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#279 - 4AM Shop Adventures & Training Classes Around The Corner
270 Plays3 years ago
TOPICS:
- John Grimsmo came in to learn the new Zeiss CMM until 4am.
- Saunders is experiencing variations on some parts.
- Learning more about epoxy tombstones
- The oldest Renishaw probe cracked the glass.
- Grimsmo provides an update on the Speedio & Tornos oil issues.
- Saunders has his training class start in only 3 weeks!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Business of Machining
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 279. My name is John Grimsmough. My name is John Saunders. This is the podcast where two buddies have been chatting for over five years at least once a week about all things manufacturing and all the pitfalls and fun things and new things and exciting things and not exciting things of running a business. It's been very wonderful to both of our lives to have this as part of it. Agreed for sure.
00:00:28
Speaker
Yes. What's going on?
Working with Zeiss DuraMax CMM
00:00:31
Speaker
I've been playing with the CMM. Oh, yeah? Yeah. The Zeiss DuraMax. Having a lot of fun. I stayed. I came in on Saturday. After a big day with the family, like 8 PM, I'm like, OK, let me just go play for a little bit before bed. And then I was here till 4 in the morning.
00:00:48
Speaker
I don't know how you do that, John. That's incredible. I don't do it often, but I just enjoyed it. The whole shop was quiet. All the machines were off already. I turned off the air compressor, everything off, off, silent. It was so weird to be in a silent shop because there's so much white noise all of the time, but it was just pleasant. Days off in the shop, like you talk about, it's just me and the machine, literally.
00:01:13
Speaker
I got a lot of stuff done, which was good. I got my head wrapped around it. I'd watched a ton of YouTube videos on just how to get your feet wet doing it, what things you need to do first, set your base alignment, probe the orientation of the part. So I put a one, two, three block on the table. And I'm like, okay, let me square it up in the software. So you touch two sides, you touch three points on the top, like two points is the line, three points is a plane, four points is a circle. It's kind of the general.
00:01:40
Speaker
rules. You hit start new measurement whatever in the software and if you just touch two points on the side, it knows you did a line. If you touch three points on the top, it knows you did a plane. If you go into a hole and you touch four points, then it knows you did a hole and it sets the alignment based on those inputs. It's really cool.
00:02:05
Speaker
So I did a couple hours of that and got the 123 block kind of set, like measured and hold and oriented and everything. And it was really cool. And then I dragged in a Norseman blade CAD file to the Calypso software. And I was like, okay, on the screen, it's oriented this way. I have it mounted on the table on two magnets, on riser posts, so I can get all the way around it and under it and stuff.
00:02:31
Speaker
And I'm like, okay, it's lied pretty much the same in real life as it is in the software, but not identical. So like, how do you get Calypso to know, okay, the whole is my origin and it's rotated this orientation, right? And I got struggled there. I got stuck. And I know I'd seen at least one video kind of about it, but it wasn't really answered by questions. And then it was like past four o'clock in the morning and I was like, I need to go home now. But, um,
00:03:00
Speaker
And then I asked the guys at Elliott where I got the machine from and he's like the guy there, Jim, he's like, Oh, did you watch my videos on this topic? And I'm like, you have videos too? They didn't come up at all in my searches. Yeah. Are they not public? No, there are. I just, I was searching for Duramax specific videos and this is Calypso generic videos, which is the same thing. I just, I didn't broaden my search terms. Um, but that brought up a lot more content to watch, which was really cool.
00:03:31
Speaker
So yeah, one of the things I'm doing today is do what I learned about in his videos and just kind of get past that little hurdle of orienting an actual CAD model into real life. And then I could do some fun stuff.
Need for Skilled Workers in Manufacturing
00:03:43
Speaker
We were watching the Zeiss team at Project NFG using the same Duramax. And it was educational. I enjoyed it. And take this with a grain of salt, because this is sort of backseat driving here of someone who hasn't
00:03:58
Speaker
live the life of that metrology world. But what's true is everything, everyone listening to this already knows we need more people in manufacturing. We need more people able to use tools like metrology equipment and you want to do as you can to lessen the burden of training and bringing somebody online and watching them use Calypso. I find I'll ask the guys like, so why do I still need to go back into this menu again and re-click what it should already know or like things like that.
00:04:25
Speaker
And they didn't, you know, look, they didn't have a great answer other than that's just kind of the way they do it. But man, someone needs to like merge Datron and Zeiss because, you know, you take a CMM, I should be able to draw with my finger like you can on a Datron, a periphery around the part, color code it here. And the CMM, you know, you could hack that I think at this point because that capability seems to all be there.
