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#274 - Defining Success, Long Term Mindset, and Turning on the Willemin
240 Plays3 years ago
TOPICS: - Preparing for Economic Recession Video - Better Business Decisions: Evolving from a Short Term to Long Term Mindset - Saunders gets personal about life, ambitions, and expectations - Make Sure YOUR Goals are Finite - Softening of Tech Market/Industry, Cash Flow, & Borrowing Money - KERN Damper Life & Replacement - FREE WAY TO INCREASE MACHINE TOOL LIFE! - Okuma Tool Break Detection & Break Control - KERN Workflow for Bang On Bore Sizes - Wear Comp, Speroni Tool Presetter for Measuring Tool Diameter - DIY Tombstone Pour - Keith Rucker's Video on Concrete Mold for Casting
- Grimsmo's Belt Grinder Advice - SAGA Pen and Pocket Book - Precision Microcast with Adam Demuth & Nicholas Hacko - Turning on the Willemin
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Transcript
Introduction & Theme Setting
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining episode number 274. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough. John and I talk each week. And today, I would portray that conversation as what it means to us to be successful, both in our daily lives as leaders of small machine shops, but also overall, why we do this.
John Saunders' Recession Video Success Story
00:00:25
Speaker
That's a deep one to start with. I love it. Well, so it's deep for two reasons. Number one, in what is one of the best small victories of my life, like just the smallest way, we've talked countless times about this recession video. And it's been on my desk for like two years. I wanted to do it. I cared about it. And I was like, it's going to be a terrible video in terms of like the YouTube algorithm because blah, blah, blah. And I think the way I recorded it and talked about it just ended up being candidly
00:00:55
Speaker
Just I nailed it. And the timing in hindsight looks very prophetic. I will admittedly say my timing was not good because frankly, I've been wanting to do it for two years. So it's not like I knew the timing was going to be perfect if I launched it in like May or something of April or whatever.
00:01:12
Speaker
And the point of the video isn't to imply that one can time the markets. The point is to talk about long lasting ways of creating a business that can last for your whole working career, if that's important to you and potentially set it up for era beyond you, which I think can speak to a lot about the, not only the health of the business, but the health and the role that the leader plays in that can the business work without John Saunders or without John Grimsmo being there.
Business Decisions: Long-term vs Short-term Mindset
00:01:40
Speaker
Uh, that makes sense.
00:01:41
Speaker
Absolutely. That's something I've been thinking an incredible amount a lot about lately. It's not that the goal is for the business to last for 500 years, but to think with that mindset makes different decisions every day. So you're not so short term mindset. So like, you know, immediate cash profit driven, like cracking the whip. And it leads to poor short term decisions that end up, you know, not working out long term.
00:02:11
Speaker
Yeah. And you can get overextended. We all, I think, kind of know that, but you can get underextended. You can be too paralyzed and scared to invest because you don't have enough confidence or conviction or you get too sucked into a, like a Dave Ramsey mindset. And I remind myself, Dave Ramsey has done a lot of good things, but he's also speaking to generally a, how do you say this, your average American consumer? Yeah, average working class, yeah.
00:02:40
Speaker
And our business, there's elements that are business that function in a non-average way. I'm not above average, but you shouldn't necessarily portray yourself as a corporation or business in that same light, as you and I have talked about. And I tell you, I feel totally at peace with how we borrow money for that latest account purchase and that's given us the right
00:03:02
Speaker
thought on how we prepare ourselves to stay competitive, succeed for
Mentorship and Personal Growth in Business
00:03:07
Speaker
us. We huddled on this. We had a marketing meeting for the first time ever and talked about what are our value propositions and how does that message exist on our content that we create or on our homepage and to our customers. It's good.
00:03:21
Speaker
of it. There's definitely a point where I didn't think long-term enough, so I would make only short-term decisions because I can only see what's coming in front of me. Now I'm starting to stretch that out over months, years. Be like, if we make that purchase now, yeah, we're still going to have it in five years. In five years, this is still the right decision.
00:03:42
Speaker
Same goes for hiring, same goes for product decisions. These things have cycles that take months or years to through it, to come to light. Certainly in the beginning, it was
00:03:58
Speaker
All you know is short-term mindset. Day one, I'm not like, man, in 10 years, we're going to have this and we're going to do this and we're going to have 20 employees. No. It's an evolution from short-term mindset to stretch it out to be a lot more long-term mindset. I'm going through it like I'm feeling right now. It's really fun.
00:04:17
Speaker
And sometimes you step back and you look around, you're like, holy crap, we have a serious business. We have a dozen employees. And everybody here's livelihood is dependent on this company. And that sometimes puts a lot of pressure on us as leadership to like, OK, we can't screw this up. OK, long term play.
Book Insights: 'From Strength to Strength' & 'The Infinite Game'
00:04:39
Speaker
OK, yeah. These guys want to be here. Yeah, OK. Customers love our stuff. Let's give them everything they need.
00:04:46
Speaker
It's all balanced. Just keep it going. You and I read books and we have mentors because you want to cherry pick and allow yourself to be influenced by folks that have been down paths or have wisdom or want to share and so forth. And that's great.
