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"Confidence Is A Superpower"
149 Plays4 years ago
The boys have been crazy busy this week. Saunders' and his team have developed a little bit of a safe word around the shop. PINEAPPLE! This signifies that the person is safe. For example, if you hear a loud bang or somebody drops something and hear the safe word. Than you know that person is ok! Its actually a very good idea especially when you have a lot of ground to cover or a lot of employees. Saunders' also visited the Grob machine manufacturing facility in Ohio! He said that he had an awesome time and learned a lot while he was there.
"Confidence is a superpower" - Robin Renzetti
The boys also touch on quality control methods. This is especially important in both Grimsmo & Saunders' shops because of the attention to detail needed for both products. Grimsmo is also buying an Okamoto surface grinder! This is a machine that was thought about for a long while and they are finally pulling the trigger.
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Transcript
Introduction and Hosts' Background
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 197. My name is John Grimsmo. My name is John Saunders. 10 years ago or so, John and I were both in garages, I think both with Tormox and now we're both in shops of similar size with similar numbers of people. You're making Sharpie things, I'm making Fixtory
2020 Challenges and Workshop Safety Words
00:00:19
Speaker
things.
00:00:19
Speaker
But we're talking about the successes and struggles through 2020, both because it's been 2020, but also just because we're at that stage with small businesses where I just heard a loud noise in the background. And it makes you wonder what's going on in the shop. No. Yeah, exactly. We have a safe word, which is pineapple. And we just say it anytime something happens in the shop, like if you drop a pallet or you drop a wrench, and it tells everyone else in the shop that you're OK,
00:00:47
Speaker
you or somebody knew something deliberately happened. So if you don't hear pineapple, you or I or somebody goes and figures out, did a tool break on a machine that's not being currently attended or did somebody get hurt and they can't, like God forbid, they can't respond, they got trapped under something, I don't know. And it's just funny because something fell, I was outside the shop, something fell somewhere and I just, I yelled pineapple and I was like, oh, that doesn't work when you're not in the shop.
00:01:15
Speaker
You're like in Home Depot or something. Right.
00:01:18
Speaker
That's awesome. You mentioned that a while ago, and I remember you saying pineapple. I assumed it was a preemptive thing. Like, I've got a hammer in my hand. I'm going to make a loud noise. Pineapple first, and then hit the thing. But I think it's more useful, more often useful as a post-analysis. You could do it either way. Yeah, yeah. How many times a week do you think it gets yelled? Twice. OK. Interesting. Yeah. It's really helpful.
00:01:48
Speaker
I was deburring some six foot long bars for the Swiss. I have to put a chamfer on the end, like a 45 degree chamfer. I had laid four of them on top of a garbage can and one of them rolled off and made that loud clattery like ding, ding, ding. That would have been the perfect time. Like pineapple, I'm good. You're not allowed to use pineapple. That's trademarked by- On coconut or something. Yeah, it's great. It's fun. Cool.
Morning Routines and Machine Operations
00:02:16
Speaker
How you doing?
00:02:17
Speaker
I'm doing great. Feeling good. You know what's running right now? The Kern. Awesome. Yeah. What's going on? Came in a little bit earlier this morning. Got a running, running Rask handles, insides, outsides, and clips. Oh, awesome.
00:02:34
Speaker
Yeah, so it's like four separate operations all tied together on the one palette. And it's running great, so great. So you come in, if you're there early or the first one, then you have to turn on the lights, the compressor. I leave it on all the time. The compressor? Yep. You guys don't have any leaks? We run the Maury all night. Oh, of course. Okay, okay. Then the Kern is off, so you have to turn it on and then do a warm up.
00:03:01
Speaker
Yup. How long does that take? Usually three minutes or if it's been off for the weekend or something, it knows the length of time and it goes, I'm going to pre-lube the spindle for five minutes and then I'm going to do a six minute warmup. But yeah, normally it's just a three minute spindle warmup at different RPMs. It starts at a measly 22,000 RPM and then it does a 32,000 and then it goes to 42,000.
00:03:23
Speaker
It's crazy. That's really actually quite quick, the whole process. Yeah, yeah. What is the lowest RPM that you've consciously programmed a part to run at, or tool to run at? I mean, probably between 1,000 and 5,000 RPM, I'm not sure. Oh, that low? Yeah. Interesting. Because you hit your SFMs, and you're like, well, I don't want to be ridiculous here. And it's whatever three-quarter inch tool, something. There's no way you're running a three-quarter inch tool.
00:03:51
Speaker
Yeah, I've got a two insert kind of a face mill something in there. Oh, it's a face. Oh, yes, like a fly cutter face. So let's have fun here.
Optimizing Tool RPM and Surface Finishes
00:04:03
Speaker
If you run a three quarter inch tool, and let's say it's titanium, so you want to do 250 service feet or something. Yeah, you're right. That's only 1200. Do you have any torque?
00:04:16
Speaker
I mean, I think I have enough. I'm not going to do a 20 horsepower cut at 1,200 RPM, but it's enough to do light cuts, whatever. Who cares? It's a light, fast machine. So you keep all that in mind, right? Right. No, I wasn't criticizing that. You almost wouldn't expect. You have the Formula One car. You don't expect it to be good at doing tractor pulls.
