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#271 - Grimsmo's Willemin Runs! Saunders To Judge Project MFG!
180 Plays3 years ago
TOPICS:
- Grimsmo finally have their Willemin machine fully functional and ready for parts.
- CAM Programming tips and tricks.
- Material shortages and price hikes.
- Preparing for a slowdown.
- Grimsmo has swiss coolant pump issues.
- Making tombstones for horizontal machines.
- Saunders will be judging on Project MFG in Kansas next week!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 271. My name is John Grimsmo. My name is John Saunders. And I'm thrown off because we're actually filming in the afternoon and I said morning and it feels weird.
00:00:12
Speaker
Super weird. Yeah, super weird. Anyway. Weird is not the W word. There needs to be color in your mouth right now.
First Impressions of the Willemin 408 MT
00:00:20
Speaker
So this is the podcast where we talk about the Willimon, the Willimon 408 MT. I just completed my first part. I parted it off and I like it fell out and it's in my hand and it's like a thing.
00:00:34
Speaker
It's amazing, John. It's so cool. The machine functions. Everything functions. I still have to do a bit of calibration, but everything works. That was a story, not a post on Insta? Yeah, I think so. OK, I was going to say, make it a post so people can revisit it. For sure. For some reason, massively incorrectly assumed that because it's an 18-year-old machine that it was going to somehow be less sexy, less fast, less awesome, and holy cow.
00:01:04
Speaker
Hard to subscribe. Yeah, I'm curious if CJ's new Willemin, like a couple years old, is much faster than this one. I don't know what the rapids are. It's blindingly fast that this one is. Right. And it moves so dynamically and the built-in codes are not like up over why it's like zoom all in one three axis motion. Yeah. And like with a turn and everything. And it's kind of scary.
00:01:32
Speaker
It was I remember watching it and right as I thought holy, you know what you said. Well, that was scary. Yeah.
00:01:40
Speaker
Especially filming, you're only half paying attention, unfortunately. This is the nature of watching and filming and trying to do two things at once. Yeah, it jumped at me when everything moved.
Technical Achievements and Ethernet Setup
00:01:52
Speaker
But yeah, so I'm able to post a program from Fusion. I got to do a couple hand edits still because the post is not perfectly suited for my older machine.
00:02:01
Speaker
Yeah
00:02:03
Speaker
just bracket out a couple little lines of code until I fix the post. And then I got the Ethernet properly configured to the machine, got the data server in the back of the machine installed properly. And I was on the phone again with Wilhelmin for like four hours yesterday, just fine tuning, getting everything dialed. Can you like layman's explain, you know, is data server like your own Raspberry Pi or is it from them? And when you said,
00:02:30
Speaker
I'm surprised it has Ethernet. What post issues are you having? Up until yesterday, I never fully understand what a FANUC data server was. I've heard about it for years. You can buy a machine with a data server without whatever. I never got it until I turned out one of my machines has it and I got it working.
00:02:51
Speaker
It's essentially an Ethernet board that plugs into the back of the control panel, like where your screen and buttons are, that gives you an Ethernet jack and also a slot for a card, a PCMIA card.
00:03:08
Speaker
which has however much storage that card happens to have your card. I happen to have a four gig CF card into a PCM whatever adapter. PCMCIA, contact flash. Yeah, that's the way. Oh man. And then the guys like, I don't know if the four gigs going to take it on this older machine and he was shocked that it would. So now my machine has four gigs of storage.
00:03:30
Speaker
as opposed to FANUC is classically known for having like kilobytes of memory storage. Yeah, here's 256K and you will like it. Not even. Really? Yeah, it's ridiculous. I created a test program where imagine tilting the head 45 degrees and facing...
00:03:48
Speaker
making a pyramid, but like 10 times, like 10 facets around the outside of a bar, and then engraving my logo 10 times around there. That program was too big to fit on the machine. Oh, but engraving, I feel like your engraving may have like a bajillion points. It probably does, but still, like not acceptable. But with the data server, I now have four gigs, which is infinite amount of space for a text file. Do you have to sneaker net a CF card between your computer though and the PCMCIA slot?
00:04:22
Speaker
What? Oh, sneaker net means you have to walk it over. Oh, um, no, the CF card is now permanently mounted in the back of the machine. Um, I don't touch it anymore. Okay. So you, and you said, Ethan, so you can literally, as an IP, you can post to that card and drop either with filezilla or with FANUC transfer tool to drag and drop files, both to the main memory and to the data server memory.
Tool Calibration and 3D Printing Innovations
00:04:44
Speaker
Um, I still got to test if I can run a program directly from the data server, or if I have to, um, call it as a subroutine.
00:04:52
Speaker
Which either way is no big deal. Lawrence, I think it was him, seemed to imply you could. Yeah, he seemed to imply I was wrong, but he likes to imply that people are wrong. But I don't know. I need to test if it works. Either way, it doesn't matter, because my main program is literally one line of code that says, M198 P 001. Call this program, that's it.
