Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
RASK KNIVES ON HOMESTRETCH, LIGHTS OUT MANUFACTURING, LATHE CRASHES, DATA & TOOL LIFE MANAGEMENT, MACRO VARIABLES, Q PARAMETERS, FUSION 360 BUG, PROVENCUT PART SERIES, and MORE!
236 Plays5 years ago
RASK KNIVES ON HOMESTRETCH, LIGHTS OUT MANUFACTURING, LATHE CRASHES, DATA & TOOL LIFE MANAGEMENT, MACRO VARIABLES, Q PARAMETERS, FUSION 360 BUG, PROVENCUT PART SERIES, and MORE!
Machining Verbiage The new rule is that when running machines, you add "ING" to the end of the machine brand name to create a new CNC-centric gerund. Acceptable examples are:
KEARN--ING TORNOS--ING HAAS--ING TORMACH--ING
A BUMP IN THE NIGHT... Just when you think it's dialed, you hit the lights and leave the shop only to be welcomed in the morning by 200-300 scrapped parts.
Grimsmo shares this one minor detail that derailed the entire lights-out process. Saunders points out that evaluating problems further up stream is worth doing!
FRIDAY - DATE NIGHT WITH A LATHE CRASH The ST-20Y is set to run the one and done, dialed process for SMW diamond pins but the lathe insert broke on the 2nd pin. And that's not all. Not only was the insert blown, the parting blade took a huge crap! Luckily, Saunders had back up blades on hand, right? WRONG!
With similar experiences being shared between them, they embark on an in-depth conversation about tool life management, tool counting, macro variables, and Q parameters. The question remains: how do you incorporate these into your shop operations successfully?
Forget textbooks---except the one Grimsmo is a true FAN...uc (I mean, fan of)
Fanuc CNC Custom Macros: Programming Resources for Fanuc Custom Macro B Users
Machines Personified Remember the poetic interpretation of Mars Rover's final message to NASA? While the rover never explicitly said, "My battery is low and it's getting dark," that partially humanistic phrase still managed to evoke a tinge of sadness for many. Why? We have a long history of personifying everything under, and including, the sun. In a strange way, machines have their own temperaments, quirks, likes, and dislikes--and that might be why it feels kind of sad leaving them alone in the dark.
Fusion 360 - Team Hubs & Documented Bug The guys discuss migrating to Team Hubs and the importance of a local back-up copy of data. By the skin of his teeth, Grimsmo saves his butt by using Instagram to approximate the date of the correct version of a specific file. During a livestream, Saunders stumbles across a bug that is driving EVERYONE insane! Finally, Grimsmo discusses how one tiny checked boxed beside, "Make Sharp Corners" has been life changing! Click here for the HSS Spline Shaft Tool Video that incorporates spring passes + make sharp corners for awesome results.
ProvenCut Part Series Saunders announces a new addition to ProvenCut that makes it more than just a library! Now, you can find parts similar to what you want to machine, select the machine and type of material, use the mouse to hover over the part to see which types of operations were used, and more! The first part being added to the series is a T-nut and there will be many more to come!
RASK IN HAND & FINE TUNING All parts have been made and now the only things left are final tweaks for the surface finish, fit, and solving the 5-10% lock-stick issue. Grinding is all systems go. The blades are now the best they've ever been!
Rebuilding The Shop - Custom Tables and Benches for Organization For Saunders, rebuilding the shop has been in progress for several months now but it's still like a breath of fresh air! He's excited to meet up with someone from Maker Pipe who's offered to help with custom solutions to get SMW to the next level!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Goals
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining episode 194. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. This being the podcast for the manufacturing entrepreneur and it gives us a chance to chat about life business and what's going on in our days. What is going on?
