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#215 - Crashing Spindle Probes & Making Johnny Five Parts!
238 Plays5 years ago
TOPICS:
- Grimsmo crashed a Renishaw spindle probe on the Mori.
- Saunders hired an intern just to focus on Johnny Five!
- Orbit mechanical water timer for filling coolant.
- Should we both get another swiss lathe?
- Saunders is reorganizing the whole shop.
- Doing a night run of pallets is a game changer.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Weekly Updates
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 215. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. This is our weekly talk about how our businesses are going and how we're feeling. Yeah, how we're growing and winning and failing and all kinds of stuff.
00:00:19
Speaker
I'll start with a win, which is Samuel is one of our actually he's not even our newest intern. We have yet another new intern. But he we found him through the local VEX robotics program. And like so many positions, he has a job I would love to have, which is he as a high school, I think junior is has a paid internship solely focused on building Johnny five. Oh, my goodness.
00:00:46
Speaker
He's a junior. Nice. Yeah, I believe so. It's a win all around. He's getting work experience. He wants to go into engineering or manufacturing of some kind. Obviously, he's in the VEX program, which is, to me, a great filter for his passion and so forth, or anyone's passion.
00:01:08
Speaker
You know, it's interesting because like we had a whole, all these parts that were crowdsourced, you know, we didn't really do dimensional drawings or certainly specific tolerances. So you've got a male and a female part, both with three quarter inch or 12, you know, whatever 18, 16 millimeter dimensions, but one's over, one's under, so they don't fit together. And it's, it's wonderful to see him say, yeah, I don't know what to do. You know, how do you open up a hole or cut down a shaft and what makes more sense?
00:01:38
Speaker
We talked about everything from lathes, to drilling, to lapping, to sanding, to machining, and he's doing a great job though. That's fantastic. It's good to give him challenges like, what do you think needs to happen? Think of it critically. These two have to fit together. What has to happen? Right. Right. Regardless of his machining experience, and he can break his brain and try to figure it out. Yeah. Good. Good for you. Yeah. It's fun.
Renishaw Probe Challenges
00:02:06
Speaker
How you doing? I'm going to follow up with a fail. I crashed a rent-a-shop probe last night. No. Yeah. It's fine-ish, but there is a dent in the housing.
00:02:20
Speaker
Wait, what? It's either good or it's not good. Yeah, I know. So I was on the Maury last night doing a custom engraving for it. We've got these four special knives coming up. So I wanted to add a special engraving onto it. And my serial count-up engraving program is quite complicated with dozens of macros, macro variables that count up and write and track stuff. So I tweaked that, made a second version, added a couple of variables.
00:02:49
Speaker
I ended up making the mistake of choosing two variables which are critically used somewhere else. And I was so close. But yeah, so variable 640 and 641, I think, store a fixture offset for making our Norseman. And
00:03:08
Speaker
So that was off by quite a bit in Z and a little bit in Y and quite a bit by Z. So I finished the engraving. It's going good. I put in like 13 hour day yesterday. And I go to run the Norseman like we do every night and just get it running for the night. And the first thing it does, probe comes in, goes to the corner of the pallet. It was really close. So I was like, yeah, it's fine. Except it was behind the pallet in Y by a little bit. So the tip didn't touch. You didn't get the benefit of the protected position trigger.
00:03:37
Speaker
No, and then the Z height was way off. So it wanted to touch the table, not the vise. And because the tip was off center, so the housing hit one of our clamps and put a dent and overloaded the Z on the Maury and just said, that was a problem.
00:03:55
Speaker
So, I was like, oh, crow. Backed it off, looked at it, checked for run out. There was like 20,000 run out in the tips or something bent. So, it's like... Something bent in the housing. Like, I don't know. Yeah. So, I was like, well, it still triggers. It's still like, either I'm running a pallet tonight or I'm not. So, I...
00:04:20
Speaker
reoriented the runout. I loosened all the screws and dialed it in for concentricity again. It still functioned and it worked. I got it down to a tenth of runout and it still works and Z was fine. I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to roll the dice and run it tonight. It did and it was fine.
00:04:39
Speaker
Send it in. Send it in. Today we're going to take a close look at it. We've been meaning to take it apart and look at the seals and it sticks sometimes. So we come in in the morning and it's like probe stuck. Oh. And it got like 20% of our machining done until the probe stuck. And then it's just been beeping all night. You know how there's this joke about how our stories have had such parallels over the years? Yeah. You ready for this? Yeah.