00:05:18
Speaker
Yeah, but it's super cool. So I know how to install tools. I know how to touch off tools on the bloom laser. Um, I still have to calibrate the probe a little bit. There's a weird way that Wilhelmin wants to do it. I'm actually 3d printing a, um, uh, tooling ball holder that holds it up at a weird 45 degrees from the spindle. It's all picture on Instagram. Okay. Um, so that should be done 3d printing any minute now. And then after that, like,
00:05:44
Speaker
I still got to add more cooling fluid to the chiller and spindle chiller because I think it's alarming out. But like little stuff like baby stuff, the machine functions, everything works. You've seen that part get cut was just on so cool, John. Yeah, so now I'm kind of like, holy cow, what's like now what? Like all the struggle and all the headache of like getting this thing running is now functioning. Okay, now I guess I program like a real part and the soft jaws and figure out how that all works and
00:06:13
Speaker
Oh, did you tip up? Is it the, not to be the you. The, the vice, I think they call it. The U is when the vice moves side to side. Okay. That's your U axis, but the tilt is just the vice up vice down, I think. Got it. Okay. Oh, so that's pretty simple. I know the M codes to do that. Tilt the vice up, tilt it down, open the jaws, close the jaws. Those are simple M codes. And then G54 is the main spindle. G55 is the vice tilted down. Mm-hmm.
00:06:42
Speaker
And that's it. I wonder who back in like, whatever, 1972 was brainstorming in a room with a dot matrix printer in the background. It was like, okay, we got to name these offsets. Someone throw something out and they're like, let's just start with G54.
00:06:57
Speaker
G53 technically. You've changed my life. Nobody uses 53, John. It's the machine coordinates. Go home. Go home. You're drunk. Yeah, exactly. That's awesome. It's cool. How many tools will hold? Like 48. Okay, so that's pretty solid.
00:07:14
Speaker
It's ridiculous. Most milling machines don't have 48. It's like, I'm never going to fill it up. I say that. It doesn't look big when you show the photo of the tool matrix. Yeah. It's like the size of a pizza, two racks, the size of pizza, like medium sized pizzas, right? Yeah. It's compact. It's beautiful. Something we just did on our horizontal, which fun fact, I love, but still, it's no Willyman.
00:07:41
Speaker
Uh, somebody had great advice of mounting a mirror right above, but in line with the, well, not can't be in line with the spindle, but right like in line with the spindle in actually just one inch above it and why. Um, and so I just bought these little one inch mirrors on Amazon for like seven bucks printed 3d printed a.
00:08:00
Speaker
45 degree bracket with a bunch of like fail points, weak points, stress risers intentionally in it, just cause I'm like, I don't really know what I'm doing here. If it like something crunches it, I want it to fail immediately and happily. Um, and sure enough, the tool change is close, but it does clear it. Um, so I don't know if this would be useful, relevant or even possible on the Willyman, but when you're trying to look at like what the spindle sees, if it's occluded or tilted a weird way, it is pretty handy to have that mirror there. Now for the, in our case, we were probing.
00:08:30
Speaker
hidden parts on the dark side of the moon and I just climbed into the machine. I didn't do that actually, never mind. But you know what I mean? The mirror helps. So are you holding the mirror? Sorry, no.
00:08:47
Speaker
I super glued the mirror to the 45 degree mount, and then the 45 degree mount, I used 3M UHB tape. That's the thin, coolant proof, really high bond stuff. And it's been on for a couple of days now. And that machine, I mean, I'm not counting hours like you, but John, that machine has been running from 8am till 11pm a lot of days. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. And unless we don't get it reloaded, it takes probably 15 minutes for our
00:09:16
Speaker
top jaw tombstone, the reversibles is much quicker, but it takes real time. I mean, 15 minutes of loading parts is a lot. We're not under pressure, but boy, it's been incredible. It just runs. Yeah.
00:09:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's almost like hidden productivity because you're getting used to it now. You're like, yeah, it always runs. But like three months ago, you didn't have that. You were like hustling on three axis machines to like load fixtures often, right? And now you've got an automated machine that just kind of keeps going.
00:09:51
Speaker
We kind of couldn't get ahead for all those typical excuses you have as a small business owner. We'd have good orders or we'd have really strong orders which would eat up our inventory or we'd be doing maintenance or we'd have something down or we'd be switching over fixtures between two different product lines so you wouldn't be running one. Now, I literally had to stop.
00:10:13
Speaker
the other day because we are at risk of overproducing on
Inventory Management Strategies
00:10:18
Speaker
the top jaws. Now, we actually got a huge order in that's not due for a while, so we actually need to do something we haven't had to handle in the past, which is start producing that order and setting it aside over time. Normally, we basically make for just-in-time Saunders sales, if you will.
00:10:38
Speaker
Is that huge order a one-time thing or is it an ongoing kind of distributor? We don't do a ton of, but this is a good one. So cool. We can't be done talking about the Wilhelmin. What else?
Challenges with the Post-Processor
00:10:54
Speaker
What else? What's wrong with the post?
00:10:56
Speaker
It's CJ's post for his new Willyman that's the one he uses and he made a couple tweaks that he knew of. He's got the 31i FANUC. I have a 16i which is much older. Little things like he's using weird functionalities that my machine does not have. So when my machine gets that line of code, it goes huh and it just stops. So I have to bracket those out, little things.
