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#270 - Occam's Razor, the $100,000 Experiment, and DIY Tombstone Design for Okuma Horizontal
191 Plays3 years ago
TOPICS:
- Grimsmo's Willemin Works!
- Saga Pen Clips & Workholding Brainstorm Session
- Brother Speedio & Zeiss CMM: Lead Times Could Cause Time Crunch
- SWISS CHEESE? A New Pump Could Solve the Tornos Oil/Coolant Issue
- IMTS 2022 & Autodesk University
- Saunders talks additional building, Okuma Horizontal Production Workflow, & Re-Starting Training Classes!
- Digital Depth Micrometers
- Saunders and Alex embark on a DIY Tombstone Design for the Horizontal
- Grimsmo Wiki: The Place Where Odd Fanuc Stuff Lives
- 86 GERP, We'll Take Google App Sheets, PLEASE!
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the Business of Machining episode number 270. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. John and I talk every Friday about a day in the life of what's on our mind and what we're trying to make and do is run in our manufacturing companies. You got it. Yeah. 270 weeks. I love it. Dude, the Wilhelmin works.
00:00:23
Speaker
I saw that. I love nothing pleases me more. I am so freaking happy that you got there and called me out. That's wonderful, John.
Machine Repair Challenges
00:00:35
Speaker
Just tell me everything. So I spent the day yesterday, probably four hours on the phone with Marcus from Wilhelmin, USA. Fantastic guy, really knows his stuff. And we got the spindle back in. We got all the wires plugged in. Had to debug a couple things, some electrical issues. I installed two wires backwards. The green and the brown wire, I got them mixed up. OK.
00:00:57
Speaker
Not that I couldn't see the colors. Are you color blind? I don't think so. I just got it wrong. Because I was referencing the picture I took of the electrical panel before when I took it apart. OK. So I was looking at my phone. I'm like, OK, it goes to the green, blue, brown, brown, whatever. I got those two mixed up. So we put it back together, and it still had the same error that it had before. And we're like, oh no, what the heck? I've replaced the wiring harness through the spindle, through the B-axis.
00:01:24
Speaker
which is all the signal wires that's causing us the problem. So then I had to bust open the Windows XP emulator on my laptop. And then I have this USB to RS232 cable, plug it into the Parvex spindle drive and see the errors that are on the drive with a 2004 piece of software. And same errors we had before or similar, a little bit different.
00:01:51
Speaker
Then another thing we found is that the contactor, the relay that turns on the spindle drive was intermittently faulty. We're like, okay, let's trace that down. Is it a solid state contactor or a mechanical? Mechanical, like one of the big chunky ones that goes boom. There's two little blue wires that go into it that give 24 volts. As I was probing them with the multimeter, one of them came out. What? These are screw terminals. It's like you do the screw and it closes the clamshell little
00:02:20
Speaker
Clampy thing that holds on to the wire and the one just popped out and I'm like hold on That was installed incorrectly No, so it was not installed in the clamshell like little clamp thing. It was just beside it So it looked fine. It probably had 90% perfect continuity, but every now and then it probably got a little flaky and I'd never touched that so it wasn't us that did it the previous owner probably and with the move of the machine and all this I don't know and
00:02:48
Speaker
So that was a big part of our problem and not to discount any of the work that I did to replace the spindle wires because they were broken when I took them out as well. Yeah. Um, but then we did that. Everything works normally. It's errors go away and we're like, holy cow. Now what? Like it just works. Serious. Yeah. So that was 7 PM last night. So we both had kid responsibilities to go home to, but, um,
Aligning Machine Parts
00:03:17
Speaker
All that's left is to align the spindle to B axis. I bought a 10 inch test bar, eight inch test bar or something like a tool holder and put that in the spindle, align the B so that it's straight up and down and then do some sort of center point rotation, calibration, something like that. Both of which don't sound too involved, but I'll definitely be on the phone with Marcus for that.
00:03:46
Speaker
clean up a couple hoses, button up a couple things, and then I'm like, I'll be making chips by the end of the week.
00:03:53
Speaker
Yeah. That's fantastic. Can I make us an unsolicited suggestion? When you go to do your alignments and stuff, let's talk this out. I'm not saying this advice is the right advice, but what I'm thinking is get it pretty close. Specifically, don't go full Grimsmo with it. Get it within a fowl or half a fowl or all that stuff, knowing that you'll come back to it, but
00:04:17
Speaker
get it close enough to where you can then move to the next thing, do that test on alignment, move to the next thing, and then see if you can post some sample code. Go through the full loop and then come back and go full nuts with it. Especially learning the process of how to align it, what parameter to change, things like that, maybe even document it, make some notes. Actually, it would be good to do it a second time anyways to learn, but I meant more just like break down all the risk factors to get to where you're running a fake part and then come back and dial in those tents.
