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Make vs. Buy - The never ending story
207 Plays5 years ago
John & John go over the never ending struggle of the classic make vs buy scenario. This time they are talking about making a custom shipping table to help speed up Saunders' work flow. Grimsmo has a Canadian version called FlexPipe.
Saunders' has been doing some WORK when it comes to Automatic Brix reading of coolant systems. He has been using a digital refractometer that you can find two versions of them here.
John Grimsmo is still struggling with the Kern. It has been full of little victories and bigger issues. Luckily Angelo had a good idea that helped solve a grinding problem!
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Theme
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 193. My name is John Grimsmo. And my name is John Saunders. And it's talking about the business of machining. And one of the many recurring themes that we have is make versus buy. Oh, yes.
00:00:17
Speaker
Have you heard of that before? Yeah. I've never heard it. Angelo here calls it the make-buy scenario. I haven't heard it called that until he started it, but it's a recurring problem.
Shop Overhaul and Shipping Table Dilemma
00:00:29
Speaker
Do I make that or do I buy it? Right. I got a good one for you. It's actually one that I think is a more gray zone. Nice. I got one for you after. Okay.
00:00:42
Speaker
So holy cow, I wish, I'm glad that we're documenting this process of overhauling the shop because the last four days we have been on fire. Yeah. Yes. We were kind of in that stage three, stage four of, you know, rounding out some of these things. And then all of a sudden it's just like, boom, boom, boom. All these things just fell into place, just clicked. So it all started with our shipping table.
00:01:06
Speaker
We have this old, uh, large table. I think it is literally a four by eight sheet of plywood that we well, well.
00:01:13
Speaker
As all shipping tables are. Yeah. Weld up a little frame. And there's one thing I've learned is that generally large tables are disasters. They tend to just accumulate stuff and you tend to not respect space and use them efficiently because they just do it. And the other thing is they are both large and generally a mobile. It's much harder to put a large table like that on wheels so far.
00:01:37
Speaker
I said, well, and Julie and I had been talking like, hey, let's, we'll get a new shipping table. But it was kind of a just said something and not did anything about it. Well, now time came down to do something. And so I did a quick Google, took a look at Uline and
00:01:51
Speaker
I saw that shipping table that we threw up on Instagram and I'm like, oh my God, you have no idea how excited I am for this. It is not inexpensive. It's probably many, many hundreds of dollars, if not a thousand. More. By the time you add those accessories, it would probably be $1,300, which
Custom Table Solutions and Shop Efficiency
00:02:10
Speaker
which I didn't actually care about. I do care. I mean, the bootstrapper in me is strong. And so part of that's ridiculous. But we are short. All else equal, we're short on time right now. We have a great team. We're all doing a lot of work. And we are not looking for projects. And so it's much easier to buy a slightly overpriced table that's from a quality company that's proven that it'll work then to start welding things up or scrappy or looking for auctions. You know how that goes. Totally.
00:02:46
Speaker
turnkey solution that you know where you fit their needs and that's okay something like shipping there's probably an argue for argument for conforming to what's out there but I when I threw that up on Instagram some folks reach out with some really good ideas ends up there's a boatload of custom table company type things and a lot of them are
00:03:08
Speaker
But it was obnoxiously expensive and it was a
00:03:10
Speaker
include either custom fittings or custom fittings plus pipe. Paul Akers actually has them. Right, the fast pipe. Yes. Now that this happened, I am fairly certain I was at a shop and I'm fairly certain that shop was Pearson Workholding that had made custom tables out of this stuff. One of the other pillows that chimed in was from Makerpipe.
00:03:34
Speaker
I believe. There's a couple of different ones out there. There's one up here in Canada too in Quebec. Flex pipe, I think it's called. It's just like the Paul Aker stuff. I've looked at it hard many times and they have this graphical software where you can build your table. It's pretty darn cool.
00:03:50
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Well, so the thing I like about the maker pipe, which I think is what we're going to experiment with is it just uses three quarter inch conduit or EMT that you can get in any hardware store. I don't like that because it doesn't look as nice or polished as many of the alternatives that are like fast pipe where you're buying the pipe from them, but it becomes almost like the rapid air line where it's got that nice. Yeah. Color. Urethane coating and colored and it looks more refined. Yeah.
00:04:18
Speaker
And this one up here, you can choose any color. They have like 10 colors. Yeah, I got to chew on that. But ultimately, they had some sample videos, and they had done some shipping tables where the shipping table was done better. They did a little recess dip that the polyseal machine sets in this recess so that the heat sealer is coplanar with the tabletop. And we know enough about what we're doing where the customization is a good thing, not a distraction in the substrate.