Machine Troubles and Solutions
00:00:18
Speaker
Well, I've been kerning quite a bit and tornosing quite a bit too lately. Yeah. Good. Yeah. A couple of things happened on the tornos lately. It's like
00:00:28
Speaker
Just when you think you got it all dialed and nailed, and then something weird comes out of the blue, and you're like, oh, I didn't expect that to happen. When it ejects a part into the parts conveyor, there's a little chute that it ejects the parts into. It spits them out. And there's these little flappers on the side of the chute. It's just a little piece of sheet metal, 90 degree sheet metal, that's fixed in position. And you have to move it depending on your part length.
00:00:56
Speaker
so that it catches your part properly, but doesn't like hit the part. This is the flat conveyor belt that pulls it from kind of below the spindle out to the outside of the machine? Correct. Okay. And the shoot between the conveyor belt and the spindle, it's just like a little slide. Literally like a kid's slide, but for exactly, it's like 45 degrees.
00:01:20
Speaker
There's this little opening that's adjustable so that it doesn't lose your parts. Because if the opening is adjusted wrong, your parts are going to fall into the chip tray and you lose it. And that's not fun to lose half your parts and be like, there should be way more than this. Right.
00:01:35
Speaker
Anyway, I adjusted that for this new part that I'm making. I didn't tighten it that much because I figured it'd be fine. Then I come back in the morning because I ran it all night long. In the morning, it was still running. One of the flappers had pivoted and slid completely the wrong way and got in the way of the spindle and a live tool.
00:01:58
Speaker
And it, like, drilled some holes into this little flapper, this little piece of, I don't know, sheet metal. And, like, no damage, really. We had to bend the thing back into place. Could have been a lot worse. But, like, one of those unexpected occurrences, you're like, oh, man, the run would have been perfect other than that. And you come in and there's two broken tools. Oh, that's why. It's because that thing moved.
00:02:24
Speaker
I was going to ask that it damaged the light. It broke the tool, but not other. Yeah. No other. Like $10 right now. Who cares?
Running Machines Unattended: Risks and Reflections
00:02:31
Speaker
And it scrapped two, 300 parts, but I don't really care about that either. So no actual damage, which is nice, but it kind of little wake up call to be like,
00:02:42
Speaker
triple check everything, especially when you're running unattended. Because if I'm there, I can check every 10, 20 parts and I can walk by every now and then and keep an eye on it. But the second you walk away, it's like full trust. I'm going to sleep now.
00:02:59
Speaker
Yeah, so so many thoughts first off I vividly remember Making our first five axis part and how despite having seen them and held parts before and so forth it's just you can't replace the feeling of making your own and I cannot imagine John the feeling of
00:03:22
Speaker
leaving your shop, going home, dinner, family, sleeping, Netflix, whatever, and coming back the next morning and it's still making farts. I think I've only done that with the Swiss. I've done it with the Nakamura before too in the past. So both the Leads have come back in the morning and they're still running. The Mill
00:03:44
Speaker
We're not quite there. It probably shuts off sometime in the early, early morning, like 3 o'clock or 4 o'clock or something, which is awesome. Still crazy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I've left. I've gone home for dinner before while the machines are running. And you're going to laugh. I actually have a very odd emotional reaction to turning out the lights because it's like, oh, man, the machines are going to be in the dark. They don't care. It doesn't. Yeah.
00:04:13
Speaker
Yeah, I get that kind of. It's like some of the machines are brighter than others. So when I go home at night and it's dark and I shut the lights off, you know, the mori is not that bright, especially after it's been running and kind of the lights go to sleep. Right. But the tornos has bright white lights. Love it. And I don't keep it running most nights. But last night I did. So I shut the lights off and I look back and it's like still really bright in the shop. And I'm like, oh, yeah, OK, have fun. Cool. OK, so now.
00:04:38
Speaker
How do you figure this out? Can you touch off a tool periodically as a brake detect? No. I have these little wands. It's like a little metal rod on an air cylinder that taps where the tool is going to be, but honestly, I've never tried them yet. I got two of them with the machine.
