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Solopreneurs, Robots & Payloads, ERP + Inventory Tracking, Brix, Automated Coolant Distribution, and MORE!
245 Plays5 years ago
Solopreneurs, Robots & Payloads, ERP + Inventory Tracking, Brix, Automated Coolant Distribution, and MORE!
Business of Machining Podcast = The Manufacturing Entrepreneurcast
You CAN Be The Crazy Guy In Your Garage Forever! The idea of expanding beyond oneself or even becoming self-employed isn't enticing to everyone---and that's okay! Grimsmo reflects on his evolution from solopreneur to entrepreneur and Saunders shares an experience with an electrician who likes his gig just the way it is.
Speaking of Solopreneurs, check out this shop update with Adam Demuth, an incredible machinist who made the shift from a 9-5 to being self-employed. If you're not into stress but want to run a business, Adam's zen-rific perspective on entrepreneurship is perfect for you! Also, check out the Precision Microcast hosted by Adam and Joshua Hacko from Nicholas Hacko Watchmaker!
Lockwood Begs to Differ Idealizing the infallibility of robots is nice and all but Rob's administering a heavy dose of truth!
"Why are we not better at this already!?" Saunders is disappointed in our lack of progress when it comes to payload issues for FANUC robot arms. Not to worry, 5th Axis is working on it! Check out their videos here!
THIS SUCKS! (but it will be worth it) During Phase 3/4 of Nuking the Shop, Saunders faces the fact that all material and supplies must be removed from the racking and the team will have to start from square one. While discussing one of their new favorite topics, tracking inventory, we learn that the Johns are taking different approaches when it comes to quantities!
BRIX, The Holy Crap Scenario, and "Screw This, I'm Goin' Home!"
The guys outline the specifics of their automated coolant delivery systems and air lines. They discuss solenoids, refractometers, ball valves with external motors, IoT (internet of things), Mixtrons, and MORE! They share progress, plans, and solutions to problems. Find out what Grimsmo means by "The Holy Crap Scenario" and the situation that made him throw in the towel, so-to-speak.
The Smoking Gun--I mean, Knife? Grimsmo tackles the lowest hanging, highest yield fruit during his "days off in the shop"! A few episodes ago, Grimsmo knew the one thing he could do to increase production right away and he nailed it! Now, there's something nice--uh, Norse, that can run lights out on the Mori!
RUN FROM HERE - Running Code from A Certain Point SMW is focusing heavily on developing reliable processes when it comes to posting code. While they used to run from the "Run From Here" feature, things have changed....
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Transcript
Introduction and Background
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining episode 192. My name is John Saunders. My name is John Grimsmo. This is the podcast for the manufacturing entrepreneur, something Saunders and I have been for the past 10 plus years. This gives us a chance to chat about it.
00:00:18
Speaker
Yeah, so I like that because it's a difference between being a solopreneur, which there's nothing wrong with that, but building something that exists beyond you. It's simply a step and it's not a step that everyone needs to take. We're working with an electrician last night on a project.
Solopreneur vs Employment Lifestyle
00:00:36
Speaker
he is happily and gainfully employed by a large contracting company. And I was like, man, you could go out on your own, huh? Because he's a hustler, you go get it. And he's like, yeah, but I like the setup I got. And man, I'll tell you, if you got a VF2 or hobby machine in your garage and you're loving the side hustle, but you got a good job, it's a lot different switching to the other side. It's not for everybody. And that's fine. And speaking of solopreneur,
00:01:01
Speaker
I was a solopreneur for the first many, many years of my business, both in the beginning of knives and before we got into knives.
Business Growth and Team Evolution
00:01:11
Speaker
There was a long time there when I was totally convinced, I'm just going to be the crazy guy in my garage forever and I don't want anything else. Yet, I still want to make lots of money and have a big impact. Those two started to converge.
00:01:23
Speaker
And it evolved. And then Eric came on, and then Barry came on, and then et cetera, et cetera. And we have definitely grown past the solopreneur where the business is much bigger than just any one person. And it is not any one person anymore.
Sustainable Business Models
00:01:38
Speaker
It can't be.
00:01:39
Speaker
Did you watch the video sit-down we did with Adam Demuth maybe a month or two ago? I haven't seen that latest one yet, no. You should. Well, if you have, it's a 40 minute chat. You could easily watch it in 2X on YouTube, which if anyone doesn't know about that hack, I think it's pretty well known by now, but that little gear on YouTube, a lot of folks are easily to digest it, one and a half or 2X.
00:02:04
Speaker
But I really give Adam a lot of credit for two separate but related reasons. Number one is he's doing really well as a job shop and he understands what he's good at and he's comfortable and confident in that. But number two is he's really completed his more than a year under a sustainable but not scalable model. And that's exactly what he wants. And yeah, there's little growing pains.
00:02:28
Speaker
another machine, he'd like a few more square feet, but those situations never really end.
Realities of Robotics in Manufacturing
00:02:33
Speaker
What I give him credit for is recognizing this is what I want and it's not a compromise. I'm putting words into his mouth here, but it's not that he's settling or selling himself short. It's that this is all about life.
