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#355 Days off in the shop - Best business decision EVER
348 Plays1 year ago
TOPICS:
- Grimsmo's plans for the year
- Naming products
- Days off in the shop - Best business decision EVER
- New employee at Grimsmo Knives
- Releasing new products
- Tom Lipton mentor
- Saving time and money
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Company Updates
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 355. My name is John Grimsmough. And my name is John Saunders. And this is the weekly podcast between two manufacturing nerds that are chronicling the growth and progress of our manufacturing companies and all the ins and outs and ups and downs of what we do. Yes.
00:00:23
Speaker
How are you? I'm doing quite well. Flowing good. It's a great start to the year. Two weeks in, feeling positive, feeling really, really good for the coming year. Good. That's great. We had a lot of irons in the fire and it's like with any analysis, depending on what you look at is how you feel.
00:00:46
Speaker
Yes. So if you only look at a past trend or only look at the data from this way, you're like, oh, doom and gloom. It could be so much better. But I, as the eternal optimist, sometimes known as optimist prime, I have a lot of things in the fire right now. And I'm super excited for the year. And it's going to be an absolute firecracker of a year.
00:01:12
Speaker
You always though, like is it because you always have a lot probably too. I heard the fire. You're saying is it even more than the normal more? Um, very laser focused. It's not that there's like 50 things, 50, 50 projects I'm working on. Although if you break it down into individual tasks or whatever, but, um,
00:01:35
Speaker
It's different because I've spent the past few years kind of running around, trying to optimize, trying to do what we're doing, trying to do it better, trying to, you know, done a lot of hiring in the past four years. You spend a lot of time doing that, just kind of getting your bearings on running a business at this size. And I feel like I'm coming into the prototyping John stage.
00:02:04
Speaker
What do you mean? Well, where I'm not just spending my time running the business, but I get to actually play and design things and come up with new plans. And I've been spending more and more time doing that and having an absolute blast. I'm sharing more of that with other people. And I'm just starting to see that future growth of accomplishing more, not just wanting to accomplish more.
00:02:31
Speaker
Yeah, past few weeks has been a lot of thinking about that and doing that and getting excited for that. Good. That's great. Mm-hmm. You're sorry. You're making me the juices flowing online. So I'm making it. So I'm rudely typing what you're talking about. I know. Do you want to share? Yeah. Are you going to share more about these projects or is it?
New Year, New Projects
00:02:53
Speaker
A little bit. Not too much. But obviously, the new knife that I'm working on, the integral knife,
00:03:01
Speaker
Integral is more of a category. It's not like the product name, and I don't have a firm product name for it yet. I've just been calling it the integral for the past 12 years. I wrote down a bunch of names.
00:03:14
Speaker
did some research, and now I have a names file that's like, any future product we'll take from here, and there's a bunch of cool stuff in here. And that's already weeded out all this dumb stuff that doesn't make sense, right? So anyway, that knife is coming together. I'm cutting the handle to probably 95% today. Super cool with a palette changing machine and zero point work holding. You can just take away at it, put it away, pick away at it, put it away, and that's fun.
00:03:44
Speaker
sure is.
00:03:47
Speaker
Okay, so I really enjoy it. I kind of miss the naming days. I've named a lot of things over the years, products and business. I Google translated from English to Finnish because Norse wasn't a language option. Forgive my language. In Finnish, the English word integral, and I'm going to butcher the pronunciation, translates to Kinteja.
00:04:15
Speaker
Okay. Which I think so. I'm not trying to get caught here. That sounds really cool. With a J at the end? K-I-I and T-E-A. T-E-A. Googling. There's like an umlaut over the A or whatever the Finnish call it.
00:04:33
Speaker
Interesting, Kinte. I might, that's the list. Although we want Norwegian, not Finnish, but... Oh, okay. Thank you. Forgive me. Oh, the integral in Norwegian is integret. Integret, g-r-e-r-t. I don't know. That didn't happen. Cool. Yeah, so a glimpse into my morning.
00:05:00
Speaker
I am, Garrett is out today, who normally runs a horizontal, which actually is perfect because I had a bunch of, you know, finishing up things I wanted to do. So like Gen 3 top jaws, we've run them. I wanted to run them again. It's been a month. No reason to worry about sitting there and watching it run, but I enjoy being here at least versus say like an overnight cycle when it's a new product that hasn't been run for a month.
00:05:29
Speaker
Not only just see how the fixture performs, how the tools sound, you know, you see it right away. Like I like that workflow. I think I've mentioned this before. We have a spin-off company called Stimped Works that makes air-cooled Porsche parts. And that works because the horizontal can hold the fixturing on the puck chuck. So it doesn't really cost us anything. It doesn't take up any of the horizontal's allocated saunter stuff. And we run these products as needed. It's
Innovations in Manufacturing Processes
00:05:55
Speaker
awesome.
00:05:56
Speaker
Cool. And we had a fixture that we used to use on a vertical that needs to be on the horizontal. So Alex just threw the puck chuck pull studs in it. And so now we have this puck chuck tombstone face that we just swapped through stuff. So in like it's zero point, I mean, it's zero point. Like I hate shilling my own products. You should absolutely shill your own products. As you're explaining this, I'm like, I would like a 13 minute video explaining what you're talking about, please.
