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Business of Machining - Episode 204
203 Plays4 years ago
TOPICS:
- Grimsmo starts us off with a smooth lead in
- SMW Product Demand Increases & The Struggle to Reduce Lead Time
- Super Helpful Tools & Gadgets (Scales & Pallet Jacks)
- https://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200680712_200680712
- Precision
- Abbe's Principle
- The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
- A Crazy Metrology Question on the NYCCNC Forum
- Toolpath & Product Improvements
- Reliable Processes VS. Cycle Time
- Using templates for easier programming
- Conventional VS. Climb Milling
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining. My name is John Grimsmough. And my name is John Saunders. This podcast is a conversation we have every Friday about entrepreneurship, mindset, struggle, happiness, CNC machines, toolpaths, staff, growth, money, and more. And like every good toolpath, you want a smooth lead in. So how are you doing today? Chuckling right now.
00:00:25
Speaker
I love that. Now I feel like it's a lot. Maybe that's emblematic of life is what we do. There's a lot.
The Importance of Accurate Weighing
00:00:34
Speaker
I took off my entrepreneur and manager hat. It was very much a technician yesterday.
00:00:42
Speaker
Just jumping in and filling bags of fixture plate plugs. We do 500. Fun fact, we have one of these inexpensive Amazon way scales that are like grand scales that we use for legal sales activities. It's the coolest thing. We've had it for a while and then I think Ed or somebody discovered that it has a product weight option on it.
00:01:07
Speaker
And so, and don't quote me on this, but you hit that button and then you put like five or 25, in this case of our fixture plate plugs, which weigh nothing. I mean, I mean, numerous of them maybe weigh a gram or something. Anyway, it is devastatingly accurate. You know about these? Yeah, we've got the same thing. We used it for the Swiss lathe. So when I'm counting little screws or something in titanium, they weigh nothing or bearing cages and plastic. And you count out 25 and you tear it to 25 and then it just knows.
00:01:37
Speaker
and you take one away and it says 24 and you're like,
Shop Overhaul: Progress and Challenges
00:01:40
Speaker
ooh. Yeah. I did a little bit of an audit myself just to be like, hey, is this really decent? And holy cow. I mean, when we do a 500 pack, we obviously round up to like 507 or 510. Yeah, it doesn't matter. But still, it's shockingly good. And it's those little things where it's like, I don't know what that thing costs, 20 bucks, 30 bucks, where it's like, God, we live in a great world.
00:01:59
Speaker
Yep. Yep. Yeah. So that's the, is it a gram scale? And then I bought a super accurate, I think they call it a microgram scale. That's like a little tiny platter that can measure, you know, super minute differences. And I've got one that's just for measuring and then one for counting as well. Okay. So for counting, I want to count our ball bearings, our 1 16th inch ball bearing and ceramic, they weigh nothing.
00:02:28
Speaker
Yeah, so it works good for that too. What I think is cool too is it just doesn't seem fussy. We tear it with a red shallower bin on top and even if you don't have the plugs evenly distributed, like they're a little bit mounted or off to one side or like debouncing where the scale kind of has to settle, no, it just works quickly. Just works. Yeah. No, but that's the theme of the week, which is, man, we're having a hard time
00:02:56
Speaker
getting to where I want to be. Yeah. Um, and this all started six months ago, nine months ago with the kind of shop overhaul in the 2020 new King. My God, we've made huge progress and you could put on your rear view mirror glasses and congratulate yourself because you know, we have Lex, we have the racking, we have huge increase in production, like all that's great, but it doesn't actually feel better today. And, um,
00:03:22
Speaker
I've been making excuses and I think they're legitimate, but that's the problem is that that's what an excuse is. It feels legitimate to you at the time. Our shop got affected by COVID both internally, luckily everyone's fine, but also some of our suppliers, which we talked about. The holidays are always a little bit hectic.
00:03:40
Speaker
And in some respects, the system is working. Rarely are we running out of raw material. Lex is working for orders and triggers and reorders. Supplier stuff is a little bit of an issue. And it's also just we are huddling on it. And the ultimate thing is we've got ways we are improving our manufacturing processes, workflows, toolpaths, KAM setups. And it's so difficult.
00:04:06
Speaker
When you're already making something, you're an example of this with probably the, I don't know if you're trying to overhaul the endorsement or not, but to overhaul a process while you're also busy is just so difficult. Oh, absolutely.
Supply Delays and Customer Fulfillment
00:04:20
Speaker
I mean, what you're saying before about I'm not fully happy with where we are right now. I got news for you. That's life. That's growth. No, I refuse to accept that. But it's happening to you right now.
00:04:33
Speaker
but it's the first time where I didn't feel like, you know, if you could snap your fingers and put another machine or another person on the floor, that wouldn't hurt. Don't get me wrong, but really it's, um,
00:04:44
Speaker
We'll get through it. This actually does keep me up at night now. And it's not some, I'm not being, what would you call it? I'm not being disingenuously fake goody tissues. It upsets me that we're not getting our product to our customers as quickly as we should be. I absolutely hate that. I absolutely hate that.