00:05:06
Speaker
And in a weird way, you can even be a mentor to yourself, I think, based on when you have different states of mind and convictions. And I made a note to myself at the end of last year that sort of said, hey, there's roller coasters of ups and downs of success and of emotions and convictions and self-confidence and so forth. But I'll tell you, I have never looked back and regretted
00:05:25
Speaker
getting the right people on our team, the wrong people off the team, and buying really quality equipment that helps us do what we do. And what's fascinating to me is that I know that to be true, but it requires
00:05:40
Speaker
concerted effort to continue to apply that mindset on a daily granular basis as the manager, not the owner, but the manager of the business. Absolutely. Because in retrospect, it's easy to say those were good decisions. But even with that perspective, looking forward, you still don't know if the next decision is going to be the good decision, right? You have to, like you said, you have to mentor yourself. You'd be like, no, we did that before it worked well. Both of us, we
00:06:09
Speaker
stress and research and think and plan a purchase or a hire or something like that for weeks or months and put a lot of effort into it so that it becomes the right decision. It's not some willy-nilly like, we need another machine, let's just get whatever's closest, whatever's fastest, whatever's cheapest. No, we plan. It's not a surprise that after 10, 15 years of doing this, we're able to make good decisions.
00:06:37
Speaker
Right. It just doesn't work. It's not a 1 plus 1 equals 2 like that. I don't know. It's just weird. The other reason I brought that up or started it up this way is I'm really enjoying the book. I think it's called From Strength to Strength, which is a
00:06:53
Speaker
the book version of the article called How Wanting Less Leads to Satisfaction by Arthur Brooks. This is not a
Balancing Success with Self-worth
00:07:01
Speaker
business book and it's not, I'm not even going to say I recommend it because it's probably one of the most personal things I feel like I'm going to share on the podcast, but the point of this is to be a conversation between you and me and not a publicly broadcast thing. And John, I'm really identifying with it. It's oddly, he is very religious and so he does proselytize in it and I am
00:07:23
Speaker
I'm not looking to plant my flag in the ground here, but I'm not a religious person and grew up going to a Catholic school, not Catholic and didn't have a found a very comfortable place and not being a fan of that. I'll put it that way. But boy, he is the way he talks about balancing the desire for success because it's who we are, but not necessarily the attachment to it and not letting it define you in that sense. It just it makes me proud of
00:07:54
Speaker
being comfortable with what where we've gotten knowing that we're going to do more but
00:08:00
Speaker
This is the book that I laughed about. My wife gave it to me for my birthday. I only turned 39. In the book title, the second half is things to think about in the second half of your life. No. And I'm kind of like, wait a minute here. Do you know something I don't know? Yeah. But it talks about how we do change, like it or not. And we do taper and we don't have that same mix of talents, energy, charisma, multitasking abilities. And I would much rather be somebody that
00:08:29
Speaker
grows old and accepts that versus fights it and so forth. So it has been the first, I'll put it this way. If you're listening to this podcast and you sometimes you can be, he calls it the hedonic treadmill. You're always on this treadmill looking for more, more success, more stuff, whatever. I never felt that way
00:08:52
Speaker
in the Keeping Up With The Joneses sense, I did feel that way. I do feel that way in the sense that I'm out to prove something. I'm out to prove that that decision to pursue a
Finding Fulfillment Beyond Material Gains
00:09:00
Speaker
career manufacturing was justified to my family and myself. If I'm being honest, my parents, even though that's silly to even have to say. But it's for real.
00:09:11
Speaker
I've already done it. That is now check the box, move on, get over yourself. Like I said, this is like ultra personal, but it's been the first thing I've read that has given me the framework to realize, no, you're there. Start thinking about giving back in how we grow the company and the culture and what we do here. I don't need more
00:09:33
Speaker
Lots of people can need more, but some of my mentors have talked about how when they hit age 50, they spent the next five years getting rid of stuff. You know, toys or stuff they didn't need and they thought would bring happiness and value. And what brings me happiness and value is seeing us build this company, deliver products, take pride, like that's the stuff that I could preach about because that is exciting. That is wonderful.
00:10:00
Speaker
It brings a deeper level of compassion and enjoyment to life when you bring other people into it. And I'm slowly learning that over time too. As we grow our team, as we care more about each other, as we do more for the world, you know? Yeah, yeah. We're trying to make quality products that, you know, put a smile on people's faces and they pay us handsomely for it and it all works out. Like everybody's happy, you know? And we treat our team really well and
00:10:29
Speaker
the work is good and challenging and I want to continue to grow skill sets and career paths and the company, not for personal reasons, but for the benefit of everybody around me.
Infinite Goals in Business Strategy
00:10:40
Speaker
Coincidentally, I'm reading a book by author Simon Sinek called The Infinite Game and I'm about a quarter of the way into it. Fantastic. It's so good and I'm a big fan of he's got a lot of
00:10:55
Speaker
speaking videos on YouTube. He's a very, very polished speaker, very quality guy. I've read a few of other books. Leaders Eat Last is another one. And this one, I've had it for a while. I've been putting it off. I've been getting through some other books first. This was the time to read this one for me. Basically talking about
00:11:13
Speaker
business in particular, but life and everything else as with a finite mindset of like, we're going to be the best, you know, um, we're going to hit these profit margins. We're going to a very finite, whereas an infinite mindset is more like setting goals that are basically not achievable for the long-term success of your company. And there's a lot of really solid examples inside of it. And, uh,
00:11:39
Speaker
a lot that resonates with how I think and how I want to think and how I want to grow the company. It's hard to explain in just a minute, but I'm really enjoying it. Can you explain more about that idea of an impossible goal? Does that mean you're supposed to set them or is it actually a hat? You'll fail if you think that way?