00:04:53
Speaker
Yeah, from what I've seen so far, there are some productivity hacks that you don't have to close the menu to choose the next level of things. I don't know. I got to get deeper into it, but it's more just understanding how to operate the software and what are the basic requirements to get what you want and then one of the fun features, the tolerance values, the points. If you want to scan the top surface of your part, you can click three points to create a plane and then it just averages
00:05:23
Speaker
It draws a flat plane through those three points. Or you can draw as many points as you want, and then it'll go and it'll touch point, point, point, point, point, and that's another option. Or you can select all of those points and convert them into a polyline, which then scans the whole surface, keeps contact with the part, the whole surface, and then it'll average the actual height difference and plane value, whatever. The theoretical flat plane through all of those million points you just selected.
00:05:54
Speaker
Because aluminum extrusion has a big dip in the middle of a wide aluminum extrusion. So if you just touch three points, you're not really getting the actual flatness of it. But yeah, there's so much fun stuff to do. What's the first, do you have a specific first goal or
Measuring and Tracking Flatness
00:06:12
Speaker
need? Two things, flatness of our parts.
00:06:16
Speaker
because we know that heat treat warps the parts and we know that the quenching cooling off operation warps the parts and we know that lapping can make flat parts but doesn't always make flat parts and they all tie together like if parts get slightly warped out of heat treat then they're harder to lap and then it doesn't always get rid of all the surface grinding marks which are first and all this stuff stacks up so I want to know
00:06:40
Speaker
which process is creating most of the warp and how to eliminate that, and then be able to track that over time. So a blade off the surface grinder, we're going to scan it for flatness. We're going to put in the current. We're going to machine the blade and scan that same blade for flatness. We're going to put it through heat treat. We're going to scan it again. We're going to quench it, cryo treat it, scan it between every step, lap it, scan it afterwards, and then hopefully find some interesting variations as to where and why.
00:07:08
Speaker
Because it's causing problems in some areas, like when it won't lap out all of the surface grinding marks because there's a little dip in the blade or the flipper tab is bending down or something downstream effects. So that's one of the things. And then also consistency of parts coming off of the current will be. Yeah, yeah, right. It'd be really cool to see.
00:07:33
Speaker
Well, on that note, I, you know, current is a current, I wouldn't necessarily say, you know, Kuma is a current, but we really like our Kuma. And we were seeing some variations that I just didn't, it's not that I didn't like them, it's that they were unpredictable. And like so many things in life, it was both embarrassing and the case of Occam razor where it's like, of course that's the problem. I just didn't until I had realized that was the problem hadn't dawned on me, which is,
00:08:02
Speaker
We were using uni-force clamps and the uni-force clamps are good at what they do. Did I say this already? Okay, so uni-force clamps are really good at what they do and in this case what it was doing is not just clamping the part but actually flexing the flat fixture into a hill.
00:08:19
Speaker
Now, sideways on a horizontal, but nevertheless, it's bowing it up in the middle as it's trying to stretch it out. What that was doing was having this weird slope. It's almost like you now, instead of having your part perpendicular to the spindle, it's on a slight angle to it, which means the chamfer on the left side is a little bit different than the chamfer on the right side.
00:08:39
Speaker
minor amounts that honestly, I don't even think that the customer would see but it was bothering me. And even though we used torque wrenches, and again, this is before I knew, I thought it was more just hey, we're loading the parts differently each time there's temperature change, like just kind of the whole like, I'm gonna throw out a bucket of a bunch of things that I any of which could be many or some of them, it ends up no, it was really just specifically the flex and the reason I caught it was that
00:09:07
Speaker
We had the fixture itself on some riser pucks because we were trying to get more travel area out of the perpendicular face of the tombstone. So by lifting the sides off, it gave us more access. Well, we kind of abandoned that idea for other reasons. And so when I re I remade the fixture because it was time to kind of over to rethink this and I'm really glad that I did that because it's a better way to do it, which is
00:09:33
Speaker
Not as you know, it's not an easy call when you decide to say, okay, I've learned a lot that fixtures has run its life. It's now going into scrap bin.
00:09:43
Speaker
But what happened is the new fixture was flush on the side of the tombstone. And when I changed the parts, there's just a bead of coolant on the top of it. Even after the chip blow off, there's some coolant on the top. Well, I noticed that when I tightened the uniforms
Fixture Design Challenges
00:10:00
Speaker
clamps, the coolant bead at the top where the backside of the fixture meets the tombstone, that bead
00:10:06
Speaker
disappeared. I'm like, Oh my gosh, I'm opening up a liquid gap. Yes. And it was a tiny amount, but the torque wrench values weren't consistent enough. Plus, it kind of changes where which holds you. Well, I'm not sure that's true or not, which ones you torque first. Sure. Yeah. Anyway, since they have a solution for it, but it kind of reminded me of your current thing where it's like, look, this isn't
00:10:30
Speaker
This isn't an Okuma problem. This is a John problem. Yeah, exactly. It's a process problem. And that's so cool that you could see the coolant basically change amount, you know, like the gap there as you tighten the fixture. And we've had things like that, too, where it's just holy cow, the fixture is flexing or holy. It's not the torque value. It's the actual design of the whole thing. And then you make you make assumptions, especially operators that make assumptions that everything should just work.
