Transcript
Speaker: Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining, episode number 58. My name is John Grimsmo talking to you from Canada. My name is John Saunders talking to you from Sydney, Australia. I'm so jealous. That's awesome. It is. It was funny. It's super weird. It's 10 p .m. at night right now ahead of you. It's actually Wednesday night for us.
Speaker: And, uh, I was just grabbing dinner with Yvonne and we were sitting there and, you know, it's just kind of normal. You're just grabbing dinner and then you're, but you're looking at your, you know, you look at across the table and you're like, we are on another continent. It's crazy. Yeah. And it's a 6 53 AM for me right now. So my morning, your evening, it's that's awesome. Yeah. Uh, it's been awesome. Well, I'll tell you all about it here in a minute, but what's going on with you?
Speaker: Things have been awesome here. We're on track for our best month ever and we're hoping to smash that. Yesterday, I had two mist collectors installed, one on each machine, which I'm super duper pumped about. It's funny. We just killed the video feed because of hotel bandwidth, but I literally looked above your shoulder and thought, hey, I think that's something new on the Maury.
Speaker: Yeah, so that's awesome. One on the lathe, one on the Maury. We just did it yesterday. I haven't really run any parts yet, but the lathe especially creates a cloudy swamp inside. So today we'll be able to test that out fully. And we videoed the whole process and we'll do some more today, I guess. Does yours always stay on when the machine's on or is it timed in any way?
Speaker: Right now, it's just plugged into the wall. And over time, we might wire that to a better solution. I was just thinking like a light switch at the control, like just hanging down from the top that I can turn it on as I want, basically. So you don't want, no, so we had the same thought, but like a light switch is so not what you and I should do, right? That's so last year's technology. So I was like, well, what's the driver? What's the input that drives that in any sort of a fog sensor or
Speaker: Moisture humidity sensor seems overkill, but awesome as well. Oh yeah, so you could. For sure you could do that. That's not particularly difficult with an Arduino in a power switch tail. That's a good idea.
Speaker: Because I know you can wire it to the control so it can turn on when you're running a cycle, and it can stay on for like five minutes afterwards or whatever. But you almost want to hear it in this small shop. It'll actually filter the air in the shop, especially with two of them running. And it outputs really clean. Yeah, with the machine doors open, if you're not running, it outputs really clean air from these particular filters. And I'm looking forward to that.
Speaker: You know, it's funny because there's this word they use over here called noise pollution. And I've heard it before, but it's not a phrase that gets used every day in Ohio at least.
Speaker: And the thing I don't like about our... So we bought the Mist away for our newer machine, the VF2, and it's definitely, I would say, better. And it's great, except it's noisy. And it's not really noisy relative to a factory. But the truth is, nothing in our shop makes that much noise. And so it actually annoys me when it's on unnecessarily, right? Right, right. And your air compressor is hidden in the other room. Like mine is right here in front of me. Right.
Speaker: kind of unfortunately used to the louder noises around. But yeah, so we'll see how that annoys us over time for sure. But do you have extra M codes on them? Do you have like digital IO off the Maury or the NOC? I'm sure I do, but I don't know yet. So like we just started, actually this was Jared's idea and it was great, but we now don't use the Haas chip conveyor
Speaker: in any of its pre -programmed format so you could just turn it on and off yourself, you could leave it on or they have this sort of like hybrid option where you can have it turn on in preset intervals for certain durations but it ends up just not being the right solution.
Speaker: I mean, as you well know now, like coolant is actually a real big deal, like keeping your coolant clean, keeping the chip enough in the tray for the sump for through spindle coolant, but also not running it full time because you'll end up pulling extra coolant out into the chip bins.
Speaker: What Jarrah does now is we just drop in in our templates and fusion M codes to turn on and off the chip conveyor and then we just drag it between certain operations and this may sound silly but we don't run the chip conveyor on certain really high precision operations.
Speaker: Makes sense. Right? I mean, are we talking about it? Like the sheet metal or oh, no, we were talking about that on WhatsApp, but this question of like insane tolerancing and like, yeah, if something's happening with sheet metal or something vibrating across the room, it can end up... I mean, it's vibration. If you can feel it, it's somehow getting into the cast iron. I like that.
Speaker: So the mist collectors that we got are, it's a brand new prototype unit actually called the Mist Fit made by Arrow X, which is a Canadian, it's a local company actually, they're only about two hours away. So I am looking forward to trying them out. Cool. Yeah. And what else have we been up to? Yesterday, we spent the entire day making foam on the Maury.
