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Manufacturing Entrepreneurship, New Machines on the Horizon, Surface Grinding, Developing Sustainable Processes & More
194 Plays4 years ago
Today the Johns are reppin' each other by sporting SMW and GK tees.
TOPICS:
- Orange Vise Tour
- Grimsmo's Next Machines
- Process for Pressing Bearings into Bearing Cages
- Surface Grinding Machines - CNC or Manual?
- Air Compressors & Sound Proofing
- Tasks - Batching VS. Whack-A-Mole
- Organizational Chart - G Suite Alias Emails
- SMW is Hiring! SMW Careers
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Hosts' Banter
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning, and welcome to the Business of Machining episode 196. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough, and this is the podcast for the manufacturing entrepreneur. The two of us have been chatting for the past three plus years, like every week. It's nice to check in and talk about new things, old things, struggles, business, life, all kinds of stuff.
T-shirt Printing Challenges and Solutions
00:00:22
Speaker
Good morning. Good morning. Oh, that's awesome. You're wearing your Saunders shirt. You know what's funny? And you're wearing the Grimsmough shirt. Oh, gosh.
00:00:29
Speaker
I was looking at my, I've got a stack of shirts that I rotate through, and this is like the fourth week in a row where a Saunders shirt kind of happens to land on a Wednesday. That's awesome. That's so funny. They're comfortable shirts. I know. This one too. I like that. This is one of my favorite fitting shirts, your Saunders shirt here.
00:00:48
Speaker
You got to get the right t-shirt fit. You got to get the right material blend. And then we do the ink on the back is blotchy, not to be super trendy, but because it's too much ink. It gets all stiff and not fun. Yeah. Yeah. We actually just did a reorder on shirts to get our inventory back up, which ties into the theme of everything we're doing in 2020, which is turning this into a
00:01:14
Speaker
I want to do a tour of our shop when somebody says, hey, can I come see the shop and do a tour? And I want to blow them away. I want to show, hey, this is the way we do our racking. This is the way we do our inventory. Here's the custom packaging. And here's the ERP system. Here's the scanning guns. And here's how we load our machines. And here's how we store offline fixtures. I have all that stuff in my head, but the difference between
Business Enablement and Decision-Making
00:01:39
Speaker
being a successful entrepreneur is building, not only doing it yourself, but enabling the folks around us to do it, which is, gosh, that's tough, but it's what we're doing. Yeah, exactly. I love it. I was thinking, this morning I was watching the Orange Vice video tour that you did when you toured Orange Vice, and it was like three years ago. I was thinking, I'm watching that now and I watched it then,
00:02:04
Speaker
And it's still impressive watching it. But I'm sure Eric looks at that video and goes, oh, that's ancient. We've changed everything. Everything's so much different. I believe they really have. I should reach out to see if he wants to do an updated tour, because they've got more machines, more facility, more equipment, more product lines. It must be a completely different place now. It was impressive then.
00:02:28
Speaker
But it's a good point. I can't be Eric. And I don't know Eric, so nothing I'm about to say is meant to be implied as to who he is. But when we toured it even then, he had the top of the line Okamoto service grinder with the built-in wheel balancer. He had the full
00:02:44
Speaker
dishwashing style stations to clean everything up. Those are purchase characteristics of somebody who knows what they're doing and is Tina for success, but not necessarily the bootstrapper. And I'm not saying it's a good thing at all at this point, but we're going down that path, but more cautiously. I don't know. Yeah. I was thinking yesterday that I
00:03:06
Speaker
How did I phrase it? And I had this elegant way of phrasing it. But I take a very long time to come to a conclusion, but then I make decisions very quickly. Because once it makes sense, it all clicks. I've done all my research. It's like, OK, now's the time to go. Pull the trigger. Go. But I might take a year to figure that out.
Exploring New Machinery for Production
00:03:23
Speaker
Right. Right.
00:03:25
Speaker
So on that point, I think I found the next two machines that I want to buy. Do tell. One is very extravagant. It's basically a tag, but it's called an open build CNC machine, like a kit. Like a Kickstarter?
00:03:45
Speaker
No, it's, I don't know, the company's called OpenBuild and they make these modular kind of machines and they have this one called a mini mill and it's the size of a tag. I need a very simple, very not that accurate three axis machine to press bearing balls into our bearing cages. Oh, okay, yep.
00:04:05
Speaker
And I've been wanting to do this for eight years now. And I finally kind of wrapped my head around the whole thing. And so I'm going to buy that machine. I'm going to send it to, I found this 15-year-old kid who's got a tormac in his garage and a perusa and wants a big project. And I'm like, dude, you in? And he's like, I'm in. So I've got a few things to make. He's got a few fixtures to make. And he's going to put it all together into a kit. And it's going to press our bearings together.
00:04:31
Speaker
You need three axes because you need X, Y, Z, but it's a very- You don't need a spindle. To two and a half axes, yes. It says you're doing effectively a pick and place and push. Exactly. Pick, place, push. The triple E, henceforth you shall be known. Yeah.
