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Learning Lessons & Making Parts
204 Plays5 years ago
"Making parts and growing a business are very similar, just on different time frames." This week is all about learning the sometimes harsh reality of running a business like this. Admitting to yourself that a mistake has been made and what you can do as a person and business owner to correct that. The boys dive into Fusion 360 and all about colletizer.com
Here are the links for this weeks reference material:
Leadership book: https://amzn.to/30RZ9bG
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to CNC and Business Growth
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining, Episode 175. My name is John Grimsmo. My name is John Saunders. This podcast talks about CNC machines and the businesses that John and I have built running those machines and making our products, which I will say we absolutely love.
Passion for CNC and Business Building
00:00:18
Speaker
I don't know what we love more, running machines or trying to build the business around them. Actually, do you want to try to make more?
00:00:24
Speaker
It's honestly both and depends on my mood for the day, which I like more. Is that the honest answer? Yep. I do like both. I like the aspects of business. I think I have more fun doing machining, but there's, I don't know, I really like both. If it were one or the other, I would not be satisfied.
00:00:45
Speaker
Okay, so that's totally fair. I didn't, I guess, mean it in such an extreme one or the other, but I love the outcome. I love the reward of things that are well done on the business front, and I think I can appreciate that. It's very satisfying in the sense of building something
00:01:03
Speaker
at that level, but when it comes to the hard work, grind, input, dive in, I would much rather spend six hours trying to figure out why the Swarf toolpath isn't doing what I want than I would like going through ERP proposals. You know what the difference is, is business is bigger and long-term, whereas making something is very tangible short-term. You physically hold it in your hand, you see the chips come off, it's cause and effect, whereas business is cause and effect, but over months.
Machining Lessons as Mental Assets
00:01:33
Speaker
That's true. It's a much more long tail endeavor. That's actually a very good point. But they are similar. They're very similar. They're just different time perspectives. But with machining, you're still building. We don't make parts in a vacuum. Every time you learn, like I wanted to ask about those
00:01:55
Speaker
clamps that you've been making on Instagram because the takeaways from that, the tooling, the speeds and feeds, the work holding, the cam, the setups, obviously will be applying that. It's building an asset in your head. Yep, you're absolutely right. It takes a lot of time, especially up front, wrapping my head around it. And as you know, for the past few weeks and months, I've been not worried, but I've been whatever the word is.
00:02:23
Speaker
anticipating, you know, tabbing operations and holding parts and vibration and things like that. Now I'm finally at the point where I'm just jumping in both feet first after thinking about it so much and, and, and proving and learning and finalizing those skills at this moment in time. And it's fantastic. It's like building blocks for the future. And already I'm feeling, I'm feeling a lot more confident with the Kern and with five axis and
00:02:51
Speaker
with the fusion's version of 5-axis and work plane origins and all that stuff. Tool orientations, I mean. And yeah, I can just, I'm much more comfortable to jump in and make something and it's fantastic.
Complexities of Making Clamps
00:03:05
Speaker
Awesome. How complicated are those clamps from a cam standpoint? There's 30 ops. I'm not counting the chamfers and drills. I mean, are you doing- Yeah, including the chamfers and drills. Yeah.
00:03:21
Speaker
They're not that complicated, but especially with 5-axis, you got to be a bit gentler. You got to do this side first and then that side. There's a lot of duplicating opposite toolpaths, some roughing, some finishing, some adaptive, some finish contours. It's funny that it's such a simple clamp that looks like it's a piece of metal with two holes in it. It has 20 or 30 ops, but experience tells me that that's what it needs.
00:03:51
Speaker
and makes them really nice too. And there's two takeaways that you just mentioned that blew my mind, both in how much I love them, like I wanted to tangibly hug them, but also that I had never really heard them espoused or as selling points when I've been at trade shows or machine demos with five axis. Number one is the ability to what I call work apart. It's not like three axis where you kind of have to do everything in one orientation in that setup.
00:04:19
Speaker
because you really don't want to bring back a part to the same orientation if you're moving it through fixtures or soft shawls. So the ability to, like you said, do a little bit of roughing here, do a little bit of roughing there, work the part is amazing. And then the second thing is that once that clamp is done, all you have to do to make 20, 30, a hundred is hit go again. I know that's the coolest.
00:04:42
Speaker
Like I remember the first Johnny five wrist, one of the first parts I made, it was simple. I think it was all just orientation, maybe one swarf chamfer. And I screwed it up at the very, very, very end, which normally would have been devastating. And I didn't care. I grabbed a new piece of material and just ran, reran the part up to that point while I did something else. But the clamps look great, dude.