00:10:57
Speaker
until you find some variations and you're like, hold on, this needs to be redesigned. And just because you throw a new design, new fixture on there, that doesn't mean it's going to magically work or not have its own problems too.
00:11:09
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, we're revamping our complete Maury palette system, all the fixtures and everything. And the ones that I've been using for four or five years are going in the trash. And like you said, it's some nostalgia and stuff. But like, who cares? Because the new ones are doing way better. You got to keep one shadow box at John. Yeah, that's that's what Angela keeps saying, too. He's like, it's going in the vault like in the in the display box. The original one that's made thousands of knives on it.
00:11:37
Speaker
But yeah, the new ones are going to be sweet. Yeah. That's awesome. So you, you have these, this like whatever four inch by four inch by 10 inch 41 40 fixtures that you had somebody make for you, right? Yeah. On the, on the current. Yeah. The tombstones. Those are, do you know if they're just, uh, 41 40 that's been hardened.
00:12:01
Speaker
It was going to be 4140, but he chose the guy who made them a P20 tool steel because it was cheaper and easier to get and like the same thing. I don't know if it's, well, it's not stainless, but they don't seem to rust or anything. It's fine in the machine. But yeah, typically I'm using 4140 for all my other fixtures.
00:12:20
Speaker
Just machines realize. And not a metallurgist, but my understanding from basic research is that heat treating or hardness does not change the metals ductility. It's how much it will flex. So things like my uni-force problem. The tensile strength, I believe, would be what drives that, but not, again, change it from 25 Rockwell to 60 Rockwell. Still going to go the same amount. Our knife blades bend. Think of a thin kitchen blade, kitchen knife. You can flex that like crazy.
00:12:49
Speaker
So yeah, the hardness doesn't necessarily affect flexibility. It's just like dent resistance. Exactly. Hardness, right? Well, so that's what we're now thinking because those fixtures that I just mentioned that flexed were a regular aluminum.
00:13:05
Speaker
I knew they were not going to necessarily want to be aluminum forever, but I honestly didn't. I didn't think they were going to be that. You could probably redesign the fixture such that aluminum would be fine. Anyway, we're going to remake them out of steel, which I think that thicker and steel alone should solve that problem, although it would be good to have Alex do some FEA infusion. That shouldn't be.
00:13:25
Speaker
hard to do. But what I'm also going to do that I've
Steel vs Aluminum for Fixtures
00:13:28
Speaker
never really done is we're either going to have the whole fixture rough machine leave say 10 or 20 thou and then send it out for heat treat. Or I think what makes more sense is because regular 40140 or you know, we can buy pretty hard at 30 rock or something that should be plenty good. But I still like this idea of, you know, stepping up our game to where
00:13:54
Speaker
the parts that go in it sit on three hardened pads that can be cleaned, precision flat ground stoned, and over the course of much longer periods of time aren't susceptible to chips getting in them and so forth. There's lots of these hardened inserts. We could make our own, but this is something where I'm happy to buy them.
00:14:18
Speaker
There's lots of these sort of inserts from different companies that should work great. And I think what I'll do is probably machine out of pocket for them, put them in and then hard mill them down probably one or two thou so that they are perfectly complete and in place. And then we should have a much improved fixture design. Is it going to be rigid enough to have it mounted only on three points? I don't know what you're mounting, what it looks like.
00:14:44
Speaker
No, the whole fixture will be mounted with traditional screws, but then the part itself, like this is our top jaws. Right now, the whole face of the top jaw rests on the floor of the fixture, or sometimes we have relief areas machined into it. Now, the bottom side will rest on three points, and then it's still clamped left to right with a traditional clamping style.
00:15:07
Speaker
Make sure the clamping doesn't tilt that three point contact. Totally. Yeah. There's so many things to think about though. That's the thing. One of my top pallets, it's like a little rectangle four inches by six inches, whatever, that our handles will mount onto.
00:15:29
Speaker
Normally we've done four bolts. I'm changing the new design to three bolts. So like two on the sides on the top and one in the center in the middle. But I definitely have to keep in mind like Boeing and how it's going to, if there's a chip under it, how are you going to, how's the fixture going to conform around that chip? You know, because before you just shove it into the aluminum fixture and now I got steel on steel, like
00:15:53
Speaker
There's deflection somewhere, right? I like your idea of having the three points. I think it's a neat idea. I do wonder if you lose rigidity and just backing on the park, depending on what you're making and how you're making it.
