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#293 releasing a new case for Saga printer, Autodesk Fusion meetup in December and more!
162 Plays2 years ago
Topics
- Grimsmo releasing a new case for their Saga printer
- 3d printing for production
- cardboard packaging
- Autodesk Fusion meetup in December https://www.dsi-mfg.com/fusion-summit-2022
- multiple computers for workflow
- tool breakage control
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Podcast Theme
00:00:01
Speaker
Good morning, and welcome to the Business of Machining, Episode 293. My name is John Grimsmough. And my name is John Saunders. And this is the weekly podcast where John and John go over the either day-to-day aspects of running their manufacturing companies or the kind of bigger picture, why are we doing this? What are we doing here? How do I optimize? How do I not go crazy? Side of doing business. Yes. And we're trying to get better
Pen Case Design & Material Challenges
00:00:28
Speaker
at that constantly on a daily basis.
00:00:31
Speaker
How are you? I'm quite good. Yeah? Yeah. Yeah. I'm eager and excited. And I want to get some good stuff I want to do today. Tell me more. I want to, most of this video is currently running. So that's cool. And we've been working on these new cases for our saga pen. And we had the wooden ones for the longest time, made by somebody else. And that isn't happening anymore.
00:01:01
Speaker
We've come up with a really cool solution that took way more effort and way more time than I expected and I ended up viewing it as an actual product. Put the effort into it that I would put into a knife design or something like that. It's sick. It's really cool. I don't know how to share it. What do you mean? To announce it, to release it, to share the process, the progress, because I haven't really shared much yet.
00:01:32
Speaker
I want to, for sure. I'm not hiding it, but I've gotten so deep into it. They're just about into production right now and haven't shared hardly anything and I want to. I'm head down focused on it right now and that's fun. I like that, but I also know that I need to announce this and I need to make a big deal out of it because it's really cool.
00:01:56
Speaker
Is this the teaser? I think maybe you posted in the WhatsApp that has I think it was a 3D printed part in it. Yeah, there's some 3D printed parts. There's rich light, there's acrylic, and it's really cool. How's that rich light going?
Innovations in Pen Case Manufacturing
00:02:09
Speaker
Good. It's messy and smells. Not that bad, but it's you're cutting plastic and epoxy kind of thing and paper. It makes voluminous chips.
00:02:23
Speaker
Oh, no. Which is good, but not good for no chip conveyor speedio. I ordered a corn cob rougher, which I haven't used since like six, seven years ago. But I bought one, a YG1 version, and it should be in today-ish. That should help with the rich light, I think. Just knock down the big, like, inch-long chips down to nothing.
00:02:52
Speaker
Good. What was I going to say? What's the 3D printing part then? The way that the pen is held into the case.
00:03:05
Speaker
is all 3D printed components. So the pen actually clicks into the case using the button of the saga, like the spring button that you click to activate the saga pen. So I was like, there's already a spring here. My first 3D printed design had a compliant mechanism like that. The 3D printed part moved around the pen as you click the pen in. And I was like, that's really cool. But I was like, hold on. The pen has its own spring. Let's utilize that as retention.
00:03:33
Speaker
So, I probably went through dozens of iterations on my printer at home, you know, 2am printing, trying a new design, new design, new design. And they're tiny little parts that they print in like 10 minutes. So, it's been fun. And I almost
3D Printing Decisions & Costs
00:03:49
Speaker
wish I would have just had a camera on me the entire time, but I didn't and that's cool and I like the solo-ness of it. But yeah, it's fun.
00:03:58
Speaker
Grant had a great idea. We were struggling to sort of like hold in position a fixture because it's either like it's either locked down and it's not moving or it's floating. And so literally like four minutes ago, McMaster or UPS just dropped off some stuff including some wave springs. And the thought is we should be able to apply
00:04:22
Speaker
you know, a very gentle snug force that of the fastener through the wave spring that should hold it fairly well into position that will then allow us to take the part off and finish tightening the fixture. So, I'm kind of curious to see how that works. Interesting. Okay. You know, wave springs are right. They're in the saga pen.
00:04:42
Speaker
Oh, that's right. Sorry. Do I do? You know, I'm very familiar. How dare I. We often either get them from McMaster or directly through Smalley, which are the same ones. McMaster sells. Yeah. The so you will 3D print these yourself or you sub on that point. My initial
00:05:06
Speaker
you know, want was like, Oh, I've got I've got three 3d printers. Let's see how long they take. What's 30 minutes per box. Oh, man, that adds up fast. Yeah, that's like I would need a lot of printers or just be printing all of the time and they'll be bed problems and they'll fall off and you'll come back to spaghetti too many times. And I was like, Well, I have a friend
00:05:26
Speaker
who has built a 3D printer farm with like 40 plus printers and he wants to grow that significantly more. I reached out to him and the pricing was a no-brainer. It's like the cost of filament basically. Oh, really? It was not expensive.