00:04:46
Speaker
Absolutely. I like that plan.
FANUC Troubleshooting
00:04:49
Speaker
Dude, Johns. I'm like, what do I do now? So you turn the machine on and it just boots up like a normal fully functioning machine tool. Yup. FANUC machine. And there was a time when I was messing with the, I was trying to communicate between my XP emulator laptop and the parmex spindle drive. And I'm like, oh, there's no connection. There's no connection. And then after five minutes of screwing with it and trying to figure out why it isn't working, I'm like, wait, wait, wait.
00:05:19
Speaker
the power has to be on, right? It's like, yes, John, the power has to be on. Okay, okay, I'll be right back. Yeah, that's good. It reminds me, as a kid born in the 80s and growing up in the 90s, the McLaren F1,
Old Tech in Modern Manufacturing
00:05:36
Speaker
the
00:05:36
Speaker
Yeah, supercar that just broke so many barriers of speed and construction and just looks and all that. I there's an article somewhere. I believe those and there's not that many like 100 of them. They all have some remote
00:05:53
Speaker
service diagnostics capability, and it involves opening like a hatch between the driver's door and the rear wheel. And in it, you plug in, I believe, some sort of a like Toshiba, I don't know why it would have to be Toshiba, but like laptop with floppy drive. And it's one of these classic like, people hoard those because they need them because they break. And that's the only way to do diagnostics on these things before you like have to, I'm sure pay someone to fly out or whatever.
00:06:20
Speaker
I love it. That's incredible. Yeah. Not all that much of a different era. I guess those were late nineties and yours is early 2000s.
00:06:28
Speaker
So I remember a couple months ago, Willamond posted that they bought two used Willamond's that they're going to refurbish.
Importance of Documentation
00:06:35
Speaker
So one of them went to Indiana-ish or wherever their central location is, and the other one went to California. Yeah. So Marcus in California had the second machine that they're refurbishing, and he could look at it and compare. He'd be like, let me look at my wires. Oh, yeah, it goes blue, green, white, red. It was fantastic.
00:06:53
Speaker
And he's like, it's, it's great for us to do it, to have that machine too, because they're creating some process videos, some documents for their own texts. Because as we're going through it, I'm like, man, this guy knows his stuff. He's clearly done this before and there's a procedure and it's, it's not something you just look at and figure out. Like there's some really complicated stuff that just the factory knew when they built it and obviously got documented well.
00:07:18
Speaker
and the service tech still remember how to do it. But that's the kind of tribal knowledge that would disappear real fast and make that thing a paperweight, you know? It's a little scary, right? It is. Yup. And I was talking with him about like, all I really want is a reliable machine that
Old Machines' Reliability and Upgrades
00:07:32
Speaker
can make parts. And he goes, it is an older machine. It's like 18 years old now. So like, you know, head your bets here. I know, right? Yeah.
00:07:42
Speaker
I don't know too, it's such a complicated design where I don't know that a retrofit would be practical because of the, maybe if you didn't do any simultaneous five, I suppose, I don't know.
00:07:58
Speaker
For me, it's a $100,000 experiment to see if it will do the parts that I want, if it will do them well, if it gives me the result that I want down the road. Do I consider a brand new one? I don't know, maybe, but I need this baby step first and I still think it'll be a fantastic machine for us to have.
00:08:19
Speaker
It's awesome to see it not under, it's back together, that's great.
Engraving Pen Parts
00:08:25
Speaker
Your plan is to make the saga clips on it? Yep, primarily. Yeah, basically those and only those for now. Pretty much. Also, definitely we're trying to come up with a clever way to hold the tube and the tip between centers so we can engrave patterns across the whole diameter of the pen.
00:08:44
Speaker
Whether that be on the Nakamura or on the Wilhelmin, either can do it. The Wilhelmin would be better because you got 30,000 RPM and 48 tools in it. So much better. That's a big plan that I have, which would be just nuts. Sorry, that's to hold the clip or the tube? That is to hold the tube and the tip, like assembled.
00:09:08
Speaker
So you could pattern the whole kind of length of it if you want. Okay. With having unfettered access to the full cylinder. Oh, that shouldn't be hard. So like you'd put a live center in the device, the tail stock basically, like a bearing poker, and then somehow either internally rigidly clamped the other side in the turning spindle, and then you have full rotational axis with a tilting
00:09:35
Speaker
tool. You could do some nutso patterns. You're willing to load those one at a time, right? I would have to, yeah, at that point. And if it's a real big deal, get a UR robot and have it do a big deal, do it manually. But for now, just loading on one by one, 10-minute cycle, go nuts.
