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#228 - CMMs, Norseman Tolerances, Business Visions, & Tours to Miltera and Born & Koch
182 Plays4 years ago
Topics:
- Tour of Miltera
- CMM machines and Tolerances on Norseman Features
- Born & Koch - Grinding Wheels on a Mill
- Sweetwater Sound, Inc. - Business Plans and Visions
- Willemin Update
- Stainless Steel SFM & Endmill Chipping
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 228. My name is John Grimsmough. My name is John Saunders. This is the podcast where John and John chat every Friday, kind of a personal recorded private phone call basically about business manufacturing, fun stuff, shop tours, tools, everything. Yeah.
Shop Tour and CMM Machine Exploration
00:00:23
Speaker
How are you doing?
00:00:23
Speaker
I'm doing great. I'm wiped. You're wiped? Wiped. I mean, I'm feeling better today, but yesterday, by the end of the day, I was just passing out on the sofa. I went to Milterra for the day, and it was like the first shop I've been to in over a year.
00:00:41
Speaker
Oh, wow. I mean, you know, I'm super busy here in my own space, but it's my personal, like, I'm comfortable. I know what I'm doing. You go to somebody else's shop, and it's just interesting and amazing. And you're just flooded with information. And my brain is, is full, let's say. It was great, though.
00:00:59
Speaker
So I went to use their CMM machine for a couple hours or to have one of their experts measure a bunch of parts for me. But included with that also was a mini non-filmed shop tour and just chitchat for hours about all kinds of cool stuff.
00:01:18
Speaker
And it was great. He's got a bunch of like three or four or five ICMMs and the kind that aren't just touch sensitive, but they're load sensitive so they can measure a contour all the way around.
00:01:32
Speaker
Um, so we measured, we brought five or six Norseman blades and measured a bunch of features.
Measuring and Analyzing Norseman Blades
00:01:37
Speaker
And I was, I was like, I brought them in. I'm like, some of these are different. They feel different when they go together. It's not the handles. It's definitely the blades. So tell me why, you know, tell me what feature is different. Um, I'm happy to rent, you know, this for a couple hours, whatever it costs. Um, I need this information. Yeah. And, uh,
00:01:56
Speaker
tons of data like five printouts per blade and we laid them all out on a big fat table and just looked at it all and like stared at it for an hour trying to figure out what we're looking at.
00:02:07
Speaker
Not the most conclusive results that I was hoping for, but it did point out a lot of really interesting features that were off that I thought should have been more on. Do tell. Deviations like arc center line of where the detent ball goes into the blade was off by a thou or two in some places. Oh, yeah. And I'm like, that shouldn't be. That's interesting. Even a hole that I spot and drill and ream,
00:02:36
Speaker
Uh, it's a one 16th inch hole. So I ream it with one 16th is off by a foul and we're supposed to be, and pretty consistently across the five or six blades. Um, but.
00:02:49
Speaker
It's not the identical on every blade. They're all deviating in the same direction, but some were more than others. Some like, come on, what am I doing wrong here? These are all off of the mori? Off the current. Oh. Yeah, so it's interesting, right? Yeah. Yeah. And they're all, when you say off a thou, you're referring to- From the model.
00:03:16
Speaker
Well, but off from what? Like a different, what datum or? From the pivot center line is the datum, I guess. Yeah. And then they referenced it based on the endpoints of the stop pin arc. Okay. And that gives you a rotation, I guess. And then I gave them the CAD model so they could load it into the Zeiss software and have the perfect theoretically thing. And then every dimension they gave me was, you know, plus or minus the perfect model.
00:03:46
Speaker
And in what direction and by how much and all that stuff. So it's super interesting. I need some time to process the information and I'll go over it here with Angelo and we'll kind of figure out what to do next, you know, but it's fascinating. Definitely makes me want to see him. Yeah. My head is already churning. What makes you say the detent, like that feature that was one thou off, what makes you say that with features off and not the feature it was being measured from? That's a good question. You know,
00:04:14
Speaker
They're all on the same setup? On the Zeiss or on the current. The features are machined in the same subtractive setup. Yeah. Yeah. And over time, I've been very careful about which features I machine first because a heavy roughing might move something. So leave all the heavy roughing to the end. Do all the critical stuff first when it's most clamped. But even still, something's moving. I think the blades might be moving on the fixture.
00:04:42
Speaker
Um, you mean the material is deforming or you think the actual physical blade is shifting inside shifting? Oh, okay. Yeah. It's been a hunch of mine for a while and it just makes more and more sense. And some of these results maybe helped answer that. I don't know. So I'm going to put gripper pads under each blade, just little tiny ones that should keep it from shifting in any direction. Um,
00:05:06
Speaker
Do you think, sorry, I may be peppering you ahead before you're ready, but like the ones where it was one thou off versus not, does that have a notable difference in the feel of the night? It does, yeah. Some of them do. Well, so that's good. You think that's a problem and you're not just going full grimacing on a feature that maybe isn't fair. Yeah. And I can look at some of the features and it's way off, but I'm like, that's just a clearance.