00:06:21
Speaker
Yeah, no. That will happen. That actually is a good segue into me balancing days off in the shop versus the marketing videos. I'll come back to that. Basically, it was phenomenal. We have this new toolbox. Next, the horizontal has fixtures in it. I was switching between Gen 3 dual station, a Gen 2 fixture.
00:06:42
Speaker
the shim-torx fixture and a new different fixture. And you just pop a button, they all pop off, pop back on. It's like, oh my God, it's amazing. Yes.
00:06:55
Speaker
Which makes doing what you do fun. I have never set up a tool in that horizontal other than adding it to the horizontal. You know what I mean? There's no, oop, can't make that part because we had to take out the 3.16 ball nose. Nope, it's already in there. Yep, same with the Kern. And it's to the point with us where it's actually
00:07:15
Speaker
too easy to make a new part on the current when it should be made on a different machine and take a setup and things like that because the current should be busy making production parts, not fixtures. It's kind of slower making fixtures because I can't just run at material. I got to take it easy. It's got a lighter spindle, things like that. Anyway. Yeah, that's a very interesting point. I've sort of talked amongst the team about
00:07:42
Speaker
building fixtures on other machines for the same reason of letting the horizontal be the horizontal. Not so much from a productivity standpoint, but from a risk standpoint. I'd much rather, I mean, it stinks to crash any machine, but we don't want to crash the horizontal. Yeah, exactly.
00:07:59
Speaker
Yeah, so look, that's my transitioning to the days off in the shop comment. I'd like to talk a little bit more about that. It has been to be a bit dramatic and emphasize what it's done. It is the best entrepreneurship or business decision I have made ever.
00:08:18
Speaker
in the context of where we're at in the history of the company. I know that's a little bit clickbaity, if you will, but we needed it. I needed it on a personal level. The company will benefit from it. If I hadn't done it, I would have continued to do the frog boiling. By the way, apparently frogs do jump out of boiling water. Oh, really? Yeah. Why are we still using this then? Right.
00:08:44
Speaker
So I hesitate to talk about it too much because it's so boring. But the second to last day was the utility closet. Hashtag boring. It felt great. John, I felt like so good. I spent two hours in there. That one, I was closer to doing it in the two hours. Third day was process bins. And it's like, don't overthink them. Like, I know I can spend two hours on improving our process bins. So I don't need to spend more time worrying, oh, what am I going to do to the process bins?
00:09:14
Speaker
So just start. And I realized, okay, we have existing product process bins. We have new product process bins. We have equipment process bins. We have like StimpWorks process bins. And you just dive in, just start doing it. And that's one where I got a good two hours in and ended up with a solid
00:09:33
Speaker
action to-do list that'll get put at the end of my days off in the shop. Like I just have a running list of days. So, okay, great. We are better off the whole keep making deposits. The bins are better off and it happened. From the whole spirit of goals are worthless. It's about the steps that you take to get there. That's great. I did it. It is
00:09:58
Speaker
I think what really made me have such strong conviction is, I think like a lot of us, I have to-do lists. I've done really well over the last years having a short-term, medium-term, and long-term to-do list. It works great for me. I have for years bounced around with something that didn't work. That's great, except the long-term to-do list didn't happen.
00:10:18
Speaker
I was okay with that because that's what long-term is, except this solves it. My long-term to-do list is almost all gone now. Most of those action items just got put in two days off in the shop. They now have two hours of my life allocated to them on February 23rd. It's not that they're done yet, it's that they're planned. They will get done so you can stop worrying about them.
00:10:45
Speaker
The whole thing with this is it puts you in control. You go to a section of the shop and you now control it. You've put effort into it. You've organized it. You've changed it. You've improved it in a way that takes you in the direction you want your company to go.
00:11:00
Speaker
Yes, I'm doing a lot of the work unapologetically, but I did part of it. Then this morning, one of our interns shifted his schedule for classes. He gets in at six now. Totally cool. I just sent him a video on this iPhone video. I was like, hey, when you're in, will you take this shelf?
00:11:18
Speaker
move it to the wire racks that have wheels, rearrange the height of the rack so that one Rubbermaid bin fits in each one. That way you can't double stack them. They're already all labeled. That's one of those things, the silliest thing. It's a wire rack that has
00:11:33
Speaker
bins with things like electrical breakers, air compressor supplies, PPE, that kind of stuff. But you look at that, and I would want to take that picture if I toured another shop to be like, I should do that. I know that sounds egotistical, but that's what I want. I want to walk into this shop, be like, oh, that's obvious, and it costs me $100 wire rack, about $15 per bin done.
00:11:57
Speaker
Yep. Yep. Labeled on the outside. Yep. Labeled on both sides, so that regardless of which way you put it in, it's there. And you can't double stack them now, so you don't have to remove a top bin to get to the bottom bin. Yep. We are documenting this in a video, but it'll be a video. I think I'm going to try to make the whole do it days off in the shop, three-month process into like an eight-minute video, which is going to be documented over two months. Over time. Oh, I like that a lot. Yeah. Yeah.
00:12:27
Speaker
It's like somebody posted a couple months ago on Instagram. Empty table space with a white piece of paper on it that says whatever you were planning to put in this empty space belong somewhere else. Yeah, right. It's funny.