00:11:20
Speaker
But when you're developing a post, same thing on my Nakamura, same thing on my Tornos, you just try and fail. Get to that line in the code, be like, oh, what's a G279? I don't know, I'm making it up. And like, oh, the machine doesn't know. Okay, I don't need that. Trial and error. If it's just calling stuff out, VS code will make that cake. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Dude. That was cool.
00:11:49
Speaker
Yeah, so now I'm going to machines, design some soft jaws for the little clampy vice, machine them in the current most likely. I want to come up with kind of a workflow where I can maybe dovetail a bunch of jaw material. I might not even have to in the one vice.
00:12:04
Speaker
But like imagine if I dove till the one side and I had 20 in stock and then I could quickly throw them in a fifth axis vise and then machine a Willeman soft jaw, like all standard material, all standard size and just post and go kind of thing whenever I need soft jaws. Yeah.
00:12:23
Speaker
Think about, could you 3D print them, especially if it's more just supporting? Yeah, you probably could. It's a good idea. I don't know how much clamping pressure they have. When the vise closes, it's a hydraulic vise. Probably not an insane amount, but would it crush a 3D print? But it won't close on itself. It'll close to a certain point, right? I don't know. It'll close until they touch.
00:12:50
Speaker
That's interesting. Yeah, that may be no good. I was just thinking like for the pen clip, if that's one of the products, you don't need that much to hold onto it. Like when you're using the vices more of a tail stocky thing. Yeah, it depends. I might actually rough out, like if you look at the pen clip, rough out the top, actually finish the top and the side radiuses. Then I flip it over and I hold it in the vise from that bottom section and then I can
00:13:19
Speaker
fully machined the, what you call the inside of the clip, all the material that has to be removed while gripped on the bottom with the vise and like everything, you know, a little bit of work happens in the first stop just bar and then everything else happens while clamped in the vise.
00:13:35
Speaker
but it would still be connected to the ground bar. To the bar. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. So it's almost like in the upper position and then roughing, milling, finishing, whatever. And then it cuts off and then it tilts down. And then it does either one of the sides of the clip that I haven't done yet. It does it
00:13:55
Speaker
Would it be able to... Oh, is the inside of the... I wouldn't know. I lost mine. The inside of a saga pen clip threaded? No. Okay. So you don't have to cut ID threads. But you totally could thread mill it. Oh, that's you. You could thread the writer, of course.
00:14:09
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm trying to think of which end mills I want in the machine. Probably A thread mill would be good to have for various reasons, like A chamfer tool, you know, high feed end mill, beater, roughing tool, finish tool, engraving tool. I'm kind of making the mental list in my head and I'm starting to add, I've got three tools in there now.
00:14:28
Speaker
And yeah, keep plugging along. When we were having more active conversations with Wilhelmin about those used machines, which I think are still real. It's just they haven't gotten them refurbed. I spent legit time and looking at the products we'd run on them. And I created my tool list. These are all
00:14:48
Speaker
either products we make are new versions of the same sort of thing. So I know how to make them in tooling wise. And all the stuff I could combine with got to like 18 tools. Yeah, because that quarter inch and three inch end mills can be used to do five axis chamfering. They can use actually they can use really they can bore things open they can like it's just it was incredible. It's ridiculous.
00:15:10
Speaker
Yeah. So I'm curious how full I'll have it within a year of the 48 capacity. It's nuts. And then turning tools too, obviously. So I'm ordering a few tool holders, a turning tool and a parting tool from Willeman. Yeah, those should be in a bit. And did you move the current yet?
00:15:33
Speaker
No, but my dollies came in and I'll be moving in the next few weeks. Cool. Yeah. You nervous? Not really. We haven't used dolly jacks or machinist jacks. What are they called? Dollies. Machines, dollies. No. Skates. Machine moving skates. I haven't used them before, but I get it. It's not that hard. Yeah. Do you have a toe jack to like lift up the... Yeah. Yeah. Sweet. Bought one of those too. Do you remember what the current ways?
00:16:01
Speaker
I think like 8,000 pounds. It's not crazy. We're moving at literally five feet sideways. On smooth epoxy floors. Yeah, exactly. No problem. We have to move our BF2 next door soon-ish for the resumption of training classes, which is going to be awesome. We're having a concrete bridge. I call it a bridge. It's just this area that connects the two building lots together because right now we
00:16:29
Speaker
there's a little bit of gravel. If anyone's tried to traverse gravel with a forklift, they quickly know that that results usually in a phone call to whatever version of AAA you have access to that helps you evolve getting that forklift unstuck. The VF2s are like 6,000 pounds. I think our forklifts can do it with
00:16:47
Speaker
You should be fine anyway. Okay. Interesting. That's not going to be as easy as pushing along a smooth floor. Yeah, exactly.
Investment in a New Brother Speedio Machine
00:16:54
Speaker
And then put my down payment on the speedio yesterday. That is officially happening. Awesome. Four to six weeks away, including the mods they need to do for the auto door on the side and any little tweaks they have to put on it. What model did you get? I got the medium sized one, the S500.
00:17:14
Speaker
I thought it was five, seven, and 1,000. Three, five, seven, and 1,000 is four. Okay. Got it. It's like six. I think it's 20-inch travel, 20-inch in X, 16-inch in Y.
