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Business of Machining - Episode 26
237 Plays8 years ago
Video: Okamoto - I DO give a chuck!
Book: THE GRINDING WHEEL
The Rask order is nearing completion and the stork's bringing the VF2.
Saunders has a fantastic week. Systems are falling into place but he reminds himself "not to count his chips while he's at the table." Grimsmo still thinks it's a good idea to pat yourself on the back every once in a while.
The guys discuss accounting, tool organization and an important question that was posed by Saunders in episode 17. Now that Grimsmo's had some time to think, he's got some answers but what if it wasn't the right question to ask? Tune in to find out about a project that will give some weight to spinner production and Saunders's $11.82 "teaser nugget." Can anyone guess what's going on with that? Hmmm...
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Transcript
Introduction and Social Media Shift
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining, episode number 26. My name is John Grimsmough. My name is John Saunders. Good morning, my friend. Good morning, how are you? I'm pretty fantastic today, fired up for a solid Friday coming up.
00:00:17
Speaker
I don't know about you and everyone else that listens, but I am guilty of often flipping through social media when I wake up. And in fact, I actually stopped doing Facebook because Facebook has a lot of poisonous elements to it. But I do look at Instagram because my Instagram friend is pretty a good list. And your spinners and pictures and energy popped up, and it got me fired up. Nice. I posted it last night and went to sleep, and I haven't checked it since.
Rask Pre-orders and Machining Challenges
00:00:45
Speaker
No, that's funny. Yeah, so that's good. I will after this. The pictures look good, and then the Rask pre-orders. I mean, that's just awesome. Yeah, we're making solid, solid progress on those. So that's really cool.
00:00:56
Speaker
What's next? What's the nitty gritty on that? Is it blades? Is it the whole knives, material? We have everything we need. It's just machining the last few parts, which I'm working on, a couple more pivots. And we're at the end of the list now. So of course, we left all the hard stuff, the Damascus, the Damasteel, to the end. So it's making the knives take longer than they normally would if they were a more simple version. But not to make excuses. No, but that's the way you should do it. Yeah.
00:01:27
Speaker
Yeah, let us get all the more simple ones done earlier.
Tackling Tasks with Dave Ramsey's Methodology
00:01:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:33
Speaker
It goes back to something I wholeheartedly believe in, which is the Dave Ramsey belief. He espouses this with regard to debt and financial progress. But I think it's true of anything from a small to-do list, which is get the stuff done in order of easiest to complete or smallest or quickest. So you don't spend months getting hung up on tough knives, don't need to finish those, and then bang out the easy ones in a few days at the end. That may be an exaggeration, but you get my point.
00:02:03
Speaker
But yeah, and you, how was your week?
Partnership and Business Efficiency
00:02:07
Speaker
It's fantastic. I was putting my notes together and thinking, a little bit of stress, not going to lie, but I am, this is going to sound really kissy-uppy to you, but I am really grateful
00:02:22
Speaker
We wouldn't be operating as efficiently if it weren't for my friendship with you, my relationship with you, this podcast. We're now finally to the point where had we not done things, we would be spiraling out of control. I feel the same way. OK, go on. Which is awesome.
00:02:41
Speaker
No, no, it's just it's everything. It's the fact that we're doing this all sounds self-serving, which is not the point of talking to you or this podcast. But I mean, we're now selling oftentimes multiple training class seats per day. We're selling this week. I think I've got two thousand dollars in shipping expenses of a product.
00:03:01
Speaker
So we've got these systems down, we've got the QC down, we're starting to get our process down on the goofs because guess what? We shipped out one product where we missed a small tiny little part. It's okay. To me, I think very few customers will become judgmental
Sales Success and Customer Service Systems
00:03:21
Speaker
of you. It's a question of how quickly and responsive are you to that stuff.
00:03:28
Speaker
And we're just crushing on videos, Ed's doing, it just, the wheels are in motion and it feels good. You always, I always cautious, when things are good, don't ever get full of yourself, don't get comfortable, and I don't ever want to do that on the flip side, darn it. It's fun to be executing, it really is. And I mean, you're allowed to pat yourself on the back every now and then too.
00:03:52
Speaker
Yeah, I guess that's true. I don't know. Yeah, you're right. It's funny. I did my quick look at our books for the year, which this is a problem in our business.