00:04:44
Speaker
Oh, that's not a bad idea. The trickiest part will be actually dropping a singular ball bearing where I want it, when I want it, um, without like overflowing over one at a time. So I need to build that for the current anyway, because I want to do that mid process on our handles. When we put the detent ball in each handle, there's another, what's, what's the other, I thought balls only went handles.
00:05:09
Speaker
There's one ball that goes in the handle and then there's 20 balls that go in the ball bearing cages. I'm sorry. I was thinking of the handle a little time. You're talking about cages here. Yep. So the machine will be for cages. Because right now we're pressing in each ball by hand and it's just tedious and our volume is going up and it's just getting more annoying. So to have this little tiny machine to pull it off is going to be sweet. Do you know the design of how to do that? Yes. Okay.
00:05:35
Speaker
I've been thinking about this for years. Do you want to share? I have an idea. Well, I mean, my theory is I'm going to have a fixture plate on the table that's going to have a bunch of circular holes in it. You place the cages in. They're these Delrin cages. You pop them in. There's spring-loaded 10 pins coming out the bottom.
00:05:55
Speaker
that will align each bearing cage so that they're clocked properly and they're spring-loaded so that when you push a ball in, it springs out of the way. Then the pick and place machine is going to have a hopper with a little singular dropper
00:06:10
Speaker
with a lever. So every time it goes down in Z and touches the surface, one ball will release. And then it'll lift up and then move over to the next spot and then release the next ball. And then just create a canned cycle that kind of goes through and does them all. And then I need to press them all, too. So on the spindle, there's going to be the dropper. And then beside that, there'll be like a flat bar, something to press it in.
Enhancing Grinding Processes
00:06:34
Speaker
Okay. Got it. Yeah. Right. Right. So it'll have, it's like a two spindle machine where you drop it and then it'll move a centimeter to the left and do the push. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. And then I got a balance. Like if it can, if it's strong enough to push 10 balls at once, or if I have to do like four and six or something. Oh, that's interesting. Yep. Just into Delrin though, right? Yeah. Yeah. There's some resistance, but it's not bad, but I just don't want to skip steps and have it like crash itself all the time.
00:07:01
Speaker
I've tried to tackle similar-ish things over the years. It's not the easiest thing to solve, so it's where you don't want to reinvent the wheel. Everything from dog treat hopper dispensers to a baseball or tennis ball machine have these ways of elegantly dealing with the need to speed
00:07:20
Speaker
a single item, whether it's round or a dog treat bone. Literally, it's a dog bone shape and it's brittle and you don't necessarily want to shear it. It's interesting to see how they drop in or feed. I've got a toy. It's actually one of those awesomest toys ever in the history of mankind. It's a construction loader set, like a kid's toy that has a little track that's maybe 20 inches. The truck moves around it and one of the things that happens is the dump truck backs up to a hopper and it drops fall. You showed me. Yes. Yes. William showed me when I was there.
00:07:49
Speaker
Yes, it is like one of those subconscious moments that you realize to find who you are because like this thing is amazing. And it has a double door method because you don't what you don't want to have happen is the door closed when it's half fed a ball or that's full. It's yeah, it's it'll be curious to see what you come up with.
00:08:05
Speaker
Yeah. So I've got it like half designed in CAD now that I've decided on the CNC machine base and open build. I mean, it's like 600 US for this kit with steppers and everything. Got it. Without a spindle. And I'm like, oh my gosh, why haven't I ordered this yet? When you started this, I thought you were going like in index, like MS20. I'm like, oh boy. I did say there's two machines. OK. But yeah.
00:08:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's the first machine. I'm excited for that. And especially now that I've found someone to do the project for me, because part of the hesitation is, I don't have time to build a little toy CNC machine. But give the project to somebody else. This is a project that will be time consuming and relatively straightforward for me to do. But for a 15-year-old, it'd be super high end. This is a big project. So I'm really excited to push him and get him going on that. And he's beside himself.
00:09:04
Speaker
Love it. So that's cool. Yep. And then second machine, I think it's time we buy an Okamoto surface grinder. Oh. Oh. Yeah. Oh. So I've been hesitating for years on this, and Angela's like, man, it'd be really nice to have a wet grinder. I'm like, yeah, we have process. We have our lapping machine. We have everything. And it finally just clicked. It made sense. We need it for the Rask blades. I want perfect thickness going into the Kern.
00:09:31
Speaker
Currently, we have them all double-disc, which is good, but not great. Thickness, like consistency. And if I can have blades that are 1255 going into the current every day, I can do better chamfers. I can do better features and just they'll be nicer. So yeah, it's all coming together. So I'm waiting for a price quote. Should get it back today on what that's going to look like for a new machine. What size? I don't know, 12 by 24.
00:09:58
Speaker
It's probably decent. You have a 16 by 32. Past tense. Yeah. Yeah. I know you sold it. And yours was an older one, right? Oh, yeah. Super old. That's a big machine. Yeah. 12 by 24 seems like I was thinking about it. So it's a sweet spot. You're not doing big parts. And you could hit a lot of blades on a size. Yeah. I think we can put 40 on the size that big, which is fine. Right.