Speaker: which is sort of a, you know, a plus and a minus because I'm like, I want to make metal, not just cut foam all day. But we have enough for the month now, which is good. So for cases.
Speaker: Yeah, for, for cases for the knives. So you kind of take one full day to, uh, do that for the month and then you can get back to real work. Right. Is your recipes with that? Is it with the Datron that you're using that they try to fill? Yeah. So going well, it's perfect. I'm, I'm kind of afraid to break it actually, because it's the only one we have, but I know I can get another one in just a couple of days. So I'm not too, too worried about it. Um, but yeah, sweet.
Speaker: What was I going to ask you? Did you figure out anything about that toolpath or gouging that we were talking about? The bleeds, like the midstream gouge. Yeah, I think we were talking about that on WhatsApp. I don't think I figured that out.
Speaker: in the 3D milling of the blade bevels, like sometimes every now and then there would be just one little spot, like the machine moved, you know, a thou or something. But the best theory is that it's when Eric turns on the tumbler mid cut. I don't know if that's fact yet, but we haven't seen it in quite a while. I think I tweaked the toolpath infusion a tiny bit.
Speaker: that helped or not. But yeah, I haven't seen the problem lately, so that's good. And then for that part, I was able to just recut it and it was fine. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Do you ever drop that code then into, not complete, NC Viewer? All the time. Okay. All the time. Some sort of an errant linking move or something rogue in a scallop toolpath or something. And it looks fine.
Speaker: It looks totally fine in NC viewers. So set up a piece of aluminum or something cheap in a block, just a quick set up in a vise and start surfacing it and then hit feed hold or something or whatever and then have Eric turn, basically figure out when to know that the tumbler is turned on and off, right?
Speaker: It'd be kind of funny. You can't do, can't do feet hold because it would leave a mark from holding there. Right. But yeah, I know that'd be, that'd be interesting testing actually. Hmm. So tell me about Australia.
Speaker: So today was awesome. There's a fellow on Instagram whose the business is called Nicholas Hacko. They are a watchmaker. So the story is Nicholas is the sort of current head and patriarch. He's I think a third generation, but their primary background and forgive me if I get any of this a smidge wrong, but I believe their primary background was watch repair.
Speaker: But it became somewhat political and there became some logistics issues about proprietary stuff about getting service parts for the correct brand. And a lot of these I think were the higher end watches and they couldn't get parts and so forth. So what they sort of thought about was, well, do we want to kind of do a ground up
Speaker: watch, you know, watch Endeavor, you know, kind of the Grimsman knives, but of watches, obviously very, very capable background for it. And for them, you know, we're here in Australia, for them, the, you know, the big thing was going to be the first ever watch completely made in Australia.
Speaker: It's funny because at first you're like, oh, okay. And then you start to think about it and you're like, that's actually insane. So Josh is our age, maybe a little younger. We went over to their shop this morning just a few miles outside of this sort of central business district of Sydney. And I mean, I'd seen on Instagram that they had this Kern machine, which I'd really only heard about from Rob Lockwood at EMOS sort of saying that these are
Speaker: one of the best, absolute best machines. The common that stood out for me was that they don't really exist in the US. There's no network, there's no support, there's no structure around all that stuff, but super, super high level machines.
Speaker: I knew that they had that machine, which kind of just jumps out as, okay, that's amazing. And so we, we literally like, um, he meets us on the, we get an Uber over there. We meet him on the corner and we walk through like a parking garage next to like a car service lot next to another parking garage, like very weird, strange way of walking. And then all of a sudden we're in front of this door and he slides the door open and it's a two week old brand new Makino EDM wire.
Speaker: No way. And it is the upgraded special version. Apparently, there's still one version higher, but it's the upgraded ultra precise, ultra stable EDM that is designed to support 50 micron feed wire.
Speaker: That's 2 ,000. That's insane. Normally they run 10 ,000 wire, I think, or you can get 6 ,000, but 2 ,000 is smaller than a human hair. We're filming this, which is awesome. Good.
Speaker: He was unrolling it like the paper towel that's around the consumable roll of wire. You can see that there's wire there, but it's so fine that when the end frayed off or the end came loose, you just can't even see it. Actually, you're going to love this because I think it was at that exact point that I said, this is John Grimsby's future shop.
Speaker: I guess he's open to make gears and little tiny things with that. Great question. I said, why an EDM? There's the obvious square corners or accuracy, but what is it up for? It was actually great in answer, which is not what I expected. It's really more for prototyping.