00:05:33
Speaker
section. I don't care if it's off, but that's fascinating anyway. I'm like, yeah, I do rough that pretty fast. So of course it's off, but why is it off this way? It's interesting to look at all the data and kind of figure out what it's doing. And they were telling me, because I asked their CMM lady expert when they make a part, because they have beautiful GF micron machines. Some of them are linear, so they're like hyper accurate.
00:06:01
Speaker
I said sometimes when you make a part like first article, it's your job to inspect it and tell them how off it is. Sometimes it is up to a thou off from where they think it is. You finish it too fast or you miss a thing or whatever. So she's like, this is not unexpected. And a lot of times they use this feedback to go back and change and tweak things to hit the print kind of thing, which I've never had such measurement capability to actually know that this is a thing.
00:06:29
Speaker
You know, you just use good end mills, use cutter comp, and it measures fine with a mic or a caliper or something. Right. But a lot of these tiny critical features that you can't measure with, you know, hand tools. It's really interesting. I feel like, I feel like if I had a Kern and you aren't doing high volume, like not thousands of holes, you're doing a couple of holes. I feel like I would almost interpolate over ream.
00:06:57
Speaker
And I'm doing both, depending on the feature. OK. Reming is definitely going to follow the whole. You don't really need to set it. My thought was we'll do a boring head instead of a reamer, but you don't need a boring head for this, especially just no current. Yeah, right. That's really cool. Yeah, it's fun. And like I said, I need some time to think.
00:07:22
Speaker
I wish, or I look forward to the day, I feel like it may not be our generation when CNN software has been, you know, HMI'd and UX'd and improved because, coincidentally, we were watching, we were on a shop tour Monday and the same thing. They had a Zeiss that has the, is it the contouring feature? They have a name for it. The head is called the Vax, vast head, V-A-S-T.
00:07:49
Speaker
And I think, I don't know specifically, but I think it doubles the price of the CMM. It's like really expensive.
00:07:56
Speaker
Well, so we did, we did, oh geez, a while back, we went up to the Zeiss place in Michigan and had fun playing around learning. We filmed a video and they did kind of showing off that bass head. We put our hand down and they, the guy was like, the guy was like, don't move. And so, you know, instead of my seven year old drawing a turkey out of my finger and it was this CMM and it demonstrates something that's truly amazing, which is,
00:08:22
Speaker
when it's at least in some certain style mode with that tracing style head, it doesn't know the feature. It doesn't know where it's supposed to go. It's iterating at probably thousands of times per second or per motion where it detects where it should go. So it could follow a complex curve. It could follow a perfect circular. It could follow my hand. It was tracing my hand with no user input knowing where it felt resistance and not. Really cool. Did it tickle?
00:08:52
Speaker
Uh, I was so trying to do a good job of not moving, throw it off. Cause I think if you move the thing, doesn't know what to do. Cause it's expecting an object that doesn't come to it's, it's, uh, touching. I think it did. Okay. Job. It was really cool. Man, that's fascinating.
Capabilities of CMM Machines
00:09:09
Speaker
Yeah. Cause like a touch probe in the mill is just an on off switch pretty much. It goes, I hit a feature. I, you know, if you over travel it, it'll crash or whatever. Um, whereas these in the head itself has like.
00:09:24
Speaker
force vectoring. I don't know what you call it. It can over travel a lot and it still measures that over travel so it can find its own contours. It's amazing. They had, I think, one of the vast heads disassembled or partially exposed to show it was multiple three axis, three tiers of
00:09:44
Speaker
this beautiful kinematic structure that allow the correct motion in a constrained state for the non-motion axes. Then I believe each stage, I think it was a strain gauge. I could be wrong on that, but thinking about how you build a system like that is super cool. Yeah, you talk about precision kinematics and design and stuff. That device probably has it all.
00:10:10
Speaker
What is the accuracy spec on that machine? That machine was called the Micura, which is one of their, I don't know, best. I think he said the machine was close to $300,000. Wow. So it's tight. Like we were measuring one micron, no problem. Okay. So it's well under the whole like, make sure your tool can measure the 10 times the detail you're looking for. Okay.
00:10:37
Speaker
Yeah, it was giving printouts of less than one micron and they seem to believe it, like trust it, you know, it was never questioned.
00:10:45
Speaker
I've gotten better at the short cut tricks, round numbers that 25 microns is one thousandth of an inch and, and thus five microns is two tenths. Yeah. I find it super helpful to kind of have that stored in your head these days. I was doing that yesterday too. Cause they were saying everything in microns and I'm like, okay, five microns is two tenths. Just repeating it to myself. Like, okay, okay. Yeah. Okay. One micron is tiny. Got it. You could just get that tattoo on your forearm.