00:12:41
Speaker
Because the guys, actually, they just moved a table from one zone to another. But all of a sudden, I saw this new table in the current area. I was like, oh, that looks cool. Because between shelves and tables used well, they change a whole space. Yeah. It's cool.
00:13:00
Speaker
that happened was the air compressors, where we cleaned them up, found out that our push to fit check valves that we use for the drains were not rated for the drain pressure, and so they were actually allowing backflow.
00:13:17
Speaker
not the end of the world, but not good. So we've got new ones of those. And then the big thing that's nice is we have process spins. Now I have a, I 3D printed a, what would you call it? Like a stall. So it's just a little L bracket that has a 3D printed spring in it. So the process spin slides into a little slot on top of the air compressor. Okay. And then the
00:13:38
Speaker
Those have the stuff I've mentioned before, the manuals, service info, fuses, the next set of filters and oil rags are right there. Then the jug of oil wouldn't fit in a process bin. Even if you wipe it down, it gets oily. I looked at the compressor and I saw that it's a 20-inch tank and the right side had plenty of open area on the
00:14:02
Speaker
The tank's laying down, so it's like a submarine going through the ocean, if you will. 3D printed a curved shelf that has a flat top with a little sidewalls, so now the oil, quart of oil, has its own little home on the compressor right there. I don't care if it gets a little bit oily.
00:14:21
Speaker
That's the easiest, like you don't have to be a genius to come up with that. You have to be willing to stop and be a surgeon and just enjoy making this air compressor the best you can in one hour. That wasn't even a two hour job. But if you're just doing it to like get the check off a box of like, hey, I purged the check valves and now you need to go back to programming a part, you're not gonna, I would not make those improvements.
00:14:47
Speaker
Right. And that's, that's a good point, what you said about fuses and filters and things like that. I'm thinking to myself where we keep our fuses and filters. And I don't fully know, to be honest, the rest of the team takes care of that. But I do know that there's okay, there's a pile of fuses in that orange rack, and there's a pile over here. And whether you keep them all centralized is probably not even as good as having it at the source, like backup fuses for the air compressor backup things at the source. I like that a lot.
00:15:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's, I mean, obviously I'm enjoying this personally, which I'm starting to appreciate in life. That's all that matters. Like, but, um, that's cool. But I hope it's a motivation tool for folks. Yep. And I do like that mindset while it may be kind of egotistical, like you want to show your friends around the shop and them to pick up ideas that are like, I'm taking that home with me. Yeah. Like I'm doing that in my place, you know? Yeah. I like that.
00:15:49
Speaker
how you have a new employee starting in two weeks. Oh, okay. I thought for some reason it was, um, he is a heat. He, yep. Okay. Let's already start. He got it. That's exciting. Then super exciting. Um, so Pierre is,
00:16:05
Speaker
He's leaving the country in less than a month. So he's kind of coming in and out and wrapping up on the last few things in the shop and advising and training us on the things that he still knows, which is awesome. Technically done with production, but luckily the new guy Jeff is going to take a couple days off of work because he's working at his current job till the end of the month. So he's going to sneak a day and come into the shop early and
00:16:33
Speaker
trained with Pierre so that they can both learn together, which would be awesome. Unfortunately, we get very little overlap time between the two of them, just a couple of days, which is rough, but the reality. We're going to milk that for as much as we can, and then he starts in two weeks.
Team Dynamics and New Product Launch
00:16:50
Speaker
and super duper exciting. Good. What are you sharing the new employee's name? Yeah, Jeff Joffrey. Thank you. What is his primary? So he will be the machinist.
00:17:05
Speaker
He's directly replacing Pierre, who runs our Nakamura and our Swiss Tornos. Luckily, both of those two are fairly automated machines. Pierre also had quite a bit of extra time to do all kinds of other little things in the shop. He brought a huge skill set. I think Jeff comes in and brings a huge skill set as well. I'm very, very interested to see how we can squeeze that.
00:17:28
Speaker
and let him grow and leverage his skills and his experience from before. He's been in the industry for 10 years and super duper excited. That's awesome. We actually had quite a few really good applicants from the Indeed post. We left it open for a little bit longer than we maybe should have, but I just wanted to see what would come in.
00:17:49
Speaker
We've had a couple more come in that we're like, we're just going to keep this guy on the back burner. I want to be ready if we're ready for that next hire at some point. We've got some really good people that we've been chatting with for the near to medium future. Awesome. Super cool. That's great. I couldn't remember if you were also trying to consider a second person or? Yeah, we were considering it for sure. It's not going to happen immediately.
00:18:18
Speaker
Basically, as soon as it makes sense, I would love to add another machinist to the team because we do have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of machines to keep busy, and I would like to make that a reality, right? Yeah. That's what's helped me with days off in the shop is also recognizing that's not negotiable, if you will. That time is allocated. Now look, the first Monday, we ended up taking the day off and going away with the kids like, OK, I'll just ship them all by day. So it's not. Yeah.