00:16:08
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not doing a good job of... Well, so think of the parts about the size of a deck of playing cards. The Brigidity doesn't come from the bottom side being coplanar with the bottom of the fixture at all. It can be clamped much in the same way you clamp a part like that in a traditional angle lock style vice. You're just clamping between the far side, the front side and the far side. So what I'm saying is instead of having a... Basically, what we're using now is effectively a full face parallel.
00:16:35
Speaker
parallel that contacts all the bottom which is no good and rather than just back relieving the fixture and relying on hardened or semi hardened fixture material I like this idea of having these three pads which we can put in place super hard we can deck them we can redeck them or we can even replace them without having to ruin the whole fixture so
00:17:01
Speaker
90 plus percent of your clamping force is side to side, like hitting the sides of the part, not bolting downwards onto the part. Exactly. Yeah, then the three points were fine. Then in that case, I think you're over engineering it. I think just machining three points on the fixture and having it be flat plane is fine in steel. I want them hard. Yeah. I don't know if you need it.
00:17:23
Speaker
We've got steel fixtures. The P21 is on the Kern and zero deformation, zero chips have stuck in there. They're still totally flat. I've stolen them every now and then. They're just fine. Stepping up from aluminum is a world of difference. We have steel fixtures for other things. I don't think you're going to talk me out of this. I'm not against it.
00:17:50
Speaker
There is a point I've been there way too many times where you're over engineering it, and is it necessary? The tides have changed now. You're talking me off the full Saunders ledge. Yep. Well, like we talk about, there's
00:18:04
Speaker
There's only so much time to allocate, and there's only so many things you can do at once. So be conscious of what you're choosing. Oh, and we can talk about the DIY epoxy tombstone that has set ruins off. But I'm going to argue this is simpler, because I can machine. Machining a pocket in the steel fixture to receive this hardened bushing is actually less machining than having to deck away everything except a riser.
00:18:32
Speaker
The fact that they are replaceable is great. You can take them out if you do want to redeck the fixture for other reasons. That's a big thing to me is I want the ability to pull off all the hardware and touch up fixture. You think about that a lot because if you want to clean up a face on a fixture or something, does that mean you lose? You have to reset datums and stuff. I'm sorry, my phone is going nuts here. So that's the thought. I hear you on the over-engineering. It's actually pretty simple.
00:19:01
Speaker
That's cool though.
DIY Epoxy Tombstone Project
00:19:03
Speaker
So yeah, I will address this briefly because we'll come up in a whole video, but I welcome some feedback on whether or not the epoxy tombstone was a good idea. But simply put, it's a quarter of the cost. I spent
00:19:21
Speaker
some time of my own, but minimal. We have a team that's good at making the flat plates. We have Alex, who's already made his own DIY CNC machine. And I can kind of irrationally or rationally justify some of it as just having fun. But the biggest thing was it gave us this shape that we wanted that's not available, period, like full stop.
00:19:41
Speaker
That's the winner to it. It's not quite done yet, mostly because the Akuma has been co-ranking on orders and work, especially for the Langmuir workholding stuff that we're building. I could probably actually have it working today if I wanted to. I'm just not going to. That's amazing. So what's the counter argument? What's the complaint as to why it's no good?
00:20:08
Speaker
Well, it is that kind of a question of, do you make something or buy it? I don't want cast iron. And there's companies that make aluminum tombstones. But look, it's three to four grand plus three, $400 in rigging and freight. And this costs us time, and we're busy right now. But we learned a ton. We'll share that in the video. The next one that we make, which at this point I do think we'll make another one, will be way better.
00:20:36
Speaker
The closest thing I made to a really, really, not fatal, but like big setback was we wanted to add two locating features in the bottom of the tombstone. I should have added those in when we had the tombstone in five or six separate pieces and not had not cast it together because the machine that plate was already in the machine, adding them literally is free.
00:21:01
Speaker
And to add them now, I had to do some haphazard tipping the 400-pound tubes and over, get it into the horizontal, sweeping it in, and then adding those features on that face in a bit of a sketchy setup, shall we say? Safe, but sketchy. Yeah, yeah.
00:21:16
Speaker
And is that locating bolt pattern kind of a standard for you, what you put into the bottom of it? I didn't think we'd need it. I thought that the all thread bolting through would be sufficient, frankly, as it is with the normal tombstones. They just have four
00:21:35
Speaker
cap screws. Now, I think the problem actually I've learned later when I took it apart, the problem may have been the fact that I had some flex in the washers I was using at the top. But I assume that the all thread which is 25 inches long is stretching a lot more than say a one or two inch bolt.