00:11:11
Speaker
Yes. That sounds good. It was awesome. Did you play with the software at all? I didn't myself, no. No, it was interesting because they were obviously helping me do the work, but also I could see the work pile up behind. And the guy was like, we've got other jobs that have to get done today, Mike. Can we get these done, please? Yeah. But it was great.
00:11:38
Speaker
Cool. I mean, obviously you got a process at all, but yeah. Um, there are some tweaks I might make soonish. Um, I don't know. I gotta think. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Go ahead. It got me thinking about when, at what point does one buy a CMM, you know? Yeah.
00:12:01
Speaker
Well, let's come back to that. What I would encourage you to do is instead of thinking, I know you, and I know what you're going to do is let's fix this problem, but consider flipping it on its head. And instead of solving that problem, change your design to where maybe you don't need. And in there, you know your product well. But if you're thinking about a ball detent in the lockup, perhaps there's a way of mixing the two where you could
00:12:30
Speaker
have the tolerance required and increase the surface area, the radius of the engagement so that it's 98% as good with 50% of the tolerance requirement kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'll consider that. I'll look at it as a system. Because sometimes you just get so focused, you're like, this individual single little problem needs to be fixed as it is.
00:12:55
Speaker
And then, yeah, it's not until you step back and you go, well, hold on. Is there any other way to do this? Actually, I should probably ask myself that question more often. Right. It's like, okay. Because it's like, look, I totally get it. It's super, super fun to be perfect, but there is no perfect. Right.
00:13:10
Speaker
Uh, in a really weird way, it's an interesting segue to talking. I'm going to jump way ahead here, but talking like super cool nerd grinding stuff with, uh, the shop tour we just did at a company called I originally was calling it born in Coke, but it's based pronounced at born in Co, but K O C H. Um, and they, um,
00:13:32
Speaker
amongst other things, own a bunch of iconic manufacturing brands that you would generally associate with yesteryears like Blanchard, Dev League, Bullard, I think Brown and Sharp, Grinders. Lots of these old, iconic, largely American brands have now been consolidated under their ownership and they make
00:13:52
Speaker
They make new machines, believe it or not, which is incredible. They do a lot of rebuilds and restorations. They do a lot of service parts, and then they've started this whole new line that's kind of synthesizing a lot of these technologies into modern machine tools.
00:14:06
Speaker
It's a super obvious point, but we were talking about grinding in a machine tool. So taking about using a traditional six inch grinding wheel, like you would have on a bench grinder, but holding it in a spindle so that the grinding wheel is kind of flat to the ground.
00:14:22
Speaker
If you're grinding in ID, then you have complimentary radii. You know, the ID of your part is whatever 20 inches and your grinding wheel is six inches. So your kind of quote unquote scalloping is minimized because while the two of course are not perfect, you've got significant overlap in the sense that they're both complimenting each other. That inverts itself if when you switch that same six inch wheel to the outside of a 20 inch feature and the two arcs are away
Machining Tolerances and Grinding Techniques
00:14:49
Speaker
from each other.
00:14:49
Speaker
Okay. And it really forces you to think about changing your grinding, you know, feeds and speeds or your cut style or your step over, or even changing your wheel diameter because of that complication. That kind of makes sense. Cause on the inside, you're going to have a heavier load, I guess, more contact area. Yeah. You're too, uh, to be fancy, your tool engagement angle would be much higher. It's the same as an end mill really. It totally is. Yeah. Hmm.
00:15:20
Speaker
Um, and then it's like, okay, well, so how do you, you can solve it with tooling and machine cam, or is there a way to fix it with your design? Yeah, exactly. Going back to, uh, modern firearms in the 20th century of like, look, create interchangeable parts, you know? Brilliant. Right. How did we not think of that before?
00:15:42
Speaker
Yeah. Well, no, but I mean, the tolerance is a tolerance. It doesn't mean it's zero. It means it's got a range. Exactly. Yup. Yup. Yeah. When I, a couple of years ago, five, six years ago, when machinists would tell me, yeah, I have my tolerance range plus one thou minus one thou. And if it is anywhere in there, I'm good. I don't care if it's, you know, minus nine nine nine or whatever nine 10ths. Um, it's fine. And I'm like, no, you want it zero. Don't you? Right.
00:16:09
Speaker
Aren't you always shooting for zero? He goes, no, it's fine. And I was like, okay. We was hanging out with a guy a while back who works at a Midwest, like a legit aerospace shop. You know, one of these, you know, have 50, 60 spindles and they had a large
00:16:29
Speaker
airplane part I think it was a strange shape profile maybe it was like six by six but 30 inches long and there was a two thousandths of an inch tolerance I don't know what there's plus or minus or what but two thou you know GD&T true position from a base feature all the way to the top and they had it they were doing it on a Hermla and the guy was talking about how it was like two days of setup and it's funny because you we throw around two thousand you think oh that's nothing but when it's
00:16:58
Speaker
a feature's location relative to something that far away. It starts to make you rethink, well, holy nuts. This is actually almost impossible. The material moves. Even temperature changes will throw that off the crazy. How do you measure it?