00:05:46
Speaker
you know, fairly quick couple day turnaround time. And he's been helping me iterate back and forth to design for manufacturing sort of thing, optimize the 3d prints, which is great. So yeah, shout out to Parker at pepcorp.com, I think.
00:06:01
Speaker
It's Canada land. Canada. Yeah, he's in Windsor, Ontario, and which is great for me because. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Easy shipping. Keep it in there, Sam. Exactly. And he's actually the guy that gave me the Prusa that I have, that I use a lot. Oh, sweet. Years ago. Yeah. So it's nice to be able to give him some work. So, yeah, first order, he's going to print 200 assemblies and they should be shipping today, I think he said.
00:06:31
Speaker
So that's very exciting. Yeah, I feel like we randomly wanted to get some other stuff printed. And I don't remember the part size. And we've gone to the typical like shapeways, 3D hubs, zometry. And I feel like what used to be awesome pricing got super unawesome.
00:06:55
Speaker
Maybe. And I don't know if I'm missing something or something changed. I would think that that's still a competitive world. Like obviously, 3-3 has changed
Startup Focus & Packaging Struggles
00:07:03
Speaker
a bunch. You had a bajillion companies and I think some of those have fallen by the wayside as the Ultimakers or Prusas have kind of prevailed. But I'm surprised
00:07:12
Speaker
I was disappointed that it wasn't like, oh, that's a no brainer. Like I felt like it used to be. That makes sense. Yeah. And I might have misspoke when I said that for the cost of filament, but my parts are so tiny. They're like, if you put your finger into a circle, they fit in that circle. And the pricing was like a dollar per piece or something. So like negligible pricing. But yeah, it's probably 12 cents in filament realistically. So if you scale that to a bigger part and I bought a big order, 200.
00:07:40
Speaker
Sure. And I've seen that before. Like, hey, you've got to spend a couple hundred bucks for it to make sense. But still, I was like, man, these are like, I don't know, they're like 17 dollars. I'm making this up. I was like, wait a minute. These would be like two or three dollar type of thing. And that's the thing. It's like two or three dollars if you print it yourself, which is the beauty of having your own printer. But if you want, you know, a thousand of them, you're not going to do that. So you just kind of have to bite the bullet and, you know, do it for production. But
00:08:05
Speaker
And we love our printers. We're on the wait, not even the wait list. We pre-ordered with the deposit the new Prusa. That's the big one total. I think we talked about this a while back, but you know, larger build volume, but it'll have multi-heads. So we'll be able to have the same printer set up with either different colors or
00:08:23
Speaker
Yes. A one millimeter nozzle for speed and volume and rough printing, a lot of our stuff could be one mill or 0.8 intrusion, and then some finer print for the details. But on the flip side, we are
00:08:41
Speaker
We are things have changed around here a lot. And so the last thing we need to be doing right now is cleaning an extrusion nozzle or something like that. You know, I want to use our printers to support us not to create, oh, hey, the printer's down. Let's spend a morning tweaking it.
00:08:56
Speaker
Yep and I've spent many mornings doing that over the years and my printers are pretty solid right now. I've got one person that's clogged up that's been sitting for probably three months with the clog and I'm like I have a Bontec upgraded extruder with a mosquito thing and I have all the parts. I just know it's going to take me about like six hours to really dig in and upgrade it and I want to but yeah. Is that not something an intern can do? It is.
00:09:26
Speaker
And I have considered that. I've got one guy, Grayson, who would probably love that challenge and just haven't brought it up yet. Yeah. But he's going to hear this on Friday. Yeah, there you go. Yeah,
Tips & Community Announcements
00:09:38
Speaker
yeah, right. I'm just like, hey, look, there's a... I mean, even as silly as we had a new intern start and wanted to have them use the U-line floor
00:09:47
Speaker
mopping machine, which is not as complicated to run as a 3D printer extruder swap out. But nevertheless, there's some know-how go-to quirks to doing it. So it's like, hey, go watch the YouTube video on the right way to concentrate and rinse. Should you be seeing a bunch of sandy water or not? And I very much want to foster the whole like, hey, go get smart on it.
00:10:14
Speaker
watch something, but then go do it, learn, rinse, repeat, pun intended. Nice. What is your current printer arsenal?
00:10:24
Speaker
We have a Prusa Mini, which is a rock star. We have a Prusa MK3S, like the kind of classic $1,000 Prusa, which until recently was great. It's been a little fussy, but I think Ed bought and we swapped out the extruder head. And that probably is from some years of minor amounts of abuse or bird's nest mistakes. Actually, the Prusa Mini has been rock star except the USB port.