00:21:50
Speaker
So basically, the long story short, the all thread wasn't going to be adequate to hold the tombstone in place. So adding to precision, five eighths pins, the interface between the tombstone base and the pallet top mean that thing is not going anywhere. Okay.
00:22:07
Speaker
Got it. So that's where we are. There's nothing wrong with a fun project. Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. You learn a lot. It's applicable knowledge. You get to use that forward going forward. You learn a lot about fixture design, rigidity, and all wins. Yeah.
Judging Anka Grinders' Tool of the Year
00:22:25
Speaker
Yeah, the other fun thing, which I wanted to throw out there is where Anka Grinders asked us to be a judge for their Tool of the Year competition. Oh, cool. Yeah, I remember hearing about it mostly through Alfred over at AB Tool. And I think like so many things that kind of, it occurred, but perhaps not with the same fervor because of COVID, but it's back, they're back.
00:22:47
Speaker
It's already open now. We'll throw something up on our Instagram today. Nothing in it for us other than the pride of being able to be part of this panel that reviews folks that have used these carbide grinding machines to make some crazy custom tools and shapes and so forth. And then they're announcing the winner, I think I'm judging them and announcing the winner at live at IMTS. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, so it should be fun. Nice.
00:23:17
Speaker
And then when's the enamel grinder showing up on your floor? Yeah, I would actually bet that you're going to get one way before we do. You can't say you haven't thought about it briefly, but I don't think it's in our future. But with everything you were doing with Zavaro and the military guys, I thought maybe, or even grinding your knives, John, I just don't think that that's a bad idea.
00:23:44
Speaker
I'd probably sooner get an EDM to EDM cut the bevels and actually grind them, which we looked into a bunch of years ago. We might look into again in the future, but yeah, we don't need an end mill grinder. We've got Zadaro, we've got other people that can make customs whenever. I mean, so many manufacturers make
00:24:06
Speaker
insanely good tools anyway, and they're not that expensive and mills. I mean, it's a big operating cost.
00:24:15
Speaker
I don't want to deal with that. Yeah. Okay. Kind of an open ended question for you or anyone listening. We might have just solved it like five minutes before the podcast, but our oldest Haas, which is five years old. I mean, no complaints been a workhorse. Uh, the Renishaw probe, the little glass ring had a, um,
00:24:41
Speaker
had a crack in it. Really? No one crashed. Well, there was no obvious crash or issue. I don't know exactly what caused it. I bought a windshield glass repair kit, which I've done because I just helped fix my wife's windshield a few weeks ago thinking, okay, that could help seal it up. We don't really run coolant onto the probe
00:25:05
Speaker
Even if by accident ever so I wasn't too worried about the IP rating issue Well that didn't that didn't work at all and then our intern Patrick did a great job of doing what I should have done Which is just go on eBay and realize there's replacement people selling these sections
00:25:22
Speaker
But we tried running it without the glass, well with the glass in there rotated away from the cracked area or with it out totally. And the Renishaw probe is, so here's the thing, I've generally found electronics to be a bit binary. Either they're working fine or if they're either totally dead or totally
00:25:40
Speaker
If they're acting sporadically, then it's acting sporadically almost all the time. It's not like, I've usually not found the case that this Renishaw probe is going to work great, and then all of a sudden it's going to go back and forth. So it works great, except
00:25:56
Speaker
Garrett was having a problem putting it back into use for reasons I can't exactly expand I think it's because he was trying to probe multiple things together and I think the issue might have been That when we took the batteries out or working on it, it kind of reset the default settings to where it's not automatically shutting off It's waiting for a IR
00:26:15
Speaker
pattern from the Haas to tell it to turn off. And so that's what we've noticed on the behavior is that when we use another probe that works fine, as soon as it's done probing, the lights on the OMP40 stop blinking immediately. The damaged probe, the lights blink for another
00:26:30
Speaker
I don't know, six seconds and then it shuts off and that's a consistent behavior. And when we probe objects with it, it probes accurately. There's no other behavior issues, which kind of tells me like, Hey, I'm not at the point where I want to go spend 1200 bucks to buy the replacement because I'm not really seeing something that tells me this thing is broken, but we're
00:26:49
Speaker
This is the last, as if we can't get this to work. Have you ever tried to re-hold the probe stylus down when you turn it on, and then it goes through a Morse code-like sequence? Yes, the reset loop and all this. You've got to read the manual and understand the difference between blue and violet, and you're like, ah. Oh, yeah. You're feverishly counting and writing down these values.
