Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
#246 - CMM for the Poor Man, Dealing with Fraud, Okuma, Ripple on Spine of Knife
235 Plays4 years ago
TOPICS:
- Fraud and small businesses: Don't be emotional; make a protocol!
- Okuma Training & Pre-Staged Tooling Quirk in OSP: Post Processor Solution?
- Starrett Optical Comparator & Mitutoyo Electronic Indicator
- Visible Valley in Knife Spine: How to Pinpoint the Problem
- Debate on Hiring Gives Saunders New Perspective
- Higher Education: Is is a Must?
Read 10 pages per night!
The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Reflection
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business on machining episode 246. My name is John Grimsmough. And my name is John Saunders. And in this podcast, I mean, for the past five years, we've used this podcast to grow together as business owners and friends and share our experiences with you guys.
Successes and Challenges in Sales
00:00:18
Speaker
How are you? Fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Things are good. Good. You?
00:00:26
Speaker
We had two excellent days of sales. We had two excellent days of Okuma training from Gossager.
00:00:37
Speaker
And then, and this is like an awesome way to try to in real time point out why you make your own happiness. I woke up to two separate orders from three months ago. The orders were about one week apart that were just now, this morning I woke up to a $1,500 charge back.
00:01:02
Speaker
And I mean, if anyone is listening who's been through that, you know that that's kind of like, oh, it's gutting.
Managing Chargebacks and Fraud
00:01:09
Speaker
And so what's interesting is the original transactions were marked as fraudulent in Shopify, or excuse me, high risk of fraud. And I am digging through some notes, but I'm fairly confident. I took a couple of actions at the time to determine whether or not we wanted to fulfill that order.
00:01:33
Speaker
I'm sure I did. I'm querying a vendor to look up some telecommunications records around that. I'll keep it anonymous for now. I can't imagine the fraudster is listening, but I'm pretty sure this was just straight up fraud. Something is weird because I know that we wouldn't have just shipped. It was international as well.
00:01:57
Speaker
But it's like, look, don't let it ruin your day and you'll be fine. And frankly, we had a pretty good system. Again, I just don't remember from three months ago what I did that morning, but I know we didn't just say, oh, whatever, we'll just ship it. And maybe the alarm is, okay, when it's a high risk of fraud, which never happens, you guys use Shopify, right? Yeah, we use Shopify as well.
00:02:21
Speaker
certain foreign countries will show that like when they give their credit card and it's a further away country. Sometimes it'll show that high risk of fraud. So I forget what we do. Sometimes we give it a couple days, make sure the payment clears or usually like if the guy's got an order history or we try to look him up otherwise or something, we're like, oh yeah, that guy, no problem.
00:02:41
Speaker
Yeah, so this order made sense. It wasn't like a tormach plate and like a Haas rotary plate. It wasn't like something weird. It made sense. And the thing is, chargebacks are wonderful for consumers. They're basically totally guilty until proven innocent on the vendor side. And we've never had one before.
00:03:05
Speaker
So my understanding is you almost always lose the reviewed case, but I'm hoping that I can show that they ordered it on their own accord. They received it on their own accord.
E-commerce Fraud: Challenges and Outlook
00:03:17
Speaker
And we had made some efforts to communicate with them to confirm. Like I think what I don't have, what I wish I had and will have in the future is if you say to them in writing like over email, like, Hey, I want to make sure
00:03:31
Speaker
This is the correct order. This is you, you know, and you get some trace course lines back and forth. I think that gives you a pretty strong case. Um, and it's like, it's, it's yeah, it is super annoying. I'm not going to lie about that, but it's also more about like, how do we build a process here for the team? Um, and go, go forward and continue. Find line.
00:03:55
Speaker
You don't just want to brush down the rug and allow these things to happen all the time, but setting up the system is probably the most important part. Look, this may happen again. How do we deal with it? What's the process? Yeah. I've always enjoyed our talks because you're such an optimistic person. I tend to have a much more cynical view. There are definitely
00:04:16
Speaker
definitely bad people out there. Yeah. And when you start Googling, like how do you correctly proceed with a chargeback case of a fraudulent, fraudulent chargeback case? It's like this stuff is rampant. Yeah. Yeah. I tried to distance myself from that type of world. You know, you mean just somebody else handle it? Not so much. I mean, it doesn't hit us too hard naturally, but, um,
00:04:44
Speaker
the whole fraud world. I don't research it. I don't look into it. I don't think about it. I don't let it bother me.
Business Developments and Innovations
00:04:50
Speaker
Um, I know it's rampant in the world, but I'm just rose colored glasses in my own business here. Like let's just stay optimistic and happy, you know? Yeah, for sure. Um, so yeah, that's, but let me look, it's still, um, been a solid few days. Um, we,
00:05:10
Speaker
are having things come together in a wonderful way, which is we've got more. We found some folks to make some organizing storage crates for us. We picked up hired a new high school intern who's only been here for two days, but doing quite well so far. And that's helping with the bottleneck of making sure QC is flow, not batch.