00:09:51
Speaker
I've seen it, and it might be Royal, it might be somebody else, but it's an inverse, it's a collet when the drawbar pulls back and expands a mandrel on the outside. And so, or frankly, John, you could just take a taper, you know, machine, 3D print, a tapered mandrel that goes down the ID of the tube, so your pen, the tip would be facing away from the main spindle, slide it over that,
00:10:17
Speaker
mandrel that's tapered and then just have the tailstock come in to support the tip of the pen. Additionally, you're done. Well, on both sides of the tube and also the point on the tip, there's like 60 degree chamfers.
00:10:32
Speaker
Already? Oh, I see. So it would just fit. I don't know. There's so many ways to do it. That's cool. Well, for what you're doing, you don't want it to slip on the rotation axis. But you don't need a lot of otherwise rigidity. I feel like a tapered mandrel would be a really interesting way to go. Because then all you've got to do is tap it off as soon as it slides off. Because what's the ID of that 300 thou or something? Just under, yeah, 27, something like that. Cool.
00:11:02
Speaker
I don't know. Yeah, you could figure that out. Yeah, exactly. So that's exciting. Cool. Any update on brother's ice?
Ordering Machines and Managing Logistics
00:11:10
Speaker
All of it. Start with the Swiss. The new pump came in yesterday. Pierre got it installed yesterday. This morning, now he's testing it. So that should hopefully solve all of our air, oil, coolant, Swiss issues. That's exciting.
00:11:29
Speaker
As far as the brother, I emailed the vendor last night and I said, look, let's wrap up this pricing. It doesn't fully make sense yet, but once it makes sense, I'm placing the order. Yeah. I'm available Wednesday and Thursday between these times. Yeah. So that's fantastic. Just, it's just specs and final. Just specs. Yep. Yeah.
00:11:49
Speaker
Yeah, he sent me one spec last week, like a lump sum price. It was this much. Then I'm like, okay, take off that and take off that because I don't need them. I already have solutions for that. Then he sent me the next quote and it was $1,500 cheaper. I'm like, shouldn't it be closer to $10,000 cheaper without those options? Just little things like that.
00:12:11
Speaker
I'm not really pushing him on price and discounts and things like that too hard, but I want the quote to make sense to me. Have you traditionally gotten line item quotes that sum up to the final purchase price? That's a good question. Yeah, I think so. I think most of the vendors just do that.
00:12:29
Speaker
And this vendor has been doing it both ways, like sometimes they'll send a quote broken down and sometimes they'll send it lump sum and I'm like, I need it broken down so that I know, you know, the big plus upgrade is this much plus this much through spindle coolant is this much the signal light, the wash down gun.
00:12:48
Speaker
the spindle override switch, all these little additions are $500 to $5,000 each and it's like they add up and you don't always need them all. But sometimes you're like, yeah, I could do it myself, but for $800, it could just be done and done right, whatever, get it done. Yeah, I wish. I mean, I don't have any heartburn about the two Okuma machines that we bought, but neither had line items pricing and had I been
00:13:17
Speaker
I'll say they're both weird situations. The Genos was a no-brainer. There was no real alternative. That was the great machine. I felt like we paid a price I'm happy with on it. The horizontal was more of a, this is what I want today. Honestly, I think I've said this before, I was pleased with working with them on it. I felt like they could have driven
00:13:41
Speaker
a harder bargain than they did, if that makes sense. But it still wasn't this type of situation where I'd like to be in, which is where you're saying, Hey, I've got two, three months to compare a few different machines. Um, and you know, understanding what you just said, what those options are and what the detailed prices are. And it's weird now. I think it's true in any salesman experience at any point in time, but especially now with COVID supply chain, and then a lot of these overseas machines, it's like, well, Hey, this option might cost us much, but it also is the whole like, well, it's 10 months lead time from Germany or Japan.
00:14:11
Speaker
Yep. And as you were asking me a few weeks ago, you're like, what would happen if you spend all this time thinking about it and then you pull the trigger and then they were six months out? They were in stock when you first started looking. I heard from another guy in the States, small shop, garage shop, who's buying his first, he goes from a tormack to a speedio and he said,
00:14:36
Speaker
He said some sort of big manufacturer, I don't know if it was auto or not, bought like 12 speedios and Yamazin's been doling them out every few months. So they're kind of eating up the inventory that's just sitting around. So those are unforeseen things that
Should We Attend Trade Shows?
00:14:52
Speaker
one day they might be like, yeah, we've got 20 in stock, no problem. But the next day they might be gone. Yeah.
00:14:59
Speaker
Do you know if their speeders are in stock? I do not know. I asked my guy last night. I'm like, I need to nail down this price and I need to know the lead time so I know if it's crazy or not. Yeah. And then we're like, let's go. I'm ready. Yeah. Zeiss. Zeiss. Same story. When I first looked into it two months ago, month and a half ago, I sent them 10% deposit, my cash, almost a month ago. Really? And then we finalized the order the other day.