00:17:33
Speaker
And you're going to put a compatible three-axis base or four-axis? Yeah, an Aroa three-axis chalk vise. Yeah, right. It's kind of like what Dennis has, totally different scale, but he has that methods vertical that has the Aroa base that is robotically fed and connected to the Grove 550 cell. For very similar reasons. He can rough out on a cheap vertical and then move it over to the five-axis to do the work that has to be precision or five-axis or whatever.
00:18:04
Speaker
Cool, so that's that's just that's happened.
Machine Control Preferences
00:18:08
Speaker
Yep, absolutely.
00:18:11
Speaker
We talk more about that each day here about, boy, we'd love to end up with a Will and then, honestly, we're looking at more higher production. I'm addicted to this horizontal, so it's kind of like, man, I get it. But we were thinking about Brothers because of the RX650, the twin palette thing. I'm like, do we want to bring on that control? I feel like at some point I'll have a high nine because I've never met anybody who's like, yeah, high nine's okay. Yeah.
00:18:36
Speaker
Yeah. If I could, everything would be hide nine, but, um, fanics, fanics. Okay. But like even the brother, if it was an option to get high, you would. I don't know. I've never used a brother control. What people have told me, they're like, okay, you know, everything about Fannock, they stripped all the dumb away from it and they made it fine. Yeah. Yeah.
00:18:57
Speaker
It's been weird getting used to the Akuma for sure. No, I wouldn't say any issues, but having different offsets, like it's H15 is your default. Oh, H15 is offset call. I'm blanking here. It's been a long day. Yeah. I've been in the car this morning driving to an anodizer.
00:19:16
Speaker
What was I going to say about that? Oh, here's where I'm like, I love this. Like I love CAM programming. I just, I know I said that before. It's been so fun. So when the way we make parts on the horizontal, like our top shots, we have four dual station mod vices that hold in total eight individual pieces of material.
00:19:38
Speaker
And this is on one face of the tombstone. Only one of them is programmed and it's patterned eight times in the WCS pattern setup. So it's up to me to tell the machine where all eight locations of that are, except
00:19:54
Speaker
We actually split it out into probably 10 different setups because what we'll do is we'll We'll do an initial Edge prep like around the part and then and that's patterned eight times, but then I'll come in with a face mill on a single offset It's that way I can go across it in a full swipe that makes sense I don't want to have the face mill Cease eight different pieces of material with linking moves in and out like I just wanted to go across and move across all of them So I end up
00:20:24
Speaker
with a really funky CAM list of operations, but it's actually no big deal because NC programs remembers everything. So you're alternating between using effectively eight offsets and the next time it may be one and then you're back to eight, eight for a couple. But where I'm realizing that I've now got another problem is I think we're gonna mirror that setup on the other side of the tombstone. And I don't think I can do that.
00:20:51
Speaker
any more without ... I mean, I could do it in Fusion by just copying the whole thing, but then if I want to change this piece and piece, it's a classic. I've got to go back and change it into places annoyance. That make sense? Yeah, I think so. I've had to do some of that like patterns upon patterns upon a mirrored event.
00:21:13
Speaker
Like sometimes I'll want to post just the one side so I have to kind of strip the patterning and the mirroring down to only let me do side three because I have some rework to do on side three or something. It gets annoying but like on my tombstones on the current they're four sided like when I make Norseman handles.
00:21:34
Speaker
So there's a pair of handles on each of the four sides. And I've come to the conclusion that I want to post side one as its own program. Got it. Finish side one, side two as its own pro. Even though there's probably like 30 tools to do each one, and it's more efficient to do them all at once. For that program, I decided it's best to just like finish side one, go to that side two, finish side two, finish side three, like start and finish. Yeah.
00:22:02
Speaker
We're doing the same thing. I'm not saving as many tool changes as I can and I'm not even consolidating them across setups because I don't, like right now, especially I don't care. The machine, I just don't care and the complication factor goes way up, but man.
00:22:21
Speaker
I also don't want to just stay complacent because the epoxy showed up about an hour ago, material shows up tomorrow for those tombstones. I got half 13 hex heads that I'm going to use as anchors on the backside of the aluminum to anchor it into the concrete.
00:22:37
Speaker
What else? PVC is in. I got a concrete form for the center core, so we're ready to go. Nice. That's some gravel and some play sand. I cannot wait. I'm so excited to make these tombstones. You're supposed to make some pictures of it. Yeah, for sure. Because it means I won't have to machine cast iron in the machine. All this work to avoid cast iron. Worth it. It's funny. Aluminum prices
00:23:01
Speaker
have shot up so much that it's kind of ruining the whole, you're saving a ton of money, but ballpark epoxy was 250 bucks, sand is free, gravel is cheap, and at least this quantity of gravel. But then the aluminum for the four plates of the four sides alone was like 900 bucks. It probably would have been half of that a while back, which means
00:23:24
Speaker
Again, assuming I'm not full of it on the rigidity and structure, which I don't think I am, you're building a custom size, pretty large tombstone for a 400 millimeter machine for a thousand bucks or less. Yeah. Are you using mic six plate or just extruded aluminum?