00:04:38
Speaker
Exactly. Well, that's the thing is, as I was buying it, I'm like, oh, 42,000 RPM. It's going to be amazing. And then I started to run these calculations. And I'm like, dude, I'm going to run most of my tools under 10,000 RPM. Anything quarter and bigger in titanium or hard stainless, it's like, jeez. And then you get into the eighth inch end mills, the 16th inch end mills, the 20,000 mills. And now you're starting to push that 30,000, 40,000 RPM limit. I'm like, OK, I've got the range. And it's got enough power to do what I need down low. And it's fine. Yeah.
00:05:08
Speaker
and you've got the Heidenhain Kern graph controls of feedback. Remember when Marv was showing this when we were in Garmisch? Yep. I haven't figured that out yet. What he showed us is he had the laptop hooked up to the machine with VNC feedback, whatever, and he was graphing the spindle vibration live.
00:05:30
Speaker
And to the point where I think you could tap on the machine and you'd see it in the spike. And he was saying that he would actually mount a tool in the holder and spin it at 30,000 RPM and look at the vibration. And then spin it at 26,000 RPM and look at the vibration. And be like, oh, this tool is optimized at this setup, this balance for 27,500 RPM. I'm going to run it there like crazy. Yeah.
00:05:52
Speaker
I've heard about that too, folks saying that there's a sort of a recipe or a sweet spot that isn't, I'm sure it's scientific at some level, but it's not necessarily a formulaic and that you can just create it with any predictable success. But running a two and a half inch face mill at this feed per tooth, most importantly, this certain RPM range just happens to work well from a vibration or harmonics or just that sort of level. And that's how I think
00:06:22
Speaker
you talk about those mystery surface finishes, how some people get exceptional finishes, it has to do with that stability of where you're at. And it's just random, maybe 50 RPMs going from 4,700 to 4,725 may change it.
00:06:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of the beauty of playing with the spindle RPM knob on the machine as it's running. And I've done it not often, but often enough to be like one little tick movement and the machine goes silent. I know. And one tick higher and it starts to buzz. And you're like, oh, wow. OK, I got to reprogram this.
Tour of Grob Machine Company
00:07:00
Speaker
Yeah. So speaking of silent, we went to Grob on Monday.
00:07:07
Speaker
the Ohio location? Yes, which is just one of those mine trips because Grob is this German machine tool company, multi-thousand acre facility in Southern Germany, beautiful quintessential German machine tool company. They have a huge, I think it's 400,000, 600,000 square feet facility here in Ohio.
00:07:30
Speaker
Well, it's pure coincidence that it's near us and it is their only substantial US facility and they actually make machines there.
00:07:41
Speaker
And so it's so cool that the world has started to change where more companies are like, hey, we'll allow you to come kind of film. And for sure, I think four companies see that it's helpful for them as well. But for us to get the chance to tour it and then to share that. So we spent the day, and they're not joking, they make machines there. They had a
00:08:02
Speaker
giant bridge mill. They had an FMS system that was feeding into a custom grow machine that they built that was on ... The FMS system was on railroad tracks. FMS? FMS is like a palette changer, except you can do car-sized palettes. Oh.
00:08:19
Speaker
So Liebherr and a couple other companies make FMS systems. I think they had one at Hermlo when we filmed there. So they had racking that may be 40 feet high, which each rack bay is the size. They can have multiple huge tombstones or just parts that are the size of, again, literally a small car or a desk.
00:08:36
Speaker
Okay, so would you call an FMS system basically a rack mounted pallet system, like with the alley and the robot that moves on rails? Bingo. Yeah, I saw that at Tornos.
00:08:52
Speaker
I've seen videos at other places too, and it's insane. It's an installation, that's for sure. Totally. I don't know if FMS itself is a Kleenex type of brand name or not, but Haas actually had a good example when we were toured there of
00:09:07
Speaker
An FMS rack that fed multiple different at the time more ease I think there were Horizontals not five axis and I believe that has since been replaced by a Makino cell but it's cool because you have a FMS rack that may have say six high 20 long so 120 pockets if you will But it can feed five different machines so it can just constantly be putting different parts of different machines pursuant to your scheduling and needs and tooling and demands
00:09:37
Speaker
and so cool. That is amazing. I just almost cringe at the thought of managing and scheduling that, like setting up the system. I guess you hire Mr. S. FMS to come in and do it. Well, it's a major thing, but the beauty was the simplicity. The Grove FMS system was relatively small.
00:10:03
Speaker
And they had these ground level setup bays that you could just walk into like a, it was looking like a pit garage for racing. And they had these beautiful racks that you could open up that had indicators and torque wrenches and set up tools and strap clamps. And it's so cool because you could sit there and work on your part and then leave it close the garage doors. And then that whole shuttle gets moved into the machine.
00:10:24
Speaker
Yeah, they had the same thing at Tornos. It was like a presentation zone where the FMS system just delivers the one pallet to this one working area. And then they put the thing on, take the old one off, measure it, and then put it back. Yeah.