00:05:30
Speaker
So, as we stuff comes off, it gets QC to get handled. It doesn't just sit there on piles and get backed up. And it was great because Ed and I sat for two days straight and learned how to run an appeal. And you need that time. You need that like, I can't worry about production right now. I can't worry about shipping orders. I need the freedom and the brain space to bury myself in new information right now. Yeah.
00:05:56
Speaker
It's been, I mean, it's funny, it's been a long time. I mean, learning the Haas control was both simple and I would say simpler than OSP. But, you know, it's like anything, the basics are relatively simple. We recorded some internal videos just for our own notes. We just practiced it. And I, they had us booked, pretty awesome. They had us booked for four days. And the end of, or lunch yesterday, I'm like, guys, like,
00:06:25
Speaker
And he'd already kind of known this. I'm like, we don't, we're good. And so this morning I came in and ran my own part on my own, set up a tool, probed it, ran
Learning New Systems and Tackling Technical Issues
00:06:35
Speaker
a part. It's like the simplest of things. And the only quirk that we're seeing so far that he kind of forewarned us about it. So Kuma is super weird on how, when it pre-stages a tool, like if tool one's in there and tool two has been pre-staged, if you try to rerun the program, it
00:06:52
Speaker
I may get this wrong, but it can't re-prestage a tool that's already been pre-staged. It's like a conflict. You have to clear it, which is annoying. There's going to be a better way. Right now, I just do an NDI ATC call of the same tool, which doesn't do anything other than wipes out the code. But otherwise, dude. Cool. Can you build that into your post and have it be cleared at every tool change or something, like first tool? The header could wipe any pre-calls. Yeah. You need a solution.
00:07:21
Speaker
Yeah, and on that, the guy was like, so here's how you copy network drive. And now it's on, and this is like so reminds me of FANUC. It's like, well, so now it's in the thumb drive. We're on a network drive. Here we're going to go in. We're going to select the program. We're going to choose a copy. We're going to split the display. We're going to choose the other folder. We're going to copy it over here. We're going to prove it. Then we're going to go back to the main display. We're going to select that program. We're going to load it. And I'm like, no.
00:07:43
Speaker
So we mapped, the Okuma is just, OSP is just Windows. So we mapped the program folder, or whatever it's calling, MD1. We mapped it on our individual computers. So in Fusion, you just right click post. Yes. You're done. You have to click the program on the control once they hit OK, but great. Cool. So yeah, it's fun. In the machine,
00:08:09
Speaker
We've only cut a couple of parts so far, but I'll tell you the way you hear it move, the spindle ramp up, just the kinematics, the little things like when we were dialing in the indicator, if you lean on it, nothing like the tense indicator doesn't move. Really? Yeah. And it's just, it gets me
00:08:31
Speaker
I mean, we've got a lot of left to work to do to prove to learn all that, but it's kind of like this is checking out so far. That's so cool. Yeah, even on my Maury, if you put a 10th indicator on the table or the vice or something and you lean on the sheet metal, it'll move. You'll see it move. And you're like, what? Right. And look, it's again, it's like it's still a machine tool. It's still a wet needle. There's still ways to do it wrong. But so far, I'm like, oh, this is awesome. That's fantastic.
00:09:00
Speaker
Yeah, that's cool. What were you doing yesterday with that, the sweeping of the spine? The spine? Yeah, the spine is our knife. So we're seeing a ripple in the profile of our knife blade. Okay. The spine from the end mill. When we stone the surface or sand the surface, there's a little valley in the eighth inch wide thickness of the material.
00:09:29
Speaker
Okay, and it's super minor, but it's like we're trying to polish that to a mirror polish so that it looks really good So as you suggested in D and text to measure it with an indicator So I took out my tenth indicator and I measured and I'm like it's like half a tenth like almost nothing Let's go deeper. So I just got an image toy electronic indicator like a week ago and I haven't fully used it yet. This was the first test of actually using it and
00:09:59
Speaker
I got it all set up. I played with it. I had it on the granite surface plate first, but the act of just trying to push and slide an eighth inch thick object across the needle is
00:10:10
Speaker
stick slip and like, you know, it's hard to control. So I was like, I got this steroid optical comparator that's also like a week and a half old. That is basically three axis machine, you know, XYZ. So I put the vice on there, I put a Noga arm on a stationary part and the indicator on the blade and I was able to jog with the machine, just like a little CNC machine and a manual machine.
00:10:37
Speaker
And the weird thing is I read absolutely zero deviation. Like the surface is flat, flat, flat, dead flat. But there's still a valley, visible valley.
00:10:53
Speaker
Well, the electronic indicator is new. Have you swept a gauge block or something else that's reasonably flat to just make sure it's working okay? I don't know. I'm probably doing something wrong or could be doing something differently because there's a visual deviation and not a measurable deviation. I still want to figure it out more. The deviation is manifesting itself because you were stoning or polishing?
00:11:22
Speaker
Yeah, if you take a precision ground flat stone to the surface, the profile of the handle of the blade, you'll see some high spots like the stones reveal everything, right? What if though, if you're holding the knife up and down like you're
00:11:42
Speaker
striking a match isn't a good idea, but you're holding the long part of it so you're rubbing the thin edge on the stone. If you were off one or two degrees either way, wouldn't that show the same behavior? Yeah, possible.