00:27:10
Speaker
Patrick's doing a great job at that. So like I said, he got it reset to what I think it should be. So I'm excited to try it, but interesting. I know on armory, you have to feed it a G 65 P 9 8 3 3 to turn it off.
00:27:27
Speaker
32 to turn it on, and it doesn't turn off by itself. If there's a probe alarm, it'll probe all night. It'll just stay on until it receives that 9833 turn off alarm or code.
00:27:41
Speaker
In fairness, we're using the, for this purpose, we're using the Haas VPS, which they do such a good job of making them, this is like what Zeiss needs to do with Calypso. It's like, give you turnkey, hand side. Yeah. Oh my gosh. In Calypso there is, you just have to understand, you have to learn it. You know, you have to know what you're looking for and I'm just getting there. But I feel like within a few weeks, Angelo is going to the training class next week. So he's gone for four days between what I've learned on my own and what he's going to learn there.
00:28:09
Speaker
I want both of us to be able to run it easily. Within a couple weeks, we'll be flying on that thing. I'm super excited. Yeah. Again, it's like a long-term investment in the company. The fact that it's not running two weeks after sitting on our shop floor, I'm okay with that. Yes. Yeah, I hear you. How are all the other things? Brother, Wave Pump, Willamyn?
00:28:38
Speaker
My brother is, I emailed them a couple of days ago saying like, where's my brother? I miss it. I want it. I don't know where it is right now. I assume it's a couple of weeks out, but I've been saying that for a month or two now. I'm looking forward to that. I don't know when. I've been working with the Canadian Aroa rep because they will have to come in and configure the robot to talk to this video.
00:29:07
Speaker
sale, like where I'm buying this video from, they're putting the auto door in and they're doing some stuff for the Aroa, some installation relays or whatever in the background. That's happening slowly. The Swiss, we just ordered a thinner new batch of blazer oil because we're wondering, in my opinion, the oil is crap even though they tested it and said it's fine.
00:29:33
Speaker
But maybe something's wrong with you all. It's still foams. It's still a problem. So we're using it minimally, like only to drill a hole, not for all turning, all parting, everything like we used to do. So we're limping. It's functioning. But whenever you turn that oil on, as it's coming out, you can use the oil. Low pressure oil works fine. Okay. Got it. But when it comes out of the high pressure, it looks like froth. It's not amber. It's like yellow. It's like foamy.
00:30:02
Speaker
If it proves to be the oil, that's crazy that you also found that like cracked seal thing or whatever in the pump. Yeah. But we bought a brand new pump and it didn't change anything. So we've replaced all the hoses, all the pickup feeds.
00:30:17
Speaker
the pump, $2,000 there, time, months, months of time. Just two days ago, I placed an order for two barrels of 22 weight oil instead of the 35 we've been running, so quite a bit thinner. That'll give us two birds with one stone, a thinner oil, which should be better all around, and a new batch.
00:30:38
Speaker
It's the same model of oil, but thinner. That should be a couple weeks out before we get that, but very much hopeful that that will solve those issues and then the tornos can go back to pumping out like it used to. Then the oil that's in the tornos right now, we're probably going to suck it out and pull it in the Wilhelmin because the Wilhelmin needs oil and it's low pressure and that oil works fine low pressure. John, deep six that oil, man.
00:31:05
Speaker
It works fine. Low pressure. I know. I know. I don't know. There's something about good riddance. If it proves to be the oil. Yeah. Yeah. I hear you, though. Yeah. Growth eats cash for breakfast. Exactly. Yeah. Speaking of that, we are so
CNC Training Class and Facility Expansion
00:31:26
Speaker
excited. Our first training class starts in three weeks.
00:31:31
Speaker
closed on the building next door. We are cleaning it. We painted it. We pulled stuff out. We got machines getting set up, computer and lab desks getting set up. We have enough machines right now.
00:31:44
Speaker
as I knew and planned, but what occurred to me with the interest that we seem to be seeing is, dude, let's rock this. So the plan I've been chewing on this week is by one or two, either new or additional of the following, verticals, five axis and lays, because we know we've had some interest in, we ran one five axis class back in the day. We never did run a turning class.
00:32:14
Speaker
But I know we can, I know we'd like to, and so if it's just a question of getting the machines done with the curriculum and so forth, let's rock and roll. So I think what we're going to do is throw up a
00:32:27
Speaker
kind of like an interested sign up type list on our website. So if you are interested in any of that sort of content, the other one thing I want to do, I thought would be kind of a more entry level, hobby level class like come spend a day or two and we'll show you where you can work on the hobby grade machines, the sheetbook goes and the desktop type machines. But I'd like to start getting a list of folks that may be interested in the more advanced or higher end classes, because I want some more conviction around that. But
00:32:55
Speaker
That's a big bill to swallow, but part of me is the future will be kind for I intend to invent it. Let's get the machines into that facility. It's going to look awesome and rock and roll. That's utterly fantastic. Yeah, a hobby grade class would be really interesting, especially at a different price point, I'd say. Exactly. Put 3D printers in there too.