00:05:04
Speaker
We put up a website disclaimer just saying, hey, we're being effective right now. I hate that as well, but at least we're communicating or trying to get in front of it and we're trying to do everything we can. We're shipping stuff out to suppliers in a super inefficient way. We normally try to batch it up or get amortized accosted to a freight load and we're just saying, hey, let's get it out as soon as we can. Let's get it in the process. Let's get it going.
Team Roles and Production Focus
00:05:27
Speaker
I think we're fighting it and I need to spend more time looking at how we get through the
00:05:32
Speaker
I don't know, I just hate it. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes various circumstances make things hurt more or less, like lead times to customers or whatever. A couple weeks ago, maybe that wasn't a concern for you and you had your mind on other things. And then this comes to light or this stuff happens so that this becomes a problem. And then it really weighs on oneself.
00:05:57
Speaker
in ways that you didn't see coming and that you're struggling to deal with and get through. But you just got to deal with it. You got to spend the time to figure it out if that involves stepping back and looking at the system as a whole, or if that involves digging down into one specific thing and be like, I'm going to handle this right now, or Ed, or whatever.
00:06:20
Speaker
and tackling it one by one. Let's talk about that. Ed was working on some R&D's on exaggeration, but improvements not really to current product lines. I guess it would be R&D. We said, hey, let's get you focused on fixture plates along with Austin.
00:06:41
Speaker
Julie and Grant are working on a bunch of stuff. What's kind of scary is we have a lot of help right now because we've had some of our interns who are not always here full time have been able to be here because they are still on holiday break, which is awesome. And I guess maybe I'm taking this problem out of context because we'll get through it, but it upsets me still. But then that's what I did yesterday.
00:07:01
Speaker
I went to the bottom of the food chain and just like, hey, I'll pack stuff. I'll build sub-assemblies, build dowel pins and sud kits. It's awesome because I was following Lex. It told me how to do it. Actually, this is awesome. It told me how many we needed. I knew where they were located. I knew where the parts were located. I started to run low on a few things. I added them in. They've gotten reordered. Actually, in some respects, it's insanely well that it's worth it. Yes.
00:07:29
Speaker
You don't see that when you're busy and digging down and be like, I'm just going to get this done. And okay, how do I do it? If I follow the directions, then I just bake the cake, you know, it's like, ah, you're running. And then today you get to look back a little bit more calmly and be like, actually, it was pretty awesome to be able to go through our process and see it as an employee as a process. And you know, maybe you made some tweaks, or maybe you saw some holes or whatever, or you just did it and you're like, it just works. Yeah.
00:07:55
Speaker
That's awesome, good for you for doing that. Sometimes it's good to be able to do that. You got to get that figured out. The goal is, and we will get there, but the goal
Inventory Management Strategies
00:08:10
Speaker
is everything except
00:08:14
Speaker
certain fixture plates I want in stock so it could ship either same day or next day. It depends on when that word comes in. But someone needs a dual station mod vice or XYZ thing, a pallet just gets pulled off the shelf and shipped and then that triggers the reorder. And yes, we will continue to get tripped up where if all of a sudden somebody bought somebody bought four
00:08:35
Speaker
of the pallet blanks, which that's not a normal day sale for us. Well, okay, that's fine. I don't mind those quirks. We already have the material on hand. We know how to make them. The fixture process is better for the setup. So you're building a real system here that's sustainable.
00:08:52
Speaker
It's really just the place, I guess, that's on my mind. We'll work through. I'll get it. Yeah. I guess you got to look at your inventory on hand values. I'm sure you've got some weird one-off machines that you're not going to sell a lot of in a year. So you might keep one in stock. But a fixture blank sounds like something you'd sell more of than
00:09:12
Speaker
Specific machines so you keep I don't know eight of those or whatever in stock So that you always have them kind of on hand and it takes a breath to be able to step back and look and be like, okay Let's have let's have six of those. Let's have one of those two of those blah blah and just just stock them up and then you're always good and Like I'm thinking back to my shop tour with Pearson three years ago that's kind of how he did it then was like
00:09:39
Speaker
He would just have two, four, six, 12 in stock, and that inventory would drive production so that he could ship same day always. I remember him, he had a live tracker on his website, and he's like, oh, somebody's on the website looking at this pallet system, and I see they just put it into their card. Okay, let's start to get it ready for them, just in case, or to come in. By doing that with some experience,
00:10:04
Speaker
Man, you get a shipment confirmation 12 minutes after you place the order. Holy cow. Right. It's that calm elegance and the use of data. And we have started doing that. I'd say we're at the very beginning of like, hey, let's print out a last six months order list report. And then let's use that data because it's so simple. But it's that low hanging fruit that we're not doing a good enough job when we will. I'm saying this out loud.
00:10:32
Speaker
mostly because I need to talk through it, but also because it builds that accountability. Like, okay, great. It's so easy for us to now understand how many diamond pins we need to have in stock or mod vice washers and stuff like that. It's easy if you can step back and actually look at the data, which is there. But otherwise, you're just like, man, it's like us here. It's like, oh, we're out of pivots or we're getting low on spacers.