00:15:30
Speaker
They're like, okay, yeah, we're going to order it now and it's going to be three months. I was like, hold on, I sent you money a month ago. I thought you would have ordered it then for your inventory at worst. I'm fine tuning the actual lead time on that. I don't want to wait three months. Did they demand 10% before a PO or order was issued? I already sent a PO a while ago.
00:15:56
Speaker
That's weird. But yeah, usually 10% on confirmation of order. And then I had to confirm the financing was in place, which took a little bit. So I'm finalizing if they have a stock one that I can just
00:16:11
Speaker
take or whatever. I don't want to wait three months. Yeah. Because I was told they're like, yeah, they're in stock in Chicago. No big deal. It could be here in a couple of weeks. Great. Okay. Anytime. I'm good to go. Three months is a lot of time. Three months means you're going to be training on it during INTS. Yeah, exactly. Have you thought about that yet? ideas? ideas for AU? Not really. I haven't thought about it.
00:16:39
Speaker
I haven't gone to any big shows. I went to CMTS, the Canadian one, last fall, which is way smaller than IMTS.
00:16:47
Speaker
But yeah, it was nice to get out, I got to say. Yeah. Yeah. Are you like, is it on your radar, or is you just whatever? I'm undecided at the moment. Fair enough. Like, we're definitely not going to Blade Show this year for the third time in a row. Really? Which sucks. Yeah, we kind of put it off too long, and then we're like, yeah, we're still not ready. Got it. Actually, I talked to fewer knife makers than you by far. I've never talked to a knife maker that is like, yeah, I'm ready for Blade. Yeah.
00:17:18
Speaker
Yep. Sorry, good. I don't know. Have you thought about IMTS, AU?
00:17:26
Speaker
I'll go to IMCS. I mean, Chicago is like notwithstanding bad airline pricing. Normally you can fly to Chicago for a hundred bucks or something, a couple of bucks. And yeah, I'll definitely go. They, I think I'm part of this judging thing for Anka grinders, like for tool of the year. I'm not truly familiar. They asked me to be involved with it. I don't know how serious that is or formal. I just like to, you know,
00:17:53
Speaker
It's kind of that conversation we had before, as much as you and I might be introverted in some ways, I do enjoy talking to people in this space. I don't know that we'll necessarily be in the market for anything other than kind of the same wish list. We're talking casually to Wilhelmin about one of those used machines that you mentioned, I think as CMMs in our future.
00:18:14
Speaker
But right now, it's not where my head is right now. I'm focused right now on the new building we're buying, some improvements to that, which I'll come back to, the horizontal production workflow and getting training classes up and running again here.
00:18:30
Speaker
It's interesting. Rob made a good point. IMTS is a lot more fun, in my opinion, or selfishly fun, if you will, but AU is whole. I've never left AU and not felt like I learned a lot and better off as a man of action. I've never walked away from AU and been like, ah, that was a waste of time. AU is great. It's in New Orleans this year. I am not against going, but haven't thought about it yet.
00:18:57
Speaker
Have you ever been to New Orleans? Never have. I've never been either. Yeah. Come. I don't think about it. When, like, fall? Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. Actually, I'm sure, sure. But you got to come to IMTS. I've had a couple people who've been like, you and Grimms have got to do, like, a meet and greet or something, which, again, whatever. But, like, you should come. Yeah. I'll consider it. Okay. Good. Okay.
Digital Depth Micrometer Considerations
00:19:20
Speaker
So, can I ask you some questions? Yeah. Do you own a digital depth micrometer?
00:19:27
Speaker
No, nothing about him.
00:19:30
Speaker
No. Okay. Other than, you know. I love our Midtutoyu Quantum mics and I love mics, digital mics, et cetera. I don't, I've never loved depth mics. We aren't like a shop that has had to use them either, but there's an application where I kind of want to measure a part on when it's still in the fixture on the machine. I'm like, I should just pony up for the Midtutoyu digital depth mic, but I have this like irrational fear that it's going to be yucky, but I still think I'll try it.
00:19:59
Speaker
The other thing is I've gotten a pretty decent design now, I think, for doing a DIY tombstone for our horizontal.
DIY Tombstone Design
00:20:08
Speaker
Full, throwing it out there, I recognize the buy versus build stuff, but round numbers with freight, it's over three grand to buy a tombstone. They're yucky cast iron and they aren't really the size I want.
00:20:26
Speaker
Oh, and the big thing is any cast iron tombstone you buy is going to have a one or two inch thick base flange. And I actually want to have our fixtures proud of that base flange or have it sort of non-existent, if you will, because I want to have access to another quarter inch of travel. It really helps in this application. So I started knocking up
00:20:50
Speaker
You know, as quick as I could, just a rough sketch, putting four aluminum plates around the edge of the Akuma palette base, which is round numbers, 14 or 16 inches square with the corners cut off.