00:10:37
Speaker
Cool. Well, what made me think of that was, um, they ran a demo of a 20 millimeter. So what is that? Three quarter ish inch, a solid carbide end mill, pretty long stick out, maybe three or four X diameter, five X diameter, taking a legit cut in 41 50, maybe material, some sort of a alloy steel. We'll get the speeds and fees I'm sure in the, in the video, but it was
00:11:04
Speaker
wailing on this material the way the chips are coming off and it's quieter than my tag. That's cool. Yeah, it was cool. The surreal part was also the fact that it was a German company in
00:11:23
Speaker
not Germany, in my backyard. We woke up and drove there. They had the European work pants that have the little neon stripe in the pocket. They almost look like a hiking pant. Yeah. The current guys wore those, and it's got the current logo on it, but it's also got all your tools. Totally, yeah. Everybody's wearing them.
00:11:41
Speaker
in like lots of crates and containers were still in German and I just was surreal. It was really cool. It's like 600 people they had. Wow. Yeah. I watched a video they put out sometime this year, where one of their guys just walked around the factory and kind of showed everything for like 30 minutes or something. I think Dennis sent it to us. Is that the US one or the German? The US one. Yeah.
00:12:07
Speaker
And it was great videos, just like a walk around tour. And the guy knew what he was talking about. And your video is going to be going to be that, but you it's all good. I mean, it's so cool. They let us film.
00:12:20
Speaker
one of the machines doing a like a prove out test with all the sheet metal off. So you could see the way they have their, it's a five axis horizontal and they call it the tunnel. So it moves in and out of that tunnel. And it's actually a pretty cool and ingenious design. And you know, it's got a relatively short tool changer on, it's got relatively short Z stick out. So you got rigidity. They can machine upside down. It's just like, there's so many little things that are just like checked in the boxes of, okay, this is fun. And just sit there and watch the,
00:12:47
Speaker
Servo mechanism takes the HSK tool out of the tool care cell tips it over moves it up into a chip cleaning brush automatically cleans the taper and then it has another sensor that can still detect that there could potentially be a chip on it like just process reliability all day long.
00:13:04
Speaker
those machines, I don't want a blanket statement, but they're heavy in the automotive world, right? They're like production, production machines. Yeah, so that's what I kind of learned. I'd heard that they were big in big auto, and I sort of thought that meant that they just did machining work in big auto, but they're really
00:13:20
Speaker
bigger than that. Again, we got to film this, which is crazy. I'm not sure how much we'll have to edit out. I don't think much because they knew ahead of time we were going to be doing this since they said it should be good to show most of what we see. They had a V8 engine block being loaded into this whole grove system. They call them systems. They'd be like,
00:13:41
Speaker
eight separate stations. And the first one may take that engine block and flip it over. Then the next one brings in these automatic torque guns and torques in the crankshaft bars or something. And then the next one flips it over. Then the next one presses and plugs. Then the next one brings in a face mill and decks something off. Then the next one twists it around and puts Loctite on these things. It's true automation solutions for big auto that is just, it was really cool.
00:14:13
Speaker
Kid in a candy store. Yeah, it was everything from DIY automation to fan of robots to just like in the middle of this multi-cell system was a five-axis machine doing this one specific thing. Yeah, it was cool. It's going to be fun.
Introduction to Ceramic Cutters
00:14:33
Speaker
The other thing they showed, which I've never really seen in person for any amount of time was ceramic cutters.
00:14:40
Speaker
Okay. You see the green ones or whatever? Yep. They glow red when you're cutting. Yep. You've only seen videos. You ever picked one up? I found one. They feel like plastic, right? They feel like a toy. Yeah. It literally feels like the weight of a green army figure toy. Right. Because carbide is heavy for its size. It's always surprising. But the ceramic, it feels like a 3D printed plastic thing because it's so light. Yes.
00:15:06
Speaker
Uh, and it's, they were doing, uh, you know, the, the requisite Inconel demo where they're spinning this thing at all the, all the rippums, like it was a probably a half inch diameter tool, 16,000 RPMs in tight air in Inconel. And, you know, the tool life is measured in minutes, but, um, it was pretty crazy to see. That's awesome. Yeah. Never played with one. Yeah.
00:15:32
Speaker
might have to. Speeds and feeds are ceramic covers, man. I know, right? I don't know how prolific they're. I've got to look up. I know Ken O'Metal has one. I think Sandvik does. They've been around for a while, but I haven't seen them take off. I think they may be limited to... Yeah.
00:15:47
Speaker
the sort of Inconel like applications. They're probably like $300 for a quarter inch end mill or something. I don't know. I don't know if they're that crazy, but literally it was like 20, 30 minutes of tool life and they showed us a worn one. It looked like it had been
00:16:05
Speaker
gouge crashed, chipped, chip welded, like it looked horrible. And they're like, Oh no, this is what it normally looks like. It was still cutting when we took it out. Different world. Yeah. Like if you saw that machine in your tool crib, you would be like, feet hold. We all need to huddle. What's going on here? It was fun though. So Kern's going well. Yeah. Yeah. I just, in the background, I heard some 42,000 RPM spin up for a one 32nd tool.