00:04:47
Speaker
5 millimeter impact driver and you can, in sawing up some EMT, you're rocking and rolling. And this is not something that I can have other people in the shop doing. Literally anybody in the shop could build or modify that. Right. And so what we realized is, okay, so we have two large shipping tables or two large tables. One is the shipping table. The other is this kind of catch-all assembly table. It's where products get brought after machining and they're in there
00:05:12
Speaker
to be critical of ourselves. They're in their new U-line bins, but then the bins just get put into purgatory. And so the light bulb went off. And so what we're going to do is build probably six of these tables, one for shipping, one for QC, and then one for the mod vices, one for the fixture palettes, another product.
00:05:30
Speaker
So now when you go get mod devices off the machine, this is where they live in purgatory until they're assembled. On the assembly table, we have everything from the never-seize to the right fasteners to the little mini, I know what we call the boxes that aren't parcel boxes, but product boxes. And these will be on wheels and they'll be way smaller so they're more specific. We can move them around if needed. All of a sudden, we're just like, yes, yes, yes.
00:05:53
Speaker
That is the big difference right there. If all you need is one shipping table, buy it, done, move on. But since you have applications for more customization, you are now investing in a system and an inventory of pipe and fittings and all that stuff. Your team's getting good at the software and the build and stuff and that becomes a worthwhile
00:06:13
Speaker
like investment. It's evergreen. You're going to do
Make vs Buy in Tooling Solutions
00:06:16
Speaker
more with this. And that's been my love of the stuff. I haven't bought any yet. I got a sample kit with like something so I could feel it and see it. And I want that customization, but I haven't yet pulled the trigger on like where we'd use it and how much we'd use it. And, you know, and I was just in Fraser's office two days ago and he's got like a plastic folding table for doing all this photography.
00:06:38
Speaker
And it's old and it's got paint all over it and there's a sheet of plywood on top and it's gross, but it's fine. And I asked him, are you good with that setup? And he goes, yes. And the very next day, he goes, I was thinking about it a lot and maybe not anymore. Right. So the cool thing that I like is it's a good tie back to the whole, what's scalable, sustainable and scalable. And so
00:07:00
Speaker
What I like to do is find ways to push myself outside of your comfort zone. Looking at one of my favorite quotes, the average person thinks they're not. You and I think we're not necessarily going to have problems that other businesses have. The reality is we do. We're starting to get into a space problem. Not really. There's plenty of room in the shop. It's like organization problem or like
00:07:22
Speaker
Just a allocation problem. Yeah, just because you have... I mean, man, I was arguably more efficient and I don't mean this in a metaphysical way, but just as happy when I was in a 600 square foot shop or 100 square foot shop. Bigger is not better here, but we need to be more efficient with the space that we have for every reason of thinking and organization and walking and growing. One of the things that the MakerPipe guys did that I like on their little product assembly tables
00:07:53
Speaker
was it's a traditional kind of lab table setup where you have a workbench, you have kind of storage below the workbench, and then you have a backer that has tools laid out on it or stuff at the top. But then there's like a 12 inch wall or 12 inch section behind the whole thing, which is on wheels, where they store all their breadcrumbs.
00:08:16
Speaker
Oh, it's like behind, but it's still right there. So like take my vice washers. We use 716 cap screws. We have 200 out on the assembly cart, but there could be 1,000 breadcrumbed behind the cart. And so every two weeks when you need more, they're already with your thing, but they're not in the way. Yep. Love it. I love that. That's awesome. And so we're thinking, OK, so you could build a double row of these assembly things back to back. And when you need to access the backside, you just wheel the thing out for a second.
00:08:46
Speaker
What's your make-by? Yeah, that's been on my mind. I haven't thought about that for many months now. But certainly moving into the new shop, I was like, oh, let's go all in on FlexPipe. And we're going to need lots of tables and stuff. And we haven't yet. But I still think it's a wonderful idea. I'm actually really looking forward to you going through that first. If you document it, then I'll be like, guys, we need this. Look, look, ideas, crazy.
00:09:13
Speaker
No, my make-buy, which I think I've decided now that I found the solution, is clearly a buy, waiting for a price back. On the Tornos, I'm trying to get the absolute best-facing past finish, like the most beautiful finish on the face of our Norseman pivot and the head.
00:09:33
Speaker
both on the pivot side and the screw side. And turning's never been as good as I want it to be. And because of that, Eric has been tumbling our pivots forever. And even tumbling takes a few hours to get through all the little swirls and everything. And so I put the grinding wheel in the tornos, and now I'm grinding the face of the pivot, and they're amazing.
00:09:54
Speaker
But talking with one of my knife maker friends, who's also a machinist, he's like, you have a Swiss lathe. You should not be tumbling your pivots. They should just be perfect. And I'm like, yeah, but they're not. And it pushed me to think of why. And I figured out why. It's because the facing tool I'm using is a boring bar that is sticking out an inch, inch and a half. And not only that, but I had to turn it down. I had to neck it down to fit into a collet, into an ER16 collet.