Speaker: It's not really for production. It's more, hey, we need to make one of a whole watch or one of a gear or one of a part and we don't want to build the workflows for certain multi positional hobby or machining or stamping or broaching or whatever. So they won't use the EDM
Speaker: I don't think they're going to use it in production. They'll probably find a use for it. Right. Which got me excited too because they were talking about how a common workflow for watchmakers will be to use things like vacuum systems.
Speaker: you know, vacuum doesn't work on small parts. And when I mean small parts here, we're talking about a gear like an actual 3D or at least two and a half D machine gear. That's only the size of, you know, three millimeters or, you know, quarter inch or eighth of an inch.
Speaker: So they'll do vacuum the way everybody cheats, which is you do it on a sheet and leave it tabbed together, but they can't have tabs like you and I can have tabs. It just doesn't work in a watch. So sometimes they'll transfer it over to the EDM and they'll tab the tabs down to be like microns so that it's still technically attached, but obviously there's no radial load like there is on an actual machining center.
Speaker: And I was just like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. Wow. It sounds like they're investing heavily in all this best of the best of the best equipment. Is it to make nanometer micron sized parts or just because that's their MO? They just need the best to make the best.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't get the sense that they are, I don't think that they are going outside of the norm for that industry. Does that make sense? Okay. I think they're going to be superb instruments and they're amazing mechanical movements, but I don't think that's abnormal. So for example, so they had the Makino, they have a citizen
Speaker: RO4. I don't know if that means any more to you. Literally, the thing is like a size of a sewing machine, but it's a dual spindle multi -axis, literally twin. They don't call them XY's, but there's a front and a back that runs two programs simultaneously. You can pinch turn on a one millimeter part. How about that?
Speaker: Yeah, so that can machine up to a four millimeter rod, which is 0 .156 inches, which is tiny. And that's crazy. Like even I make small parts, but I still use quarter inch rod for everything. So I can't even fit a quarter inch rod in an R04 machine. Yeah, way too big, right? That's crazy. Yeah, that's awesome. So actually, we were talking about you. Josh was asking, what's the largest part that you have made on your lathe diameter wise?
Speaker: one inch. Okay. Which is only really some of the spinner parts that I made. And then the flashlights I make will be probably just under one inch. Okay, because what's a you make the bearing bearings are half inch. Yeah, right. That's not big.
Speaker: That's the biggest knife part. Everything else is three eights or quarter or less. This is vacation John talking, not business owner John, but John Grimson needs a Swiss light. I know. Are those citizens expensive?
Speaker: Depends on how decked out you go, but they could go like 150 to 200 US brand new decked out. He has a bar feeder, but if you took away the bar feeder, it is literally, I mean, you could fit eight of them on my desk at the office, the shop. They're tiny.
Speaker: Yeah, so my, not concerned, but my curiosity with if I were to get one is what size to get, you know, the R04 is too small, but they have like a 12 mil, which is just under half inch, which would do, do all the knife stuff, but do I want to do, do I need a capable for other stuff or do I use the Nakamura for that? Like a 12 mil might just be big enough.
Speaker: But yeah, I think long -term if I do get one all the knife stuff is going to move to the Swiss and then I'll use the neck mirror for bigger bigger things like flashlights and then I can pop my flashlights Machine that's that's kind of my plan for that That's what Josh was saying the citizen people or the dealer was like how many how many of these screws? Do you want to make a year and he was like, you know? probably like maybe a hundred a month and they were like so more like 3000 an hour and
Speaker: An hour, yeah. Something crazy. Yeah, that's awesome. So yeah, so it's the brand new Makino, the Citizen, then the Kern is a five axis machine. I mean, literally like possibly the most accurate machine in the world.
Speaker: He mentioned all the specifications on camera. I don't recollect them in terms of positional accuracy and tolerancing, but everything is just taken to a whole other level. The whole machine is hydrostatic, so there's no actual mechanical motion.
Speaker: on it, so you don't have any of that inertial lurch as you either start or change directions. 95 tool holder, but they're all HSK25s. They're like, they are cute. They're tiny. It's cute, yeah.
Speaker: The HSK25s, I think we're from Kern, and they are all Shaubland collet systems that are in the collets are so precise and finicky that you have to order your carbide tooling with an H value tolerancing on the shank of the carbide because the collets have such a limited range. Whoa. Right?
Speaker: That's awesome. What kind of RPM on the spindle? 50. 50 ,000 RPM? That's nuts. It is an older machine, ironically, or not ironically, owned by a former household name in his industry.
Speaker: And so that machine, they've had it for like three or four months, but it hasn't really done much. They're basically tooling up. So that's what's kind of interesting is they are selling watches under their own name, but they are not making all of the parts right now. And they're starting to phase that in as they get equipment and they tool up and so forth.
