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Business of Machining - Episode 14
257 Plays8 years ago
As an entreprenuer, confidence in your tools and machines isn't all you need. Multi-tasking - is it a valuable skill or bologna? Saunders applies Grimsmo's often stated advice, "You can do anything but it doesn't mean you should do everything" by hiring a new employee. A dedicated Grimsmo Knives fan goes above and beyond and Saunders attends SKILLS OHIO, a state-wide machining competition for high school students. Tattoo Photo: http://bit.ly/2pxRp8H
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Kickoff
00:00:00
Speaker
Cassidy recording on Zoom, Grimsmo. Julie, this is Business of Machining, episode 14. Coincidentally on 414. Do you want me to clap? Yeah, go for it. One, clapping on three, one, two, three.
00:00:30
Speaker
i have no idea whose turn it is yeah i'll go lala lala all right
00:00:47
Speaker
Good morning, everybody.
Balancing Personal and Professional Life
00:00:49
Speaker
I am fired up on this Friday morning to talk to my good friend, John Saunders. My name is John Grimsmough. Oh, and I am John Saunders, and that's an aggressive introduction. I like that. I'm feeling good. Good? Yeah. What's up? No, I just woke up, kind of slept in. I slept past my alarm, kind of groggy. Like, oh, I don't want to be in this bad mood for the podcast. You know, I want to be good and fired up. Right, right. And then I just had a good morning after that, talked to Meg.
00:01:17
Speaker
Things are really good. Nice. Meg's your wife, what did you talk about? We talked about, it's just nice to talk to someone in the morning before heading out to work. Just kind of talked about what's going on today for me and kids are off today, it's Easter holiday.
00:01:36
Speaker
It's funny, I was actually thinking about doing a chip break on some of the good advice I've received in my life, and one of them is Mary from Love, and I think you and I are both, I'm super lucky, I love my wife, she's supportive, she's great, she's driven, but I love everything about our marriage.
00:01:54
Speaker
I will say having two kids now, I wish I got as much attention because I miss having that person to talk to. Nobody knows you as well. They've been through the story and I miss having somebody, whether it's her advice, whether it's just a sounding board, whether it's whatever. So how the heck did you get Meg to give you undivided attention this morning? Tell me your secrets.
00:02:18
Speaker
Claire is still sleeping. She woke up, but I got her back to sleep and Leif is just on his own. Yeah. Yeah. So we had, you know, 20 minutes of undivided talking time, which was really good. But I think you and I are in a very similar boat where I've been with Meg now for 15 years.
00:02:37
Speaker
And Claire is now seven, so a good chunk of that time was just the two of us. And I totally understand what you're saying. It's like we've had so many years together, it's just us. And you kind of expect that to continue throughout life. But then we've got two kids now, and it just gets busy. It changes. It evolves, right?
00:02:57
Speaker
Right, but I'm very like, I think, I've been thinking this week about part of what makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur and I'm a, I think to some extent you've got to be, I don't know what the adjective is, it's not narcissistic, but you have to believe in yourself and your vision and I balance that with also self-confidence questions of what do you, where do you struggle, what do you not serve out, because I don't have that, I don't have that bold, crazy,
00:03:24
Speaker
feelings or sentiments that some people, some entrepreneurs that have that are just like, and I'd always wonder how much of it is a facade versus how much of it is real. But some people it is real for sure. But for me basically, if I need to talk about something, I sort of go into this,
00:03:40
Speaker
Switching the crayons to markers is not as important right now as being able to stop and listen to this thing I want to talk to you about. And that's not how life works, I will tell you. A mother is not very sympathetic to that debate. Right, because there's always so much going on.
00:03:58
Speaker
Yeah, I think as you said about some people just kind of putting on the facade, entrepreneurship is not easy. It's freaking hard and it's taxing. I've never been a very self-confident person. I've always been self-conscious and always worried about what other people think and never been super sure of what I'm doing.
00:04:21
Speaker
more so now than ever, I think, but I'm more confident now than I've probably been in the past.