Bookkeeping Challenges and Solutions
00:04:02
Speaker
And I don't know how to solve this problem right now. But I don't believe that the person who prepares your numbers, your accounting, your books, all that should be the same person that reviews them. Because I think when you, it's just like you don't do your own QC, right? You hand the knife to Eric or somebody else to say, hey, look this over. Not fair enough. Yeah, that makes sense.
00:04:22
Speaker
Because you're too in the weeds to have any objective view of it. So what I kind of do is every day, every morning I import our checking statements and our credit card statements. We use a credit card only to buy stuff that gets paid off immediately.
00:04:38
Speaker
And then every month I do a quick sort of overview review, but then like every six months I kind of take a look. And I was actually like, holy cow, we have more revenue than I was thinking we would have in my head, just budgeting, whatever.
00:04:56
Speaker
Which is great, but what occurred to me was we're not like the world's best QuickBooks users, or there's definitely a risk that mistakes could have been made on some things. Like, for instance, I'm not going to get into the weeds here. But if I create an invoice in QuickBooks and generate that invoice and send it out, but then when I reconcile that transaction, like when they send the payment in, if I don't match the two together, then it effectively double books revenue. Does that make sense? OK.
00:05:27
Speaker
which is really bad because you think you made double the money you actually made and worse off, you're going to end up paying tax on money you never really earned. So long story short is I had my accountant come in and we spent like two hours yesterday going through QuickBooks reconciliation function. So I literally printed out all my bank statements for the year. We started with the Jan 1 balance and we went through everything and you know, it didn't take that long.
00:05:51
Speaker
And now going forward, I can do that every month. I bet you I can do that every month in like, I don't know, seven, eight minutes. And that gives me basically 100% confidence in my numbers, which is a big deal. Yeah, because numbers don't lie, but only if you're looking at everything, at the right things, right? Right. I'm not going to miss revenue, and I'm not going to miss expenses. Good. Done. Great. Yeah. Do you have everything import kind of automatically from your bank statements to your online payments in and out to QuickBooks?
Financial Tools and Team Building
00:06:20
Speaker
Or is it more manual?
00:06:22
Speaker
No, it's all I pay. It's a little bit of a thorn in my paw, but I pay Chase. We use Chase. I pay them $10 a month to give me the direct QuickBooks access. So every morning, I just go download statements, and it downloads everything. And average day, we'll get between 10 and 25 things, either revenue or expenses combined.
00:06:45
Speaker
So it definitely takes me a few minutes. We use classes in QuickBooks. I should do a whole video on this. We do classes in QuickBooks. That has nothing to do with my tax bill to the government. But it separates out, generally speaking, job shop training, YouTube, and products. And if it's a McMaster bill and most of it was for products and a little bit was for training, it's my own classification. It doesn't matter for anything else. But anyway, I do that every day.
00:07:15
Speaker
Okay, because QuickBooks is something I've never done. I've always sent it out for a bookkeeper. But this is my August project, is to get QuickBooks, implement it, use it, and fill it up. Are you set on QuickBooks? No. Well, I don't know.
00:07:32
Speaker
You know, I don't have the energy to dive into this again. I looked pretty hard at this and I got pretty close to using a thing called Xero. I think it's X-E-R-O. Or I would have switched and used QuickBooks online. I use the QuickBooks paid, the actual installed software.
00:07:52
Speaker
Everyone's moving to the cloud and everybody's moving to subscription services, which is fine with me. I have no appetite for people that want to complain that they don't own the software these days because QuickBooks still hits me up every year or two and they force you to upgrade or else you don't get blah, blah, blah.
00:08:09
Speaker
I would do an online version. Then you actually probably don't have to pay for syncing with your bank. But more importantly, QuickBooks has little to no integration with things like Shopify or PayPal. Whereas when you do the online one, they're going to have much better APIs. Yeah, I need that. Right. So go look at QuickBooks online or zero is my recommendation. Perfect. Thank you. And I'm sure that will be helpful to everybody else listening too, because this is something I've been avoiding for a very, very, very long time.