00:02:50
Speaker
What are we gonna how you think about this? But when you're 70 or 80 or you can't work or for whatever reason Well, you know what? What do you look back on and having said this important and man? He's got it set up with this home set up and the balance of work life and you know what? It's okay. If you say, you know what? I'm really into this TV series I can go watch a 40-minute episode then walk out to my garage and reload his DCG Morissiki tool room It's insane machine. Anyway, I give him credit for having that vision and being comfortable with it
00:03:20
Speaker
period. That's fantastic. And I mean, that's kind of where I was back when we had the garage shop, you know, I'd wake up first thing, I'd run out and I put some parts on, and then I'd go make breakfast or workout or whatever. And same thing right before bed, you know, running tonight, I'm falling asleep, I can hear, you know, blades being cut or whatever. And
00:03:40
Speaker
It's not for everybody. There's a lot of stress and hassle with always being on, always being there. Being there but not being there, especially around family. That was difficult for us. Because I'm always at work, never fully at home. And I mean, maybe it's kind of the same now with having a computer at home where I can still get lots of work done at home. So I'm there at the kitchen table.
00:04:06
Speaker
But computers don't bug you. When a machine, if a tool breaks or the light goes on, it's really hard to not satisfy the machine's need to say, come. It reminds me of, it's one of the best lines ever. I think it was Lockwood and I think it was at some meeting we were all at when somebody was like, robots are great, they don't call in sick. Rob was like, oh, I assure you, robots complain. This idea that robots just work is completely, machines run great, but then they also, they need you.
00:04:36
Speaker
Yeah,
Shop Reorganization and Automation
00:04:37
Speaker
they need their own TLC. It's the allure, it's the theory that robots are infallible. Man, if everything was just perfect, no tools would ever break. The robot would just always load. Everything would just always be happy. You'd never run out of coolant. Everything would be perfect. And that's the goal, sure.
00:04:57
Speaker
Fifthaxis has put out two YouTube videos. I think they're going to do more because they haven't really gotten into the meat of it, but they were saying that they are just trying to figure out a simple way to take a FANUC robot, which is very capable, industry-leading, very good. If it picks up a vice that is a small vice with nothing in it versus a larger vice, maybe the difference between two or three pounds and seven pounds, not a huge difference. You and I would have no issue as a human handling those two different weights, but
00:05:26
Speaker
the robot dimensions and kinematics move by like tens of thousands of inches, if not more, which is obviously an issue as you're moving through these different joints, degrees of freedom, and then trying to load something in, which just makes you think like, gosh, why are we not better at this? Yeah. Period.
00:05:43
Speaker
Like in that scenario, I wonder if the robot picked up a palette, put it on a scale, a way scale, let go, and then the scale knows what to do. And when it picks it up and goes, that would be a simple way to do it. You would think you could build out that profile. The weight is the center of gravity and the mass location isn't going to change.
00:06:02
Speaker
It's why I love your compact 80 Aroa, but then actually, coincidentally, fifth axis has the giant one. I think the same one Rathy has that's got the tower in the middle that you could almost, you could buckle a car seat and do it. It's awesome because that whole design where you've got a center post with a slide in and out is seemingly impervious to weight. It just doesn't, it's not going to matter if there's a little bit of sag relative to a six axis articulated robot that has to cantilever out so much. Robots never call in sick.
00:06:33
Speaker
Actually, that's a great segue which is that we loaded our robot onto the trailer yesterday.
00:06:39
Speaker
to go out, the FANUC one? It went bye-bye. It went bye-bye? It went bye-bye, yeah. Did Johnny Five Wave and say bye-bye? Yeah, oh my God, that would have been great. No, it was, dude, we are absolutely executing on this plan, including that kind of phase three, phase four, which is, okay, reevaluate what we need, what Saunders needs to do, how we do that, how we staff that up with people and allocation of resources, but then also machine tools.
00:07:07
Speaker
we're swapping the RoboDrill out with a machine that's gonna have three-spindle coolant, has probing, has more travel, is gonna be able to run any program so we can move a program from the VF6A to the VM3, potentially the VF2, although that main machine may stay a little bit different, or the new machine without any changes. The code will be the same, offices will be the same, tooling numbers will be the same for the core tools. That will be a huge boost to us. So that new machine comes to our morning, RoboDrill left yesterday,
00:07:35
Speaker
even just having the robot out of here, it was five separate pallets with the robot and the enclosure and the accessories. Obviously, the FANUC books were two pallets. And that was a breath of fresh air because now what we need to do is this sucks to admit it, but as soon as you realize it, you get over it, we have to empty all of our racking
Inventory Management Challenges
00:07:54
Speaker
out.
00:07:54
Speaker
We threw everything up on the racking when the racking came because we had to, and that wasn't the wrong decision, but now we got to buy a little bit more. And the only way we're going to reorganize it is to kind of start over rather than trying to do musical chairs. And then Alex is I think about done with the addition to Lex, which gives us location tagging in the ERP system with barcodes. Nice. So like zone location, like an area.