00:04:29
Speaker
As you should be, John, you've deserved it, you've earned it. I don't know how many people around you tell you that, but what you have done is incredible.
Entrepreneurship and Personal Growth
00:04:38
Speaker
Yeah. Well, thank you. And you've as well. It's really fun to share the journey together, you and I chat about this, and you can grow together, and we're not done growing anywhere near it. It's exciting to think about. I had a really tough day, Wednesday, which I'll be happy to get into.
00:04:57
Speaker
Every once in a while, if I need to, I'll just be like, okay, we'll rewind two years or rewind 10 years. And it's like, would you rather have gone a different direction? Today stinks, taste sucks. How can you fix that? But then also, would I?
00:05:14
Speaker
No, absolutely not. Like not even remotely close. So yeah, you have your ups and downs, but life is good. We're both, I like to sometimes tell people, we were all born, well,
00:05:31
Speaker
This I guess has a little bit of a different tweak because you're Canadian, but I say people here. You were born in the best country in the world at one of the best times in the history of civilization with the highest standard of living, with access to the most amazing stuff. Like this is, you know, you got to keep in perspective. Totally. Yeah, it's the best time to be alive.
00:05:53
Speaker
Yeah, life is good. It's hard to remind ourselves of that sometimes. Right, right. And it's just incredible. We had an employee start on Monday. I don't remember. Did I mention it on the podcast yet?
Meet the New Editor
00:06:08
Speaker
I'm not sure yet. Is this Julie? This is Julie. Go on. And in a very funny and awkward way, Julie will be editing this podcast.
00:06:19
Speaker
So I'm super excited. She has been working sort of on the side, whatever you want to call that, consultant or just part-time freelance, helping with editing some stuff and including these podcasts and some of the video stuff. And I got to say, it is such...
00:06:38
Speaker
It's great. It's such a breath of fresh air. She is as passionate about video making and editing and nerding out on cameras and all that as you and I are CNC stuff.
00:06:53
Speaker
I love that model of entrepreneurship. It reminds me very much of your saying of, I want to be able to do anything, but that doesn't mean I should do everything. It's kind of like, hey, I've been making these videos, I don't know, 700 videos over 10 years. I know what I'm doing, and now to hand it off to somebody and see them on day one do it so much better is great.
00:07:16
Speaker
No, but it's great, but I know what I need to bring to the table. You know what I mean? Even two years ago, I actually brought somebody in to help film, and it just didn't work, and I wasn't comfortable justifying. Our business wasn't there to support it, and blah, blah, blah. So it is awesome. Yeah, so you're kind of soured of the whole outsourcing thing.
00:07:36
Speaker
I had the same thing like two years ago I had a video editor do a lot of my work and it worked alright but there were these barriers back and forth and it cost money and all this stuff and so I stopped it over a year ago and now I'm slightly soured of the whole thing. I would love to have somebody come in and hire them full time and do what you're doing now with Julie but you can be my test subject and see how it works out. And so that's the thing.
00:08:03
Speaker
when Julie was part-time, or when she was working on her own, which is something I absolutely insist for a, oh my gosh, there's so much good stuff here. I just was talking with another entrepreneur. What a great conversation. He was like, anybody who tells you,
00:08:21
Speaker
Any company that brags about never having laid somebody off, run away.
Business Pruning Analogy
00:08:25
Speaker
It's not personal. A business is like a mediocre on analogies, but it works well here. A business is like a fruit tree. You have to prune the tree.
00:08:36
Speaker
It's for the betterment of you as the owner, you as the employee, you as the customer, you as a shareholder, you as a stakeholder. There's no such thing as just cramming people in and making it fit and just believing that because you've never laid somebody off or fired somebody that that means it was the right decision. People don't always fit. The things don't always work out. For me, I don't really have the luxury of
00:09:01
Speaker
Nobody likes firing. But for me, basically, the idea was work with somebody first. Give them a test run. Filming with somebody or working with somebody is really intimate. You know this. You have a small shop. How you work with people is very intimate. So she worked for, I don't know, four or five months, I think. Maybe not that long. Anyway.
