Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
#311 Sharing responsibilities
118 Plays1 year ago
Topics:
- Lapping plates
- wood blocks in the router
- Willemin!
- Okuma is running deep into the night
- expensive power bills
- Machining Cast iron
- Material inventory
- Sharing responsibilities
- breaking taps
- sacrificial wood block in the router
- Inspecting parts and improving processes
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction: Episode 311 Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business and Machining episode 311. My name is John Grimsmough. My name is John Saunders. And this is the podcast where two buds chat every week about their manufacturing journeys and their businesses and the little issues that pop up and the fun things and the not fun things.
Machine Glitch and Production Disruption
00:00:17
Speaker
This is true. I've got a strong lead off there unless you've got a strong lead. We are trying to get the will of it up. It looks like one of the IO cards might have somehow glitched between when it was in the showroom and moved here.
00:00:37
Speaker
Look, it could be no big deal for sure. It could be kind of pressing it to the future. I certainly hope it's not, but rather than ignore that, I think I'll just be candid and say, hey, look, it's kind of funny that it's our first used machine. It doesn't feel like that.
00:00:52
Speaker
Yeah. That very much feels like a used machine. But anyway, what's a super bummer is they overnighted one last night to be here at 9 a.m. this morning, which would be an hour ago, and it was weather delayed till tomorrow.
00:01:08
Speaker
No. So it's kind of a bummer.
Challenges with Used Machines
00:01:11
Speaker
Do a service tech here? Yeah, Florian and Trani are here. So I was worried that they were going to have nothing to do all day because that's the current thing they need to fix. But the Tyler from IEMCA, AKA Buchi, just showed up there working on the bar feeder right now. So they've got enough to keep them busy. I hope so. Yeah.
00:01:35
Speaker
Cool. Yeah. They got power to it. Obviously, it turned on. Yeah. Again, that was kind of a weird thing. All the machines that we've bought, we always had to get power run to the machine, but not the final. Actually, I think on the Haas machines, we would have it hooked up, but we would never flip the disconnect, and they would check the phasing. So for this time, we have a disconnect installed, a transformer, and then power into the machine, but got all that done, got the air hooked up.
00:02:04
Speaker
Yeah, they haven't powered up, but they can't get past a bunch of IO errors that they think is this card. Again, it worked a month ago in their showroom. Something happened.
00:02:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's the same with my machine. It
U-axis Issues and Troubleshooting
00:02:21
Speaker
was running production before they turned it off and shipped it to me. Then I was getting a B-axis cable error or something like that that had to remove the entire spindle and the whole column B-axis thing to replace a cable harness, which was like a few thousand dollars of cable.
00:02:41
Speaker
Yeah. And many, many hours of taking this thing apart. But yeah, I don't know if it's... I know they were telling me that sometimes the Fannock fans, like the old drive fans on the drivers, they like to run. And if they don't run for Christmas holidays or for a week or month, then they kind of seize up a little bit. And then you get fan errors.
00:03:06
Speaker
Yeah. Some of ours, we've peeled the sticker back and we put a drop of nano oil inside and they work again. They work fine. It's funny going into each fan and turning it, feeling it. Yeah. But they are replaceable. It's not the end of the world. I think even McMaster has a comparable fan.
00:03:25
Speaker
Well, I guess my fear is that you cook the board, though. Yeah, that's true. But there's enough sensors and they're smart enough to be like, yeah, the fan doesn't work. I'm just going to not run right now. Oh, really? That's pretty cool. Wow. Which is annoying because it's stopping due to a fan, but it's also good because you're not going to cook it. Yes. All right. Well, it's all relative, but I feel like I
Optimizing Machines for Automation
00:03:46
Speaker
can happily take that trade off. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. So it's OK. One day at a time. Yeah, one thing at a time. Good. Mm-hmm.
00:03:55
Speaker
I mean, with the guys there, they can shake it down and they can like test everything and align everything and make sure it all works. And I didn't fully have that because we insulted ourselves and we just like kept picking away at it and finding little issues.
00:04:12
Speaker
Yeah, so our Wilhelmin, we've been trying to run it the past week or so and I need to call Marcus today because I don't understand or it's not working to set the vice origin. Did I talk about this last week? I think you and I... Good. It's like a grab distance. The vice comes up, moves into the part 0.25 inches or whatever you tell it to, grabs the part and then cuts it off and we keep getting like
00:04:41
Speaker
three-eighths of an inch or more of crash basically, the vice just wants to
Improvements in Horizontal Machining
00:04:46
Speaker
over travel and I believe we're setting the origin the way we're supposed to, it makes sense, it's just not consistent and I don't know, we're doing something wrong and I showed Pierre and I had him do it and I'm like, tell me if I'm crazy or if this magically makes sense to you.
00:05:04
Speaker
And so he played with it for a day and kind of led to the same conclusion. So either we're doing something wrong or something's goofy and I kind of just need somebody on video call to walk through what I'm doing and have it make sense, you know?