Precision Challenges in Manufacturing
00:17:15
Speaker
in a constrained state or unconstrained state, improve it, and then your customer, how are they measuring it? Yeah, exactly. Well, we hear that from our buddies all the time. They measure parts that are perfect, the customer measures them, they're not perfect, and this whole back and forth. I'm glad I don't have to deal with that. Yeah. Cool. But yeah, this whole concept of making better parts and knowing
00:17:42
Speaker
your result is fascinating. I want to make the best parts I can not just for the cool factor but for the interchangeability, for the consistency so that we have consistency on assembly and finishing and fit up and then the customer gets a consistent product too. The tighter I can make that, the more my vision becomes a reality.
00:18:05
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Totally. And you don't know what you don't know, right? Yeah, exactly. That's cool. A small-ish CMM need not be insane, price-wise. Yeah, there were what, 50,000 to start? No, manual, yeah, but there's zero chance to criminalize by CMMM. Got it. Way too much variation on user heavy-handedness. I think
00:18:31
Speaker
Uh, it's been a while since I looked into it, but I think a little over a hundred would probably get you kind of what you want on the smaller. Okay. Like the Zeiss ones that are still, um, meant for metrology rooms, not just like the shop floor, higher, uh, less, less, um, I mean, less accurate, I guess. Yeah. Yeah.
00:18:50
Speaker
Yeah, interesting. Yeah. Mike had a used one, a 2004 Zeiss that did have a vast head on it. Um, but it was gigantic. It was like 12 feet tall and like, like the table wasn't huge as maybe two foot by two foot, but it, uh, it was monster. Yeah, you don't want that. And he said that's a shop floor rated, um, uh, with the vast head, which I don't know if that's common to have a shop floor with the vast head.
00:19:20
Speaker
Oh, it's a good question. Yeah, so I'm sort of thinking about looking into it, but let it percolate.
00:19:29
Speaker
They had a large Zeiss. I don't know which model, but it'll be in the tour video, which is kind of fun. And someone had sent in a fellow's gear shaper. So super cool because one of the reasons I love doing shop tours is the chance to see how stuff's made and share that with the world. It is so cool. And there's so many technologies and processes that we take for granted.
00:19:57
Speaker
the fact that almost every single vehicle, or really every single vehicle, has numerous gears. And those gears are incredible. And they think about how often they're used and their lifespan, the remarkable revolutions. And when was the last time you had a friend say, oh, yeah, gear cracked in my transmission? No, they're perfect. And so they are born and coz big into gear shapers and your hoppers. And some of these are old machines. They're not what you think of as, you know,
00:20:27
Speaker
the hydrostatic linear wave, say the R5 axis, they're like old school iron. It just goes up and down and eccentric shafts that turn and shape gears. So someone had sent in the fellows, they were rebuilding it in the machine. It looked like it had put in some hard life usage. It's kind of cool to see them staring it apart. And then they had the spindle in their measuring metrology room and they had
00:20:52
Speaker
I don't know what they had done, whether they'd reground it or replayed it or coded it or something, but they had it up on the Zeiss and it was like, it's exactly what is awesome about modern CMMs. They had it in a...
00:21:04
Speaker
three jaw chuck on a rotary table on the CMM and the CMM was doing that same continuous probing around three points of the shaft, the shaft so that it didn't matter how within some reasonable amount. It didn't matter how accurate the shaft was in the three jaw chuck because it found its own axle center line and then it measured the, I think it was a, what was it, Giorno Jarna taper.
00:21:30
Speaker
one of these strangely UME tapers. It basically measured the shaft circularity and perpendicularity to the taper. Really cool. That's awesome. In the printout, there was perpendicularity call out, cylindricity call out, one or two others, I forget, plus locational values too.
Kinematic Accuracy in Multi-Axis Machines
00:21:52
Speaker
Cool.
00:21:53
Speaker
Yeah. So of the five blades, one of the perpendicularities was quite a bit out. All the others were really close to zero. And it makes you wonder, was that fixtured weird? Was it, I don't know, did something get picked up weird? What do you mean by perpendicularity? Squareness, the whole squareness to the flatness of the handles.
00:22:13
Speaker
Oh, interesting. So maybe there was a booger inside the boar that got touched kind of thing that threw that out. Could it be taper in the hole or you think it was the actual face of the tool blade? Don't know. Okay. How can you talk to me about current accuracy? In what sense?