00:10:21
Speaker
So it's just a bad scenario and a bad scenario for rigidity purposes. So there are these tooling blocks you can buy or make that replace the whole thing and bolt in with two cap screws and it's a big square chunk for a CCMT insert. And I didn't really think about them until now. So I sent off a price code last night and I'm like,
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, if this is under the ridiculous price range, I will just buy it. And I'm sure it'll just be a few hundred dollars. I need that. So basically, you think it's either vibration deflection, chatter, harmonics, something of the sorts? All of it combined, yeah.
00:10:58
Speaker
Interesting. Exactly. The finish looks okay. It's just not perfectly flat. If you brush it on some sandpaper, you can see rings and it's not amazing. I can hear a little bit of singing when it's cutting too. Even if it doesn't chatter, it makes noise, right? I love that idea that noise ultimately is the manifestation of sound waves, which is the manifestation of things I don't like.
00:11:23
Speaker
Right? Like, I don't know how that, well, like, like I'd love to have a conversation with like one of the Bose. First off, you know, those Bose noise canceling headphones as a layman's explanation, basically work by offsetting the phase of the sound 180 degrees so that it cancels. It's canceling noise with more noise. Weird. So, you know, sine wave and your A is 440 Hertz or whatever. Well, they shift it. Uh,
00:11:48
Speaker
100 degrees out of phase. So it's the craziest thing to think that like, if someone's blowing an air horn that's like, you can almost feel it, it's so loud, you shift the frequency and add a second air horn and it's all the sudden silent. What?
00:12:03
Speaker
Now in fairness, it's probably silent. It's like the tree falls in a forest. It's silent because the waves are actually canceling themselves out. So it's not like you're getting double the noise that you just can't hear. It's literally canceling the noise. But I always love that. We do some slotting. We've done some slotting recipes on ProvenCutware.
00:12:24
Speaker
You almost think the tool broke because all of a sudden, but you can see the chips in the spindle loads there, but you're like, oh my gosh, it's silent. This is awesome. Yeah, you're playing with it, and you hit that RPM band, and it's like, where'd it go? The thing that, to me, screams full grimace mode, dude, carbide boring bar, like the carbide holder, soft body. Yeah. Way stiffer and not that expensive. No. Yeah, that could work.
00:12:52
Speaker
The way it's mounted right now is in an ER 16 holder, which can only go up to three eighths. And I think it was a half inch boring bar. So like there's downside on downside, right? Whereas if I replace the whole block, I now get a rigid square, like beefier solution. So you get rid of the collet. That's a good thing, but you're still using a boring bar.
00:13:09
Speaker
No, it's an integral piece. The piece that bolts on has a square piece machined into it where the insert just sits onto it. Oh, that's amazing. Okay, so the whole thing, it's literally an insert screw into that. Totally. Perfect. Done. I'm sure it'll be under $500 and I'm sure I'll just say, yep, I need that right now.
00:13:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's a no-brainer. Yeah. But until I found the solution at a store, I was like, I could probably reverse engineer that and make it on the current. It'd be a fun project.
00:13:40
Speaker
But I had to tell myself, no, don't be stupid. Just buy it. I have so many other things to make that are actually more important. This is important. But if you can buy it, don't reverse engineer it and make it. And for the most part, that's my stand on things now. Even if I can make it, we've got a stocked machine shop here with lathes and mills, and you can make anything. But if it exists, I need to spend my effort and time on things that don't exist, on products that can sell or solutions to my problems that don't exist.
00:14:08
Speaker
What, uh, the pivots are titanium. They're stainless 17 four. Oh, it's okay. Are you using a positive break tool? Yeah. CCGT, I guess. Yeah. CCGT. Interesting. I'm surprised that you can't get just a primo finish. Yeah. Um, it looks good, but it's never, you know, always, I'll be shooting for the next. Well, hopefully I'm grinding them then.
00:14:36
Speaker
Yeah. And I don't mind grinding them, although the grinding wheel is wearing down noticeably. So I have to offset it every day. If I go for more than 10 pivots, then I have to offset it again. Fail. Right.
00:14:51
Speaker
It's not the most sustainable way, whereas if I get a good insert, solid holder, I should be able to make a thousand. Well, I would not expect you to have great tool life though. I would think 50 or 100, I don't know. Yeah, I do pretty good. If you walk up to it every three hours and measure the last one and offset it, then you can keep it. You can keep the range.
00:15:15
Speaker
Oh, I didn't need a tolerance so much as the dimensional tolerance as much as I meant. You would think that positive, you want like a sharp insert to give you a good finish. You do. Yeah. On that stainless. I get on stainless, I don't know, probably get a good thousand parts out of an insert before I call it toast. That's incredible. Yeah.
00:15:31
Speaker
This is where it's super fun to leverage an apps or technical person from a tooling company. That's where hardness versus toughness. You're not doing interrupted cuts. You're doing light things.
00:15:47
Speaker
I don't know what they would say here because you want the wear resistance, but you don't want a heavy coating because you're trying to get a really good shear angle, right? And so it's like, I forget which one, PVD or CVD, but one of them is noticeably thinner.