00:08:38
Speaker
Yeah, it'll be good. Yeah. Actually, the point I brought, the reason I brought that up was actually less about the minutia of accounting and more. You've got to build your team. Yes, I'm a bootstrapper. Yes. I'm going to get a bill for a hundred, $200 for my accountant for the time in here. That was well worth it. He's an expert. He's the one that I lean on when if there's a problem, have them come, you know, so for you, John, go find who are you, who are you going to use for your,
00:09:04
Speaker
County or tax stuff make sure they're comfortable with the software there may be your own form of tech support And build your team up that way you don't have to become an expert. Yep. Yeah Well real quick you've said for many many months now You know that you reconcile your books every morning and you get this mental snapshot every morning And you feel you know clean and fresh and on top of it And I don't so I've been I've been wanting to get to that point
00:09:34
Speaker
Yeah, to be clear, though, and again, this would be a great video topic. There's a huge disconnect for me between historical accounting and how I actually operate and budget and forecast and think about my business. I basically almost never, which is a, I'm not saying that's the right way to do it or it's a good thing going forward, but I don't get to, it's kind of like the poker saying you don't got your chips when you're at the table.
00:09:59
Speaker
as you've been mentioning it all this time.
00:10:04
Speaker
I now know how much we made in the past, and I think I have a good idea of how we're going to make money going forward. But they're kind of disconnected. That makes sense. You always end up spending way more money than you expected. Yeah, exactly. Past success does not guarantee future success. Right, right. The other fun little pickup thing was, actually, it's funny I use that word, is we use Shopify for the Saunders MachineWorks store for the products.
Shopify Workarounds and External Problem-Solving
00:10:31
Speaker
And I wanted to wait for the people that come take our training classes to be able to buy something and then do a local pickup. Because right now, usually we refund them the shipping, which is a manual process, which is prone for error and just not great. And Shopify basically doesn't support it, but there's a hack. The hack is something like where you can add 1,000 pound product, which then triggers its own shipping class, which opens up a zero shipping hour option or something.
00:10:57
Speaker
And I was proud of myself because I was able to Google it and figure that out. And then I look, and it's like, oh, it's code. It's tweaking. It's troubleshooting. It's testing. Upwork, baby. Again, I went to Upwork. I had a guy who I've used before to help with the Shopify store. I don't even know what it's going to cost me, $40 or something. And he went through, did it, built it, integrated it, tested it. It's like, that's a win. Nice.
00:11:24
Speaker
Oh, somebody, I guess the person asked this probably because of the lag. They asked for an update on the Linda grinding wheel. Is that story really? Well, no. Go ahead. That's a good question.
00:11:41
Speaker
OK, I forget how much
Grinding Wheel Issues and Task Completion Plans
00:11:43
Speaker
I've updated you. But basically, both the wheels that I have are cracked, although one of them works. One of them seems to be less cracked than the other one. OK.
00:11:54
Speaker
And now, I mean, now that we're at the tail end of the Rask pre-order, or obviously not done making them forever, we're going to make a lot more in the future. I'm just trying to find the best way to do it as we move forward. But I only have like 20 more blades to grind, and then I'm all caught up. And I think I can pull that off with the less cracked wheel that we have. So I'm not dead in the water right now. I can finish what I need. And then moving forward, I've got some other
00:12:19
Speaker
ideas whether I don't know if I'm going to get another wheel from Linda. That's the question. So they worked, it's also slow and unfortunately for whatever reason they don't last. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah, whether it's user error. I mean obviously I broke one of them during installation. I did it wrong. Right. And the other one cracked, I don't know how, just through use or something.
00:12:46
Speaker
I'm not knocking the quality of the product, but it's the method, the implementation that I'm doing, the way I'm using it. It's not giving me the results that I want. Yeah, which all the matters. It's all the matters. I don't have to be loyal to anyone if it's not producing the results that I specifically want, so I think I've got to try another method.
00:13:10
Speaker
Yeah, I'll be able to get through this and then I can take my time and figure out next course of action.
00:13:18
Speaker
Got it. Yeah, it's going good. Interesting. Well, that was a fun little saga. We just published our Okamoto video on what we did to kind of repair that machine. And there's this book I got. Actually, a guy named Andrew gave it to me at the open house, a really good book called The Grinding Wheel. And it's got these just beautiful. Yeah, awesome kid. Awesome. I say kid. I mean, guy, right? Young person, yeah.
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah, younger fellow from the Chicago area knows his stuff, really passionate, just really enjoyed. He was actually here hanging out like the morning of our day before something. But that book had, actually, you know what? I'm going to stop our conversation. I'm going to read this passage. May I? Yes.