00:09:22
Speaker
To me, it became a no-brainer. She's got the right attitude, she's sharp, she's, I think, is gonna be able to work independently, which is all great. On the other hand, Wednesday was tough. I mean, we were filming together and it was actually not so much that, it was just like all the interruptions, all of the phone calls, all that stupid stuff that happens as an entrepreneur, it got me frustrated. Yep. So, how do you get over that? You know, what's, where do you go from there?
00:09:50
Speaker
I think my mistake was probably not doing a good enough job of recognizing, hey, I need to carve out some onboarding time. Maybe I'm not going to change. I'm always going to try to fit more than I probably should in a day, or I'm probably always going to try to
00:10:10
Speaker
set the bar a little bit too high and I think it's hypocritical of me because I'm also a big fan of like, hey, stack the deck in your favor and what I could have done and should have done probably is said, hey, we've got a couple of videos in the buffer and I don't have any job shop job I need to run today.
00:10:31
Speaker
Just turn everything else off. I could even turn my phone off, which sounds crazy, but I could. The world will not end. I'm not going to lose new business or upset anybody. It may be a little inconvenient, and to some extent, you're going to create a little headache for that night or the next day because you're going to be behind on other stuff. But hey, what matters is, I think the takeaway is also, if you're going to do something, do it well.
The Myth of Multitasking
00:10:56
Speaker
And be able to focus on it. When you stretch too thin, you're not being as effective on everything.
00:11:02
Speaker
Yeah, multitasking. The more I do in life, the more I realize that multitasking is a bunch of baloney. I totally agree. I was just reading an article about that yesterday in modern machine shop. Oh, really? Yeah. I think the latest one. I don't know if I had that. I forget what's, it's got an EDM picture on the front.
00:11:20
Speaker
Yeah, it was just really on point. Multitasking is, you know, a lot of people think they do it well, but in truth, you can only work on one thing at one time. And the fact is, if you're jumping from one thing to the next, then it's just not full focus.
00:11:34
Speaker
But like I've even learned, I would multitask just because I, time is so precious. So like when I'm waiting for my quick book statements to download, I'll alt tab into another screen and try to like bang through a couple of more notes on something. And even that creates this like staccato disruptive, I think I'm being more productive, but I'm really not. And so that's, that's crummy multitasking. But then also,
00:11:59
Speaker
big picture multitasking where I'm like proofing cam for five minutes and then I'm going out and looking at a shot, a setup part. And then I'm thinking about my after like just stop spent, you know, I, I've been trying to do this a little this week of like, I'll look up and I'll say, okay, just spend 20 minutes and ignore everything else. You know, ignore your emails, ignore. And it's funny because when you have 20 minutes of uninterrupted stuff, it's, it's, it's great.
00:12:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's amazing what you can accomplish. And especially critical things like proofing out code on the machine. The last thing you want to do is crash the machine because you're thinking of something else. Do you proof out code at the controller? No, but there are safety precautions you can make.
00:12:41
Speaker
do things properly in the right way and don't just run it blindly and hit cycle start, you know, lead into it and slow it down a bit. Well, no, but this is like, this is kind of curious because I, when we're doing something new, I will slow down my rapids. I'll do, I really don't do with that much single blocking. I'll do for sure option stop. So it stops between tools in case I'm not standing in front of the machine. But really I checked distance to go on the first couple of tools and then
00:13:10
Speaker
I don't do that much. Yeah, that's about what I do, too. But it's easy to forget to do that even sometimes if you're too stretched. Yeah. I emailed my Haas AE guy, and he wrote back right away with some tips on writing that code, I don't know what you call it, macro variable code, to basically confirm that your x-axis
00:13:33
Speaker
position, G54X value has changed relative to the last part. It's so easy. Like maybe, maybe everybody does this and I just didn't know it, but I feel like people don't do this and stuff like that. When you're not taking advantage of it to me, that's so powerful. Fairness. I haven't done it this week. I haven't implemented it yet, but it looked, it looks so easy that I actually put it off because I think, Oh, that's, that's like, that's so easy. I'm not even going to go worry about it as a project. Yeah. It's a two minute job. I'm going to do it when it, when I need to do it. Right.