00:10:51
Speaker
And they make it very difficult to replace it or like swap it out. And that's a bummer. And then we have a 10 log IDEX. There's a number to it, like 10P or something. I can't remember. But it's a dual head glass bed that used to be mine at home. And I brought it into the shop. Ed has let us borrow his larger Creality. And that's it. Cool. Yeah.
00:11:23
Speaker
Yes. Your packaging sort of reminded me of the podcast I was just listening to about a startup and they went to get funding, venture funding and as is so often the case got laughed out of the room by everybody which is an ego bruise but they chose to take it as kind of a reality check about like, hey, maybe we aren't as hot as we thought we were and they'd done some sales so it kind of sounded like they thought they were going to
00:11:51
Speaker
walk into a conversation, not a no thanks. And what it made them do, which I think is a great lesson was realize, okay, well, if these people don't believe in us, do we still believe in ourselves? Do we need to stop? And instead of chasing growth, do we need to just
00:12:12
Speaker
come back to the core product, which we are profitably and sustainably and so forth. And I just think that's wonderful and sustainable. And that person
Team Dynamics & Business Operations
00:12:23
Speaker
coincidentally ended up to go on to a whole joke of like, I don't know why we wanted to think about becoming this company that gets a $50, $100 million valuation to do more sales, only to lose tens of millions of dollars each quarter because we're awesome.com slash bubble. And I think
00:12:42
Speaker
probably probably to see some of the, with the reckoning of the, you know, like I love Uber, but I believe Uber has hemorrhaged cash continuously. Like it's a great service, but it's not a company. Anyway, maybe think back to like at the end of the day, I hired you for never deviating from the core product. That's a good way to make a business. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um,
00:13:10
Speaker
We're struggling on packaging. We are trying to get better with our local corrugate suppliers who tend to do a pretty good job at doing what we tell them to do, but we're not box people, so it's hard for us
00:13:29
Speaker
Like John Saunders in 2007, I don't know how to send a print to a machine shop because I'm answering tolerance questions in carpenter terms like one 32nd of an inch. How to deal with a corrugate cardboard
00:13:42
Speaker
drawing and production run information like polarities, where the perf lines, what are overcuts and bleeds and entering. Like we had some delivered and the logo was off centered and angled. And I'm like, get these. I believe that was not so kind, like with my colorful language, like these shop now, like who in any right, like even if this wasn't clarified on a print, who would ever think like, oh yeah, we should run a thousand of these. You know what I mean?
DIY vs. Purchasing Equipment Debate
00:14:09
Speaker
So, some painful learning lessons there. But what I've sort of learned is that they just basically do what we say. Well, we're not package designers. And so, we do, I do need some help on, you know, like who do you, you have a cardboard box with your logo on it, right? We do not at the moment. Right now, we're just doing the white on the outside, brown on the inside you line.
00:14:35
Speaker
boxes. What's this? The saga box that we used to sell everything. Yeah. We went through the same process. We went through printing and packaging and cut lines and perforated lines and bends and folds and how to print it, where to print it. And it was a hassle, I remember. This thing? Yeah. Yeah. And that was a local company? Yep. Okay. So it was certainly handy to have it made locally. But
00:15:09
Speaker
Yeah. It's been a couple of years since we've even shipped those things. Cue the sad trombone. It's a saga box without a saga. That's even a couple of versions of saga box ago. All the ones we sell now, the women ones are much different than that. I had number 47. Had.
00:15:32
Speaker
Did you lose it once and then you found it again in the field? Twice. The third time I lost it for good. I didn't know exactly where it is. It's in the southwest plain middle seat back pocket.
00:15:48
Speaker
Actually, in some respects, kind of hope that like someday somebody finds on like eBay saga number 47, because it's like, hey, at this point, finders keepers. I can't. And if I remember it, was 47 like special to you? I think you asked for it. It was. Oh, yeah. Yeah. My first, well, I had a 22, but this kind of sounds funny, but I don't really care. My first like real rifle was an AK-47.
00:16:18
Speaker
Yeah, I had saved up money. I'm not going to say how old I was, but well, almost to high school. And yeah, at the time, they were incredibly inexpensive. This is the mid 90s. And so I always loved the number 47. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. So so you. Well, any other tidbits of good or bad? I mean, you obviously moved on from the box. Maybe that's saying enough as it is there for the cardboard. Yeah.
00:16:49
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know we. Oh, good luck.
