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#328 Breaking drills on Swiss lathe image

#328 Breaking drills on Swiss lathe

Business of Machining
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210 Plays1 year ago

TOPICS

  • Grimsmo was on vacation
  • Terminator movie
  • Breaking drills on Swiss lathe
  • Puck chucks and training classes at SMW
  • Speedio grinding
  • SMW internal newsletter
  • Coolant temperature

 

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Transcript

Introduction and Personal Reflections

00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining episode number 328. My name is John Saunders. My name is John Rimsmo. John and I debate and try to share tips and insights, the serious stuff and the whimsical stuff about manufacturing entrepreneurship life. It changes every week too. Yes, it does. How are you doing? I am fantastic. I just got back from a four or five day vacation.
00:00:29
Speaker
an actual vacation family, non-work related trip, so weird. It was wonderful. I traveled with my dad. I haven't spent so much time with my dad since I was a child. We live in the same town, but we traveled together for five days with each other nonstop. It was great. It was like either we're going to be totally sick of each other or this is going to go great and it went great. Oh, that's good.
00:00:54
Speaker
Yes, that was really good. Traveled to Vancouver, upstate Washington, and got to see my mom, my grandma, my uncle, my cousins, good friends. Got to go shooting, which was super fun. I haven't shot since I shot with you last time. Do tell. Yeah, so a buddy of mine from high school is still very, very, very much into firearms. And I got to pop off some good toys there. Awesome. That's fun. Yes, that was super fun.
00:01:25
Speaker
Yeah. Just great. Just great. Good. Sounds like you did a decent job of detaching from... For the most part, I'd answer the odd quick email, but I didn't even have the time or brain space to really crunch a problem. When you're at home and you obsess about things, do you think through something? You're trying to buy something to do all the research, things like that. It takes time.
00:01:50
Speaker
to run a business. And I didn't have the time to do that. My dad and I chatted and we had conversations and talked about stuff going on and all that. But it's not like that's just explaining how things are, not trying to crunch a problem. And it was freeing. It was actually really nice. I don't take the time to do that and get out and go for drives for no reason and go for walks with family
00:02:19
Speaker
We went for a hike with my mom and it was just nice, just so nice. You know, sit around the fire and chat about nothing and everything in business. It's wonderful, right? Yeah. Yeah, I forget. It was actually kind of eye opening like I used to do this stuff, you know, being around this family in high school.
00:02:40
Speaker
And I used to do more of this and now on my own with my own family, I don't do much of it. And I'm like, it gets me kind of to wonder, you know, what am I doing with my life? You know, what do I want to bring into my life that I'm not doing with my family, with my kids, things like that, that, you know, I just kind of life and work got busy and I haven't made them those things a priority, you know, like,
00:03:09
Speaker
camping and things like that. I used to do that stuff so much when I was a kid and now my kids are kids. It's my job to make sure they get to do those things and I'm so focused on work sometimes that I forget to do those things. It was a good eye opener to just be like, well, take a minute. Think about what you want for your life and your kids and your family and things like that. Yeah, just good reflection time. Good. I'm glad to hear that.
00:03:34
Speaker
Having been a grinder for a long time, I don't miss, you know, I've said this before, but generally don't work nights, weekends, spend time with the kids, family.

Business Challenges and Entertainment

00:03:44
Speaker
It's not easy, and it's funny. The reasons are changed. It's a subtle nuance. The reasons have changed. For the first six, seven, eight years, it was personal need to prove it to myself and get the business stable. And now, I do have a bit of anxiety and sense of obligation around
00:04:01
Speaker
the performance of the company for everybody else, the state groups. I'm pretty comfortable reminding myself I don't desire more. I'm actually really happy with where we're at, but there's inevitable growth. I'm happy to talk about it this morning, but I'm working a lot on the puck chuck, the zero point system, and that takes a lot of effort. I don't want to be the bottleneck because
00:04:26
Speaker
there's so many other people and systems and vendors and processes that need that stuff to happen. And probably not the best thing for me to be so involved in some of the technician side of it, but I do love it. I get up early and do personal stuff every morning, play piano and all that. I could be, we would be better off if I got up and spent an hour and a half, two hours
00:04:49
Speaker
you know, here on the machines or planning or strategizing or all that, but, but oh, it happened. Like life's life, you know, this will all be over one day and you got to balance it all.
00:05:07
Speaker
Arnold Schwarzenegger has a great three-part series on Netflix. Arnold? Yes. I haven't seen it yet. Totally no relevance to this podcast other than it was an enjoyable show. Good to know. That got me fired up to rewatch some of his classics. Kindergarten Cop. That's like a tier two classic.
00:05:32
Speaker
Terminator. Yes. So I feel like everybody, I've seen Terminator 2 throughout my life. I haven't seen Terminator 1 since 25, 30 years ago. I remembered almost none of the plot. Right. And so I watched it. And The Takeaway isn't anything about Terminator. It's a great movie. The Takeaway is there's a scene where Sarah Connor is going to go out for a night on the town with her roommate, girlfriend roommate, and they were going to meet up with a couple of guys.
00:06:02
Speaker
And right before they're about to head out, she says, hey, check the answering machine to see if we have any messages. And they were like all ready to go, like going to meet them at six o'clock at this restaurant. And the guy had left a message earlier in the day canceling on her.
00:06:19
Speaker
And it was just this wonderful moment of realizing that we humans civilization managed to get by for a really long time without constant, you know, foam up, FOMO and text messages and planning and making sure you're not going to show up. And like, just, I, you know, it's kind of makes me think of Ted Kaczynski, like in the manifesto. It's like technology boy does great things, but it's a, it sure is a set of handcuffs.
00:06:48
Speaker
Yeah. Interesting. Even at that time, leaving a message was pretty new age. 10 years before that, they didn't even have that kind of thing. Not everybody had answering machines or checked them. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? That's cool. I've always admired people that have managed to keep a good balance in perspective and simpler things.
00:07:14
Speaker
Yeah, on the flip side, what I think I hear in front of you, which is awesome, is that if you go away and take a break and enjoy moments, if you hated your life and you hated your job, I'm sorry, hate your life sounds extreme, you'd be reticent to be back at the shop. I usually find after a few days, I'm actually fired up to get back. Yeah, and I am totally fired up. Yep. More present, more, I'm still, my brain is getting back into the swing of things and I have to like remind myself, okay,
00:07:42
Speaker
Everything's exciting, but what do I actually need to work on? What specific projects are going to make the biggest bang for the buck and put my focus and energy in that?