00:11:57
Speaker
But
Enhancing Precision with New Tools
00:11:58
Speaker
even going to a sanding belt or a scotch bread wheel or something like that, it still shows a little ripple in the surface that's really hard because when you have a wide surface with a deep spot in the middle, you have to take a whole surface down to be able to get that deep spot, that scratch, that valley out. So I'm just trying to figure out the best way to do that because I know it's been
00:12:24
Speaker
causing issues on the finishing side. I'm like, well, the source is from machining, so how do I machine it better? To do that, let's measure what's happening and let's try to understand what's possible or what's not. Maybe there's a limit of acceptability here.
00:12:43
Speaker
night the back of a knife like the spine or how could be anything else that's shaped kind of like a parallel shape. And instead of milling it on the side, like I think you're doing with the knife handle, what if you just take a scrap piece, put it in a regular vice and just use the flat end of it and the mill and cut along it that should be by all reasonable definitions, quote unquote, flat flatter, although it's a very curved surface.
00:13:07
Speaker
Regardless, I'm just trying to think about a way to isolate, whether it's the stoning process or whatever, or the machine, because it doesn't really... I wouldn't have said it didn't make sense that it's a machine process until you did all the cutting that you've done on it with a Kern, with high quality end mills multiple times, and the indicator is not picking up anything. I know. It's confusing.
00:13:31
Speaker
Even if it's some crazy phenomenon where when you stone it, you're somehow bouncing. It could be tipping left to right. Yeah. Absolutely. It's hard to do it by hand for sure because what does flat feel like on an eighth inch thick object?
00:13:49
Speaker
put the knife in a small vise, like what you had on the syrup setup, flip the vise upside down, put some one to three blocks on either side of it. That way you turn it into a stable upside down platform and sew it that way. Yeah, maybe. Somehow keep it square. Oh, sorry. I'm overthinking it.
00:14:11
Speaker
Uh, use, um, uh, simple plastic clamp to clamp it to the side of one, two, three block and then stone that way. Yeah, I'll probably keep playing with it. I don't know. I spent a couple of hours on it yesterday and I'm like, I feel like I've done a lot of work on this. I'm trying to, trying to figure out this one little tiny little thing and it was late. So I was like, okay, I'm good. But yeah, cool. What else is going on?
00:14:42
Speaker
Speaking of the optical comparator, it's fantastic. It has the high nine glass scales. I found out they're half micron resolution. It's crazy. Which is microscopic. 10 microns is ... Hold on. Five microns is two tenths. That's my mental ... 10 microns is four tenths. Thank you. What?
00:15:06
Speaker
Holy cow. Five microns is two, I got to walk backwards. Five microns is two tenths. So that's just like under 50. That's insane. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. That's pretty sweet.
00:15:20
Speaker
So it has the digital readout, which reads to five digits, so 10 millionths, theoretically. And it's been working really good. We've been using it, playing with it, and stuff. And then we had a company, Beatty. They're a British company that makes basically a computer screen for the optical comparator that you can upgrade to. It reads the scales, and it allows you to map out measured features on a part.
00:15:50
Speaker
No kidding. Yeah. So you can actually, if you're measuring a thread, you can draw a line here and then draw a line here and then measure 60 degrees. Yes. And then do the next one, next one. You can go to the other side. You can measure, measure, measure. It becomes, you know, it's not a CMM, but it starts to add up as if a CMM is measuring multiple features at once. Yeah. Because the scales are super accurate and the machine should be calibrated.
00:16:12
Speaker
to be super accurate than once everything's calibrated. So it uses a fiber optic lens. It looks like a tiny little 1 16th inch rod that's a fiber optic thing that goes almost right to your crosshairs on the optical comparator. And that reads light to dark.
00:16:31
Speaker
Okay. So you focus the optical, you know, so it's nice and crisp. And then the sensor reads the edge difference between light to dark. So and you once you calibrate it, you know, you can measure a half inch gauge pin and it'll measure to the millionth, several millions, exactly what it is. So that was really cool. So they came in, gave us a demo. Somebody on Instagram put us onto them. And
00:16:58
Speaker
gave us a demo. They left it here overnight because they didn't need it till the next day. And I was like, okay, that's cool. Give me a couple hours to play with it. There's some learning curves for sure. But the power and the accuracy really started to add up and it really started to make a lot of sense. So I was like, yeah, I'll buy it.
00:17:18
Speaker
How much? It's about $5,000 US, give or take. Oh, OK. Full price. OK. So more than I paid for the used optical comparator. Yeah. But still absolutely fantastic. We started to measure some features that you can't really measure well on a manual optical comparator, just because you're comparing different things. You can measure two circles, find the distance center to center, or outside to outside, or inside to inside. And there's some features on the Norseman blade that
00:17:47
Speaker
we were able to measure and qualify. You can drag in a DXF and compare your live measurements with the DXF and it'll show you your tolerance bands and like how your plus or minus, it's pretty freaking cool.