00:16:55
Speaker
Yeah, we need to make some temporary boxes for a new product. And so we've used in the past a company called Pack Lane, P-A-C-K-L-A-N-E dot com. And so we had some ordered there and they seem to make it easy. And I suppose that's probably a good recipe is to use them as an R&D tool and then take a box that works and hand it to our local supplier. But even things like
00:17:22
Speaker
We've gotten boxes back where they did what we said, but then it's like, dude, when we're assembling this box, it doesn't fold over correctly. The foot tabs want to flip out and so forth. The struggle is real there. That's what sucks about not having direct quality control over the things you make, which is why we continue to take everything in-house and in-house.
00:17:47
Speaker
and more and more. And then the things we do buy off the shelf are solid products like the Uline boxes, they're not custom, they're just standard. That's actually a really good point is maybe I should take
00:18:00
Speaker
Because I don't think it's a quality control complaint. I'm not faulting the box company at all. No, but it's the design iteration revisions, right? I just don't know what to tell them. Yeah, I remember. And so maybe that's it. Maybe I need to take a Uline box and be like, I want the tabs to fold over like this. And I don't want the thing to bulge. I want the, you know, all those little things. Right. Because when you're starting from scratch, dude, you're not a packaging folding cardboard expert. Right. And yeah, no, I remember that.
00:18:27
Speaker
It's like having parts machined 10 years ago. I sent a bunch of stuff out originally.
Tool Management & Shipping Challenges
00:18:33
Speaker
It laid spacers and things like that. I don't know how to spec it, how to tolerate it. It's actually a great humbling reset to remind myself it's not easy when you don't know. If you had to come up with the
00:18:47
Speaker
plumbing requirements to build all the sub-varied stuff for a new shop. You would just be like, dude, I have no... I can't watch YouTube in a day and get smart on this. What was the cardboard WD-40 trick you just posted about to clean precision flat? Spencer Webb on Instagram has been talking about this a couple of days, past week or so, where the precision flat stones that he makes and sells
00:19:16
Speaker
They get dirty and gummed up over time with dirt and grit and just dust like machining dust. And yeah, he said spray WD-40 on a piece of cardboard.
00:19:27
Speaker
rub the stone onto it for like 10 seconds and they get nearly spotless. Interesting. It was really interesting. We just rub ours together, but. Yeah, that like cleans them surfacely. So they're fine again, but they still stay dirty, like in state and stuff. And we've ultrasonic cleaned them, which works quite well. But the WD-40, like my, what I would do now is I would WD-40 them on a piece of cardboard.
00:19:54
Speaker
I rub them on all sides for like 10 seconds each side and then ultrasonic clean them to get the WD-40 off. Because I did it last night and I was like, these now smell like WD-40. I don't really want that. So I washed them under the sink with Dawn dish soap and I scraped them together and I was like, yeah, this works too but ultrasonic probably would be better to get the WD-40 out. But they look brand new almost. It's like really cool.
00:20:19
Speaker
crazy excited to go try that. Yeah. Yeah. I was too. It just, I knew about it for a couple of days already and I was in the shop and it hit my brain and I was like, this is going to take me like three minutes to try out. So let me just go try this. And it was pleasantly surprised. And in a huge irony, I have plenty of cardboard that I don't like that I can use. No, it's funny. Okay. You have to use ceremonial cardboard. I think that's the, uh, that's the rule here. That's funny. Oh man.
00:20:49
Speaker
Well, on a more exciting positive note, the company DSI that Phil and Devin went to work for, they're an auditors reseller, which is kind of a funny term that I've never really considered like relevant to me.
00:21:06
Speaker
what they're doing is I think kind of interesting and hopefully good is they're trying to recognize the role fusion in the kind of new community of world of people like us, you know, people that use fusion and are active, but not necessarily the legacy like, you know, you and I weren't writing five figure checks for power mill and so forth, which is normally what the resellers I think, you know, put food on the table with. Anyway,
00:21:29
Speaker
DSI is putting together a fusion, what are they calling it? Not a fusion academy, but a fusion meetup, like a formal fusion event. Interesting. Yeah. They're doing it in, I'll have link. We'll put it up on our Instagram. We'll try to get it in the show notes here as well, but it's December 5th and 6th. The format that they decided to do is a paid event.
00:21:57
Speaker
It might be six and seven, sorry. But Tuesday, Wednesday, it's at Stewart Haas Racing in North Carolina. So I think there's going to be a chance to see some of both the NASCAR, but also really cool, the F1 side of things. It's also just a good place that has CNC machines and a big meeting space, if you will. So it's a paid two-day event. So think of it like the Fusion Academy in Portland that was awesome. Like mini AU, where only thing we're talking about is good fusion stuff. Cool.