00:05:06
Speaker
Yeah, and they turned out great. I'm really happy. The bottom side where the tabs are, are gross, as I hope they wouldn't be. But you know, they're chattery is the wrong word, but they're, they're gross. But that's okay. That's fine.
00:05:23
Speaker
And especially for what it is, it's a clamp. We're going to grind the tabs off anyway. We're going to smooth out the contour just on the grinder and it's literally no big deal.
3D Printing in Machining Setups
00:05:31
Speaker
And then for any critical parts, like if you were to ship this to a customer, as we've talked about before, you'd put a clamp on it or you'd flip it over and put it in soft jaws and you'd finish that surface well, like these are all possibilities. But the fact that you can get 98% of the work done in one op is freaking incredible.
00:05:49
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I commend you for not over Grimsmowing the tabs. It's just an internal production fixture. Good job. Yeah, and I had to wrap my head around that because I wanted it to be perfect and I wanted to come off and the contours are perfect, but just these little tiny tabs are there. It turns out the contours are not perfect because there's just a lot of rubbing and
00:06:12
Speaker
Vibration and stuff whatever and I'll learn I'll get better. I'm sure there's many different ways to do this You could you could tripod the three tabs to make it more rigid. I want to play with that someday even just for fun and But yeah, who cares move on, you know, I'm at that point there's there's a lot of great parts to make and as you said last week one at a time and learn lessons along the way each time and that's what's fun about this and
00:06:37
Speaker
We had to make four five-axis parts yesterday that were not likely to be repeated, but that kind of similar thing like fixtures. I actually did care about the tab quality. Now, I cheated and just did an op, final op where it was a prismatic part that had a square face, so I could just hold it in the vice and deck it off. No big deal. That was the right workflow in that situation.
00:07:02
Speaker
So what occurred to me was we just filmed this video that it should come out in a few weeks called 3D printing in a machine shop. And it is chocked full of legitimate uses of a 3D printer. Yes. We threw in your DIY Schaller bins that are stackable. So thank you for that.
00:07:22
Speaker
But it's an awesome video. We got a couple of collaborators that threw in some really good content as well to it. One of the things I didn't include in it, I might have to go add it on, is take your fixture clamp. We'll make sure the Instagram link's in the description of the podcast, but it's not a part that would be easily held in a vice for the final op.
00:07:44
Speaker
Before you and I had talked about mechanically clamping it, if you had such features or even potting it with hot glue, both of which are decent outcomes. A third option that's in the similar vein that I don't think I've seen or mentioned is insanely awesome for something like these clamps. 3D print a quick clamshell fixture. It can have a hex relief on the backside so that it just takes a cap screw and a nut.
00:08:11
Speaker
And 3D printing takes a few minutes, but no time involved in your part. These clamps aren't high volume. So yes, the machine will stop. You'll go in there. You'll add a left and a right 3D printed clamshell clamp that will arrest
Efficiency of 3D Printed Fixtures
00:08:24
Speaker
the part. It'll hold the part. You can then come in and properly machine those tabs away.
00:08:28
Speaker
Love it. And I was just thinking, imagine if they had the Carve Smart Dovetail and you had the setup to put Carve Smart Jaws on there. That would make them pop right in, no problem. We wouldn't have to worry about locating. It would work great. What are you talking about? Carve Smart? Oh, yeah. For sure, the dovetail. Yeah, 3D print that feature into the dovetail into the soft jaws. No, no, no. We're not talking about the same thing. Well, I think we are.
00:08:58
Speaker
Anyway, go. When your part was just tabbed off, it was still connected by tabs to the top of your material. Okay. If you have a bridge clamp that bridges between the remaining stock below, oh, I see. Well, maybe you could actually have an interface with the fifth axis dovetail, but then also pinch the part at the top.
00:09:25
Speaker
Am I making sense? Yeah, I think so. Think if you just walk up to so a tabbed part, you know, you break it off by bending it back and forth. Think about if you if you walked up to it with your left hand and your right hand and you just pinched the part holding on to both the part and the material below it. That's all I'm trying to do with a 3d printed clamp.
00:09:44
Speaker
without moving the part whatsoever, like keeping it in situation? Absolutely. Easy to do. Just do a Boolean subtract or combine infusion. That gets you your net shape in a 3D printed part. Split it. And then when you print it, just add a hex thing so that it will squeeze that thing together. Doesn't matter what the shape is. It's 3D printed. So you haven't broken it off the tabs yet? Exactly. So you've put a captured thing around the part, and then what?