00:14:02
Speaker
No, I totally agree. And hearing to my applications engineers, it sounds like in the greater scheme of things, nobody takes advantage of macro programming.
Macro Programming Successes
00:14:11
Speaker
Very, very, very few people actually do. And these are the guys that go out and train everybody. And when they see me playing with it and diving into it and geeking out about it as much as they do, they're very happy and proud that I'm taking advantage of what's available.
00:14:26
Speaker
And the past week, week and a half, I've dove deeper into macro variables and statements and programming and stuff and it's like the world is opening up and I'm seeing new possibilities and you just think about, you know, thinking about machining in a completely different way.
00:14:43
Speaker
How is this on the lathe? Both. Oh, really? Because I have FANUC controllers on both machines, so they're the same. And yeah, it's applicable to both. Are they different FANUC controllers? Are they actually literally the same? They're quite different. OK. But macro kind of stuff is the same. Yeah.
00:15:06
Speaker
So what's the good anecdote there? What's the good learning takeaway? Simple things. I think I mentioned this maybe a couple weeks ago, but tracking tool life based on every palette that I run, it goes variable 8.01 for tool number one plus one.
00:15:25
Speaker
So every time it runs a palette, that tool gets a plus one, plus one, plus one. And then when it breaks or wears out or whatever, I can look and be like, oh, that tool just ran 14 palettes as of April 1st.
00:15:38
Speaker
And then I know, OK, that lasted me two weeks and 14 pallets. And now I put that into variable 9.01 that says 14 as my max. So I can have a thing that says, if variable 9.01 equals greater than or equal to 14, replace the tool now before even running the program. Like, replace it early and safely. And that's just one minor little thing. Like, on the lathe, I'm doing some much more complicated
00:16:01
Speaker
Variable programming with the probe where I go in I probe it if it's too big I spit it out if it's too small I spit it out and then I just move on to the next part Yeah, it's working. It's working great. That's awesome. Yeah
00:16:15
Speaker
That's really cool. So I ran the lathe all day Friday night, like I left, and I put a new bar in as I left, and I knew it was going to run for seven hours. And it ran every single part. It spit out four parts out of 150. Yes. And they're all on spec. And they're all measured and documented. And I have a text file that has the size of every single one. And it's like, oh my god, it's so perfect.
00:16:39
Speaker
And you're checking them with a mic and they're on? Yep. You're back to holding a few tents then? Yep. Oh my gosh. Yes. That's amazing. Yeah. And there's a little bit of fine tuning too that still needs to be done. Like probing and offsetting, like probing every part for size and then offsetting the machine to compensate like thermal growth tool way or whatever. Doing it every time becomes chasing your tail.
00:17:04
Speaker
OK. Too iterative? Yeah, it's too much. So I've got a macro that says it's a looping counter that plus 1, 2, 3, 4. And I can say every fifth part probe for coordinate system offset and every tenth part probe for tool wear. And then start the counter again. But are you still QC'ing every part in the machine? Yeah. OK. Exactly. So I am probing every single part, but I'm only offsetting every five or ten. Right, right, right. And it's working great.
00:17:34
Speaker
I kind of, sometimes you gotta stop and think big, which I don't do a good job of, but with some of the parts that we're making now, I was
DIY Coordinate Measuring Machine
00:17:44
Speaker
like, okay, so stop, what do I want? What would I snap my fingers and want? And I was like, what I want?
00:17:50
Speaker
And I guess I'm ashamed to admit it because I feel like I'm succumbing to being a big manufacturer type person mentality. But I want to take every part off my machine, turn around, put it in another machine, which I guess is going to be a CMM, which I can't afford, and have every part checked.
00:18:12
Speaker
Like I don't, there's no more reason to, you know, the little labor and ambiguity of hand checking stuff, the hassle factor of a height gauge, the fact that you don't get the, everyone I've talked to calls it statistical process control, but you know, whether you're serializing the parts or not, if you are serializing the parts, then you now have a database that's trackable, which means, you know, part number 12244 had this spec sheet on it of,
00:18:41
Speaker
you know, coming off of my Midutoyu C&M or whatever you have, that to me is power. Yep, and traceability and documentability.