00:10:54
Speaker
It just needs me to be able to step back and be like, actually, if we just had a supply, we go through whatever, a thousand every three months or whatever the number is, this is not hard. This is not complicated. We're scheduling and inventory levels. It's like the most basic business theory ever, but we're both busy running around doing stuff that you miss stuff.
00:11:18
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that's what it's hard to do is I think it's better. I just feel, and again, God, I sound like a, I want to. You're allowed to feel. No, no, but like, I would rather go, I think it's, I remember this way, I remember when a company I used to deal with, their CEO,
00:11:38
Speaker
I was talking like, oh, sorry, this is a small company, but their owner of the company was like, yeah, we know we're like six weeks back ordered, tough. It's just, we got to work out some stuff. And I'm like, you have these products in your warehouse. He's like, yeah, what do you want me to do? Go pack it myself? And I'm like, yes, yes. That's what I think is right. It's not fair.
00:11:58
Speaker
to not execute and hold. That's the end-all accountability thing. It just is. It's your reputation. So that's what we got to work on. And I want to throw resources at it to get through the curve, to be a good leader of the team. So we have a system in place. And it's like what Jay also said. Overtime is a sign of failure is not the right word, but you shouldn't need it because it shouldn't be part of your workflow. And maybe every once in a while, but no.
00:12:27
Speaker
Yeah, we're getting to that interesting point. For the most
Managing Staff Overtime
00:12:30
Speaker
part, nobody works overtime, except for me, but I don't count my hours. But we're getting to the point where Barry came in several days over the break, over the few days off we had recently for New Year's and stuff to ship.
00:12:44
Speaker
and to do end-of-year accounting stuff. And even just the shipping. We sold a lot of stuff last week. And he was here for hours on a Sunday packaging and shipping stuff. And it's great. He's happy to do it. He does it willingly. He could wait till Monday, but he wants to do it. But it's like we're getting to the point where everybody's time is getting strapped to the point where we need more hours.
00:13:09
Speaker
I hate the phrase, I don't have time, but it's getting to the point where it's like, we're too busy. Do you have a person whose sole job is just to focus on shipping and maybe isn't as skilled in terms of the rest of their shop capabilities? We do not have that right now. Got it.
00:13:27
Speaker
No, we have Barry, who's our accountant, our CFO. And then Fraser also does shipping as well. But he's also full customer service website, video editing, marketing genius. So they both have other responsibilities that are not shipping. Shipping is the icing that still takes hours a day to get through. So yeah, we're looking into that role next. We'll be kind of like the
00:13:52
Speaker
entry-level, do lots of stuff kind of busy person and we could fill that role. It's going to happen soon. Yeah, that's that role. Same role we're in the market for right now, which is, and I hope I'm going to email the recruiter back to see if they can get us some candidates soon now that the holiday period's over, but it's shipping and then all the ancillary related type stuff like receiving material and cleaning and
00:14:21
Speaker
prepping stuff and organizing the racking. Yesterday, I also just was like, hey, we had five different shipments of material come in and you got to cut the bands off of it. You got to cut the cardboard off of it. You got to label it or flex it or make sure it looks right or where you're moving it to. Fun fact, these mini pallet jacks are amazing. You ever seen these? A pallet jack.
00:14:44
Speaker
No. Do you have a regular pallet jack? Yeah, we have a regular push around like pallet jack. So scale it by like 50%. It's all that our guys want now. We've had one for a while, and then Ed was like, can we buy a second one? I'm like, yes. So we're actually selling our other big pallet jack. We have one big pallet jack still, but they're more maneuverable. They're fine for almost everything we're doing. It's super nice. It's northern tools where we get ours. I couldn't find like an Amazon type deal.
00:15:14
Speaker
Looking it up right now. Super handy. It's like 300 bucks shipped. Strong way to the brand. Yeah. 2,000 pound. Narrow legs. It's a model 51 S062. Northern. Let me look up Northern tool. We'll put it in the description if anybody actually wants to follow up on this. Yeah, I see that Uline sells some of them. There we go. A strong way mini palette. $204.99 today. Like 100 bucks in freight.
00:15:43
Speaker
Yeah, like the legs are closer in. Yeah. They're shorter, though, too. Okay. Because they make narrow, full-size narrow ones. And we think ours are for you, but I don't know how you're moving stuff around. Several times. Ours does not fit in the small pallets or something. So we're just balancing it on one leg. Yeah, right. Super, super janky.
00:16:07
Speaker
You got to angle it through there to try to balance it along an angle. Do you have the Tormek surface grinder?
00:16:15
Speaker
The one that also doesn't fit a pallet jack underneath? Yeah, that's the one I'm thinking, yeah. Yeah. That's not too bad. Material is worse because sometimes we get material in a 30-inch wide narrow pallet that has material, maybe 1,500 pounds. The box just bows when you lift it and then you are dragging it. It's just funny. This is the shop problems meme that
Shop Equipment and Efficiency
00:16:40
Speaker
nobody talks about.