00:05:05
Speaker
Tell everyone what I'm holding. Oh, you're looking at the Renishaw OTF, OTS? Yeah, OTS. The tool touch off sensor. Why are you holding it in your hand? I'll tell you, I'm all smiles because first off, I'm fine with it. And second of all, I've learned it's the whole like you make your own happiness. Sure, it stopped working. It literally just stopped working. Really?
00:05:32
Speaker
It is what it is. I could choose to be upset or frustrated or feeling differently about it. No big deal. This thing came off our VM3 that is five years old. It has made, I mean, thousands of parts. It has been used probably numerous times every day for five, six years. And the only thing that I'm perplexed about
00:05:59
Speaker
is I can't figure out why it's not working. There's three things that are usually a problem with Renishaw probes. The first is batteries, the second is batteries, and the third is batteries. Because it's wireless, right? Ours is hardwired into the machine.
00:06:15
Speaker
Oh, yeah, your table probe is. Yeah. No, I don't mind the wireless. It's just they take these certain brand of batteries. They're super weird. You can't even use a voltmeter on them because of the saft batteries. Yeah, exactly. A voltmeter will show the correct voltage, but there's still no voltage. Yeah, yeah.
00:06:31
Speaker
But I went through the logical process of getting batteries that worked on a different probe and then put them in this probe. What's strange, I mean, I spent a day on this. I won't bore you with all the details. But the probe itself gives the correct LED color code schematic or blinking pattern when I put the batteries in. So the probe itself is fine. And then, I mean, I went nuts on the Haas side of things. I reloaded all the Renishaw things. I went through macros. The spindle probe works. I checked the port. The diagnostics is like pin 17 triggers.
00:07:00
Speaker
Um, and that works fine with the spindle probe, which means my receivers fine. Like I kind of went through everything. And then ultimately I was like, wait a minute, John, what are you doing? I just grabbed a different OTS from, like from our UMC moved it over to the VM three work totally fine. And then I took the one that seems to be dead, put it on the UMC still doesn't work. So I'm like, okay, good to know. Yeah. I don't know what's going on. It's basically 1200 bucks to do a rent a shelf swap out, um, onward. Nice.
00:07:30
Speaker
And that stuff happens. I mean, yeah, you can feel bad about it, but it's like my crash. I mean, I do feel bad about it, but I'm not beating myself up about it. I'm like. Yeah, I made a mistake and.
00:07:43
Speaker
How do you not do that again? That's what scares me. I'm not going to criticize you for a second. I love what you do on your macros. But if there's no way to mark that a variable or thing is already reserved, that scares them.
00:08:01
Speaker
Yeah. Ideally, you need a master list, a master tool library of macros. And I keep that on the current now. I have one text file that saves, okay, I'm using QR20 for this and 21 for this, 22 for that. So that anytime I'm custom programming anything, I look at that. And I basically have that for the Maury 2.
00:08:23
Speaker
I guess these last, I checked it a bunch, but these last two quick additions at the end, I didn't check and they bit me hard. Can you reserve, I don't know how much range or numbers do you have to choose from? There's 500 range from number 500 to 999. I'm using most of them. I'm using all the 800s, all the 900s, most of the 600s, a bunch of the 700s and
00:08:52
Speaker
half of the 500s. But it was like my program uses 636, 37, 38, and then another program uses 40 and 41.
00:09:04
Speaker
And I needed two more, so I just did the next sequential logical ones. Yeah, right. And bummer. Can you reserve? This is, gosh, because the thing that stinks too is that this is not, what you were doing was not an investment process. It was just a quickie one-off. Yeah, I know. And so can you keep like $9.70 to $1,000 as never? The garbage ones? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I could.
00:09:34
Speaker
It reminds me of what I've seen people who do tool libraries well. It's like, and there's all sorts of ways you have to deal with this, whether it's the tool table and the machine control or your physical tools. But ultimately, they may say, hey, I'm going to set this range as swing tools. I never trust the offset. I never, it's just always wiped. But that lets me know that tools 1 through 200 are good.
00:10:00
Speaker
Yeah, and that's how I set it up on the Kern, because I use same tool number for the same tool. Like, the eighth
Organizing Machining Processes
00:10:06
Speaker
inch drill is always 158 or whatever. And I set ranges. Like, when I got the Kern, I'm like, OK, I got 200 tools. Let me organize it by all my ball mills are 20 to 40. All my flat square end mills are 40 to 80 or whatever. And I had to guess, like, how many am I going to have eventually? And I think I guessed well. Like, all my thread mills are in a certain range. All my drills.