00:18:52
Speaker
ends up that CMMs are really expensive. Yeah. What about the cheaper Pharaoh arms? I don't know much about them, but. They're like plus or minus a few thou. Yeah. Okay. That's no good. And they're not, you still got to operate it by hand. I mean, I want to, so I started looking at CMMs and you can get a used one for 15 to 20 grand, which I thought, Ooh, that's a lot. That's even expensive. Yeah. Um, and ends up that that's manual. Uh,
00:19:18
Speaker
So you're still, you're moving the thing around yourself, which is absurd. Like I'm not saying it's not valuable, but no, like I want to, and I think I've spoiled because on the factory tours and things we've done, I've always seen the automated ones that move around like a CNC machine and they can even rearticulate the Renishaw probe tip, different degrees of probe sideboards.
00:19:42
Speaker
And short answer, a medium sized one, so maybe 20 or 30 inch travel area with automated stuff would be like 150 grand. Yeah, that's a whole other machine right there. Yeah. Yeah, you got some thinking to do. Yeah, well, so of course my next search was DIY CMM. And the problem is you've got some,
00:20:10
Speaker
It's funny, I wish part of me was thinking about it. I think there probably is an opportunity for a, it's tough because no one's going to spend five figures if it's sort of accurate, you know what I mean? But I feel like you could get something that's well, a thou or better maybe.
00:20:30
Speaker
for way less, and I was kind of like, man, is that enough? Well, hey, there you go. Folks, if you're listening to this podcast and you, you know, it goes back to what entrepreneurship is. It's execution, not ideas. There's an idea to sell. The cheapest CMM I found, Fowler came out with one that's a quasi-portable that is 40 grand.
00:20:50
Speaker
So cut that in half. It doesn't have to be portable. The piece of granite is not expensive. The hardware is not that expensive. There's some code to write. But you buy the right quality ground.
00:21:04
Speaker
screw and it doesn't have to be hard. It could be a lead screw, right? I mean, it doesn't have to be a whole screw. Well, it has to have no backlash, but the whole system doesn't have to be very rigid. You know, it can't move, but there's no cutting force and there's no spindle and you don't, it doesn't need to weigh like 10,000 pounds. That's kind of fascinating. All you need is like really tight, precise motion. Right.
00:21:30
Speaker
Yep. You could even potentially, this would be a huge sacrifice, but you could even potentially deal with the backlash. I'm thinking out loud here by always having it go back, basically always doing positive measuring maybe. So could you have it? It wouldn't work for boards. Exactly. That's what I was thinking. Anyway, there's an opportunity out there, seriously, because there's a lot of, um, the software could be done for sure.
00:21:56
Speaker
Anyways. And you'd need a good quality probe, either buy one or make one. They're not difficult to make. They're just difficult to make well. Yeah, but you know, the Tormach has two probes, a passive and active. And I want to say, what did I hear? I just learned from somebody on the Facebook page that
00:22:19
Speaker
One of those probes is actually one of the major companies, I think maybe Renishaw, although I don't want to misspeak here, uses for some of its lower cost Asian products. I think you could get with Well Within a Fowl with something like that. Or it could be an add-on. You could buy a higher quality one.
00:22:39
Speaker
Right, if you build the machine to be as tight and rigid as possible, and then the cost goes on the base of the probe, like the accuracy of the probe. That's fascinating.
00:22:54
Speaker
Like that would work well for kind of 2D positioning. To do 3D measurement if you wanted to measure a weird surface, it has to take into account the sphere of the ball and where it's touching on the ball. I was thinking about that the other day.
00:23:11
Speaker
Right, but you could get by with a dumb one if it just does displacement of the ball and it doesn't know which way it was to place the displacement. Exactly, yeah. For any 2D kind of like bores, pockets, corners, things like that, that would look great. But gosh, I kind of think that's what most of people need to do. Yeah. Although from a practical standpoint, your Haas with the Renishaw would work just as well, if not better.