00:16:03
Speaker
Yeah. Um, but I would not give up. I mean, I think you're doing the right thing, um, for the, with the holder, but, um, different brand tools, cutting inserts, uh, code, a different insert that was more meant for stainless and like a sharper rake angle or something, whatever. But I don't know if I ever tried it. I know I have it. Kiosseira brand. Um,
00:16:25
Speaker
But I think it was a different nose radius, so I didn't jump on it right away. Do you face, like is it a facing tool path that goes outside to center? Yep. Okay. You ever thought about like trying to do a chip thinning effect where you start from the inside and roll into the center line and then pull out? I have before. I don't think I'm doing that right now, but yeah, that might be worth considering. These pivots are what, like three, four millimeters diameter? Yeah, they're three eights.
00:16:53
Speaker
Oh, that's bigger. Okay. 350 actually. Yeah. Nine millimeter. Yeah. Yep. Cool. I don't know. I have no idea why I just gave metric as the first. I know. Guess it's because you drink milk out of a bag. I do. Yes, but I still don't metric unless I have to. Do you have your Imperializer on the table right there? You can do a quick calculation. Moment of silence. Things from a bygone era. That was a fun project.
00:17:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's like a graphing calculator. We grew up within school, but I don't think our kids know what they are. No, I've actually made a concerted effort to try to get better at those quick conversions of just knowing, hey, what's your...
Coolant Measurement Solutions
00:17:32
Speaker
For sure. And I'm decent at the units. I still struggle when somebody is like, oh, this machine moves two meters a minute. I'm like, I have no idea if that's a turtle or a hare.
00:17:39
Speaker
Yeah, you go too big or too small, you kind of lose it. But you look at Allen keys and stuff, 5 mil Allen key, it's about that big or whatever. But you start talking microns, and I'm trying to convert it to my head, like, what's 3 microns? Or meters, exactly. Yeah.
00:17:55
Speaker
So I learned a lot about auto bricks reading. Oh, go, go, go. So it's kind of one of those awesome, funny examples. Lehman's explanation is bricks is just a measure of a sugar content. It was a system really developed for alcohol, like vineyards, breweries. And it has really nothing to do with coolant concentration, except that it's a stable, convertible
00:18:24
Speaker
or measurement that can be converted into the units that cool companies care about. And it's one of those things where because it was such a developed product, that's just what they used, or some version of that story. Unfortunately, there isn't really another tool other than a refractometer, readily or commonly available to give a BRICS reading. And a refractometer involves the use of the
00:18:47
Speaker
how much light passes through a liquid. So it's not something where, unfortunately, you can buy a Digi-Key sensor or Adafruit Arduino sensor that you can dip in a tank or allow it to measure electricity or some other readily measurable thing.
00:19:04
Speaker
They do make in the in the term to look for is in line refractometers they are readily available and made by numerous companies unfortunately they're all very industrial oriented. You know for like i'm looking across the street like a huge food company food factory that probably a.
00:19:21
Speaker
Yeah, they may not care about having these industrial grade huge sensors in this huge system. Most of them are about two to three grand a pop. The cheapest one I found was 1600. And it irks me because we have decent quality digital refracts. We use the ones from Milwaukee, no relation to the Milwaukee Hand Tool Company.
00:19:45
Speaker
But you can buy on eBay, Amazon, wherever for 100 bucks. And they're the same electronics and the same build as a more reputable company's $300 version. It's kind of one of those classic rebranded. And they're not perfectly accurate, but I don't need perfect accuracy. So I have two different thoughts. I haven't decided what we're going to do.
00:20:09
Speaker
But those digital refracts, we'll put a link in the description, but basically it's a little display and then a little silver Petri dish thing that you just dropper some coolant onto it. Now, you can't just flood the thing with coolant. You have to put, I think it seems to be the case that if you just dump a whole bunch of coolant on it, it will error out. So it's somewhat sensitive to how much coolant it has.
00:20:30
Speaker
But my first thought was the kind of go crazy approach, full Saunders, where you could build an Arduino or something similar, very inexpensive water pump that could pump coolant up to it. That's easy to basically, that's very simple and reliable and safe to pump up a small amount of coolant onto the thing. We could hack the device or even build a way to push the button to read. And then the display is either right there or you could either figure out a way to kind of port the display to the front of the machine.
00:20:59
Speaker
And then afterward you could use either an air blast or literally a rag on a arm, like a motorized rag or both to clean it off. But then it occurred to me, what's the problem that I'm solving? The problem that I'm solving isn't really the act of using the dropper to pull some coolant out and measure it, because that's really not hard. The bigger issue is we have one of these and it's always somewhere else in the shop.
00:21:24
Speaker
So the interim solution is we are building little shelves and putting these things right above the coolant sump on each machine. Nice. Because that's not a big deal.
00:21:37
Speaker
Yeah, that is true. Until you're going full automation where you're mixing coolant at the right percentage and you need this feedback loop, then it's worth investing in the big thing. That's a good point. If the problem you're trying to solve is literally just the quickest, easiest way to see the reading, I think just solve that. For now, at least. Yeah, for now.