00:18:47
Speaker
It's fine. We had a vendor here one morning that saved half an hour late, so I shipped a big deal for us. But the general idea is that time is now taken off the table. And that has helped me realize, okay, there's a lot of other stuff, look, if I'm being honest, that I still do or am I responsible for. And that's actually what we were had huddling on yesterday in the manager meeting was that
00:19:08
Speaker
We have started shipping Gen 3 Mod Vices to customers that we've been talking with. We're not as focused on this from a release standpoint because for Inch users, which is most Mod Vices users, the difference is almost irrelevant, if you know what I mean.
00:19:28
Speaker
But there's a lot. This is our first time really bringing a product to market as a much more mature company with distributed teams and inventory and Lex and packaging, all that stuff, which you see how it kind of slows you down. But it's also because, I don't know, when we first released the Gen 1 mod vice, we were two people and we sold a few every now and then. There's days now where we ship a lot per day. And so we just need to have our ducks in a row.
00:19:55
Speaker
And Alex was saying we really need to finish up the digital side. So the Shopify listing, the copy, the dimensional drawings, the step files and FAQs, and then also a short instructional video, which that will fall into my plate.
00:20:16
Speaker
And that's something I had planned to do after I finished these days off in the shop at the end of February. But I think I need to I don't think I am going to reprioritize. It's not a big deal. Do that sort of now, because it needs to happen now. I'm also realizing I think days off in the shop is going to be something that I do all of 2024.
00:20:35
Speaker
I think if I'm being honest, I could do two to three days a week for the rest of this year and not run out of stuff to do and we will be so much better off for it. Right. You think of the ROI on that time, it propels you deep into the future. You set up a base that now the company can grow and sustain itself a bit more without you kind of thing. Yeah, I like that.
00:21:01
Speaker
I hear you on releasing a new product. This new knife, we haven't fully released a big product since the pen came out in 2017. Seven years old? Yeah. That's crazy, John. We haven't had a core product released since then. Wow.
00:21:24
Speaker
The company is in a completely different, you know, 2018 it might have been, when we had basically Sky and Angelo as our two employees. We're still here. But now we are, like you said, a much more mature company. We've got 13 employees. And the whole process of everything is different. So much is more out of my hands.
00:21:45
Speaker
Not only that, but we have to release the product properly with a punch. It has to be good. It has to be really good. It has to be done. The whole planning process, I can't just hole up in the corner and just make it on my own because I need to involve everybody else. I don't know how to heat treat it. I don't know how to surface grind. Those aren't my jobs.
00:22:03
Speaker
So I need to schedule in time for each person and Angela and I sat down with the whiteboard and he's like, okay, tell me everything. And he just started writing down and drawing arrows and boxes and ops and everything. And I was like, because it's all in my head and he's very good when he pushes me to extract that and to lay it out in a visual format. And then we literally, we have one of those wheelie stand up whiteboards.
00:22:25
Speaker
We wheeled it outside to the team meeting and he explained it to everybody. I was like, wow, my vision, my plan just got put on paper and explained to everybody by somebody else. Whoa, this is cool. I'm jumping out of my seat because this morning reading that Toyota book was this exact thing. It was like, hey, here in the 80s was how bicycle manufacturers used to do it. Then it was like in the 90s, there were some – I actually didn't really love the anecdotes. It felt like it was a little
00:23:09
Speaker
I hope word mansplaining comes to mind where you're going to tell everybody what to do. You're going to get their buy in, but there's actually going to end up, everyone's going to break back away apart and there's still, there's going to be rifts between the finance team who wants more margin and the tool making team who thinks the tolerances are ridiculous. 100%. Yeah. Yeah.
00:23:21
Speaker
Is this the same Toyota book you mentioned a couple of weeks ago?
00:23:31
Speaker
We're small enough to where, you know, everybody in the company, let alone the teams can just huddle up on a project. Right. And we are too, but I'm starting to see that exactly what you were just on about, you know, the finance team wants more margin, production team wants better tolerances. The finishing team wants better finishes and faster parts and all this stuff. And we are balancing that and more communication is always better. Um, and, uh,
00:23:56
Speaker
obviously trying to realize we're always on the same page, always on the same team here. You know, we're trying to try to feed each other. Um, and you know, what might be observed as a, uh, what do you call it? Being, being mean by doing something poorly. I don't know how to explain it well. Um, but really everybody's trying to do their best and everybody's like,
00:24:21
Speaker
you might not be getting exactly what you want, but the person's trying to give you the best that they can. And that's how we have to communicate. Um, and it's good every day where we seem to be improving that more and more and more and more, which is awesome. And we're leagues better than we were even a couple of months ago, years ago. So.
00:24:38
Speaker
It's good, but yeah, introducing a new product. I don't think anybody else has really felt the effects yet because I'm like almost at that point of like, okay, here's the next step. People like now you do this, now you do this, but, um, it's good that they know what's coming and I'll let them know when, when it's coming. Yeah.
00:24:56
Speaker
Tom Lipton was on Spencer's podcast a week or two ago. Tom's one of those guys where I know him well enough to text him every once in a while and say hi or call him. I think of him as a mentor, but he would never call me a mentee, if that makes sense.
00:25:13
Speaker
He's one of those guys where when I'm, when I'm debating a decision, I sort of think what would Tom Lipton say about it, my own head, and it can help you kind of think about things.