00:13:59
Speaker
Chapter 14 truing dressing and balancing reason for dressing the ideal grinding wheel if such a thing existed would be self-sharpening its abrasive grain size grade bond structure and operating speed as well
00:14:16
Speaker
as the speed and nature of the work and other controllable variants would be such that the stresses on the cutting points would cause them to be fractured just before they became dull enough to glaze. They would thus offer new sharp points in effect, new cutting tools, or if their substance was so far gone that the bond had a tenuous hold, they would be torn out in new grains, slightly deeper set would come into action.
00:14:44
Speaker
Come on, is that not beautiful? It's like gospel. Yes, yes. At the risk of sounding sacrilegious, it is. Grinding, I was so in my journeys as a self-taught machinist, I was so dismissive of abrasive processes. I'm like, oh, grinding. Do you think belt grinder, bench grinder, lack of, and I'm now realizing that it's just such the ultimate thing. Yeah, especially surface grinding. It is...
00:15:11
Speaker
Yes. There's so much to learn. And when I was working with the Lindo wheel, you know, I did a ton of research on surface grinding in general, just practices and everything. And obviously with your Okamoto, you've been diving deep into it too. It's a deep swimming pool.
00:15:26
Speaker
Yeah, yes. It is cool, though. It is really cool. So it's fun. Nice. So speaking of self-taught and new, I asked you that question months ago about if you all of a sudden had $500,000, what would you do or
Rebuilding the Shop: Investment Strategies
00:15:45
Speaker
buy? And I think the tough thing with those questions is it's too much like I won the lottery. And the truth is that
00:15:51
Speaker
No one answers those questions, honestly, because it's not real. Most people say they would buy something, and the truth is, would you really go do that? But here's the other way to think about it, which I really like, which is, if you had one week to repurchase or restart over, rebuild your whole shop,
00:16:13
Speaker
What would you buy again? How would you structure it, organize it, and what would you do differently? That's really funny because as I've been finishing the e-myth and reading sections that I'd never read before, because I never actually finished it the first time,
00:16:29
Speaker
And the past week, and I watched the movie The Founder, actually I've got 15 minutes. You did? I got 15 minutes at the end that I haven't seen yet. But I've seen most of it. The first half of the movie is phenomenal. It's like epic. Is that brutal? Yeah. Yes.
00:16:45
Speaker
I've been thinking about your question is if somebody forcefully invested half a million dollars or a million dollars or whatever to your business, how would you restructure it? How would you set it up for the future? How do you plan your business to be the biggest it could ever be from the start? And I've got different answers to your question than I had originally when you first asked it a few months ago. Oh, really? Yeah. Share, talk.
00:17:10
Speaker
Because then my first answer, my only answer, was hire people. I need people. I have everything I need here, which is mostly true.
00:17:19
Speaker
If I wanted to grow and if I wanted to hire several people and if I had the opportunity to start over and organize the shop differently or scale up from here and get more machines and things like that, I'm starting to develop a little mental wish list of what do I want to do in the next, say, five years with this business and how would it grow and how would it look like.
00:17:44
Speaker
from the get go, it's kind of like a game to think about it now. What would it be like? And I think we'd grow out of this shop space fairly quickly. We could stay here as long as we needed, but if we are to scale and grow and get bigger, we should plan for a bigger shop space soon enough and take the time it takes to renovate it and make it nice. Aren't you a do up on your lease anyways? Yeah, I think we got a three year lease. We just passed two years.
00:18:12
Speaker
But I'm sure that's flexible if we wanted to get out early or something like that, or stay later, it doesn't matter. So moving shop would not be the first task at hand of course, but I'm trying to think like what kind of machines would I want. I think I have a Swiss lathe or two in my future, my distant future.
00:18:32
Speaker
As much as I love my Nakamura, I think a Swiss would be much more suited to make the knife parts, the small round extremely tight tolerance parts. I'm struggling with that a little bit on my neck. Can I interrupt you?
00:18:49
Speaker
Everybody talks about the set of time and difficulty on a Swiss lei, but why wouldn't you make a, and I know enough about Swiss leis, but I don't know, not an expert, why would you not make a Swiss lei that had pinned, basically hot-swappable gang tooling blocks so that you could, you should be able to relocate one of those within a few tenths, and you could just pull off a whole rack of tooling and put it back on. That's a fantastic idea.