00:21:56
Speaker
And if we still did the upgrade, there's a chance that we would be able to convert these or probably could sell them to other machine shops. So if I bought it for 100 bucks, sell it for 60 bucks, it seems like I'd probably get people to buy them. So it's like, okay, your downside here isn't that much.
00:22:13
Speaker
Yeah. And it feels gluttonous, but then it's like, no, this is great because I just want to be able to... If the VF2 needs top off, I don't intend to close the loop. I don't need to do long-term data tracking. I just want to know the pricks. Of course. It's tooling investment. It's like having torque wrenches at every machine kind of thing. It's not a waste of money. It becomes necessary. And once you turn your brain to that, then it makes sense. It's like, oh, yeah, duh. Why didn't we do this sooner?
00:22:40
Speaker
Well, I actually split the baby. I bought three. We have one already. So we'll have a four dedicated for now. I'm going to make sure that that holds true before I go buy five more. Yeah. You just increased your measurement capability by 300%. So yeah. Yeah.
00:23:00
Speaker
Yeah, we only have one too, and it's ancient. I've had it since Tormach days. It works. The telescope, look at the stars. A little flappy on the onion. I'm sure I got it from Tormach.
Shop Reorganization Success
00:23:13
Speaker
I had the thought the other day, I'm like, should I get a new one, a nicer one? I don't know, this one works.
00:23:18
Speaker
Actually, I would, I would encourage you, um, we have the Otago it's probably 150 bucks, maybe 200. It's there like kind of Honda Accord, one of the standard grade example, because it's a nice, it's a very nice, but it's the glass glass refract. And I'll tell you, we have the junky Chinese one to buy the Otago. You'll like it. Okay. Yeah. I'll make sure.
00:23:39
Speaker
The other thing is that when I mentioned earlier, everything kind of fell into place was when we originally bought the racking three months ago, we knew we were going to need more, but this was just the first step and that worked out perfectly. We knew we need more, but we knew we'd need to learn more about how to use the racking and how much we'd need. We also realized that we needed to reconfigure the racking space because even though we have pallet jacks and the first rack height,
00:24:08
Speaker
is the co-planar with all of our rolling carts. So you can kind of scoot something off the rack onto a wheeled cart if it's not too heavy, but not something you want a free lift. Nevertheless, we've learned that you really want to have your racking safely and easily forklifts accessible. So we'll do this on video. It'll be much more enjoyable to explain. But basically, we're building a U of racking. So left side or right side, and then against the wall.
00:24:36
Speaker
And moving one rack over to that section, bought some new, and that's going to come together with the location tagging in Lex. And, you know, we've now got raw material. We're starting to get inventory of the like Haas and other bigger plates, like sitting on the shelf for now we can do, you know, one day turnaround on plates on some plates, I should say. Nice. And we even have like 15 crates prebuilt now ready to go. Like,
00:25:01
Speaker
We're even going to have an inventory rack for unbuilt crates where we have all the two by threes pre-cut to the lengths. We don't want to store 12 foot two by threes anymore. We know the dimensions, get them cut down to size. It's really coming together.
00:25:16
Speaker
That it totally makes me think back to the times that I toured Pearson. It's very similar. He's got all his racks. He's got it all set up. He can make something on a moment's notice. There's inventory, but it's also one piece flow. And it's his own mix of that. And it's what works best for his company. And you're finding that too. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So I'm really excited.
00:25:36
Speaker
Um, so I think in the next two, three weeks, we're going to be at a point, you know, it's kind of, as you'll never call it done, but we'll be at a point where we can really say this is a project that we can now speak about in the past tense. Like this is what we did in 2020. Um, and, and honestly be really proud of it. It's, it's probably one of the best business sort of things we've done. Um,
00:25:57
Speaker
And I don't know if I really shared all of this on the podcast, but it all started because we got called out on a mod vice that we sent. It was out of tolerance. Yeah. And that was, it's one of those things. I'm so glad that happened because that just, that started us to revamp our fixturing our manufacturing process workflows when we're not rushing because we have, didn't have material. We had to get it in. Then we had to rush to make them. And it just daisy chained into this whole awesome process. And we are significantly better off for it. Yep.
00:26:28
Speaker
Yeah. And we are, I'll tell you this, like we on our Mod Vise top jaws and on our fixture palettes, darn it, we're holding grinding tolerance. Yeah. We have some ways that we're doing those top jaws now to where we're pulling off parallelism and nominal dimension within two-tenths. And Ed was even joking about like the 50 millionth readings, which the quantum mics can show that, but I don't believe it.
00:26:54
Speaker
Yeah, we're aiming for that one to two tenths. And so all of a sudden, when you have one that's like five foul across, you know, four inches, which is still frankly, fine, you're like, what is this? Yeah, something's wrong. Right? Yeah, in small miss small. Yeah.