Balancing Content Creation with Manufacturing
00:25:25
Speaker
And he enjoyed his perspective on life. And he said a bunch of things, which I'll maybe recap here, but at the risk of, of, of course, misstating anything, forgive me. But one of the things that's relevant to this conversation is the phrase tolerances are meant to be used. And he deals with
00:25:43
Speaker
who his title is involved overseeing all the mechanical aspects of a particle accelerator at Lawrence Berkeley. Yeah, that's not exactly it. But basically, lots of engineers, scientists, machinists, fabricators, project management, complicated devices and
00:25:58
Speaker
There's the scenario of very intelligent but young or green engineers who are really whiz-bang cad folks that don't necessarily understand the machine side of it. Everybody's heard that. I'm not saying anything new by the phrase of over-tolerance apart. It's not just over-tolerance or under-tolerance. It's the idea that tolerances are a range and it's completely acceptable
00:26:25
Speaker
to use and you should use the range. I like the way he talked about that and I like the way it jived with what we did six months ago, a year ago of many of our part drawings now have a tolerance
00:26:41
Speaker
They have two, we call it target and scrap. And target is the tolerance, excuse me, scrap would be what we would consider the talk, meaning if it doesn't meet that, it is thrown away. But we're not okay using all of that all the time, which is why it's a target. So like, if I walk it to a part and it's plus or minus
00:27:01
Speaker
plus 2,000 minus 0. If it's within that, there's no conversation to be had. I can't say, oh, man, I'd really rather it be better. Wonder what's going on. Nope, it's pretty good. But if it's the scrap might be plus 4 minus 0, and if it's 3,000, we should think about tool fixture pull up. Right. Yeah.
00:27:20
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah, I've found in our life and in yours now too, where you're literally inventing your own tolerances, and especially with the buck chuck, I'm sure the tolerance stack becomes a real thing. Sure does. We see it in the knives too. You might be designing a pivot or something and you're like, yeah, plus minus five tenths is fine, but then it stacks up to everything else in the knife.
00:27:42
Speaker
Using that full tolerance range is fine if the design criteria is thought out. All the tolerance stack up is properly planned. Be like, okay, if this is over three tenths and this is over three tenths and this is over three tenths, is it still going to work? We're learning that year over year that if something is over by a few tenths, it's really in the scrap range, then it should be kind of thing.
00:28:09
Speaker
Which segues to the second thing Tom said, which was Toyota got good, period, like everything they do because they learned how to build, I don't remember when we said complex assemblies from non-complex parts or precise assemblies from non-precise parts. And you could kind of pick that phrase apart, but that's that idea of understanding the end result. And it's a simple point, but I got to give Garrett credit on the
00:28:36
Speaker
mod vices instead of dimensioning both. Okay, so if I'm super candid, on a half inch part,
00:28:44
Speaker
When I'm measuring it, I like seeing 0.5 in the other. I'd rather see, this is totally rational. I'd rather see 0.5003 than 0.4998. So I'd rather see three tenths over than two tenths under. Now, I think part of that's because you see the number in the mic, but also I guess all else equal, I'd rather have more material than less. Neither of those things are true.
00:29:12
Speaker
are empirically good. That's our personality quirk. What we realized is on the stack, we should skew the tolerance range on the bottom part
00:29:23
Speaker
to be low. Meaning the scrap range should be negative four-tenths to positive one-tenth or something. The top part should be high. That way, the two together are more likely evened out instead of both of them being high. It's such an obviously, frankly, dumb obvious point yet. Oh my God, it's so simple like yes, of course.
00:29:45
Speaker
I like that. So for a lot of our lathe tolerances, say nominal is 1.870, and then we have plus 2 tenths, minus 2 tenths.
00:29:54
Speaker
I don't, I know some vendors, especially like Boston, they're like, you know, minus zero plus four tenths. And I haven't wrapped my head around liking the tolerance only in one direction. Yes, I kind of want my nominal, my goal to be dead center. And that's, that's my experiences is where I'm at. But like, you're starting to do minus zero plus four or whatever, for some tolerances.
00:30:19
Speaker
Well, yes. On that, it would be minus 0 plus 4 on the bottom half of the product. The top of the product would be the opposite range. But doesn't it feel weird to be like your nominal is in the middle of that? Understood. Yes. Yeah. But if it works, it works. Yeah. And like you said, some parts will have a positive range, and some parts will have a negative range so that they always fit together. And that's part of your tolerance stack. You're planning that in. I like that. Yeah.
00:30:49
Speaker
I like, I like. Yeah. Tom also sort of changing subject talk about, he had slowed down on making YouTube's videos and none of us, I don't want to hear, so I don't want to talk about like YouTube burnout or your changing algorithm, but like, yeah.
00:31:05
Speaker
I enjoyed being a consumer of YouTube and have transitioned to consuming more than I create. It was nice to hear somebody else say, yeah, the platform is different. It's not about the money, but the money you make on it is so little that it's just different. Yeah.
00:31:31
Speaker
I have been consuming quite a lot of YouTube lately too. I go through phases. Sometimes I don't touch it for months and then sometimes it's pretty much all I watch. Usually very specific stuff when I'm on a learning kick or something like that. I'll just dive deep down some rabbit holes. It's super fun.