00:10:29
Speaker
I thought Heidenhein didn't have tool numbers. It has tool numbers and tool names. You can do either. You can call via either. Gosh, explain that actually for folks listening about the tool name because it's amazing. You can call the name.
00:10:45
Speaker
text file, I don't think it can have spaces, but you can do dashes and dots. So I can be like quarter inch, like short drill, eighth inch radius, blah, blah, blah, through coolant. And there's a character limit, like 30 characters or 20 or something. And you can call a tool via that name. So in your program, you could be like tool, quarter inch, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, I could walk up to it and know what tools come in. It's amazing.
00:11:08
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I use the tool number, because that just makes sense to me. And also in the current, because the pockets are so laid out, that tool 200 is in spot 200. And it makes it super straightforward. And there's a name attached to it. So when the tool is called, I can see the name. And some people go for a serial number name, where you need a map to be able to understand what 0.25 dash 127 dash.
00:11:37
Speaker
H-inch, TR, blah, blah, blah. I go text-based. I'm like quarter-inch Lakeshore with a five-hour ad. Yeah. Cool. And that works. It's slick. Yeah. Well, I'm sorry. I let it bummer. Yeah. I mean, it works. There's a dent in the face of the housing, but probably later today, we'll pull it apart and clean it and see what comes up.
00:12:02
Speaker
1,000 bucks, swap it. Mine were not $1,000. The Haas ones are $1,000. But yeah, Renishaw has the crash protection and warranty thing. Yeah, I don't actually think that has anything to do with Haas at this point. I deal directly with Renishaw for the security program. Yeah, I've heard of that, where if you smush it and pancake it, they will exchange it for a very nominal fee.
00:12:22
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, we actually did. I didn't share this because it's a tough thing. I didn't want to bring attention to a mistake that was made because the person felt really bad, but we actually did totally crunch. Really? The OMP 40 spindle probe about six months ago. I mean, just food barred. Oh. And yeah, call up Renishaw, $1,200 included the expedite fee where they send you
00:12:46
Speaker
a new one and you send yours back. You could wait two weeks to send yours in first, but obviously, no brainer. Just get me a new one. Interesting. I think you know this, but the second that thing starts acting erratically, you're going to start making bad parts and not real. True. John, it's done its job. Get a new one. I've had it for five or six years. We use it every 50 times every day. Yeah. Okay.
00:13:15
Speaker
What was I going to say? Kent, may I ask what caused the crash for you guys, the pancake? Oh, I don't specifically remember, but I'm pretty sure it was when we were trying out a new fixturing technique and classic mistake. We ran our datums off of the bottom of the fixture
00:13:42
Speaker
and we probed that but when you probed it you had to add manually add one inch to the offset or sorry the wcs was at the top of the one inch part or snow had to be worse than that because it crashed more than one inches in z but nevertheless the idea was
00:14:02
Speaker
we probed the bottom of the surface and then we were going to need to comp it four inches, call it that, because the data was at the top of the four inch pattern, but there was nothing at the four inch height to actually probe. So you probe the bottom of the two, four, six block or something, and then just forgot to add that offset.
00:14:21
Speaker
Yeah, that happens. It's unfortunate. It's like, how do we establish processes that make sure this never, ever happens again for nobody? It's a noble cause to be able to do that, but stuff happens. Yeah, we're human. We make mistakes.
00:14:42
Speaker
The worthwhile teachable moment is it's very similar to how we flooded the shop, which is we have to know that we're human and not be so arrogant as to think you won't forget to do something. Even if you're telling yourself, this is super, super, super important. I always think about the phone calls, the distractions, the phone notifications, the emails, the loud noises that just pull you away.
00:15:06
Speaker
I feel like I was better at this 10, 15 years ago. I mean, I'm only 37, but I feel like I've noticed a little bit of a change in my ability to be sharp on some things. I don't know. Yeah, is that- Interesting. ... if you agree or not.
00:15:19
Speaker
Maybe. Maybe it's more of an awareness of when you're 20, you're arrogant. Everybody is. Like, I can do it. I can blah, blah, blah. Whereas now, we're trying to be a bit more introspective, trying to like, yeah, I probably will forget that at some point. It's being aware of reality. It's just like how you flooded your shop, and we could easily do that too. You turn on the valve. Hey, too soon. I don't want to talk about that. No, I'm just saying. I turned on the valve to fill the curtain.