00:12:01
Speaker
It's more setting companies as they grow, they set their mission statements, they set their culture goals, they set everything else. He gives a lot of examples from big public companies.
00:12:14
Speaker
both ones that are successful and ones that have since failed and how they phrased the attention of the company and whether it's inward for profits and shareholders and investors and things like that or whether it's outward for the benefit of the consumer. Because at the end of the day, we're in business to make things for people to buy those things. So let's put our effort and energy into that as opposed to
00:12:38
Speaker
being so profit-minded and so dedicated on growing the business without realizing what it's costing the people in the business or the customers or whatever.
00:12:50
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm still wrapping my head around the core concept of it, but it's very enjoyable to read. There's been some interesting things come to light even in the last week or two with some softening in the overall economy and the tech sector. I read an article about, there's a thing, I guess, a term in Silicon Valley called the default.
00:13:11
Speaker
not the default ratio, the fail rate, something where basically if you are a much better thing to talk about in the context of a tech growth company because of the idea that you need to potentially subsidize losses or high growth rates with lots of cash, but basically the idea is if you stopped raising money today
00:13:36
Speaker
What's your burn rate? How long do you last? Can you justify your ongoing operations as is, meaning revenue as is and overhead as is, or what does it mean you're going to need to grow revenue that may not be attainable or are
Financial Responsibility in Business
00:13:50
Speaker
you going to need to do, you know, quote unquote, corrections internally to rebalance. So, you know, basically if, if you have to freeze it today and, but then keep going forward on a runway, where do you end up?
00:14:01
Speaker
I guess in the context of a venture capitalist kind of company that needs another injection of cash, the context there is if you don't get that. But even for us, I guess what you're saying is if we don't borrow more money to buy machines, what's our current burn rate? Can we continue to grow or be happy where we are or whatever? That's a neat way to think about it.
00:14:28
Speaker
Even though I do have reservations about debt, mostly because we all want to keep our businesses and not lose them, I don't think the trade-off of borrowing money, you do need to make sure you have a rate of return on the equipment that exceeds
00:14:44
Speaker
the cost of it. The cash flow matters, not just ROI, cash matters about bringing the building in. But I think a lot of the tech sector type stuff has also relied on increasing valuations with equity money that then expects perpetuating growth, growth, growth, growth, growth. It's a very different
00:15:03
Speaker
out forecast that just responsibly borrowing money for things like hard assets. For sure. That's true. Even in our industry, you and I have seen serious and jokingly examples of companies that have borrowed huge amounts of money to revolutionize automated CNC machinery and CAM software mobile line. You're like, oh, I mean, don't get me wrong. Some of these companies may rocket and they may make millionaires out of technology that was truly trend city. Some of them are hyperbole and going to fail. Yeah.
00:15:33
Speaker
Some of them are saying that every machine shop out there is old grandpas that are stuck in their times kind of thing. Right. Yeah, it's interesting. He talks about that similar thing in The Infinite Game. And he says that talking to a lot of tech companies and a lot of venture capitalists, a lot of venture capitalists will invest money seemingly like, oh, yeah.
00:15:59
Speaker
grow your company, no big deal, take your time, whatever, but really they only gain their value back when the company sells or is valued for a super high value. So all of a sudden their interests shift when they start talking about cashing out. You know what I mean? Yep. For sure. It's a very different set of stakeholders and I would
00:16:24
Speaker
If anybody is contemplating taking on outside money, you really have to be willing to recognize the loss you will go through in terms of controlling your company and direction and decision making ability. Simply put, don't do it unless you're a sophisticated person that understands
00:16:46
Speaker
It sounds no big deal early stages, but if your company does grow to be a bigger deal, then it gets messier very fast.
Machine Tool Maintenance: Issues & Solutions
00:16:58
Speaker
What have you been up to? Playing on the current, playing on the Wilman.
00:17:07
Speaker
teaching Angelo more on the Kern, how to recover from some sticky situations on the Kern, a pallet misload or something. We've had a couple of those lately. I had to go through it. The tool changer on the Kern has these little dampers that shock absorbers that will slow down the arm.
00:17:28
Speaker
when it hits the limit and they have a life. We found this out a while ago where one of them was popped and the tool changer was bouncing on every tool change. The sensors would get crazy and then it would miss the tool change. Not a big deal, it just stops and it says, I don't know what to do. Then pretty easy to recover from that, but harder to fix the problem.
00:17:51
Speaker
A while back, I replaced the one dampener and fixed the problem. Totally great. And then over the weekend, I was doing a long weekend run, like 30 hours on.
00:18:01
Speaker
after Friday night if we left. And so I check in, I log in, remote in from home Saturday morning, and tool changer's stuck. Oh no. And it turns out the second damper that I installed a while ago has failed, but failed differently. The first one kind of expanded. This one just doesn't compress far enough. There's a blockage inside. I don't know.
00:18:23
Speaker
So it was kind of fun. I filmed a YouTube video on Saturday morning all by myself, just how I replaced this part and talked about it a little bit. And we'll get that going up here pretty soon. And it was neat to film a video with the mindset of like, really, I'm filming this so that Angelo can watch it and know everything he needs to know. But also get to share it to everybody.