00:19:17
Speaker
Does that not, that has to exist. That has to exist, I don't know. Okay. But yeah, everybody keeps quoting like three hours to set up a Swiss or eight hours to set up a Swiss. And I'm thinking to myself like, what? Obviously Paul Akers has never owned a Swiss lathe. Right. He would own six of them and have each one set up for each product.
00:19:35
Speaker
No, but again, a lot of them have two or three rows of tools, often at 90 degree angles relative to each other. Just have strips that you pull off. This is something gang guys do, right? Yeah, exactly. That's a fantastic idea. I think that the time quoted for that is to pull off every single tool and replace it with a different every single tool. And there's no tool setter, so you have to touch off manually. You have to do a test cut, et cetera, et cetera.
00:20:06
Speaker
But they have no tool center? No, they don't. That's for the birds. Unsubscribe. I'm not interested anymore. I think some of the super fancier ones might. But just the way that it's, I don't know, there might be some on the fans. You should be able to, I mean, even one of the bloom optical ones, whatever. Well, you think most of the cutoff tools and turning tools are at
00:20:33
Speaker
But the spindle face. So a cut off tool would have to, or a probe would have to be at the spindle face. So? Yeah. I'm sure there's a way. Put a probe in the spindle. Yeah, exactly. That's not a bad idea. But I think if you bought a machine with enough tool holders, and as we talked about last week with swing tools versus standard tools,
00:21:03
Speaker
on my lathe, I'm really only changing out two or three tools ever. My turning tool, my parting tool, my boring tool, my probe, my spot, my drill, they all stay on the machine forever and I would do the same with the Swiss. So that setup time garbage is you're changing out some collets and some couple things here and there, 20 minutes and you're done, I'm hoping, I don't know.
00:21:24
Speaker
But anyway, down the road. I am strongly considering the Swiss though, down the road, to add to the inventory of machines. And I think I definitely need a second mill. Like when you said, when you first told me you need a second mill, I was like, whoa, whoa there buddy. But now I'm, I see it. I'm not anywhere close to purchasing one, but I'm like, man, this one's running and I've got other stuff to do. I need like an R&D mill.
00:21:53
Speaker
No, I mean, we literally have the tool holders came in. We have all the tooling came in. And we have it all set up. It's on a cart. It's next to the place where the machine's going to go. So the machine will have been there by the time this arrived, by the time this podcast airs. But it comes Tuesday between 10 and 11 AM. Electrician's booked. And I mean, literally, I also have to come do the set up and install. So that'll take a couple of days. But then we're just going to start running jobs on it.
00:22:23
Speaker
It's not that it's not exciting. It's incredibly exciting. But it's completely different. It's not daunting. I'm going to get crushed for making this analogy. But it's like when you have your second kid. You're like, we go to the hospital. I can't bend that down there. Right.
00:22:43
Speaker
Sorry, don't tell Meg I said that. More Yvonne, actually. Yvonne definitely doesn't listen to the podcast, so I'm safe. Yeah, Meg told me the other day, she's like, yeah, I stopped listening to them after the first few. They're just too geeky for me. I love you, but. Yeah, that's awesome. Anyway.
00:22:58
Speaker
No, I mean, it sits there to make parts. I am super excited. What I am excited too is I've really rethought our tool organization. And we've got, you've got tool libraries that exist in Fusion. You've got tool libraries that exist at the machine controller. You've got physical tool libraries that exist in the actual inventory of cutting tools, right? And I've been really rethinking that workflow.
00:23:24
Speaker
Are you going to keep the same tool number on your VM3 and your VM2? Like the face mill is always tool number, yada, yada. It's funny you actually had not thought about that. Almost certainly not because it's a fallacy.
00:23:41
Speaker
There's no point in that structure because unless it's the exact, which it could be, if it's the exact same, you know, Sandvik or whatever, 245, with the same inserts, maybe, but even then, no.
00:23:58
Speaker
Because Tool 1 isn't going to be the same. Tool 7 is not going to be the same. I'm trying to get away from each machine's going to have core tools that never leave the machine, and then they're going to have hot-swappable tools. I'm actually getting closer to the point where I haven't fully baked this, so I don't want to share it.