00:31:48
Speaker
And I find myself watching these 30, 40, 50, 60 minute videos that are totally not exciting, they're not well done, but they're right up my alley. Yeah, that's great. Right? And I think about that in the context of me making videos.
00:32:05
Speaker
As you grow and mature as a company and as a person, you're like, I want to do better and YouTube videos as a whole are getting better. We've talked about this a lot. There's guys making absolute fire that's well edited and well lit and well filmed and all that stuff. My shop's loud and hard to yada yada.
00:32:25
Speaker
I'm trying to convince myself to stop caring and to just pick up the camera and film everything, which is where I need to go because perfection is not the goal of making the videos. Our products, that's the goal, but for the videos, it's just share the story, bring you along, say what's going on.
00:32:46
Speaker
everything else is what it is. Especially with making this new integral, I'm trying to rile myself up to bring back Knife Making Tuesdays as a video series. Because, geez, I'm making a new knife. This core video process from our beginning, from the inception of the company, is coming full circle. It's like if I don't make Knife Making Tuesday videos, I'm doing a complete disservice to all of our fans and customers.
00:33:12
Speaker
But off the record, everybody put your serios on mute right now. I wholeheartedly endorse that if it doesn't in any way, not even 1% impede the development and progress of the knife. But it does, yeah. I know. Sorry, John, you can't. I know.
00:33:33
Speaker
It's going to be a choice and it's going to be a balance. Um, I will make some videos, but I don't think I have the time or the brain space to really like document everything like I used to do, you know, just turn on the camera for every job that I do. Cause even the past few weeks I've been doing a lot of CAD work, a lot of CAM work.
00:33:52
Speaker
trying to make this handle. I haven't filmed any of it because it's so much easier just to work and not film. That's what Tom was saying. Lawrence, the birthday lab shuts down for a while over the holidays and he had a bunch of ideas for videos and then he was like,
00:34:07
Speaker
I just want to go, yes, he does this at his day job, but his hobby shop is his hobby shop. He's an awesome home shop. He has these Meatloaf Mondays. I thank him for the content he's put out over the years. Absolutely. He has a book called Metal Working Singer Swim, which is excellent. Tom will have forgotten more than I've ever learned. Awesome guy.
00:34:29
Speaker
It's like I give him all the credit in the world for being a little bit selfish. I just want to go make projects. I don't want to not do this project. I'm like, I don't feel like I'm in the mood to film or the batteries aren't here or the lighting's wrong. Just shut up and go do your project. That makes you smile. That's all that matters. It's great. It's like the world has become, if you didn't film it, it didn't happen kind of thing.
00:34:48
Speaker
No, no, that's not the case anymore. Sometimes I just want to make a stupid project and enjoy myself and stay late and make it perfect and add whatever features make me happy and not film it. OK, so then do push these things to the extremes to help understand them. One extreme would be that YouTube shuts down and ceases to exist. Sucks, but like, OK, great. Take that anymore and move on. Or the other extreme would be, OK, I'm going to budget.
00:35:17
Speaker
$30,000 a month to have two or three camera guys and a full-time editor following me around such that everything is filmed and everything is edited and it doesn't in any way affect me. Well, that didn't happen either. Yeah, exactly. Okay. That's what it would take to make things work, but your focus should be the integral. Yeah.
00:35:44
Speaker
I'm going to make some videos, but they can't impede. So I'm just going to pick up the camera and update and be like, this is where I'm at right now. Here's a bunch of 3D printed parts. Here's the plan. Here's the thing. Show me the whiteboard process plan and be like, OK. And then I'll touch base when I've made something. But as far as filming the machines and putting the camera in there and waterproof cases and trying to get all fancy, fancy, I'd love to. I'd love to. But that's not my job. Yeah. Yeah, I hear you.
00:36:14
Speaker
It's fun. We have a new first in our machine shop wall of fame. Okay. We have a part that's going to be burning up in the Earth's atmosphere.
00:36:33
Speaker
Very sadly, did I talk about this last week? No. Sadly, the ULA United Launch Alliance rocket that launched 10 days ago or something, the rocket launch went great. It was delayed forever, multiple times across multiple years.
00:36:53
Speaker
The ULA is a joint venture between Boeing and Northrop Grumman, its competitor to some of the other for-profit space companies, blah, blah, blah. This rocket finally went up, launch went great. Unfortunately, the Peregrine, whatever the lunar lander assembly was in it, which had 24 payloads, of which one of the payloads was the Carnegie Mellon Iris lunar rover.
00:37:17
Speaker
Okay. The peregrine lander screwed up, and it leaked all of its propellant, which it was going to use to orient itself and solar arrays. You have to do transliter injections. You have to go around the earth to slingshot yourself to the moon. That's the way they did it back in Apollo. Basically,
00:37:37
Speaker
They quickly realized no propellant left. There's no backup. There's no option. Can't land on the moon. Really sad. Think about it. So we made the camera mount for this lunar rover, which was going to be landed on the moon. It would be on the moon forever. Lunar was only going to last for a couple of days with its batteries.
00:37:54
Speaker
you know, I, my heart goes out to all of the engineers, scientists and students that had far more invested in the creation of this project and then the outcomes of the studies on the loon because that's, uh, it's really sad. Hmm. But that's how it goes sometimes. Yeah. Right. Nobody was hurt. Yeah. Bummer. Bummer. Move on. Yeah.