00:18:45
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm basically looking at that part now as a consumable item. We're going to have two or three on the shelf always with this video. Now it's super easy to replace. Anybody in the shop could do it in like 20 minutes and problem solved. Awesome. No big deal. We had a very similar experience this week. We had our Akuma detect a broken tool as we request it to. We have a
00:19:10
Speaker
manual NCM codes in certain parts of the program to make sure tool didn't break or basically we know a tool is going to break because we'll have a better grasp on how we handled long term tool management later. We don't right now. So one of the ways to tackle that is just making sure we do lots of break control. Yes.
00:19:26
Speaker
So a quarter inch or 316 centimeter that does some slotting for us broke. No big deal. But the way we replace the tool caused the machine to, the technical term of freak out. The matrix puts a broken tool back in the matrix in a spot called NG. There's NG1234. NG stands for no good. Yeah.
00:19:51
Speaker
But we had already replaced the tool with a correct tool when it was still in the spindle. But you have to go to the tool table to mark it as no longer broken. So because that didn't happen when we did a tool change, it put it in no good. And then the matrix got stuck on the taper of... Not physically stuck, mechanically stuck, but it decided to... It's confused. Yes, thank you.
00:20:12
Speaker
And we couldn't figure it out ourselves. And then we couldn't figure it out on phone support, which I was now moved from frustrated to like, oh, come on. I don't really want to incur a big service bill on this. And luckily we got it figured out, which was awesome through
00:20:30
Speaker
More phone support ideas but the other reason i mentioned all this was the gossinger service guy was like look your matrix is running at a hundred percent speed. Are tools are pre staged from cam.
00:20:46
Speaker
back that down because those matrix have wear items and the thing flies for no reason. I took it from 100% down to 70% I think is what they were even saying, but it doesn't matter when the tool is pre-staged and I would much rather not wear out pads and bearings and linear rails and adjustments. I'm happy we got it fixed and I'm even happier that we've found out effectively a free way to improve the longevity of our machine.
00:21:16
Speaker
So is it kind of similar to the current where it's an XY plot? Very similar. The thing goes left, right, up, down, and just grabs the tool and places it where it needs to be. Yeah, exactly. It's a spider, like an XY bridge mill on its side, or gantry rower. Cool.
00:21:36
Speaker
Yeah, you have to come see it. I mean, the volumetric area of our matrix is probably bigger than your whole current, which isn't necessarily a good thing. It's big. It's hilarious. Yeah. And it's Cat40, right? It's Cat40 Big Plus. Yeah. Wonderful. It is. Do you have the little Flickr tool breakage sensors? No. Those are BK Micro, I think. We don't have those. We have a Renishaw.
00:22:05
Speaker
cube, like an actual ground cube in the Akuma. It's pretty standard, I think. And it is like an R2D2 pop-up or a Johnny Five pop-up thing where it comes up out of a hole. And so the tool can come in and it can set the gauge length and it can detect a broken length or tool pull-out as well. But it cannot do anything more than that. Like, for example, it cannot measure diameter. So do you have two? Just one. How do you measure diameter? You just can't?
00:22:35
Speaker
we don't use where comp. So it's frankly irrelevant. Otherwise we have a spare oni or you could put them in another, like a hot or the Genos or the Haas and do it that way. Yeah, exactly. That's funny. Interesting. So you don't measure. Oh yeah. I measured diameter for everything, even on our Maury. Um, cause I use where, um, cutter comp for,
00:23:02
Speaker
all the critical hole diameters I want to do. So new end mill goes in, I want to measure the diameter because they do vary from end mill to end mill. Oh, for sure. And then use that exact, not 125, but 1246 diameter to her radius to try to make the hole the right size. Yeah, interesting. We just don't have
00:23:27
Speaker
Those tolerances, so all end mills are, no end mill matches that's nominal like kind of the whole like, I think it's perfect. But most of the stuff that we do that isn't as critical and then other things they are kind of walked in.
00:23:44
Speaker
You've basically found other ways to hit your goals. A couple of dimensions on some of our products is incredibly tight tolerances. Other things like fixture plates when we match sets, I don't really care. That's a length, not a diameter issue, but we just come in different ways. Yeah, that's good. On the current, I figured out a workflow to create
00:24:11
Speaker
bang on accurate bore sizes like holes or features. Basically, I want to do a YouTube video on this because I think it'd be really good to explain. And if I can condense it into like a five minute package, it'd be solid. But basically like, you know, rough machine, the hole with say fourth hour radial stock to leave,
00:24:33
Speaker
probe it knowing that there's fourth house smaller, and then finish machine it and probe it again to confirm. But it's this staged progression of rough probe, semi-finish, finish, and consistency is key for everything.
00:24:53
Speaker
Totally. We just did this on the horizontal, although a little bit different.
Precision Machining Techniques
00:25:00
Speaker
We're not doing tool diameter and probing on a feature, but what we're doing is checking the fixturing location of an object, and we're probing it in two spots, and we're doing the G11 shift plane, which we've already been doing. It's kind of like G68 hospital. Like to tilt it, to rotation?
00:25:17
Speaker
Yes. But then what we're also doing is we're updating the datum of the work coordinate system, but I philosophically will not allow perpetual roaming work coordinate system adjustments. I just don't think it's right. I always want to go back to the original and then the next set apart gets measured from there. Just like on your board, you're going to measure it for 4,000 stock to leave.