00:16:41
Speaker
Anyway, speaking of which, I happened to cross a video on YouTube last night about a guy who just has a small woodworking shop in his garage, but he bought a walk behind forklift or whatever you call it. It's like a push around forklift that goes up super high. And it just seemed really cool. It was a perfect solution for him in his shop. And I know you looked into the kind of push behind
00:17:10
Speaker
Oh, we did more than look in. Yeah, I see you shaking your head here. We purchased a death trap, and it was quickly removed from the shop. I remember us talking about it, but I can't remember all the details. So we got one that was obviously powered lift. They make them in all different variants, including completely manual, like jack it up and push it forward. The extreme was what we bought, which is it lifted like a forklift does under power, and it also moved forward and backward under power.
00:17:39
Speaker
Those do not work unless you're in a huge shop. Really? Yeah. You'll run yourself over. They're super scary. They're super hard to maneuver. You can't turn it unless it's moving when it starts. It's just super scary. And so we replaced it with a Waco, I think? Westco? Westco, maybe?
00:17:59
Speaker
version. The other important thing was that the one that we replaced it with is counterbalance, whereas the one that we had that was fully motorized had the two fingers out in front of it. Huge pain in the butt. Total deal breaker. Unless you're Amazon or something, you're dealing with the exact same size pallet on the exact same thing every day, you really
00:18:18
Speaker
The better way is to get it counterbalanced where you can do what you need with it. Because the video that I saw, the guy had the two forks or the two feet wheels sticking out the front. And I'm like, won't that be annoying? It's the same thing we're dealing with with the engine hoist. It's like the feet won't fit under stuff. So I thought about the counterbalanced idea. And that's cool. OK, seriously, you're happy with that now. Is it the same thing, just counterbalanced or what?
00:18:45
Speaker
Yeah, it has a 600-pound weight limit, I think. Don't hold me to that. Or 1,000-pound, I forget. So the problem with counterweights is that the counterweights allow it to not have the outriggers, but also come at the expense of it being heavier to move around. This is a manual push-pull. It's not too bad, but it's not super easy and fun. So it's not motorized. You don't push forward, and it goes forward. I refuse to have that in our shop. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.
00:19:15
Speaker
And then the better solution is also to try to minimize the use of that thing by keeping the racking area clear so that you can use the proper forklift. But like yesterday, we had five things come in. There's stuff going out. It's shot problems. Yeah, we've used a forklift a few times a year. Really?
00:19:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's one of those things. If you have it, you'll use it every day. We don't have one. And we're not really borrowing it from neighbors. We rented one when we moved in to put the Transformers up on the wall and to do all kinds of stuff. But I don't think we've had one since. And then the riggers come in and drop off the service grinder. And our guys are like, can we get a forklift? Because this thing's cool.
00:20:01
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know how you, I would think you'll just need one and thus go put your feelers out on Craigslist or Facebook to pick one up when the deal comes up. Right, right. Yeah, we've had a couple of odd ones like pass by us for $5,000 or something, but they need batteries or they need whatever. Oh, get an LP. Yeah, I was wondering about that. Yeah, the battery ones, they seem slow to respond.
00:20:27
Speaker
Oh no, they can be great, but the batteries, if you get a battery when you want to make sure it's traditional, like golf cart or 12 volt batteries, not a proprietary battery, which can be $10,000 or a place or something crazy. Yeah, exactly right. And LPs, especially since you're not going to be running it all the time, LPs totally fine. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. But that's what's on my mind. What have you been up to?
00:20:52
Speaker
I'm running the Kern. It's yesterday, finished the first Rask sellable. Perfect. Everything's good on it. I sent the parts over to Eric, and he finished up the knife, and it looks gorgeous. So today, I should be checking it, making sure it's all good, and then it should go up on the website. I was going to ask, is there something special around it? I'm not going to make that big of a deal, but we're going to do a
00:21:18
Speaker
a name draw on Instagram on our official, Grimm's more official Instagram page. Basically, everybody signs up for a Google Form for 24 hours or whatever it is, and then we randomly pick a name out of that and they get to buy it from there. When is that happening? Today, tomorrow, I'm not sure yet.
00:21:36
Speaker
Well, you'll do it after the podcast. Yeah, it'll probably be sold by the podcast. Okay. You just got to follow me on Instagram, but there will be many more rasks coming out.
00:21:49
Speaker
That's good. Things are great. Super happy with the grinding, fairly happy with the lock bar inserts. There's more work to be done there, but we're making usable parts. They're fine. It's more process related that I want to nail down and get better and better.
00:22:06
Speaker
The inserts, I'm going back and forth, like do I machine them hard or do I machine them soft and then heat treat the little tiny pieces individually? And we've done both and they both have their pluses and minuses. So currently I'm machining them soft, tumbling them in the magnetic pin tumbler to get rid of any little burrs and then heat treat and then tumbling them in the big ceramic tumbler and then they're good to go. But they're tiny. They're like half the size of a pull tab from a Coke can.