00:10:12
Speaker
So if you are holding it, it's basically a different form of hot glue. So when your tab, before you flex your tabs and bend it off, break the part off or snap it off, if you take hot glue and put hot glue around the finished machine area, so not where the tabs are basically, then that will hold it in place. Now hot glue isn't as mechanically rigid as a proper machine fixture or printed fixture. So that's all it is.
00:10:38
Speaker
Surrogate for hot glue. But how do you attach the 3D print to the stock remaining or the vice or whatever? Let me... John Grimsmo Instagram. This is like the joys of the radio. Okay, so when you... Oh, is it on? What channel is it on? It's not on your John Grimsmo knives? It was a story. Oh, it's a story. I love stories for that exact reason.
00:11:06
Speaker
Uh, you would have, it would, I'm calling it a bridge clamp, but basically the bottom part of the clamp would, would clamp around the remaining stock that's held in the vice, or you could even extend it down to the little dovetails on the fifth axis. And then the top part would just squeeze the part together from each side.
00:11:25
Speaker
But point being, I get your point calling it a bridge clamp. It's something you're adding to the fixture that holds everything rigid so you can zip those tabs off, and it's rigid enough. I wonder if a 3D printer would be rigid enough for that.
00:11:37
Speaker
Yes. Oh, sorry. Yes. You're nailing it. Is it rigid enough? I don't know. I don't know. If you stayed a one or two thou off, I bet you you would get a much cleaner look and it wouldn't be putting the radial pressure on the whole part. Right. Where I was going with the Carbsmart jaws is like, you know, in an orange vice, they have the Carbsmart
00:11:59
Speaker
dovetail, so you can put soft jaws on real quick and dirty. I don't do a lot of soft jaw work, but part of me wants a vice on the Kern that has Carbsmart on it that I could just throw soft jaws on. And they could be aluminum soft jaws. I could flip this tabbed part over, blast it into the soft jaws, and zip the end off. Or I could 3D print Carbsmart dovetail jaws that would be super easy, and then I wouldn't have to worry about machining them.
00:12:28
Speaker
What do you think of that? Yeah, so that's a good idea. We have done that. There's a bunch of good examples of that in the video that we're going to release. The thing I don't love about that is it's a tremendous amount of print material and time. So if you really want to build out that workflow, I would consider just printing a little insert that sits in a smaller amount of 3D printed material that sits inside. Like you could make a set of soft jaws that have a little
00:12:55
Speaker
relief area and then just drop it in, which is basically you're only using the 3D printed part to locate the part. You're still in using the clamping nature of a clamp to hold it. Hmm.
00:13:10
Speaker
I'll have to crunch on that as situations come up. I'll keep that in mind for sure.
Five-Axis Machining Techniques
00:13:16
Speaker
Nice. Fun. Awesome. Over the weekend, I had a great three-hour chat with Phil. We did a screen share and we recorded it about going through programming and five-axis workflows. We took this clamp that I'm making and he went through it and how he would program it and design it.
00:13:38
Speaker
It was different enough from the way that I did it that it was very fascinating. And then we took the saga pocket clip, which is a complicated, you know, Nakamura operation right now. And I'm like, I want a blanket on the Nakamura, and I want to put dovetails on it. And I want to put on the current and let the current do all of the milling.
00:13:54
Speaker
And he was like, Oh, this will be a fun challenge. So we theorize with lots of different ways of not only holding it, but accessing all the features and then tabbing it off and then adding a bridge clamp or something. So we played with some ideas for how to add a clamp as a second off on the current to keep it in position, located rigidly and be able to zip that tab off perfectly. And it was fun. It was great, great chat with him. Cool.
00:14:22
Speaker
What the heck are you going to put a dovetail on that pen clip? Magic. Gosh, there's no surface area on it. Well, it starts off as round five-eighths titanium. Most of it is removed. In that negative round space, there's plenty of room for dovetail. Interesting.
00:14:43
Speaker
I like it. That's cool. But tabbing it off and reaching all the access is going to be the tricky parts. And of course, I want it to come off current perfect. So no witness marks, no tab marks, whatever, whatsoever. So creating a very rigid bridge clamp with maybe an ID expansion clamp and a finger tab that kind of holds down the tip will keep it still and then will let us tickle that last tab off. And that I want it to be perfect.