00:18:00
Speaker
We've done the same thing with our Spironi. It's effectively a poor man CMM for any particularly round part or part that can be held within that camera range because it has auto-recognition on black-white contrast. It can count threads, thread pitches, distances, and if you think about it, the fact that it can do gauge length, diameter, et cetera, means you can just jog things around and be like, okay, this point's here, that
Learning and Growth in Isolation?
00:18:24
Speaker
point's here. If you had an OD groove on a part, super easy to figure out quite precisely.
00:18:29
Speaker
Nice. That's fantastic. How accurate is that thing? More accurate than we need or are capable of. It's one of those things. I think it reads beyond tenths, but it's repeatable to a tenth or two, I would say, maybe a little more. There's very real limits on all that stuff.
00:18:52
Speaker
It basically comes a shadow graph as well, right? Yeah, exactly. You have a contrasting black and white. Yeah. So we use the silly putty to make sure there's dust off the parts and focusing it on edges. Yeah, because if you wipe it with your skin, usually you'll pull off enough skin cells that it becomes fuzzy. Yep. I noticed that. Yeah, go for it.
00:19:15
Speaker
The fun thing to do with the ... We've got the brown and sharp electronic indicator thing, like the same thing, and its lowest setting is like bananas. You could zero it out on a steel part, like a gauge block, and then just hold your hand over it, not even touching it, and you can watch the needle move. Oh, I'm going to have to try that. Right? That's awesome. Yeah, it's fun.
00:19:42
Speaker
Cool. Yeah. So they took the demo back, but, um, since I ordered it, I'll get it in a week or two, I think. Cool. So that's pretty cool. Um, yeah, I've been getting really into metrology more and like, okay, we do need to buy some stuff. So I'm really glad we bought the optical. I'm really glad we bought the baby. They actually call it fusion.
00:20:04
Speaker
It's funny. The model name is Fusion, the software and everything. That's exciting. The electronic indicator is pretty sweet and also ordered a Zeiss microscope.
00:20:19
Speaker
I don't know what the progress on that is, but probably a few weeks should be seeing that. It goes to 55 times zoom and has a 4K camera built in. It's going to have a big 4K display screen. The amount of times that I've got something under the microscope and I want to show somebody else, even just in person that I want absolute quality,
00:20:39
Speaker
And apparently, you can also measure with that computer program as well. You can measure features in the holes and stuff. So we'll see how useful and awesome that is or not. But all that really wants the amazing microscope with an amazing TV screen. Awesome. Yeah, that's one of those things where I enjoy
00:20:54
Speaker
the shop tours treat us a little bit, but really more the shop tours with conversations of push. It was a theme I had written down to talk about this week, which is like, we do, we do a little bit too much in our own vacuum of our own world of our own shop of our own thing. I don't generally, maybe I'll flip through a magazine or something every now and then. And it may be my own fault, but I've been very, I'm very protective of
00:21:22
Speaker
I guess my time in the sense, I unsubscribe from almost every email blast. I don't look at them. And so I
Strategies for Hiring and Team Building
00:21:30
Speaker
like that. I like that I don't really get emails these days, which is wonderful. But it's like, how do you learn? How do you keep understanding what's out there? What are other people doing that makes us all better?
00:21:45
Speaker
And there's so many things that happen in one's shop that, I mean, you do a bunch of things that you don't think to talk about on the podcast or on video or Instagram or whatever. Yet, if I toured your shop, I'd be like, what is that? And you'd be like, oh, that thing? Yeah, let me tell you about that.
00:22:02
Speaker
Yeah, when it's funny, because I am not an ego less person. I don't want to be egotistical ever for sure. But no, I don't think anybody does. But I also really enjoy voluntarily getting outside of my comfort zone. Like, tell me what we're doing wrong. Tell me how it can be done better. Like I don't
00:22:24
Speaker
Joe Rogan, whether you like him or not, says the same thing. I tend to believe him. I'm like, look, I'm going to have opinions. I'm pretty well informed. I'm going to have opinions. And if I'm wrong, I'll say I'm wrong. And there's people that will say that and don't do it. So the segue was someone was talking to us about, and you were part of this conversation, about hiring. And we kind of all got in this debate about it. And I generally would have, well, I unapologetically would have been a proponent of, no, bring in
00:22:51
Speaker
sort of as many candidates as you can, like take the benefit of having a group of people, because it's when you have the chance to see lots of different folks, whether they're interviewing, which is, you know, interviewing is not so great. But like, you know, if you could have five or 10 folks come and shadow you for two days or a full day, or a two hours or full day, not always possible. But
00:23:15
Speaker
I think there's a lot to be said for that. Very similar to the idea that if you're going to do an Upwork project, hey, spend $50 or $100 and send out to three different people and see who works best. And I still think there's a lot to be said for that. But where I got my world rocked, and I think I'm wrong and they're right, is this idea of no. When you're hiring, understand before you meet candidates, understand who
00:23:38
Speaker
you want for this job. Build out that persona, that profile, that characteristics. Know what the job is and who's going to do well at it, and then individually find people. It doesn't matter whether it's the first person or the fourth person, but you need to be honest with yourself enough to say, if the first person that walks through the door and meets these criteria, and you and your heart of hearts are not just trying to get this off your to-do list or succumbing to any other
00:24:03
Speaker
win that an entrepreneur may have of like, Oh, it may be in a work or maybe they'll change or maybe I'm seeing something. I don't know that it could be a flag, but let's just see how it works out. No, just if the first one doesn't work out, say not the right fit, move on. And it kind of, you know, I don't want to make more of it than it really is, but it kind of blew me away.