Machining Challenges and Solutions
00:27:08
Speaker
Well, it's funny, on that note, I made something on the current last week, where imagine like a half inch thick chunk of two inch by five inch material.
00:27:20
Speaker
Dove tailed, held, sticking edge up. Yeah. So like two inches up, five inches wide. Mohawk. Yeah, exactly like Mohawk. And I made four little, you know the pocket clip on our Norseman? I do. It's like that size. Four of those, but not a pocket clip. It's a support that goes under the pocket clip on the fixture. OK.
00:27:40
Speaker
It's just a support pad, basically, but I wanted good tolerances. I window machined four of them, leaving material on the outside, and then tabbed them off. I machined them from both sides, and I strategized all my operations and everything. I was like, yeah, they should be amazing. Then I threw them on the machine just thinking they were current perfect. I threw them on the Maury fixtures, and Angelo ran them. He said, yeah, the clips I ran last night, they're all bad.
00:28:03
Speaker
And I'm like, but the thingies came off the current, like they should have been perfect. I didn't measure them, but they should have been perfect. So I made another set and I figured out why. And the ones closest to the vice were thinner and the ones further away were like thicker and is a big problem.
00:28:22
Speaker
And I forget maybe the opposite, thicker, thinner. But it was like 10 thou in thickness between the two. And I'm like, OK, this is good. I need to learn what's happening. I need to learn how to not do this next time. I need to learn how to prioritize my ops more. So I'm doing the critical features first when there's all the meat. And then I'm clearing away after. Yeah, it was just a funny, like, I'm surprised. Did you fix it?
00:28:51
Speaker
I haven't fixed it yet. I've looked at it, I've measured, I think I know what I have to do next. Whatever happened, I think it was two weeks ago, we were talking about hot glue or Delrin inserts or the Rask blade. I made Delrin inserts. I never got the chance to try the hot glue because I already had the design for the Delrin. First one was 3000 undersized.
00:29:17
Speaker
The Delrin was intentionally. Intentionally and measurably as well. I bought this plastic gauge stuff that they use an automobile invention building. I put it between the two, sandwiched it together, torqued down the blade, and I noticed like 3,000 of squish. Perfect. I made the next one plus 3,000, or two and a half, I think.
00:29:40
Speaker
much tighter on the next one. So I ground a blade and it seems to be amazing. It works. Yep. And you just, you put the Dela insert in there and then you add a 3000 plastic gauge to kind of wedge it in.
00:29:54
Speaker
The plastic is just a measurement device. So in situation, I wouldn't use it. But the Delrin is screwed in and bolted into the fixture like tightly. Oh, okay. I didn't realize it was captive. I thought it was an open cavity that it would just fall out of.
00:30:11
Speaker
Nope, so yeah, it's held in there nice. So it's just a support pad, little cup pillow in the back that's plenty stiff enough and strong enough and accurate enough to support the blade. And the funny thing is with grinding, I've been running to two major problems, which I've solved mostly. The first one was every blade that I ground
00:30:33
Speaker
you know, I'm probing, everything's perfect, everything's awesome. And then I'd basically burn up the grinding wheel on the very first pass. And I'm like, No, this is wrong. I should be cutting air for like, tons of passes because I put like 80 passes to cut air and then
00:30:49
Speaker
it was still burn up on the first pass and I'm like something's wrong so i bang my head against the computer in the current for like a day or two trying to figure this out and then in desperation and you know Angela was walking by so i showed it to him and i told them like you know i i wind above my problem and he goes it looks like it's doing the last pass first.
00:31:07
Speaker
And then moving away from it, I'm like, no. So because it's a patterned operation, there's a patterned folder in Fusion, because it's cutter comp. So I have a single pass cutter comp that I'm patterning out however many times I want, and I had the reverse direction wrong. So it was doing final pass first, and then moving away every pass. I'm like, OK, I feel dumb, but I got it. Thank you so much. Way to go, Angelo. And yeah, that changed everything. Did that fix it?
00:31:36
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Awesome. I can grind amazing now. Wait, so the ras knife blades are, I mean, subject to constant proof. You're good. You're done. Move on. The last thing I'm running into is a height nine issue called it doing a cutter comp, it does the lead in and then it stops and it says tool radius too big. And I'm like, no, it's not. Stop yelling at me. Okay. And then
00:32:02
Speaker
it's, I'm sketching the lead in arc, and then I'm sketching the toolpath trajectory. And there's plenty of clearance, the arc is bigger than the tool. But high nine is still complaining. And I tweak the sketch. And I, you know, I don't use the sketch leads, I use actual like fusion leads. And sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. So I'm finding the balance of like, what
00:32:24
Speaker
what exactly is happening there. And I'm still struggling with it, but I can get it to work sometimes. And I'm doing research and it's kind of a common problem. And I think that in FANUC, if you try to do a cutter comp and the corner is too small, like a square corner or something, it'll just round it and it'll work.