Return to Work and Technical Troubleshooting

00:07:54
Speaker
Yeah. What did you get back? I got back.
00:08:00
Speaker
Not yesterday, but the night before Monday night. Yeah. So today yesterday was your first day. So I did do an assaulted half day plus yesterday and then full day today. Nice. That's good. Was your first day back a 10 out of 10 or a first day back?
00:08:17
Speaker
It was good. We had a bunch of people out actually. Spencer was working from home. Angelo and Steven went shooting. It was just me and a couple of guys in the back shop and the machine shop and then a couple of guys in the front. It was pretty good to work on some stuff.
00:08:35
Speaker
Yeah. I found it's good to be pretty realistic on when I'm out. Knock on wood, when I am out, things have gone really well. Like wholesome, like they really have and that's awesome. But oftentimes, the first day back is better off if I don't plan on trying to tackle a bunch of John stuff but rather recognize, okay, this is going to be my day to
00:09:00
Speaker
help the team, help whatever it needs to be because some stuff may have been put off or have questions for me. It's interesting how much managing your own expectations and mindset can change that stuff in a good way.
00:09:15
Speaker
Yeah, I was actually expecting to come into a pile of problems. But no, it was great. Awesome. Pierre is challenged with breaking drill bits on the Swiss lathe. I saw that. Yeah, and still not exactly sure what's going on. It's either some alignment issue or we're tweaking speeds and feeds, but I don't think it's that minute.
00:09:39
Speaker
I think it's something like we're breaking six millimeter drill bits or chipping on like the second part kind of thing. It's a pretty strong drill. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't through coolant drill too with oil. So I don't know. I worked with them a lot yesterday trying to figure that out and no real solid solutions. We tried a couple of things.
00:10:01
Speaker
It's on what machine? The Tornos Swiss. Swiss, okay. So it's hand coded, not fusion? Probably a fusion drilling code, yeah. Double check the fusion did that quick about face and then reverse about face on feed per rev on drills. So just make sure it's not posting a super wrong feed rate. I think this was posted four years ago. And you're never reposting? No, not that one.
00:10:30
Speaker
Can you check the alignment? Yeah, check and run out straightness. Alignment to the subside. Yeah, I learned a cool trick a couple of years ago where you put a
00:10:47
Speaker
gauge pin or dowel pin in the sub collet and then another one in the tool holder and you jog them in together until the bushing slips between them. Yeah, that's cool. I love that trick. It's so cool because you can literally feel a tenth of misalignment and it's like, oh, that's X zero, Y zero. It's great. Yeah. So he did that.
00:11:07
Speaker
caveat is you're removing an ER-16 to put in your bushing, and then you're removing it again to put in your drill, and you're assuming everything's still concentric and straight, but it's quite close. Yeah. And the drill is static because the part's turning? Correct. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, right? That is odd.
00:11:34
Speaker
But that's the icebreaker in a bunch of tools, I hear you. Yeah, he makes one part and the edge will chip. And we're like, what? Have you confirmed it's not a bad batch of material or a different hardness? I didn't think about the material so much. I did wonder if it was a bad batch of drills, because they're kind of the cheaper ones from OSG, the hydrocarb. So I ordered some of their fancier ones, the A-brand drills from OSG, which we use on the current almost exclusively in the work
00:12:05
Speaker
In this op, we've had the same drill last for months. You know, don't even think about it. And now it's just it's I don't know. Yeah, he's going to try bronze material today, because we haven't really thought of that or tried that yet. Okay, let's switch material to another part that we need to make. See if that same drill still works in that material, like no problem, just to see. So we shall see.
00:12:35
Speaker
A question for you. I am this morning, had a nice morning working on the puck chuck.
00:12:44
Speaker
R&D or beta units, we are making them on our UMC right now. And we actually flipped, we were making off one as the bottom, we decided it's better to do off one as the top, so I had to kind of do something programmy. And there's a pattern, a bolt hole pattern on the top that has pockets around it. And I did program one of them and did a pattern, a circular pattern. And when it ran this morning, I expected it to do,
00:13:14
Speaker
a pattern like move X, Y around each one and it kept X the same and it did a C rotation for the pattern. Interesting. Which doesn't hurt anything, but have you come across it on the Kern to be the way it posts? Yeah. I just would rather be an X, Y.
00:13:37
Speaker
Typically when I post on the current, it would do an XY move, not a C rotation. Every now and then I want it to be a C rotation and I have to fake it. I forget how I do it, but certainly on the lathes, sometimes you want XY, sometimes you want C all the way around. Absolutely. More concentric. I don't really know. It's posting really. Yeah. And there had been some stuff I'd seen in Fusion where they were going to give you more operational control about either hard
00:14:08
Speaker
hard definitions or preferential definitions of like, hey, I'd prefer this to be. Right, which would be amazing. Yeah, exactly. I'm sure I can figure it out. Again, it doesn't even matter. It's more just that when I'm running that part in the background and I hear the C move, that means I know it's doing some of the 5-axis stuff. So I may want to go pay attention to it. Yeah. You can hear the C move. It's not a current, John. Yeah, it doesn't sound like anything on the current. It's funny. Yeah, you can.
00:14:37
Speaker
The other thing is it actually is a smidge slower because it does have to do the break and release. Interesting, yeah. Not the end of the world, but yeah. Yeah. That's the UMC 500 in the training