00:08:22
Speaker
It'll be a bay rack shelf. So a bay of racking may be three racks wide. And then like we'll have one rack section that's quite long and has three racks within it. So it'll be that bay and then that number within it and in that shell. And that's all we need to do. That'll be good enough for finding the material there or whatnot.
00:08:39
Speaker
Yeah. The theory as always is you want to give your day one employee, like here's the info, go find the thing and he'll be able to figure that out. Well, we actually probably had our first real Lex fail, which is we reordered softjaw bar stock because we thought we couldn't find it. We kind of thought we were out. I kind of thought we had had some around, but it's way past the point of anybody being able to know
00:09:06
Speaker
when we ordered it and whether it's around. If you order titanium round bar six weeks ago and then either Sky or Angelo or somebody else was running the machine some, you're like, I don't know if that stuff's still around. It probably got turned into pens, but I can't even, it doesn't even close to resemble something I could keep track of in my head. We ordered a thousand bucks more or something of it and then we arrived and we realized we already had a whole freshman. Not a big deal, but that's what the location thing will help us solve.
00:09:35
Speaker
Yeah, and until you start tracking quantities of everything in and out. No quantities. No, but I'm saying that's when that becomes more clear is we do have something. It says we have 1,000. Why don't we have 1,000? They got to be somewhere.
00:09:51
Speaker
Yeah, but we're not doing that. I know, I know. Okay, yeah. That's how I am going to tackle it. I want to know how much rod we have, how many end mills we have, how much everything in and out. Are you doing location tagging? It's sort of built in, but we're not really fully utilizing it yet.
00:10:09
Speaker
Like right now, we're focusing on end mills. And there's a bin number. But we don't even really have our end mills organized yet, because I'm still 3D printing the kind of bins that we want. And I've got a couple different styles going on. And we don't really have a drawer suited for them yet. So we need to buy another toolbox and tool it out. So right now, they're all just kind of spread on top of one of the tables. And Angelo's got it in his head where everything is so that he can use them. But yeah, eventually, the goal is to set a bin location anyway.
00:10:36
Speaker
It's really easy to do the whole like, we'll just lay it out on the table for now for like months at a time. On that note, we're pretty close to finishing up our whole, the internal thing is nuke the shop, but the shop overhaul to be a little bit more prim and proper.
00:10:53
Speaker
And one of the things we realized was we got to just take, we're going to get the VF2 and YT tomorrow, and then we're going to get that set up and running, which will take a couple of days at most, I think. Then we can have all these machines running, and we can all take a breath of fresh air and
00:11:10
Speaker
I think what
Tool Organization in a Growing Shop
00:11:11
Speaker
we're going to do is take every single toolbox out of the shop, like wheel it into another room and then start emptying them, laying stuff out. It's kind of that like Pearson, like put all your junk in a junk room and then pull stuff back out the same day that we want to use and keep in there, but then otherwise kind of do that system where I think
00:11:32
Speaker
I think this is that woman Marie Kondo, but I don't read her stuff. We realize we do need something. We can go into the office or wherever that stuff is, go grab it and start rebuilding those from what we really need. We're switching all of our hex drivers from sets to individuals because we found color-coded individuals available.
00:11:51
Speaker
from McMaster that are high quality, and that way we can stop dealing with missing set items or worn out and broken ones, the stuff like that. Mm-hmm. Over time, there's just so much. The business becomes so much more than like a little garage shop with one toolbox that just has your stuff in it. And now I have multiples everywhere.
00:12:12
Speaker
like a hex wrench set. If the set is new and clean, it stays together. We still struggle with that. I'd say we're probably on the better end of etiquette. We're not perfect, but it's just so hard. It's fighting an unnecessary battle.
00:12:33
Speaker
If somebody breaks a 332nd wrench, what's more, or starts to wear it out, what's more important that they put it back in the set so it's complete or it gets lost or it gets thrown away? We're just going to order a bunch of extras and there's an extra hex bin and you could just go grab more. That works too. Yeah, absolutely. That lets you have an extra inventory. Alan Key is like a dollar from McMaster.
00:12:57
Speaker
It's no big deal. So to have four of each size extra, the common sizes anyway, works fine. Yeah, we've got the little drill bit insert bits, like for our torques, to undo a torques, like a T15 or torques plus. So that's how we screw down all the pallets and the pallets grooves. And they're like little driver bits, you know, that go in. A quarter inch or six mil. Yeah, exactly.
00:13:20
Speaker
So, we use tons of those and they wear out and we break them sometimes and strip them. So, I've got just yesterday, I put them in a baggie. We've got three extra of each of the two sizes we use. And I rode like new on the bag. So, it's like if you need them, they're here. These are not the maybe new. These are the definitely new.
00:13:38
Speaker
Yeah. That'll be one of our intern jobs. Through Lex will be every other Friday, go around to each tool cart and swap out all the box cutter blades. Not the most enjoyable thing in the world, but I want them to get replaced, not reactively, but proactively. Honestly, you can probably do it in 10 minutes. Yep. And organizing is tricky.