00:23:46
Speaker
7075 plate, which is what we already buy a lot of for all of our fixture products. Okay, they're all 7075? Nice. No, we do some 6061s for the hobby machines as well, but the majority of what we make and sell is 7075. I've never actually machined 7075, like made anything from it. I mean, it's no big deal, but I know back in the day, I used to do a lot more aluminum parts and 7075 was always like, oh yeah, it's like 30% better in every way.
00:24:15
Speaker
Yeah, we don't. It's not like it's hard to machine. Everyone's a hero in aluminum. Speaking of which, I broke my first tool on the Willyman. Oh my God, that didn't take long. In brass? No. Yeah.
00:24:31
Speaker
So the spindle chiller is not fully hooked up, so I max the machine to 5,000 RPM just so it doesn't heat up. It's got a 30,000 RPM spindle. So I changed my toolpaths, tiny little tools down to 5,000 RPM, but I still fed them stupid fast. Oh, oops. And so it's like 4,000 per tooth or something like that. Yeah. So yeah, a one 30 second ball. I was trying to peck drill a hole.
00:24:53
Speaker
at 5,000 RPM and it just broke. I was like, aw. How did you know it broke? It did three holes and then it didn't do the fourth or the fifth or the sixth. Yeah, so I had to basically part off that slug of material because there's a little piece of carbide in there. Yeah.
00:25:13
Speaker
Vince is running some parts right now for some custom side work on a plate job and it involves some 47,000 diameter holes and it's in a semi hardened material that may or may not be stainless.
00:25:30
Speaker
It's funny because he's got his process dialed in, his tools dialed in, like good to go. And then we bought five drills and he's almost finished with the job. And I'm like, how many drills you broke? He's like, man, buy five drills. You never break any. Yeah, exactly. It's a secret. Does it work for taps too? If you're not in Squamish, I think it should be good.
00:25:52
Speaker
The other thing we got, this is like, it couldn't be more boring, but I love this stuff is we got a bin drain for setting our Gaylord boxes on top of that we put our chips in because they, our chips are wet and we try to drain them in having double layered bins, which does help, but inevitably they're still wet, which means they leak. And I don't want them leaking on the floor. So we got these, it's like a 10 inch,
00:26:19
Speaker
tall plastic platform tub that the pallet or galer box sits on and then it just drains into that and itself has a drain. It came yesterday. Is that on the ground then? Yeah, it's pallet and fork with compatible itself. When that drains, can you get a bucket underneath or is it at floor level?
00:26:38
Speaker
That's a great question. I looked at it, but didn't like process that. I think it's at ground level, in which case you could just lift the whole thing up in the forklifts and drain it. I think we're out to drain it like twice a year or something. Yeah. But I saw them the first time in area 419 and Uline sells them, but they were like COVID out of stock. And so I just emailed our Uline rep and I'm like, any chance you can hook us up? They're like, oh yeah. They're like, we'll sell you one.
00:27:05
Speaker
I think it's a thing where it's like they don't want anybody to buy them or buy them to try to flip them, but I was pleasantly surprised that they were like, oh yeah, we have some available. Yeah, I've seen them for hazardous waste. Like you buy an IBC tote and you can put the spill tray under it. It's like bright yellow. I think it's the same thing. Same thing, yeah. I think so. Nice.
00:27:32
Speaker
Have you seen any material issues, availability of price or anything?
00:27:38
Speaker
A while ago, like a year ago, the price of our steel went up significantly, but it's fine. Titanium, I don't think has changed or been a problem. I emailed our titanium supplier a couple months ago when things were starting to look kind of weird in the world. He's like, I understand. I'm getting a lot of emails. At the moment, we're fine. Nothing to worry about. We have a lot of inventory. That's good. I haven't checked in a little bit.
00:28:08
Speaker
Yeah. Nothing, well...
00:28:13
Speaker
I've heard firsthand, I heard that one of our suppliers is not taking new customers. That's not a rumor. That's true, because I heard it from our rep. I've heard rumors, which is just that total rumor slash fear-mongering of this idea that they could be rationing aluminum at some point. And I have very much firsthand seen massive, massive price increases. Yeah. See where it goes.
00:28:41
Speaker
On that note, I always try to remind myself, this may sound a bit strange, but I do what I do, especially on YouTube, because I like it not necessarily because it's what's going to get the most views or whatnot. I've had this topic I wanted to talk about. It's been on my desk for probably a year, which was preparing for a slowdown. You've mentioned it a bunch.
00:29:05
Speaker
Yeah, okay. So I recorded it and it actually came out two days ago from the date of this airing.
Preparing for Economic Slowdowns
00:29:11
Speaker
And it actually is great because I think with the Fed just raised interest rates 50 basis points and everybody knows about this talk of like, wait, is this too good to be true with all the things going on with the tech?
00:29:24
Speaker
bubble or lack thereof or whatever. But then also, the bubbles and recessions and the circumstances around it are never exact replicas of past bubbles and so forth. And now it's like, wait a minute here, what we didn't expect, which is repeated stress on the supply chain and now inflation and strong demand that's pushing power through these price increases, but maybe not forever. And I just saw now the article at the time saying about, hey, hiring is cooling off.