00:23:40
Speaker
if you tested it. Right. I need to do more testing. Actually, that's something I want to do, which is set up some known diameter stuff and then probe it and make sure I don't have as much confidence as I wish I had with my, but mostly just been spooked by what we talked about last week, which is sort of the ambiguity of measurements on angular offsets. Yep. Right. Right. The G68 thing. Right. Yep.
00:24:06
Speaker
But sometimes it's just testing and your personal hesitation is not fully understood. When I was working on the lathe probe and even doing stuff on the mill, you don't fully understand it, so you don't trust it therefore. Exactly. But once you dive deeper into it, you're like, oh, that's why it does that. OK, I get it now.
00:24:30
Speaker
Like I want to set up a basic trigonometry worksheet and I want to put a part with a set of, you know, I want to intentionally put a part at like 1.6 degrees. Confirm that with an indicator and then G68 it and I want to write down what that angle is going to be before it does it and have it match. That's all I need to do. You should machine a triangle.
00:24:51
Speaker
Oh, there you go. There you go. Duh, thank you. And then probe it to check and then see. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, thank you for, I literally would have gone over and set up an anchor goal. Yeah, I love that. Awesome. Yeah. So I'm going to change pace a little bit once I find my list.
Norseman Knife Tattoo: Brand Impact
00:25:12
Speaker
So it finally happened. What? One of our fans got a Norseman tattoo on his arm.
00:25:22
Speaker
Stop yes like like large on his forearm. The Norseman is kind of the iconic first knife. We've made Of the look of the knife in the blade a whole blade handle combination honeycomb pattern sort of an artistic rendering of it It's I'll send you a picture of it. It's it's insane
00:25:40
Speaker
Can we post the picture? Yeah, we can do that. I think I'm gonna post it on my Instagram as well. Okay, we'll put a link in the video description, folks, to the Instagram post for John. That's crazy. That's incredible. Yeah, it's like mind-blowing, and he's not even a customer. He doesn't own a knife. He wants to one day. He just loves the brand, loves the knife, wanted it on his body forever. It's crazy. It's mind-blowing to think about.
00:26:10
Speaker
That is insane. Good for you, man. Sometimes I don't know what to think of it. It's mind boggling that somebody would do that. But it kind of proves that the brand is working and people are becoming very happy with what we're doing. Do you have any tattoos? I don't. Eric has two. And he's thought about getting our Norseman, like our Viking head logo. Even I've considered it, but I'm not really a tattoo guy.
00:26:40
Speaker
But you don't have any tattoos, do you? No. No, I didn't think so. I'm not nearly cool enough for a tattoo. No, not that I... The same way, but I've never really considered a tattoo, but I could maybe consider doing my Viking head logo now, because even if the business dissolves and we move on to something else, this was a solid time period in our lives that I'd be happy to have documented on my body forever.
00:27:04
Speaker
Yeah, but it's like, I don't know, it's just weird. It's all the typical, whatever, yeah. Good for you, man, that's really cool. Yeah, it's awesome.
00:27:15
Speaker
My little win of the week was we took Tuesday off and went to a Skills Ohio or Skills USA competition, but it's pretty awesome. It was a group of, I don't know, 30 or 40 students, high school students, who were in machining competitions.
00:27:35
Speaker
They went up and had to do, there was a lathe, you could either do a lathe or mill test and then there was a written test on general machining and CNC stuff and then there was a measurement test where you had a bunch of different parts and a bunch of different tools, you know, feeler gauges and angle gauges and mics and calipers to measure parts of the table.
00:27:56
Speaker
It was really cool. I think the fact that that stuff exists is great and gives kids a chance to feel like they're part of something and working toward it. And this was state level competition, so these kids had already, I think, won local or regional stuff. On the flip side, I feel very mixed about
00:28:16
Speaker
about, there's a lot to be said for having the capability to write hand G-code, and I'm not knocking it, but if you only have so much time to learn, I don't, I'm just gonna say I don't think that that's where you should be focusing your time. I just don't. And it's not, I'm not trying to make a statement admonishing hand G-code, but what I'd rather is somebody, I mean, I just look at everyone you and I know as well as you.