00:10:26
Speaker
Yeah, so we'll still double disc the blades. They come in about one, two, seven, five. So two and a half thou oversized. So we might just we're taking off one thou off each side, but then they'll be like perfect and nice and lapping will be easier. Because now we're not lapping off two and a half thou we're just lapping off tents. Well, that's what I was chucking. I'm like, I feel like you've been using your lapping machine as a surface grinder. We really have. Yeah, right.
00:10:50
Speaker
Got it. It's time consuming. And we're on our third plate now. And it's like a $7,000 plate. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, we just put it on yesterday. And yeah, it's stuff. And it's time consuming. And it puts a bunch of heat into the machine, which then causes things to warp and things to not spin properly. And one of the regrets that I have with that machine is that we didn't get the liquid cooling for the plate.
00:11:16
Speaker
Oh. And it was like a $8,000 option at the time. And the guy was like, nah, you don't need it. We've got customers running this thing 10 hours a day. We should have gotten it. Interesting. So it plums. And you can't add it. Oh, it's a rotary unit that plums less V. Yeah. I've asked them multiple times. I'm like, you sure we can't add it? Because I'd buy it right now if we could add it. Yeah. No, it's integral to the machine and blah, blah, blah. Ah.
00:11:40
Speaker
Interesting. Well, this will solve it a different way. Probably the better way to get these to spend less time lapping, right? Exactly. The downside, I mean, it's not that you can't grind titanium, but I don't think it'll be effective. Do you not do titanium blades? No, but handles. There's two handles in every knife. Why do they need ground? Because they need to be lapped. Oh, lapped for finish or thickness? Both.
00:12:06
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. So the fact there's twice as many handles as there are blades. We're still lapping those. But even just the benefit in taking the blades, making the blades easier for lapping and for machining and for everything, huge win. You can grind titanium. You can, right? Right, anything. You can't mag chuck it. So you'd have to vacuum fixture it or something. There's possibilities. And I'm going to look into them.
00:12:35
Speaker
Well, I've seen guys grinding aluminum. Now, generally, it's larger aluminum parts, and it's kind of what you would expect. It's nothing surprising or crazy. You just build a custom fixture that nests a metal negative of the blade. It's just a sheet pattern, and then that will take the mag chuck, and that will rest it generally quite well. And maybe you do that plus avacassist. I would be shocked if that wasn't sufficient. Yeah.
00:13:05
Speaker
Are you getting a CNC grinder or just a manual? I'm getting an automatic grinder. It's not fully CNC. I can't do form grinding on it, but it'll have Auto-Z, which is sweet. But it's still a dumb control. There's knobs and buttons and stuff. There's no code or anything. But it's fine. You program it to be like, OK, I want half-thou, half-thou, half-thou, and then one-thou, one-thou, one-thou, and spark out, and whatever, something like that. And then it's done.
00:13:33
Speaker
When we got sort of serious about bringing grinding in house a while back and we looked at the Okamoto's and some others as well, what
00:13:43
Speaker
I heard in talking to folks was that even if you don't need a CNC grinder in the sense that you're doing forms or complicated shapes, it does change your process reliability or sorry, your sort of flow. Like when you're doing rasp blades or titanium, you just pull up the five that has. So I don't know how much, if it's even available in a 1224, what the price increment was, but I would, I would look at it because again, it's that idea that when operator or new person pulls, wants to do it, it gives you this and set up sheet of instructions, the program, the speeds and feeds.
00:14:13
Speaker
I mean, you could still define that with all the knobs and switches and kind of make your own program. You don't think so? I mean, you can, of course. Of course you can.
00:14:22
Speaker
professing is what others told me, which is that no, it's just different. It's just different when you, um, can you, you, you are, you're building out processes to scale, John, you're building out the idea to grow raster, grow endorsement to do handles. You've already, we've already defined three or four different parts of families that may have tweaks to them. So the ability to just pull those programs up is way different than good grief. What are you going to do? Take a picture of the knob settings and like,
00:14:48
Speaker
I mean, totally possible, but less user friendly, I guess error prone than just calling up a thing. Are you doing the auto wheel balancer? I'll press it out. We'll see. Sounds cool.
00:15:05
Speaker
Yeah. Yes. Sorry. I mean, I'm assuming 12 by 24 with auto Z is going to be around 50,000, something like that. And then the options are going to be like more, more, more. So we'll see. I want to make sure we deck it out with everything we're going to need. But I don't want to go overboard being like, yeah, we can see and see form grinds and stuff we're never going to do. Yes, it's a balance. But I would think you'll have to switch wheels between Ty and Steve. I would think so too. In which case, good grief.
00:15:35
Speaker
I don't think anyone I've met that has the auto wheel balancer is like, yeah, it's a cool gadget, but we'd rather do it ourselves. Nope. Yeah.
00:15:43
Speaker
Yeah, I watched the Orange Vice video this morning, because I knew you had a surface grinder bit, and he talked about it for like 10 minutes. And he was like, yeah, what a wheel balancer. This thing's awesome. And it shows on the screen how out of balance it is live feed. And I'm like, OK, that's pretty awesome. Oh, yeah. Well, and it's built into dressing, because you're going to, in theory, be getting into the Renzetti level of grinding details. The wheel balance can change as you dress it for sure. Stuff happens. So that screams dressing.