00:16:35
Speaker
Pretty sure. And then, yeah, it's going great. So good. One thing I haven't worked, I don't think I've done it once yet for tool breakage detection. 42,000 RPMs on a 0.313 diameter tool is 344 surface feet. Exactly. Wow.
00:16:57
Speaker
That's funny. But yeah, I haven't done tool break detection yet. So sooner or later, I'm going to make a mistake. Is it hard? It's not hard to do. It's super easy to do. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to modify the Camplete post output to probably tool check every tool forever. It's just one of those things I haven't started yet. And I'm mostly worried about breaking those tiny little ones, the 130 seconds or whatever.
Quality Control Processes
00:17:28
Speaker
That was something I had asked somebody at Autodesk, and I thought they had implemented, but I haven't played with it yet. In the tool library, you can define, when you're defining a tool, on the last tab, you can choose, I think it's called break control, which means anytime you use that tool, it will automatically, at least if the post supports it, and it certainly does on the Haas, and I wouldn't be surprised if it did so on the Heidenhain, it will automatically then do a break control test on that tool.
00:17:55
Speaker
every time, but I don't want it to happen every time. I want to do like a manual and see and just say, Hey, under certain circumstances at certain points in time, I want to do a break control because I'm a Haas to relatively slow. Um, although side note, somebody has sent us the fast break, like the kind of brother level. And I've got that code I want to play with. Yeah. Nice. Anyway.
00:18:16
Speaker
Yeah, that's what we do on the Maury too. We do it with manual NC and after most tools, but not all tools. We do a break check, especially tools that are going to ruin the following subsequent tools. Right. Yes. Yeah, cool. Well, that's good. I mean, our rasks, then what's left or what's next? Left, I think.
00:18:40
Speaker
The handles are done, clips are done, blades, I think they're done. I just have to do, I have to tweak the lock bar inserts. They're made from 58 Rockwell AEBL stainless and machined at 58, which is pretty sweet. And they look amazing when they come out. A couple of geometry things in there that I got a fine tune, but other than that, like everything's done. Okay. So it's November 18th, November 20th. What's your thoughts on?
00:19:10
Speaker
What I'm doing right now is because I've made so many prototype blades, I'm going to run a bunch of handles so we can actually assemble them and get some testing of completed knives. So doing that this week, for sure, we'll have a bunch of knives put together, prototypes this week. And then after that, we'll analyze and be like, are we just running production knives now? I think we are. We are. OK, so it's before Christmas.
00:19:35
Speaker
Oh, yeah, it's like November. Dude, awesome. But that's how I tend to do projects, whether it was working on cars 10 years ago or whatever. I just work, work, work, work, work, and then kind of step back and be like, I think I'm done. I think that's it. I feel like I'm almost there, so that's really cool. Awesome.
00:19:56
Speaker
We had an interesting realization that I want to share. We have a QC sheet, I think we've shared it, on serialized fixture plates, which is a whole formal QC process, and that works pretty well. Always ways to improve it, but it works pretty well. We make some of our smaller plates that don't get serialized just because they're not
00:20:24
Speaker
We do QC on them, but they're not things that need to be serialized for a variety of reasons. There's other like soft jaws, we don't serialize soft jaws, but we need to QC them. And so what we realized is we can still do a form of a traveler
00:20:38
Speaker
And maybe this is a super obvious point. It wasn't to us. And now that we've talked through it, it makes a lot more sense. We can have pre-printed travelers or QC runners that could be attached to things like a take fixture plate or a shape of fixture plate where it still reminds us what is important, which is not only what's important to the customer, but what we know we might goof on. Like where do we really need to pay attention to? And then we will go through that. And then it would still get kind of done and signed off on. But then in a weird way, it's just thrown away.
00:21:07
Speaker
Basically, it lives on the product until it goes into the shipping box and then you just discard it. I guess. Unless you made it laminated, wet erase marker kind of thing, you wipe it off, use it again. Oh, that's not a bad idea. Actually, John, that's a good idea. It's QC. Unless you want to track that data long-term, it's more like, okay, this end mill likes to chip out, watch this surface. Make sure it's good so that you catch things quicker.
00:21:34
Speaker
Thread gauge these holes kind of thing. That's actually what got us is we were thread gauging from the backside for no reason, and we had a chamfer tool get a burr spot on it, and the chamfer on the front side, the normal side you would use on the Shaboko plate, raised a burr which made the screw hard to go into the tap.
00:21:59
Speaker
which looks like a much bigger problem than it really is. That's fine, but it's the chamfer. Right, but okay. We can fix that.
00:22:12
Speaker
It's good. Yeah, with the rasks coming off the curtain, I don't have a written down checklist yet of check these threads, this feature, this size. I had one of my quarter gen mills kind of chip out some of the flutes and wear down a bit. So it made this pocket where the ball bearing cage goes like 15 thou too small or something like that. And the bearings wouldn't fit. And I didn't catch it till I'm assembling the knife going, why does this feel weird? This is like something's wrong.
00:22:42
Speaker
And then I finally measured that diameter. I'm like, oh, that's a diameter that's never a problem for me. I never even think to check that thing, but now I'm hypervigilant and I restrategize the toolpaths like roughing finishing and won't happen again.