00:25:39
Speaker
adjust the tool diameter, run the cut. But then I think you should go back to what you think is the measured tool diameter each time to avoid it always chasing itself in iterative loop. Yeah, because I've definitely chased tolerance. Like on the lathe, because we have a probe on our Nakamura, you turn to diameter, you probe it, and then you fix the next one or something. Exactly. And then that swings back and forth and back and forth. But the way I found on the Kern,
00:26:08
Speaker
because tool pressure is bigger than I ever realized even for finish cuts. So even when I'm creating the rough machined 4,000 stock to leave, I want to start with 8,000 stock to leave so that the semi-finished pass is taking off 4,000 and then you probe it and then the finished pass is also taking off 4,000. So it adds up, right? Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
00:26:31
Speaker
But take the tool diameter, I think it's a little bit easier to visualize the example. If you're going to wear comp tool diameter from half inch, the way we rewrote this code is every time you do it, it will adjust the tool diameter, but no more than 1,000 or 2,000. That way, it doesn't do something crazy. If something crazy gets measured, it happens. And then let's say it goes 1,310. So it goes to 0.5013. After it's done with that cut, it resets the tool back to half inch.
00:26:59
Speaker
Because I always want to go back to home, or quote unquote home, and I always want to know I'm only allowing it to go a certain amount off of what it should be to avoid bad parts and catastrophic consequences. Yeah, I could see that.
00:27:13
Speaker
Yeah, I don't do it that way. I do let it stack up. Like on the current, we do a lot of probe the whole offset, the tool probe the side of the feature and offset the tool diameter, the radius, um, where, where diameter. Um, and it does stack up over time. And because we're tracking our tool life and our tool, all of our tool information, every pallet. So I have a whole list of, and I can watch that swing, like gently grow and grow and grow as the tool wears out. Um, and it seems consistent. It's not wobbling back and forth.
00:27:43
Speaker
We're hitting our tolerances, so it's working, but I could see that, yeah, there's a math to it. You can argue with me about whether you need to go home each time. What I don't think I would concede to is not allowing it to be collared because I just don't like this idea that you're- Oh, I've definitely broke a chip and you add 20,000 and it's bad. Yeah.
00:28:07
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's just the idea that you're having the machine or the probe rewrite either a tool diameter or an offset with no limit is crazy. Especially those scenarios you can't think of, of like where you stop the machine and it like, who knows if like the radish off cycle actually wipes it out to zero and then
00:28:26
Speaker
It goes from half inch to zero to 501.3. If you ease up the machine when it was zero, then all of a sudden you're crashing. I see what you mean. You sort of just learn these things over time and wait until they come up or read through all of the probing logic in the probing macros, which I do and try to understand how they function and how to modify them.
00:28:49
Speaker
Yeah, I love you. Oh, we poured our pot, we poured our tombstone. Yeah, dude. So this is Wednesday, we poured it Monday afternoon. Even as of yesterday, the epoxy that had spilled out was still tacky and like viscous. And then we have two eye hooks that were set in there, those could still be moved a little bit. So I left it alone this morning. Dude, you knock on that thing. It feels
00:29:16
Speaker
like a granite mountain solid is, yeah. Oh yeah. Um, so I don't know, Alex is kind of in charge of the science here of how long we really need to let it cure. I saw a post he made about it and he said the epoxy was specifically chosen to take forever to cure. So the expansion and the thermal and everything is spread over days. I don't know how long it takes. It's like a low exothermic style thing. And we have
00:29:40
Speaker
quote unquote, he sinks in the form of both the stone that's in it, as well as the fact that it's six sides of aluminum, which disability, we were going to put a fan on it, it is, when you put your hand on it, it is not cold. But it'd be hard to say it has any heat to it. Maybe you say it's lightly warm. I actually should put a temp probe on it.
Epoxy Tombstone Project Update
00:29:58
Speaker
But by no means am I worried about overheating or thermal or excuse me, physical growth expansion. So
00:30:06
Speaker
It'd be funny if you put indicators all around it while it was curing. Oh, yeah. Well, I've got it ratchet strapped to the base and the lid have lips in them, so it's actually self-arrested in. So if anything, the expansion is going to push the center cardboard tube in.
00:30:28
Speaker
which is only supported right now by pool noodles, hashtag summer. My kids unfortunately won't be able to swim, but a Facebook comment from somebody said, hey, go check out Keith Rucker's video. He did an... Did I mention this last week? I don't think so. He did an incredibly similar project, except it was a concrete mold for casting, I think.
00:30:51
Speaker
And he used the same brand and style of concrete form. And these forms occurred to me after this. These forms are meant to dig a hole in dirt, put the form in there, and then pour the concrete. So you have concrete in the middle with a cardboard form outside of dirt. So there's nothing unsupported inside or outside. I'm using it with nothing on the inside, which is where the wet material is supposed to go. So number one, we had already put our
00:31:19
Speaker
cardboard form in the aluminum silicone. I could have pulled it out, but I didn't want to. Next time, you could consider coating it with something that could help it resist moisture, wax or rhino lining or whatever.