00:38:24
Speaker
Um, so I've been, we had, we had our year end financial meeting the other day and it, our, our accountant Spencer got us to look through kind of every, um, every cost thing, like category where there's material and mills, metal, whatever. Um, and he got me to think about it and he's like, is there a way to save money on these things? Choose a different supplier. And it was really good to look at most of them and be like, no, we've actually, we've, we've shopped around.
00:38:50
Speaker
We've gotten different quotes. Someone might be cheaper, but is worse because of these reasons. And I'm actually really, really happy with almost the entirety of our cost list. And it's like, maybe there's a couple things. Yeah, I could probably squeeze that. Probably choose a different vendor for that. So maybe we'll look around. But it was nice to be able to like, it's good to review and realize that, oh, there could be money to be saved. Tony Robbins calls it being a treasure hunter in your business. Because absolutely, whether it's lean or saving time and money,
00:39:21
Speaker
Those are two resources that we want to maximize in a business, absolutely. So that was pretty good. It was good to see that. And I did find a couple things that I'm going to dig into and see if there's a couple bucks to be saved there. But it's effort versus reward, too. Is it worth spending a lot of time and changing vendors and doing all this stuff if you're only going to save a dollar per part or whatever? Not always. Yeah, totally. But it was a great conversation to have, which was awesome.
00:39:47
Speaker
And I've also been working on saving time and looking at the, we make a lot of rasks and we make them all on the current and they take a long time to make, just period.
Enhancing Production Efficiency
00:39:57
Speaker
There's a lot of surfacing, a lot of 3D toolpaths that come off beautiful. And I've been looking at those toolpaths and some of them, especially the surfacing toolpaths, I can switch from a four flute end mill to an eight flute end mill, which I had an eight flute quarter inch end mill, which I had Zadaro custom make for me.
00:40:16
Speaker
And I'm using it a little bit, but I was like, why don't I just use it for everything? Use it for all the roughing, use it for all the finishing, use multiple versions of it in the machine instead of only for finishing because roughing with a four flute. Why don't I just rough with an eight flute, a dedicated eight flute. And I can save like so much time, even just on those tool paths. And it's super cool. So I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but I was looking at the tool paths last night and I'm like, dude, what?
00:40:45
Speaker
Like I have this picture in my head. I was like, I want to write down the cycle time before and I want to write that cycle time after and I want to explain it to the team and I'll be like, I saved, you know, three hours a day or whatever. And I do want to do that. But at the end of the day, look, I want to have proof of that it worked, but at the end of the day, I just want to save time and make more parts.
00:41:06
Speaker
So, I'm right at that balance right now of doing that. But I think in the next few days, I'll just pull the trigger on that, take the time, be a surgeon, do these right, add another tool, an eight-fluid roughing end mill, and just go nuts, and then monitor tool life over time.
00:41:23
Speaker
I think it's awesome. So you can double, is it as simple as same RPM or same surface footage, but you're going to be able to double your feed rate? Yep. And the current can make it, the current probably can move that fast. It can. And now on especially pretty surfaces, if you surface too fast and you're going over a hole or a bump or around a corner or something, like it doesn't look as perfect as going slow. So there's a balance there. So especially on a handle, say surfacing the outside of a handle, when I'm going over the pivot hole,
00:41:53
Speaker
It's only a small hole. The head has not been machined yet. So that when the tool bumps over that hole, I still have more material to remove. That's cool. Which that works great because otherwise you literally see an artifact of vibration or whatever when it's bumping over the hole and coming back into place. And that works great. So just machine the head after. Done. Easy peasy.
00:42:13
Speaker
Yeah. I like that. Or you could avoid the hole and have it lead out and then lead back in after the hole, but that takes time, dumb. So I'll either put patches in fusion over the hole, like a loft patch or whatever.
00:42:28
Speaker
Or I'll just de-feature the model. I'll make another model with no holes, and then I'll just use that surface. And making the integral knife has refreshed my memory of all this stuff because I'm doing it all again from scratch with all my knowledge. And now I'm back applying it to the rask and be like, dude, I could save so much time on this. That's awesome. And then even thinking a lot more about surface footage
00:42:53
Speaker
Because the listed surface foot, like titanium, you want to cut at 150 surface feet. I do a lot of titanium cutting at 400 surface feet.
00:43:02
Speaker
And it works great even for roughing and the end mills last for a thousand minutes and I'm like really cheap. Yeah. Wow. Like for surfacing the rask we're removing a rough mill scale kind of titanium. It's not bad but at 400 surface foot roughing and then I'm also finishing taking off a few thou also at 400 surface feet and I'm like scratching my head going
00:43:23
Speaker
Can I try 600 surface feet? Can I try 800? I don't know. Why not? What's going to happen? So I'm asking the tooling vendors. I'm trying to learn, right? Yeah. Because that's free time if you can really get away with it. I would argue that's not free time. You will. I've never heard somebody say that you won't have some trade-off of tooling. Sure. But tools are cheap. $20, $40 an end mill versus time on the current, hours a day? I'll make that trade-off all day, right?