00:33:16
Speaker
It's kind of like this is the stuff you can have in your basement. Anybody within reason can afford this kind of stuff. We're talking about a couple thousand dollars in anything you could want in this range. Then you can make at home. You can be a maker. You can create things. Whether that's just a video series or whether that is an in-person class, it's a great idea. It's very popular out there. The maker community as it grows.
00:33:45
Speaker
But when it comes to buying six figure machines that are going to sit in a showroom.
00:33:55
Speaker
What's your logic process there? If they're not for production, when I'm buying a current to run 24-7, it makes sense logically, financially. I can justify that cost. How are you thinking about it like that? One way is to look at what does financing or leasing costs look like?
00:34:16
Speaker
It doesn't mean you have to do it that way, but it's simple if you can sell X number of seats. So one thought I also had was no reason you can't use the five axis machines as traditional from your axis verticals. And in fact, I think you can even on the Haas machines or probably any lockout B and C. So you literally just have a three axis vertical. So for my capital. On my current, I just post the code with no tilted work plane. Like I can post three axis code. It doesn't care.
00:34:46
Speaker
Totally. But I just mean I want to create a safe training environment where you can't just start jogging the B-axis or crashing the machine. Fair. And even if we laid a fixture plate down over it, it even starts to look a bit more like a vertical. I'll put it this way. I think if you're trying to learn a vertical, I don't think you've really lost anything. You've got probing, you've got the same setups, the coordinate systems, all that stuff.
00:35:12
Speaker
So one thought is ditch the verticals and just go five axis and then turning. The turning was tougher because lathes can get, you know, you can double the price of the lathe when you start adding live tooling signals or Y axis. But to me, I'm not interested in tooling up for a training class to run a two axis lathe period. Like it's got to have some more to it. Don't know that it has to have a sub spindle, but then, um,
00:35:37
Speaker
That's the question I got you on. Yeah. I mean, the value there is at the very least explaining what a sub spindle can do for you and say, Arlay doesn't have that, but it makes it better. I don't know. Would you consider like in the classes, are you going to do a walkthrough of your actual machine shop?
00:36:00
Speaker
or are they separate? They're separate, yeah. They're separate because they should be separate at this point. Yeah, cool. That's good to know. Yeah. That's cool. It's cool to see you revamping the training class with a whole new mindset and a separate facility and building. It might be the same curriculum, but it's going to have a way different feel to it. It's going to feel very professional.
00:36:23
Speaker
Oh yeah. We got these like canvas prints ordered that for the walls. And I'm thinking of like some cheeky fun signs of like, like the, cause the shop that we're moving into for it used to have like a employees only sign when you went from the office into the woodworking area. And I want to be like, I don't know, like CNC trainees only or something like, like walk through this door to learn. I don't know, like, yeah, yeah. Just find some good machinist memes off of them and print them literally. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah.
00:36:51
Speaker
The other fun thing, perhaps off topic, but one of the people that signed up for the training class works at the factory adjacent to ours, which is a, I mean, I don't know, multi hundred thousand square foot, uh, veggie burger factory. Huh. It's the, one of the major manufacturers in the U S of vegetarian, uh, meat substitute products. So veggie burgers, veggie, nuggets, veggie, bacon, veggie, all that stuff.
00:37:18
Speaker
And I mean, I lived here for whatever long and worked next to it for six years. And I've always been like, man, that's such a big factory. You know, it's huge, huge. I mean, they have any point in time, 30 semi trucks in their staging lot. And so he invited us over for a tour. So this morning, I got to go over and it's kind of what you would expect today, like before the podcast.
00:37:40
Speaker
Yeah. Like four hours ago. Nice. If you've seen like the how it's made or YouTube of like a food production facility, it kind of just looks like that of, you know, a whole bunch of stainless steel conveyors and mixing bowls and ovens and so forth. But like really, really impressive, you know, 500 horsepower pumps or motors on, on blades that would chop stuff up.