00:24:22
Speaker
Makes sense? I think so. Yeah, something I just read on the topic was sometimes you have to hire for strengths and not for a lack of weaknesses. So a lot of times when we look at candidates, they're like, oh, they're well-rounded. They're all around. There's nothing really wrong with them. We can mold them into a good person. Or the flip side is like, they are fantastic at this.
00:24:43
Speaker
But they're a little annoying or they're a little too direct or they have some weaknesses. So what's the balance between finding, hiring for the absolute talent and dealing with the weaknesses or hiring for a perfect cultural fit and to train the talent? That's the whole rockstar versus
00:25:03
Speaker
newbie hire question. What's your feeling on that? I don't know. I'm considering it. I've always been a fan of, I'm happy to train for talent, but you need aptitude and kind of right fit for the right job, kind of right person who's willing to do that kind of stuff. Like someone I've been thinking a lot about lately is some people like to come in and be given a to-do list and here's your tasks for the day or do the same thing every day.
00:25:30
Speaker
And some people like to come in and solve problems and have challenges and the other people don't. And I find that those are almost two different types of people. Some people love to be production staff and some people love to be problem solving, creative, new challenge every day and I've got that in my company too. It's great to have both and it's great to realize that there are both and it's okay.
00:25:52
Speaker
Right. That's an interesting question. I can't get my arms around voluntarily bringing somebody on that you know isn't going to be a fit. And Fit Night may not be binary, right? For sure. All that, but yeah. I agree. I just read it last night, but the argument he gave in the book was very convincing. The book is called The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. And he was a tech year 2000
00:26:21
Speaker
super player and now he's venture capitalist. He's like very Silicon Valley kind of programmer kind of companies, but talks a lot about hiring and firing and building a culture and it's a really, really enjoyable book. You know, some of the business books that I read are kind of dry and kind of like, you know, I turned through them and this one I'm actually looking forward to getting my 10 pages every night in. It's awesome. Maybe it's just me and my point in life right now, but it's like it's what I want to hear, you know?
00:26:50
Speaker
Well, and look, you've got to, it's like the number one thing I would love to impart on folks that are trying to pursue this path is you still need to have your own opinions. Meaning you want to balance being impressionable, listening, learning of soaking up, but like a book doesn't mean it's right for you or right at all. It's a guy who wants to sell books. Um, and the, you know, the reality I got to face is we're in a relatively rural market without a heavy industrial manufacturing area. And, um,
Educational Paths and Personal Development?
00:27:18
Speaker
I'm not a silicon startup with a seven figure hiring budget to bring through multiple people on HR. No, it's not what we are. Agreed. We've had very little turnover rate in the five years we've been hiring people. I like that. I like to hire good people that are going to stick around and
00:27:41
Speaker
be part of the team and we know or assume they're going to be a good fit culturally because that's very important to us. I know some businesses will just turn through people and not care, but I want to care deeply about the staff.
00:27:57
Speaker
I don't agree with that. I don't really think anybody doesn't care. I'm that guy who's like, no, there's really bad people out there. There's people who regularly commit crime and actively defraud people. I think there's people who struggle to understand how to care or may not have the right tools.
00:28:18
Speaker
to, you know, you think about like, we have some distribution centers here in town, I've heard folks say like, you know, what a miserable job, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, frankly, there may be some truth to that. But I don't think that their manager doesn't care. Although there's varying things to care about, you could care about the profits, you could care about the people, you could care about the product, the process yourself,
00:28:42
Speaker
make yourself look good and every manager is going to have a different focus. Yeah, no, no, you're right for sure. The idea of how do you
00:28:55
Speaker
I don't know. This is a tough one. And I've been thinking about it as we've gone through a good year, a weird year. And it's actually been really good to, I just finished Good to Great. And look, thank you. It was the whole excuse of like, all right, you look.
00:29:18
Speaker
I enjoy watching TV at night with my wife. I'm not going to fib about it. I don't always want to pick up a book, but just do 10 pages. It's okay. You can make yourself do it, and I haven't done it every day, but I got through Good to Great in the last three or four weeks. Yeah, yeah, and it's made progress.
00:29:35
Speaker
And it's also, I'm kind of hitting that point in my life where I'm like, I don't really care. I don't, you know, I'm doing this because I really do love it. And the odds that I'm never going to really interview for a job in the future are slim to none. I'm never going back to school again, like for sure. And which is like, I did fine in school, but like,
00:29:53
Speaker
get excited about not ever having to go back to school, you know? Speaking of school, I never went to university or college or anything and I don't miss it. I'm glad, you know, everything worked out, I'm glad. But in the mail, we just got a junk flyer for our local college, like technical college and I just picked it up and I was looking at it because I'm like, dude, I might hire some of these kids eventually, like maybe I should know. I was looking through all the programs and I'm like, man, there's so much cool stuff you can learn.