00:31:36
Speaker
But the bigger thing was the actual weight and pressure and liquid nature of what you pour, compressing it in, and that's what happened to keep his whole thing collapsed and failed, and it stunk. So I kind of thought, oh boy. So I tried great stuff expanding insulation foam. It wasn't going to be volumous enough. And so I just stuffed pool noodles into it. It ends up that the epoxy is, it's almost like
00:32:03
Speaker
a mix of honey and sand. It's not wet, so I wasn't nearly as worried after we poured it about the liquid nature or weight collapsing it in, but pool noodles were a dollar each. For 10 bucks, I saw, mitigated this dish. So is it fully capped on the top and the bottom and all the sides? Yeah. You've created a pressure chamber basically? Sure.
00:32:23
Speaker
Well, there are a couple of vent holes, or they're not meant to be vents, but there's a couple of holes. But yes, it now has six sides of aluminum cast in place. Okay. Yeah, I mean, the vent holes help, but otherwise, you're saying the cardboard is going to degrade before the aluminum bulges on the outside, if it expands a lot, you know? Oh, yeah. I mean, although cylinder is a pretty strong feature, even though cardboard, but... You could push this cardboard too, but it would be okay if you had to.
00:32:49
Speaker
Okay, cool. Is the cardboard meant to stay there forever or are you going to pry it out afterwards or something? It'll live there forever. Peel it out. We'll end up putting a 3D printed cap on top with silicone so that coolant doesn't get down in the middle of it. Cool.
00:33:07
Speaker
Cool. So far, 10 out of 10. I would do it again. Now look, we'll talk about this in the video, but we were already set up to make those parts for it. We had an intern put in all the fasteners. Alex did all the math. This wasn't- It makes sense. Yeah. It totally made sense. It's like you guys already make fixture plates and you just put six of them on the outside of the thing. Again, for me to make that, it would be a giant pain in the butt because I'm not used to working with that kind of materials. Cool.
00:33:37
Speaker
Can I ask your advice on belt grinder? Yes.
Considering a 2x72 Belt Grinder
00:33:41
Speaker
We have a benchtop grinder that has one of the two by 30 or something hacky attachments and we use it. I remember when you bought that.
00:33:50
Speaker
Do you? Wow. So I would like to splurge slash treat ourselves to having a proper 2x72 because we do use it. I think a nice one could allow us to really quickly change belts. So we want to, you know, whether we want to do wood or aggressive on steel, or we want to switch to a scotch bright wheel to do some light deburring strikes me that
00:34:15
Speaker
The 2x72s allow that belt change stuff and they have a plethora of belt options. You can buy Scotch-Brite belts. Yeah, exactly. That are pretty cool. Yeah. We've got three grinders now, I think. They're all in the finishing building in the front and I never really touched them, but I certainly have in the past. We built our first one out of aluminum just based on some plans that we found online in 2014 or something.
00:34:41
Speaker
ended up upgrading it to have an air piston tightening ram. A lot of them are like clicky cams or an over-center cam where it's like you rotate it and it expands something to create tension on the belt. The over-center cams work quite well and you adjust the tension by pulling the wheel, your contact wheel out further or inner more. So it's pretty super easy to adjust tension. But
00:35:05
Speaker
Basically, once tension is set, the way Eric uses it for sharpening, he goes through a couple belts on every blade. He's switching from different belts, so putting the air cylinder on it with a toggle valve to turn on off the air changed his world. He's like, it's so easy now. You just flip it and it goes dead and it's super slack. Now you throw the new belt on and it tightens it and it's always self-tightened and it's perfect. The air ones are really cool.
00:35:31
Speaker
but not required. So we've got the one we built, we've got a Travis Wertz grinder, which is a knife maker, a friend of ours, and it was like three grand probably. And then we just bought a Vashti grinder, which is a company out in Vancouver, Victoria, BC, Canada.
00:35:52
Speaker
which I don't know if they've gotten it set up yet, but it's there, ready to be set up. But there's a ton of companies out there that make them. A ton of websites in the States, like True Grit, USA Knife Maker, some other ones, I don't even know.
00:36:08
Speaker
that sell a mara braid is kind of I just started hearing about them like my buddy key bar bomb one started posting pictures and I'm like oh that looks pretty cool their prices are cheaper than most and it looks really quality so I don't know it's not an endorsement or anything it's just value you know
00:36:27
Speaker
Like, maybe there's a company that's like, let's just make a great grinder for cheaper than everybody else. Okay. Yeah. Maybe. Generally a terrible business model for the record, but yes. Maybe. I have no idea, so don't take my word for it. Whereas some of them, like the hardcore grinders, they're like five or six grand, but they're mint. They're like so nice.
00:36:48
Speaker
Yeah, that's not necessary. We can't even justify that or we don't want to. But they're really nicely machined and blue anodized and they're gorgeous. Do you guys or does Eric use variable speed? We definitely have VFDs on them, which helps you run a 230 motor on 110, something like that. Does he slow down? I'm sure he does. Yeah. I'm just trying to think. It is helpful. Yeah, for sure.
00:37:18
Speaker
I was like, I know sometimes we do want to do light deburring. It's surface feet. Yeah. Versus like 3,600 SFM all the time. Yeah. Get a VFD on it. Okay. Totally worth it. Okay. Yep. Yeah. There do seem to be like a plenty of options. 2K would be kind of for us, the sweet spot because look, it's, it's not, we're not you, we're not grinding blades every day, but boy, it would be nice.