00:21:04
Speaker
So I thought, okay, if I can somehow stand an aluminum plate on each side for a four-sided tombstone, now all I need to do is design a way to secure it to the pallet base, which is drilled and tapped, like 5.8.6, 5.8.11 maybe, and then make it rigid. And I started to play with internal ribbing or collars and so forth, and then it kind of occurred to me, wait a minute, here.
00:21:29
Speaker
I say intern. Alex has done an epoxy granite pour for a DIY CNC machine. So where I'm at now is we'll make an aluminum base plate and that means we have an aluminum base that we could deck if we had to to keep it all perpendicular and true. I don't think we'll have to because then we'll have some internal cleats that will hold the four fixture plates
00:21:52
Speaker
perpendicular to that base. They don't actually have to be perfect because it can all be decked in the machine after it's installed, but get it within, I would think, a few thou. The cleats will hold it all in place during the pour. Then I have a center, either six or eight inch piece of PVC to keep the pour size and weight down. You just don't need it. I actually have four PVC tubes that are around the corners inside the pour that will allow me to have access to
00:22:18
Speaker
the pallet base stud so I can put all thread all the way through it to clamp it down. So now all I have to do is machine those plates. We're good at that. And then buy some of this epoxy off of Amazon and mix it in with gravel and sand. There's some video recipes and recommendations, but it's, you know, two, 300 bucks for the epoxy and then let it cure for a couple of days.
00:22:44
Speaker
put it in the machine, dial it in, face it in with aluminum, don't have to cut cast iron anymore, and then we'll actually just install fixture plates on top of the aluminum plates that have been embedded into the... Oh, and the backside of those plates will all have be drilled and tapped and we'll install some half 13 screws that'll serve as anchors.
00:23:03
Speaker
What do you think? I think I get it. How tall is it going to be? Like full height? 24 inches or something? So it's going to be big. And are you hoping to cut aluminum or steel as your final part? This one will be for our soft aluminum soft jaws and aluminum hobby top jaws. So the requirements are light. Yeah. Exactly. The rigidity you need is not cast iron dampening weighs 1,000 pounds. I say try it.
00:23:32
Speaker
Yeah, I'm going to. It's weird. I got to explain that plumbing to our eight-inch PVC doesn't seem like it's super easy to find. Hope you didn't have it. I want that over six-inch because it reduces the epoxy pour size appropriately and it gives me access to some internal screws. I don't need them, but I want them. I'm also kind of like you. I'm excited to
00:23:56
Speaker
shouldn't be that bad. I think my requirements, maybe naive here, are so low in terms of what I need out of the porosity and the perfectness and all that compared to... It should be fine. We'll see how it goes. Put it that way. Yeah. Sometimes you just have to take on a project.
00:24:16
Speaker
Well, it shouldn't be all that bad. I mean, Grant is already modeled up a lot of the, the base plate in the four side plates. Those basically incorporate right into our workflow right now. So it's almost no additional effort. We got to make some cleats, um, or I honestly might just use old one, two, three blocks as cleats, internal cleats. I get cast in because that allows me to bolt down into the side, um, mix up some epoxy, pour it. You're kind of done. I mean, I know it would be more than that, but really not that bad. Cool. What's new with you?
Testing Willeman Machine Setup
00:24:46
Speaker
So today, I'm going to do some cleanup on the Willeman. I have to tweak the cooling, the spindle chiller hoses because the fittings that we got basically are too big. So the machine is going to crash into the electrical stuff on a tool change because these coolant hoses are too big. The machine moves so dynamically that everything's tight.
00:25:09
Speaker
Oh. Like in the back of the machine where all the pneumatics are and where all the ball screws and everything are like. Yeah, it's kind of open when it's moved in one position, but it takes up the entire travel zone and everything's got to be snug. So anyway, I just have to reroute the cooling hoses. So go to the plumbing store, get some fittings, tidy that up, tidy the machine up and just get ready. I think either today or probably tomorrow we're going to align
00:25:39
Speaker
the spindle and get it all done. Then start picking away at, like you said, a test program, how to post a code, how to do a tool change, how to load the tools, how to touch off a tool. I haven't done that yet.
00:25:51
Speaker
Yeah, I was going to ask you how to touch off tools and set datums. It's like the two big things. Exactly. It's got a Renishaw OMP40 probe with a really stubby little tip on it and a Bloom laser toolsetter. Awesome. Man, the fanic control is weird. The way you operate it and just even how to turn it on and which buttons to push to reset it and home it and
00:26:18
Speaker
You know, when you jog the axis over to the hard limit, there's like a weird combination of buttons to get it off the hard limit that is not intuitive. It's like you have to hit reference and then Y minus and then hit the power button and hold it for five seconds and then the machine will slowly come off the limits switch. I'm like, okay, I need to document this stuff so that everybody in the shop has access to that information.