00:29:55
Speaker
I don't have a crystal ball and in the video, I don't very much don't claim to have one except it's completely naive to think that in your and my working careers, we're not going to go through some version of a correction. I just shared, hey, this is what I think about and honestly, what I try not to worry about. I try to think about it a couple times a year and there's some general things I keep
00:30:17
Speaker
on my weekly radar, but also you can't live and feel like you got a music song, you got to dance. But I do think it's unfortunate because I think it's healthier to have small forest fires every few months than it is to say we're not allowing any fires and then 10 years later, the whole state burns down. Yeah, you burn to the ground. Yeah.
00:30:38
Speaker
Yep. When things are going good, you definitely don't want to think about the possible bad. You know, ride the wave, let's go. But you do need the perspective to be able to...
00:30:52
Speaker
be prepared, whether it's having enough float cash in the bank to weather little storms month to month. That happens to all of us. Who would think that some material prices have doubled in the past year? Who would have guessed that? You don't think about that.
00:31:12
Speaker
Or like we can't get green paint for something or like our labels, the boxes that we're having designed, we're fixing the mod vice box again, we're changing it. And the labels were gonna be like four times the price of the whole box and insert or something. We're like, well, that doesn't make sense. We'll just do another round of gray boxes and we'll put a sticker on them, which is a bummer. But it doesn't make sense to pay three or six dollars for a printed insert.
00:31:39
Speaker
Yeah. Right now. Yeah, early lead times being, you know, six months for regular stuff. It's like, I keep thinking to myself, like, Come on, world. Come on manufacturing. Like, why can't we meet the supply that we needed, like, two years ago, like, this wasn't a problem two years ago. Yeah, as far as global manufacturing, like, I don't know, why can't people catch up?
00:32:04
Speaker
But that's the interesting thing, John. This is totally off topic. But the thesis that we, as in Westerners, are in for a rude awakening of, hey, the fast and cheap of the Far East is over. We're insourcing stuff, and that's great. And as a manufacturing person and as an entrepreneur, I love that. But the reality is lots of people that say,
00:32:29
Speaker
I know a person that's very passionate about buy American, employ American, all American, all American, you know, all that stuff. And like, shop is filled with Chinese knockoff machines, like, like junk Chinese, not even the like, hey, just made more sense. Like you can't buy a fiber laser, except for China. This is all like you had a choice and you chose to buy China every which way you try. Anyway, I digress. Nice. How's the lathe pump?
Troubleshooting Coolant Issues
00:32:57
Speaker
Um, this new pump, $1,500, bought it, put it in. Uh, it seemed fine for the first few minutes, but now it's still foaming the coolant. So like we're stripping it down to the bare minimum. We have a five gallon bucket full of oil. We have a three foot hose to the pump and we have another three foot hose to another five gallon bucket. Run the pump still foaming.
00:33:26
Speaker
And I'm like, where's the problem here? Yeah. It's an aerating on the new pump. It's aerating the coolant with visible button bubbles. And it's frustrating. Can you get a five gallon sample from your coolant supplier of different oil? Probably. We tried two different oils that we have. There's a third brand we have that we haven't tried yet. It'd be interesting to try just to kind of check it off the list.
00:33:52
Speaker
But today we're like, what if it's a power issue? Like it's three-phase power. What if two of the phases are working and one isn't? So it's, I don't know, it's weirdly working the pump, which I don't know. Yeah, sure. It's like, it's still frustrating, yep. I'm sorry. Socks. And we had our service rep come in, like we paid for service a few weeks ago and the guy came in, had some good suggestions, good ideas, we've tried them. Might need to get him back just to,
00:34:20
Speaker
continue. Because I'm almost getting to the point where it's like, guys, at any cost, let's fix this now. The problem is somewhere, it's hard for us to even find it, find the source of the problem. Unless we happen to break the second pump the same way that the first one broke with the carbon seal around the shaft, I don't know.
00:34:44
Speaker
So we might take apart that new pump to inspect. And if it is cracked, then we're like, oh, okay. Well, at least now that's still the problem. But why did it crack immediate? I don't know. Yeah, that seems. It seems unlikely, but something's weird. That's the low pressure pump that just feeds. Yeah. The transfer pump. Yeah. So it'll fill a five gallon bucket in like five seconds. Oh, okay. 10 seconds. Like it moves a lot of fluid. Sure. But.
00:35:13
Speaker
It is also aerating the fluid and it's frustrating. I'm sorry. I wonder if you did it with water. Try it. I don't know. I haven't thought about that. Dish soap. I'm truly sympathetic because every day that I love this horizontal more and more, it scares the bejesus out of me because
00:35:40
Speaker
that machine is going to become so critical. Yeah. And we don't have a backup. Yeah. So I'm like, oh, man. I mean, I try to justify this. That's why you bought a very quality machine. Yes. That theoretically has amazing service and parts available as necessary. But also theoretically, like nothing's going to break. Not like a bad machine, you know, that's going to fall apart all the time. You bought a very, very stout, strong,
00:36:10
Speaker
workhorse machine. That's how I try to justify my purchases. No, you're right. I forget what the inventory numbers were. They shared back in December when we were talking about this, but they were bringing in like 30 a time. I don't know if that's every quarter or something, but there's a lot of MB4000s in the US. Not a huge risk that some crazy part that's unobtainium, but nevertheless, I don't want to get
00:36:37
Speaker
Well, I'm going to lose sleep over this because when the music's on, you got to dance. But it's something where I'm like, oh, man, I could see the value in just our compressor now that we have two. I'm like, oh, man, I will never go back to one. I can't believe I was that.