00:14:03
Speaker
say hydraulic or pneumatic fittings, all the little NPT stuff. I've got a few boxes kicking around in different places. And no, I want them in a drawer system. I want them all together, all sorted. These are eighth inch NPT. These are quarter inch NPT. These are my push to connect airline fittings. All that stuff needs to not be hard to find. And you shouldn't have to dig through a cardboard box with
Creating Efficient Shop Systems
00:14:25
Speaker
100 fittings in it.
00:14:27
Speaker
like we have now. How often do you do that though? Not like once a month, twice a month, something like that. It's just annoying though. It's like, do we have it? I don't know. Let me dig through this entire box for the 50th time to see if I have this stupid fitting because it's just kind of been the junk box. Yes, I have hydraulic fittings, but they're not well organized.
00:14:47
Speaker
I'd probably say that's where we would draw the line. Look, don't get me wrong. Organize it, throw out some extras so that you don't have unnecessary extras, but it's not our business. I'm the same way. I'm probably in there once a month. We have that. We have three bins of just extra stuff around air fittings. My thought is
00:15:09
Speaker
Don't spend the time. Don't try to keep that organized, aside from being in a box. And then if you know there's a lot you use, buy extras. If not, I can go drive to the hardware store or McMaster next day.
00:15:19
Speaker
Yep. I mean, that's where we've been up till now, right? Like, we have all this stuff. At the very least, I need it all in one location. That's, I think that's very fair. Because I'm like, in my head, I'm like, we need, we have ball valves. I know we have some ball valves, but I don't know where they are. They need to be in a well labeled area that even if they're all junk together in a box, at least you know, you've exhausted your look without, you know, asking everybody to search around the shop. It's a waste of time.
00:15:44
Speaker
That's an easy fix it, which is nice. Yeah, exactly. The tool table thing with Angelo in toolboxes, one idea is to move all your tools somewhere else in the shop and then as he needs them, each time he needs one, he goes through the process of adding the bin number and putting it in a toolbox. The key there is
00:16:05
Speaker
that forces you to make sure the process of adding it into GURP is easy, which has to be the case and is often the part that people, even us, like adding a new cutting tool into Lex isn't that hard, but boy, it could be easier. Yeah. Not something you want to sit down and do every time. Yeah. So forcing yourself, like that's the business that you're in right now is making that process as fluid as possible. That way he can start adding them over time, or you can sit down for two hours and have bank through 30, which might be more efficient rather than
00:16:34
Speaker
That's what I've done so far. Most of our tools are in there already, but you're absolutely right. We all need to be able to input a new tool, know what the critical data is, how to print a barcode, and just how to do everything. Yeah.
Innovative Coolant Management
00:16:48
Speaker
But I'll tell you, man, it's awesome. We built BLEX off of the original tool thing that we have had for a year and a half. When I need
00:16:56
Speaker
a 60,000 rad quarter inch end mill, it's in there. It's freaking awesome to pull it, and it's freaking awesome when I want to put it away. It does not take long to be like, okay, we just label the toolboxes with stickers on the outside, which works great, and then we either use shallow bins or even the 3D printed things, and it's not hard. Once you know it's toolbox one, drawer two, bin 27, great.
00:17:24
Speaker
Yep. Go get it. Inlex, can you sort the list of end mills by features like corner radius, size, things like that? Yes. Yeah. That's super handy, right? Yeah. Because that's a lot of time I'll pick the unique feature. Like I'll usually pick brand and diameter or like ball end mill. We don't have that many ball end mills. So picking ball and mill alone will usually get me the list I need to see.
00:17:50
Speaker
Yeah, in my head, I think we have a lot more tools than what I actually see when I look at them. When I search for ball and mill, I'm like, oh, we have seven or whatever. It's not a lot. Right. But you're daunted in your head. You're like, oh, I've got hundreds of tools. But it's really not. Yeah.
00:18:07
Speaker
Okay, so here's my next challenge and I have all these PDFs pulled up on my screen right now, which is trying to understand what a BRICS is. Let's just think about that yesterday. I've read the buzzwords before like specific gravity and sugar concentration and density, but BRICS is used in the beer making brewery alcohol world. My other thought is the saltwater fish tank industry is incredibly
00:18:34
Speaker
well-developed from a technology standpoint with IoT and sensors and so forth. And I am tired even having a digital refract. A refractometer is passing it through light. So I think it cannot be a refractometer that solves the task at hand. But subject to a price limit, probably of $300 or $400 per machine, I want something that lives in the machine and either real time or on demand just tells me the sump bricks.
00:19:01
Speaker
There's systems from I know zebra I think has one in some other of the fancy cool system folks have that are Thousands of dollars really which doesn't pass the smell test because it's like we hold on what's the sensor? What am I trying to measure or read and I want to figure that out?
00:19:17
Speaker
Exactly. I know I've heard from the quality chem guys and from others that big, big companies have solutions for this. They have ways of measuring the bricks live at the machine. I just don't know what it is or how expensive it is, but it does exist, which means I want it.