Speaker: Okay, so they're having parts machined elsewhere, obviously, to ridiculous standards currently, and then they're just trying to pull that in -house for all the benefits involved in that, yeah. Which is a really interesting way to do it, and so yesterday I gave a talk
Speaker: for being sort of for Autodesk, really just like a Sydney meet and greet thing. And we were kind of talking about that as a business strategy. You obviously give up margin for sure. You increase huge amounts of vendor headaches and tolerance. I remember, gosh, remember like whatever, two years ago when you thought about getting, or you did get some part outsourced and they just didn't meet your standards was my recollection. Yep, not even close. Right. So that's, and it's not like you didn't know how to ask for what you wanted.
Speaker: Not to say it can't be done because I've had friends of ours now that can make fantastic parts, but then there's still a lot of benefits to having it in house.
Speaker: We sort of got the brand to be to the point where we do everything, and there's a reason why we do everything. So like now, I almost can't backtrack and start outsourcing some stuff, even if I know it's going to be perfect, because this is the brand, this is the way I like to do it, and this is the way we know how to do it, you know?
Speaker: But you and I both had the benefit of spending years coming up to speed. That's what really impressed me today was that they have gone from not owning a single machine tool to being pretty darn in the know. He was talking about comparing his machine against a YASDA and what some of the functionality was. They haven't even bought their cam package yet.
Speaker: like, uh, tooling up in kind of a opposite manner, but in a way that I still think is really cool because they're still running their business. Um, whether it's, I think they're watched or repaired or also the new, you know, the kind of the new Co, you know, original bait pieces.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean it's gonna take them some certainly a lot of learning time to be proficient and be able to make you know Excellent parts just because as you and I know like to be a machinist is not an overnight endeavor But it obviously sounds like they're taking the time to learn everything They need to know both about specs and then once machining and cam comes into play they're gonna learn that too So I don't have any worries for them Okay, okay last crazy thing about that shop
Speaker: thread mill. We had to put it under a 50x mittutoyu vision system to look at the thread mill because it was 0 .5 millimeters in diameter. I got to calculate that. Where's my imperializer?
Speaker: I don't have one yet. I got to buy one. That's 25 ,000. Yeah, right. Yeah, 19 .6. That's tiny. I use a 20 ,000 mill, and I can barely see it. But to use a 20 ,000 thread mill means that the shank has to be like half that at least if not more. Well, yeah. If you think about it, there's no pitch diameter offset to those threads. Yeah. Because that was my other question. OK, so you make a screw on the citizen, and the screw is so small,
Speaker: You could fit 3 ,000 of them in your hand, right? How do you see it? And that's where he sort of just said, you see it by the checking the fit against the thread you're making. They are making everything so you can check it. But I know I had the laugh because that's the exact problem that you're getting away from now with going to standardized thread gauges. Right. Yeah, I'd imagine thread gauging
Speaker: I don't even know, a zero 80 screw or whatever they're making. I feel like you could just deform the thread by checking it with a thread gauge. Yeah. And you know how they count all those tiny parts sometimes, like in the bigger production Swiss places? Weight. By weight. Yeah. Like microgram scales. And they're like, yeah, that's either 10 ,000 or 10 ,050. And we're going to call it good enough.
Speaker: Did you see on the citizens how they can do the built -in parts catcher that dispenses them into interval bins? No, I didn't, but I saw our buddy Danny Rudolph made his own version of that. Sweet. No, I haven't. Is that a new citizen thing?
Speaker: It was on there as I'm sure it wasn't after market. You just in the controller say every 10 parts or 200 parts rotate the carousel and it starts dispensing them into a new parts catching bin and that lets you batch up your parts in terms of QC work.
Speaker: Right, because if you make 10 ,000 parts, you don't know the first or the last if they're all caught in the same bin. We noticed that, too, with some of our parts. Luckily, one bar only holds maybe 100 parts. But still, in that run, there could be some wear, some thermal growth, some things like that. So they need to be checked, sort of often if you're trying to hold silly tolerances.
Speaker: So the answer here is that you should put a turret on your turret. So in the second little turret will hold multiple pill bottles on the big turret. Yeah. I like it like a, like a revolver, you know, six bullets and you can each, I can aim each one, have a little macro count up each one. Yeah.
Speaker: to anything's possible. It was it was cool to see I actually I don't know what we were doing. Oh, this morning, just like hanging out relaxing. I caught the most of your video on introducing Angelo and kind of talking about new improvements in the shop. Yeah. How'd you like that video?