00:26:44
Speaker
Are you using a Grimsville wiki? We are now. Are you really? Yeah. Do tell. Sort
ERP System Transition
00:26:52
Speaker
of. I think I mentioned it to you privately a couple weeks ago, but the GURP ERP system we've been building for two years, I threw in the garbage and I started from scratch using Google App Sheets, which has been the greatest choice I've ever made in my life. Great. Exaggerating.
00:27:12
Speaker
It's been fantastic. It gives me a central place to put everything I want from all of our parts and all of our inventory to inventory management, to cutting purchase orders, to work orders, to managing process flow. I added a whole section for procedures that can be subcategorized into any section I want. So like literally I wrote a procedure how to hire a new employee.
00:27:36
Speaker
These are all the steps that make sure you get their birthday, their details, their numbers, their address, all the stuff you need to know because we just hired somebody. And I'm like, why am I trying to remember this every time? So I want the entire business to be documented in that program, which is what the eMyth told us to do 10 years ago. I'm ready to do that now.
00:28:00
Speaker
And like we had a pallet changer issue on the current yesterday. So I'm like, as I'm remembering how to do it, I'm like, holy crap, I'm documenting this right now. And it's great. It's fantastic. The key is this idea that, at least this is how my brain works, is that when I have a problem, I think, where would I have written this down? Yes. And for me today, it's been mostly my documents. I have like a Haas running notes file or an Okuma running notes file.
00:28:27
Speaker
or Gmail is great because Gmail just crushes it on search. So I'll reply to myself with an email that has SEO words like Haas, Renish Offusion, Post, Probe, Calibrate. It works great. The biggest thing is sometimes you're like, where did I put that? Or ironically, even I won't remember that it's been documented. So a guy called yesterday
00:28:54
Speaker
We don't offer FedEx overnight shipping on sauntersmachineworks.com because anyone who's paying for that is going to expect that the order ships the same day. Sometimes if we have an order coming at 3.30, I just don't want to miss manage expectations. It's disabled, but a guy called up, he wanted to buy two plates and actually send the FedEx overnight.
00:29:16
Speaker
and we had them in stock. It was $3.15. I'm like, if you get this order to us in a half an hour, we can get them out today. But I had to go into Shopify and figure out how to re-enable this. It's crazy because we use a shipping app, but then there's the shipping settings and then there's all these carriers and it's confusing
00:29:34
Speaker
confusing. And I forgot that I had already written down a note in my Shopify folder of how to do that because I just, for lack of a better description, I panic and I'm like, I can figure this out. And then you're like, I should make a note of this and you go in to make the note and you realize the notes are already there.
00:29:52
Speaker
Exactly. Make fun of me if you want. I'm just being honest. No, absolutely. I've done that too. And that's one of the concerns I have and I have had over the years is like, A, where do I put this information? And two, how do I find it? Do I know it's there? And most importantly, how do I get the rest of the team to have access to that information? Because I would write Google documents or I'd have spreadsheets or files or notes or text files or in my personal Google Drive subfolders. And I'm like, yeah, I know they're there, but
00:30:22
Speaker
nobody else has access to it. And I want this business to be scalable. It's something I'm working on really hard right now is to remove myself from the day-to-day equation. And this is critical point in time for us to have the ERP system doing what I want it to do. And it's so cool. It's so cool.
00:30:43
Speaker
That's great. We just went through updating all of our procurement with our vendors, suppliers to getting emails sent to and from our fresh desks. I don't know what you call fresh desks, other than the customers. Technically, I think of it as customer service platform, but now,
00:31:01
Speaker
When RFQs go out or POs go out, anybody can find them. Oh, they can actually find those in Lex as well. But now what they can do is also see the confirmation emails come through, check former order history, check tracking if for some reason you really need to know where something is, and basically remove John or some other employee from being siloed in that process. Yes.
00:31:25
Speaker
What is, or could you explain Google AppSheets? So Lockwood got me onto it. He's been talking to us about it for years. I learned that Google bought AppSheets company in 2020. So it's relatively new Google product. It's not like Google came up with it from scratch. I think AppSheets was its own separate company. But basically it's
00:31:49
Speaker
you're creating what looks like an app for your phone. And it's seamless on my phone, on the computer, on the laptop, on a tablet, it's same interface on all three. So it's a website, but it acts like an app and it runs through the AppSheets main program. But on my home screen, on my phone, I have a Grimsman eyes logo as an app icon. And I'm like, that is the sickest thing ever.