00:22:56
Speaker
That's what we're continuing to do, though, is I hate checklists that end up just getting skipped through or like a warning on a controller. You're about to overwrite a program. I've hit yes so many times that it doesn't serve any value anymore. We're trying to think about ways that we can do things, like on a bearing cage, your QC is not a list or a sheet, but it's rather
00:23:20
Speaker
Let's say you have a little dedicated granite block and it has six 3D printed pockets at the top that each have a tool. To QC that, you just go through those six tools. Everybody knows what each tool or jig or little fixture does. You don't have to write it down. You don't have to log it. You don't have to read anything. You're just like, hey, I'm going to check the IDs with this pin, the IDs with this pin, the thread with this gauge. You know what I mean?
00:23:42
Speaker
Yep, and we kind of do that on the Maury making Norseman knives, we check the 440 thread, we check that the pivot fits properly, we check that the stop pins, the holes are perfect size, and the right depth and
00:23:56
Speaker
I forget, maybe something else. And then there's some visual inspections to make sure the blades look good and things like that. But we don't have a formalized inspection. And I think all of us get a little sloppy sometimes and forget. And then downstream, Eric or Sky is like, the pivots don't fit. And then we've got to figure out why and how.
00:24:19
Speaker
Yeah. It gets me so fired up because same thing with soft jaws, though I want to tweak that fixture because it's done this to us a couple of times where we have a slight parallelism change for not a good reason. That's a problem that should get fixed, but the problem is more so making sure that doesn't end up in the customer's hand. If one out of 12 is bad, no big deal. Again, let's fix it, but what's more important is to make sure those don't get missed.
00:24:47
Speaker
Um, doing handheld micrometers or calipers is a hassle. It's a little bit too much of a skill if you will, it's just not convenient workflow. And so we took some PVC siding that we had laying around, uh, just like trim pieces and hot glued it to a, one of those sort of $40 granite mic indicator bases. You have a little like four inch square indicator, um, magnet, um, granite bases.
00:25:14
Speaker
and hot glued it in place so that it gave a parallel edge along the tip of the indicator. And now you just slide the mod vice in there, slide it across, and it gives you
00:25:29
Speaker
Oh, both the nominal because it's preset on a, we bought a dedicated mid to toy gauge block that lives with that little granite plate. So you can always either calibrate or just double check that you're on the right size and you just slide it across there and it tells you if there's any taper or issues, just zoom, zoom, zoom.
00:25:47
Speaker
So it tells you size and taper because like thickness and taper, that's cool. I like the dedicated fixture. In the kitchen, my wife calls them unitaskers. You know, like the one whisk that you only use for this one thing that's a unitasker and you know that maybe that's a bad thing. But in work for us, having a dedicated station like
00:26:10
Speaker
It's quick, it's fast, you're not setting up. It's just always ready, always there.
Shop Innovations and Business Reflections
00:26:14
Speaker
Oh my God, that actually just totally made me realize we're going to change too. This is on a dedicated maker pipe table. And what I need to do now is cut a hole out in the tabletop to recess that granite so that it's coplanar with the tabletop so that the jig is literally just built into the table. Yep. Yes. We did that with our gummy tape dispenser. We did it with our
00:26:40
Speaker
poly sealer, so our poly sealer is nested into the table so that the sealer band is coplanar with the tabletop. Yes. So you're just sliding parts across. What do you have for a tabletop surface on the maker pipe things? We have a bunch of one inch HDPE. Okay. It's great plastic. Yeah, it's great. Very durable. It isn't susceptible to liquids or chemicals. It's great. Is it cheaper than Delrin?
00:27:07
Speaker
Probably. I don't know. Yeah. You wouldn't have to get one inch. We got it through a guy. We paid for it, but it was a good deal. But you can get it from Alro. A half inch would be totally fine. We just buy four-byte sheets of it and cut it up. Nice.
00:27:23
Speaker
Yeah, it's like the perfect desk surface for that. I'm thinking about some assembly stations here and some checking stations that I want that kind of plastic cutting board surface kind of thing. Slide parts around and easy to keep clean.
00:27:39
Speaker
And it's funny what happened when I wanted to happen happened, which is a friend that I really do look up to who's really good on entrepreneurship and some business type stuff. He happened to visit yesterday and he walked in. He goes, can I take a picture of that table?
00:27:54
Speaker
I was like, yes, this is awesome. Is this in manufacturing or in some other entrepreneurs? Yeah, it's not a secret. It's Ryan from Seneca Woodworking. He was swinging by and actually he bought a rack that were some of the stuff that we're getting rid of. It was a good fit for him and so he brought his trailer, drove over and it was good to catch up with him. Yeah.
00:28:15
Speaker
which is a good segue to, I was listening to Robin Renzetti talk a little bit about his background, and he had a line that he said that I think really resonated, which is, confidence is a superpower.