00:05:00
Speaker
So they're not tool length probes. They're just brake detect probes. Yeah, they are. Is it not their probes? Yeah. And I worry about chips hitting them or getting in the way or weird stuff. So I actually haven't tried them yet. For this little flapper door, whatever the problem is, before I only had it on one screw. So it was able to pivot out of the way. And it wasn't that tight. So now I've installed it with two screws because it's like a slot. It's a long slot.
00:05:29
Speaker
So now it's not going anywhere. And then Angela had the idea to 3D print a replacement.
Tool Management Challenges and Innovations
00:05:36
Speaker
And the good thing there is that it's a fuse. If something crashes into it, like, oops, no big deal. It's plastic. Yeah, sure. So I kind of like that idea. And I've put printed stuff in the Swiss oil before. And they seem to last for quite a long time, no problem. So I might still do that. But now that I have two bolts on it, I feel really confident about it. Yeah, but it's also not
00:06:00
Speaker
You're not trying to solve the issue of whether that or something else randomly breaks again. You're just trying to solve the whole, like, I don't want to run this machine for any extended period of time when a tool's broken. And I don't know, is it possible to use the tool management and set a minimum load? It's so light, like a chamfered valve or something. Yeah. You know, a 1 16th two flute end mill. Turning the spindle, the live tool itself, especially the gear driven ones, takes more load than any cutting that I'm doing with it.
00:06:30
Speaker
Man, it's like the irony of you want to go back to the shape-oko days of where you've got a continuity probe. That's an easy test. Everything you turn is conductive. If there's not a closed circuit between the tool and the spindle and the part and all that, then
00:06:45
Speaker
I mean, there's so many ways you could do it. You could have it stop. You could have it alert somebody. You could even consider having it, I don't know how you do this, but you could have it slow down. So like, instead of making a part every minute, you could intentionally put like five minutes wells in there so that it only makes 30 parts instead of 400 over the night. And so you've got some, if it works, and if it's broken, then you may only make 30 back.
00:07:08
Speaker
But it's kind of that gamble of like, do I want to come back in the morning? There's going to be 400 parts. Are they going to be good, or are they going to be maybe not good? And it's like pump your fist up in the air when it works, and then kind of debug the problem when it doesn't, and hopefully don't make that mistake again.
00:07:24
Speaker
And I think I'm having more wins than losses for those night runs, so it's worth it. But it's like you're building a system to be reliable and to trust. And then some shops that run 18 hours a day, solid or more.
00:07:41
Speaker
That's what they're doing. They're building a system that they can trust, and yes, stuff goes wrong. Always, this is manufacturing. It's good timing because we just had a goof on our lathe, which is on Friday, I was setting up to run diamond pins. Totally have this process nailed down. Love it. Code is there, NC program, infusion. I know how to run the Royal Chucks. I'm happy. I know how to run more with the machine, the tooling.
00:08:07
Speaker
And unlike the second one, the insert in our parting blade broke. And this has happened to me once or twice before. And the insert is only a few dollars or $10 maybe something, which is fine. It wears out. The problem is that the blade is not $10. The blade has been more
00:08:28
Speaker
And we had two extra blades on hand something that they can yeah john you you know this you got never the blazer double sided so that's a lot of extra sides. But the please were manufactured incorrectly. Yes they were manufactured backward exact same part number i have all the lot numbers i sent them to the manufacturer.
00:08:48
Speaker
Now, you can flip it around and move the hardware that handles the through spindle stuff. All you lose is the millimeter stick out laser marks. Not a big deal. You can easily handle that with a caliper or something else. So part of me is like, look, no harm, no foul. You've got this back up and running. And then they're already be like, no, this is how
00:09:08
Speaker
you make a series of small mistakes that could lead to something more catastrophic because you've got this boring bar or this parting blade, you're spending time to flip things around. What if it's just something else is wrong with it and how it was manufactured or what if the coolant doesn't go through it? Anyway, it did work, but it's got me chewing on it. We don't run our lathe every day. If we ran our lathe every day, I would probably just
00:09:34
Speaker
do an automatic replacement cycle. Every week, you just throw that insert out. How do you handle parting? Parting is tricky, because if it's bad, it can ruin stuff. Both of my lathes have pull detection. So when it parts through, it pulls like 20,000. The sub pulls it slowly and measures for load. And if there's excess load there, it'll stop. So if there's no parting blade, obviously your part hasn't parted.