00:32:13
Speaker
So do you publish it to the Android store? No. You download AppSheets, the app, and then you log in with the credentials given by me, the creator, to access this section of AppSheets, like this website, whatever it's called. And it's based on Google Spreadsheets, Google Sheets and Docs. And you can link to anything, files on your Dropbox, whatever.
00:32:38
Speaker
but all the information is stored in Google Sheets, which I am an expert at. I love Google Sheets. We've used them extensively with custom scripts and programming like really crazy stuff over the years. So now that I have a database that is essentially a spreadsheet that I can see and manipulate and use and it just ticked all of the boxes and I was able to create what I wanted
00:33:05
Speaker
the rough structure in its entirety in like four days. It's amazing. I work a lot on it, but yeah, no coat. It just takes all of the backend programming out of it for you. Your linking databases, your linking fields and forms, I want it to look like this. I want my color scheme to be like this. I want that to talk to that. I want this piece of information. I want that to be a date field. I want that to be a text field. I want that to be a long text field.
00:33:31
Speaker
And the way we were doing it before, having a programmer do it in .NET was very manual, very time-consuming, very dirty code. Any change was painful and expensive. We spent tens of thousands of dollars on our old system that I've now thrown in the garbage. I'm not. At first I was, but I'm like, you know what? That got me here. I'm totally okay with that. That got me
00:34:12
Speaker
in the zone. I was absolutely in heaven. The kids are like, let's go to the park. And I'm like, can I bring my laptop? And I did. And then I've been able to pull back. Fraser's learning it right now. And our software developer, Sadie, is also involved now. So I'm completely pulling back and I'm letting them run. Sadie's our Upwork developer. OK, third party. Third party.
00:34:13
Speaker
I knew what
00:34:40
Speaker
Yeah, she's in Arizona now, but we've worked with her for a year now. She's developed a lot of the Kern, uh, tool life tracking stuff. And she was going to take over GURP as a.net programming thing. But now she's going to take over the app sheets version and she created a features request section on it with, you know, date created.
00:35:00
Speaker
person requesting it date, you know, finished date and all this progress reports, stuff like that. So when I have a future request now, I just put a thing in there within GURP. And then she it's her job now to watch that and track it. And I released it to everybody else on the team. We bought three tablets for everybody on the shop. We'll buy more if we need them. And everybody can use it, you know, can just dig in. One of our guys who's not super computer savvy, I just gave him the tablet and I said,
00:35:31
Speaker
poke at everything. And he's like, this is sweet. This has everything. So built out our vendor list. We've got 103 vendors in so far with name, first contact, second contact, grim small contacts like me or Fraser or somebody else, notes, all kinds of stuff. It's just going to grow and grow and grow. I'm so excited for it.
00:35:53
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't apparently have been living under a rock, but someone had mentioned the no-code stuff a month or two ago and I popped on YouTube and watched some review apps. The one that for some reason I got pointed to was Bubble, but there's a bunch of them out there. The way that they explained it was wonderful because there's templates and examples and you could build
00:36:16
Speaker
Of course, they're selling here, so they probably are painting a little bit of a rosy picture, but you could build your own effective Pinterest, like Pinterest, where you have credentialed logins, and people can create their own curated photo stores. You're not building your own version of a Pinterest. Exactly. Or a Facebook, or a database, or a CS customer service thing. And it is what you said. It's like WYSIWYG, drag and drop. It helps to be comfortable. It's not easy, but it is very doable.
00:36:46
Speaker
But you're not writing nested if statements for programming logic. You can put logic into it as you need it.
00:36:54
Speaker
Yeah, I was joking with Lockwood on day three of doing this and I'm like, I could create Instagram with this right now. Obviously, I'm joking and exaggerating, but my app looks like Instagram. There's five buttons on the bottom. Just like on Instagram, there's a menu button at the top which gives you more things. There's pages and things and pictures and I'm like, I get it now. I understand apps so much better than I've created my own.
00:37:17
Speaker
Obviously, the big multi-user public based ones are completely different league of code and things like that, but I don't care. I've got like 15 users and who cares? That's what the YouTube videos seem to imply was that look, if you have thousands of users or paid stuff or big security issues or just taxing
00:37:42
Speaker
amount of activity, you need straight code, like legit efficiency, but like none of us, like we just need... No, we're not there. But what's cool about this is even if you were going to rebuild an Instagram for public use and make it a billion dollar company, like you could absolutely start an AppSheets and conceptualize it as a moderately knowledgeable computer person.
00:38:04
Speaker
But you don't have to have a master's degree in computer science to be able to do it. However, Sadie, our remote developer, is getting her master's degree Saturday in computer science. So that's cool. Her pay level is going up, unfortunately. Good for her.