00:16:12
Speaker
I wondered about the consistency of the bond throughout the wheel. So you balance it on day one, and then you dress it, and maybe you balance it again or something. I don't know. And then as you wear it down and down and down, does it stay balanced, or do you have to rebalance it as it gets smaller?
00:16:31
Speaker
My understanding as a very much layman in the grinding world is that when you balance it, you're balancing it only relative to the current specifications of the wheel, which all wheels have imperfections in the location of the ID bore, the OD circumference, and then the material throughout it. So yeah, as you change that wheel, maybe balance may not be an issue as you dress up a few thou across a couple of weeks, but as that six inch wheel becomes a 4.75 inch wheel,
00:17:01
Speaker
I know what I know about talking to grinders. Any grinder in the world would say, oh, if we had the job come in, the critical job come in, even though we knew it was balanced and it's working great, we would still rebalance it. That's what I would expect to hear. Interesting. Okay.
00:17:18
Speaker
Yeah, I will look hard at the auto balancer price. And I'm sure it's going to be like $5,000 or something. Yeah, more than that. I don't know. It's actually a great mentality to think about with the through coolant rotary table on your lapping machine. The auto wheel balancer, I would guess you could add later. But the CNC control, if that's something you want, you've got to do that now. So focus on the options that can't be tweaked later. You can always upgrade them.
00:17:48
Speaker
coolant filters or mesh it later.
00:17:51
Speaker
Yep. Yeah, and about the cooling filters, I saw a video of a similar Okamoto, maybe the exact same one, that had a magnetic drum filter that sucks up the magnetic chips and it rotates and it looks like slime, like magnetic, whatever that ferro magnetic liquid is they use in suspension. Anyway. Oh, yeah, the magnetic with the stuff that looks like pecans? Yeah, exactly. It looked like that, just rotating. But the guy said, the salesman yesterday,
00:18:20
Speaker
said that that doesn't pick up grinding particulate from the grinding wheel. So it only picks up metal, obviously. So he prefers bag filters. And I'm like, that's actually a really good argument. I'm with you on that. Do a bag filter downstream of the magnet. You could do both. Absolutely. I mean, the bag filters are still going to pick up both.
00:18:42
Speaker
Yeah, but it'll last longer. And from my experience grinding, I'm a big fan of double protection. Okay, good to know. And that's, I mean, the bag filter, what we rigged up for our Okamoto because it was kind of an old unit was a McMaster sock filter that was cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, like no big deal. Yep. Now the funny thing with this whole project is I'm
00:19:05
Speaker
I love to research new technology, new machines, purchase options. I like to make that final decision. I've done it for every machine up until now. I'm trying really hard to step away and let Angelo do this one. Yeah, that's good. Because he has more. He's run surface grinders for years. And I've actually never touched a real surface grinder. I've touched my Tormach one. So I have experience. And I have lots of theoretical experience watching videos and stuff. So I get it. But he has more experience. And I want to let him run with this.
00:19:32
Speaker
But man, it's hard not to be like, OK, let me just look at all the videos and let me learn all my own stuff and talk to you about it. It's OK. Yeah, I'm just saying it's a funny balance where I'm actually trying to step back and let him step up and take care of this. And he's doing a great job.
00:19:47
Speaker
The funny thing I remember about surface grinders is that there's Okamoto, there's Chevalier, which I believe is Taiwanese, certainly a step down, although arguably fine for, depending on what you're doing. And then
Air Compressor and Infrastructure Planning
00:19:59
Speaker
there's some other sub brands. I don't know how active they currently are, like I think Acer or somebody, but other than that, then there's some weird German, like not weird, sorry, there's Walter, I believe. There's a group, but they're not,
00:20:15
Speaker
They're not, like Okamoto seems like the game, I mean, certainly one of the better options. So it makes it easy because you don't need to look at a bunch of options. You could buy a refabbed old school good one, which honestly, nothing wrong with it, but it's not going to happen if you want. And I don't need a project right now. I thought about that. I don't need, I don't know.
00:20:38
Speaker
We can afford and we can justify getting a new machine that's quality and good and just put right to work on day one. I was talking with Robin Redzetti on Instagram last night and I asked him about the Okamoto and he goes, look, there's absolutely nothing wrong with Okamoto. But I'm surprised we're not looking at, I think he said Negani?
00:20:55
Speaker
or some of this Japanese brand. I looked at their website, looked at their stuff. It seems like they're the current of surface grinders. I was like, great, but I've never heard of them. If there's no presence in the US, if there's no service, if I don't know, I don't know.
00:21:13
Speaker
And that may be betraying my own ignorance about the statement I just made. Maybe there are other key players, but you and I have been in the service grinding periphery over the last five years, and I don't see a lot of others, whether it's at trade shows or Instagram, we're just talking. Like, Renzetti's rebuilding a Mitsui-Siki. Now, Mitsui-Siki is the current of machine tools. I don't know if they currently make grinders though.