Speaker: Cool. Um, it was cool to see him. What was it that I had? I had to laugh about the bathroom improvements. Um, and just, yeah, it's, it's exciting because I think you're getting settled in, but I think that's kind of the next question is what's the next move there. Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, that, that video kind of became a catch -all for footage we've been filming for the past like two months. Um,
Speaker: which is great, and then Aaron put it together in a way, and I watched it, and I'm like, that was fun. Like, I liked watching that video. Good job. That's cool. Yeah. The next move, I don't know. Like, I think I was telling you last week about the shop that we looked at, the really big one. Yeah, yeah. And you threw up the video on it, which was awesome to watch. Oh, my God. Oh, so nice. So, like, I'm honestly going back and forth in my head, like, well,
Speaker: It is too big, but should we do it anyway, et cetera, et cetera. And I was kind of sad last night because they said somebody else signed on it. And I'm like, oh.
Speaker: Like I'm not ready to sign today, maybe in a few months, but even still I'm like, oh man, like that kind of makes me sad. Right. And then like if he said the deal might still fall through, like if they don't get a deposit check or something, but so then I'm like, okay, well, if, if it does fall through, then what are we going to do? You know, are we going to jump on it or we it's not over. I don't know. It's just a lot to think about, but, um,
Speaker: Yeah, it would, it would be an amazing space if too big, but still usable. Do you have you had any leads or thoughts on like three to five K spaces?
Speaker: Uh, nothing, nothing nice. There's a bunch of like really gross hole in the wall places, um, that are often farther away than even here. I'm getting, I'm getting pickier the longer I wait. And after seeing that one, which was a hundred percent perfect, except probably two times too big or at least one and a half times too big. Um, other than that, like.
Speaker: I think I told you, if it was 6 ,000 square feet, I would have signed for it already. I'd just do it. But it's 11 ,600. And it's like, oh, man, that's a lot. Yeah. And that's what I think we were like, I don't know if we were talking about this on WhatsApp later or what. But that's the problem with real estate is that it's always look at the downside risk, which is it's very difficult to
Speaker: get out of a real estate lease if you just need to right size your space and you don't want to break a lease and pay penalties or get stuck with issues there and then have to also find a new space. Meanwhile, also pay rigging costs because you're not going to move into that space and not get more machinery at some point. Of course. More stuff to move out and deal with.
Speaker: It's something I've always kept in my mind about when you analyze the situation is kind of what's a realistic downside and how does that affect the outcome?
Speaker: Because I would have said, holy cow, like 6 ,000 feet. Even if it's a little bit of a stretch, you're there, bud. But man, 11. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think they can take one of the offices down, which would take it down to about 10 and a bit. So that might take $800 a month off the price. But still, it's
Speaker: The downside is the cost per month, which is a lot more than we're paying now, and then also the unused space. Is it waste? Is it unnecessary to have it and not fill it up? In your case, you're buying the building, you're investing into it, so you can justify it. But as a lease, if you're not using it, you'd just pay some money away.
Speaker: No, it's just like you and I shun things like extra inventory because it costs money to store it and you've got to deal with it, but it's the same thing there. It is the same thing. It's unused space, just like unused inventory. Even if we grew to our wildest dreams, I still don't think we'd fill it up in a year or two. It's a lot of space. Right.
Speaker: Yeah. But I don't know if it came available again, I'd still think hard about it. Yeah. Gosh, the location thing is what makes that so teasing. And then I was driving home last night, I drove by it and then I looked at all the other businesses nearby and I'm like, nothing else is going to come up. Like, but I don't know, maybe that's just the fear of loss thing, you know? Who told you somebody may have signed on it? Your broker?
Speaker: my real estate guy. Ask him the nature of the business. If it's a major warehousing people, they probably want the whole thing. But who knows, John? Maybe it's another person in your shoes that's just like, gosh, we didn't need all of it, but it was too good to pass up and maybe you can go in on a subdivide.
Speaker: Maybe it's worth asking about for sure. I was trying to think of the layout of the place and I don't know if it could be subdivided, but maybe that's me talking outside my skillset. Like maybe I just don't know. Yeah. Broach the conversation. It doesn't, you know, you don't get what you want to ask for at least. Yeah. Or find out, find out where they're coming out of. Cause maybe that's a space that's going to be available. That's a good point too, which would be smaller. Well, depending on the situation. Right. Right.
