, it can read the code, but is it actually moving the servo motor at those fifth digit places? And it is not, it only moves the servo motor every actual 10th.
00:28:44
Speaker
Oh. So even if you give it five-digit code, it won't listen to it. And I watch the servo pulse encoder movement and like, oh, it's not listening to a fifth-digit place yet. Did you put an indicator on it or just you're just watching the encoder value? Just watching the encoder value, yeah. Interesting. So then again, an indicator moving 10 millionths of an inch is I have one or two indicators that might see that. Oh, you don't have one of the Mar
00:29:12
Speaker
I do have one, yeah. It's set up in a fixture right now. Got it. I was watching the stepper motor and it moved every full tenth and ignored every 10 millionth move, which is interesting. The submicron option, the chip that gets installed into the machine,
00:29:34
Speaker
should allow it to move that fifth decimal place. It should solve some of the chunky issues that I'm seeing in the grinding of the blades. Awesome. The test that I did last week
00:29:44
Speaker
where the main part of the blade is now in one axis only and doesn't tick along in Y a little bit, that was totally successful. Oh, well, great. So that's huge. So now the latest blade that I ground on this video is great for half the blade. And then as it curves towards the pointy tip of the blade, it's a little chunky because it's only moving full 10th increments. But now with the submicron option, I should be able to move 10 million increments of five digits. And it should be awesome.
00:30:14
Speaker
That's awesome. Apparently, I'm borrowing Luma Labs chip and he's like, test it out. If it works, send it back and buy one. It's like, got it. I will do that.
00:30:26
Speaker
I want, now you need to make t-shirts. It's like, I, you know, I chipped my speedio or whatever. Like, you know, like, yes, I dropped the diamond chip in my three series. Yeah. Um, yes. So was it literally a through hole, like snaps and like, just like, it's coming today. That's hilarious. I'm gonna be, I'll post a picture if I, uh, if I can.
00:30:53
Speaker
Apparently, there's like some licensed software on that chip that even Brother is paying somebody to do, I don't know if it's private or not. So when you just turn your machine on with the chip in, it's just... Yeah, I asked him and he said, you have to go into the IO settings, you have to do some thing, you have to do some fancy code that he has to look up and tell me. So it's locked for sure.
00:31:18
Speaker
But yeah, sounds cool. I'm excited. This is pretty cool. And I have an actual direct need and proof case. If this works, I'll see it. And I'd be happy to spend this couple thousand dollars for whatever this thing is. Done all day. Yeah. I see a UPS truck, but I think it's FedEx.
00:31:40
Speaker
That's great. I feel like I then need to eat a little crow because I didn't necessarily think that that was the option that would solve it, but you already did that test. Yeah, that's kind of helpful to me. Yeah, you're good. That's great. Yeah, the test helped me and I've been chatting with Greg a lot at Spedio and we're kind of of the same opinion. Like there's a lot of high accuracy modes.
00:32:02
Speaker
in this video and we kind of talked about them, we tried a bunch, no difference whatsoever. I think this is the difference for what I need and most people don't need this option but I think it's exactly what I need. Yeah. It's funny we were looking at
00:32:17
Speaker
Grinders trying to finalize that process and I'm gonna keep this super vague because I don't really want to throw anybody under the bus But one person told us that this new feet this feature that came out as an option It's not super popular and it's really only been out for four or five months I have a quote a copy of somebody else's build spec from three years ago that has that option on it and like you're just like why do you like I do I think they're deceiving you know, but like why is it so like
00:32:42
Speaker
Just feels icky that like there is a sweet talk in your downplaying or don't know what it does or say it's new. It's like it's been around for years. Like what? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you getting closer to pulling the trigger on a surface grinder?
00:32:56
Speaker
Yeah, so I wanted to, again, it kind of goes back to that comment about Hermlen, like, what are you buying this for? In this case, it's more of a specific use than I've ever had. So we've even mocked up the fixture. And so I wanted to have Zoom calls to say, like, hey, I want to understand when we walk in in the morning, what happens? Like, do we need to, of course, turn it on, warm it up. But like, do
Automation in Surface Grinding
00:33:17
Speaker
we need to re-punch in values? Because it's not a G-code machine. So does it have,
00:33:23
Speaker
Some of them, the X-axis I believe is likely to be finger screw adjustment. So those won't have to be physically changed because we'll have the same fixture. Y-axis is in the software. So are those values persistent?