00:28:44
Speaker
as well as our own stories. And what I care about would be your ability and confidence to pull up in a book or the web and look something up. Like I remember the first time I had to troubleshoot a G76. I'd never seen G76 before. I had threaded so many times, and I had no idea that's even what the code was. I don't care. But when I had trouble with it, I had the confidence to type that in, pull up a spec sheet, look through the parameters, and fix it. That's what matters. Not that I could whip it at. Right?
00:29:14
Speaker
It's that whole research knowledge, book learning versus knowing about it and knowing how to find it and knowing how to learn it and going from there. I will say for lathe machining, I'm very happy that I know how to write jeed code by hand or at least edit it and know what I'm seeing or be able to research what a G76 is. Because I do a lot of hand tweaking even on my Nakamura.
00:29:43
Speaker
for lathe coat, for the mill, almost never. But yeah, lathes are just like that.
00:29:49
Speaker
Yeah, no, and again, I think it's, I wouldn't, I wish I knew it better. I really do. I actually told, when they asked me to judge, I was asking, what's the, what's that involved in that? And they said the, you know, grading hanji coat. And I looked at them and I'm like, I can't do that. I'm not even embarrassed to say that. I wish I could. And don't get me wrong. I wish, I wish, you know, I wish, there were a lot of things I wish I could do, but the reality is you got to run a business in, in,
00:30:16
Speaker
Stay focused and I don't think that's the top skill set Yeah, so the real question is how would you have done in these competitions? Well, so that goes back to something else which is okay
00:30:32
Speaker
for people that were taking this test or participating, they're students, right? They're students, right? Yeah. It's very clear what's going to happen. Like it's not a surprise. We don't, you don't know what you're going to get. You know, you're going to get a lathe part. It's going to have some OD profiling, some ID, uh, boring, some threading. Like I think that's a life lesson there, which is if you're going to do something, do it well. So how would I have done, I would have done terribly, but I actually, um, as the Haas has coordinated the,
00:31:01
Speaker
They're not part of SkillsOhio, but they coordinated the test of the judging and all that. And I asked for the prints, and I've got a copy of them. And I'm going to go blur myself and teach myself. And I think we're going to do a video on it, because I don't think it's what you should be marketing your confidence and skill sets on, is being able to, from memory, write long, long parts of code.
Learning on Demand and Hands-on Experience
00:31:23
Speaker
But I also think, I do agree that it's really helpful to know somebody. And to your point, yes, on lathe and on tweaking production stuff.
00:31:30
Speaker
Well, I remember taking a shop tour once of a shop that had probably 20 different Haas machines. This was
00:31:38
Speaker
eight years ago, like really relatively early in my CNC days. I had just converted my two small machines to CNC, and I got to tour this shop of awesome Haas machines all over the place. And I saw guys standing next to the machine with a piece of paper, a print, and it had all the rads and dimensions on it, and they're typing in code by hand at the controller to make this part. And I'm like, this is,
00:32:06
Speaker
This is how people do it, some people. And as a cam guy, I'm like, this is kind of ridiculous. But this is how they went to school to learn it, and this is how they do it. On one hand, it's really cool that they can stand there and look at some numbers, some dimensions, and just be like, oh, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. But yeah.
00:32:26
Speaker
Yeah. But if there are students listening to this, I would say there's two different angles here. One is that if that's what you're being judged by in school and that's what you need to learn, then darn it, learn it and do it well. Don't fight. Don't go into school and say, well, I've heard people don't need to learn G-code, so I'm just going to do poorly in this section because there's CAM. No, if you're going to do something, do it well. On the flip side, recognize that
00:32:49
Speaker
And that's kind of my general criticism of anything that's regulated, whether it be the government or schools, is they're always behind. It's always difficult for them to be dynamic and politicians get involved. And it's actually pretty amazing when you listen to the
00:33:04
Speaker
Structure of how things like this get created and they're not going to be cutting-edge and that's one of the things I love about About YouTube and about the internet and the ability to you know, I would you know if you're a high school student learn your g-code but then if you're in an interview talk to the Talk in the interview about how you got an a on your hand g-code But really what you enjoy is learning and watching John Grimspo do custom Brenner Shaw probing
The Need for Continuous Learning
00:33:31
Speaker
routines. Oh my god Yeah blown away, right?