00:22:37
Speaker
Well, I've hear these names or these terms and phrases of like two top or not phrases, but you're two microns or five. Yeah. But, um, is that across the whole work envelope? Like, I think so. Yeah. Extreme a, or what do you have a B? Yeah. It's a B B and a C.
00:22:54
Speaker
Right. See, I guess if you go all the way far out into one extreme and then rotate your B the other extreme and maybe even rotate the CSUN, you're really saying it's- That's what they say. Two microns is millions. Yeah. Okay. Given rigidity, given to a way or to a life, things like that.
00:23:16
Speaker
If you're cutting aluminum and brass all day, yeah, you could probably hit two tents on everything, but I've noticed my tools wearing. I notice cutting stainless and tie all the time. I do chase tolerances. Like the thing is the machine is thermally stable and super duper consistent, but it's the setup. It's the tooling. It's the quality of the tooling and the life and the coolant delivery and cooling percentage and all these other factors that I can control, but that do affect tolerances.
00:23:47
Speaker
But even before all of that, many or most multi-axis machines don't pivot on their point of rotation. So like your A axis has points of rotations, but the platter is below that. So your theoretical, where your B and your C intersect is a point that is actually in space. It's not actually a point of the, where you can touch.
00:24:12
Speaker
Those two are, I mean, it's kind of one of the things they're actually never perfect. So if they're off by three tenths, when you tip your B over and move out, I don't know what your travel work here in Phillip is, but 10 inches, 12 inches, two or three tenths, all of a sudden becomes two or three. It's leverage. Yeah. Yeah. So to be two tenths at the craziest extremes is almost unbelievable from a
00:24:37
Speaker
Like when you do the kinematic test, you put the test ball on the machine and you probe it in all different directions across the whole work envelope. Like my ball is six inches tall or something. Um, and it gives you the printout, the result of all of that movement. Yeah. And, uh, and it compensates many features of the machine to, to, you know, do what it's got to do to keep it in. I haven't run that in a while. I should probably run it soon. Um, I know Rob says he runs it like every Monday or something.
00:25:08
Speaker
I think it's just in a palette schedule. Yeah, it's just automatic, which I could actually implement now. But yeah, the deviation is like microns, like tenths, a few tenths.
00:25:23
Speaker
Yeah, someone was explaining this is over my head, but there's a stereotypical difference in philosophy between like German and Japanese machine builders. And of course, I don't know how exactly true this is, but where
00:25:38
Speaker
certain one style is measuring at a certain point and at another point, whereas the, whereas the other alternative methodology has to do with motion through that path, which is generally actually more of what you, well, for simultaneous of certainly more what you care about, but otherwise it's kind of like, are you just measuring?
00:25:58
Speaker
at spot points, which again, uh, on a five axis, that's good, but not end of the road. That's, I think where you see it is if you drill a hole at the extreme of your travel range, like be tipped over in your way out and X or something, you drill that hole and then you have to rotate all the way over a different angle. And then you spot drill the other way you're going to have this alignment. Yeah, that's, that's one of the tests, right? If you can drop a pin through both, both sides, um, I should try that.
00:26:27
Speaker
Well, it was great to travel again and be out and do a shop tour. It's great. The other thing that I find unbelievably valuable, and I've always found this valuable. I don't know if it's accentuated because of how kind of locked down the world's been.
00:26:47
Speaker
The things I value the most are experiences and interactions that do push you outside of your normal comfort zone. And I know hearing from you, certainly even just talking to Milterra is, I hate the word inspirational, but it is corny. But like, what are other companies doing that you're not doing? And it's easy to get carried away, frankly, because you can start to see
00:27:12
Speaker
how impressive other facilities are, it can frankly engender some self-confidence questions about like, well, I'm not good enough because they're doing it and I'm not there, you know? And frankly, there's where that meets the reality of profitability and capital and can you afford it, right?
00:27:32
Speaker
What I value is seeing things that make you have clear conviction about the plan. We've talked about that plan versus goals. If it means you want a CMM to improve processes to know where you can change and not change features and figure out how to make that part of the plan.
00:27:55
Speaker
Yeah, when you look at, I mean, there's so many ways to think of it. You could look at it as our scrap rate is this. If we had a CMM, hopefully it wouldn't be, or we'd be able to solve the problem sooner. Say we went 100% inspection. Every part off the current gets put in the fixture, just hit go, and then we could tweak accordingly. Would that, I mean, the scrap rate affects our finish rate.
00:28:19
Speaker
and then it affects not just the cost of the scrap, but the time spent on it, but also the loss of a finished product. If the current makes six knives a day and two of them are bad, then the other team can only make four knives a day. So it's that value proposition. That's one way to look at it.
00:28:42
Speaker
But yeah, like you said, just building the whole plan. I want consistency. I want repeatability. I just want the parts. I know it just gives you such an insight into what you're actually making. It's crazy. We talked to some of our buddies and they're like, you don't have a CMM yet? What's wrong with you?