00:30:21
Speaker
You're, you are the, I want you at 61 years old to be in front of the classroom at the community college teaching the like machining knife maker class. And they're like, did you go to college? And you're like, no, I didn't, but I found it grim. So not as any further questions. Like that's who I want is my teacher, not, not someone. Yeah.
00:30:40
Speaker
Okay, so here's a changing subject a little and putting you on the spot. How do you feel about schooling and education for your kids? Different than most people, I think. Different than most of the people we know. We're not very strict about it. I know they're getting a varied education, but I'm not critical on test scores. They don't have to know the everything.
00:31:05
Speaker
I want them to be good people. I know they're smart. I want them to learn how to learn when they need to learn. And yeah, we're actually super lax on school and requirements and things like that. What about?
00:31:18
Speaker
post high school stuff. I mean, Meg went to university and it was great. Um, although she went for history and anthropology and she had a very hard time getting a job in her field with an actual degree. And she's like, and they still don't pay very much. So she's, you know, she's changing her tune over the past 10 years or so. Um, I could go either way. And, uh, about kids going to post secondary and,
00:31:47
Speaker
I think Meg, yeah, she could go either way too. I don't know. Yeah. We'll see. But it's not an absolute requirement.
Data-Driven Decision Making
00:31:53
Speaker
Got it. Some people are. Yeah. Interesting. Anyway, one of the good takeaways of
00:32:04
Speaker
Good to great was this idea of how do you effectuate change in an organization? Somebody asked me a month or two ago if I could bring this up on the podcast. And it just wasn't like a question you and I frankly are qualified to answer, which is, I think the context was there a younger person that either manages or took over a shop that has some folks that have been there a lot longer, like 20, 30 year folks. And they're like, we're struggling to
00:32:34
Speaker
put in, I don't remember what the change was, you know, manual to CNC or lean, not lean to lean or fight or whatever the, these buzzwords and trends are and so forth. And look, I've never done that. So I don't feel qualified, but good to great kind of directly addresses, which is you don't, you don't tell people you're going to change. You start changing and then use data to show the results and work through ways that can show people what that does. And yeah,
00:33:01
Speaker
And then they put it quite eloquently, repeatedly throughout the book. You make sure you keep adding the right people onto the bus and the wrong people need to exit the bus. Yeah, you kind of let the momentum snowball if you start to implement change and then everybody starts to see the progress and starts to see the need.
00:33:22
Speaker
Yeah, I wouldn't want to be the young guy who goes into an old established company with employees that are older than you and you're like, we're going to change everything. You guys are doing it wrong. That'd be a tough position to be in.
00:33:36
Speaker
Well, but, but you're not wrong, but it's also not going to be a tough position because it's not something I'm here to discuss. Like I'm here, you're here. This is how we're going about it. We're going to have a two way conversation. Like I'm not closed-minded, but we're moving to this type of equipment. We're like, there's opportunities to train, to grow, to change.
00:33:55
Speaker
Um, if it doesn't work, we're going to use data to show why. And, um, it's kind of, uh, you know, it's kind of going to, this is my bus now. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Um, and I remember, I remember, gosh, was it either saving private Ryan or the Pacific? Do you ever watch either one of those? Yep. Yep. Long time ago.
00:34:14
Speaker
I think it's Tom Hanks and somebody, he's this incredible leader. And at one point somebody was like, so what did you do prior to being drafted in as a commander or officer or something in the army? And he was like, I think he says like I was a kindergarten teacher.
00:34:32
Speaker
You're like, what? Wow. So it makes me think a lot about how things are coming together here. We are completely missing the mark and the opportunity to take that last step, which is we have Lex. Lex is working. We have our e-commerce is working.
00:34:51
Speaker
and we have the right people, mostly the right equipment, the right products, the right team, the right shop, everything else is there, but we're not using data as much as we need to be using it, period.
00:35:04
Speaker
I think everyone will be on board. I just need to figure out, okay, so are we doing weekly reports and how are we looking at some really important data so that it's not me or anyone else's opinion or feeling on how things are going? It's like, hey, this is what happened. And we'll get there. I know we'll get there, but I also want to admit we're not there right now.
Balancing Work, Personal Routines, and Goals
00:35:26
Speaker
For sure. But it takes you spending weeks and months and years
00:35:30
Speaker
wanting this and seeing and feeling a need for it and then figuring out the best way to start implementing the company. We've got the exact same thing. There's still too many things in our business that are run by feel. I feel I have enough end mills or enough material or I feel like the customers are buying this just fine.
00:35:49
Speaker
Isn't that hilarious? I feel like the cycle times are fine. We don't have to optimize it or I feel like the ferrochloride for our acid etching is still being effective and then you replace it and you're like, yeah, that just twice as fast now. Right? Right? Yeah. There's data that's irrefutable, but if we don't capture it and track it and
00:36:11
Speaker
It's very easy to overwhelm the staff with too much data and too much tracking and too much reporting and too much stuff. So you got to be careful with that. But like you said, it's not an overnight switch. It's a progress. Start tracking this. Pay attention to this. Clean this up. Make sure you have enough for so much production.