00:21:34
Speaker
Yeah. But yeah, with Okamoto, they have a US headquarters, and they have service reps an hour away from here. That's the salespeople. And Angelo sent the email form to our local distributor, and within an hour, the guy's like, I'm actually in your area. Can I stop by? Yeah. This guy's hungry. Right. We'll get a quote on the Nagasaki, just so you can... It's always good to hear. Yeah, absolutely.
00:22:00
Speaker
Yeah. I've done a great job of letting this stuff just shed off my skin and not upset me. But as a person who likes to see the world be a good place, I can't help but chuckle. We sent out some quotes, requests on our air compressor. And one company did what you said. They were like, hey, I'll be here. Would Wednesday work to swing by your shop? I'd love to see all the typical, what you'd expect out of a hungry, good salesperson. The other person wrote back,
00:22:27
Speaker
They're like, well, yeah, that should work to my request about like, Hey, we're thinking about doing this with our compressor system. And I'm like, bro, that was your chance to like run with this. Like, tell me a quote, get me excited. Like, just tell me what you're like. I couldn't imagine a more disengaged response. Right. That requires no follow-up. Right. Right. I'm interested in Okamoto service grinder to grind our blades. It will grind blades. Right.
00:22:57
Speaker
Anyway, that's awesome. You've got room for it, right? Yeah, there's room. I'm mildly concerned about putting it next to CNC machines. No. Dusty. It'll be a wet one. No, not mildly concerned, severely concerned. No, exactly. I don't know. I want to talk to more people about that. No, don't have to. Just have to build a room.
00:23:20
Speaker
Yeah. It's not a debate period. You have a current building a sheetrock wall. You can put a mini split in into climate control, which isn't a bad thing if you need to sub-light control it, or just you could ventilate through filters, but build a room. Yeah. Or you don't want to put it in Eric's side. It's no, because we will be running it here. And yes, it needs to be with us here.
00:23:46
Speaker
Yeah, good thing is it's small, you know, compared to a machine. Yeah, sure. And light. So yeah, either way, I'm very excited. Yeah. Good. Very good. Well, we're looking at a new machine.
00:24:02
Speaker
I think you've just, I was being a little bit stubborn about this idea that, oh, if we go down, I'll buy a Home Depot piston and just figure out the service. Like, John, what are you doing? You got the chance now to do this right. I'd still rather have two compressors.
00:24:18
Speaker
that are not one is a backup. I'd rather have them so that there's a couple of different ways folks can do this. If the compressors are smart enough to talk to each other, they can do that and alternate on an hourly or daily basis. Some folks do it more manual way. But what I don't want is just having the Atlas Copco current one just stuck in a corner and every month we run it for five minutes. That doesn't work for me. I need this to be seamless. So
00:24:45
Speaker
I'm going to ask the Kaser guy for a new quote instead of what he quoted, which I think he quoted the 15 horsepower. I'm going to ask him about two smaller units, but having them, if they have a, I'm not sure the smaller units will have the feature functions that allow them to talk to each other. Some of the folks just do it by adjusting different pressure reg ranges, but that does seem nice because
00:25:06
Speaker
I always talk about scalable and sustainable. What is true is there'll be some point in the next, make it up five years. There'll be some point where I want to take a compressor down. Good grief. Even now, when we do filter and oil, we have to shut it off. It's actually hugely disruptive. Now, having two, you can do that with no stress. No stress whatsoever. Yeah, with our old Kaiser.
00:25:27
Speaker
We had quite a few days where it's like, oh, the relay keeps popping. We got to go do that. Or there was a loose wire that, you know, cause some problems that wasn't tight properly. So it was down for, you know.
00:25:40
Speaker
couple of days over the five years we had it. And it's just annoying because you're like, I can't do anything. I can't even turn on the machine. It just yells at me. Yeah. I don't know why it took me as long to get to that point, but I don't think it'll be demonstrably different in price even. And the question is, do we add
00:25:58
Speaker
If we don't, if we got a second Atlas Copco, do we, those are not smart enough to talk to each other at that level, I believe. So do we get a secondary one? And if it's a different brand, do we, how do they talk to each other? Do we just sell the Copco and buy two smaller kazers? Um, I'm surprised at how prolific kazers seem to be even amongst our peer group, because they're a little bit more expensive and it's just, I don't know. What I also want to do though, which is one of my kazers concerns was we're going to do some sort of a room.
00:26:27
Speaker
with has to be well circulated air because those things will get super hot, but I need like fresh, clean air kind of. Right. Yes. I got to figure out that, but we will, you know, just like, I think you're going to build a grinding room. We're going to build a little compressor closet, but enough room and airflow that'll help. I'm curious if just doing a acoustic tile on a wall and above it will mitigate a lot of it, but
00:26:53
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I want to do that to mine too, even just putting acoustic panels around it or something. Amish said he was looking into it pretty hard and we want sound absorbing panels. Yeah. Not the other one. I don't know. Oh, I assume they're the triangular. I think it's different. It was like a half inch, three quarter inch sheet of
00:27:16
Speaker
dense something that it's not the big cone triangles like they have in a sound studio. It wants to absorb the sound and not just bounce it around differently or something like that. He's looking into it, so I'm just going to wait for him to tell me what to get. I think it was a museum. I can't think of where else it would have been that had, or maybe it was a factory tour that had a clean room for audio electronics and it was a quiet room where
00:27:43
Speaker
It's actually super trips with your senses. It messes with you to have that level of deadening. Yeah, I watched the YouTube video about that once. I think it was Veritasium or something that he was like, can you spend an hour in this quiet room without going crazy? Does it mess with you that much, huh? Yeah, apparently it's like 50-50. Some people are fine with it and some people just can't stand it. Got it.