Training and Role Balancing

00:14:51
Speaker
class? Yeah. We actually just released a video on Wednesday, sort of talking about, hey, six months in, what we like. A couple of things that could be done better, but it's been good. Nice. Yeah, I'm looking forward to watching that.
00:15:07
Speaker
Vince actually really up to the game. It's pretty cool. The training class main part is about a three or four inch size V engine block.
00:15:18
Speaker
And we, the first few classes, we only did sort of the top half of the block. If you are like the outside of the block, looking down from the bottom, it was the top Vince took it one step further to get some better five axis work and or more five axis work. Cause he had time in the curriculum. So now it's part of the opportunity instead of just decking the bottom, we actually open up the crank case and machine that away. So it does look a bit more like a true engine block. It's pretty cool. Yeah.
00:15:48
Speaker
That's fun. Yeah. What does Vince do, uh, SMW wise production wise, curious for as an employee? No, he's mostly focused on the training class stuff. Um, nice. So spent the last year getting three X classes up and running. Kind of funny, just to be totally honest, we like didn't have any empty seats for a year.
00:16:13
Speaker
And that's great. That tells us we're offering a product that people want. We've got it fairly priced. It's good to go. And then we have a class in two weeks that has three out of eight seats sold. So we discounted the seats. It'll be last minute, but if anybody's listening, we'd love to have you. But it's just interesting that all of a sudden we went from having saturated demand to it could just be the summer schedules. I'm not going to worry too much about that.
00:16:36
Speaker
Five axis classes are on board and now what he's doing when he's not teaching is getting the lathe curriculum up and going so we'd like to be able to start offering our lathe classes. Nice. That's so awesome. Yeah, it is good. Yeah.
00:16:51
Speaker
It worked out well to have the machines for classes, but then we also use it for R and D. Palette makes that good. The tooling is work better at it, but it can be tricky to balance how we have tools set up for sure. Yeah. 30 something tools in that machine. 50. Yeah. That's not bad. Yeah. Hmm.
00:17:14
Speaker
and the step back a minute, the purchase of the second building and the renovation of it and buying the machines, that's all working out. You're happy with that?
00:17:25
Speaker
I am. You know, top of mind is my focus this week, this month is mostly on puck chuck. Yeah. Partly because, like, literally, I actually finished the part this morning. I didn't take it out of the vice because I want to spend a few more minutes with some of our metrology tools while it's still set up. But knock on wood, I should this afternoon be able to hand those off to one of our summer interns to run more of them. But look, that's where I
00:17:55
Speaker
I enjoy either playing the role of person that kind of oversees everything and puts out fires, answers questions, plans, or I like, I love being a machinist and programming parts. I really struggled doing both and I'm, this week I've been in the both mode. So I came in early, got some time on the UMC. That feels really nice. And then you just kind of got to be realistic about like switching over to other stuff, if you will. Yep. Yep.
00:18:23
Speaker
Like for example, I spent time on three different printers in the shop and know we don't need an IT person. These are quick things to fix, but nevertheless. And then I was laughing. My computer, my main work computer was shutting down on me very infrequently. And then yesterday, it shut down three times. And it's been a long time since I knew in the weeds on computer stuff. And I was like, I wonder if it's a power supply, but it's only shutting down when
00:18:51
Speaker
I'm doing, you know, heavier simulation. So I was talking to Alex and we installed I think it's called core temp. It's a little
00:18:58
Speaker
CPU monitoring app. And so sure enough, my cores were getting way too hot. And so I was like, why would what changed? And so pulled the case off and the fan, the heatsink, which has a fan at both to the top of it, three of the four heatsink plastic tabs had just somehow broken. I mean, my computer doesn't, it's a desktop, it doesn't move. And so the fan wasn't attached to the heatsink, wasn't attached to CPU. So like, good grief, no wonder it wasn't working.
00:19:27
Speaker
and always comes down to your setup. Well, gravity is my setup right now because Amazon had the fan, but it's not here yet. So my CPU is laying on the ground sideways to let the heat sink be held on with gravity and thermal paste. Yes. Cool.
00:19:48
Speaker
Yeah, I do need to be more realistic about long-term. It's not that I can't spend days making parts because the day I don't do that, the day I'm out period, like full stop. Yeah, for sure. But the business comes first in my job right now until Alex has really stepped up of a lot of the stuff. I've had a number of other people here, but switching between the two is a joke. Like you can't do it. Don't so stop kidding yourself to think that you can.
00:20:14
Speaker
Yeah, especially short term, like jumping back and forth between heading the weeds of a project and like running the business and doing big decisions and stuff back and forth, back and forth. I find myself doing that and not enjoying it or not thriving at both at the same time, you know?
00:20:30
Speaker
No, exactly. When you try to do that, you're good at making bad parts or missing things, and you're good at not doing your job right in the shop. It's the myth of multitasking. Everybody's like, I'm so good at multitasking. And it's like the brain can only focus on one thing at once kind of thing. And it's task switching that you think you're good at. But it's jumping back and forth, back and forth. It's not efficient. I mean, sometimes it's reality. You just have to do it.
00:20:58
Speaker
When you have the option, you know, put your surgeon hat on and focus is the way to go.