00:36:31
Speaker
That's it, John. And that's what really resonated with Good to Great. It made me feel like, okay, no, we're doing okay. Because when you want to go from where Saunders Machine Works was 18 months ago to where you are today, you don't just say, hey, everybody pencils down, come on in the meeting, we're going to have a talk. Today is the day we change. We are now- And it's like new information for everybody.
00:36:52
Speaker
Well, yeah, and it's just a talk. It's not action. What we did and said over the last year and a half was we picked away at, hey, we're building our whole ERP system. Hey, we're barcoding stuff. Hey, we're starting to think about how we track other data. We're making sure e-commerce, like we've done a lot with Shopify now and Lex so that they're further integrated on material cost product margins, tracking and reporting so that we can actually have a lot of inadequacies of Shopify reporting now
00:37:23
Speaker
basically if we move, if we, when orders occur, if we move that data in the Lex as well, it gives us total control versus Shopify, which either doesn't have that is slow or they make you kind of pay for act. This isn't like a bootstrapping thing. It's more like, we're not at that level of Shopify that gives us the data we want period. So we're going to do it. We're going to do it our own way. Yeah, exactly. And there's options for that, you know? Yeah. Cool.
00:37:49
Speaker
Yeah. That's fun to talk about. Yeah. I'm going to start Small Giants again next week because you were saying that that's probably the better book for us. Yeah. Good to Great is all about huge public corporations, which we can learn a lot from, but we will never become basically. We'll never be the Home Depot, whereas Small Giants is literally about companies in our realm.
00:38:10
Speaker
you know, from two employees to like one of the companies has over a thousand employees, but he calls it human scale businesses where the owner can actually kind of know everybody on the team. Um, and they choose to, you know, but especially companies under a hundred people that, you know, are run with passion and care. And, uh, that's, that's us. That's what we're going to be forever. You know, um, again, and how to,
00:38:36
Speaker
effectuate change in those businesses, but how to lead, how to build a culture, how these other companies, you know, the 10 examples in the book are doing it. It's really interesting, your perspective. Cliff Bar was one of them. And I'm like, I love Cliff Bar, he's the climb and hike, you know, the energy bar. Yeah, they're one of the companies on the list in the book, huge stories about them and how they, you know, how they've built their company and their team and
00:39:03
Speaker
how the employees like it and there were some tech companies in there and some visual artists studios like motion picture CGI kind of companies. It's a really nice book to read. That's one thing I've done a much better job at this year. It was on my personal list of goals is what you just said. I was already excited to read Small Giants. I am now excited to read Small Giants
00:39:29
Speaker
When I finish 10 pages, I will be happy I read it, but I fail at the, it's eight o'clock. I'm maybe a little tired. Maybe I want to just veg out. That's where my weakest is. And the Tim Grover relentless, like stop thinking. Don't have one more thought about what you do or don't want to do. Just walk over to the book, pick it up and put your eyeballs on the first letter and it's fine. You're done. Yep. A hundred percent.
00:39:56
Speaker
Yeah, I've removed that thinking part of my brain that says, I don't want to do it. This past year, I've been a little bit more lax with my routine. The reading, I've slipped probably maybe a dozen days throughout the year. And my evening walks, I've slipped a bit more because I'm like, I'd prefer sleep tonight as opposed to spending an hour going out. Or prefer work, like if I work late or something like that. So I'm finding the balance that works best for me.
00:40:25
Speaker
75 soft, John. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, but it's like at the end of the day, who cares? At the end of the day, I did the program and it's affected my life and I need to find what is sustainable for the rest of my life.
00:40:40
Speaker
Yeah. It's also, I care because I love you. You're my friend. No one cares. Exactly. It is a personal thing, right? That said, I went for a great walk last night. It's time to myself, I think. I don't listen to music, podcasts, anything like that. It gives me that alone time out in nature. I saw two skunks, nice cool night, went at a fast pace, and just stars were out. I find myself looking up at the stars a lot more lately.
00:41:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's cool. Awesome. What do you have today? Today, I'm getting Dibor Tools, which is a Canadian end mill manufacturer. They have some tools that I really, really like, but they're like a mile long in gauge length. I'm like, how do I get these as stubby as humanly possible? Because they're necked tools, they have a small neck, but the neck is like half inch long for it.
00:41:39
Speaker
Mm hmm. You know, three 32nd, and I'm like, I need no neck. So they said anything over 20 pieces in a custom order, they can do that no problem. And it's becomes cost effective with a, you know, off the shelf price. So I'm like, Yeah, I could order 20, I could order 50, like, I'll need them. So I got to finalize that and send them an email. And the guys are working on the Wilhelmin picking away at the past few days, they put
00:42:06
Speaker
antifreeze like coolant in the chiller, the spindle chiller. That's the correct thing to put in the spindle chiller, I hope. Yeah, even the correct brand and everything like that. It leaked all over the place. They were pumping it in with a hand pump and then all of a sudden just a waterfall from the top of the machine.