00:28:08
Speaker
Are you claustrophobic? I'm not, no. Now, Eric and I were just talking about this. He is. Yeah, interesting. No, I was telling him, I had an MRI 10 years ago, and I fell asleep in the MRI machine. And it's loud and humming, and you're in there for 45 minutes. I'm like, this is nice. Yeah. It's a safe space. Yeah.
Balancing Technical and Leadership Roles
00:28:29
Speaker
That's awesome.
00:28:31
Speaker
in the spirit of what I'm doing this year, improvements. I think you and I both will inevitably continue to balance that technician work, that task work, if you want to use the EMITH terms. There's days where it's no big deal. There's days where I'm like, gosh, I feel like it's never ending.
00:28:47
Speaker
I need to do a better job at recognizing it's okay to batch it rather than whack-a-mole it. Because I'm one of those people, I like a clean inbox, and I use the star system in Gmail as our way of stuff to do, and so it kind of nags at me. And whether it's an invoice that came in or a question about something, even though I built systems like now, Alex handles a lot of customer inquiries, and that's great, and other people do so. That stuff is happening, but nevertheless, there are
00:29:16
Speaker
things and so I'm thinking now I have kind of a batch of time in the morning to do a lot of it and then kind of like the 10-hour, 10 fairs, four-hour work week like, hey, you can do 30 minutes of it around lunchtime and you can do 30 minutes of it at the end of the day and that will get most of it done and not feel like you are allowed to take the random 217 email where someone's asking for an updated W9 or something and it's like, oh, I could do that so quick. It's no big deal. I know exactly where it is, but it's like, no, just ignore it. Do it later.
00:29:46
Speaker
Yeah, and it just comes down to discipline. Either you...
00:29:49
Speaker
Have the discipline to constantly be distracted and taking care of it immediately as it comes in. Or you have the discipline to turn off and be like, I'm not touching that until like four o'clock. And it's been great here because Fraser's been taking care of most of the inbox. And he'll leave things that I have to take care of. But that means I don't have to worry about it throughout the day. I get to do my thing. I get to work and manage and lead.
00:30:16
Speaker
design and come up with stuff that I like to do and I'm not constantly distracted. Like my phone's on silent all day long and I love it. That's great. So you have, whatever your email is, other people are checking it. Phraser is, yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's a good step. Yep. I may not be, I may not be far away from that. Yeah. Yeah. Even the process of forwarding email. And we actually, to my credit,
00:30:41
Speaker
You know how in the email that they talk about writing out your org chart, even when you're a solopreneur and it helps you just sort of think about stuff we created in Google suite, you can create alias emails. So there are some emails on our accounting or sales or info. I don't know if those are all really emails. So don't email them folks, but, um, at Saunders, we see works.com. Well, like some of them come to me, but I like that they're set up because I can also.
00:31:06
Speaker
send emails as that account, which is actually a good thing in some reasons, but also when we want to transition that to a true third-party role, it's seamless. We just create that as a real account instead of an alias under mine, and that system is now in place. It's great. Yeah, we don't have ... I haven't gotten G Suite yet, but I have Fraser as a delegated email guy, so he has
00:31:34
Speaker
limited access to my Gmail account. But he can read and respond. But it always responds as responded by Fraser. Interesting. Yeah, so it's not coming from me. It's coming through me as him kind of thing. It works well.
00:31:54
Speaker
When you say limited access, I mean, I assume basically anything that gets sent to you is fair game to go. Yeah, sure, sure. Okay, got it. Okay, that's good. Yeah, I think I talked about this last week, but we've kind of realized we hit that limit on marketing. Did I talk about that? Yeah, you want to considering hiring a marketing strategist.
00:32:17
Speaker
Yeah, and had had one phone call interview, which it's not over yet. But tell me it came from the ball. No, no, no, it was local person. And I don't like to talk more about it, because I don't know which way it's going to go yet. But I still would love to
00:32:35
Speaker
The more you know, now that you've gotten pregnant on that idea of hiring that person, and you know what that opportunity is, I think it gets you more and more. It's like the service kind of like, you all of a sudden, you now know what you're going to do on it, put on it. And so I'm fired up about finding a role for that. And I'm thinking, if you use Indeed, or haven't used them aware of it, yeah, looked at it a bunch.
00:32:58
Speaker
I think I'm going to throw some more resources at just seeing what we can come up with for candidates to get an idea of who's out there, who's folks are looking for. I think it's an awesome role. I mean, it's definitely a marketing role, not a manufacturing role, but man, if you are interested in everything from social media to analytics and campaigns and A-B testing and click-through, I think it's super exciting stuff, but it's like I can't
00:33:26
Speaker
I can't get into the weeds on
Team Expansion and Strategic Planning
00:33:27
Speaker
this. I wanted a guru on this stuff. Yep. Yeah. You want to create the system and you've already created the business and the ecosystem and the customer base and the flow and everything. And you just need to teach that to somebody and be like, look, this is what we do. This is how we do it. Here's the plan that I have moving forward. I need you to run with this. And you'll find the right person and it'll click for you.