00:33:39
Speaker
Because a lot of these grinders are really designed toward job top work, where every time you're touching off the part, and every time you're setting up your wire, I'm not. I don't want to touch off my chuck, or I don't want to touch off my part. Because if it has auto comp dress features, then I want to see if we can build a workflow that doesn't require us to retouch it off, knowing that over time, there'll be certain things where or thermal stuff changes.
00:34:06
Speaker
You should be able to home the machine and have it be pretty darn accurate. I've never run our machine, just talked with Angelo who runs it all the time.
00:34:19
Speaker
I mean, we've got that use case. We grind blades and lock insert blanks, which are a little bit thinner than the blade. But still, we're grinding this eighth inch material all day long. And that's it. And as far as I know, he'll make a part, he'll measure it. And if there's a difference of a few tenths or something like that, then he punches it in and comps it for the next time kind of thing.
00:34:43
Speaker
But I think the height, the thickness of the part is really the only variable. X, and I think they call it Z. But front to back, don't worry that much. If it's off by a thou, nobody's going to notice.
00:34:56
Speaker
Yeah, but it's the height. The Z, which is your y-axis, doesn't matter. But it's funny, grinders are not set up like CNC machines. Like when I was saying, I effectively want to have a, let's say we're grinding a two inch block, we're going to leave between three and 10,000. So let's say I want every grind to start at 15,000 over just to be safe. I don't care if we grind a little bit of air. So I want that machine to home or reference or come down to 2.015 and then start doing its work down to two inches every day.
00:35:25
Speaker
And they're like, I'm pretty sure that that's how ours works. I don't know. Yeah, it's not the normal. Interesting. They want you to like reestablish your datum by looking or a piece of paper or sparking and then kind of zeroing it and then starting. I'm like, and we figured out a way that should work. But yeah.
00:35:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's where I'm at. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I've seen Angelo touch off parts like spark out or start to spark, but I mean, some of our incoming material can change in thickness by ever so slightly. So you kind of want to do that anyway, because the last thing you want to do is overload your wheel.
00:36:01
Speaker
Well, that's, we're going to have up to 10,000 of height stack up to grind. So we're just going to start at a 15,000 or whatever. We'll figure it out. But it's not that I'm against having skill involved in this machine, but I'm super focused on processes that allow reliable work to be done without. That's why I want to buy a
00:36:23
Speaker
really nice machine that's able to do that kind of stuff. You're taking the CNC machinist automation, accuracy, fixturing, zero point mentality and putting it to a surface grinder, which kind of comes from the old school manual machinist like expert world where it's like, no, you're a rockstar if you run a surface grinder well. Yeah.
00:36:44
Speaker
When that's what somebody had mentioned, they were like, look, because there's some lower cost brand versions and then there's the kind of higher end versions. And they were like, look, if you're thinking about reliable processes, it's worth noting that you could err toward the better higher end side.
00:37:00
Speaker
to allow that to go well, which is kind of okay, because I'm trying to make sure I don't buy a BMW when a Honda Accord works, but it's also like, ah, but it's kind of like current. Like I don't need the accuracy of a current on one part. I want the consistency across two other parts. Like that's why you buy crazy good machines like that. Yeah, exactly. Are you leaning any specific way? I mean, you had a couple of brands, you're shooting out like Okamoto, like ours, Chavalier, some others probably.
00:37:28
Speaker
Those are the two. There's some lower end ones that are not going to make the cut. And then there's, you could spend more on like a Mitsui, not in relation to the Tyler bond, by the way, different. And Parker Majestics, which have kind of come into, I think a lot of the social media world awareness because of like Adam, the machinist, and there's another guy who got ones working with it. But those are, those are tool room, carbide, grinder that are a little bit niche here for what we want. Sure. Yeah. You need a workhorse. Yeah.