Machine Experimentation and Feedback

00:21:05
Speaker
It's like when you're in a conversation with somebody and they pull out their phone to answer an email while you're talking to them or something and it's like, excuse me, like no. Oh no, like they said everything they need to say at that point, right? Yeah, exactly.
00:21:20
Speaker
When I do it, I'm having a conversation with somebody and I have to look something up on my phone or something. It feels so distracting and so like I can't listen to them talking when I'm looking at my phone to do a thing and it feels rude because I realize that I can't focus on both at once. If it's important, I'll be like, okay, hang on, hang on, do this and then come back to it.
00:21:46
Speaker
No, it goes back to all the books and mentors of people that I look up to. All I end up having that trait of being able to be present and listen or give your attention. It's a rare commodity these days, so value it and treasure it and maximize it. Yeah. It's been hard to focus because you Canadians keep sending smoke down here and messing up our air quality. Yeah, sorry. That's two. Yeah.
00:22:16
Speaker
How's your cool situation? Any news? Um, nothing new. I think, uh, a couple of blossom people are going to come in in a week or so, have a stronger conversation about options there. Okay. Um, I haven't officially reached out to quality camp to say what's up yet. Yeah. And I might, um, mostly curious what Plaza has to say. Fair enough. So yeah.
00:22:42
Speaker
Yeah, nothing there. So last week we talked about on the speedio grinding blades. And you had those choppy lines every few, every 80 thou or something.
00:22:53
Speaker
After we talked about that, I actually had quite a few emails and DMs from people that whether they be hard course BDO fans or other people just offering great suggestions, a couple of people reminded me to try the accuracy settings.
00:23:12
Speaker
of the machine like you could do M260, 261, things like that or 289 or there's options where you can choose the built-in speedio smoothing or accuracy setting where apparently the default, if you don't force anything, the default is speed over accuracy. It might be quickly moving to the next point and not accurately moving to the next point.
00:23:36
Speaker
I was really excited once a lot of people suggested that because I was just on the default, whatever it is. Just this morning, I turned on the finest high accuracy setting that's available and I did the same exact reaming cycle that I did before.
00:23:57
Speaker
Cross my fingers, super high hopes, and it looks exactly the same as it did with other high accuracy. But it kind of led me to believe that maybe last week I was jumping the gun and I haven't talked to Yamazin or Speedy or my local dealer about options and things I'm not thinking about. Greg at Luma Labs is an expert at this kind of stuff and there's so many Speedy nerds out there that are
00:24:22
Speaker
way smarter than I am and have more experience on things like this. So, you know, maybe I need to shop around a little bit and see what people have to offer for ideas instead of just, you know, writing it off completely and saying, ah, this video is not accurate because I had a couple of people being like, that hurts my feelings. Like this video is great, you know.
00:24:42
Speaker
No, I see that like as an outsider here. It's like what else do you get spoiled with though, moving the process from a current to anything else? Yeah, exactly. It's not disparaging. I mean, literally, you have been running Max for chaffins formula one car. And all of a sudden, you've hopped in a late model, you know, Porsche Streetcar and it's a phenomenal vehicle, but no, you know what I mean? Like, exactly. So I don't know.
00:25:10
Speaker
I want to make sure that I'm not jumping the gun as far as writing it off because I'm not trying the right things or something. Yeah. The Y moves anyway. It's not like the Y is in a linear fashion. Yeah. Yeah.
00:25:33
Speaker
And I did mount the blade at a 45 degree angle so that every single move is an XY of like two or three thou. And that's the test I did this morning. And it's looked pretty much the same as it did before the high accuracy setting. But there's a couple other settings I could still try, still keep playing with it. I was very helpful.
00:25:54
Speaker
There was something in the WhatsApp about a brother option that sounds like you don't know. Yes, a high accuracy option, which I think it's just a software thing. That's what Ken was saying. I don't know if you pay for it or they give it to you or something. I don't know. Probably pay for it. Everything you pay for. Apparently, that gives you a fifth decimal point and it lets you move more accurately, whatever. Because I was looking at the
00:26:19
Speaker
Is it the IO page or something? Where you can see when you jog the machine one tenth, smallest increment, how many pulses the servo motor moves. It's about 227 pulses per tenth. Wow. It's not unaccurate. Seriously? Yeah.
00:26:38
Speaker
That doesn't seem, remember seeing like the mechanical resolution accuracy, which is not like true, like you can't go back and forth in this increment. That would imply that it's like a few millionths. Yeah, less probably. Yeah. Crazy. There. Yeah, because a tenth is a hundred millionths.
00:27:14
Speaker
But maybe the high accuracy mode just cuts that in half and lets you move a bit more accurately. So I still got to figure out exactly what's happening here. I'm curious. The Occam's razor outside perspective for me was seeing that picture you posted privately of the spacing of those witness mark lines and they're so perfectly spaced that it seems like
00:27:27
Speaker
So that's implying that it's half a millionth servo resolution accurate like pulse.
00:27:40
Speaker
that has part of the answer to it. Why is it so consistent? That doesn't mean it could be accumulation of hardware issue, but gosh, it feels software-y, you know? Or code as well. Sure. When it was exactly in X, like not a 45 degree blade, when it was doing all the moves in X with a little bit in Y, every vertical line was a 10th move in Y.
00:28:06
Speaker
So it's like 80,000X and then a 10th forward in Y, and then another 80,000X and then a 10th forward in Y. And that's where all the dips were. And Sky tried to polish out one of those blades. And he was able to, but he said it took longer than normal. And it still didn't leave the greatest finish. It's good. It's a little bit more rounded and not as flat, flat, flat as it should be.
00:28:35
Speaker
It's all your Y moves are in the same positive or negative direction, is that correct? Correct. Okay, because that would be a big red flag of like... If it's back and forth, back and forth. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point.
00:28:47
Speaker
What if you, let's say your X line spacing, you're making like 600 X plunges or whatever drill points. Let's say there's 600 of them. What if you change it to just do 200 of them? So the grind isn't necessarily being good, but change the number. Your cusp height would be bigger. Huge. But does it, see if it changes the, because if it's a code issue or point issue or a cumulative area issue, they would change the interval spacing of those lines.
00:29:20
Speaker
Okay. Can we all handle that? Like, to a point. Yeah, you go too big spacing, then you're plunging the wheel, like more aggressively kind of thing. I just don't want to try that geodesic pattern. Like I've done it in fusion, I just haven't posted it or run it. But that is more of a, you know, 3d code, as opposed to just a reaming cycle. And maybe the reaming cycle itself.
00:29:50
Speaker
whatever it is, G82 or whatever it is on the speedio, it's being a little unaccurate and an actual three axis code.
00:29:59
Speaker
might point space more accurately. I don't know. Sure. Or maybe the high accuracy mode doesn't affect a reaming cycle. Maybe that's the thing. I'd be really curious to see what a brother expert can somebody like that says about in your specific application about, you know, Hey, what's this look like? Cause I don't know how the brother architecture works, but like, I would be surprised if they, they weren't willing to unlock it for you to do a test pay for it. That's a good point. Yeah.
00:30:30
Speaker
So progress. Yeah. Good.