00:22:27
Speaker
Yeah. So I'm going to be, they said I'm a speaker. I think I'm just going to like do a panel with other people or something, but
00:22:32
Speaker
the chance to see both from Autodesk what's coming, but as well as other Fusion users and Fusion educational type content on, I believe, mostly manufacturing stuff, which should be great. Like a mini Autodesk university, but only for Fusion. Bingo. Yes. When they asked me to get involved, I said, that's fine. I don't mind that that's paid event because if it's really good value content, so be it. But I think a big part of the Fusion world is also
00:22:59
Speaker
I hate the word inclusive, but the
Business Optimization & Future Goals
00:23:01
Speaker
truth is like, hey, like, you know, come hang out. So I think what we're going to try to do is figure out if on that Wednesday, the seventh at the end of the day, there can be kind of an open, open meet and greet, like open to anybody. You might have to register to get to have like a pass if you will, but shouldn't cost anything to see either Stuart Haas or to see us and other fusion folks, or I don't know if there'll be any sort of QA or just hang out, but PSA that is happening in early December.
00:23:29
Speaker
Sounds awesome. That sounds like fun, actually. Yeah, should be good. Yeah, I might think about that. You should come down. I might. I'll think about it. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is it's like it's. It's low stakes. Yeah. And like the the I've really enjoyed like seeing what Devin and Phil show in person to talk about is like, what's life's all about? Like, oh, my gosh, I didn't realize, you know, that's something you could do or a workflow or whatnot.
00:23:58
Speaker
Yeah, being friends with them online and also spending quite a bit of time with them at IMTS was really good. I was like, oh, that's what a DSI does. That's what an Autodesk reseller and the kind of work they get to do and help they get to do for other companies. It's like it's starting to make a lot more sense, you know, basically saying fusion users are not on their own if they're willing to pay a bit for help on post processors or workflow or whatever. And these two guys are absolute rock stars.
00:24:28
Speaker
cab cam machining, five axis, everything like top tier. What else is going on with you? So I had this issue with stuff like a week or two ago where
00:24:47
Speaker
The Kern would just start scrolling like we've got this big table file which is like an Excel spreadsheet in the Kern control panel that controls our schedule like palette management schedule and it would just start scrolling to the bottom. Nobody's touching the machine. It's just random scrolling like phantom and Angelo's like, oh no, is somebody hacking into the Kern because I know it's connected and I was like, no,
00:25:13
Speaker
It must be for my laptop. Maybe my mouse is broken. Maybe the scroll wheel is stuck because my laptop would do it too. My laptop is VNC viewing the Kern.
00:25:30
Speaker
down button was flaky, huge down key or something. So I'm thinking that I replaced my mouse, I'm hitting there, jabbing the keyboard, trying to break a key loose or whatever. And we just kind of dealt with it for a couple days until I finally realized that there was a box sitting on top of my space mouse ever so gently pushing the space mouse that this old one that I've had forever, it doesn't actually work for fusion anymore. But I still haven't plugged in for whatever reason.
00:25:56
Speaker
And it apparently still scrolls websites and stuff like that. And I had put a box off the top of it and. So the like six hours we use a space mouse, we had it like not calibrated perfectly and it was moving constantly at like point zero zero one percent. Yeah. So you're like W T. Yeah. If that happens to mine sometimes, if I unplug it and plug it back in again, it works fine again. Yeah. But I still use it at home not every day, but when I'm like getting into a design, um,
00:26:27
Speaker
I do like to use it but I don't need to use it. So, it's a take it or leave it kind of thing, you know? And you've clearly chosen to leave it.
00:26:35
Speaker
Oh, it's mostly a joke. But you don't use one to fact, right? I don't use one and I don't think anybody would watch me use... Look, I don't care. It's not a bragging contest, but I don't think anybody would watch me use Fusion or Computer and be like, oh man, he would be faster or more efficient or happier with a $200 heavy accessory. And to your point, I mean, I use four computers regularly, five really. I know that sounds egregious, but I just do.
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah, I've got three at least that I use regularly. Yeah, it's actually been a great way to... Well, so that maybe is the best segue I'm going to come up with to like things have changed around here at the shop. So, I'm in my office right now which is more paperwork or like big programming like I'm just kind of hunkering down. Otherwise, I try to stay out of here.
00:27:23
Speaker
I have a floating computer that's been next to the horizontal for most of this year, but it moves around to whatever the machine du jour is. And then lately, because Julie is no longer at Saunders,
00:27:41
Speaker
That's that's kind of been kind of what's rocked our world. I've been home office seen in the shipping area just to help guide the folks that are now helping step into that role, which is, you know, it's weird. Like it's a huge loss and a huge hole on the flip side. All you can do is hold your head high and recognize, hey, we do. What's your quote that you always talk about? You you fail to the level of your systems or something you know, it's not mine.