00:15:49
Speaker
I, it's too easy to walk away and not come back, you know? Yeah. Okay. Coming back to that though, huge shout out. We got a couple of good links to some various different products out there. Most of them were still devices that required power, which awesome to know about, but to me,
00:16:06
Speaker
If I'm going to add any sort of battery or AC power, then that's just a different outlook on, I got to have outlets near there, safety, all that. The huge shout out is somebody sent me a orbit, I think, ORBIT, mechanical water timer.
00:16:22
Speaker
Interesting. Which I thought of in the back of my head, and I'm kicking myself for not actually just taking the five seconds to Google fill it by typing like... I did. I looked hard, but... Yeah, like 11 bucks on Amazon. I'll send you the link afterward, but it uses a... I'm assuming it uses the flow of the water to just ratchet like a clock, almost like a click spring. What's the watch component that toggles
00:16:47
Speaker
the motion forward as it main spring. Anyway, we got one. The only thing I don't love about it is it's designed for 15 minutes up to 90 minutes. You can turn it to less than 15 minutes, but it's meant to be longer duration now.
00:17:08
Speaker
One thing is I could intentionally choke down the flow rate, or we're thinking about 3D printing a little cover that stops you from turning it past six minutes. Six minutes would probably still flood the tank, but not by much. Yeah.
00:17:21
Speaker
Yeah, on the current, I set it for five minute, like I set my phone for a five minute timer, and I had to do it at least three or four times, like 20 minutes. Oh, then you should pick one of these out. Yeah, I'm looking at it now. That looks exactly like I was looking for. Yeah. I did start getting parts from Amazon for a digital, you know, you set the time interval, whatever you want, you push one button, and it gives you 10 minutes of coolant or 20 minutes. And yeah, all those parts are almost in. I'm just waiting for the valves to come in.
00:17:51
Speaker
But this is a simple version of that. Simple is awesome here. Mike at Milterra has been telling me about these. I don't know exactly what he's using, but he's like, yeah, just go to the hardware store and get a mechanical timer. And I'm like, but they don't have them. That's the one. Cool. That's very cool. So I see orbitonline.com pro flow metal mechanical timer.
00:18:14
Speaker
Oh, you guys have Amazon, right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm just like this. I found their website. Okay. Yeah. Or a bit. Cool. Yeah. I mean, it's checking all the boxes here. Yeah. 5,900 Amazon reviews. So it's like commonly used. And do you worry about any reliability or plastic components or it just being crappy? Good question. We're just doing water with it. So I'm not worried about
00:18:41
Speaker
risk of coolant, but like coolant is brutal on GoPro cases. I don't know what kind of plastic those are, but this is for, we're only using water, but even if you had coolant, I got to think that because this is meant for outdoor use and with gardening type stuff that it may have like miracle growing. I would assume that it's both UV safe because of sunlight and just better different plastic that can handle stuff, but no, I'm not worried about it. Cool.
00:19:09
Speaker
I'd much more worried about electromechanical failures of a solenoid or powered device than I would be a mechanical timer. Yeah. Although with the electrical, you can fail closed, theoretically. Great point. But I assume, I shouldn't assume that this fails closed because you turn it to open it, but I don't know. Yeah. Imagine if something got gummed up inside, just picture it out, what would happen?
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah. The other thing that is an interesting thought is, gosh, if you're designing a shop or have any ability is to basically run tapers to drains or troughs types thing. You wouldn't want to cut troughs at your floor. But our flood was a little bit mitigated by the fact that some portion of the water did flow to a floor drain. But yeah, if that helps. Yeah.
00:20:05
Speaker
rather than turn it into swimming pool. Cool. So I'm still in the, um, I'm deeply in the thinking phase of getting a second Swiss.
00:20:20
Speaker
Okay.
Considering New Equipment
00:20:21
Speaker
I haven't sent out for quotes or anything. I don't need to. I know what it's going to cost. But I've talked with the guys and trying to figure out... With Elliot or your shop guys? Our shop guys. Okay. Yeah, kind of put the seat out there and it's kind of a no brainer. The question is when. We have
00:20:46
Speaker
easily three parts, if not like six, we could put on it immediately. Isn't it funny how you start assigning work to it? Yeah, yeah. And you have to, to justify it. But for sure, it would take load off the other machines. Our two lathes right now run nonstop. The Swiss runs deep into the night and the NAC runs when we're here. But ever since Pierre started, him and Angelo have been keeping both lathes running.