00:22:43
Speaker
Right. Do they move a lot, like warp on when you put them through heat treat? They do actually warp a little bit through heat treat. And we were all freaking out about it for a day or so last week. And then I'm like, you know what? It's held down with two screws, and it self flattens. It'll pull itself flat. We're talking about a few thou of warp. This is not an issue. Oh, look at you. I know. You want everything to be perfect. And we're like, oh no, this is a big problem. But I'm like, you know what? It's not a problem.
00:22:59
Speaker
Oh yeah. Like there may be less than half.
00:23:13
Speaker
Awesome. That's refreshing. Yeah. Maybe we'll do better over time. Yeah, it's not an issue. It's literally a non-problem. Good. When you say grinding, you're talking about current grinding, not Okamoto. Correct.
00:23:28
Speaker
Yeah, grinding on the Kern. Speaking of the Okamoto, when I came in this morning to grab my water, I saw everybody in the back corner by the Okamoto, and I didn't go investigate and see what's going on. But I know yesterday we got the magnetic chuck lifted onto the table. Today, I think the service guy's coming back and going to address the chuck. He said there was some sort of fault problem where the machine was shutting off because of some power delivery issue or something. So I don't know. That's all I heard. So they'll figure that out today, and then it's off to the races.
00:23:58
Speaker
Cool. Awesome. Sweet. And that's going to be grinding both both Norse and Norseman and Rask. Norseman and Rask. The goal is to grind them all soft, get them down to the right thickness like 1255 or 126 or whatever. And then we'll lap it down to 1250 after heat treat.
00:24:17
Speaker
Yeah, sweet. We're trying to prep. If I have 1255 going into the current, I can make perfect blades coming out of it. It's awesome. Yeah. Aim small, miss small. Yeah, exactly. Dude, it's awesome. Yeah, I love living in that just tiny world and you all of a sudden realize, oh, this is
00:24:37
Speaker
Yeah, no big deal. It becomes normal now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about that the other day of like, when you don't know something, it's this daunting, like mountainous task of like, Oh man, there's so much to, I don't know, like, like learning a new control for a machine, you know, when I got hide and hide, like it was such a vast difference. Or when I got the FANUC after having tormac,
Precision Work and Tolerances
00:25:00
Speaker
for so many years like everything's different I just can't wrap my head around it's gonna take me months and years and then a couple years later you look back and you're like it's cakewalk now it's like now I know it you figure out what were you thinking at the time like where it's so worried but yeah you just have to be able to jump in and think about it and be like well I know it's hard now but you know a year from now I'm not gonna worry about it and I'll get there
00:25:25
Speaker
That's, that's if there's a single sentence that got me into the machining trades, it's a thousandth of an inch because our, that engineer for strike mark had mentioned that as a tolerance and my, uh, or maybe it was the fabric heaters that were building parts of it or something. And I just remember thinking like, well, the only way I know to answer that question is like a carpenter, like one 32nd of an inch. And I was like, what's a thousandth of, I mean, I can surmise with a thousandth of an inches, but, um, it's that language that you learn and, uh, yeah.
00:25:54
Speaker
So I'm reading a book that you recommended quite a long time ago called The Perfectionists, how precision engineers made the modern world. I'm pretty sure you recommended that. I don't think so.
00:26:07
Speaker
Anyway, I have it. I thought it was good to you. It's a historical story about how precision changed everything. It starts briefly in Egyptian times and things like that, but mostly talks about 1718, 1900s, and I guess till today, I'm not that far into it. It talks about clocks and watches and how in the 1718 hundreds, like steam engines came about and
00:26:32
Speaker
Have you ever heard of like a Whitworth thread or a Whitworth bolt? Sure. He invented the standardized screw thread and was the first person to be able to measure a millionth of an inch. A million? Yeah. In early 1800s. Holy cow.
00:26:49
Speaker
And I was like, oh, this is really cool. So it's like the ultimate nerd historical how precision changed the world kind of thing and how interchangeable parts became critical for firearms or every industry. And I'm like, this is so up my alley right now.
00:27:06
Speaker
Apparently, yeah, apparently before him or some event, there was basically a competition. It's kind of like phone chargers. Everyone was like, we have our own pitch screw or side screw or threads profile. So tough luck, man. You've got a Remington that Winchester just ain't going to fit or whatever equivalent. So, oh my God. Can you imagine? Exactly. Or like he was talking about
00:27:30
Speaker
back in late 1700s, I think, muskets in wars. The trigger guard was a handmade one-off piece. And if you broke it, they'd have to hand make you another one. And you're the soldier in the battlefield. And it's like, well, you can club the guy to death. That's about as good as it's for until you get a new one. Yeah, it's crazy. The theory, the obvious, but it wasn't at the time, theory of if they were interchangeable, you could just have a box of them and replace it in a minute, and you're golden.
00:28:00
Speaker
Yes, so many stories. And he's obviously making up some of the stories based on historical theories just to sound cool and be exciting to read and stuff. But yeah, I'll put the link in the notes to that book. It's nerdy and deep, but I'm very much enjoying it. Awesome.
00:28:20
Speaker
We actually had a guy ask last night on our NYC forums about measuring a really tight, like one or two tenths circularity, I believe, circularity tolerance.