00:05:20
Speaker
So actually, this is super, I'm curious, but also selfishly want to learn. So your vice, if that's the U-axis, if I recall. Yeah. Left to right. Travel two inches or so. Oh, forgive me. OK. The vice pivoting is an axis, but not control. It's like hydraulically. It's on off. Yeah, exactly. Hydraulically.
00:05:41
Speaker
So it's not, is it not really considered a quote unquote axis because it's not an axis. It's an M, M, I don't know, 89 or something. Yeah. So the U is the actual travel of that sub spindle vise in and out toward the main, closer to and away from the main spindle. It's not that much travel, like you said, two inches. What you're saying is that when you let's say it's M89, you pivot it up, when you pivot it up, it's pivoted up in the furthest away position. Is that correct? Yep.
00:06:08
Speaker
And then can you jog it in? Yep. And it's got its own work coordinate.
Automation Enhancements in Manufacturing
00:06:14
Speaker
Yeah. So like x, y, z, u. And you want it to match your x-axis. So if the face of the spindle is x0, you want the face of the vise jaws to also be u0 if they can travel that far towards it. OK. They can't. So we put a 1-inch gauge block between the two. And we're like, OK, set it to u1-inch when it's touching. That should work.
00:06:37
Speaker
And it's not. Interesting. And there's a little program that runs every time, like a subroutine that runs the beginning of every program that automatically matches X with U with a modifier factor. Like for me, it's 7.2 inches or whatever it is that you control to fine tune it. I don't know. It's not working yet.
00:07:06
Speaker
I'm sure with Florian there
Effective Material Inventory Management
00:07:08
Speaker
and everything, it'll just magically work for you guys, but it'll be neat to see. I'm far away from being that like confident slash, you know what? Optimistic. Yes. I was thinking of a different word, but yeah. Top of mind as well, I was kind of recollecting what I think CJ had said in the past, which is that
00:07:30
Speaker
it is not a lathe, God bless it. So on a lathe, if you have a piece of one inch round bar in the lathe spindle, as the cutting tool moves from the tail, let's call it tailstock to the headstock, that's a Z move. But on the Willemin, that is a mill style X move. Yes. Or no. Yes.
00:08:00
Speaker
That is an X move. But when your B axis, your spindle head rotates down 90 degrees, and you're still moving left to right operator style, now that's a Z move. Right. Left to right is an X move. Okay. Yeah. So if you tip your head to be 90, that would be like if you're drilling a hole in the end of the part, like a tail stock sort of thing. Right. I believe Z matches your spindle, like your milling spindle axis.
00:08:29
Speaker
Yes. Right. So then that's so funny. Is it like just a tilted work plane thing? Because obviously we can drill a hole at 45 degrees for like a like a muzzle brake port or something that that's that's not. That's a combined move. Yeah, right. Exactly. Synthetic access or whatever you call it. You let the post figure it out basically. Hashtag Phil. Yeah. Yes. No. OK. Got it. Huh.
00:08:55
Speaker
It's going to be sorry. Are you can you make parts, but just have them like hand transfer the part and then do the opportunity by hand or something? I have done that a couple of times. We've gotten to the point where we can make one part and it transfers and it works and we're like, sweet. And then we run the next part and the U-axis crashes. Wait, what the heck? Yeah, it's not something crazy like modal versus I don't know relative. You know, maybe it is.
00:09:23
Speaker
Because we tune it, we put the gauge block in, we're like, yes, everything makes sense. Yes, move it. Yes, makes sense. Perfect. Even to a manual transfer, feed it in. Yeah, the numbers look perfect exactly what we want. Clamp it, cut it off. But when you run it automatically, it's...
00:09:40
Speaker
When the U-axis crashes, since the rotating advice is just a hydraulic action, it just moves. It doesn't care. You hear air hissing out and it just moves, but still, not the most. Totally. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, I'm going to work on that today.
Team Management and Delegation in Business
00:10:03
Speaker
I can only hope that I'm soon in a position where I can try to- We can talk to each other about this? Yeah. Help you or repay some favors here and so forth. Yeah. We'll know more soon, I hope. I'm writing it on my list right now to text Marcus today. Sweet. Yes. I made soft jaws. We had some- I saw that, yeah.
00:10:26
Speaker
Yeah, we've managed to get our VF2 IT kind of set up as a free machine. So we took some of the products that we used to make on it. We've moved into the horizontal. Hashtag fun fact, for a long time, we had an Alexa routine that shut off our air compressors, I think at 1am. Okay.
00:10:43
Speaker
I'm realizing now that we've added so much to the horizontal. The last two nights, it's had all six tombstones scheduled running with no... In talking about it, there's a lot more improvements to come, reconfiguring some parts, adding some more tombstone faces, but we're still running all six tombstones and now it's running past 1 AM.
00:11:04
Speaker
And I actually, so the Okuma, I know I mentioned it last week, but this Okuma thing I'm gonna talk at Tuesday, March 7th. It's open, you have to register, but it's free and all that in Charlotte. Would love to have folks come. I'm excited because I'm gonna talk a lot about...