00:33:51
Speaker
It may be interview a couple people or whatever, but eventually it'll just be like, oh man, if I had this person on my team. I know. But you know how it is, John. Once you have something done, you look back with the benefit of hindsight and you're like, oh, that was not necessarily easy, but we always have tended to make stuff happen. But when you're at the beginning of that journey, it is staring into the abyss. You don't know
00:34:14
Speaker
But little things like your conversation with someone else in the WhatsApp group about like, why am I getting ads for this vehicle? And you're like, it's like, well, it's a combination of the peer group and the creepy stuff the internet does to track what you're doing and the people you talk to, which like it or not is real. Yeah, it's just reality these days. Yeah.
00:34:39
Speaker
We've decided on hiring two new people. Congratulations. Very excited about that. So over the next couple of weeks, they'll be onboarding. Both of them will be moving from their locations to here. And very exciting. So in about two weeks, we'll have Pierre starting. He'll be our machinist. And I mean, in his video interview, he had a Kennedy toolbox in the background. So I'm like, you're off to a good start, buddy. That's awesome. That's really cool.
00:35:04
Speaker
So you had me at Kennedy. Let's, let's talk here. He's got a lot of surface grinding experience too, just as a, as a fun bonus. Like he didn't know we were getting a surface grinder, but we can now put in between him and Angelo. Like I'm probably not going to have to touch that thing. I want to cause it's fun, but I won't be running it. Yeah. Sure. Awesome. Yeah. What in the other person is in the finishing department? Yep. Awesome. Well, congrats. That's a big step. Good.
00:35:34
Speaker
Yeah. We're up to a, I think, I don't know if I'm going to do it tomorrow. I should make a decision on this though, but we need to do kind of a group huddle, kind of a group days off in the shop.
00:35:49
Speaker
Because we're at the point now where we've got Lex to where barcodes are in place with location stuff. And I've got to just bring everybody on board to communicate about that, about the new maker pipe tables so that people know, like, for example, we're not done building those. So I don't want folks to start forming these subconscious decisions of like, oh, I got to work with what's out there. Like, no, no, there's more coming. Let us know. One of our interns, Scott, is taking the lead on building more of those.
00:36:14
Speaker
cool system, like all the kind of more than just like a huddle about shop update, which we do, but kind of, okay, let's everyone take a break today and go through. Yeah. And get on the same page. Yeah. We can, we're going to kind of do a hybrid purge. We're going to move a bunch of old tools and toolboxes into my off my old office so that they're
00:36:33
Speaker
kind of in that we'll pull them back out as needed. And just a list of like little stuff, which will be kind of one of those like last draws, like let's push it across the finish line of this 2020 overhaul. Love it. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think about the end of the year? I mean, we've got what seven weeks left, give or take six.
00:36:55
Speaker
I am very ambivalent to things like calendar dates and end of year. I will use the end of the year to reflect for sure and think. And like, I've sort of formed this idea that 2020 was the overhaul. 2021, we're gonna really focus more on the marketing and like every product that we ship, we need to have, not every product, but like the fixture lights, the model lights. We need to have QR codes and videos and instructions and tips and tricks and PDFs. Like we know all that stuff can,
00:37:25
Speaker
We know what needs to happen or we know enough to start that process, but it's not being done. So that's my kind of goal next year, but otherwise I don't, I'm not a big like.
00:37:34
Speaker
people are like, where do you see yourself in? Right. That makes sense. Yeah, I'm similar. We're using each annual year, especially in financial terms, as a goal post because you can add those numbers fairly easily and compare with last year and things like that. So we do have a goal for this year, which COVID altered a little bit, but we can still hit a modified version of that goal. And it's
00:38:00
Speaker
fine tuning our decision making for the next six weeks. But I think we can do that no problem. These are numbers, financial type goals. Yeah, exactly. Which leads to production goals and daily output.
00:38:18
Speaker
making sure, you know, when to crack the whip and when to loosen off and to deal with certain problems and when to, you know, take a machine down to upgrade it for this thing because it'll work out more like in a week. Yeah, kind of. So yeah, like putting the third palette on the Maury a couple of weeks ago certainly slowed us down for a little bit because there were more issues that came up from that. But then it's been like butter ever since. So yeah, things like that. And it's all timing is everything.
Streamlining Employee Purchases and Processes
00:38:47
Speaker
But yeah, otherwise I'm more of a steady growth kind of, you know, January 1st doesn't mean much specifically outside of those parameters.
00:38:59
Speaker
Yeah. I think that would be a really hard step. I don't know that it's one I ever want to have to take, which is this idea of forward-looking budgets. We have this much to spend on grinding wheels or supplies or software. A renewal license is obviously easy to budget, but I very much
00:39:18
Speaker
wanted to be a cultural thing where it's like, Hey, you know, Ed wanted a new pair of precision ground flat stones. And so we bought a pair from that guy, Spencer Webb. And it's kind of like, those are not cheap, but it's like, okay, like, you know, there's no like two or $300 or whatever they are. Like, yeah. Oh yeah. I think that's, I'm not saying they're not worth it, but it's like, it's not, it's not a willy nilly. I need a $17 drill bit, like rock and roll.