Communication and Data Management

00:30:35
Speaker
A small victory that we had just started it, but I love it, is we have our lunches. We moved them to Tuesdays through the summer because we've got different people who sometimes are out on Fridays, more so in the summer. So Tuesdays and the lunches. That works great. But there was some information that we're talking about in the lunches that I just didn't
00:30:56
Speaker
felt like there could be a better medium to share that. So Yvonne started a Monday morning email newsletter just in terms of letter. It seems like we're here. We're like, you know, take away like what do we need? Why do we have a newsletter? But you say that even before you explain it to me, I'm actually kind of like, I like that idea.
00:31:15
Speaker
I'll forward you the first one that came out Monday morning, but it was like, here's what's on the schedule this coming week. Here's, you know, next week we have a holiday. Here's who's on vacation or out. When we have things like machines coming or training classes happening, that can be put on there. And then she actually was pretty awesome, put out like some of the spore of the sort of outstanding orders that we're all focused on. These are bigger orders or custom orders type of stuff. And that was great. And then I realized, okay, I like that.
00:31:44
Speaker
What I want to do is balance that with the fact that we have a shared Google calendar that I don't always look at because I don't. We are setting up a Chromecast TV in the kitchen that will have the ... I'm going to try to do a split screen so the newsletter that week will stay up on the left and the right will just be the shared calendar that's always up there. I like that a lot.
00:32:07
Speaker
I suppose we could also put a way to put live announcements or fun things like sales or things that happen or anything else. This is clicking. I like that. That's so cool. Good.
00:32:26
Speaker
It's like a silly idea that just got run with and you're like, three weeks from now, you're going to be like, I can't do anything else. We can't stop this. Yes. No, it's so good to communicate and it's felt folks can refer back to it if they do need to know something and yeah, it's good. That's good because even verbally in a meeting, one day morning meeting or something,
00:32:48
Speaker
the organizer has to remember to announce the fact. So you take your notes ahead of time and then everybody just listens to it once like, okay, so-and-so is on vacation on Thursday. Thursday comes around. Nobody remembers. Yeah, but having it posted on the, I like that.
00:33:03
Speaker
lunch conversations are really great. It's more of like, hey, this is what's happening here. We have a conversation and, you know, like actually one of the things we talked about our last lunch yesterday was I was just kind of saying, hey, guys, I don't know the answer to this, but I can tell you that
00:33:21
Speaker
There are lots of negatives to all the different ways you can handle linked or derived or embedded CAD objects with infusion. Some of them we break the link, some of them we keep it linked, which is obviously the perfect situation, perfect world. Everything stays linked. You have your master CAD, you split out your CAM, you split out your assemblies.
00:33:45
Speaker
Look, I don't know anybody that can't open a fusion file and be like, do I want to click get latest? Who knows what those changes are? Does it break the, I swear to God, put together best effort, best focus building out tombstones with more complicated fixturing and setups. And when you go to click update, it breaks the something. And look, I'm sure I made a mistake somewhere, but I'm just trying to say, I really was like, hey, let's do this right.
00:34:13
Speaker
So more often than not I break the link but then we change one dimension by fifteen thousand a product and so we're like okay let's go in and manually update the broken cat files which works so long as you have that conversation but yeah at least wanted to address it and say hey this is. I don't know what the answer is. I know there's drawbacks on both sides.
00:34:36
Speaker
Yeah, I've been able to successfully have links on all of the recent stuff anyway. Some of the older files from like five years ago that I'm still working on are messed up from back in the day. But all the newer stuff, the current stuff is linked well, linked properly, except there's tiers. Like sometimes I have to go up two or three levels to get latest.
00:34:57
Speaker