00:15:12
Speaker
But you're going to have two different fixturing setups where you want there to be no witness or blend lines? Ideally on the same fixture. So it's dovetailed, it machines 90% away, leaves the tabs, and then something else is added to that fixture, as you taught me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In such a rigid way that it has not moved whatsoever, and then leaves access to just that little tab part. And then we can set that off, and it should be 90% perfect, I think, theoretically.
00:15:43
Speaker
That's the word, theoretically. Just remembering when we toured K1, the current job shop, and they talked about how they, well, I don't know if this is hard, fast rule, but I mean, I think all the work they do seems to be pretty darn precise.
00:15:59
Speaker
and they only make fixtures on the machine that's going to run the part, period. So I would suspect the right way to build a sustainable process is to not think and hope and use theory, but rather practice to say,
00:16:15
Speaker
I mean, just like even a current, if you move between two setups, it's not going to be the same within 50 millions or a tenth or three. Yeah, it's just not. It's very much to do with the style of setup, the locating features that you've put into it, the accuracy of those features, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:16:33
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm jazzed to do that. I'll probably be tackling that in the next few weeks. Have you seen the Fusion part alignment inspection probing process? No, I've heard whispers about it, but that's all I know. Oh my God.
00:16:51
Speaker
We used it and it was like, I'm done. This is it. This is unbelievable. Yeah, that generative truck thing, we needed to finish it.
Fusion 360's Impact on Accuracy
00:17:03
Speaker
We'd totally be honest. We kind of struggled with that workflow of bolting on material, machining, locating datums, and then relying on it. And we learned some lessons in there. I think 98% of the mistakes are on us, not on the workflow. It's still a good workflow.
00:17:20
Speaker
basically either to double check or just to compensate perfectly. What we were able to do is take this super organic shape with no square faces of any sorts. We had it secured. So think about it. If you had a precarious fixture, a 3D printed fixture, where you could hold the part, but you didn't know how to orient it or align it. And then in Fusion, we picked 10 or 15 different points on the part, ran that code. It created a dprint file.
00:17:48
Speaker
which we then copied back off the host control, imported it into Fusion. It sounds complicated. It actually worked easy and seamlessly for us. I've heard some other folks have had trouble, and I don't know how much this thing is in beta versus, quote, unquote, being done.
00:18:04
Speaker
And it's a little bit nerve wracking because basically you're doing a three axis shift of your WCS, but fusion handles it behind the scenes. And we did a test chamfer on a edge that was pretty far outside the recording system, which we kind of betray or show how well it had done it.
Fixturing Challenges and Solutions
00:18:23
Speaker
Nailed it.
00:18:25
Speaker
So maybe, um, now this required a back and forth, which maybe that could get automated down the road. Cause in theory, what you have to, well, I wouldn't necessarily work well for unattended production, but some maybe, maybe that will, uh, become a feedback loop system where you could have the probe come in, probe the pen clip, make minor adjustments, possibly even throw an alarm if it's out by more than a tolerance amount.
00:18:49
Speaker
and then compensate to let the Kern's accuracy and the probe's accuracy compensate for any fixture error. I think I could do that now with the Hydinine probing cycles. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because you can do five-axis probing cycles, and you can align a bore. There will already be a bore on the part. Say that's sticking up to the sky, but it's cocked by two degrees.
00:19:16
Speaker
two axes or whatever. I think the current should be able to figure out the straightness of that. Now here's a question for that. So if if I have one fixed work coordinate system that's like at the base of the palette and standard for every palette and everything's just always that when you probe a feature and it shifts by ever so slightly, do you just use a different work coordinate system like five or something? Not your main one.
00:19:43
Speaker
My understanding is that the main one remains unchanged. Right, which it should. Right. It's a similar thing, I believe, to like when Rob has talked about, he uses a master, I believe either the master gauge or a similar datum
00:19:59
Speaker
across all the pallets, but then you may pick a feature on a part that's two inches up and three inches over that you want to check. You may check that or reset an orientation to that, but it's not overriding. It's not overriding your G54. I know that's not what Heidenhine uses, but- Yeah. Yeah. It's just one, two, three on Heidenhine. That's funny.
00:20:23
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense, obviously. So it would just be a secondary work coordinate system that is based on the first one. It starts off as the first one. But once it probes, it writes to the second one, and then the code runs from that second one. Yeah, that's what I figured. It almost invalidates the, everything runs on the same coordinate system, but sometimes you have to be able to probe it to dial it in and center stuff.
00:20:48
Speaker
Right. Exactly. It's kind of like if you, um, when you use a Haas VPS macro, like to just do a probing cycle, you still have to tell the control where the, where to start that cycle. Basically. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Cool. Good.