00:28:58
Speaker
Oh, yeah, yeah, it's a joke, but but so so build the plan. I mean, certainly the middle ground could be if there's a way to work out an arrangement with a place like Melterra or we took a plate to Zeiss and I mean, look, they did it for free, to be honest, but they do it as a service. And I think they probably just did. They'll probably do it for free for anybody first one time.
Leveraging CMM Services for Precision
00:29:22
Speaker
and CMM as a service. I mean, spend some money and time. You'll learn more about the CMM and what you frankly want and need out of it. Maybe you can figure out how to dial in because I suspect a good portion of these problems could be solved.
00:29:36
Speaker
Yeah, which means you don't need CMMs every day to be constantly. No, that's not the solution. Well, and I don't, you know, a lot of aerospace shops need the printout with every part and that's fair. I appreciate that. Um, I don't need that. I need to like, I'm measuring parts that have never been fully measured before.
00:29:53
Speaker
I'm just assuming they're good, but once maybe you go back and forth with the CMM three or four times max, but then you have a process that's bang on. Then you keep your tools in check and your main tolerance is in check and then you're good. You don't need to inspect every day. That's one of the concerns for sure. You spend one or two or 300,000 on a CMM and you're like,
00:30:14
Speaker
It sits most of the time. That's not a good value proposition, but- Well, yeah. Wouldn't you rather have another Swiss or- Yeah, totally right. Mill drill. Okay, yeah. So I got to think about that clearly. And then also, Elliott Matsura, where I got both of my layouts from, they are the Zeiss dealer. So I could definitely bring parts there. And even if I pay for three visits to get them inspected, either there or Mill Terre, it doesn't matter.
00:30:42
Speaker
Then I get to use the best micron machine that they have and get the best printout from somebody who knows how to do it, because again, this is another machine to learn and keep busy and operate and train people on. And yeah, I'd rather have another CNC machine.
00:31:01
Speaker
But I will admit there are points in time in a journey where you've got to look at building in processes and equipment that's not necessarily the sexy front-facing machine. It's like support service equipment, all that stuff. You can't just keep buying spindles and not infrastructure rather. I know. It's tough. It's like Angela's been asking for an optical comparator for years. You can get them used for a few thousand dollars.
00:31:30
Speaker
I don't know why I keep avoiding it, but now I basically tell them, find one and buy it. I don't need to be involved. On the drive back from Born & Co., we drove through Fort Wayne, Indiana and ended up having a real eye-opening experience.
Sweetwater Visit and Company Culture
00:31:45
Speaker
There's a company called Sweetwater, which is now, I believe, the largest online retailer in the music and pro audio world.
00:31:54
Speaker
And I've always heard about it. I bought a couple of things from them over the years. And they have this impressive facility in Fort Wayne that now has or has a retail store. It's kind of ironic because it's an online company that now has a brick and mortar. And I sort of said, hey, let's stop for fun. John totally blown away. So you stopped in a brick and mortar store? Yeah. OK.
00:32:20
Speaker
So I mean, they have this massive, I mean, maybe even a million square feet of warehouse and, and facilities there. Oh, yeah, no, it is huge. I mean, they have, I mean, they may have 1000 employees, it is large. And they just finished a renovation of the kind of brick and mortar
00:32:40
Speaker
uh front office or not the right word term but like basically you walk in and they have the display showing the history of the company and then they have this store they had a front desk cashiers they have i mean this is this place is a great example of
00:32:56
Speaker
I think how to do it right, tied with the fact that they've been very profitable, period. I mean, you can't do this without having a level of success that affords it, but they have full music recording studios where you could record, I mean, anything, literally, like studios, they have auditoriums, they have cafes, they had a slide, a two-story slide for the kids and arcade.
00:33:19
Speaker
And you've seen some of this type of stuff if you visit the kind of dot coms out there that push the kind of culture of like this. But this was different because it just felt a little bit more kind of real. And as you and I have talked about business books and goals and cultures over the years of talking, I think Sweetwater did an incredibly good job
00:33:43
Speaker
I think maybe it was easier to see that because it's an outside company. It's not manufacturing, if you will. Immediately, I walked in and you see what the company does. You see why they're successful. You see how they treat their employees. You see what they promote and push and what they value. Like your day at military, I haven't fully digested this yet either.
00:34:04
Speaker
I started to think about, okay, hey, what are the best shop tours that I've done, the best corporate examples and nuggets of pulling in front of me? And why? Yeah. It's fun to think back and be like, oh, that's how they did their cool in management. That was really interesting. And that's super nerdy technical love it, but it's this culture, this aura, this attention to their employees kind of thing that I'm thinking more and more and more about.