00:11:23
Speaker
some of the improvements that we've made under the guise of automation, but not just spending a bunch of money on robots and cells, but rather things in the shop that have helped us, including Lex and so forth. I wanted to talk about the horizontal and what it's been like. We haven't even had that machine one year.
00:11:41
Speaker
And when I look at the, I actually don't even remember if I annualized it or I just took the total runtime to date. I think I took the total runtime to date divided by the number of days that that is.
00:11:55
Speaker
And I can't emphasize this enough, we brand new machine, six new tombstones, we took our time, had to take our time learning how to get stuff brought on to it. And in just all those sort of caveats, it is still averaged cutting time, not operating time, not machine on time, actual in the cut time of 8.2 hours a day. What?
00:12:19
Speaker
John, that's pretty good. That's insane. Right? Averaged over, yeah. Since you caught it. Now it's going to be, I think the last two days are probably averaging 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. So what is that? 18 hours a day? It's a lot, yeah. Like just, and it's not even, you know, we're not even like, it's not some like everyone, not all hands on deck. We need to be focused. We need to be like, it's just more like, yeah, it just runs.
00:12:44
Speaker
It's not the best. It really is. I mean, you and I like four years ago talking about automation and palletized machines and stuff. We're like, that sounds cool. One day, you know. Well, that's funny because I can see the Wilhelmin from the horizontal. And I look over, I'm like, is it going to like, it's sort of like, doesn't feel like it's real. I mean, the machine's sitting on her floor. I know. Not working yet, but it's on her floor. I'm very familiar with that feeling.
00:13:13
Speaker
Oh, man. To look over and think that that machine has the ability to soon be just running. I mean, it could for us, it could be running 24 seven because the parts we need to make are that hard and the barfed like it could just going soon. Yes, yes. I'm very much looking forward to the day when one of your machines is still running when you come in in the morning. Oh, my gosh. Right now. Far from it.
00:13:38
Speaker
I mean, do you have enough runtime? Like if you loaded all six tombstones when you went home and you had cycle start, do you have enough like runtime to still run in the morning? Right now, we do hit that last. So yesterday was a good example. Garrett ran it from 8
Power Consumption vs. Production Output
00:13:58
Speaker
till 2 or so. I took a couple hours to do some R&D, new work on it.
00:14:03
Speaker
And then it was basically all loaded up. And so when I left it for 15, I hit the sort of automate like PVC node button. So it ran from four until, well, it actually aired out at 1 a.m. because we had the air shut off. So it didn't finish the last part of one program. No big deal. That could be a big deal.
00:14:23
Speaker
No, I didn't mean to be casual with that. I fixed that right away because that is a great example of being a bootstrapper gone wrong. I like to train the air compressors off so they don't run, but good grief. If we're running at risk. Yeah, our air compressor runs always now. But if, say, I come in on a Saturday night and the Kern's just finishing up, which by the way, if we leave on Friday night, it's still running till deep into Saturday night, like 24 hours later.
00:14:51
Speaker
Yeah, we usually get 24 to 30 hours on a Friday night run. But if I'm in on Saturday night and like
00:14:58
Speaker
The current is not going to run till Monday or last Monday was a holiday. So we're off on Monday. So like I just turned the current off and the miscollector off and like I almost turned the air compressor off. I have before because I'm like, I'm here for other stuff. I don't need, I don't need air or these machines on, you know what I mean? So just shut them off. But, um, otherwise the current will just sit idle on when, when it finishes and then the air compressor just, it runs, but whatever.
00:15:25
Speaker
Do you mind sharing what your power bill is a month? I feel like it was in the $2,000 to $3,000 range. Kind of makes sense because you're- I haven't looked in a while, but I think so. You're definitely outperforming us in terms of like spindle time and frankly, compressors are probably what run the meter and we're
00:15:47
Speaker
at $1,700 to $2,000 a month. Yeah. So yeah. US as well, like ours is Canadian. So it's almost the same money right there. OK. I need to think about the conversion there. Yeah. But it's like comparing it. It's a power than us too. It might, yeah. I don't know. Comparing it to like the home power bill. Yeah. Yeah. It's so funny. Yeah. Well, some of our friends that we know have five-figure electric bills. Yeah.
00:16:17
Speaker
It's like the cost of doing business unfortunately, but it's so weird.
00:16:22
Speaker
There's a local company that has blast furnaces to dry a product, like a food grade product. And their power bill is six figures a month. But I think they look at it as like a variable, like it's just directly related to the cost of the product that they ship. So it's not really like, it's kind of like, you know, consuming the material. If I bought $100,000 of aluminum in a month, that's great because that meant I shipped
00:16:48
Speaker
X times that. Exactly. Yeah. Like I used to joke when I look at the power bills and it was higher, I'd be like, woo hoo. We used more power. Like we're actually making more parts.