00:21:08
Speaker
We're super excited to get the clip on the current because right now the Nakamura just made 150 of them over the past few weeks, which is awesome.
Chip Management and Process Shifts
00:21:18
Speaker
But there's so much milling that the milling chips flowing through the Nakamura chip conveyor is causing all kinds of problems. Angelo's been cleaning it out now for a while. And he's like, I don't want to do any more milling in this machine. Not like this.
00:21:34
Speaker
The volume and size of the chips, they miss the chip conveyor, they get around, they clog up. That chip conveyor is not designed for those kind of chips, it's designed for turning chips. And it's a problem. So yeah, putting it on the current, which is absolutely designed for big and small milling chips.
00:21:56
Speaker
40,000 RPMs precise. Oh, yeah. That's a total win. The clip is an object that is roughed and then fine 3D machined. I'm using a 6,000 RPM, lay the live tool with tiny little bearings and gear train to do this. Yeah, let's use the current for that, please. Why are you still going to rough them on the knock?
00:22:25
Speaker
The OD of the clip is turned, is a turned finish. And I want that. That's part of the- You own a turn. Did you not get that memo? But it also comes from bar stock. So instead of machining little slugs, it could be made totally on the current. And maybe I'll consider that, actually. Well, I was thinking about how Dennis has been talking about he does so much workout around. And he does have to op zero a dovetail to do it.
00:22:52
Speaker
And it sounds counterintuitive. And you can get a lot of armchair heroes that tell you you're wrong and argue with you. But the reality is he's got an automated workflow that does that. And funny thing, this is one of those awesome factoid nuggets that I love learning is I guess the world just makes so much more round bar that it's markedly cheaper and more available than square equivalent. So per pound, not playing with weights here. Literally, it's just cheaper.
00:23:20
Speaker
I'm thinking about that pen clip if it were dovetailed and then held in. Oh, man, could you? My brain's. And you can fake. Rob talked about this in his AU class. Workflows and tool paths, they do a really good job at synthetically faking what looks like a turned finished. Absolutely. If he's doing it on a Micron, obviously, your current is a much, much better machine than a Micron. Burn. I will consider that.
00:23:51
Speaker
In this scenario, we buy 42-inch bars of titanium. So something has to cut them, bandsaw them, or turn them and chop them off. And something has to put the dovetail in. And right now, we have a workflow that could do that. Although if I were to start with slugs,
00:24:09
Speaker
You're right. The Kern could do all of that. So I'll talk about it. Ops zero in the knock, put a dovetail tool in the live holder. You could blow out a quick bore if you would just to, because the lathes are good at drilling holes, throw on the two dovetails, parting tool, parts off to a repeated black strip length. That's our plan.
00:24:30
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. That's what we're doing now. Um, and that'll be, that'll be like, take a 23 minute Nakamura operation down to like a four minute operation.
Managing Emergency Collets
00:24:41
Speaker
And we still get that beautiful turn to finish and, uh, get the bore, get the critical tolerances on the bore. Um, but yeah, there's lots of ways to skin the cat, right? Isn't that funny? We came up with a similar result from a completely different approach. I love that.
00:24:59
Speaker
There aren't that many ways to skin a cat. I wouldn't actually know the answer to that, but. I hope nobody knows the answer to that. Yeah. Moving on. Moving on. Hey, I had a moment that frustrated me, but I'm reading that Jocko book you recommended now, Leader. What is it? Oh, the leadership strategy and tactics.
00:25:23
Speaker
Yeah, reading that and remembering the extreme ownership and let's not talk theoretically and use big words. Let's just get down to brass tacks. How do you fix this problem? The problem that happened was we have a set of ER 16 and ER 20, I call them emergency college. They're college that are in a special box and a special drawer and that sets are always to be kept complete.
00:25:48
Speaker
And basically I went to use some and four out of the 15 were missing. So that's frustrating, but we have a great team. Nobody's intentionally doing that thinking, I don't want to care about this. I don't want to respect this system. What's happening is it's not a good system.
00:26:07
Speaker
I talked it out and what made sense was make a better system. So I put a red label on the comment box that says emergency use only. We're gonna put them in a special drawer where we're gonna keep all of our emergency tools. So we always keep a few extra pull studs, a few extra drill indexes. We might add some taps in there. Basically that stuff that you wanna be able to dive into if you need to get something done the same day.