00:37:44
Speaker
Yeah, I've been putting it off, buying one for the machine shop back here. We really should. We really should spend $2,000 to $4,000 and get something decent, something quite nice because we do a lot of stock prep and deburring and nothing finishing work really. But like you said, just having an assortment of belts and just having, I should do a video on this. I was going to ask you a favor. Will you post an Insta today of just like a quick phone Insta of those machines in Eric's shop? Done.
00:38:14
Speaker
Make a note in my grim smoke pocket. Oh, there we go pulling in the saga What do you call the pocketbook pocketbook? Great. Yeah. Yeah, these are great The other thing so my Adulting methodology around things like these belt grinders, you know, I fear about it I decide we're gonna get when I go super excited nuts because it's like let's do it Yeah, and then I force myself to sleep on it the next day I wake up and I realize okay back back off Saunders you this is this is a
00:38:44
Speaker
What do I call it? Um, not preparatory purchase, but like not adjusting your lifestyle, lifestyle creep. Like you don't, John, you don't make knives. You don't need this every John's Honors. You don't, you know, blah, blah. But then I legitimately thought, wait a minute here. I for years had one of the $60, $70 Harbor freight one inch by 30. That is what we still use in our machine shop. I'm ashamed to say.
00:39:05
Speaker
Well, no, but then part of me is like, John, buy three or four of them, leave the grit. You know, one could be an 80 grit, one could be a 320, one could be a scotch, right? And one could be polishing or something. Now you have four dedicated grinders that are plenty adequate for the work we do that have the belt on the period. Fair, but they suck.
00:39:23
Speaker
Yeah, they're super low horsepower. We stall ours all the time. The belt flies off all the time. The adjustment tensioning, it sucks. Tracking sucks. There's no assortment of like platens and wheels and things like that. And I totally agree with you. You don't need to go hog weld on it. You don't need all of the attachments. I would get like two attachments that you like, like maybe a big rubber contact wheel.
00:39:44
Speaker
which works good for some stuff, but I think you'd really enjoy a flat platen with a work rest. So you have a belt going up and down with a backing behind it, and then a flat metal plate. You could put Delrin on it if you want it a bit softer. That forms like a true 90 almost. Yeah, that 90 is probably going to be 90% of your usage stock prep and just like shoving metal and making sparks. Yeah.
00:40:13
Speaker
That's what we need for our shop basically. We actually bought a disc grinder with that
00:40:19
Speaker
90 degree work rest and you put round sandpaper on it adhesive. Oh yeah. We got one of those, I don't think it's fully bolted down yet and set up. We got that from Vashti as well. Beautiful kit. I still don't think it's the end all be all for what we need. I think we need a belt as well. It's also like I've got money to spend elsewhere. I don't know. Yeah, that's the
00:40:44
Speaker
We talked about that for me. Have you ever seen an attachment that would have a V where the bottom of the V is cut away so that you could shove a rounder square part into... Like a V block. But it would deeper a 20... It would basically only grind a 20 thou edge break or 10 thou edge break. Oh, like a tilted forward V block. Should be easy, right, to do that? Like I could make one and visualize my head. Right?
00:41:12
Speaker
kind of like you've seen that's a cool idea. Tom Lipton did this with a belt, a bench grinder, I think, and I don't think he invented it. But you you or no, it was like he did it with a what do you call those woodworking like a table router where it's coming up from the bottom? Yeah. And then you could deeper parts. And you couldn't over gouge it because the physical limit.
00:41:35
Speaker
It's like little bearing on the router bit or something. Yeah, there's a couple ways to do it. When we do stock prep, and on the Swiss, we have to chamfer the end of every bar. It goes through the guide bushing. We just walk up to the belt and just roll it. We don't even have a rest or stand or anything. But if you want a bit finer chamfer, yeah, having a V-block, even a 3D printed V-block would be kind of sweet.
00:42:01
Speaker
I can't believe there's zero chance I just thought of that idea and it hasn't been true before. I've noticed it. Really? Yeah. Crazy. But that's cool. Did you see, I'm sure you did, Adam Demol's video of 3D printing the V block but with the carbide pins in it?
Admiration for Adam Demol's Creative Work
00:42:17
Speaker
No. And he made a nice YouTube video too. He's coming back to the tube. Super enjoyable. I love everything he does. Brilliant guy and a great video. Super good. Short. It was nice. It was perfect. It was like, I want to do that. I'm sending this video to Pierre. He wants to do that too.
00:42:37
Speaker
I unfortunately do have an issue with Adam, which is that he and Hakko need to produce more micro podcasts. They do not come out frequently enough. Nice. Gentlemen.
00:42:49
Speaker
Are they irregular or are they irregular? I don't actually I want to but oh, John. Yeah, you would love it. Um, yeah, they look, they think I love that they haven't like commercialized the podcast, nor have we I would probably say but like, they I think they went two or three months about one. And they just have one. They're always wonderful though. I they are gentlemen, we both have a lot to say. I'm an avid listener.
00:43:16
Speaker
That's the precision microcast. That's what it's called, right? Yes. Wonderful. What did you do today? Turning on the Wilhelmin.
00:43:29
Speaker
Turning is weird on that machine, but I'm finally wrapping my head around it because your turning tool is in the spindle and you don't just clock it to zero because every turning tool is different. So you have to define the angle of the spindle rotation that your tool is now zeroed at. And when I put it in the first time and I tried to do something, it was like 90 degrees off. I'm like, oh, that's not going to work.