00:21:12
Speaker
every day, all day, save for downtime and changeover and stuff. It's fantastic, but we need more capacity. We need to make more parts. What's the responsible but growth-oriented plan look like? Keep the knock for a while, keep the knocks forever? I think so. We've got another nine months of payments on it, and then it's ours.
00:21:39
Speaker
But that doesn't matter. Your equity is in it. Yeah. But yeah, I think it's still useful. So the original theory was, you know, get rid of it, get a swiss to replace it. And that could work. It's a little aggressive. But like we have this one, it works. We make parts on it now. We make the clip, the Norseman saga clip. And it'll just keep doing that. But now that will be the only thing it makes.
00:22:02
Speaker
Would you, I'm just thinking, would you get, is there a plan for three Swisses? It seems like one could almost be dedicated to the socket clips or is that not a Swiss part? I don't think I want it to be a Swiss part. Okay, got it. Yeah, I want to put it on the current actually.
00:22:22
Speaker
Oh, that's right. Yeah, I want to spend some time and test that out, but it's going so well on the Nakamura. It's slower and the finish could be better and stuff, but it's an established process. I have a lot of unestablished processes that can be figured out right now first, right? Right. Don't under-enthesize what you just said there. That is huge.
00:22:46
Speaker
Yeah, I have all the problems that help you move forward. Exactly. And then when there's time, which you have to make time that will never just magically be 14 days of free time to be able to figure this out. But
00:22:59
Speaker
But yeah, when it makes sense, when everything else is running pretty smooth, then I can work on improving other processes, including putting the clip on the current or something else. But getting on Swiss to free up the NOC to only do clips means you don't have to change the setup on the NOC, and that clips are slow, but who cares? Now that's the only thing the NOC does.
00:23:20
Speaker
The Swiss tooling up the Swiss to run those other parts is frankly simple from what I remember those parts. The current is two to three times the cost of these other machines. You hesitate to put a 30 minute part on it that can be run on a cheaper machine, John. True, but the current when set up right runs deep, deep into the night. It should still be running when we get here. Throwing more work at it. I could run clips all weekend.
00:23:47
Speaker
You, you, where that's the wrong philosophy is you're going to fill the current up. Yeah. So it's a question of what do you want to put on the current? Yeah, that's a good point. What, what, you know, what does, what need not go on it? That's a good way to look at it. Like right now I'm just, I'm looking to fill it up. I'm looking to put cakewalk work on there that can just,
00:24:10
Speaker
eat up time, save time on other machines. But if the NAC is dedicated to just the clips, then I don't need to free it up. It works. The only reason I will need to need another solution is if the NAC is maxed and we're only making, say we're maxed at 250 pens a month, because that's all the clips we can make. Two Swisses can make 400 pens a month. Then we have a problem or a solution waiting to be found. How do we make more clips?
00:24:37
Speaker
Those are, those are the best attack because that's fine. Like I have no problem throwing money at that money at that problem. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it's kind of what happened with our nascent part of our Swiss journey here, which is we realized, wait a minute here. There's two other parts that we can put on the Swiss. Yes. Like for sure, which changes to the size. It would most likely be, uh, I forget whether it's 32 or 38 millimeter, but the one and 1.25 inch guide bushing diameter. Yeah. 30 probably.
00:25:08
Speaker
that gives us a lot more flexibility. And again, it seems like the downsides are slightly more cost and slightly slower max RPMs, but we're never doing the micro work like even like you, like we're not doing anything under quarter inch, really half inch. So I don't necessarily think I care about that. Plus,
00:25:27
Speaker
Nothing we're doing is remotely close to what you would consider high volume Swiss stuff at all. It's more about, look, I want a Ferrari of a little machine that can do these little things reliably and unintended-ish. For sure. Yeah, like 6,000 RPM on a Swiss. I don't even know what I'm running mine at, but that's probably fine on a spindle.
00:25:49
Speaker
Right. The only thing I haven't liked is one of the vendors stepping up from I think 20 to the 32 or whatever does require additional other features that I don't need that drives the cost up. So more complicated sub-spindle platform.
00:26:05
Speaker
Just like a bigger, more complicated machine. Basically, they don't scale up a simple version in a larger diameter. Okay, interesting. We're still starting our research on that. Yeah, I've never paid attention to the bigger machines. Over the weekend, I spent a little bit of time on the Tarnos website and YouTube channel. They make a lot of different models. They make the big multi-spindle index trowel machines. They make turret swisses.
00:26:32
Speaker
It's like a Swiss guide pushing, but it has turrets and it has Swiss tools at the main spindle. And there's this one I sent a video to Pierre, where it's got this gun drill that's like eighth inch diameter, 30 inches long.