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah, well, if anyone listening knows like a specific product or a term, I mean, that's what I'm also thinking like, gosh, is there not a digikey sensor that we can, this is where I would happily throw some money at building out a DIY solution to absolutely, it doesn't even have to be perfect. Like I'd be willing to take a plus or minus
00:19:54
Speaker
15 20% kind of threshold ish, or you could you start getting crazy like okay, you could easily have a pump that pulls coolant out passes it across a light beam that then uses a camera so you could do this just the brute force way and there's must be a more elegant way. I think the tricky bit with coolant is that it once it evaporates, there's oil leftovers. So your sensor might get like dirty over time. You know, if you sprayed water on
00:20:21
Speaker
Why is there oil in it? The coolant, like the oil. Well, it's semi-synthetic. No, but let's say you had a refractometer, like a standard one, the eyeball one, and you just had a system that automatically sprayed on it, it would evaporate and there would just be oil left over.
00:20:40
Speaker
Okay. Over time. I see what you're saying. Right. You know what I mean? Well, so you'd have to have a way of mechanically wiping it off or blowing it off, but that's not hard. You could just spray water on it for like five seconds. There's ways.
00:20:55
Speaker
So if you saw the Instagram posts where starting again, one of the last sort of things on this shop overhaul is our coolant system. I felt guilty because the folks that helped us build it with a Raspberry Pi touchscreen, all that, they delivered it in June and I had to say, Hey, thank you. We're excited, but I need to put this on hold on my end while we go through the next few months. And it was the right call, which is a bummer because you like pleasing people and they put a lot of work
Automation with IoT Solutions
00:21:21
Speaker
into it. Well, we fired it up, turned it on and
00:21:24
Speaker
John, it is freaking awesome. Nice. So this is the system that you say, I want two gallons in this machine and it gives you two gallons of that machine. Correct. Nice. But the other benefit that we've since learned is we're actually using RO water now at the machine to rinse off parts.
00:21:46
Speaker
So just a splash if you will, but we're really focused on turnkey, fully completed parts. So obviously things like complete machine chamfers, but then also we're doing blow off cycles, not with chip fans, but with different through spindle coolant tools and implements with different angles and different tool paths to correctly blow off parts. Comes at the expense of cycle time, but I will take that trade off with the way we're building out this business. Are you blowing off chips or coolant?
00:22:13
Speaker
Uh, both, but more coolant chips are usually already gone. Okay. But we don't want operators to deal with it, spending the time doing with it. We don't want downstream folks like packaging QC to deal with it. And so I want the part off the machine perfectly clear, clean. And so one of the things we're doing now right now, we literally just have a two gallon picnic jugs that has a spout on it and we're just splashing RO coolant over it. So the only concern would be, well, you're putting our water. Are you going to cause rust?
00:22:39
Speaker
We're not seeing anything and it almost immediately gets re-rinsed with coolant and quality chem that in our experience tends to not require a lot of agitation to mix in. So putting straight water in and then putting coolant on top of it later seems to be acceptable. Interesting. Some coolants need a lot of mechanical agitation, otherwise the water will kind of not be emulsified into it, which can cause problems like water leaching out or rusting or whatnot.
00:23:06
Speaker
So with the new system, we will be able to have RO water right at the machine and basically a second coolant nozzle or spray gun and just hose off parts in the machine and getting them clean. The rust would be the only actual concern there. And if that's not an issue, then go bananas. Have fun, right? I should clarify, this is mostly aluminum parts, steel we handled differently. Good point. But the table and the vices and your fixture plates and all that stuff, if
00:23:33
Speaker
If you're proving that that's not a problem, then awesome. That's so cool. Yeah. So we bought the SharkBite crimp tool and we're about to get into the PEX business because I got to run those lines all over the place here. Yeah, we've been doing a bunch of that here too. Going okay? I haven't physically done it, but the guys are working with SharkBite. I don't think they have the tool. They're just like push to connect fittings.
00:23:53
Speaker
So the push to connect fittings are great, but they're way more expensive. If you buy the like $70 crimp tool, you can buy the fittings that are like 30%, 70% cheaper. And we're going to have dozens of 100 connections to do.
00:24:08
Speaker
Yeah, so over the past two, three months, they have PEX-lined the entire shop. So now every single machine has a coolant line going to it from the mixture on in the back from our IBC tote. Our water fills up the tote. And then we've got a Grundfos pump pumping it through the mixture on and then to each machine. And you can set if you want a top up percentage or a full fill percentage.
00:24:32
Speaker
And right now, actually, they took down the Nakamura yesterday and they stripped out all the old Qualcomm 450 coolant that we hate. It's just gross. And they're like, oh man, this is a terrible job. There's bacteria in here. It's sticky. It's gross. Can't wait to get 251 back in there.
00:24:51
Speaker
So yeah, all the coolant's out now. They're currently cleaning the machine. And then the 251 got delivered yesterday. So probably by tomorrow, they'll have coolant in that machine. And then we'll tackle the Maury. Then we'll tackle the Kern. And then we'll be done. Everything will then be the same 251. Yeah, that'll be really nice. Yeah, exactly.