00:28:12
Speaker
Well, nobody like I heard it from you. Maybe I did. Maybe you aspire to the. Oh, it's like a I do remember reading that somewhere, but it didn't stick. Interesting. The the notions like you as you strive for the the aspirations of the future, but you fail to the level of your processes or something like that. And so the reality is, by and large, we're doing pretty well. Yeah. Isn't that weird? Like,
00:28:39
Speaker
You think of every employee in your company as absolute key players and then something shifts, rocks the world kind of thing. And you're like, oh, crap, now what? And then a couple of weeks later, you're like, we figured it out. We're not there yet. No, but you're it's visible, right? Yeah, we have figured it out in the sense that we kind of know what to do. Part of it's literally just the loss of inevitable tribal knowledge or just actual management level manpower, if you will.
00:29:10
Speaker
And you know, I think everyone kind of grieve is the right word. She's she's she did not succumb to the accident, but she's probably not going to be working here for a long time, if ever again. And there's a whole I mean, look, I even struggle with how to talk about it because I don't ever want to come up with anything other than
00:29:32
Speaker
Supportive and compassion caring but I've tended I tend to host this podcast under the guise of a guy who runs the machine shop and Let's focus on those reasons not the kind of like like I've been to the hospital visitor I went to see her elsewhere So I don't mean to be cold like that and I'm comfortable saying I'm not but from a hey I gotta run this business standpoint the show must go on But I'll tell you sometimes you need You need to
00:29:59
Speaker
Things like this make you realize how good we had it. This business a month ago was at a point where frankly, I probably was as close to ever as having the option to become an absentee owner if I wanted to. I've never desired to do that. Everything was humming. Material was getting ordered. Parts were getting made. QC was going out. Customer service. I still played some roles, but in hindsight, handing those few last little things off would have been child's play compared to where we're at now.
00:30:28
Speaker
So, yeah. It's a good perspective for you. Yeah. It's been a pretty miserable past few weeks because I don't want to stop being John. I don't want to stop thinking, exploring, videoing, contemplating because that's what I choose to want to do, but I have had to recognize I can't do all that and
00:30:51
Speaker
We had two new interns start, we had a new part-time shipping guy start. Training folks, not only does it take a huge amount of time, but normally, Julie would have been the one person to lead that training. That's something where, I think you and I talked about this before, I really like having other team members handle onboarding and training because it's...
00:31:12
Speaker
Yeah, I just do. Yeah, I'm, I'm getting there too. And it's, I think we're there having other team members do onboarding, which is really cool. I'm still kind of, it's weird to me, but, um, I mean, we've had several new employees lately that I haven't spent a lot of time with, um, because the rest of the team is, is onboarding them and getting them up to speed. And I'm like, this is great. I check in every now and then. I'm like, how's it going? You know, nothing I can do. No. Okay. Bye.
00:31:43
Speaker
So that is cool. Yeah, been tough though. I can imagine. Yeah. I'm glad I in hindsight made the decision to purchase two more tombstones. I feel like you and I could have a whole sub thread on like, should we DIY or not? Yes. The DIY epoxy tombstone is working out great and I would do them again
00:32:09
Speaker
and defend doing them again in a heartbeat with the caveat that it still took some time. Sure. You get you get a better design and you save some money. But ultimately, we just don't have the time. So I'm glad I bought two more cast iron ones there here. They're actually already installed machined for bringing up final fiction on board this morning. So that was an easy like just write the check, get them in the machine running period. And that's what I found about
00:32:37
Speaker
buying the thing is that I almost, unless it's an absolute failure, I almost never regret purchasing something. Yeah. And I enjoy having the time that it saves me to buy that thing. Um, unless cashflow is like seriously tight and then, you know, then the cost is, is a scary thing, but almost always like any tool that I purchase, anything that I bought instead of DIY, um, I never think back on it. I'm like, I shouldn't have done that. I spent that money. It's like, it's done, done and dusted and you,
00:33:07
Speaker
move on, wash your hands and don't think back to like, oh, that was $5,000. I could have saved that money by doing it myself. Like I just move on to the next project. And I'm like, that one's done and that took no effort. Sweet. Next.
00:33:19
Speaker
So where I would love to have the kind of over a beer debate on this is I don't disagree in some respects. It's just about money. You're fighting the wrong battle and so forth. But for me, it's a combination of number one, I want the product I want. I want the shape and size and so forth. Then you look, you can do these as weldments or castings on your own, I guess. But the real way is I
00:33:47
Speaker
like the thought that this business is at a point where we can serve as our own R&D and our own skunk works and our own development and prototyping. And so I want to think about making a tombstone, not as like throwing a wrench in everything we do, but rather like, hey, we have a team of people and resources and knowledge and equipment that is able to serve to support
00:34:11
Speaker
Saunders Machine Works as a product facing company and making a tombstone should be weighed as taking away from other R&D time, which is for sure real versus this idea of like, what the heck are you doing? Just go buy this commercially available product type of thing.