Challenges of Machining Cast Iron
00:16:59
Speaker
You know, your kilowatts per day or whatever it is per hour. Um, not so much the, the cost factor cause costs change, but, but yeah, the actual usage, I'm like, sweet. And you see it in the bar graph and your bill and it's like, oh yeah, those months we actually did, we did crush it. Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool.
00:17:18
Speaker
So what's going on good or bad on your end? Mostly good. Things are really good. I've been making these cast iron lapping plates on this video, which we talked about last week. And I will reiterate, cast iron is a stupid, dumb material to machine. It's like machining dirt. There is just dust everywhere.
00:17:39
Speaker
Yeah. Not so much up the machine, but certainly on the table and on the weight covers and on the side low walls of the machine. We're going to have to toothbrush that off, like clean it. So I'm almost done. I've just got a few more plates left to do. And then we'll put some cleaner through the coolant. We'll probably pull it all out, actually put in some fake coolant with a bunch of some cleaner and run it through the whole system for a while.
00:18:07
Speaker
and then use that to scrub the whole machine down and then stage zero started off again and never touched cast iron again.
Strategies for Material Inventory Management
00:18:19
Speaker
Fresh coolant? We will do fresh coolant, yeah, absolutely. I just wondered if, don't you have a Freddie or a similar? We do, yeah.
00:18:26
Speaker
I wonder if running it through just a 5 micron or even a 10 then a 5 would... Well like everything's running through a 20 micron filter paper right now on this video which captures 90 and a plus percent of all the garbage which is amazing. It's like funny to walk behind the machine and just see this paper is black. We have absolute mud on it and chips.
00:18:49
Speaker
So it's capturing almost all of it, which is good. But when we suck all the coolant out, I'm curious how much will settle in the bottom. And there's tons of rich light in the coolant from before we had the conveyor. And it needs a solid clean out. Got it. And you're done with rich light? Yeah, for now. I mean, we still have tons of stock. But if we do run it again, we'll run it on the router with the dust sucker upper.
00:19:17
Speaker
Okay, yeah, that's nice. Yeah. So funny you say that. I've been sort of looking at what I want to accomplish this calendar year. And again, not like a huge annual goal type of guy, but I do like thinking
00:19:33
Speaker
I find that I'm productive by focusing on what I need to focus on today. You still have to be that manager or visionary and looking at what needs to happen. Over the last few years, we always wanted to have material on hand full stop. The world was weird, aluminum was weird. I didn't want to have production issues because we didn't have a certain part. You could probably make an argument that we've overbought some sizes.
00:20:01
Speaker
So, okay, instead of spending more time thinking or worrying about that, let's fix it. So what I'm going to do, your rich comment made me think of this like, okay, let's go look at what we have, do a more formal kind of
Logistics of Sourcing Materials for Production
00:20:13
Speaker
review. It'll probably take two hours. And then let's say like there's some random like sheriff and Bantam size
00:20:20
Speaker
we might sell one or two a month and we have 50 pieces of material. So, okay, let's fix that. Let's either sell that material, make a bunch and then we don't have to make them for a long time, which I don't love that, but I just don't want to leave it on the rack because it's not right to have it next to the VF2 aluminum that is like constantly getting moved and used and all. So it makes sense? Yep, absolutely.
00:20:46
Speaker
And we've certainly got some old stock that just has no purpose anymore. But it's good material. It can be used for stuff. But yeah, to have it right next to stuff you're pulling from every day, it's that weird balance of how are you organizing your stock? Maybe you have a junk section that's like all this stuff over here we don't really think about too much, but we're going to hang on to. But this is the core. You're pulling from this every day. You see the inventory levels.
00:21:16
Speaker
Because you also don't want to give yourself the wrong mental picture of, oh, we have lots of material. But that lots you're thinking of is garbage. Yeah. So that'd be good to do. Interesting.
00:21:30
Speaker
Yeah, we're always playing that inventory game too because some of our stuff takes months to arrive. You know, like we've got to order Norseman and Rask handles next. So we talked to the supplier in the States, order some sheets, get them water jet cut in the States, send them out for rough lapping in the States and then they come up here and then they're ready for us. Yeah.
00:21:51
Speaker
And that could be several weeks, if not a month or three. It takes a while, right? We got to do that now so that we don't run out. Because if we run out of knife handles, we're kind of screwed. Right. Yeah, that's no joke. Right.
00:22:07
Speaker
I don't, I mean, that's a world that we spent two years getting out of. And I mean, for five or six years, with steel fixture plates, we fought this battle of where do we buy material? And I mean, we went through and exhausted, like, we probably have three different vendors that we had an over one year relationship with.
00:22:29
Speaker
And you know, we are full grims, but a lot of steel fixture plates, it's probably one area that I'm like you on like we, and you know, one example is we were getting when we were using a third party grinder, and they'd be mostly within spec, but then they're like the outside corner, like one inch of a corner would be
00:22:47
Speaker
three or four tenths different. Is that reason to fail a two or three thousand dollar big piece of material? No, but I hated it and I hated it because it was after six weeks of waiting for it and it really neutered our ability to do custom jobs or faster turnaround.