00:24:18
Speaker
Basically, I want to do more like in the SNH tour. Basically, you spend the money to buy tool holders so that when you're job specific or
00:24:31
Speaker
Sort of yeah, I mean when you have a part The part to run that part the tools are already set up They just happen to be in an offline cart if you depending on how meticulous you are you may not even have to retouch them off because Like on the hodge controller you can actually store all your tooling offsets with a program That makes sense. Oh interesting Okay
00:24:52
Speaker
So when I load up a program 1007 to make a bracket, it can actually re-update your whole tool table, presupposing that tool one isn't this end mill, tool two is this drill at this specific height.
Tool Organization for Efficient Production
00:25:06
Speaker
So it's prone for a big time error or crashing machine if you happen to mix tools up or change the tool out and not do that update, but boy, also pretty cool on the upside. Yeah, if you had dedicated job tool holders,
00:25:23
Speaker
Then that would work excellent Yeah, in my mind, maybe this is flawed. Maybe this is old-school whatever but like my t16 my tool 16 is always a quarter inch rougher So whatever job I do I know in my head as I'm setting up infusion Oh, this has to be a t16 or my face smells always 64 or whatever it is like and if I had multiple machines I think I would want that consistency, but I know what do you think you've got I?
00:25:47
Speaker
You got to get away from that because because this the number 16 has nothing to it's a superfluous piece of piece of data Has nothing to do with the actual tool or the process and what we need to look part of this is the problem The fact that fusions tool library needs to be improved a little because the filters stink right now but
00:26:06
Speaker
What you care about is the fact that it's a quarter inch rougher, not that it's a tool 16 period. And look, one of the things I wish, because of the way our Haas, actually your mooring has to be the same way as well. Tool numbers don't correspond to pocket numbers. I was thinking about a little wireless Arduino two digit thing that we could stick on each pocket, but that's also fighting the wrong battle. What I do want to do is write
00:26:36
Speaker
A script, so let's say on our 40 tool changer, tools one through 23 are core tools. Again, they don't correspond to pocket numbers, so what I want to do is write a script that automatically goes through tools 24 through 40 and makes you take them all out.
00:26:58
Speaker
So at the end of the day, an intern or somebody, an operator, can go up to the machine and run the program that basically says, shed swing tooling. Because look, we're all guilty. You finish a job, something happens, and you leave a quarter inch twist drill in there, and there's no easy way to solve that really quickly. Yeah, I was talking with Rob Lockwood about this a few weeks ago, because they've got a micron with 300 tools in it or something like that.
00:27:26
Speaker
And he's like, yeah, an operator puts in a quarter inch drill, and then the next guy puts in another quarter inch drill, and then the next guy, they don't realize that there's already one in there. Right. It's actually interesting, too. Eric at Orange Vice was talking about this, where they have the problem of not putting in more than one redundant tool. So let's say they use a 3-8 inch end mill to do a brothead and finishing or something. They may put one more in.
00:27:53
Speaker
But then that's it because they found, and I hope I'm paraphrasing this correctly, if they put six in and they have enough tool holders to do that, they put six in. It's too likely that all of a sudden you're going to realize, oh my gosh, we went through all the machine kicked out all six for because it measured where offsets. So now all of a sudden we're down or we're missing six tools. I've got a working capital problem. I'm ordering six tools. I've got a time of six tools, a machine down while I actually set up six tools.
00:28:21
Speaker
It's too chunky. Yeah, I watched that in your orange video and it was really interesting to hear him talk about that. You know, you think you'd have all these redundants, but he came up with a very practical point of once you try it and do it, then you realize, oh man, all those problems. Right. And so that's also what spurred part of our reorganization thoughts, which is on the machine, we have toolboxes for each machine and that's going to have
00:28:48
Speaker
a shallower bin, Kaizen foam, whatever, something that'll have the core tool library. So we'll probably have one extra of each core tool there. And then we'll also have our main tool boxes that hold all of our other tools. So that will be sort of breadcrumbing, which means, if you don't know lean breadcrumb, which I just learned is when you, so let's say you have 10,000 fasteners on inventory, because it makes sense to order 10,000. Well, you may only put 500,
00:29:16
Speaker
up at assembly area, but you breadcrumb it back to the other $9,500 somewhere else in the shop for storage, less expensive real estate.
00:29:24
Speaker
So then in our, quote unquote, tool room, tool library, physical box that has extra tools, that can have our more random tools, the tools we're going to use every day, as well as the higher quantities of our core tools. And that way, every machine has at least one extra core tool, plus we have, so where does the Kanban card live? That's the question. The Kanban card can then live back at the core tool library, or excuse me, at the tool room, I think. Right, once you're out of inventory there.