00:38:01
Speaker
They're the largest water user in our county. They have all these different mechanical systems. They have a full-blown internal machine shop, repairs, SAP system for tickets. Their budget alone on repairs is, their budget alone on just repair parts is multiple times your, my revenues combined. So that part of it makes it really cool. And so it was, to me, there's always been something
00:38:29
Speaker
at this human level, instinctual level of it's so weird to drive by a building for years and not know what's inside. And now that you know what's inside, you can't unring that bell. It's so cool. Yeah. And it would be so easy to be like, oh, they make veggie burgers? That's cool. Not interested. But
00:38:50
Speaker
You're looking at it more from a business perspective. It is manufacturing, right? It's process control and it's managing employees. They must have dozens or hundreds of employees running a shop that size. Yeah. There's a lot of business that goes into that. Yes. That's cool. It was cool. It was fun. That's awesome. Yeah. What are you today?
00:39:10
Speaker
Yeah, I play it on the CMM. I've got some, I need to focus on some probing operations on the Kern, like it's one of those you need to, I was trying to program it last night at home and I'm like, I can only do so much without testing it immediately and getting immediate feedback if this is the right number to type in, you know? So I'm going to spend some time on the Kern doing that.
00:39:33
Speaker
Yeah, I'm testing for variation between our different tombstones and some of them have 10ths or more of height or XY variation in their position. And, you know, I'm trying to make perfect parts here. So Z height specifically is one of the ones I'm hitting.
00:39:50
Speaker
I actually had our operator, Steven, write down a certain thickness on every single part and write down the palette that it came from and the date that you pulled that number on. We're seeing definite trends like palette nine is doing this and palette 18 is doing this and it's very different. Yeah, I'm fine tuning that process. A little PSA tip that we found, we've gone away from it.
00:40:18
Speaker
Well, we still do it sometimes. I think some of it's changed because the way we fix your stuff or move different machines. But when we had hypercritical datums, especially in Z, what we would do is do all of the machining, which mostly probably benefits you from the sense that if the machine happens to be cold, it's not now if you're doing 30, 40 minutes of machining or coolant, thermal, all that.
00:40:43
Speaker
But then right before we would do the final critical Z, we would come in and we would probe a fixed feature that's not part of the part itself. And we always knew where that was and it was thermally stable. And that would do the final Z comp update so that especially on a C-frame machine where you can have a foul of head nod or change. And we found that it was,
00:41:09
Speaker
It's wonderful with how stabilized that did things. Interesting. I've heard of guys mounting a tooling ball onto the table of the machine and probing it periodically throughout the day to compensate for thermal growth. But I like your idea actually. Having a fixed point, like what I'm doing on the current is
00:41:29
Speaker
We have a flat handle that mounts to the side of the tombstone, to the fixture. I'm probing the fixture itself, the flat face of it, which is the bottom plane of the handles. I'm probing that in three points and averaging the three to create an average plane. Why do you have to average twist? There's usually a few tenths of twist or flatness in the fixture sometimes, depending on the side, depending on the fixture.
00:41:57
Speaker
Depending on specifically how it mounts, how it wants to mount on the aroa that day, it's usually not a problem. Oh, I see. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. I felt like that would be better than just probing a single point. Do you do it towards the clamping side or at the longest point away from the clamping side? I don't know. Probe three points average it.
00:42:19
Speaker
I'm not arguing here and I'm certainly not saying I have best practices. I always try to be careful about like anything like that where you're averaging stuff or like it's just kind of, you know, I'd rather pick a single point and see how it tracks. And, you know, all pictures are different. They have different bigger quirks, but like, I don't know. I think I originally did it to see what the three points would be. Yeah. To see how different they are. And I remember seeing two tenths or something like almost nothing.
00:42:48
Speaker
And at that point, if you're averaging it, who cares? Because you're averaging one tenth. It depends on what you're trying to hold. Yeah, exactly. For us, we were found on a pretty large HAZ vertical, which is going to succumb to thermal growth and change and so forth. We found that you could
00:43:06
Speaker
you can increase your desired need to hit a specific number down to those sort of tense levels. Hugely improved it by, and it totally makes sense. At the very last second possible, I'm probing a feature that happens to be within the, say, an inch or two of the height of the feature I'm trying to machine, which means I'm not probing way up high or relying on the ball screw change through 20 inches of stroke, and yeah. Makes sense.
00:43:34
Speaker
Sweet. Cool. What are you up to today? Anything else? Working on the Akuma for that. Oh, I've got to dial in that fixture offset still. I'm close to getting it.
00:43:48
Speaker
The service guy would come in, or the apps guy, I think at no charge to us. But he was kind of joking like, man, it'll be four hours of travel time. It'll take me 20 minutes to do it. So I was kind of like, well, look, let me just walk me through it. I'll do it. I'll send you some videos. That's taken longer than it should have. And I'm kind of like, man, I should have just had it come in. But there is value in you learning the machine better. That's true. I still should have it come in.
00:44:17
Speaker
I should be able to get that done here in a few minutes. Sweet. That's on the plate. All right, man. See you next week. Have a great day. Take care. Bye. Bye.