00:10:02
Speaker
Okay. So the subsequent can sense that, hey, I'm not moving. I'm not moving now. So that has saved me many times. What does that save you from though? It saves you from making more bad parts. Like, okay, your insert will still break your blade might break but only on the one part. Sure. It's not going to come in on the next part with no insert and smash the holder into the
00:10:26
Speaker
Okay, that's a great point. However, especially on the Nakamura, because we have a blade style insert. And I've certainly hammered the blade back into place, back into shape a couple times. And it still seems to work fine. But I mean, we get
00:10:44
Speaker
months out of an insert. Even cutting titanium and stainless, it's something I should look at more often. When I switch between titanium and stainless, I can go one way, but I can't go the other way for keeping inserts. I can cut titanium and then I can cut stainless, but I can't cut stainless and then cut titanium because the stainless really dulls the insert.
00:11:06
Speaker
You don't want dull tools cutting titanium. So just the other day, switching back to tie, I replaced the main turning tool and the part off blade. And they both looked the part of insert. Yeah, sorry, the answer. Yeah. Yeah. Because on the Tournos, it's an it's an insert style. It's not a blade holder. It's like a turn. It's a stick tool. But yeah, so a periodic replacement. They're so cheap. I know. Place it every two or three weeks. Like never forget it. Kind of put a chart, a calendar on the thing and
00:11:36
Speaker
I don't know. Every month would be fine because now you're talking about $120 a year or so, something like that. But boy, the bootstrap rim, he couldn't shake the hole. If you have a hard schedule to replace it every week, well, there are weeks where we don't run the lathe. I cannot bring myself to pull out an unused insert and figure it out. But I want to build a process that doesn't require any ... Think about you build the process and you never touch it again. Put a counter on it. Every thousand parts, replace it.
00:12:02
Speaker
So that's what I need to look into with the ATM, whatever they call it. They call it advanced tool management. There's elements of it in Hostet are great. There's some elements that I think need some work. When I replaced that insert, I looked at my tool life because I'm pretty good at tracking the tool count on the Tornos. And every single part it makes, whether the tool is used or not, it counts up the value for all tools, which is good and bad.
00:12:28
Speaker
because you never use whatever grooving tool and it still counts it up on. But for the part off blade, when I replaced it, it still looked okay and I had made 8,000 parts. Okay. Yeah, that's the one. The other tools you know from finish or tolerances, so no big deal. It's that parting blade I want to nip in the butt, so I've got to find a parts counter or even
00:12:48
Speaker
we could create a simple, I think, and we can actually put this into Lex. We're starting to morph Lex into also handling our maintenance as a, it's actually very similar to when we need to make a product, which issues a work order, maintenance are just work orders. So what we could do is log the date and the, say like even the spindle on time, like every 20 hours or 30 hours of spindle on time. I don't care if it's because we part every time anyways. So there's probably an elegant way like that.
00:13:17
Speaker
Do you want a part counter if you, the hospital should have tool counter? It should. The general criticism, and I wouldn't say I've exhausted the options here, but I did confirm this with my HFO, is something like time in the cut.
00:13:36
Speaker
It's so frustrating because it's so close to working and it's a complete fail. They allow you to take a traditional end mill on a milling machine and it will track with no effort the time in the cut. T7 is a quarter inch end mill.