00:29:55
Speaker
So if you wear out a half inch twist drill at the machine, you grab the extra one from the machine toolbox, then you walk over to the other box to grab the replacement for
Tool Inventory Management with Kanban
00:30:08
Speaker
the replacement. And if that one has less than five there, whatever the inventory number is, then that triggers a reorder. So you take the one from the toolbox, put it in the machine, hit go so that it's cycling. It's running. And then you can take your time and walk back to the tool crib.
00:30:25
Speaker
replace it and fill out the Kanban card and order it and all that stuff while the machine's running. I like it.
00:30:32
Speaker
The other thing I want to do with this is have those shower bins labeled somehow with the tool number because part of the problem right now is if I pull up a half inch lakeshore carbide four flute end mill, I can tell that it's for steel because of the coating, but I can't tell is that a square shoulder? Does it have a 10 thou radius? So by having a shower bin at the cart with the tool box from the manufacturer on it, I can quickly scan or Google that
00:31:01
Speaker
Look up that tool to say. Oh, this is a 30 thou rad, right? It's actually not gonna not gonna work or I need to run it deeper or something Barry actually came up with a very simple and elegant solution for that here He simply takes the sticker off of the plastic end mill container and slaps it on the shower bin And I'm like, holy cow. That is so smart, right?
00:31:24
Speaker
Oh, high five to Barry. Yeah. I'll tell him he said that. Yeah, that's perfect. So that, and then Eric has also mentioned to me, he would also like to know if it's tool 16. Because if the machine says, hey, tool 16 is broken, Eric doesn't know how to look through the tool, the shallow bins, and be like, well, what exactly is this broken one that I'm looking at to get a replacement? But if he knew it was T16, he could pick one out.
00:31:54
Speaker
That's the beauty of the system here. We're talking about now is you've got 20 shallower bins in a row. They're numbered. So Tool 16 is, your kids could go figure that out. You know? That's awesome. That's a good idea. Oh, I'll throw this one out as a little teaser nugget.
New Project Tease: Tech Integration
00:32:13
Speaker
I just bought an $11.82 Amazon barcode scanner. And that's all I'm going to say.
00:32:24
Speaker
All right. That's cheap. Wow. Cool. Yeah, I'm excited to see what we can do with that. I'm looking forward to developments and updates from that. Are there going to be Arduinos involved? Come on, of course there are. Actually, there may not even need to be. We'll see. Not at this stage anyway, but give it a few months.
00:32:45
Speaker
uh... we had going back to the the whole like question about if you had to rebuild your company what i like about that is it does two things what info can let you focus on some of the decision-making process from a true practical pragmatic standpoint of what did we do right what did we do wrong and not not beat yourself up but just think about it but also
00:33:06
Speaker
It's one of those questions for me that pushes me to open up, to think differently, to think big.
Reflection on Machine Purchases
00:33:15
Speaker
One of the questions that people ask me is, do you wish you had just gotten a has from the start or something like that? And I'm like, well, first of all, that isn't realistic. I never would have worked that way.
00:33:26
Speaker
But no, I wouldn't be who I am if I didn't, I built the, it's just who I am. For buying the Tormach, running it, being successful with it, getting comfortable, and using them and learning how to make money with them for years has now helped me start, because I think what's funny about that too is it presupposes that Haas is the highest and last machine we're ever gonna buy, and that's not true either. Let's say you get an OKK, or you get some Hermely, well then are you gonna say, are you gonna sell all your Haases?
00:33:55
Speaker
No, it's just a different tool on the spectrum of what you do. And I totally agree with the whole Tormach front. I wouldn't be exactly what you said. I wouldn't be where I was. I wouldn't learn what I knew. Yeah. If they had the Tormach 440 when I lived in New York City, here's one that'll mess with you. John, I never would have left New York City.
00:34:22
Speaker
I only moved to the suburbs seriously. I mean this is I proof of this in email with my wife I only moved to the suburbs to get an 1100 to fit my basement if they had the 440 I That would have replaced my tag with the 440. I would have stayed in Manhattan in my more comfortable place and Who knows what would have come of it? Maybe I would have been more successful, but it's not how you think about life I just it's funny that you never know what's going to take you where it's going to go and yeah
00:34:51
Speaker
Yep. What's on tap for today?