00:36:52
Speaker
The problem is you can't have a duplicate of everything. I can't have a backup current just because we use the one so much. If I did have a second current, I'd be running it 24 seven as well. And now you're in a situation where yeah, you have two, but you're relying on two. And if one goes down, oh, no, now you still only have one. Like you're still down the production you've been used to at that point. Well, but we could big difference between having one to make our products and none. Yeah.
00:37:23
Speaker
Yeah, it's Yeah, it's been good. I can't wait to get these tombstones built because then it's gonna be it's like an unlock Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean we're if they were done
00:37:36
Speaker
Well, I hope I literally might pour them this weekend and then programming them won't be too hard. I can add some new tools. We got material in for the parts on them already. And then it's going to be running all night, John. It's just going to be so amazing. What does your tombstone situation look like today? How many did you buy and what's in the machine right now? We bought three that are cast iron. And how many are in the pallet pool? Six? Six. OK.
00:37:59
Speaker
and two of them are in use. The third was going to be used for our 12 by eight and 16 by 10 pallets, but we're still running those on the Haas verticals because we just haven't moved them over. We have a six-sided hex tombstone that runs our reversible inserts. We're running only two of the six sides to date, and it is cranking them out. We are finishing up, we finish up the third fixture,
00:38:28
Speaker
So there's six sides, three op ones, three op twos. We have the first op one, op two fixture has been on the machine for a while. The second op one fixture is done on the machine, but we aren't using it because we're waiting today. The second op two fixture will be done. That'll double that output as of probably tomorrow with no additional work. Let's just go. And then we have a, they call it like a T-style tombstone. So it's more of like a,
00:38:59
Speaker
full width, maybe 16 inches, but it's only six inches wide. So it kind of looks more like a traditional graveyard tombstone. That runs our modelized top jaws on one side with those eight dual stations I mentioned. And then I think this is pretty cool. On the short six inch side, we mounted fixture plates that hold those jaws for off two. So I bet you the majority of those don't have the side being used. The other side
00:39:17
Speaker
uh, slab.
00:39:28
Speaker
Both sides have our fixture plates to hold the mod vices, but then the other side right now has actually the fifth axis vices that we're using for one-offs and production. I like having that in the flow. Nice. Okay, so you've got room for three more that you're going to make. Yeah. Are you planning on removing and storing tombstones and having other ones to go on? You're going to have 15 on the shelf eventually. You choose which ones you want. What are you thinking?
00:39:57
Speaker
No ish. So the ones that we're making will have aluminum for aluminum plates cast with anchors into the epoxy so those will be permanent, but to those we're going to just mount our fixture plates that will allow us to hold.
00:40:15
Speaker
mod vices. And then like some of the things like our soft jobs, we're just going to mount a fixture directly to it. But my point is they're still modular in that sense. So we probably won't need to do more because it's going to be easier to switch out a modular top fixture than it will be to actually pull a whole tube out. But the way they're being done, yes, we're going to just have a
00:40:38
Speaker
That concrete form tube is basically a 10 inch ID and so we're going to print or machine a boss that will locate it on center within 20 thou or maybe even better and then from there we'll dial it in and then use the alt thread to lock it down. So pulling them on and off
00:40:54
Speaker
shouldn't be more than a two-hour job. So I could see something like, hey, every four months we want to run a bunch of a different product. And it's just a question of do we, I don't know. I think we still would just change out one of our existing fixture plate configurations. Well, so how does the Okuma work? It comes with six base plates, like base pallets. That's one of the ringers. I got to talk about this when we talk about our next horizontal video. But yeah, the Okuma
00:41:25
Speaker
purchase includes all the bases. Nice. Which is super nice. Yeah, I assume they're not cheap if you want to buy more. Probably two or three grand a pop. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, so you don't exactly want to inventory more of those and have like 15 tombstones with bases kind of sitting there doing nothing.
00:41:44
Speaker
Oh, sorry. Yeah. What I'm saying is we would just swap out. I get it. Section on top. Because on my current on the Aroa, I think the Aroa bases are 500 to 1,000, something like that. And I bought enough to fill up the machine. So I have them all. So when I make a new tombstone, I just take another base plate and machine it into that.
00:42:07
Speaker
But yeah, we did that with our pool studs. I'm like, John, just sit down, have a cup of coffee, smile and put issue, the PO for like four grand to big Kaiser for a boatload of pool studs. Um, I'm like, buy once cry once. And then when do we need to set up tools? We've got the pool studs here. Good to go. End of conversation. Yep. Yep. Yeah.