00:28:36
Speaker
I readily will admit that I'm not capable and qualified to participate in this or even frankly offer correct advice on how to do it. But there was a discussion around what the right tool could be including a tense indicator. And the rule of thumb, which is just that rule of thumb is that you really want a measuring instrument that's 10 times more, either accurate or has 10 times resolution for the feature you're measuring, which
00:28:58
Speaker
just isn't going to happen. Brown and Sharp makes a 50 million indicator, but that's still only one to four times the resolution you're looking for. The bigger thing I would be concerned about if this is job shop type work is you got to get on the same page as your customer because features like that, ambient depends on the material and just how you're measuring it because you'll lose that argument all day long if they want them to be out of spec.
00:29:28
Speaker
Yeah. Man, two-tenths circularity. Circularity is not something I really think about or deal with very much, but I'm trying to think even how to measure that. That'd be like, hypothetically, you put an indicator in your spindle and you rotate it around the object.
00:29:47
Speaker
Yeah, there's that even the spindle run out or there's like, well, so you got to use that old school member rolly dad's method from the hobby lathe days and this had to do with taking a bar which it didn't really matter how accurate the bar was or rather
00:30:04
Speaker
You basically, you flipped it and measured the highs and lows and it took out any issue of run out in the material or whatever. So you can, you can average that kind of thing out. But I mean, again, you're just, you just don't have any room. Yeah. And this is absolutely like.
00:30:20
Speaker
tool and die maker territory. Renzetti knows how to do this exactly. There's other guys, for sure. There are ways to do this, but they just don't come across our desk very often. You think about it, you're like, how do you do that?
00:30:35
Speaker
But CNC CMM should work because it should have that level of precision in this. I don't know the diameter of the feature, to be honest. That matters as well. But even a manual CMM, I would worry. Actually, I don't think you can because circularity requires you to follow around it. We did that test on the HSK taper at Kern, right? And it's technically not even a circle. It's just measuring thousands of points around the circle. So it's sort of an inferred circle, if you will. A tessellated circle or whatever.
00:31:05
Speaker
But yeah. And then even CMMs, don't they have an actual tolerance range, like realistic? I believe like a Zeiss Contura or something should be able to get it. It depends on over what range. But I'm assuming that this feature is, if you're talking about measuring on a spin jig or with an indicator, I'm assuming that's one inch or under or something. I think a CMM could do it. But again, you're going to now, when there's your CMM calibrated and the climate controlled and all that. Yeah, that's a tight tolerance.
00:31:35
Speaker
We were trying to figure, sorry, change subjects, go for it. Do your, your Heidenhine has, who makes the probe? Is it Heidenhine probe?
00:31:46
Speaker
The spindle probe is a blue. Yeah. Both of them and the table probe, the laser. Okay. I thought or think Heidenhain has a program. Maybe they're rebranding somebody's. Anyway, I'm curious if yours will keep the probe tip normal to a feature if it measures at multiple points around the clock.
00:32:06
Speaker
I don't think mine does, but I know Bloom does make one. I remember them showing me one at a tool show. Got it. That should just be a software feature. It's how the probe is made too, because some of the probes are on-off switches. Fair enough. They're like three-point triangles like tripods that once one side lifts, it breaks contact. Whereas other ones, they were telling me they have a laser beam inside that
00:32:31
Speaker
measures like deflection or something. And then the constant sensing ones, I don't know how they're put together. It's cool magic. Yeah, magic. Yeah. But as you're saying, that's that world of like, if you want to measure a 10th, this thing has to be good to 10 millionths, like, or better. And it's like, okay, that you start to talk about precision, you talk about how measuring tools are made and how super precision measuring tools are made. And it's like, okay, now we're talking.
00:32:59
Speaker
When we did that scraping class with Richard King, one of the best moments and anybody can recreate this is we put a tense indicator, just a regular tense indicator, probably would work with a foul on a spanning across a part and there's two different things you can do. One is if you have a group of people or a bunch of something heavy, like we had a group of people around the table and then everybody moved to one side of the table, not touching the part and you saw the indicator move.
00:33:22
Speaker
Everybody moved on just standing on the ground. Yeah. What? Oh, yeah. We did the video on this. And then the other one, which is even easier, is just put an indicator on a piece of steel, like a magnetic indicator base with the same indicator touching that same piece of steel. Okay. And then just turn it around, rotate around your hand and you'll see gravity pull that tip down. Ooh, I got to try that just for fun.
00:33:44
Speaker
And that's the reason why you want to be careful how you measure lathe tools is when you're spinning an indicator around like that, even technically a coax, gravity pulls on it differently. Yeah, yeah. That's cool. Yeah, it's fun. I love metrology. That's the ones that know about it. Yeah, I'm buying more books about it and learning more. It's just so fascinating.
00:34:07
Speaker
Yeah, and I know there are many concepts and things that I don't know about yet. Like I've seen the word, even circularity, like I don't know very much about it. And it comes with time, right?