00:13:52
Speaker
When you reset that value or start over a new machine, it will start counting up the time that's actually in a, I think it's a G1 move or something. Great. The problem is that you can't use that data to drive tool decisions unless you assign
00:14:09
Speaker
tool groups, which means you have to create group T1000. T1000 is how you have to program
Leveraging Community and Resources
00:14:17
Speaker
it in your CAM software. So T1000, H1000. And then in that group, it can have one or many tools. Many tools would allow it to have sister tools so that you could then kick over. Well, darn it. I don't want sister tools. I sometimes can't afford the pockets for sister tools. I just want you to tell me when this end mill has hit three hours.
00:14:35
Speaker
It's the same thing on a Maury, and that's why I don't use that system. That's why you wrote your own? Yeah. So I do it all macro-based. The 800s are my tool counter, and the 900s are my life. So for tool one, it might be today, it's a 26 or whatever, and the life might be 30. So by the time 26 equals or greater than 30, it alarms right at the cycle start so that it tells you like, oh, tool one needs to be replaced. And then you do that.
00:15:04
Speaker
That system has been working phenomenally, because now we have macro values. Every pallet, it counts up by one. So we know 27 pallets later. Or that tool broke just the other day. I had a drill, an eighth inch drill, break twice in a row on the same hole at three out of 33 pallets. I'm like, something's weird. Is it bad material or something? I don't know. I never really found the solution, but I got through it and moved on. But yeah, that solution has been working.
00:15:32
Speaker
But that system only counts by the palette increment. It doesn't count. OK. I wonder, I don't know if there's a way to pull in the macro variable, like the math of time in the cut. Because with the weirder, I don't know.
00:15:46
Speaker
It wouldn't be that hard. Actually, it's really not that hard to do an accumulated time counter. I'll look into that because like on inserts, we actually need to be proactive. And I bet you I can just do, you know, classic C++, like, you know, A equals A plus B or whatever, you know, and then you just sum up the time and then you have a counter. And it's not a hard, the beauty for us is we don't need the complicated look-a-heads like you do of like, hey, I'm gonna run this many pallets, make sure they're in that, I don't violate it. I just wanna know, hey,
00:16:15
Speaker
Have we hit two, three hours on these inserts or this end mill? Yeah. Do you have the FANUC programming book? Our shop's not big enough.
00:16:24
Speaker
to house that book. That's correct. No, it's not by FANUC. It's by a guy named Peter Smid. FANUC macro programming book. It's like a little textbook. It's only about an inch thick. It's like $80. But for a book, it's fantastic. And I highly recommend it to anybody looking into FANUC macro programming, including Haas stuff. And know there's a section in there on time variables and how to measure and calculate time. I just can't remember off the top of my head
00:16:49
Speaker
if there is one that calculates G1, G2, G3 moves as a time. I'm sure there is. Well, that's the funny thing is the way the Haas system works is, don't quote me on this, but everything is tied, ultimately tied back to a macro variable. So like your work coordinate system, G54 Z value is a variable that you can access. Parameter. Yeah, you can access. Thank you.
00:17:14
Speaker
parameter. So if they're counting this in, that's what's so frustrating about this scenario. If their host knows the information, in fact, maybe I can even do it simpler. Maybe I can somehow find the ATM parameter that's storing the value that I can't get and just look at that query that there we go, John.
00:17:31
Speaker
Ask the smartest guy programming.
Managing Serial Numbers and ERP Systems
00:17:34
Speaker
Now we're on to something here. Because otherwise, every tool call, yeah, I read about this because I actually read the whole book cover to cover. I'm that much of a nerd. But it's super valuable for me because I use it like crazy. It's the one textbook in my life I have ever enjoyed reading. And I'm sitting there at night in bed next to my wife and it'll be like, this is really cool.
00:17:58
Speaker
North American history. No, I want the FANUC program. Yeah, she can read about history. No, that's awesome. That's funny. That ties back to overarching theme this year for us, which is like, okay, what do we do? What you just said there is what I love, love doing. I will never go tired of it. We're going to go figure this out. We're not figuring out alone. We're going to leverage the conversations with you or
00:18:22
Speaker
We'll go query websites where people have done work like this, and we'll pull this together. We'll find this together, and then it's just like when we figured out how to use the Renishaw Probe with some Fusion and Haas variables to just create a quick program that'll give you a kind of CMM value. Now, Fusion with the new extensions has given you that kind of turnkey, but still, it's super cool to be able to like, hey, I want to do a parameter check on the stock size, or I want to just measure something and blah, blah, blah.