00:23:05
Speaker
Fast forward, that's why we have the Okuma and have been able to bring all that in house and work with material suppliers where we now get, we actually, it's a pretty freaking awesome. We need custom sized material or even just reordering our regular sizes. We have that material usually in three days, definitely under a week. So I don't mean this, I don't know how you would
00:23:26
Speaker
if and how you would ever deal with knife handles, but it's great. Now that we're on the other side of that, it's great to not have a six-week or three-month process that relies on so many other folks. Well, you basically took the grinding operation in-house and transformed it to a face-melling operation and a way to fixate yourself so that you can control every aspect of it. I'm basically not interested in buying a water jet.
00:23:51
Speaker
And the rough lapping machine is hundreds of thousands of dollars that I also don't want to spend. So it is very nice to have already pre-cut blank handles that are already to a rough thickness that we can just process.
Optimizing Team Roles and Process Efficiencies
00:24:07
Speaker
And at the moment, it's worth the planning scheduling of a few months' lead time. But our blades, however, we buy the sheets directly from Damasteel in Sweden.
00:24:21
Speaker
even our regular stainless steel blades. So we buy like 20 sheets at a time of material and then get them shipped here usually once a year.
00:24:31
Speaker
And then we have sheets on hand. And then I literally put them in my trunk and drive five minutes down the road to our local water jet place. And they cut them for us. And then I picked them up. And then we have our turnaround on blades. And we have our Okamoto surface grinder. We surface grind them ourselves. Turnaround on blades is super easy, as long as we have those sheets of material. These aren't like four by eight sheets then? No, they're two by three. So they're pretty small. Two foot by three foot. Got it.
00:25:00
Speaker
It's very easy to lift one yourself. Yeah, right, right, right. I'm thinking like 24-byte sheets getting put in a C container from Sweden. I'm like, oh man, that's crazy. No, it's basically a palette, like a small short palette of material. Got it. So do you, with the handles, do you think about
00:25:19
Speaker
keeping three or four months on supply. In terms of if it takes you three months to get them, do you want to have three months on hand so you're always one buffered cycle? Absolutely. I'm just removed enough from that inventory count that I'm uncomfortable right now.
00:25:34
Speaker
Oh, like Angelo's on top of it, but he told me. He told me yesterday, he's like, yeah, we're going to order more material. And I'm like, what does that mean? Are we like out or are we going, are we good for three months? I don't know yet. So we just got to have that further conversation, but I'm sure we'll be fine. But yeah, it's like everybody's got to be on top of that schedule and keep your eye on it. We've got a really well organized, but not every person involved knows every detail of like the three month lead time or like whatever, you know? So.
00:26:05
Speaker
Well, that is curb handling that or is it not yet? It's still tribal right now. We've got, you know, paper copies of inventory counts, things like that for now.
00:26:15
Speaker
We're kind of having minor failures in a similar thing on stuff like screws that usually aren't a big deal. Like oftentimes we can get them the next day from a supplier, but it's kind of that whole, like there isn't a trainable system, especially if we're having some part-time help on shipping or whatnot. So we've gone to just the old school, hey, we keep, um,
00:26:41
Speaker
We have our main supply. Then we have the next tier of supply should be what you can use, but triggers a reorder. And then there's also two or three weeks worth or some amount worth. It's in a polyseal bag with yellow electrical tape around it. And that is the whole, because it's pretty forgivable sin if somebody uses the next tier. You just don't know. But if you're cutting through yellow tape, that's an easy rule to raise your hand, please.
00:27:11
Speaker
I forget. I think it says something on it, but like you, I'm awkwardly disconnected in a good way. It's a good way, but there's a couple uncomfortable things at the moment. Being from solopreneurs that were completely in charge of absolutely everything, now we're distributing the workload across the team, which is amazing. But there's a lot of trust, but verify. Yes.
00:27:36
Speaker
I will say I appreciate the often given advice for mentors or just anybody of like, it's harder to let go than you think. Yeah. Because I don't know. I think I thought I was doing a better job than I maybe am. And it's good grief. I'm not like we do have incredible progress around how this team runs and so forth for sure. But man,
00:28:04
Speaker
It's down to the little stuff too. It's like that classic entrepreneur dilemma where it's like, I'll just do it. I'll just order that thing. I'll just set up that machine. It's faster if I do it because I know how to do it. Taking the time to step back and train somebody or write out the process or brain dump all your thoughts onto a piece of paper.
00:28:24
Speaker
is so worth it long term because that's how you grow a team. That's how you show that you trust other people so that they can do the work to your standards and then they just want to know what to do.
Addressing Manufacturing Challenges
00:28:37
Speaker
Yeah. Amen to that. But yeah, that is still very tricky. I've done very good in some aspects and I've done very poorly in other aspects of the business letting go.
00:28:50
Speaker
constantly seeing new areas for improvement, whereas I could do better at that. I really got to step away from that or let somebody else do that.