If I've done a single file, then it goes into the assembly and then it goes into the cam file. If you want to update something, you got to go up the chain and update everything, which gets annoying. Well, there's just still a question of, let's say Alex changes a model chamfer from 10th out of 15th out and I go to reopen the cam or Garrett or Grant or anybody and it's get latest.
00:35:23
Speaker
You could get later. True. You might, your cam might intentionally or deliberately go out of date. So you got to refresh, but like, I don't know what I'm looking for. Yeah. I don't have that problem yet. I've shared, um, you know, multiple people working on the same file. So I, yeah, that could scare me for sure. Yeah. I kind of liked the broken link because yes, it's more work, but.
00:35:53
Speaker
When I have forked off a file for production cam, I don't want anybody else messing with that. We got to make a change, we make a change, but I'd rather have that change be a big event, a memorialized event where we all have to physically huddle, it stops things, it slows things down, but we get together, we look at the change, we know what to expect. I recognize that feels very 2005-ish, but eh.
00:36:19
Speaker
Yeah. On the current, especially for Rask production and Norseman production, I've created a Google spreadsheet where, um, I'm trying to log every significant change. Um, you know, I changed this drill bit to this brand or this stick out or a chamfer from five out of 10 thou, or, um, I'm interpolating this whole, I used to drill it or something. And it's been super helpful, especially going back, you know, like
00:36:45
Speaker
What did we do before? When did we make this change? Oh, we made it last August, you know, um, and I put the revision number and the, even the fusion file number, like version number, uh, in there. And, uh, that's been very helpful. Put the, put a date next to the change because while there's probably only like 50 changes or so across all the different files, it's still super nice to be like.
00:37:07
Speaker
I know we changed it. What did we change? When did we change it and why? Because sometimes parts take a couple of weeks to flow through the shop fully through heat treat and everything. If the change I made didn't work, then this tells me when I changed it and things like that. That's been good. It is good. Even if you're just making parts for yourself, you can't remember all that stuff.
00:37:32
Speaker
Right. Well, to your point, like the idea of like, well, where is that batch of material in the work in progress? And when does that change going to proliferate through the whole system? Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we try to, um, if we have to, you know, travel post-it notes with the changed product, you know, through the shop, so that once a Sky or Eric or whatever gets it, then it's like, oh, here's a little post-it note with the change. Hopefully it makes it that far, the post-it note.
00:38:04
Speaker
Cool. I learned something I thought was really interesting on a, I think it was like a December or January, so like six months ago, episode of Spencer Webb's PFG live. And he talks about, I hope I'm getting this correct, that water
00:38:23
Speaker
It has about 10x the energy storage capacity than cast iron, meaning cast iron can come up to temperature quite quickly. So when a machine- Like thermal conductivity, you mean?
00:38:39
Speaker
I'm trying to think what the word would be, but it's pretty quick and easy to get cast iron machine to go from say 50 to 68 degrees. It takes a lot more energy, AKA time or effort to get that water from 50 to 68 degrees. Really?
00:38:54
Speaker
Yeah, like 10 times more according to Spencer. And he had done some pretty good testing from putting temperature probes, or whatever you call them on, his castings and then in this cooling tank to understand how and where stuff changes temps and how quickly and so forth. Long winded sort of conclusion of him putting a, I believe Adam Deemath kind of got this going, but a fish tank, like 800 watt or 500 watt heater in his cooling tank. So
00:39:24
Speaker
I just bought a, can you iterate this morning, a similar, I don't know who Spencer was using, but I bought a probe, a data log, a temperature data logger that is water rated. So I'm going to start logging the temperature in our Okuma horizontal, which has like a, I think I've got a 200 gallon tank.
00:39:40
Speaker
I don't know what i do most days that machine runs from like six thirty till ten pm but it still has five or six hours overnight where the shop is at its coldest and we do know that the machine changes when it warms up the interesting to know if the cast iron is the easy part but if we had started i'm gonna measure the data first but if the.
00:40:02
Speaker
results make it meritable, then that's a word meritable, worth merit worthy,