00:38:27
Speaker
Alex will be here full-time for the summer off from school here in a week or two. We've got some Lex work to bring home, pulled across the finish line because Julie has been taking Lex data and outputting it manually to a Google Sheet so that way some of us have updated, hey, this is what we need and whether it's for an order or inventory.
00:38:48
Speaker
So we kind of know exactly what we want, but we need Lex to do that on its own, which it can. It just hasn't happened yet. But we have hit areas of Lex where there are limits and user interface limits, code limits, functionality limits. And so I wouldn't necessarily be surprised if we
00:39:06
Speaker
do this last thing and then say, okay, do we, it sounds crazy, do we rebuild the whole thing now? And we're not gonna do this, we'd hire somebody, but we know almost exactly what we want so they could parallel process, do that, and we're no longer,
00:39:22
Speaker
It takes the pressure off the development because I think I've said this before, I know I have, but Lex is issuing numerous POs, RFQs, things, work orders per day. We ceased to function without it at this point. It's that fail fast, fail cheap, fail forward mentality that you took with Lex. It costs you very little dollars to create, a lot of hours, but in a platform that you were able to do everything you want within reason,
00:39:49
Speaker
and you've been utilizing it for two years. That's fantastic. Whereas I took the other method, it was like I had
00:39:57
Speaker
you know, my dad as the gatekeeper and then his programmer overseas. And there was a lot of back and forth and difficulty and nobody else on the shop ever saw it. It was never used except for like two people. Whereas this system, I was like, everybody's, everybody's a user now. Like everybody use it. I want you all to create a product. I want you to create a process, start documenting everything. Let's go.
00:40:24
Speaker
If you walk through our shop and just look at people's monitors, if they're not in Fusion, they're probably either in Google Sheets that are driven by Lex or in Lex. I got a RFQ response yesterday and the way we built the functionality when you convert an RFQ to a PO, it shows you all the historical orders for those items.
00:40:42
Speaker
And I just noticed your prices are all over the place now, but I noticed the thing I didn't think past muster and ended up saving myself 10% off by sort of saying, Hey, this doesn't seem to make sense. Can you check it? Yeah. And that's, you know, it's wonderful. The information is right at your fingertips. I love it.
Increasing Production Capacity
00:41:01
Speaker
I love data. Yeah.
00:41:04
Speaker
Um, I am here next week, but then I am off the week thereafter for this Kansas project MFG thing. So folks are, uh, you know, I've gotten the question before about, you know, what's happening in the world of.
00:41:19
Speaker
The sort of two-year trade school manufacturing and this to me seems to be the absolute best Example of how to do it right where you've got students focused on multi-axis machine cam driven projects with a little bit more real-world element around the need to You know take and bring things full circle. Yeah, which is You know, it's not just
00:41:42
Speaker
It's not a lot of things. It's not just being a push-button operator. It's not just being a manual machinist. It seems to be the kind of reflection of the type of people that would just step right out of that program and right into a shop like your mind, which is awesome.
00:41:57
Speaker
I'm still learning about what this thing is. We've got a couple other judges. It seems to have a tinge of reality TV, although it's not a TV show. It's just broadcast on, I think, YouTube, but it does have some legit production stuff behind it. To me, like I said, the answer was yes, because it seems like a really cool thing and we'll see how it goes. But if folks are interested and want to check out more, I would certainly appreciate it because I'm kind of scared to see what we can make out of it.
00:42:25
Speaker
Yeah, that's amazing. I can't wait to see how it turns out. Yeah, thank you. Angela's off today and Steven's off today, so I'm running the Kern totally by myself and then helping Pierre get the Swiss pump running if he needs it and then Wilhelmin. Yeah, awesome. Okay, what about you?
00:42:44
Speaker
I am also running the horizontal. We just moved from making four top jaws at a time to eight at a time, which took some more. It was a great workflow. Like I just getting four on there was easy and it ran the crew. The big step from four to eight is that the
00:43:00
Speaker
other four are on the other side of the edge of the tombstone, which means when they get cut, they get cut on the far side of the moon, which is just as horrifying as everybody says because it's super occluded. Like I can't even, you can't see anything. Yeah. Yeah. I've got one up on the current where I do that and it's, but I have more access. Like it's a smaller tombstone. I can, I can still mostly see.
00:43:27
Speaker
Yeah, this is, I feel like the worst, the worst because it's the narrow edge of a T-style tombstone. And then the fixture I'm working on is inside that T-edge and then it's pushed further back. It's about 50 thou off the Y, the X limit toward the far side. And it's all the way up. So for me to actually stop the machine and poke my head in there, I don't fit like this. It's this, the tombstone is too close to the, uh, columns, Z column or Y column. Um, so it was.
00:43:56
Speaker
super tight. But it's working. I just just walking it in. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, that's all I got. I'll see you next week. Sounds good, man. Take care.