00:25:10
Speaker
Yeah, I sort of stopped thinking about automatically measuring bricks, because I know it's possible, but it's not priority for me at the moment. But I do want to get into putting float levels in the tank and setting up an autofill system so that it just knows what to do. I know there's danger involved in that. But you can supplement with sensors and shut off valves. And it's totally possible.
00:25:31
Speaker
Yeah, what Amish was saying about an IoT, like a dead man switch style sensor, basically, I would much prefer if it ever sensed coolant somewhere in the shop to close a ball valve and tell me, because there's not really a consequence of a top off. Your sumps are still there, like it'll be okay, versus like air. So we're doing this with our air system right now. I got tired of, I'd come back to the shop at like eight or nine o'clock to shut the air compressor off. We have a couple of small leaks and
00:25:57
Speaker
You could argue that we should find the leaks, but man, that's a fool's errand with air systems that have hundreds of connections.
Shop System Reliability and Upgrades
00:26:04
Speaker
You just never know. It is detrimental to let our system completely drain out because we've got a battery tank and airline tanks. The tanks themselves are airlines, so we don't really want the system to bleed out and we don't want to run our compressor overnight. I'm buying a
00:26:20
Speaker
not an expensive ball valve that has a motor on it. It can still be manually actuated, which I like, but it's a 12 volt. I wish I could find 120 volt because it would be way easier to hook up. McMaster has them. Yeah, but they're 450 bucks. I paid 150 something for McMaster. For what? For a water
00:26:43
Speaker
ball valve, motorized, it's a solenoid valve. I'll send you the part number if I want. Okay, yeah. So I don't want a solenoid valve. That's how I'm doing my coolant system, because that's how it autofills the IBC tote. There's two solenoids, one's a primary, one's a backup. Tell me more about that.
00:27:02
Speaker
So this is waterline going into the system. It's like waterline from the city to the RO tank, the RO filter thingies. And there's float levels in the IBC tank. There's two float levels. One is a normal and one is a holy crap, I'm overfilling. OK.
00:27:17
Speaker
Love that. And each one controls its own solenoid. So one is normal, and the other one is open until the holy crap scenario, and then it'll shut off. So it's kind of a double redundant system. But yeah, so I got two of those valves. I think they're 120 volts. Yeah, they are. And then I wired up a box with some solenoids and relays and not solenoids, relays and switches and sensors and LEDs and stuff, and a big stop on the front.
00:27:42
Speaker
so that as the float levels go up, then they know what to do. Every night before we go home, we shut off the e-stop and the lights turn off, and then it's safety time for the night. Right. I love it. When you say solenoid, do you mean an electromagnet? Yes. Okay, so that's the difference. I'm looking at a regular, think of a regular ball valve with a regular handle. It's just that that handle is actuated with an external motor.
00:28:08
Speaker
Okay. So motorized rotating 90 degree. Yes. Right. Why? Well, solenoids are good at doing one thing eventually, which is failing. Yeah. And my concern is a solenoid, especially in your case, that's never really actuated, they can be sticky or overheat or just- They do get hot.
00:28:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's not that it's not ideal. It's just that I'm not sure that I have a ball valve where when I need the motor to do something, the motor will do something. But otherwise, it's a ball valve that works and can be manually overridden. And I think it will work. Crazy idea, since you're talking about air.
00:28:44
Speaker
Why don't you put a small air cylinder on the lever of a ball valve that extends it? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, so that's the IY solutions for sure. You could do a little torque motor that has a cam that rollers around, but there's turnkey off the shelves. Sure.
00:29:01
Speaker
which we're at that point now, I want something that works. And so the point is I want to IOT it so that I can basically do an if this then that or Alexa schedule or something where it shuts it off every night at nine o'clock unless we do an override because let's say we're doing a night run, which is very unusual right now for us.
00:29:20
Speaker
And then I don't have to come back, because if that bulb out shuts, the tank won't drain, which means the compressor won't run. And the machines go into safe or sleep mode, which means they don't consume any meaningful amount of power. So I don't mind leaving the machine on overnight. Like if it finishes at nine o'clock or 10 o'clock, no big deal.
00:29:36
Speaker
You just need an air solenoid valve. An electric automationdirect.com has plenty. OK. I'll look for some. It doesn't have to be a ball valve. It can just be a solenoid valve, like an air solenoid valve, whatever they're called. Nowadays, with so many DIY projects, there's tons of breweries and DIY guys and you and me's out there that are nerding out, buying cool stuff. And then there's the industrial automation side, the Festo stuff, and the big Kaiser version of
00:30:04
Speaker
pneumatics. There's big boy stuff out there. Doing all my research for the coolant system, you find that there's hacky solutions that work great, and then there's like, you want to spend a few thousand dollars and do it right. There are options out there, but they're hard to find.
00:30:20
Speaker
Well, so we went through this, I think it's probably one of the best quality of life upgrades to a Haas machine, which is we put a solenoid in with a Z-axis travel sensor. But when the Z-axis is all the way up, it shuts off the coolant ring around the spindle so that when you have the doors open in the Z's home and you turn the coolant on to use the freaking coolant hose, the ring doesn't blast you.