00:29:01
Speaker
Part of it is I like, like we have two new products that we need to move on to the horizontal. And we kind of roughly know how to fixture them because they're similar to other parts we make. But I am tempted to start making the fixtures, but then no, like, no, you're designing them. You know, I got to put that a little, but I enjoy doing that. And I enjoy kind of owning some of that process, but we'd be better off
00:29:31
Speaker
We'd be better off distributing that. Yes. And we can. Not understanding the fact that we've got different. I probably need to do a better job at clarifying responsibilities. It's sort of like the shop scheduling from a production standpoint around balancing the current stuff with, quote unquote, R&D and all that. Yeah.
00:29:54
Speaker
I'll go first. I ordered the laser for the router, and it has shipped. And it should be here on Monday. Nice. Super pumped about that. That's great. And that should be relatively. It should be straightforward. I'm going to 3D print the dust boot that I printed already, which was working amazing. I'm going to 3D print a version of that where the laser will bolt right to that 3D print, like in the front of the spindle, front of the head, basically.
00:30:24
Speaker
It comes with a magnetic mount where the power actually goes through these magnetic pins, so you just pull the whole laser off and you just plop it on. So cool. Because the enclosure doors and everything, the router spindle at full forward travel is an inch away from the door, so there's no room for the laser normally.
00:30:45
Speaker
We can't just leave it on all the time, basically. Easy. Pop it off, pop it on, hit cycle start again, and it'll laser the foam. Cool. I'm excited to see how it works. Yeah, me too. We've been oddly fighting taps. This is one of those, we forgot about it because it hasn't been an issue for years.
00:31:10
Speaker
and rewind, geez, three or four years ago. I think some of the reasons that we were breaking taps back then is we weren't as smart on having as rigid a work hold as the areas we needed. So if you're tapping in the middle of a big plate, the plate itself can be just enough to where you could cause more stress on the tap. And we fixed that with way better fixturing workflows these days. And we also often will use
00:31:36
Speaker
like the big Kaiser compression head that soaks up a few thou of travel inaccuracies. But sometimes taps last us thousands of holes, a couple of thousands or something, and sometimes they break after 100, and that's no good. So I immediately went into kind of like, hey, let's tackle this every way we can. So OSG actually, to their credit, got back to me within like two hours, said, hey, let's try a different tap. But then I'm sitting here thinking like, man, could it be
00:32:05
Speaker
the hard spots in the material or coolant like concentration bricks type issues. It's just bothering me that it's all of a sudden happening and it's not super predictable.
00:32:21
Speaker
that's what I was posting on the WhatsApp. I had thought Fusion used to have a dwell because when you go to the bottom of the tap, rigid tapping hole, you do want to give time. I mean, I'm not a machine tool designer engineer around this stuff. The immediate full slowdown stop in reverse is I remember talking to a tool designer, like a cutting tool holder designer about like, hey, that's the most
00:32:47
Speaker
area that's ripe for machine inaccuracies of the spindle orientation relative to the Z travel. So a dwell could let you coast down, stop, pause. I mean, we're talking about 0.1 seconds and then retract up. But the Haas G84 cycle for tapping doesn't even support a p-value dwell. Other controllers do. So I was like, man, I must be misremembering that it never has even had that option. I'm actually doing this on
00:33:11
Speaker
Well, actually we're going to Akuma and Haas, but anyway, that's my current. I don't need to give you, I don't want to give you food for being against rigid tapping because it's still, it's still great, but man. Yeah, still not a fan. I knew I should have said that. That's okay. Cool.
00:33:30
Speaker
Yeah. To finish on tapping, when you break a tap, what do you guys do? Is the fixture screwed? Are you starting over? No. Yeah. Sadly, we've gotten pretty good at how to get those out, and it almost always doesn't ruin the part, which is important.
00:33:51
Speaker
I guess like a half 13 tap or something like it's big enough you can get some needle nose in there like something. Yeah or machine it out. Yeah ours are like quarter 20 or less metric stuff but yeah.
00:34:07
Speaker
The, uh, yeah, it's just, it's, I don't want to thread mill them. I've always thought that that was just seen. Well, for you, you got thousands of holes to tap. Like obviously it makes total sense. Um, yeah. When I thread mill, I'm thread milling like five holes. I'm like, whatever. I don't care. Yeah. We'll get it figured out. Yeah.
00:34:27
Speaker
It was really fun. We had a great response to that Keselowski cam, so Keselowski Advanced Manufacturing Tour.
Tour Insights: Keselowski Advanced Manufacturing
00:34:36
Speaker
It stopped me from talking about this on the podcast, but it's that guy who's still actually a NASCAR cup driver who
00:34:42
Speaker
you know, didn't have to do any of this and has poured a lot of money into some cutting edge machines and talent to build a shop down in north of Charlotte that is the only work they do is work that has both metal additive and
00:34:59
Speaker
usually five-axis type of subtractive work on it. So I didn't know until I toured, but they're not doing race car parts. They're doing parts that go up in the sky or parts that are defense or medical or aerospace, all that. A very legit dialed job shop that has a very unique value offering around their processes. And it was fun to go back with COVID and just the way the world has changed. And a little bit of you and I talked about how like seeing a cat 40 machinery tool change isn't exciting as it was in 2017 to us.