00:37:58
Speaker
Yeah. Cool. So we actually... Okay. With Okamoto, there's two main kinds. There's the one we have, and then there's the one Spencer Webb has. So... Maybe there's more, but I didn't pay attention. So there are. What I've learned is there are basically three levels of surface grinders in most modern worlds. The lowest level tier is super... They're all still clinical automatic. The table moves under power,
00:38:26
Speaker
You're not going to sit there like an old school brown and sharp. The manual most one though, doesn't have any intelligence, doesn't even have a computer screen, doesn't have the ability to do things like table dress with auto cops, like automatic order, dresser comp like that. They might be able to with the overhead.
00:38:43
Speaker
But that's kind of the lowest level. The highest level skipping the middle is a true CNC code that could grind complex shapes, surfaces up to edges and shoulders, move around like that. We will go with the middle, which is the SAI, which I think is what you have. And that is
00:39:03
Speaker
I think it's called an automatic. I think the level below I mentioned a second ago is called a semi-automatic. So an automatic grinder has a computer screen, and it has values that you touch in. And while it's grinding, you hit a button that says redress. It'll finish that Z level or that Y level layer, and then it'll move over, rest the wheel, auto-compet, and go right back to work. You can say grind down 14 thou, and then the last
00:39:28
Speaker
foul to get to 15 total. I want it to be finished in passes. So different feed rate, different wheel speed, different, um, different dress, different dress exactly. And then spark out three times. And then when you're done, go back, like that's where we'll get. Yeah, it's, it's amazing. Yes. And, and watching Angelo now teach Steven how to run it. And I'm just kind of fly on the wall, you know, poking every now and then.
00:39:50
Speaker
Steven's super nervous, of course, because Angela's teaching in a very like, please don't screw up kind of way. But it's great. It's cool to watch. Yeah. Yeah, it's really cool to see what the capabilities of this machine are and how he's maximized it. And even the, not just the wheel, you choose the composition of the wheel, but how you dress it and how the cool it aims on it and surface speed and all that stuff. So as the wheel wears smaller, like there's a limit where you shouldn't run it anymore.
00:40:19
Speaker
It was actually
Precision Measurement in Grinding
00:40:20
Speaker
really fun. We dug out our electronic gauge. I'm 99% sure it was a gift. I don't think he wanted money for it from Tom Lipton. Shout out to Tom, one of the good guys out there. It's one of those, almost looks like a multimeter that sits on your desktop. It has a plunger as well as a test indicator stylus to it. It has
00:40:45
Speaker
of settings from the courses is a range of 30 thou and I believe the lowest setting the intervals are 10 million. Okay. Needles in electronic indicator. Yes. Yeah. I bought one on eBay a couple of years ago and it's, I haven't used it much.
00:41:03
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm embarrassed to say is we had used it in the past, but it basically sat in our little metrology cabinet. And now that we have a grinder kind of on the radar, we got an old surface plate out that we don't hadn't been used either. And we have the Alina gauge set up there. Because on our puck chuck, we will be grinding to a final overall height spec. So we'll get a set of gauge blocks.
00:41:23
Speaker
Actually, we might make a fixture ourselves and grind it in and master it against a set of gauge blocks. But basically, we'll be able to use that tool to do a final sweep test of both dimensional as well as parallelism spec on that product, which feels great. That's exactly what it's there for. I love it. That's that precision, man. Next level of precision. I love it.
00:41:47
Speaker
Um, yeah. What are you up to today? Super cool. Um, got a lot of things on the go right now.
00:41:56
Speaker
I've been working with DSI to try to get a couple more Fusion licenses for the shop, which has been super helpful. The guys at DSI are just killer. I had like a two hour phone call with Devin and trying to figure it out. So I'm on an old, old legacy Fusion license with what they call single user storage. And that's where all my files are. And to try to transfer that to Teams has been challenging.
00:42:23
Speaker
Yep. Some of the projects transfer fine. Some will not transfer and I can't figure out why. And it's challenging. Sorry. So I want to get that tackled before I really open this up to the other guys in the team so that everybody's on the same database and same structure and things like that. So that's what I've been working on. It's been good. Got it. Good.
00:42:50
Speaker
I have a reseller who's interested in listing the UMOCs. Good. Which is good. CNCmachines.com. Okay. So I'm going to send a bunch of information. They take a small cut of whatever they sell for if they sell and then they just have an audience that scrounges the website every day looking for deals so it could be better than kind of local advertising than I could do or eBay or whatever. So yeah, I'm going to go through that.