Temperature Control and Machine Precision

00:40:07
Speaker
whatever. I will buy some fish tank heaters, put them on and IO devices that can turn them on and off as appropriate and then keep that temperature, a coolant temp more stable. Especially if you could circulate the coolant somehow, even just a little
00:40:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think what I'll do is get a fish tank pump that'll pull it from one corner and just bury a line, a piece of hose tubing in the coolant tank that moves it to the other side. Yeah. In the past, I've looked into heaters in the coolant tank and a lot of people question the bacteria growth and don't make it too hot and things like that.
00:40:45
Speaker
Something to keep in mind, but I think if you can regulate the temperature and keep it 70 or whatever you want, whatever typical operating temperature is. There's only one, John, 68 degrees. Yeah. That's the ultimate standard. It's 20 Celsius, man. There you go. But notwithstanding the smoke, I live in Freedom Land, so 60 degrees. Yeah, exactly. Well, you can have my smoke. I don't want your smoke. Take it back.
00:41:12
Speaker
Cool. I'm excited to see what we learned. We're spoiled on the current because even the coolant is temperature controlled to 68 degrees. In the coolant tank reservoir, which is also the paper band filter, there's a heat exchanger in there.
00:41:27
Speaker
But that, so everything I've heard about the big boy shops, the dentist writings of the world, they have to chill their cool because it gets so it gets warmer from the pumps. Fair. After it's running for a long time, you actually have to bring the temp down. I'm only going to focus on bringing it up from
00:41:43
Speaker
Although I guess I'll learn, maybe I'm going to eat my words here if it ends up that our problem is our cold gets too warm. I'm not sure if our chiller actually has a heater in it to bring things up to temp. I know it obviously chills down to temp. But I mean running the machine for a few minutes brings it back up to 20.
00:42:07
Speaker
Okay. Yeah, because I get cool on my hands plenty of times throughout life in the shop here. And I've never once felt like, Oh, that cool. It's like, you know, tap water warm or anything like, yeah, that's warm. So really, you haven't seen that even on ladies. I don't touch the ladies, Sean. Come on. Yeah, exactly. On our Nakamura, it gets like warm, like, like you feel like warm water. And the Swiss oil to gets gets warm.
00:42:32
Speaker
Interesting. Okay. That's why I'm saying on your Okuma horizontal, I bet you the operating temperature of the coolant, like mid day, end of day kind of thing is warmer than you think it is. Well, if there's ever been a point to bring up data versus emotion, this is it. We're going to stop talking about it and start getting some data. I love it. Is it going to be a live monitor with a little display next to the control that you can just look at all the time?
00:43:00
Speaker
Bring that thing over here. Oh, it's out on my desk in the shop. It looks like a voltmeter has four different probe options. I'm only going to put one in one tank for now. Actually, I'll probably put two. I'll put one in the ambient air. I'll put one in a one gallon bucket of water that doesn't get touched as a control one. I'll put one in the coolant tank. It shows screen readings, but the whole point is you disconnect it, pop the SD card out, put it in your computer, and you have a CSV file. It's a data log. It's nice. Yeah.
00:43:29
Speaker
Yeah, there's aquarium temperature meters that just have a little display device, no logging or anything with a probe. And I've always thought about putting one of those next to the control panel and just dipped in the cooling tank so that you can always feel like, oh, cooling temperatures, you know, 78 or 80 or 60 or whatever. Just give you that extra little data point of actual fact. You know, like, oh, I got to run a warm up because the coolant's cold. Yeah.
00:43:56
Speaker
When we did that on the Haas lathe to great success with that warmer program, we have a warmer program and then we have a precision part program that won't run unless the spindle is at a certain temp. But some of my thinking has been softened because if what Spencer says is true, it's pretty easy to get the machine up to temp, coolant though, spraying coolant that's 20 degrees lower.
00:44:20
Speaker
will be counterproductive and it could take a lot more energy units to get that coolant up to the temp you want. Interesting. Well, on a machine, all of the temperature comes from the cast iron, the motors, even the coolant pump adds temperature. So running the coolant by itself will add a bit of temperature.
00:44:44
Speaker
But you also have, like you said, 200 gallon tank. That's a lot of water to suck heat from a little bit of cast iron comparatively. Um, so I could see why it would take a very long time to heat up the coolant itself. But, uh, um, what do you call it? There's a phrase for like amount of heat energy to heat something up or suck heat away. A jewel.
00:45:12
Speaker
I don't know. I don't know. But I feel like water transmits heat a lot faster than cast iron would. You know, unit of energy.
00:45:21
Speaker
I mean, the conduction nature of the heat. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. But our shop's climate control. So what I'm hoping I learn or hoping I see is that the coolant doesn't get that cold and doesn't get that hot. But nevertheless, a 1500 watt heater, that may not be enough can help. Let's say it gets down to 59. Well, a heater could bring it up to 63. And then the machine will take up to 64. And those, by the way, three or four degrees is only, you know, six millions instead of it being four tenths. Yeah, man.
00:45:51
Speaker
Yeah. And this is going to be more of a problem in the winter than in the summer. Yeah. You know, when the shop gets cold.