00:30:42
Speaker
And we found that the Amazon call it $50 solenoids broke over time. And that's, again, kind of a thing with solenoids. So we buy the McMaster ones, which are three times the price, but have been flawless. Right. So it's, yeah, it's a cost benefit there. Yeah. And for reliability, like as Eric at Orange Vice would say, you know, process reliability is everything. And we need to think about that with systems, you know, air systems, water systems, things like that. Yeah.
00:31:11
Speaker
It'll be
Machine Operations and Adjustments
00:31:12
Speaker
good though. I'm excited to be able to shut the air off at the shop remotely and then coolant, same thing, get coolant to where you can push water to any machine, but then also a couple of sensors that if for some reason there's a flood, I don't even know if it'll shut stuff off. I just want, that's when I want the repeated phone calls to my cell phones to go in and not have a fill incident.
00:31:36
Speaker
Yep, exactly. Yeah, that's the dread that probably every... I mean, I had an oil leak in the Swiss like two days ago and I was making parts and it alarmed out and it said, pressure, blockage, whatever, please replace the high pressure filters. So I'm like, okay, whatever, no big deal. So replace the filters, put the cap back on. They're like these huge 20-inch long canisters, canister filters.
00:31:58
Speaker
And I replaced them, put it back together. Great, run parts. While I was in there, I cleaned up a little bit. Run parts going great. Four hours later, I walked behind the machine, and there's oil everywhere on the ground.
00:32:09
Speaker
There's a top plate with a big O-ring and I pinched the O-ring. I took it apart and I'm like, oh man. I shoved it back together because the pinch wasn't that bad and hoping it would be great. I cleaned up all the oil and made it really nice down there. I ran it for another four hours and then huge oil leak again. Screw this, I'm going home. Sucks. I ordered more O-rings from McMaster. They should be here today and good to go again.
00:32:37
Speaker
Yeah. Is there a, you think oil, do you think that one of those IOT water sensors would have worked on an oil leak like that? Possibly. Oh, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Random question. Are the doors to your shop unlocked? Like can the delivery guy just walk in the side door, front door or whatever? During the daytime. Yeah. Okay. And is there you, but you have no exterior signage?
00:33:00
Speaker
No. Will you leave it that way? I don't know. I keep going back and forth. The old company still has the sign up front, and it's a little hidden in sheep's clothing kind of thing. We don't exist. Yeah, I'd debate if I want to put a...
00:33:16
Speaker
big Grimsmo sign up. Maybe just the logo and Grimsmo so that delivery drivers know. Doesn't have to say Grimsmo knives. We don't need a bunch of looky-loos saying, can I buy knives? We don't need that. We're not a public facing storefront. But yeah. And to delivery drivers, you have it too. You know the guys. They get comfortable. They pop their head in the door. They drop the stuff off. They wave. And it's good to go.
00:33:38
Speaker
Yeah, we don't have any problem with that. We do have a little bit of an issue with some solicitation stuff where I wish we're not anywhere close to having a receptionist type role. But you kind of see the desire for it sometimes. Part of me just wants to leave the door locked with a doorbell, but then you don't want the delivery guys to have to hit the doorbell. I don't know if
00:34:01
Speaker
I'm curious, do companies give delivery men keep logs of past? If we did a keypad, I'd be fine giving them a keypad that only works between business hours. Sure, yeah. That's a good point. But I don't know if that's something delivery guys have to go through or not. Well, that's right.
00:34:18
Speaker
The bigger shops will have a shipping and receiving department, and maybe that door stays unlocked, but the front door is closed or something. And at the bigger places, the ITAR places that are all controlled, like at Milterra's new place, I had to log into their website, basically, to get a pass printed out to step into their door. You know, one of them friends. What do you have today?
00:34:41
Speaker
So the past couple days, I have been doing days off in the shop. Nice. We had a three-day weekend here, so I took the last two days and had the shop completely to myself. And I'm like, OK, OK, John, there's a million things you want to do right now. And they're all fun. And they're all exciting. And I want to do them all. But what is going to make the biggest difference? What's going to progress us forward
00:35:01
Speaker
And I have two answers for that. One is rasks, obviously, and the other is getting more pallets on the mori so that we can run more Norsemen at night. Not even during the day, but just so we can have, you know, instead of two pallets at night, having three pallets at night will change everything. So I spent two days and I got that third pallet on, the third orange vice pallet. I had to make some clamps, some adapters.
00:35:22
Speaker
I made them on the current, which was cool. I got it on and it works great and it's perfect. Remind me, you had two orange bases and then you had extra fixtures from Amish, which you didn't have a third base. Correct. We have the vices, but we had the VAC magic on the table before, but now we have the UMAK running that, which has been amazing. We're running like two months worth of foam in about three days. It's amazing. Nice.