00:33:35
Speaker
Yep. So you and I have grown our businesses and our entire lives by learning what we need to learn when we need to learn it. When you're in class, you're bombarded with everything, right? But you and I were like, OK, I want to make this. How do I do that? And then you figure it out. And we might consume way more information than is necessary, but that's our choice. That's us falling down into the rabbit hole of figuring out how to do it and over-learning on purpose.
00:34:05
Speaker
We didn't learn how to hand write G-code just because somebody told us to. I know just enough how to do it to do it. That's necessary for my business. It's a tool. It'll make it more or less. I think it's such a hot topic and people go crazy like, oh my God, it's just a tool. And you can distill it even further.
00:34:29
Speaker
Okay, I don't bother learning all the memorized formulas behind trigonometry because I have a calculator that does tangent for me.
00:34:42
Speaker
Sweet, what are you into today? Today, I'm trying to make this part of my lathe that I haven't made in a long time, because I made so many in the past. So I haven't made these little knife spacers on the neck. It'll be easy, because you're just going to pull up the laminated process sheet and hit go. Exactly. That hasn't been created yet.
00:35:04
Speaker
I'm dialing in the last 5% of this product that I haven't made on the lathe yet. I'm dealing with chips wrapping around it. That means I can't come in and probe it. It's causing even the sub-spindle to not grab onto it properly. I'm just trying to learn all these little tricks. If you're having chips wrap around the spindle or the part,
00:35:28
Speaker
What kind of fixes are there? Well, you can do your profile turn and then you can just reverse it without lifting it all and do the back profile backwards. So that's what I'm going to try this morning. What's the material? Titanium.
00:35:41
Speaker
Huh. It's stringing, huh? Yeah. And chip breaker is not an option in terms of running it harder or anything like that? Yeah. I mean, I have an insert with, I believe it's a chip breaking insert, but it just makes strings. And I've got 300 PSI of coolant in a through coolant tool holder that's aiming it directly at the insert tip, and it's still wrapping around.
00:36:07
Speaker
I'm gonna wait until you come back to me with a picture of a fishing hook on like a spring that goes up to the part and like just drags over the top. Just pulls the chips right off of it. That's a great idea. Now one of my guys was telling me to reverse the spindle for this backwards pass to do an M4 so that it's unthreading the chip.
00:36:29
Speaker
And then could you have the tool start at the headstock with one, stay one thou proud of your OD and just walk across it that way? Yeah, I tried that and it skipped right over the chip surprisingly at one thou. Really? Yep. Yes, I'm going to try it at zero thou. The OD dimension is not critical for me, so I'll just... What did you just say?
00:36:50
Speaker
Yeah, I said I'm realizing that dimensions are not all critical. I've never heard that come out of your mouth before. No, but you still want it. It's a good, yeah. Cool. Well, let me know. We'll be curious to see how you get along with that. Yeah, it should be good. So that'll be today's project. Sweet. And you, real quick.
00:37:13
Speaker
Real quick, what am I doing? That's a good question. I'm trying to do a little bit of filming. I've got one job shop job to run. I want to, oh, I got to grind in my chuck on the grinder because I made a part yesterday, grounded. It was beautiful, but it's got some warpage. I think some of that is due to, I'm starting to learn about relaxing the magnet and getting comfortable with how much I can relax it.
00:37:38
Speaker
I never ground the chuck in because I wanted to make a part first before I go grinding into the chuck. But I've got enough confidence now to do that. So that's what's on tap. Nice. Yeah. Excellent. Awesome, dude. Well, have a good Friday. Yeah, you too. Crush it. I'll see you. Bye.