Workflow Improvements and New Equipment

00:45:59
Speaker
Yeah, cool. Well, data will tell. Data will tell. What are you up to today? Sweet. So today I'm going to stare at the speedio a little bit more, see if I can figure out the next test. Maybe email some people about that.
00:46:13
Speaker
Otherwise, what am I doing? Tempted to program one of the parts on our Swiss onto the Wilhelmin and make parts on that. That's quite tempting, which might finally get us to hook up the bar loader and finish that install, because we haven't yet. But that could be good, because breaking these drills on the Swiss is causing Pierre to fall behind a little bit in the next parts to make. So I'm like, well, instead of
00:46:40
Speaker
This next part is very complicated to set up on the Swiss and every time we set up takes that like eight hours to set up and tune it kind of thing. And I'm like, if we set up on the Wilhelmin, it should just like be a 30-minute set up next time. Isn't that amazing? Let's take that eight hours and I'll teach you the Wilhelmin and I think that's a much better use of everybody's time. So that's what we're going to propose to the team today. See what Angela thinks. But that kind of stuff, what are you up to?
00:47:07
Speaker
funny you mentioned that Wilhelmin, ours went down and I'm gonna give them a big shout out both Wilhelmin and Grant. Grant figured out there was a hydraulic error and talked to Florian. They looked at the hydraulic unit and there was a iconic, it looked like cast but it might have been aluminum, some sort of a coupler bushing, something or the other and it broke and not a particularly expensive part. They got us a replacement one, helped us
00:47:33
Speaker
figure out how to pull it was a little bit hard to pull it off of the key axle. Like it wasn't obvious as to how to get it off, got it off, Grant did all that stuff himself and got it back up and running. But I'll tell you, we missed it. Like, yeah, it ran. It ran 151 part. We had another part we wanted it to make it in another part after that. Like it is good to have it back already. Nice. Yeah.
00:47:54
Speaker
I'm going to go do one last QC on that UMC part. If it's good, we can start running them. Another good reminder, I really wanted to get that part started yesterday. I was disappointed in myself that I didn't get further along, but 315, it's only 20 minute part cycle. So at 315, I'm trying to leave it for. I got plenty of time. I said, John,
00:48:15
Speaker
Go double check your tools, change a couple of tools that you wanted it set up differently, get the part probed in, and just leave your machine in the perfect state to come in fresh in the morning. And that was the right call. Yeah. And Patrick's setting up our new fiber laser. We'll talk about that next week. Oh, yeah. That came in. Yeah, that's the. Yeah, by next week, you should have results to talk. So good. I'm looking forward to that. Good. Awesome. Awesome. I'll see you next week. All right, take care. Bye.