00:34:28
Speaker
Yeah. If the one you're going to make is going to be customized in a way that benefits you, that adds a big plus one to the DIY. I've come to this point so many times. If the one I'm going to make is nearly identical or essentially identical to the one that's off the shelf, unless the off the shelf one is ridiculously expensive, then it's like, what are you doing? I have
00:34:51
Speaker
more important. Why are you redesigning something, somebody that already spent hours designing and manufacturing? It's usually only until about 80% through the project that I'm like, why did I do this?
00:35:04
Speaker
but you and I are both going to commit this sin. You're probably committing this sin right now, John. You're not buying a turnkey router. You're having somebody, do your credit, having somebody else do a lot of the work, but still it's some form of a project. For sure. I was almost going to buy a Pearson vacuum pallet, but it was slightly the wrong size and too big for this video layout that are on my table, so I made my own vacuum pallet.
00:35:29
Speaker
which I'm re-engineering what it was. But mine is exactly 12 by 12, and his is 13 and a half by something. And it wouldn't have fit on the table. Otherwise, I would have done it in a heartbeat. But I was like, OK, so here I am re-engineering what he's done already in a production format. And it worked. It's cool. It's integral. It fits right on the chunk pallets. It's got pull studs on the bottom. It's what I want.
00:35:54
Speaker
Yeah. It was actually really nice to give me good seat time on this video to post code and load parts and fixtures and stuff. I'm glad I did it, but yeah. Yeah. I guess the hard part is the undersides.
00:36:11
Speaker
connection, sorry, the airflow tubes, slots underneath it, right? Because otherwise, a vacuum chuck, slots on the top is no big deal. Yeah, mine is just slots on the top with one big hole in the middle and a vacuum fitting underneath with a plastic hose. Oh, that's not a big deal, John. It wasn't a big deal, but it was time and effort and I have a lot of other things to spend time and effort on. Sure. Everything going okay on that front? I think so.
00:36:35
Speaker
Yeah, I'm really working hard to stay focused like the saga cases right now because we're making sagas and we don't have cases to sell them. So we are collecting. And I do want to talk about this more publicly, like to my audience, not just the podcast, but it's going to be good. So we have quite a few to sell, which will be good. And
00:36:58
Speaker
It puts the pressure on me to finish the cases though, which has been my primary focus for the past little bit. And today I should have production ones finished. We should have a finished couple of cases today and then with a good process to run them. So right after the podcast, that's my focus on that. And then my mind is already starting to drift as to like, OK, I can hand this process off to the team and they can run it. What's next for me? What's the next challenge that I get to sink my teeth into?
00:37:28
Speaker
I've had a lot of seat time on the speedio lately, which has been fun. I've got to move on to something else. Can I ask you a tool break question? Because we're having this problem on our raccoon now. Let's say on the Kern, you're running a pallet 22 and it breaks a 360 and 10 mil. Okay, so the tool
00:37:51
Speaker
probably continues. It breaks in the middle of a cam operation. The machine doesn't know it until the end of that cycle or cam operation when it goes over and does the laser or tool probe check and then it knows it's broken. Okay, good. We know that's broken. Right now, our Akuma just stops.
00:38:12
Speaker
Does your CERN move on to the next thing and or if so, how does it know if the next program or one of the next program also uses that tool? So this is a really good question and I saw it coming a mile away when you started talking about it.
00:38:28
Speaker
Right now, my current is set up. All my machines are set up to do exactly that. Stop all everything on a broken tool, which sucks much of the time. You come into the shop in the morning expecting the current to still be running and it's stuck on a broken tool. To our credit, that almost never happens anymore. We have tool life and tool redundancy and reliability like wonderful to the point where we almost never break a tool like
00:38:52
Speaker
a handful a month, if that I don't even know. So you have sister tools or you have the custom thing that tells you this, this tool has done 27 price, 27 knives, replace it now. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so kind of predictive tool replacement schedule is our primary thing. Redundant tools only work if you hit max tool life, and the machine wants to keep running and nobody's replaced that tool yet. And then there could be a replacement tool to keep going. And we have like,
00:39:22
Speaker
probably four or five replacement tools that almost never get used in the machine because we have predictive tool life scheduled so good. So anyway, on a breakage, it will halt all production. I've started to implement little flags like variables one or zero kind of thing for if the breakage check
00:39:44
Speaker
breaks, it would be really nice to be able to take that flag to layer by layer exit out of all of my sub programs and then keep that flag and then put the palette away and then flag our palette management site software that says like this palette is problem whatever. Yes. Pull up the next palette and keep machining.