00:43:16
Speaker
I had a good phone call with them yesterday and he's like, what do you want for them? And I'm like, well, here's a number I've been telling everybody but you know, I'm flexible. It's totally fine. And yeah, so that's cool. Great. Get them gone. Yeah, they need to go. Good. So and hopefully they can go to somebody who can, you know, give them a little bit of love they need and actually enjoy buying them, you know, like make it a good experience.
00:43:43
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Good. Get them gone. Yeah, exactly. What are you up to today?
00:43:52
Speaker
So it was really fun. Qualicam asked if they could come film at our shop. And I said, you know, for sure. They've been just, they've been nice to get to know them. And I didn't want anything out of it. Like that was kind of nice too. I was like, they just wanted some time to have access to a machine. The training facility was great for that. They did most of the filming on their own. And then they interviewed us as like a customer story at the end. Cool. So it was actually even nice because it was just like, Oh, you know, it's not, you know,
00:44:20
Speaker
really no effort on my part other than I helped, you know, show them how to run the UMC a little bit. So now that they're back out of here, we're back to running the prototype puck chucks for a beta unit puck chucks. And it's actually super awesome. We so that so there's a tough feature to get good to get good finishes on because it's an ID hole. I'm holding it up in front of the camera. But it's just it's a long
00:44:45
Speaker
narrow diameter hole relative to its length, relative to its diameter on the side of the part. And so it's, you don't have, you have to have a little bit of a longer stick out or gauge length unless you change, you can change the fixture and you could change the material, but it just, the way it is, it's tricky. So I switched the tool, I bought a longer, well, I bought a correct length Lakeshore tool, so it doesn't have more than I need, but I ran that this morning. But what I also did,
00:45:14
Speaker
that hole intersects with the center hole, and I hadn't been drilling that center hole out. I don't even know why, to be honest with you, because now I'm realizing if I do that center hole first, it's also one of the nice things about having this on a 5-axis, is then when it does that radial hole, the coolant actually can flush through the hole versus the chips effectively being in a swimming pool. And the first one I ran of those this morning was already
00:45:39
Speaker
better. Like you can just tell and it may be just like, I really enjoy that. Like, oh, hold on, let me rethink the cam. Don't worry about extra tool changes yet. Don't worry about you can come back and optimize stuff later, get the part really dialed. And so that's good. Solve the problem, figure out different ways. Yeah. Yeah. When you start to think about coolant flow of toolpath is when it gets kind of fun.
00:46:02
Speaker
Yeah, but it's totally obviously gets so much better for, especially because I'm trying to take a finishing passes at full depth. So it's an inch and a half length of cut on a three eighth inch end mill, which is pretty asking a lot. There's about a foul of taper that actually is fine in the way that this feature works. It oddly actually almost helps. But you think about those, those chips, they're not going to naturally evacuate. Right.
00:46:30
Speaker
I see what you mean now. Yeah. Yeah. They get to go up and down. Yeah. Bingo. Cool. Yeah. How about you? I'm just waiting for FedEx to come in.
00:46:43
Speaker
Yeah, I got to tweak the fixture for that grinding operation. Got to do that. Load some different programs on the Kern. The Kern broke a tool last night, which is kind of rare for us now. I'm like, that tool? That tool lasts forever. Not forever, but we replace it often, and it hasn't broken in a long time. I wonder why. And it broke at midnight, so we lost eight hours of running. I'm like, oh, man, that's kind of a lot, actually. Yeah. Yeah.
00:47:10
Speaker
If it was like at 10 o'clock when I last checked, I would have come in and fixed it, but I was already in bed by then. Does that disrupt today's downstream flow? It does actually because we were really planning on, okay, this run's going to end at nine o'clock and the guys can switch them out and we'll have those blades still get into the heat treat. And one of our guys is going on a week and a half vacation in about a week. And so he will be a bottleneck unless we're prepared for it. So we're trying to get ahead on
00:47:41
Speaker
machining soft blades, heat treating those soft blades, lapping those soft blades so that when he's gone, we have enough. We have like tons of blades ready without him kind of thing. So yeah, it does kind of put us back a little bit, but we'll be fine. Cool. Yeah, very much. See you next week. All right. Have a good day.