Innovation with Pneumatic Press Project
00:34:53
Speaker
I am finishing up a quick little project that I'm working on, which is something I've been wanting to make for a super long time. A pneumatic press. Oh, awesome. Yeah, basically it's like an arbor press, but fully pneumatic and adjustable PSI and controlled. And we're currently going to use it to press together our spinners, the weights into the titanium body. Yep. And I even made. Is it fast acting? Yeah.
00:35:19
Speaker
And I've got a bleed valve on it so you can adjust how fast and violent it is. With a little hand lever that goes up and down. And I've even got a little Delrin fixture plate that will hold the spinner. You place it in place and it holds it centered and everything. And then I could make a new fixture for another product or the tops or whatever else as we need different uses. It should be a pretty versatile system. I've been wanting to make this for a super long time.
00:35:45
Speaker
So I first made it with a... Will you send me a picture of it? Do you mind? Yeah, of course. Once I get it going, I'll do probably Instagram of it. I first used a 32 millimeter piston, a 32 millimeter bore cylinder, which is like an inch and a half. So that's like an inch and a half? Yeah, inch and a half diameter, maybe two inch diameter outside. And it just, it wasn't strong enough. It pressed in the way, it's halfway, and I'm like, oh. So then...
00:36:12
Speaker
we upgraded from a 32 mil to an 80 mil, which is like a four inch square now. Holy cow. And that should be plenty. I did some math and mine was giving me 220 pounds and this other one will give me a thousand, so. What PSI? At air, shop pressure. 125. At 500 or something? Yeah. Wow. Holy cow, John, that's a lot. Don't get your finger in there. No, exactly. So I've got a regulator on it and we'll only use as much as we need, but this should be enough.
00:36:41
Speaker
That's awesome. Yeah, this is really cool. It's been a fun project, a bit of a distraction. And it feels bad tying up my mori while I'm prototyping this, while I'm developing it and designing and coding it and then going to the machine. And if I had a second machine down the road, even a small Robo drill or a Brother Speedy or something like that, even the small phone booth size ones.
00:37:07
Speaker
that would be perfect for this application. I don't need to tie up my big production machine with stuff like this. You know what I mean? You've got like 17 tormacs that would be perfect for this job. No, but no joke, that is freaking awesome. We do that all the time. It's great.
00:37:27
Speaker
It's funny, because you said distraction. And yes, you're right. But on the flip side, it's like the parable of the Brazilian fisherman who just wanted to fish, and the company convinced him to sell out and build this huge fish empire. He's like, all I wanted to do is fish. As much as that's distraction, for me, John, at least, building that stuff is sincerely what makes me smile and happy. I love the tinkering and building little.
00:37:52
Speaker
You gotta keep focusing on how you put food on the table, but on the flip side, that's, I don't ever want to get rid of that stuff, because that's fun. Along that thinking, I thought about something yesterday that it's been bugging me for a very long time with Eric, and now with Barry coming in, and I'm like,
00:38:08
Speaker
telling myself it's it's my job to make everybody else's life easier. I'm making this so that Barry can assemble spinners easier and faster and I make other stuff so that Eric can do it faster and I've always thought of it as a negative thing because I'm taking my time away from production and you know everybody else relies on me to make their life easier and you know I'm just giving giving giving whatever but I thought about this yesterday and I'm like that's a good thing like this is my skill
00:38:34
Speaker
I love making their life easier and I love making things faster and better and R&D and, you know, leaning everything out. That's what I want to do with this business. So I need to, as we're talking about the E-Myth and founder movie and Ray Kroc and all that stuff, I need to tighten up these systems so that I can transfer them and have anybody come in and do what I normally do production-wise. And then I can take her with this stuff all day long and run the business, obviously.
00:39:03
Speaker
So yeah, the closest thing, we're going to do a Wednesday with John. We build our first custom metrology tool. So we took a dial indicator. We tore it apart. We redid the shank. We redid the face. We redid a fixture that holds it. And is it a tool and die guy is going to be like, oh, OK, whatever. Let me tell you that this is going to be cool. Nice. And it's thinking just enough outside the box to realize, wait a minute here. I can do this. Yes. It's yes. I can't wait. So awesome. Dude, crush it today, bud. Sounds good. You too, man. Bye. Bye.