Speaker: interesting. I will do that because nobody goes from 1 ,000 square feet to 11. Nobody. Yeah. So should I reach out to the, what do you call it, the listing agent directly or go through my real estate broker? Yeah, it depends. You want to generally go through the person you have the relationship with, but
Speaker: there are times where the person you have a relationship with, that person is not necessarily that savvy or they don't spend time on it. So you got to make that call. Yeah. I mean, sometimes just direct answers are easier than passing through a, you know, not to bypass the system, but just to get like a quick and dirty, uh,
Speaker: Community agent. So I met the listing agent, super nice guy. It's one of those people like, have I met you before? I feel like I know you. I just thought all Canadians were like that. Yeah, maybe. All right. So you're in Australia. What else is on the plan for you? You're there for like two weeks, right?
Speaker: Oh, you know, it's funny sort of. It's been awesome. We we got here. We did like all the touristy stuff, saw the opera house, went to the beaches, took a serving lesson. Nice. It's been like totally detached from.
Speaker: Normal life which is which is really cool like it is is it is it summer there? How does that work? Yeah? Well, it's opposite seasons, but we're in So let's see we're moving from summer to winter right now But it's normal like it's 23 24 degrees. It's like 70 to 80 degrees outside. It's Fahrenheit, right? Okay
Speaker: Yeah, that's what LA was like when I was there last month. It's just nice. Yeah. It was spectacular. Today, we literally just did the Sydney. They call it the bridge climb, where you climb up the bridge that goes over the Sydney Harbor. It was just spectacular weather.
Speaker: And then tomorrow we leave, we go up to Cairns in the north, so just another city. And you're going to have the chance to meet Clickspring, which I'm super excited about. And we may just grab a launcher. I don't know, maybe I'll get to see a shop. But then doing some like rainforest jungle, whatever type stuff.
Speaker: And then the last few days, we're going to go kind of like out of canned, but around their area to the Great Barrier Reef, which I'm super excited for. Are you going diving or just boating? I hope so.
Speaker: I have my open water license, Yvonne does not, but most of the time we've seen stuff before like this elsewhere, you could do like resort dives where it's only shallow like 20, 30 feet diving. So we'll go with the flow, but I would absolutely love to if I can. Have you daven, dived daven before? Yeah, no, I have my open water license and I've done it, but it's been, gosh, it's been years.
Speaker: Yeah, it's something I've never done, but I've always, I think I would love it. I'd always wanted to try. Yeah, it is very cool and tranquil and yeah, the ocean's a cool place actually. Yeah. The great unknown. That's awesome.
Speaker: Yeah, but it's good. It's funny. I posted a few pictures on the way out here, but then I was like, you know what? You don't get too many chances in life to actually just take a break from it all. So literally put the phone away and haven't been really posting or checking social media and emails and all that. And you know what? It's pretty nice.
Speaker: Yeah. And I'm sure you get back to our WhatsApp chat and there's like 600 new messages from all of us who are still working away. But then you kind of reach that, like say the Zen where you're like, you know, it's like that fear in life of like missing out. And then you kind of get over it because it'll be okay. The world. Right. Right.
Speaker: Amazing. The only question that I think I asked on WhatsApp to all the guys about you was your epoxy painted floors, you put the sandy grit in them, right? Yeah, they didn't call it. Well, so there's two different things. There's flaking and there's the non -slip abrasive. Yeah. Okay. And so we did both. Okay. My question is how are the floors to mop if they're gritty?
Speaker: I'm sure it would be easier if they weren't, but I would never, ever, ever not have the grip in there. It's not safe. It's not safe in my opinion. Like Phil did shiny painted floors, Amish did, I did, all the minor kind of pitted, so it's not glass smooth. It seems like you're the only one that has the grit in it. And we're all like, yeah, it does get slippery, but you just got to be careful. Is that dangerous? I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah, it's different. I mean, it's one thing when it's a little bit slippery, but if you have certain like whey oils or WD -40, it is, and I'm not trying to over dramatize it, it's like an ice skating rink. It's insane.
Speaker: But I don't know, I guess you're right. I mean, I've walked around some shops that didn't have it. And it wasn't like it was a problem in most situations. And also, you know, you shouldn't have oil on your floor. Right. So there's that. But stuff happens, you know, we've had coolant leaks and everything. And I think Barry skidded a couple of times. No, no, no damage. But
Speaker: Yeah, it's a concern for sure. I was just thinking, if we get a new shop and the floors have to be painted, I'm thinking ahead to what I would want to specify. I think more and more about people that aren't. For instance, Julia and I went over to another shop when we were filming. You take for granted the things that machinists know, that non -machinists don't know, just like where to stand if a lathe is throwing chips or little things like that.