00:39:44
Speaker
Yeah. That's the bootstrapper in you that... Yeah. And that's something else through either through Lex or just through cultural changes is starting to think about distributing non... Well,
00:39:59
Speaker
What is it? Purchasing versus procurement. Procurement being researching like a grinder. Well, but there's also that level of things like, hey, I want to try out a tool holder or a custom tool or a different thing or stones. I eventually will need to stop being part of that process in a good way. Building a system that allows folks to do that without keeping it in check.
00:40:22
Speaker
And a lot of it is, especially as you grow the team with more people that aren't like, you know, your closest friend kind of thing is
00:40:31
Speaker
Um, letting them know that they're allowed to, you know, letting them know if you, if you actually feel like you need this thing, like research it, bring it up to me. I'm not going to bite your head off. Like I want to know, cause I don't have the time or even the knowledge to research this thing, uh, and letting other people do it. And I'm actively trying to back away from those conversations and let people run with it. You know, like we need, um, dust filtration in various grinder setups. Uh,
00:41:00
Speaker
in areas and I'm letting Angela run with it and Eric too, and the two of them are dealing with it. I'm like, guys, I don't need to be a part of this conversation. I'm not trying to be rude. It's just like, you guys got this. Well, we're probably already there on that front, but what still happens is someone will email me and be like, I'd like to try this. If it's something I'm concerned about, I'll have a discussion. Otherwise, I'll just order it.
00:41:24
Speaker
The question is more of a mechanical, do we give folks access to accounts? Well, that's frustrating because it's more of an issue these days with password resets or double confirmation sign-ons. Do we do corporate cards and credit cards? Well, if you do that, are you going to have people do expense reports? I never thought we'd do that kind of a company, but you've got to think about how is a way of scalable, sustainable. And there has to be some accountability. You can't just have
00:41:51
Speaker
hundreds of thousands of dollars in who knows what just passing through your books. You got to think about that.
00:41:58
Speaker
But it's like, we still have my socket set and wrenches set from when I was a car guy like 12 years ago. And there's missing stuff, and it's garbage. And I was just thinking, how come nobody has gone out and just gone to Canadian Tire and bought a nice set of wrenches? And so I told two of the guys yesterday, I'm like, just take care of it. You guys have been asking for this for years, and so have I. And you guys can handle this. Do you just hand them your credit card then?
00:42:27
Speaker
That's happened before, yeah. Three corporate cards, Eric, me, and Barry each have one, so Barry usually just passes his out. Yeah, totally random. When the MakerPipe guys were here building those tables, they had the cutest cordless portable bandsaw from Milwaukee. The thing is tiny, barely bigger than a drill. It takes a 27. Right? Yeah, probably on Instagram.
00:42:53
Speaker
The blade is like 27 and one 16th inches. So it's like, I love that because in the throat is, I don't know, inch and a half, two inches. Sorry, not the throat, but the opening of the blade of the throat would be a different dimension, I guess. But when you're doing that little quick cutoff of conduit of pipe, even the part on the lathe where you goof and you've got to restart and you need a fresh face on the piece of bar sock and you don't necessarily want to jog through your parting tool.
00:43:17
Speaker
And so in kind of a sad moment, we sold the Jet Band saw. It's one of the last tools that came with me from New York. But that was kind of our beater band saw. And I'm not sure they had this cordless thing where it just is freaking awesome to have PSA. Nice. Yeah. And that's one of those little several hundred dollar expenses that it's like no big deal. Yeah.
00:43:41
Speaker
Ah, those things I'm so conscious of. That was a no-brainer, but I actually did put it in my cart, and then I waited a few days to make sure that wasn't an emotionally cool decision. I'm like, no, that's a tool. We'll use that. I've done that too. Yeah. What are you up to today?
00:44:00
Speaker
Today, I'm making Kern Rask handles on the Kern. I had a couple little mismatches yesterday as I was working on them, so I'm just going to fine-tune those toolpaths.
00:44:14
Speaker
That means once handles are good, blades are already good, grinding is going perfect. Awesome. Yeah, it's just these handles. And then lock bar inserts, I've made them. I just need to make more so that I can fine tune little bugs and change a couple tools with better performing stuff. And then I'm done. And then rasks are selling. Now that you're effectively done, is there any simultaneous 5-axis?
00:44:39
Speaker
A little bit. Is there? There is a little bit. Yeah. I think maybe it's just one operation. A chamfer. A chamfer is some stupid. I love it. I love it. I love it. It's a flow app. And it's cool to watch because the whole thing like moves, but it's just this little hidden chamfer, but I couldn't, I couldn't hit it otherwise. Yeah, that was perfect. That's funny. Awesome. But tons of positional, obviously. Yeah, I wasn't harping on you. It's just the reality of what it is. Yeah, it's funny. Cool. I'll see you next week. Cool, man.