00:42:24
Speaker
And it turns out a lot of the fittings were super corroded, like gone corroded. Um, so they pulled them out, they bought stainless ones from McMaster and, uh, they're in the process of putting that all back together now. So that's cool. And the other piece in the puzzle, we're waiting for a couple of things to come from Wilhelmin USA to button that up and get the air system all sealed up again. And, uh, I was
00:42:51
Speaker
Most of the time Angelo loads the current and runs the current and checks the tools and everything, but last night he left early, so I had to do it. And I was here late and I was fiddling with it and I was looking at a tool and I was like, yeah, I should replace that tool. So I replace it, but I left it in the Rego fix holder. Okay. And I didn't put it back in the machine. So I have this yellow 3d printed placeholder that I put in the tool changer to know, to know where to put it back.
00:43:17
Speaker
And so I go home and, uh, you know, I got a text this morning from our guy, Steven, who comes in first and he's like, so the, the Kern ran one palette of rasks and it stopped around midnight. Cause it was looking for that tool that I didn't put it back where it's supposed to be. So I lost like eight hours of production there. But I view that as a huge win. Like nothing went. Okay. So who cares? Nothing went wrong, but that was a huge oversight fail on my part.
00:43:42
Speaker
Yeah, I know. I've very much had a view of like, but what would have been far worse if the program still ran, it caught up the 3D printed HSK empty and then tried the machine parts with it, which results in friction stir welding plastic into the mixture. And then you got to unwind and fix a bunch of stuff like whatever. But I've already eliminated that possibility. So it's like everything about the current and the production that we're doing is eliminating all variability and all, you know, human error and machine error and, you know,
00:44:12
Speaker
probing and tool breakage error and everything like that. So this was just a human mistake. It's not a big deal, but yeah, it won't happen again. Awesome. What are you up to? I'm kind of unwinding myself out of Okuma mode because I'm taking a step back now that we kind of got the basics down with it. You and Ed both learned it quite well.
00:44:37
Speaker
Yeah, we basically were both there. I had to step away every now and then, which means Ed was always there, which is great. I don't have a ton of my list. If you want to go to this, well, I have a ton of my list, but nothing that's behind fire drills relying on me. We're at that point now where I run this business, the business doesn't run me and my life in the schedule.
00:45:08
Speaker
Don't underestimate that. That's like a huge point that I'm realizing about myself now. Yeah, you're right. And it's gigantic shift from where we were a year ago or five years ago. Yeah. Things like that. It's fantastic.
00:45:22
Speaker
Our RO system doesn't seem to be working. I need to either figure that out or just buy a new one. We took the light down that was near where the Okuma is now because it had to get mounted underneath our big ass fan. That way it doesn't, that's the brand name, by the way. This is still a child friendly podcast. That way it didn't cast shadows through the fan location, but it's too dark over there. So I have an idea of just mounting like it. You want it, you do want it under the fan, some amount to have it in the right location, but I'm just going to make an L
00:45:50
Speaker
like a fabricate or have an L bracket made that kind of hangs underneath the fan and over a few, but I'm very particular about having that light back. It's interesting. It means very much stuff that, quote unquote, I shouldn't be doing. I also know that the people that I could have do that are doing good, busy stuff, and so I don't mind at all. It's that balance. Yeah. It takes somebody who has the time to step back and think and stare at it for 20 minutes and go, yeah, this is what we should do.
00:46:19
Speaker
And that takes away from production, but that's part of your role and part of my role. And then maybe you'll have one of the guys make that L bracket or something. Do it. They just get a direction. Yeah, sure. I can do that. No problem. But the thinking and the planning takes effort.
00:46:36
Speaker
Here's a good one. We saw the gossamer guy brought his own setting ring gauge to calibrate the spindle probe. And when I saw it, I just said, Oh, you got to be kidding me. He had a very nice high end, I believe Japanese made gauge that had integral
00:46:56
Speaker
magnets. But what occurred to me is I'm just going to take the MSC, it's that Swiss brand SPI, two inch setting reengage that I'm holding up. And I 3D printed a carrier for it with has three neodymium magnets screwed into it. Now, in theory, if the magnets aren't perfectly coplanar, it could affect the perpendicularity of the cylinder.
00:47:19
Speaker
The sphericity of the tip means that should be neutralized beyond that. The ease of being able to just set the sitting ring down and have it magnetically same place versus finding a clunky strap clamp and finger tightening that down.
00:47:37
Speaker
Yeah, the one that came with the Kern is like half that size. Like, you know, you put your fingers together, it's that big in the circle. And it came with three, not new dimming magnets, the black kind of cheap magnets glued to the bottom of it. Oh, interesting. They're not what lapped or ground right now. I don't know how coplanar it is, but it works. Yeah. And it's just nice. I just have it on top of the high nine control. And whenever you need it, it's just right there. Yeah.
00:48:05
Speaker
We'll throw up the, I mean, I'll throw up the file and the McMaster maggots we bought. Anybody could recreate on their own for sure. But it's one of those like, Oh, that's a nice quality of life improvement. It's like a handy hack. Yeah. So yeah, it's all I got. Have a good week, bud. Sounds good. I'll see you. Okay. Take care. Bye.