00:26:36
Speaker
And so I put the red label on it and then I pre-printed 25 just off of laser printer labels that say we need to order blank size and then circle one, ER16 or ER20. So, because that's always been the rule of thumb. I don't care if anybody uses those collets at any point in time, but the rule is if you take one out to use it, it immediately gets ordered. That way we're building up extra collets because
00:27:05
Speaker
you know, sometimes you'll take that weird size. Yeah. And like, you'll take it 11, 30 seconds for a tap and you'll tell yourself you're going to pull it out of the machine at the end of the day and put it back, but you don't. And that's okay. What's not okay is when the emergency system doesn't work. The two next steps that I don't think we're going to have to take, but I wanted to share, cause this is my internal thought process. Number one was putting a piece of masking tape around the plastic collet box just increases the mental
00:27:34
Speaker
threshold of saying, I'm doing something that's special. And then the second thing would be having somebody assigned to doing a weekly or periodic inspection of the emergency tools. Again, I don't think we'll have to do the last two things, but I'm very, I'm very, I'm forcing a level of discipline on myself to make sure what we're doing is our better sustainable and scalable systems.
00:28:00
Speaker
I love it. And it's funny, because I was thinking of that last night, because I have just a tiny little foam collet rack. And most of the collets that we have are in use right now in holders in the Swiss in the Maury, in the current, whatever. But we still have a good handful of extra collets. But I don't have a good organized way to say, okay, there's, there's three extra eighth inch collets that always need to stay there. Because sometimes you just use the last one. And I don't have a system in place to make sure that we order new ones.
00:28:31
Speaker
as needed. So I love the emergency call it system. And I will be implementing that too. So that there's this little box, this little area that that stays full, you're allowed to use it, but it gets immediately ordered from McMaster or our local place or whatever.
Setting and Achieving Business Goals
00:28:47
Speaker
And that's fine. That's a college or 20 bucks. And it's we were not allowed to have those problems anymore.
00:28:56
Speaker
Also, Colletizer, C-O-L-L-E-T-I-Z-E-R. This is a guy who, God bless him. He's taking like pretty inexpensive Home Depot, like synthetic corner rounders or synthetic crown molding stuff. I don't know what it's called, PVC maybe. And he paints it and laser cuts it into ER16, ER32. They're cheap. They look nice.
00:29:25
Speaker
We use them in our toolbox drawers. So shout out to Colletizer. I don't know the guy, but he's doing something right. I might just have to buy some of these. He even has Regofix power grip holders. Swiss lathe holders. Interesting. I didn't know you had all this stuff. Yeah, I'm looking at it now. Oh, this is what I've wanted to make for myself, but he's already made it. So I just need to support him. This guy's going to get flooded with good. It better. Everybody go buy it.
00:29:55
Speaker
We all want to make it ourselves we all have shape oko sitting collecting dust or something and we never have the time or the energy to do it and here's a guy who has solved the problem for us why would we do anything ourselves. Yeah right it's even a bar loader call it rack for the call it's in the bar feeder.
00:30:17
Speaker
Ooh, custom too. Sweet. I didn't even see that. Gosh, I think it's been probably two years since I bought some of these. I think he's done a good job of growing. Good for him. All right, everybody send your business to him. On that note, what you just said is...
00:30:34
Speaker
ties into what I mentioned about self-imposed discipline. I was having a good talk with Ryan Wenner over at Seneca about... Actually, I was talking to him about the ER collet problem because it bothered me at a fundamental level of like, I have failed as a leader if I can't put systems in place that work.
00:30:52
Speaker
And it ends up, I think the key part of that is going to be the fact that I'm pre-printing a little tag that anybody can just take. You just reduce the hurdle to fix the problem. Anyway, I couldn't come up with that solution for a day. And it wasn't until I talked about it out loud that what a simple solution came to it.
00:31:14
Speaker
The other thing I'm kind of admitting is there are projects and things that I want to do that I value. Like what you said, there are no such thing as a priority list. There's just a priority. So I'm going to start something called Days Off at the Shop.
00:31:30
Speaker
Look, I'm not going to get cue on this. I might be half a day, maybe a full day, we'll see, but I've already labeled out five projects and shut off your phone, shut off your email, the world will go on. Put on that orange vest if you want to that no one bothers you and go do a project. Go fix something that you know you need to fix or tackle something you need to tackle, period. Sometimes that's the only way that gets it done and getting it done is the goal.