00:26:48
Speaker
Oh my god. On a turret, so the turret changes, and the thing is literally flopping in the air, bouncing up and down five inches, and then this other turret comes in with a little, like, holder. Oh no. And it comes in, and it just, it's in the video, the thing's flopping up and down and up and down, and then the second thing comes in and just stabilizes it, and then puts it in the hole, and I'm like, oh my gosh.
00:27:08
Speaker
That's insane. I think I just saw something on Grob's social media. And I'm like, well, you've been sitting on this the whole time? There's some function that can come in with a second support axis. Same thing to temporarily stabilize. Actually, kind of like what we were joking about with your pen clip, although I don't think this is part of your solution long term. But hey, when it's really precarious, I want a tail stock for my mill to come in temporarily and then get out of the way.
00:27:38
Speaker
Love it. Right? So cool. Yeah, that's cool. I love technology. Yeah, it is fun. It really is fun. What's going on today? So I'm going to make more progress on these special knives that I'm working on.
00:27:56
Speaker
Oh yeah. Are you sharing more about that? Yeah, I'm doing a video. So we're calling them the 4,000s. So we're making four knives that each have the 4,000 serial numbers, 4,000-1-2-3-4.
00:28:10
Speaker
because we skip those numbers when we cross those numbers. But the handle is going to be a nickel aluminum bronze solid handle. So we're going for a custom pattern on that, some custom engravings on the inside, and a dam of steel blades. And try to change things up a little bit, make them special, make them fancy. What's the sale format? How are we going to sell them? I'm trying to decide if I just
00:28:36
Speaker
do some sort of sign up and sell them for a regular price, or if we do an auction and try to get some real money out of them. We might go for auction because we never do any auctions. You obviously want to be careful not to... Some makers just try to auction everything and try to grab as much cash as they can. We do almost zero of them, so to do it once every couple of years is...
00:28:59
Speaker
I don't feel so bad. It's the market. The market. It's the market. Yeah. Yeah. You're not talking about auctioning raffle tickets though. No. You're talking about auctioning the night. Yeah, like one guy gets it and pays whatever he offers. Money talks. Yeah. Is your summer show on? Do you know? Blade Show. I think Blade Show is on. I don't think we're going.
00:29:22
Speaker
Oh, really? Yeah. Got it. Yeah, the border is still a problem, and it's too close. It's only a couple months away, and I'm fine not going. We didn't go last year. Apparently, we're on the exhibitor list because we preregistered two years ago. Got it. So customers are emailing us and asking, and they're like, you guys are going, right? You're on the list. So we'll have to clear that up socially somehow.
00:29:47
Speaker
I was just thinking too, like I think it would be an emo year, but I haven't, I mean, it's not too far away to start thinking about a fall for travel and logistics, but I haven't heard whether that's on or not.
00:30:01
Speaker
I'm certainly ready for normalcy. I think everybody is. I'm ready for normalcy, too. I'm getting pretty used to the current situation, and I'm doing fine. Everybody here is doing fine. But yeah, I miss normal. I miss the tool shows. I miss going to visit you. And I don't think about it too much, because it's depressing. But it'll be nice. We'll get there. We'll get there.
00:30:26
Speaker
It's funny when you said you didn't go last year. It's just like, holy cow. Like you forget about the duration. The time is a strange concept right now. Yep. That's the first year we missed in like seven, eight, nine, nine years. I don't know. Cool. Good.
00:30:46
Speaker
Yeah, what are you up to? I might actually make a Johnny Five part for fun. And we switched the shop order around a bit. So we've got like a sort of proven cut area in office where Vince is with. Yeah, I saw the pictures of that. Yeah, it's perfect. It's great. Definitely have some room to improve or continue doing what we know we need to do on how we
00:31:14
Speaker
store orders, raw material, packing supplies, shipment. I totally get now the benefit of like they called them cross-stocked facilities where stuff can come in on one bay or one area and it goes out the other. We like most small shops do shipping and receiving from the same door, but really that's
00:31:35
Speaker
difficult slash terrible because you've got raw material coming in, but you've got finished orders trying to go out next to each other. Um, we will figure it out. It's also, you know, classic like, well, should I not make a Johnny five part and go spend more time on that? Like we'll get there. Yeah. It's a, it's a journey, not a race. Interesting. And there's things you don't even think about until you get to that point. Like we, we have no outgoing here at the shop. Like we talked about last week, we don't have mail come and pick up, but it's happening. It's happening probably this week.