00:32:44
Speaker
Whereas I think no you get an error. Do you get an error? I've honestly done more of an on path pilot and it's like a it's one of those errors or it's like I'm not this isn't a negotiation like no Sure, and that's what it's like in high nine I just don't think I've ever run into that error before and I'm programming kind of the same way as I always have Anyway, it's it's a roadblock for me right now. But once it hits that
00:33:09
Speaker
point along the cutting curve, like once that error happens, is the wheel no longer in contact with the part? I don't know.
Shop Automation and IoT Innovations
00:33:22
Speaker
It's probably in contact. Well, it's first pass, so it's air cutting. Well, my thought is could you hack your posts to turn off cutter comp on the lead out? Are you doing wear comp or cutter comp? Cutter comp. Yeah. But like every single pass has cutter comp. Right.
00:33:39
Speaker
But it's weird because the spindle will stop at the coolant will still go. So if you're just watching the machine like briefly, you're like, yeah, it's still going. Wait, why is it not moving? Do you have a light bar tower thing? Yeah. Can't say I look at it very much.
00:33:56
Speaker
Doesn't it go to yellow or red? Probably. I don't pay attention. It's funny. Yeah. That was when we were looking to the BRIC solutions. That's when I had to chuckle over this whole, again,
00:34:11
Speaker
Is IoT 4.0 and industry 4.0, what elements of it are organically happening and real and useful? And what parts of it are, again, a marketing effort by industry organizations to force something that isn't ready and not happening? And there is a $40,000 BRICS coolant solution out there. And I'm just like, man, I mean, I guess you don't get what you don't ask for, but good grief. Wow. Yeah.
00:34:39
Speaker
Yeah, you sell two of those a year and you're a millionaire. Yeah. Well, it's like, why are, even Haas, like Haas has the app for your phone, but, and I haven't used it in a while. I turned it off because it was hard to differentiate like little e-stop things that I don't care about. Or like somebody, somebody has a cutter company or I don't want notified on my phone. I do want notified if there's a Z-axis overload alarm. And why isn't there not more better connectivity in a real practical sense?
00:35:06
Speaker
there. Yeah, like they have empty connect, which basically has access to all of the variables and parameters on the machines and based stuff. But the app still has to decipher and sort and organize what you want to see, whether it's machine uptime or alarms or errors or whatever. And
00:35:27
Speaker
Yeah, you got to be both a hands-on machinist and a programmer to do that properly. That is something next on our list is courtesy of Anish to find, buy, and implement some basic
00:35:45
Speaker
actually going to intentionally flood our shop a little bit. We're going to turn on some hoses and see where the water goes and then add some floor sensors because that's kind of like you were talking about having double ball valves on your system. I don't necessarily want to tackle it that way because there's an almost infinite number of places something could fail like that. So rather than try to solve that problem, which we actually will still do, but rather I just want to simply know I want
00:36:13
Speaker
code red full steam alert when there's standing water on our floor for any reason, period. So that should be fairly simple with an IOT flood sensor. And frankly, I mean, we don't have one, but us in every shop should have one of those for the 100 bucks. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yeah, we need that too, for sure.
00:36:38
Speaker
What's going on today? Today, busy day, running around, picking up kids. But on the current, I'm going to dig into the tool radius alarm a little bit more.
00:36:54
Speaker
So I haven't finished ground the second side of the blade. But I think it's ready. I'm having this tool radius too large error. And once I can push past that, then I should be able to finish grinding the second side of the blade. And that's a huge step. And then the blades are done. That's good. So I'm going to focus on that today. Yeah. Good. That's what I'm going to focus on. Let's leave it there. Have you been asking about that in WhatsApp?
00:37:22
Speaker
Did I miss that? I don't think so. Oh, OK. So I woke up to 200 messages. I'm like, oh, I don't think this is a skip. But yeah, that's weird. Well, let me know what you come up with. I'm curious. One of the reasons we don't use, we need to start using wear comp to do whatever shop does, which is kind of tweaking little things at the machine. But we're also, we care a lot about the finish and dimension of the
Live Machining Sessions and Coolant System Automation
00:37:51
Speaker
the talon rail for the mod vice top shawls. And it's not half-inch, it's slightly over, which makes it way easier because we can use a half-inch tool and still machine both sides. But we have this really weird back and forth strategy because we care about roughing it out. We care about the forefinish, we care about both sidewall finishes, we care about the dimensions. And so we end up going
00:38:13
Speaker
through three different tools and different cutting operations in order priority. And we've got it down perfectly, but the benefit of using three different tools is also that finishing tool gives us what we need and less concerned about where comp because we've got the tool life out of the finishing tool. Sure. Yeah, it lasts.
00:38:32
Speaker
Yep. It's neat tooling up the kern as I'm getting deeper into rask production. And I'm like, you know what? I'm going to put an eighth inch ball in there for stainless. And I'm going to put an eighth inch ball in there for titanium. Love it. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Not mixing materials. Yeah. Was that your story yesterday of clipping into the tool rack? Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Oh. Oh. I mean, kudos to kern. That, I still, the way that- Yeah, the tool rack. It's amazing. Yeah.