00:28:29
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Was this on the with intolerance podcast? Yeah. Yeah, I was a week ago or so and it's awesome because and of course it's the typical look we're not talking about arrogance but but rather I kind of ties into that the future will be kind to me for I intend to invent it like The confidence not to think that you're invincible but the confidence to know that you know, we can do this we can figure this out Yeah, it was
00:28:55
Speaker
confidence is a gained skill. Like I think arrogance can be kind of manufactured quickly. Yeah, but confidence happens over time with with skill and experience and, you know, internal strength. And it does become a superpower because then you can
00:29:16
Speaker
you can know your limits. You can know what you can do and what you can't do. Yeah. I think it's important though as a leader and I think what's tough is I'm getting a wager that many people who may be viewed as arrogant
00:29:29
Speaker
few of them actually think, I know I'm arrogant. I like being arrogant. So it's a fine line because it's kind of like, wait a minute here. You don't know what that sounds like or is. Certainly, internally, we all have our mental thoughts that are probably a significant amount greater than what we actually say. But I like that quote.
00:29:48
Speaker
Yeah, the one that really hit me from that podcast. I knew a little bit about Robin Renzetti for the past few years, but not much. Like I haven't been close with him or anything. Listen, that podcast just, you know,
00:30:03
Speaker
bro style kind of fell in love with him. It's just super interesting, dude. It's super smart. And then I started watching some of his videos and I'd seen a few before but I'm like, oh man, this guy is like, he's been a tool maker for 50 whatever years. He just knows his stuff. But what he said that really struck me is he goes, you know, people ask me for years,
00:30:28
Speaker
if I want to grow and hire people and get a big shop and get a bunch of equipment and stuff. He goes, I've thought about it for so long, but no, I don't want to. I decided I want to have my small business and be the tinker in my garage and be able to just go out in my pajamas and do stuff as opposed to being the businessman that's heavy hitting and making big decisions and hiring people and stuff. I heard that and I thought,
00:30:57
Speaker
the opposite for me is I actually want to dig into the businessman side of things more and be less of the tinkerer. I'm never going to give it up, but I want that. I want the opposite of what he's built. I don't want to spend 500 hours rebuilding a spindle because I don't. But if one of my guys
00:31:17
Speaker
does has to do that, then that's better for me. The company is still getting that skill, but I personally don't need to invest that time because I need to build a business. It was cool.
00:31:30
Speaker
But you and I are coming from the same cloth because when Robin is talking about how you take Angular Contact pre-laborians out of the bag and move them over to the clean tray and use this grease and this, I'm like, I am all in. If you were like, press five to be teleported to my shop and help me with this project, I'd be slamming on the five button.
00:31:55
Speaker
He's talking about measurement, and he's like, if you can't see the needle move, you need a better indicator. Right. It doesn't mean there's not variance. Crazy. He's talking about measuring in millions, like five millions deviations. It's so cool. And I'm so fascinated by that stuff and precision surface grinding and finishes and using an optical flat to see how flat something really is based on light and the bending of light. Holy crap.
00:32:24
Speaker
What I love about my position now and in the next many years is I am aware of all of these things and more so I want to dig into them more but I do not need to be the foremost expert on these things. I love that I have a conversational knowledge and I want to grow my team to be the experts at that and then I can follow their conversation and I can lead them in the right direction. That's where I want to go with this which is, it's good to have that.
00:32:51
Speaker
I want to come back to that, but I'm curious because you're talking about grinding. Any updates on your grinding adventures?
Equipment Purchase Considerations
00:32:58
Speaker
Yeah, we are going to get an Okamoto surface grinder. I think I've decided on which one I want to get, the 12 by 24 SA1. There is a
00:33:09
Speaker
almost a brand new one at an auction in Texas right now that closes tomorrow morning, and I'm wondering if I should bid on it. I don't know. I don't know. What's your hesitation?
00:33:24
Speaker
buying a piece of used equipment and shipping it across the country and the border and bringing it in and paying a lot of 18% buyers premium for the auction and taxes there and taxes here and not having dealer support or warranty or all those things.
00:33:41
Speaker
Yeah, you nailed it. That's my estate. Question if the price reflects the discount. So retail for the new machine is $75,000. Current bid is like $20,000 on this. So I would have to do some math and figure out, OK, my break-even point would be if it goes for $50,000, I'll get it or whatever. But I don't know. What do you think? I have to make a lot of decisions in the next 12 hours if I'm going to get that machine. Right. Do you know why it's for sale?
00:34:11
Speaker
It was at the GE Aerospace factory in Texas that I wonder if they're closing down because they're clearing out all kinds of stuff. It's a 2019 model, and the picture of it looks dusty, and the paper band filter hasn't moved. I don't think it's been turned on. Got it. The description says it has not been used for production. And except for one option, it's identical to what I would buy. What's the option?
00:34:41
Speaker
a table mounted dresser instead of an overhead dresser? You want an overhead? I think I want both. It comes with an overhead and you can option the table mount because that allows you to program the dressing feed rate as opposed to having a set like one feed rate. Yeah. Because you know like a manual surface grinding, you dress fast or you dress slow based on what you want. So I think the table mount is better.