00:32:05
Speaker
Oh yeah? Yeah. You got that figured out? Yeah, we set up a Fraser's on it. He set up Canada post to do three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, they'll come pick up whatever's on the table. So as of like in a couple of days, we will have that receiving outgoing same table issue. Yes. So he went to Canadian Tire and got a big table for us and signs and stuff. So we're trying to figure out that flow as well. It's good. There's so many of these, uh,
00:32:34
Speaker
problems are solvable. They just are. Yeah, we got a price sheet back from our office supplies vendor where I don't have to go to Sam's Club anymore. We just put the stuff into Lex and anybody can order it and it gets pushed and it just shows up here. Actually, that's really cool.
00:32:56
Speaker
progress we made too, when we had the Renishaw fail on us, we thought was it the batteries and we have never successfully formalized or implemented a Renishaw battery program. It was easy when we had a couple of machines, but now with as many as we do, you can write the dates on the batteries or on the note on the machine, which we tried to do, but still that's not proactive.
00:33:20
Speaker
It relatively quickly and easily, Alex added a battery section to Lex, where it just generates a work order ticket for each machine, has two spindles, probes, so table and spindle, or sorry, two probes. And when you redo the batteries, you just reset the date in Lex. And then I think it's six months later, it just emails
00:33:40
Speaker
Nice. The assigned person says they needed to do it, has some notes about where we keep the extra batteries, where we order them from if you need to, and then things like don't use a voltmeter in case. I just am thinking like, hey, we're going to try to hire a maintenance person. They may put a voltmeter on it and say, nah, these are good. We can put them back and use them for a while. Like, no, no, don't do that. It's just idiot proofing it. Because that'll be another six months before anybody gets notified. Yeah, exactly. Until the fail happens, yeah.
00:34:05
Speaker
It's like don't do anything other than just replace the batteries and throw the old ones out period. Yeah, pretty much. So yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. I just did a video which was actually pretty raw.
00:34:19
Speaker
called When to Quit Your Day Job. I think I've mentioned it before. I filmed it a couple weeks ago, but Julie just edited it and I just watched it. I say this humbly, there's some really good advice in there. It was also fun to look back on the journey and the memories and the choices and the difficulties. We had, gosh, some early failures that were tough, tough to stomach, but you just do, you go. Yeah.
00:34:46
Speaker
That's incredible. Yeah, I'm excited to put that
Improving Production Efficiency
00:34:48
Speaker
out. Good. I'm looking forward to watching that. Yeah, and then I'm heading up to area 419 again. We were going to go later this year when they were kind of settled in, had their shop up and running machines. They did not take long to do that.
00:35:03
Speaker
Oh my God, it literally is a record for Western civilization, time from machines on trucks to making parts unbelievable. They asked if we could come up basically now because they want to try to get the tour video ready for their April 19th open house, which I think is now virtual.
00:35:27
Speaker
I just looked at my calendar and was like, I mean, it wasn't like the easiest thing, but I was like, no, let's make this happen. It's such a cool story. I'm going to head up there Friday, film a shop tour, show off the machines, their story, the processes. I mean, they've got some stuff really dialed in. I've said it before, I'll say it again, they've done a great job of being inspiring on when to buy that second Swiss or sell that knock if you need to or buy that torque wrench if you need it or that extra bore gauge or whatever.
00:35:56
Speaker
Yeah, I was telling some of the guys yesterday and Eric specifically, I was like, I'd rather
00:36:00
Speaker
I'd rather we make decisions and spend some money and move quickly and make progress than like sit and wishy-washy and wonder and worry and not make decisions. Because I'd rather know quickly if it's a good decision or a bad decision. Right. Right. And that's not the advice for everybody at every stage of business. Like in the early days, maybe that's not the way to do it. Absolutely. Because you will blow all of your money if you do that. And we certainly got there a couple of times. But now, I mean, we have the money in the bank. We need to make progress.
00:36:30
Speaker
Our problem is we need to make more products. We need to get more efficient. We need to just make more parts. So let's find those solutions immediately. That's why humbly you shouldn't spend time on your rent a shop probe. Yeah. Spend that time making your shop better. That's going to get needs to get replaced anyways. Done. Yeah. So yeah, I'm excited for that. Yeah, that's all I got.
00:36:58
Speaker
I've been running the Kern every night with multiple pallets every single night. It's such a game changer. I know it adds a lot of cost to people's machines, but oh my gosh, having a pallet changer is just, once you wrap your head around the workflow of it, I'm running minimum four pallets every night, completely different parts. All the tools are set up. It alarmed out last night.