00:39:01
Speaker
Yeah, it was funny yesterday. Kern put up a picture of the spindle out of the machine with all the wiring on the back. So I reposted it because I thought it was amazing. And then I got a text this morning from a buddy and he was like, why was the spindle out of your current? Well, no, that's not my intention. I didn't even think about that. No, that's not mine. Somebody else. There wasn't an extra square centimeter of real estate on the north end of that spindle.
00:39:26
Speaker
No, you couldn't have put a quarter inch, you know, airline in there. Yeah, it's crazy. It's just because that's the, that's a motor and spindle. I think so. Yeah. Cartridge or whatever they call it. Yep. Got it.
00:39:41
Speaker
Yeah, Robin, I think Robin Renzetti just put out a video on precision spindle design or something, and I have not watched it, but I'm very much looking forward to it. I saw he briefly commented on Kern's post and said something like, nope. It's funny. Yeah. Sweet. What are you up to today? We are, oh, we're doing a live YouTube. Yeah.
00:40:08
Speaker
So going to do like, I've got a couple of fusion. It's something that, frankly, we've covered before, but we've gotten a couple of different inbound questions from folks. And a lot of it has to do with toolpath containment on 3D surfacing. And it's just so important that folks know this stuff, because otherwise the software, I think, is a lot more frustrating than it needs to be. I want to go through a couple of those examples. And then I've got a couple other kind of good examples of stuff we've been up to. And then we're going to see how Q&A goes.
00:40:36
Speaker
I'd love to be able to help people and answer questions, but we'll see. I'm actually pretty excited for it. We got the OBS software set up so we can broadcast both our screen as well as me so you can see me and talk to me. Are you going to talk it back and forth or leave them both on screen?
00:40:53
Speaker
I think it'll be picture in picture with me as the smaller one. Otherwise, oh, this is funny. It's like not nightmare, but we're building the nodes is what we call them, which is the PVC drop section of the cool automation system.
00:41:12
Speaker
And so we're converting from PEX to NPT, which goes to a couple of T valves, as well as to a Y, which has a couple of hose garden hose quick disconnects, and then a flow sensor, which is unfortunately three quarter inch British pipe.
00:41:32
Speaker
Tell me exactly why it's British and still three quarters. Is it like Canadian thing where they use mixed units? I can understand 12 millimeter or whatever it would be. I have the wrong adapter. I mistakenly saw three quarter inch and thought it was garden hose. It was actually three quarter G. GHT by the way is the industry term for garden hose and like on McMaster and so forth. Exactly.
00:41:58
Speaker
I need to nail this down, which is just one more fitting I got to get and then PVC these together. But the idea you're looking at it is that basically everything I just said, maybe didn't sink in picture just a straight
00:42:12
Speaker
PVC pipe, except it has two tees, and there's a ball valve in between the two tees. So if you shut the ball valve, it forces water out the top tee, and then it'll go through our mix-a-tron and back, whatever pre-mix we want, and then back in and down, straight down into the sump.
00:42:29
Speaker
Oh, it's a bypass for the mixture on. Bingo. That's cool. And above this, you don't see it here, but above the PVC section is the solenoid, which opens and closes pursuant to the PLC or the automation box. And then right below this is the flow sensor. So there actually is a PID loop or sort of feedback sensor, which measures how much it thought it should dispense and how much it actually did.
00:42:54
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. Because water's not perfect based on how much pressure there was and head pressure and so forth. Is the mix turn going to be okay? Receiving pressure on both inlets inlet and outlet. It won't, it'll just be pressure coming out and then it'll know. But if you, if you open the ball valve, it's still going to see pressure to the mixture on top and bottom.
00:43:15
Speaker
Well, mixture won't be plugged in unless you're closing the wall valve. And when it's not plugged in here, this is a quick disconnect, which when it's not connected into it, it's closed. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Because if you left it plugged in, you might have some back pressure issues or something.
00:43:31
Speaker
Yeah, we just did cool and fill. I actually didn't touch anything. It was amazing. That is awesome. Angelo and Steven did a cool and fill and clean on the Nakamura. And they're doing the Maury tomorrow. And then they're doing the Kern, kicking out the Quali-Chem 450 and going back to 251. So the lathe is now done. It's amazing and clean. Shop smells good now. It doesn't smell like coffee. And what was I going to say?
00:43:57
Speaker
Because we have this huge IBC tank of RO water, but they say you want to do tap water for your initial fill to get the minerals or whatever. So they just ran a garden hose from the sink to the mixture on instead of fancy trying to bypass the RO system. And it works for now. Mm-hmm. Good. Yeah. Love it. Awesome. Yeah. Sweet. I'll see you next week. Sounds good, bud. Take care. OK. Take care.