00:43:52
Speaker
I'm like, how on earth do I rotate it? I don't know. In the tool table, there's a double W value for angle of rotation. So I put 90 because I'm like, I need 90 degrees and it's way wrong. And I'm like, I don't know. And then I tried like 10 and it was really close. I'm like, what? Are there metric angles?
00:44:13
Speaker
No, there's not. And then I tried 10 to 15 and I saw a huge change in difference. And I was confused and I was late and I had to go home. I think it was like 2.30 in the morning on a Saturday night or something. Went home, ended up texting CJ and then reading the manual. And it says, because my controller is older, you have to divide the angle by 10 to get the value you want. What? To get more resolution or something like that. I don't know, but it was, it was weird.
00:44:43
Speaker
But the angle degree has four digits behind the dot, which is kind of accurate. But so the difference between like a nine degree difference is a 90 degree effective difference.
00:44:56
Speaker
Crazy. Which is crazy. But anyway, so yesterday I put an indicator on there and I swept to the top surface, like not where the insert sits, but the flat just above that, which should be coplanar with where the insert sits. Anyway, I moved my X side to side and I find the kind of effective angle for that. And I kind of trammed in the angle of that W value. So 10.892 or something is the final answer. Gives me no run out, like no taper.
00:45:26
Speaker
So I did that for both my tools. They were very similar, but like 0.1 millimeter or degree off. So that's where I'm at. And now I can, I did turn a taper the other day. And then it's, it's coming together slowly, literally. Awesome. Yeah. It's super cool.
00:45:47
Speaker
But you can post fusion cam. Yeah. And it just works on the turn. Yeah. I'm still fine tuning like my XYZ coordinates, you know, tool offsets, the lathe tools, you can't probe, you have to manually like, and now that my angle is accurate, now I can trust, you know, turn a half, half inch diameter, measure it half inch, adjust, whatever. The machine is in metric and I'm
00:46:12
Speaker
I think I'm going to change it over to inch. They said it's kind of possible. It's the only machine in the shop that is metric and that feels dangerous. I would argue the opposite feels dangerous. Why? Changing it to inch. Yeah. I'm sure there's some caveats to it because there's a lot of deep parameters, tool change positions, where in space the bloom laser probe is. Those are all metric values. Totally possible to convert them.
00:46:41
Speaker
I'm kind of digging the metric, I got to say, but it's still, I don't know. You can post code either way because it's just G20. It's like doing a tool offset. Oh, I need five tenths bigger. Oh, what's that in metric? You know, if you type five tenths, it's going to be the wrong. Well, but it would error in your favor if you leave it metric as possibly type it in.
00:47:06
Speaker
five-tenths, it'll actually be far less than you need. So at least you're not going to goof. So I'm 80% sure I'm going to do it, but I'm not positive yet. So we'll see. I'll talk to the Willman guys more about it. I know they've done it before, so it's no big deal. When the Kern guys were installing my Kern, they grumbled pretty hard when I asked them to make it inch. But they did it, and I'm glad it's fine. Yeah.
00:47:34
Speaker
Okay. That's what I'm up to. What are you up to?
00:47:38
Speaker
finishing up some modified custom fixtures on the horizontal that will go on this new epoxy tombstone, which PSA, I don't know if it would be useful for your turning tool work, but it is a good reminder. I needed to probe the underside of a part that had been machined and then flipped over. And there was a hat top that stops you from kind of getting to where you really wanted to get to, not that you could reach the underside anyways. And so, and it was in the,
00:48:07
Speaker
Well, it was in a mod vice, but that's no different than a regular vice where it's held up on effectively parallel. So you have the backside of the part is not touching like a solid surface. And I just put some super glue on one of our, we have this kind of like shop gauge blocks that our metrology use and actually use an angle block because it was longer, like two inches long.
00:48:26
Speaker
put some super glue on that, held it onto the backside of the part. And that gave me a one inch tang sticking out from the side, touch that off on the probe so that I got my Z zero as the backside of the part. And then you just literally just pop it off by your hand. And I like doing that because the few times I have had goofs in my life usually relates to
00:48:49
Speaker
probing the wrong datum and relying on yourself to correctly update the value, remember to correct it at all, blah, blah, blah. And I've seen that trick on weird tool holders as well, where you super glue in a little thing that allows you to sweep it in or dial it in, and then you can pop it off and put the insert in or whatever. Yeah. Nice.
00:49:11
Speaker
Finishing those up, checking on the epoxy thing, programming some other parts. We just poured our concrete bridge to the new building, so we're actually going to be able to start moving some stuff over there as soon as this afternoon. Nice. Getting ready for our first training class, which is in July, but it feels soon. Is that training class going to be in the new building? Oh, yeah. So you're prepping, you're doing a lot of like... Yes. Do you have to paint much and renovate?
00:49:40
Speaker
The first training class is dust off the cobwebs in that sense, so I'm not going to feel bad if it's not all done, but yes, we need to clean, we need to paint, we need to put up... I want to put up some nice... You see the... It's beautiful. Yeah, these really nice pieces of artwork of our products that I can take pride in. Awesome. Well, Phil's wrapping the parking lot right now. Oh, yeah. Sorry, Phil. Oh, Phil moved. That's true. He's a process of moving. Oh, we can't use that joke anymore.
00:50:08
Speaker
Well, he's taken the ferry to Victoria. How's that? The fairies. It takes a couple hours. Yeah. Awesome. Take care. See you later. Bye.