00:34:18
Speaker
How about Abbe's law, Abbe's rule? Ooh, no, nothing. A-B-B-E-Y, I believe. It has to do with whether you're actually measuring something in line or offset from the motion. So if you have a bridge port or a traditional mill and you have a say like a DRO scale, well, the further away
00:34:40
Speaker
It's not off-axis. I think the further away it is, the more there's Abby's air potentially induced. And that's all I can explain about it. It's easily Google-able talking, but it's like I picked it up from one of Ranzetti's videos and it's just like, the more you know. Yeah, it might ring a faint bell like I've read it once.
00:34:58
Speaker
Okay, and it makes sense. It's all these concepts that as you learn about them and read them, you're like, oh yeah, that's a thing. That makes sense. I get that. But how did somebody figure that out and how did somebody nail it down? There we go. Abby's principle, it's important for guideline for measuring instruments in order to improve the target and the scale must be placed in a co-linear fashion.
00:35:22
Speaker
Oh, that's okay. Great. Here's a great example. Calipers do not follow Abby's principle because you have a caliper scale along the top and then like an inch below it, you've got your pinchers that you're putting your object between. Micrometers do follow Abby's principle because your thimble is directly in line with the part you're now clamping down. Got it.
00:35:46
Speaker
Cool, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, everybody who's listening either already knew that, in this case, awesome, or everyone learned something. Yeah, exactly. That's cool. What are you up to today? I've got a couple of things on my list today. I've got to do a special engraving for pen buttons.
00:36:03
Speaker
I'm going to do just a couple of these. Remember the Grimsbrough Fist t-shirts that we did? I'm going to do a couple ingredients of those. We've got some uses for them. I'm going to improve the starburst pattern on the Kern rask. I'm going to make more rask handles and a couple of other things I wrote down. I can't remember. That's why I wrote them down. I don't have to remember them.
00:36:26
Speaker
The starburst pattern you used to do on the Maury. Yes. And so in that case, you had the tool normal to the blade. Are you not you're now tilting at 45 degrees, which is pain in the butt. There's a lot of unforeseen variables to doing that, but it's it eventually works out awesome.
00:36:46
Speaker
Do tell. Because you want to climb mill always to make a good finish. When you're normal to the surface, like in a three-axis mill, and you're dragging a ball mill through the material, one side of the ball mill is climb milling, the other side is dragging, and it can look gross, especially in titanium.
00:37:05
Speaker
So, when we do it on the Maury, we slot down the middle, and then we move over a thou, and we slot it like contour again, move over a thou the other way, and then climb mill. So, we're climbing both walls, which takes three times as long, but it looks amazing. On the Kern, I was like, if I tilt it 45 degrees, then I can climb mill the whole way, except with the Starburst radial toolpath, I'm going outside to inside, or sorry, outside of the handle to the pivot.
00:37:31
Speaker
And as I'm dragging in a 360 degree motion, most like half of it is climb milling and the front half from the pivot to the blade area is conventional milling.
00:37:45
Speaker
And it's like, oh, I didn't expect that. But it's such a fine detail that it looks fine. I was going to say, can you see it? It tumbles out. It works great. It looks fine. So it works. So you're using just a sharp, flat end mill, a traditional square-shouldered end mill for that then? Round end mill.
00:38:02
Speaker
Oh, it's still a ball. OK. Yeah, so it was a ball. Yeah. OK. But yeah, the tweak I'm going to make today is I think I'm going to rough it and then finish it. I'm going to leave like 2,000 or 5,000 or something for finishing pass because there's one little overlap area that I'm not super happy with. So I'm willing to basically double my starburst cycle time, which is already very long, just to experiment and see if it gets rid of that thing and if it's worth it and just let the machine run. You know what I mean?
00:38:25
Speaker
I'm very conscious of cycle time, but at the other hand, I'm just like, just let it run, get it done. Who cares? Go, make it nice. We had a similar path of evolution to the Mod Vyse top jaw slot that holds the reversible insert or talent grip. Basically half inch slot about 200 thou deep. We went through all the logical iterations of
00:38:48
Speaker
used to be kind of one tool with two passes type of thing. And where we ended up now is we use a Mitsubishi through spindle coolant, dual insert 90 degree cutter. So kind of, I think of a Sandvik 390 happens to be the Mitsubishi version, but it's indexable carbide through spindle and we slot out
00:39:07
Speaker
the whole thing, but we leave material on both sides and the floor. So I think we had to buy a metric version under, and then we come in with a, I think maybe two separate end mills. I don't remember, but it's a YG1 V7 Pro X, or whatever they call it, V7 Plus A, but it's stubby.
00:39:27
Speaker
So it's short and it's held in a side lock. Hilarious, but like inexpensive end mill and a very inexpensive holder with the holder has those three spindle port ports. So you don't have to buy the tooling with it. It's just the right there on the ports and it's stubby. And then we do clean up pass on both side walls and then on the floor and it's just
00:39:47
Speaker
Perfect. It is perfect. Now, can we figure out a way to improve cycle time? Maybe, but I like this for now. Yeah, right. There's compromises to make. I want a good surface finish. I want good accuracy, so I'm willing to eat cycle time. You can plow and move at 800 inches per minute all you want.