00:32:02
Speaker
I certainly get blinded by the goal or get distracted by shiny objects or whatever. So I'm putting a lot of thought and effort into what the goal is, both tiny goals like daily goals or whatever, but also like, what's the three month goal? What's the year goal? Where are we doing? Why are we doing this? And what are we actually trying to work towards? Otherwise, we just come to work and do our stuff and go home.
00:32:26
Speaker
And it's kind of Groundhog Day every day. But what's the goal that we're working towards? And for me personally right now, it's June 17th. How many days are in June? 30? So I have two weeks from today, from yesterday. I'm going to sell a rask in two weeks.
00:32:43
Speaker
Dude. Really? Yeah. I decided this a few weeks ago, so I've been working towards it. Okay. And so Rask will be ready by the end of June. Singular. Okay. Yeah, that's fine. Good. Yep.
00:32:58
Speaker
So I'm pumped. Even just that goal, whether it's stupidly aggressive and totally impossible or not, I don't care at this point. It is already structuring my workflow and my priority on a daily basis to make sure that I make progress towards that goal. Otherwise, I'll just keep picking away at it with no real timeline in mind, with no real finished date, with no real notable progress. But already, I'm like,
00:33:25
Speaker
banging out a couple things a day, and making actual progress and can I can plan the rest of the system to fit in that two week period. And it's like, Oh, this is how planning works. I get it now. Yeah. Just make sure you don't
00:33:39
Speaker
That's the goal, but it's the some of the some of the steps like I know you John you're not gonna You're you you you accept compromise with extreme hesitation like the tabs on that fixture So I don't want you you know, you're gonna let yourself down if it's not done for good reason So just maybe break it down into well, I don't mean to tell you what to do. You're you've gotten to where you are for a reason but Don't make it so binary I guess is what I'm saying
00:34:06
Speaker
Yeah, and it's tough because there's different ways to interpret this. Either I'll get to the end and I'll be only halfway done and I'll feel super bad about myself, or I'll get to the end and be like, you know what?
Fostering Team Problem-Solving
00:34:17
Speaker
I'm way further than I would have been if I didn't set this goal. Or I completed perfectly and I was like, holy crap, I can actually do what I set out to do.
00:34:25
Speaker
So those are like the three options and they're all wins. Well, let me ask you, let me ask it to you a different way. If there's, if there's whatever it would be, um, 14, 10 work days left in June, if you work eight hours a day and you don't have to do other stuff, which that's a big if, like if you don't have to handle business stuff, is that a reasonable amount of time to design, cam, fixture, machine, et cetera? Cause I honestly have no idea. I have no idea.
00:34:51
Speaker
Yeah. Well, take a stab, but spend five minutes taking a stab at that because that's where I would judge you. If it were my place to judge you, it would be not if you finished a rask by July 1st, but whether you were able to stay focused and make progress that you would be proud of. Because that's what I know. That's what you are proud of is what you have achieved and built, not
00:35:15
Speaker
false deadlines. I mean, because even if you don't make the July 1st, it sounds like August 1st is, is cake walk. You know what I mean? Exactly. Exactly. Yep. But if I said August 1st now, then I'd get lazy in that six weeks between now and then. You are not allowed to use the word lazy as a self-described adjective. Distracted is probably a better word. You have my full permission to use that adjective. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll see. We'll see how it comes. Good.
00:35:46
Speaker
So actually, let me see. Next podcast will be on July 1st. So two weeks from now. No. July 24, June 24th. Two podcasts from now. Two podcasts from now. Yep, yep. We'll be on the first.
00:36:01
Speaker
That was one of the chapters I read this morning and that leadership book from Jocko was the ability to look past insignificant events and allow problems to be solved at the lowest level. Yes. One of those great examples of it's a pretty simple statement to make and a sentence to read and it will mean something different to different people when you're a long year machinist or business journey, but I would say make sure you're keeping that in mind, John.
00:36:32
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. And I am making progress on that almost every day, um, allowing, uh, allowing the guys on the team to make decisions and take on responsibility and, and problem solve on their own so that the decision is happening at the lowest level. Um, so that as he talks about later in the book, uh, don't be the easy button for everybody, which I have been, you know, you got a problem, go to John, he'd love to figure it out.