00:43:54
Speaker
Yeah, I guess so. 1,000, yes. I mean, month on the math right now, for sure. You can get 500 minutes instead of 1,000. I would see for us in 4140, which is what we mostly run, the trade-off becomes busted up parts, broken tools in the middle of cycles. And that's not acceptable. Yeah, hassle and time of changing the tools. 100%. Yeah. We're not up against a
00:44:16
Speaker
capacity limit, the horizontal still has free time. Sure. And I'm just trying to maximize so that we can put more. I mean, to make more on the current will involve making more fixtures. Like if I just save cycle time, the machine's going to sit for a little bit because there isn't necessarily more loaded, ready to run. That's easy to fix. Make more fixtures and just schedule more work. And with the integral coming on, I want to make a lot of them because demand is going to be
00:44:43
Speaker
Ridiculous. Yeah. I don't want to make one a day. That's not going to work. It's not going to fly, right? So I'm trying to find time so that I can maximize with that. And yeah, talking to the tooling manufacturers and they're like, yeah, I mean, you'll start wearing out the end mill prematurely and then maybe leaving a worse surface finish if you go too fast. But for light finishing cuts, you can go a lot faster than the recommended for a surface sheet.
00:45:10
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Oh, surface. Okay. So it was safer for Chippler per tooth chip. Thinning is real. And some people. And your feed feed forward lines are real. Like feeding it anything over one thou per tooth on a finishing pass looks worse in my eyes. Got it. For our finished surfaces anyway. But you know, if you can go 600 surface feet instead of 400 surface feet, that's adding
00:45:35
Speaker
feed rate as well. Another 50% of feed rate. And it might cut your tool life in half, but I'm willing to make that trade off in some ways. And there's going to be a literal surface finish line in the sand where my finishing guys are like, duh, that looks worse. Stop doing that.
00:45:53
Speaker
Right. But until I find that limit, I'm going to play. It's a tolerance. It's like I'm going to use all the crappy, crappy surface finish I can. Exactly. Yeah. Because basically my whole life on the current for four years now has been low and slow. Just I want to make beautiful parts. I want to make tight tolerance. And now I'm like, well, let's let's turn up the dial a little bit and see what we can get away with because it's free money to do that. And because I'm so slow and slow, like the Rask takes forever.
00:46:23
Speaker
And if you start to look at what you would bill the Kern as a job shop machine, I'd bill hundreds of dollars an hour for work that goes on this machine. The Rask doesn't belong on that machine in that case. That's a big deal. It's a big deal. That's where I'm going with this. But if I start to save time and optimize and change things around, then now I have the time and experience to do that. And it's going to pay off huge, huge. So exactly.
00:46:53
Speaker
But that ties into a packaging problem we had yesterday, which is the same sort of overall business thesis. It's like, don't worry about what it costs or how much time it takes. We haven't had this in so long. We had a large router fixture plate damaged in transit.
00:47:12
Speaker
And router plates often go parcel, not freight, which is parcel gets more damage more often. And we've gotten much better at the boxes and all that. But nevertheless, this one is a little bit larger. And it was kind of like, okay, this was probably this was predictable, if I'm being honest. And so it's like, now we need to do is stop living in denial. And we're need to go manually spend more time and more money packaging each one of these correctly and well, because
00:47:39
Speaker
it shouldn't be damaged in transit full start. Yes, the carriers are going to be hard on it. That's not something that I can control and complain about. We know that it's going to happen, so stop victimizing yourself over it. What we're doing is we have different things. We can do corner protectors, extra cardboard. That takes time and money, but that's fine for now because it solves the problem and then we'll improve
00:48:04
Speaker
how we do it. Better box is a new box. Exactly. It's same thing. Okay, like make the product great. And now you need to correct things. Yep. Yep. Cool. I like it. I like it too. What are you up to today?
00:48:22
Speaker
I am running the horizontal, which is great. Getting some metric my advice is off. Q seeing some things running and set up a new tool. It's awesome. I love it. That feels good. And then same old that you nice nice. Yeah, I'm Angelo said I've got some time in about an hour on the current to make this integral handle. Oh, I've been I've been spending a lot of time on the toolpaths. It's actually quite a lot of
00:48:50
Speaker
I'm high-feed milling the slot down the middle, and then I'm surfacing the inside walls of this very skinny slot quite deep, which Cam says it's going to be great. Yeah. Send it. Yeah, exactly. But I do have some experience doing this. And I'm like, no, honestly, I think that's going to work extremely well. And it's a full five-axis part, so there's a lot of positional, like flip over, do this, flip over, do that. And then I'll tab it off from the back
00:49:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's really coming together and I'm 96% done with all the cam. Just a couple of things I'll fine tune once it's machined, you know, like, like whole fit and things like that. Um,
00:49:34
Speaker
I have this custom-made Harvey key seat cutter that is very specific dimensions that I had to have them custom-made because it doesn't exist. They were cheap. They were about $270 each to have this made, but I got three of them. That will do this feature on the knife that I've been wanting to do for years and years and it's going to be sick.
00:49:56
Speaker
That's a great stopping point to pick up next week with a obvious but valuable hack I learned on tabs in Fusion with trim tool pass. I need that now, not next week. The next week. You got to wait for it. Sounds good. I'll see you. All right, man. Have a good day. Bye. Bye.