00:35:29
Speaker
Yeah, good. It was a great tour. So I appreciate them letting us come film there. And it was fun to see how encouraged folks were. And it seemed a little insight into that technology.
Efficient Foam Machining Strategies
00:35:39
Speaker
That's awesome. Let's see what else. Did I tell you about how I put a fifth axis vice on our router? No.
00:35:56
Speaker
So, the foam that we're using and the same foam you guys are using now, everybody I know who's cutting that foam says it loads up the end mills. We're having that problem too and when the end mill gets loaded up with goo, it doesn't cut as cleanly. So, it's leaving bad surface finishes for scrapping parts because of this.
00:36:12
Speaker
So, one of our guys and a bunch of people online suggested, why don't you mount some sacrificial piece of something that you intermittently cut between passes. So, I put a fifth axis vice on there, I have an extra one and one of our guys has a woodworking set up at home. So, he cut these one inch by one inch by three inch blocks. He gave me two choices, pine and cedar. He said, take your pick, whatever. And so, he brought like 20 or 30 of them in. And so, today I'm going to program
00:36:42
Speaker
basically a secondary operation. So, after normally we make 15 foam cases at once, but in rows of three. So, it will do three and then that pattern will be done and then it'll do another operation where it goes to G56 or something like that, where the vices does a quick little skim cut and that my quick testing says that that absolutely clears out the tool.
00:37:05
Speaker
It comes right back and does more machining and then every three pieces, they'll do another skim cut and then every cycle will replace that piece of wood, which I think will be a good workflow. I think it'll be fine.
00:37:15
Speaker
You could G10 it to have it skip like to move over 10 thou. I don't know if I can on the Maso control. Oh really? I don't know how macros or anything. I don't even know if it has macros. Got it. It has G54 and five and six and stuff. So I don't know. I've got enough cuts to do. I think I'll just blow through the piece of wood each time and then replace it. Yeah.
00:37:39
Speaker
Yeah, it should be good. If it has that, from the little time I spent with a Masso, it was FANUC base. If it can do a G10 shift, you just move your G26X over 10,000, that block should last you like a month. I don't think it will do that much.
00:37:56
Speaker
I don't, I want to, I want to bury the end mill through the block. I mean, I haven't, that's all I've tested so far. Um, to actually do a slot. I don't just want to do a little skim, like 10,000, 5,000 cut. I was thinking like, I don't know. I need to test more, but at the moment, um,
00:38:18
Speaker
If you do a G10 shift and you say, okay, I can get five sheets of foam out of this one block, you need to be able to count that five sheets somehow. And there's no macro screen on the Maso to do counters and stuff. So my current thinking is just simple, replace the block every cycle, make it work, move on from there. But yeah, I think that'll be really good workflow.
00:38:41
Speaker
Now that you say that, we have a reamer in the horizontal that tends to bird's nest. It's not the end of the world. Once a week, we have a maintenance reminder to just poke our head back in the tool, the room that is the tool magazine. Make sure everything looks okay back there.
3D-Printed Solutions for Tool Maintenance
00:38:56
Speaker
You just pull it off. It takes one second, but no, I hate that. I'm thinking what we could do.
00:39:02
Speaker
It kind of feels a little bit shady. But the tool setter has a little trap door, like an R2D2 antenna head thing that comes up. On that, we could mount a 3D printed, like it almost would look like a football uprights. And the reamer, after it's done, could just have a separate program that goes over and it plunges in and then down and then retracts back through those uprights. And it would just clear the bird's nest off the reamer. OK.
00:39:32
Speaker
Right? And it's 3D printed. You could even put a stress riser in it. So for some reason. Yeah, if it crashes, then yeah. No big deal. Shouldn't get in the way of anything else. So I think I'll try that. Yeah, we have a tiny bit of that in the current as well. And like you said, it's for tools that don't really matter. Like if the bird's nest is up the flutes of the reamer, like who cares? Yeah. It's not doing any harm. And then when you're replacing other tools, you're like, oh, pick that off. Right.
00:40:01
Speaker
If I had the Kern with the visibility and access of your tool changer, I wouldn't even worry about because you're just always right there. But our matrix is back in no man's land. And it would be bad to leave it that way for weeks or months. They would build up and that's no good. Did you learn anything or are you spending any time on, I don't know, I don't remember where we left it, but on automation software to sink in and take product photos?
00:40:26
Speaker
Ryan and I talked about it yesterday and he said he was going to look into it so no,
Exploring Automation Software Solutions
00:40:32
Speaker
not yet. Keep me posted because I think even though we aren't like Henry Holsters where we're photographing a little retail box of stuff, we have big products, man, I still would.
00:40:42
Speaker
I know Canon has a software that I've seen. One of our cameras is a Canon. Ryan's got Sony cameras, so he's going to look into Sony stuff.