00:34:30
Speaker
I think you just validated what I was going to kind of ask, which is like an all-star recap of extracting out some of the best nuggets of tours over the years. Yeah. Because this is that entrepreneurial process where you get drunk on amazingness. Like you see this and it's like unbelievable, but it has to come back to the real world, which is, okay, how does that apply to Sondra's machine works? What can we do today? And it is-
00:34:58
Speaker
Well, exactly. It's replanted that seed that I really felt after touring Area 419, who like Sweetwater has had a lot of growth, they've had a lot of success, and they've had the chance to do build up a ground up construction to build what they want, which is not something most folks haven't. I'm not sure we will ever have, but boy, it makes me want to think about it, plan it out without feeling the limitations of reality.
00:35:25
Speaker
show that off and then let's start looking at what we can do without building a building. What can we do here now? Because if you're close minded about it, you won't figure it out. But I think there is a lot more we can do now. It's exciting.
00:35:44
Speaker
Yeah, if you plan a future reality that is desirable, but maybe unrealistic, you just, your brain hasn't gotten there yet. But if you allow yourself to actually sit back and be like, you know, if we did build our own building, if we did grow to a staff of 20 or more, if we did have this many machines, what would it look like? What would it feel like?
Planning for Business Growth
00:36:03
Speaker
And then, you know, you play with that for a while and then you pull yourself back to reality. And then you now have a different perspective because you're like,
00:36:10
Speaker
That's what could happen given unlimited resources or time or customers or whatever but if you don't allow yourself to do that then you'll never. You'll live date today you know you'll be like this you know we can increase our profits by point one percent on a daily basis kind of thing yes sometimes I like to.
00:36:31
Speaker
think big like that. There's this book I keep hearing about called The Magic of Thinking Big. I've never read it, but it's come a couple of times. Interesting. And then another book that I think was just delivered today was called Small Giants. I've never read that. Companies that decided to stay small and powerful instead of big and monstrous. And that'll be interesting. Yeah. Well, and look, I think we're all
00:36:59
Speaker
There is no upside scenario. I guess you could become, you could become a, whatever. I don't even know how big Microtech is, but you could become, I think you could shoot. 15 people. Is that right? Okay. Well, it's still pretty big. I mean. Yeah. Across two plants actually, I think. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, there's certainly some household named big knife companies. You could become way bigger, but I don't think either one of us are going to become, you know,
00:37:21
Speaker
the sweet waters or the ... You hear about manufacturing facilities in aerospace that have a thousand employees or something like that. That's not happening. We're also going to be micro businesses, so I think it's a lot more about what we can do with what we have.
00:37:36
Speaker
But like the difference realistically between 10 employees or 11 and 50 is gigantic. It's a monstrous difference. Yet it's still so far from the thousand employee mega company that, that I'm not interested in, but I'm, if I stretch, I can envision maybe a possible future with, you know, 30 to a hundred sounds crazy, but I try to think of what it would look like. You know what I mean?
00:38:02
Speaker
Yeah. I don't want to be closed-minded, but it doesn't check any boxes for me to think about companies that have, you know, an IT department and an HR department. I mean, none of these things are bad things. I just think about like, I like small scrap. But that may be wrong.
00:38:18
Speaker
When it's small and scrappy and nimble, everything's on your plate. As it grows, you put it on other people's plates. I agree. I've totally avoided the thought of HR department, IT department, et cetera, et cetera, but I see it now. I actually understand why bigger companies need that and leverage it and utilize it.
00:38:38
Speaker
That's just a personal avoidance that's starting to make more sense. You know what I mean? Not saying I want it or need it, but it is needed in a company that size, and I get it now. What are you up to, weaves today?
00:38:53
Speaker
I have to ask Barry where my Wilhelmin is. Oh. Because it's, I know it's in Toronto, so it's at our rigger's place right now. And it is, as last I heard a couple days ago, the riggers are just finding a time to deliver it based on their schedule. So Barry told them anytime late this week or next week, anytime. So I'm just, I'm like on my toes kind of waiting. Okay. Just what day tell me we'll play for it. So that's exciting. Super pumped about that.
00:39:22
Speaker
Are you willing to never touch the Wilhelmin? No, I thought about it briefly. Um, I'm definitely going to step back more than I would normally do. Cause normally I'd be like, everybody back off. This is my machine. I'm going to figure it out, but, uh, I definitely need to, uh, involve the other guys in most every process, um, which will be great. Yeah. I'm actually really looking forward to it. You might be making a mistake in what sense, even in the don't touch it sense.
00:39:51
Speaker
Yeah. And look again, hashtag like backseat driver. Who am I to tell you what to do? Well, opposite with the surface grinder. I haven't touched it. I don't know how to work the Okamoto surface grinder and that's been great. And you cautioned me. You're like, no, you're going to want to play with it. Um, it's been awesome. I don't know how to turn it on. And Angelo is the expert at it. And I am 100% comfortable with that. The lathe, I set up, I programmed, I designed everything for the other two lathes. Um, the other guys aren't at that level yet.