00:35:04
Speaker
Yeah, as you say, I'm venturing outside of my comfort level of good true knowledge. But everyone I've talked to who does precision grinding work would always use a table, not an overhead. But the new ones have an overhead, and they're fancy, and they're supposed to be perfect and stuff. But even Eric at Orange Vice, I watched that video you showed, and he
00:35:26
Speaker
He's table, right? He's table mount. I don't know if that's required on that machine, but he talked about the benefits of it because he's like, because then your tram or whatever of your table mount dresser is on your y-axis or your z-axis. Yeah. Yeah. Surface crangers are backwards. What I think of as a z is actually the y. Because it's a horizontal? Spindle is tapered different. So like up and down is y. Weird. OK. And in and out is z. Anyway.
00:35:55
Speaker
I mean, the strange thing about this is you're not a bootstrapper. You're not a value buyer kind of guy. You're not looking for, you know, it's weird. It's harder to talk about from a gross purchase price. Because look, if the thing goes for $20,000 at auction and you add on a $5,000 buyer's premium, a couple grand in transport or something. Yeah, I've just saved $50,000. Right. That's real. Right. It's not going to sell for $20,000. It's going to sell for more.
00:36:25
Speaker
There's already 18 bids on it at 23,000 or whatever, and it's going to get crazy at the end. That's all auctions do. That's why I never do auctions, period. Not necessarily. Okay. Depends. It's a weird world. A lot of auctions are now online only. They're not like eBay where they're sniping. They can't be, but it's counter to you as a
00:36:48
Speaker
If you look at the equivalent lease or financing payments and so forth, it's probably a perfectly fine machine, generally speaking. The story matches a reputable company with strong internal management and machine maintenance program that is, unfortunately, because of devastation and aerospace just shutting down a whole line or factory, and this just happens to be surplus. It couldn't be a better, newer machine. Exactly.
00:37:12
Speaker
But that could work against you because it only takes two people in Texas to want a surface grinder and have the chance to go see a person and rig it away on their own trailer. These aren't that heavy. Yeah, it's like 5,000 pounds. But I would have to organize rigors there or have to organize transport across the country, across the border. It's a lot.
00:37:35
Speaker
It's a lot. It's all doable, but is the juice worth the squeeze? I had already resigned myself to being like, you know what? I'm just going to buy a new one from the dealership, and it's brand new, and it's perfect. It comes with a warranty. They handle all the border, all the shipping, everything, because I pay for it. But it comes here. They install it. They train me. Yada, yada, yada.
00:37:57
Speaker
And then I get an option to inspect exactly how I want. Okay, so let's do some real-time math. Let's say it's $75,000. And let's just say you're going to finance something at a 6% interest rate across 60 years. So equals PMT of 6% divided by 12 for monthly payments, 60 months, and $75,000. Payments across that should be $1,400, $1,500 per month, fully amortizing. So in five years, you own it, making all these numbers up.
00:38:23
Speaker
So if you do that, if you get it for 50 grand, it's $9.66 a month. So it's $500 cheaper per month. That's not a small amount of money. On the flip side,
00:38:37
Speaker
big deal. First off, it's going to potentially consume a lot of your time over the next week when you could be selling rasks or making rasks. I'm sure we bought a used locomotive dealer and the machine talked to our dealer about it, and they were nice.
00:38:55
Speaker
if you buy a new machine, they're going to help you with the grinding wheel and the speeds of use and the recipe and the success. And if I use one, of course they're going to be nice, but it's different. Exactly. Yeah, they're going to be nice, but they're not going to give you everything because you're not a customer. You took a shortcut. Yeah.
00:39:13
Speaker
And also what happens in, I'm not sure exactly when, but before the end of the year. So in the next six weeks, the Maury is completely paid off. So now we have a $3,600 Canadian monthly payment that is not being paid out anymore. And putting, I mean, half of that into the grinder payment means we're already ahead. Yeah. And look, if it were in Kitchener or Toronto or something, good grief, I'd say for sure. But this sounds
00:39:41
Speaker
Probably like a pass. Yeah, I was talking with a buddy in Texas. He's in Dallas or Houston. I forget. He's like eight hours away from this place, but he's like, oh, that city is kind of way down there in Texas. There's not a lot of major hubs around there, meaning there might not be rigging companies close.
00:39:59
Speaker
Oh, no. The way these auctions are usually run is one or a few riggers have exclusives. I was wondering about that. Maybe you could have yours come in, but the riggers are pretty good about being bullies, for lack of a better word. Two people have exclusive rights, and that means you end up paying $300 to lift something four feet onto a table or off a table. It just is what it is. Usually, those are disclosed in the auction terms. That makes sense.
00:40:25
Speaker
I'd go throw in a $24,000 bid right now and probably then walk away. If rigging won't be that bad, freight shouldn't be too bad. I don't have no idea about across the border. There shouldn't be US taxes for you on it. I have to pay Texas tax, I think 8%, 8.25. You shouldn't. At least that's what the auction rules say. I don't know how that affects me. Yeah, you shouldn't have to. Yeah.
00:40:55
Speaker
Yeah. Thoughts. It's pretty easy. If this gets expensive, you're like, yeah, you know. Yeah. And there is one in stock in Chicago at the Okamoto place. All right. I'll think about it for a little bit, but I'm easily 60-40 by new at the moment. Right. Right. OK. Thank you for chatting. That was really interesting. Yeah, absolutely.