00:40:06
Speaker
At some point, you got to slow it down and you got to finish it up. Especially our parts are so aesthetic that everything matters. Every chamfer, every end mill finish, chamfer quality. I rough and I finish chamfer all the big chamfers on our knives.
00:40:26
Speaker
Awesome. We've been trying to make sure we switch all of our chamfering over to those Helix chamfer end mills. We have them both from, I think Lakeshore and Helical. Both seem great. I've been starting sort of for fun, a YouTube thing where I look at how to cam up random parts from viewers and fans.
00:40:48
Speaker
Yeah, I want to make sure they're good. I don't want it to come off as like, oh, I'm telling you. But it's also just like, hey, like, here's what here's maybe how you can prove it or do it differently or think about it. Just keep keep that perspective on it. Like, here's how I would do it. You know, everybody's going to tackle this differently. And maybe mention often, like, everybody has their own style, everybody has their own experience. And I'm just using mine. And let's go.
00:41:11
Speaker
And actually to your point, both Rob Lockwood and Amish have been big proponents about the ability to get toolpaths made and the machine running. Amish was more of a job shop where he's like, hey, while that 3D adaptive is going, I'll finish up the part. Should still too for sure.
00:41:27
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Sorry. I didn't mean to, I thought he was baking muffins right now. And then Rob is more of a, I don't care about the cycle time or efficiency. I just need parts churned through. And so it's kind of this approach of less efficient toolpaths, but more efficient programming in camp, which I love because if you let that be your base foundation, I programmed it to access, excuse me, I've had a program to dual spend a lathe part last night
00:41:52
Speaker
between 840 and nine o'clock, like at home, fully done, sub-spinal transfer, everything I want, freaking love it. And frankly, I did that with templates that need improved. I just keep putting off improving them. But when you start with that framework that gives you the kind of, hey, it's not necessarily a perfect cam, but it all works, then it's easier to then say, here's where I know that operation could be better. Oh, I love that.
00:42:15
Speaker
Yeah, it's establishing a workflow that is bulletproof even if it's slow or could be improved or whatever, but it's an established base that's super valuable. I definitely need to lean into templates and stable
Process Improvement and Operational Efficiency
00:42:30
Speaker
strategies more as opposed to just like copy and pasting the last one that worked. Yeah.
00:42:36
Speaker
But on my lathe cam, I have a single groove. I have a finishing groove. I have a finishing groove with roughing passes. That way, all those are there. And then sometimes I just want one of them where you just delete the other two. But grooving is one of those, it works great when you get it dialed in, but kind of a pain in the butt to go recreate a grooving op when you're trying to figure out what those fusion settings do. Yeah, exactly. And if you find yourself continually banging your head against it again and again for every new part,
00:43:06
Speaker
you
00:43:07
Speaker
You got to establish a process there. You got to figure out a template. Because once it works, it works great. But yeah, I've been there too many times. If it's like, well, you just got to mess with it. How do you do that? You just play with it for an hour, and eventually it works. No, that's, come on. Yeah. Days off in the shop, I miss them. We're cranked. Yeah. On that note, I should get back to filling orders. Don't laugh. Go be the technician. Yeah. Yeah, you got anything else? Interesting plan for the next few days?
00:43:37
Speaker
No, we're so focused on that. I'm making some, as part of the process, we need to make some support pieces. I'm doing those on, I'm doing them in the house right now, but we got that Tormach 8LA, the little one, and I'm actually super excited because there's parts where we just want a couple and I don't want to either program or frankly risk the beauty of that SC20Y. And so Alex has been working on getting it kind of tooled up and running.
00:44:03
Speaker
Um, and we'll do a video or kind of like a, Hey, here's what we think of this thing. And we're working on it. Proven cut recipes is are still getting worked on, but that's something I want to even allocate more. It's all that list of stuff. Um, I'm less into talking and more into just let's put our nose down and get stuff going. Yeah. So awesome. Yeah. We had, uh, we had another new employee start yesterday.
00:44:27
Speaker
You just leave that to the end. I just wanted to mention it. Yeah, it's been in the works for a month. But yeah, it started yesterday, January 5th, and all good to go. What's the role? Working with Eric in the finishing department. So now Eric's got Eric, Sky, and David. So the three of them doing all knife finishing, pen finishing, things like that, heat treat. It's great. And now we've got four people in this side and two people in the office.
00:44:55
Speaker
to maybe I'm missing somebody. But there's nine of us total now. And it's like, oh, baby. Do you ever, are there days where you don't see people in the other shop? Yes. OK. We have our meeting at 12 o'clock every day. So we always get together and always see each other for that. But otherwise, yeah, I'm like, oh, Eric, I haven't seen you in a while. But sometimes, especially now that I'm more hands on with Rask, I'm bringing parts over and I'm working together. So yeah, things are great. Awesome.
00:45:24
Speaker
Cool. Cool, man. I'll see you next week. Sounds good. Okay. Take care. Bye.