00:40:21
Speaker
Right. Uh, for programming, programming of five axis Wilhelmin. Um, but as I said, I do want to involve them heavily. I don't think I'm not going to operate it. Um, but I will program it for sure. And they will help me set it up and they will run it. We are, you know, coming back to that plan that like, Hey, what do we need to do to, to, to do what we do? Well, I still think it's going to involve.
00:40:47
Speaker
Somewhat soon, um, on the near term, a Swiss lathe for us for some of our products for a couple of reasons. And, um, that's kind of what I've realized is, you know, we have a great team. We've got people that are capable and it's amazing in counterintuitive, how enabling it can be to, to, you know, give folks the resources, the tools, the education, the know-how and, and step back. Mm-hmm.
00:41:14
Speaker
That's awesome. My first thought of you getting a Swiss was if you choose maybe the one or two models that you're thinking of buying, would it be worth it to get like, if you're going to get a citizen, get Danny Rudolph to make a hundred parts for you and then like buy his program from him or something? Yeah, sure.
00:41:35
Speaker
Um, actually it's pretty incredible. We had a guy with a citizen in the UK, huge shout out to him. Um, literally like program one of our parts without us asking, he literally just did it. Like it's not all perfect, but like he had to lean set up and he's like, Hey, here's kind of how you do it. And that's freaking awesome. Um, I, I'm not in the citizen mindset this weekend. So no need to go down that rabbit hole, but I think the,
00:42:00
Speaker
concern I have is making sure we buy the right diameter machine with the right sub spindle functionality that allows it to grow. But also, you know, the mistake I made when I bought our first VMC was thinking that one machine was going to be all we ever had and needs to do everything. And I'd be better off focusing this machine in on the four parts we needed to do, let it do those parts well. And worst case, you can either sell it to buy the I mean, that's not part of the intended plan, but it could be part of the plan.
00:42:29
Speaker
or add to it and so forth. Yeah, or farm out the weird like one off big piece. Oh, you know, wouldn't be that it would be more like
00:42:40
Speaker
We know there's some stuff we could consider moving on to it. It's just balancing that a lot. No, that's funny you said that about buying, you know, one of your first few machines, you're like, I got to get the everything machine. That was my Nakamura. It was super capable, big, powerful, 20 horsepower spindle or whatever it is. And I haven't used its capabilities. You know, it's like way too much machine for what we need it for. But it's capable and it's been making great parts.
00:43:08
Speaker
But yeah, same with the Maury. And I guess the point is now you and I are at the point where we're buying more dedicated machines. We have an established product line. We have an established process, like getting the Wilhelmin to make pen clips only. It's great. Yeah.
Installation of the Wilhelmin Machine
00:43:27
Speaker
But think about that. I know you're
00:43:28
Speaker
You're good at what you do, and you're going to want to own that machine, program it. And I probably can't convince you otherwise. But the companies that I look up to that have taken that next step, if I work outside of coming into Crimson Eyes, I'd rather see you say, yep, I got Angelo, I got Pierre, whoever, learning that machine. They're going to need to ask me questions about how I program the same part on this other machine. But you don't have the pressure of getting this machine online to start making money, because it's a parallel process. Yeah, exactly.
00:43:58
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not in a rush to get it running. I know we're going to need parts. We're going to need tools for it once it comes in. So I just want to get it here. The guys are going to do the full install, everything. We're switching it from oil to coolant. So there'll be a lot of clean out to do that. Interesting. Yeah, we decided to do that. And I'm pretty happy with the decision.
00:44:17
Speaker
CJ runs oil though, right? Yeah, he does. What's that? CJ runs oil. Yeah, CJ runs oil in his Willyman. Most do, but the Willyman guy said, yeah, you can run oil or cooling. It doesn't matter. You just got to change the spindle grease timer or something with one setting. But yeah, I think it'll be better for our process.
00:44:37
Speaker
Did you random question did you get your current fixed with a pallet? Yeah, what was the problem again? I mean, yes, but how it and the aroa and the machine thought there were different. Oh, yes. Yeah, it was actually
00:44:50
Speaker
super easy once I did the right magic combination of, okay, shut both machines down, turn them both on at the same time, hold this one button, and then everything just worked fine. And then even still, the Kern thought palette 16 was in there, but it was clearly palette 52. And Tina from Kern told me, the Kern doesn't know. Just call palette zero, call a different palette, and the Aroa will fix it all. It's like, okay, sweet.
00:45:16
Speaker
That's awesome. So yeah, that became a non-issue once I did it, right? Once I had the time to do it. Yeah, it's been rocking ever since. Awesome. Cool, man. See you next week. All right. Have a great day. You too. Bye. Bye.