Speaker: the more you have people in your shop that aren't machinists or even folks that have been around manufacturing environments, the more
Speaker: little things help because you don't want somebody to fall and hurt themselves. You want them to fall and grab something expensive on their way down. I didn't really see that. I don't think there was any cost difference to be honest in adding because it's effectively just sand. It doesn't look as nice, I guess, but it's still quite easy to clean. Yeah. And they still mop fine. Yeah, totally fine. Yeah. All right. Good to know.
Speaker: Yeah. Cool. What are you up to this week? Digging through a giant box, well, six boxes actually, of new material, which came in ahead of schedule, which was awesome. That's a first. Yeah. So we're ordering, I think we ordered almost 400 knives worth of everything, blades, handles, clips. Nice. And we still have some inventory, which means we're ahead of schedule. We're not waiting for stuff. We have a little bit of excess inventory.
Speaker: Actually something we looked at last week a lot was lapping machines to buy our own lapping machine because currently the company that's doing it is doing a horrible job and they're scratching all the parts and not happy with that at all. So you haven't double disc ground, but that's not good enough finish? Exactly. So we have Nifty Bar who I like. They do the double disc grinding.
Speaker: But it leaves a swirly finish that has some topography to it, some deeper gouges. So they double disk it to 127, and then they outsource it to a lapping company to lap it down to 125. So they're taking one thou per side. And it's supposed to get a mirror finish. And we've had parts come back from them.
Speaker: with basically a mirror finish and uh and then now we're getting parts that are gray and chalky it's like you like you blasted it with some sort of super fine powder and they're smooth but they're you know it's not a mirror it's not even shiny and it because of that surface it scratches really easily and they're stacking parts on top of each other and they're
Speaker: And they come back and there's just scratches and gouges all over the place. So it's like, why are we paying for this? So a lapping machine is not cheap. Like a lap master in the right size would be about $15 ,000, $20 ,000. Like we're spending about $1 ,000.
Speaker: It's not that crazy. We're spending about $1 ,000 a month right now just on lapping. So I mean, that would have a 20 month ROI if you look at it directly, plus our time involved. That's a payback. OK, sure. Yeah, ROI is just return on like just as a so.
Speaker: ROI in that case would be $12 ,000 a year you're saving against a $20 ,000 investment. So that's still a phenomenal return on investment. Okay. Yeah. That's a good way to look at it. Keep in mind, the thousand dollars we're now saving goes into our time to operate the machine. Right. Right. And the machine depreciates or needs maintenance and so forth, but still. So we get the quality in house. Right. And it fits with your value chain stack of bringing stuff in house and
Speaker: And it's the last step of the process before manufacturing, and even afterwards. So we lap the parts. They're shiny. They go right in the machine. They stay shiny because we know how to hold them. And then Eric does a little bit of polishing or surface grinding, et cetera, afterwards, which we can use the lapping machine for. So after heat treating the blades, instead of him spending a lot of time surface grinding, we can throw them back in the lapping machine because they just need to be polished again after heat treating some scuffs and things like that.
Speaker: So, there are a lot of benefits and we're seriously thinking about doing that. Now, we have enough material to last us for a few months, but we're probably less than a month away from ordering the next batch based on the current time schedule. So, I'm like, well, at what point do we just dig in and get our own machine?
Speaker: I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense. I think that's awesome. What I'm sitting here chuckling about is that I have the same sort of conversation with my wife and she'll literally say, I don't understand how you now need a machine that I have never ever even heard of before.
Speaker: Like we've talked about tumblers, we've talked about EDMs, we've talked about five axis and Swiss and the list goes on, but all of a sudden now it's a lap. And it's not, I mean, I know you lapped your parts. It's not like a secret, but it's just funny. You're right. No, I have the same conversations with my wife. I'll get, I'll be all excited about something new. Well, new to her cause I'm just telling her for the first time, but I've known about this for six years and we already use this service, but you haven't told me. Right, right, right. It's funny.
Speaker: That's awesome. Yeah, so we'll see if that becomes a reality. It's certainly fun and interesting. We had a sales rep come by last week and he was here for over an hour and really schooled us a lot of information and misinformation from the internet that I was trying to understand in my binge the night before. I follow the Black Masters guys on Instagram. They post some pretty cool stuff.