00:36:58
Speaker
Oh, you mean the cool and pump on the on the tumbler is broken. Okay, let me go find a new one. Let me let me run around to all the stores and and you know, find a better one. I can do that. That's exciting for me. Yeah, no, I'm done with that kind of stuff. I love it. But
00:37:14
Speaker
I got other fish to fry. You guys can handle that. This is not a challenge. This is just time and a little bit of effort and brain energy and anybody in the company can tackle that. And something I love that Jaco says is when you allow other people to make decisions and problem solve and come up with a plan and present it to you,
00:37:34
Speaker
If the plan is 80% as good as what you would have thought to do, let them run with it. If it's 70% as good, give them one pointer, let them run with it. If it's 50% as good, it's usually fairly obvious that there's some problems with it. So you guide them, you coach them, you get it up to 70%, you say run with it.
00:37:53
Speaker
Their plan, they're going to have so much ownership and pride in that plan and they're going to run with it harder than they would have taking direction from you and running your plan. I believe in that wholeheartedly and I struggle with that hard. Yeah. That's the best baby step there is instead of folks proposing or coming to you with problems, state the problem and offer a solution.
00:38:23
Speaker
Yeah, so even I noticed on a daily basis, you know, guys bring me problems. And I was like, well, what would you do? What do you think? What's, what's your thought? I put my ego aside, I put my decision brain, my decision making brain down. And I let them crunch through it, because they've already got ideas, just afraid to share them. So I'm working on that. And it's fun. It's good. It's good to think of this makes me realize what I've been doing this whole time and what I would like to be doing instead.
Machining Rask Handles
00:38:50
Speaker
It's a funny dichotomy or difference from that whole be a surgeon. I love that quote of being able to, like you're going to be a surgeon and your patient is the rask. Yeah. Okay. I love that because you focus, like there's, when you're in that operating room, you don't care about WhatsApp or Instagram or the mail or the coolant pump, right? You have a patient cut open, you are focused on them. On the flip side,
00:39:17
Speaker
Surgeons are like the worst example of a business person because they're the alpha female or male who's smarter than everybody else in the room, more credentialed. Nobody else is involved in the decision making. I'm being extreme, but you know what I mean? I don't want to invert that. I love it when Jared and Ed and Alex and Julie all propose ideas and come up with stuff and you steal the ship some, but it's the exact inverse of what a surgical room is like.
00:39:46
Speaker
Yes, and I do all of those things, for sure. What's on tap for today? Be a surgeon, baby. It's not easy. No.
00:40:05
Speaker
Yeah, so I've got rask handles mounted on the fixture now. The clamps that I made work awesome. I made locating pins, which are simply a variation of our Norseman screw. I just made some screws with a taller head. Those are now my locating pins. Epic.
00:40:21
Speaker
So I threaded them into the fixture. So handles are mounted up. So today is programming the toolpaths to make the inside of the handles, which I literally have from the Norseman or from the Rask three years ago. It's just a matter of transporting them over to the new fixture, making any changes that I want to make, and just changing it for the tools on the current and speeds and feeds and stuff. So that's today. If I can at least put a couple toolpaths into titanium today, then I'm waiting pretty hard.
Training and Focused Work Days
00:40:49
Speaker
Awesome.
00:40:51
Speaker
And then, yeah, whatever else is going on. Sky's running the Swiss, setting up a new job, running his first parts right now. I can hear the coolant from running. Things are going great. Good. Awesome. Yeah, what's on top for you today?
00:41:05
Speaker
We have the, I've got the ST20Y getting set up right now with, to make some fixtures for the VF6s that are now fully commissioned. They are handed off to us. So balls in our court. It's a little bit awkward timing because we're in training next week. I'm actually taking a few days off. So we'll really get rock and roll on those, you know, the July, like June 29th or then, which is fine.
00:41:31
Speaker
So work on those fixtures, and then I actually would love to put a call out to our audience. I think a lot of folks that listen to this are involved in the trades or small businesses, and I feel like this idea of carving out
00:41:47
Speaker
It's a horrible acronym, but dotes days off at the shop. You've got to be willing to pay yourself first, carve out time. It can be cleaning. For me, one of the things I've been putting off is really finishing touches on our 5-axis master template. Just some tweaks I want to make to it.
00:42:06
Speaker
those will be done better if I give myself the dedicated time to do those and not just say, Oh, I've got 20 minutes before my next thing or call or the parts done and I got to go to the machine. That's not how you get the best out of yourself. Yep. So don't, don't love it. Horrible.
00:42:24
Speaker
That's what's so funny though. I love it. It's good. Yeah. So we'll see. I'm curious if folks, if that resonates with people and look, I'll see. I'm not interested in talking about, I'm interested in doing it. So I'm going to leave it at that. Love it. Sweet. Good stuff. Awesome. Hey, I'll catch you next week and look on those risks. Sounds good buddy. Thanks.