00:42:31
Speaker
We also learned something. I was trying to load a program that had surfacing in it on the Akuma and there was this buffer overload error. It seemed, it was pretty quick to figure out that when the file was over two megabytes, it was no bueno. And I was kind of like, oh, you got to be, you know, cause I brought this up with our salesperson on the call.
00:42:52
Speaker
And long story short, you can totally run programs effectively any size. You just have to change the way you open the file. In OSP, you normally open programs in A mode. Anyone who knows Okuma is going to be correcting me on right now, but there's A mode, or you can open it up in B mode, which I think is kind of the equivalent of what you do where when you're in B mode, you can't necessarily pass certain things through to other programs. That makes sense? Yeah.
00:43:19
Speaker
I don't care about that. Certainly not now. What I don't love though is when you load a program in B mode and you run it, it doesn't show you how far you are through the program. Again, it doesn't really matter. All these little tweaks, quirks, machines, and FanX is the worst for it.
00:43:40
Speaker
Yeah, but I'm just grateful that we can now run programs that are four legs. Fantastic. I mean, I would have been the same boat with the Willamond. It's like, wait, you mean I can only run a thousand lines of code or whatever the limit is, like 10,000? I don't know. It's like the free version of Mach 3 from 2007.
00:43:57
Speaker
Yeah, 200 lines ago. 500 lines son. Yeah, exactly. Step away from the computer. Yep. Well, and that's what I love about Heidenhein is like unlimited storage. It's got a gigabytes of hard drive on the Linux computer.
00:44:11
Speaker
Just the interface is really good. It shows you an accurate scroll bar of how far you are in the program. Yes. This FANUC sucks at that, which is very fast, very responsive. Starting in the middle of the program is better than any of the other machines I have. It just does it. It's great.
00:44:29
Speaker
hide and hide all of the things. I want to come up and see the Kern and meet the Wilhelmin and give it a big hug. I think about that when you do come up and if you, if you wanted to film a shop tour and like what that would look like. And I'll be like, I would take the camera out of your hand and I would make you do stuff. I love it, dude. Like here, you're going to run the Kern now. Let's do this. Do a tool call, do a, do a thing. You will always have a soft spot in my heart because your Dura vertical was the first time I ever pushed cycle start on a VMC. Yes.
00:45:00
Speaker
Speaking of travel though, I know I told you this offline, but I am in Kansas next week to be a judge on Project MFG, which is pretty cool.
Upcoming Role in Project MFG Competition
00:45:09
Speaker
It's four different trade schools that are competing in a combination of welding and CNC machining challenge. I don't honestly know a ton about it, but I'll try to share more on our social and I'll be there next week.
00:45:24
Speaker
Like I said, I think it's probably one of the most rewarding things is to see and be part of something where it's really, it's what we talk about. It's like pushing out curriculum where students are using CNC machines. They're using five-axis CNC machines. They're doing modern carbide tooling and not stuck in so many of the education curriculum where it's manual machining or hand-coding and high-speed seal tooling. It's just all stuff that's not relevant to the industry anymore.
00:45:49
Speaker
I will figure out a time to do our podcast once I figure out more of what this schedule looks like. Sounds good. Yeah, we'll get it done. If the worst happens and we skip next week, then we skip next week. And we're now warning people ahead of time just in case. But I think we'll be able to find the time. Yeah.
00:46:08
Speaker
Well, I guess it's even those four o'clock, which is super weird. What else? What are you up to for the rest of the day? The rest of the day, I'm actively working on the Willyman right now. Actually, it was like two minutes to the podcast. I was like, oh, I got to get off this Willyman and go to the podcast. So I'm going to go back on there, keep making some cool stuff, understand it better. And then tomorrow, we're going to the L.A. of Metzora joint open house. Oh, fun. Which they've closed for the past two years. So it's kind of a big deal to have it back on.
00:46:37
Speaker
I'm bringing four of my guys from the shop, three of which who've never been to a tool show before. Yeah. Manufacturing event ever. It'll be a really good experience for them. It's like micro IMTS. No, that's cool. We're going to LA of Matsura and they sell Nakamura, Tornos, Starrett, Zeiss, all that stuff. That's Matsura.
00:47:05
Speaker
DMGmori, Pharah Techniques, who I'm getting the brother Speedyo from. I was like, I hope they have a Speedyo on.
00:47:13
Speaker
like on the floor and I was like I just bought one so I hope you're gonna let me poke at it. I've never actually touched a speedio. I've seen them at shows and stuff but like I want to like do something here. I'm a buying, purchasing customer. I just sent you money. Like let me play. Oh yeah. Yeah but at a show we'll see. Yeah. And then there's actually the Okuma and Sugami Swiss rep, EMEC is the other one.
00:47:41
Speaker
We'll be going to all four of those. The trick is if you go to all four, you get eight hours of free service from the vendor of your choice. Yeah, that is insane. It's sick. Can I get on that? $200 an hour or whatever it is. Yeah, that's incredible. Now that we have machines from three of those vendors,
00:48:00
Speaker
We have our choice. It's like what machine needs it. Yeah. Looking for a fuel pump or not fuel pump. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Cool pump. Yep. Awesome. Need a guy. We'll have fun tomorrow. I'll figure out what works next week. Sounds great. Take care. Take care. Bye.