Speaker: Oh, I got to do that. I don't think I've done that yet. I watched a lot of YouTube content, but I haven't seen anything on Instagram. I'll do that. Um, yeah. So lap master makes like a $20 ,000 machine. And this other company Angus makes an $80 ,000 machine. And I'm like, I just, I don't know if it's that much better. Like I'm all for quality, but that's like four times better. Well, it's like what you said. I've watched, um, like at this, they wouldn't let me film this, but at the Sarah factory watching them a lap in,
Speaker: the faces of your indicators or your micrometers. So obviously, micrometer faces have to be hard and accurate. Yeah, okay. The little carbide disks. Right. And so they have a pretty novel way of lapping those. And so again, they're doing that
Speaker: you know, incredibly high volumes relative to the insane amount of accuracy. Obviously, you can't pick up a stare at, you know, a micrometer and look and have there be light between the two. That would be, you know, fail. And so when you look at it, lapping machines, you know, it's not that they're easy to do, but they're not that complicated either.
Speaker: It's a recipe like anything else. I've thought about that too. If we do it, it needs to be a process. It needs to be run by several different people, not just by one expert in the shop. You make the recipe, you follow it, and you can make great parts. There's a thickness tolerance and then a finish quality. Then I would need a roughness gauge.
Speaker: Profilometer, yes, because I want one bad, but also because I need it because we're polishing parts now. Yeah, so we This was insane, but we had somebody send us that really old mid to toy surf test that I posted on Instagram and I forget what the backstory was, but I think it was like They I don't know what it was, but they weren't sure it was working or they didn't know much about it and they're just like we'll just send it to you and
Speaker: And so I plugged it in and tried to get it figured out. And they're not the easiest thing, what to do a video on it, because they're not the easiest thing to like. It's not totally obvious and intuitive, but it comes with, and I guess most should come with a, what do you call it, like a roughness gauge, like a master to use it to calibrate. It's at a known RA. So I ran it across that, and it was within like one RA.
Speaker: Like it's 127 calibration sample and it came out on the first try 126, which I was like, okay, that's really cool. So then I just started measuring the surface roughness of all these parts around my office. And then I was like, I need to go home.
Speaker: What's the smoothest thing you measured? Cause one 27 is really high. It is quite rough. Yeah. No, I mean, I grabbed, um, the first thing I grabbed, if I'm being honest, was just a, um, an unused pad of note paper. And it was like four or something stupid low for paper. I think so. Yeah. I was surprised. Or maybe I didn't do it right. Uh, or maybe I grabbed, maybe I grabbed something else. Um, I got a couple of things pretty low though. Nice.
Speaker: Yep, that's on my list at some point to get one of those. And they have fancier ones that actually like show you a graph of the topography, which could be really cool too. You can even put a profilometer head on a CMM. I've seen that like bloom makes that
Speaker: even for your machine. Oh, really? For the CNC mill. Oh, that's, oh my gosh. And it's like, like wireless to, you know, back to your computer kind of thing. No, but like you can get a brand new surf test for two or three grand, which again, like this adds up, but it's not that insane. Exactly. And I've seen them on eBay for about 1200 bucks. Um, not brand new, but, but not ancient like yours, um, with the graph and everything. So, you know, that might be an option.
Speaker: Did I tell you I got those Sera blocks in? No. What is that? The Midgetoyo ceramic gauge blocks. Oh.
Speaker: Nice. So I bought two of them just because we're doing a revamped process on our fixture plate QC process. And I just, it's kind of funny. It was a little bit of a splurge, but they were, the Sarah blocks are not that expensive if you're just buying them individually. And it makes everyone treat them special and it makes them discrete blocks only used here versus getting them mixed up with regular gauge blocks.
Speaker: And I just wanted them because they're really cool. So they We've got to show this on video when I get back they ring together with an insane Amount of force and that's probably just because they're good quality. I bet you steal of that quality would do it as well But I I rung if that's the right word to one inch blocks together
Speaker: So I'm holding the one inch, I'm holding one of the blocks flat and the other block is rung against it. So it's effectively a one wide by two inch long block, but it's two blocks that are rung together. And I just start stacking stuff on the over half block and it got uncomfortable to hold. Whoa. It was insane. Like one inch is a pretty big, big block.
Speaker: Oh, gauge block. Yeah, yeah, I guess it's not the smallest one. It's squared. Yeah, they were like, that's a good amount of surface area. It's bucks or something. Which for me is, is super cheap, given that you're getting this insane quality tool. So yeah, I mean, to buy a whole set of that would be thousands, but you don't need that. Yep. All right. Awesome.
Speaker: So what's the plan for next week? Are you still there? Are you home yet? No, I think we head home Wednesday. So if it's still good with you, we'll try to do this Tuesday night. Sounds good. Thanks, bud. Crush it. We do. Take care. Enjoy your vacation. Bye.