00:35:49
Speaker
And so those machines have paid for themselves already. And we had a Pearson mini pallet also on the table. So I mounted that on top of an orange aluminum pallet. Perfect. Done. So I got that all dialed in and trammed. And yeah, that was my past two days. So now we have a perfect solution. And we have room for a fourth vice if and when we're ready for it.
00:36:08
Speaker
And I modified all of our code. Like right now, the code is kind of smart because it goes in and it probes all the pallet locations. And it says, oh, you have pallet one and pallet two on, or just pallet one. So I had to unlock it for pallet three and test it and make sure it all works. And now it does.
00:36:24
Speaker
It's awesome. Yeah. Speaking of that randomly, Ed realized that the Haas run from here has been actually solid and reliable, which we've always steered away from that because there've been a couple of hiccups I've had in the past where you do run from here and it bites you. Or something. Exactly. Yeah.
00:36:44
Speaker
I'll tell you, it saves our butt now because we're so process-focused right now around using NC programs to post out all the fixturing across multiple offsets and multiple fixtures and so forth. When you want to tweak something, you end up having to otherwise post a partial program that you only run once and then you delete it and run the next one. Well, if you're running a 45-minute cycle time, it's really
00:37:06
Speaker
You have to do like a tape note on the machine to remind yourself when this is done, delete this program, reload the other one, and run from here, which you have to change a setting parameter to allow it. Great. Solves that problem. Nice. So on FANUC, it doesn't look back. If I run run from here in the middle, if I just scroll to the spot and then
00:37:26
Speaker
It only runs forward. So I changed my post, Lawrence helped me change the post to like every time I put the tool offset for every operation, tool offset, the spindle on coolant on, et cetera, fixture offset. What's the downside of doing that?
00:37:43
Speaker
But it doesn't do that by default. So if you run from the middle, it's not going to call the new tool offset. It's not going to call your fixture offset, blah, blah, blah. So every time it does that, so we can run from an op in the middle of the code, no problem. On the Heidenhein, on the current, it's really cool. There's a block scan. Yes, yes.
00:38:00
Speaker
that you scroll to the middle of the program, to the beginning of an op, and it'll block scan behind, and then it'll give you a little screen that says, okay, M3, M5, M3, M5, M3, M5, M3, M5, and then tool 20, and then move to this fixture location, and then are you okay to do this? You click cycle start, and it goes, the spindle doesn't turn on, but it goes through all the M3, M5s, and then it moves to the location, and then it's asked you again, you're good to go, and then it goes, and it works great.
00:38:28
Speaker
You should check the – well, maybe irrelevant if it works, but I believe that Haas is largely a FANUC-based control, even though it's their own now. I should also clarify, when we say run from here, start from here, it's always at the beginning of an operation. We never do it in the middle of an
Future Shop Updates and Projects
00:38:43
Speaker
adaptive or something. Agreed.
00:38:45
Speaker
there's that option somehow, which is the same thing. It's kind of like, okay, you're going to run from halfway through the program. I'm going to go ahead and go through all of the M codes, macros, subroutines, calls, G codes, et cetera, up until that point. So it takes, you know, between five and 30 seconds depending on how long your program is to get up to that point. And then it goes back one line. So it's kind of weird because it usually will end up calling the prior tool, doing a tool change, which again, no big deal. That's not the,
00:39:11
Speaker
That's not ideal, but it's not the problem I'm worried about right here. And then it does the correct linking moves, lead-ins, and make sure all the correct, what do you want to call it? Like environment variables are applied. Where's the machine tool? Where's the fixture? What's the current active codes? Yep. Spindle, coolant, things like that. Yeah. There must be a setting way to do that in Phantom. There must be, but I've never heard of it.
00:39:33
Speaker
I'll look at what it's called and see if that helps Google your foo. It could be helpful just because it's like if you're doing three offsets, three pictures, sometimes you can't repost the code because it's halfway through the third iteration of a pattern and there's no way to post the third pattern but not the first two on stuff like that.
00:39:52
Speaker
And especially the more logic you throw into the program, you want to continue from that same logic point. Exactly. And yeah, so I guess I've just modified all my posts so that any machine, both of our lathes are Maury, and now the Heidenhein can run from the middle, from an op in the middle, because they all repost everything. Like the Swiss, I do it all. Well, I would say I do it all the time. On the sub-spindle side, I do it often.
00:40:17
Speaker
because if I just want to test just the phasing op or just the torques or just the dots or something, then I'll do that. That's a great example because the HAWS, the way it uses G14, it gets real fussy. You can't post sub-spindle-only ops because it needs to actually see the transfer in the code to get up to that point to know it's okay to mirror. What's G14?
00:40:39
Speaker
Shortest explanation, small chance I have the wrong G code there, but a G14 or G114 mirrors code so that you can program a sub-spindle like you program a main spindle. The NAC has something like that. I forget what the number is, but cool. It won't matter after we burn it to the ground. Fire is not susceptible to mirroring code.
00:41:04
Speaker
So I am off to a good Crimson Pex line and make it rain in the shop. Beautiful. Awesome. Have a good day, bud. I'll see you. Have fun with that. You too. Take care. Bye.