00:41:26
Speaker
Regardless, after listening to Robin talk about surface grinding for the past week and thinking about getting one, and the weird thing is I'm not going to be running it. I want to play with it. I want to learn it, but it's not going to be my baby. Angelo and Pierre, our new guy, they both have more experience than I do surface grinding. I just want to know how to do it, but you know what I mean? Didn't you say on WhatsApp that they have enclosures too for these now?
00:41:54
Speaker
They have their factory option, and the casting is actually different. No. To get this added. But if you want to wait six months for them to build one in Japan or wherever they are, then you can. And it's like a $10,000 upgrade, I think, which is considerably worth it if you want that. But yeah, it's annoying. You can't just buy one and throw it on. Why don't you? Is it really six months? They said four.
00:42:21
Speaker
Everyone I've talked to is starting to admit that things have slowed down a lot. If you want that, I mean, that's a lot of money and you could build a room for a lot cheaper than that. But, boy, rather than having a drywall room where there's a hidden machine inside of it, having that nice Okamoto in the shot, think about 10 years down the road, John, when you're crushing it, get the thing you want if it's a three-month wait.
00:42:47
Speaker
But I want it now. You've built this company up across 10 years without one. What's three more months? Well, if I don't have it soon, I will have to outsource surface grinding locally for the short term, which is totally doable. Surface grinding is not hard. I just have a whole bunch of rask blades that I want to be a better thickness than they are currently.
Recruitment Success with Indeed
00:43:14
Speaker
You would not, I don't know how important the enclosure is, but if getting the right machine meant you had to wait three months or whether it's outsourcing or just holding off, you don't want to hold off. Send them out. I mean, someone kiss a few thou off of them. It's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Okay. I'll talk to Angela and we'll think about that.
00:43:34
Speaker
Cool. Well, I'm going to end on a really oddly good note, which is we're looking to fill a few different roles here, kind of an assembly worker, general maintenance position, a machinist position, and that marketing strategy role. And long story short, I just took a whim on tryingindeed.com and in the process of starting the interviews, but across three days have gotten
00:43:59
Speaker
significant numbers of resumes sent in for each position, frankly, much to my surprise. I did not expect, especially things like machinists and marketing strategy to have emails start hitting your inbox with resumes of people that have qualifications, whether they're exactly what we're looking for or not certainly meet that. It's been eye opening and really positive and it's kind of
00:44:22
Speaker
It's exciting to see, okay, great. Now we can start thinking about, you know, what kind of machinists are we looking for? What kind of marketing strategy person are we looking for? And so forth.
00:44:32
Speaker
That's amazing. It's like when you throw something up on Upwork for $50 and you get 20 replies in the first three hours, you're like, holy crap, people can actually do this. Incredible, right? Yeah. These are also crazy because these are local folks. The way Indeed works is they, I think Indeed proposes an amount per lead they get you, like resume or person candidate.
00:44:56
Speaker
We've gotten between those three positions probably somewhere between 50 and 70 resumes. Now, I'm kidding. Many of them are for the order picker, the lowest level job there. Still, probably over 10 machinists and 10 marketing strategy folks. Some of the resumes or positions are not qualified. It's not like every single one is John Grimsmoke applying. Total spend for those I think has been like 500 bucks.
00:45:23
Speaker
Okay. Across all those resumes positions like this is great. How did that money get spent? It's like making this up. It's like 10 bucks per resume or lead for the order assembly person. Actually, I think it's cheaper. It's $13 for the machinist position. You can cap and you can say, okay,
00:45:44
Speaker
You throw a thingy up on Indeed and they charge you per result that comes towards you? Bingo. Per person that actually submits and you can say cap it. I don't want any more than 30 resumes for this position. We had one that was a BS consulting company out of California that tried to apply for
00:46:07
Speaker
in-person job here. I'm like, okay, I didn't really need to pay $17 for that. I'm part of me thinking about telling Indeed to take that one off, but all in all, been a very good eye-opening, at least opportunity or resource. For sure. I remember last week and the week before, we were talking about it on defense. I don't know, I've never used Indeed before. What's it like? I'm really glad you took the plunge. That's very exciting. Yeah, so I'll keep some soon.
00:46:32
Speaker
Correct. Yeah. I mean, I have an interview in six minutes with the second person. I've been called five o'clock tonight. I'll call tomorrow. And that's the key. That's the thing I've always looked up to others advice, which is that when you're doing a position like this, talk to more than one person. Get a feel for what their skill sets are. And so obviously, you spend some time prepping the questions and thinking about not only the specific role, but the culture, the fit, what we're trying to do. It's good.
00:46:58
Speaker
Do you have certain questions you ask the same people? Sorry, the same questions to everybody kind of thing? It's usually a conversation. I mean, interviews aren't like, please tell me about your... But yes, I for sure want to make sure I understand. And they're very different. Obviously, machinist questions and conversations is different than the marketing strategy position. But yeah. Nice. Cool. Cool. I'll keep you posted next week. All right, man. Have fun. Take care. See you.