00:40:58
Speaker
I don't know, very looking forward to seeing what comes up. Yeah, we use the Canon, like PC software for Provencut, which works great. So you just tether the camera, but I want something that more that could do intelligent, like, like, you know, when you go to see Santa Claus and the kids and they have your, you get a QR code when you get in line and then they, your picture's tied to that. Like I wanted that sort of a thing. Interesting. Our orders, what, you don't take your kids to see Santa?
00:41:25
Speaker
Not in a long time, but it's funny that for manufacturing, you look at a Santa Claus photo studio and they figure it out. It can't be that expensive if Santa's doing it. We know this. Yeah. You're in a concert and they take your picture and then they're like, hey, if you want to buy your picture, here's the- Yeah, or like a water slide at the bottom of the thing. Interesting. Technology. That's the automation for your speech there.
00:41:54
Speaker
No, well, but the difference is the speech needs to be something we've actually done and not got things that we were, we've walked the walk, not just talk to the talk. Yeah.
Continuous Improvement in Machining Processes
00:42:04
Speaker
What do you, uh, what do you say today? Um, I've got a couple more laughing plates to make, hoping to have them done by the end of the week. And then Angela's going to surface grind them, clean up the surface grinder fully. Cause it's going to get nasty. Um, Pierre and I are going to work on the Wilhelmin and get those wood blocks. Um,
00:42:22
Speaker
Set up in the router. It's a solid day. Yeah. Awesome. You? I've got to go check in with the little man guys again to see if I can help them and what's going on. And then we, oh man, I got to say like 10 out of 10, the improvements that we've made on the horizontal with some changes to fixtures and cutting tools is, you know, we used to be in these kind of crummy situations where we'd have, let's say like,
00:42:50
Speaker
three tenths of taper and it's within spec and it's hard to like complain. But why like, why is it that way? Why can't we be better? Why can't it fix it? And between some processes and offsets and new tooling and new fixturing, we have got that thing like image is so stinking proud that we just we still check to 100% inspection on some of these criticals. But like, it is so good now. So I need to take that mindset and apply it to one is kind of what I was mentioning earlier.
00:43:20
Speaker
one new fixture to get one more product that it's the aluminum hobby top jaws. Right now, because I want them
00:43:29
Speaker
I want them excellent. What we're doing is we're not decking the critical, leaving it rough, and then we're actually clamping it in situ one at a time and finish decking them. It takes like five seconds per part, but that could be automated and done. It's kind of like your laser thing. I'd rather it just be done as part of the production of the part, not create this batch where we do 50 or 100 of them, and then we have to manually load each one. Each one's everyone, yeah.
00:43:56
Speaker
But at least doing that gives us exceptionally good parts. And now it's time to fix that process. Yeah, it's funny because when you create a new product, you're like, make it work. Whatever it takes, just give me a finished result that is acceptable. And then you get used to that for a little while. And then you get kind of bored of that for a little while. And then you're like, actually, it could be a little tighter. It could be a little straighter. It could be a better surface finish. Right. And then at the end of the day, I've found this teaching our guys to machine and inspect parts. There's always a reason why you're having a problem.
00:44:26
Speaker
It's our job to find that reason. End-meltiflection, fixture, bending, the way you're loading it, warp through heat treats, it's been a big one for us, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What's the root cause? That's what Angela always says, find the root cause.
00:44:41
Speaker
And just keep asking why until you get it. And it can be so frustrating, especially a team of guys who are all pretty proud of what they do. Yeah. To be like, it almost feels like pointing fingers. But that's not the goal. It's like we're just trying to find the cause, the answer, so we can all be better.
00:44:59
Speaker
And to build off of that, the thing I want to kind of break the, what do you call it, the third wall here and talk to the audience is like, no one is born with perfect knowledge. And it's the thing I always want to remind myself to be comfortable with and proud of is like, hey, all we're doing is trying to do better and learn. And, you know, it's kind of I don't, I'm not really speaking to the internet trolls here, because that's not what this is about. But like, the people that want to troll you for whatever it's like, dude, like,
00:45:29
Speaker
I don't know, you know, I got nothing to say like work. I want to be more like the Robin Renzetti's and the Tom Lipton's take pride, do better if it's not good, fix it. But like, I ain't perfect. And what we're doing is and that's what makes me so happy about where we've gotten to is like, now I'm going to walk with a little swagger my step on a few of those parts. Because you know what, we got it going on there.
00:45:50
Speaker
And you just know that to be true. It's not like, oh, 9 out of 10 are good. I don't know why that 10th one is off, but whatever. We'll fix it. No, it's more like I know why that 10th one's off, and we will get to it. Yes. Yes.
00:46:04
Speaker
Yes. So it's been fun. Love it. Good. I mentioned to you before we hit record, I might be on the road. I am on the road. I don't know if my schedule is going to be. So there's a chance we miss an episode. And if we do, folks, we appreciate that you miss us the week that we're off. Yes. All right. We'll see what we can do. Sounds good. All right, man. I'll see you. Take care. Bye. Bye.