00:40:06
Speaker
as opposed to halting everything. On the Kern or on Heidenhein, when a tool breaks, it locks that tool in the tool table, puts an L on it. So that, depending on how you configure it, the machine could keep running. But the next time it tries to call that tool, it will not be able to. If you have a sister tool for that, it will call the sister instead, which could keep going. So if you have three or four tools that are iffy that can break, and you're worried about them, and you put these flags in place,
00:40:35
Speaker
you can absolutely have the machine put that pilot away, get the next one, keep machining, call the sister tool when it needs to and keep going and I kind of want to get to that system but I haven't been forced to yet because our current method like works. It's probably a huge amount of work for... It can be, yeah. So this happened last night, I happened to check at 10 o'clock, an unusual tool had broke and... In person or like webcam? Webcam. So you're sitting at home going, do I go to bed or...
00:41:03
Speaker
Actually, I was driving home. We were at a thing. I thought, oh, this is no big deal. I'll just swing by the shop. What I wish would have happened is that was a broken pallet to Tombstone 2. It had one and four Tombstones left to run that night. One actually used that same tool. I would love a scenario where it says, I can't run one because that would use the same tool, but I can run four. Four is totally fine to keep running. Like you, I don't really want to spend all this time to put this into place because
00:41:32
Speaker
It's not the lowest hanging fruit right now. Yeah, you would need a way to tell your logic that tool whatever is being used on Tombstone 1. That info exists in the form of a simple look ahead.
00:41:50
Speaker
Oh, I mean, if you could write, you know, conversational programming, it would be a little statement that would say, if next, you know, next program includes these tools, skip if next run, just loop that through until it finds a program that doesn't use that tool. That's part of a family. Like you can't run a second program that first up hasn't been run, but it wouldn't be. I don't know how to do look ahead through a program.
00:42:15
Speaker
Me neither, but I mean, the machine scan through a program to see what, in fact, the post even lists them at the front. Like you could easily. That's what I would do. Yeah. But again, I don't want to do this. It's just kind of one of those, like, what's the history where we are now and where the future will be in 20 years? Like you should just. Actually, that that is how I set up the Maury, because the custom configured the post to output every tool number as a variable, like one through 30. And then the first line of the code
00:42:44
Speaker
reads all of those, reads what's available in the tool magazine, and compares them. And if a tool is not in the pot, because you took it out for something, it won't run the program. And if tool life is expired, it also won't run the program, like on cycle start. Yeah, right. And that works really well. It's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I actually have a bunch of other questions, but I'll save them for next week. Well, it sounds great. I gotta run.
00:43:10
Speaker
Shipping John is being called. Yes. No, it's all good. I struggle with like keeping it real, but also recognizing, hey, we'll figure it out. So what's your first task you're going to go do right now?
00:43:27
Speaker
So we have an order going overseas. I need to make sure that that is absolutely packaged up perfectly. We had to order some new metric hardware that just came in from that same McMaster order. I need to just make sure that's right. And then I can get boxed up. And then we are trying to
00:43:49
Speaker
Well, here, my list right here is, I have a quote to process long-term. I've got a way to offload the quoting stuff, but I'm doing it right now. And then I'm going to go clean those. I'm going to try the WD-40 thing. I bought a new GoPro, so I want to test it out. And then we had some problems with our GoPros. It's like, okay, it's time to stop messing around with these older heroes. Just get a new one.
00:44:16
Speaker
I'm tracking down a rare example of a company that's not paying us. So trying to deal with that and our contact there just left the company from a email bounce or email like I'm no longer with. So we'll see how that one plays out. Interesting. Is this like a sub thousand dollar order or over a thousand dollar? It's just under two thousand dollar order. And it's a
00:44:41
Speaker
ISO 9001 aerospace company that has press releases and appears to have billions of dollars. There's a couple of things that sort of feel like it could be fraud too, but that's me more just like playing fun with like, is this, am I getting defrauded here? Because it's like, wait a minute, who is setting up all this work to buy this? Like it's not like you can resell one of our fixture plates for an organized, you know, organized way of like defrauded people perpetually. So it's probably more just like a
00:45:11
Speaker
I suspect we'll get paid. But anyway, you're going to have to ask the right person enough times kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Interesting. Well, good luck with that one. Yeah.
00:45:22
Speaker
And then just getting orders pulled and packaging and like that's another big loss where it's like hey boxes are also even the boxes that we have that we like are longer lead time and a little bit harder to track quantities of because the Kanban cards don't really work that well in our experience for where to get reordered. I know in a perfect world you could shove the Kanban card in halfway down like Jay Pearson does but like it just doesn't work great. Where are the other breadcrumbs of them? Do we have a whole nother palette of them? Those sorts of problems.
00:45:50
Speaker
Yeah. I'm trying to, I got to take the lead on. So yeah. Sounds good. Good day. All right. I'll see you later. Bye.