00:37:23
Speaker
Angelo came in this morning, and he sent me a picture. And he's like, it's off, but the coolant's still flowing. Oh, that's funny. And there's one little error where if you know Infusion, if you set your toolpath base, your tool speed based on whatever, IPM, it'll auto calculate your RPM.
00:37:45
Speaker
So it'll be like, oh yeah, or SFM. Yeah, you said it. I want 400 SFM. It'll tell you, well, that's 8,422.7777 RPM. Apparently, Heidenhein doesn't like the 0.7777. It only likes whole numbers. I don't know if that's a hard rule, but that's what I'm finding. So in Fusion, I have to be very good about being like, OK, I want 400 SFM, but then round down the RPM number and make it like 399 SFM or something.
00:38:15
Speaker
That's a post edit, dude. Maybe. Oh, yeah. Just round the number in the post. Yeah. It's a complete post. Is it harder? I don't know. Maybe. Easy. I mean, it should be easy. Yeah. Because it's not a problem if I've fixed all the tools in the tool library, but obviously, there's one that still had the problem. Yeah.
00:38:39
Speaker
No, and that's the glitchy thing I don't love about fusion. I don't fault them, but like if you toggle for some reason between inch and millimeters, sometimes the conversion doesn't resolve perfectly back to one another. It's like, really? Yeah. It'll be like, if you went, I'm making this up, but 200 service feet over to the metric equivalent, then you go back. It'll be like 200.00001 surface feet, which of course that's not what I meant.
00:39:04
Speaker
Same thing with units or tolerances or stock to leave. No big deal, but just do fix that in your post. Yep. But do the aroa, it's not a question of if, but when, oh my gosh, it's amazing. That sounds amazing. Yep. And now I just want to load it up. I wish I had easy work. All we cut is stainless and titanium.
00:39:23
Speaker
And tools break, tools wear, tools have a life. Although I'm really finding the tool life, which is great. Getting really good about replacing it at exactly, you know. You find the life, you reduce 20%, and you just call it and just replace it every time. And then it's nice to replace a tool on schedule and then look at it under the microscope and be like, OK, yeah, it's got a bit of wear to it. That was a good time to replace it. Like still good, but it's on its way out. That's really satisfying.
00:39:51
Speaker
I would not be against the future of machine tools, including like, especially the way your current is laid out, which I still love having like a LED or whatever the current screen technology is below each
00:40:06
Speaker
tool pocket that shows you things like the tool number, the stick out, the last time used, or Mark turns to red when it was retired and thus needs replaced, or the tool name. The tool library shows all of that, but it doesn't show it with all of the tools.
00:40:23
Speaker
My thought is have anybody walk up to the current in the morning and see that there's three that are marked red, and you just grab those and replace them. Yeah. Currently, you can go to the tool library screen. You can sort by time or whatever.
00:40:38
Speaker
sort by locked. So my plan for the future is to have the guy like teach the guys how to do that. So every morning they come in, they sort it by that. And they go, Okay, these tools are coming up. But I'm also kind of tempted to extract that data, you know, hourly, put it into a spreadsheet and be able to like really play with it and display it on the screen. So anybody walking by it could be like, time to replace that tool, it's getting up there in life. It's, you know, it's 92% towards its tool life. How about I just replace it? Right? I would like to look ahead. Yeah, yeah.
00:41:09
Speaker
Sure. And then the question is, some tools are used for 13 seconds per cycle. Some tools are used for 25 minutes per cycle. So what's the allotted overtime? And it's different for whatever you're making. You're doing sister tools, right? I'm not. I don't think I have any sister tools at the moment.
00:41:32
Speaker
Mostly because if a tool breaks, I'm not going to call the next tool and go back in there and fix it. But not if it breaks. I mean, just wait for a different time. Yeah. I think I've had more tool failures than actual time limits at the moment. But yeah, I do have a couple of sister tool spots planned. And yeah, I'll get there.
00:41:52
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, no, it wasn't. It seems very... Well, it seems like a thing you would really want. Like, oh, yeah, it's tons of sister tools. Double up on everything. I haven't wanted to yet, now that I have the ability. It's like why you always have to have the dual toilet paper dispenser, man. Oh, yeah. We don't have to replace the roll when it's got 10% left. You just got the next one ready to go. Nice. Yeah. Good.
00:42:23
Speaker
I'll see you next week. All right man. Take care. Have a good day. Bye.