00:18:51
Speaker
It's subject to the error within the ball screw. Well, if you're measuring something that's 22 inches, the Haas ball screw and machine in good condition is probably better than a lot of other tools at your disposal. Yeah, exactly. How do you measure something so long? Tape measure? Yeah. Anyway, that's awesome. Yeah, that's cool. We'll figure that out.
00:19:11
Speaker
I've been diving into Heidenhain lately to do similar things and work on the macro variables within Heidenhain, which are called Q parameters. And it's similar architectures. Everything's called different. And the math formula is a little bit different as well. But I'm wrapping my head around it. And I read last night that you can pull the current time and date value in nine different ways.
00:19:36
Speaker
whether you want date and then, you know, two digit month, two digit day, and then two digit year or four digit year, or, you know, you want time, no year, blah, blah, blah. There's nine different ways you can, you can parse that into a number and you can put that into a variable that you can use later. I just don't know what it looks like yet as a format. Is it all numbers? So I want to post that today and see what it looks like.
00:19:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's probably like if you ever look at Microsoft Excel and you put a date in and then you convert it to a decimal number, it's just a string of characters that it converts regarding to how it's formatted. Because what I want to do, we're doing this
00:20:13
Speaker
halfway on the Maury. For one, we're automatically counting up the serial number engravings, so I need to do that. But I also want to engrave the current month, even the current day on the handles. And there's an automatic cycle where you can do that, but you're limited to their fonts, and I might just use it anyway. But what else did I want to do? No, you're not.
00:20:35
Speaker
We'll see. You can scrape out the value and then apply a statement or whatever the code that matches it then to your, like how you do it now where it's like, okay, if it happens to be a nine, go to like 440, which is how I engrave a nine. Exactly. Yeah. So I'm working on that process right now. Yeah. Cause I want to engrave the date. I want to engrave count up serial number, a couple of choices, depending on which like handle pattern we're doing or blade steel or things like that.
00:21:05
Speaker
So yeah, I'm in that phase now. Humble suggestion. Think about starting your serial numbers with an alpha numeric character, because when you get your second CERN, you're going to have an issue of not wanting to deal with sequential serial numbers across multiple machines.
00:21:21
Speaker
So like your current current would be A and the next one will be B. So you know which machine they came off of. Okay. And then the numbers could overlap. You'll have a 672 and you'll have a B 672. So they're different.
00:21:36
Speaker
Yeah, it would. They're different. Not from a customer's perspective, because the knife has to count out. I haven't even thought about two machines engraving blades at the same time. Or you create a centralized server where both machines query and grab the next available number.
00:21:50
Speaker
Yeah, I'd have to figure that out. That'd be cool. Yeah. We actually, in a weird way, had to do that with Provencut because you can have multiple users logged in on our side, like on the creation side, backend, and you're starting a recipe and we had to make sure you grab a new recipe number because the number
00:22:09
Speaker
is what dictates how we store all of the media, the F3D file, the video, the photos. And so we didn't want to have a situation where two people grabbed 782. And so it's actually pretty simple to do on that end. I don't know how you would do it for current. Well, you can see a network drive. So we could see a shared folder. And that's what it would look at. Actually, not that bad. It's like having two users logged into the same Fusion account. I still don't know. Can't do it anymore. Yeah.
00:22:40
Speaker
Yeah. Hashtag team hubs. Yeah. I haven't dove into that. You're not on a hub. Make them, uh, we, we politely request that they help us do a manual backup of our data because I'm just like, look guys, I know disrespect, but there's no recourse here. If, if when we do this migration, they're like, well, we lost something. Um, and it's also goes back to one of my favorite,
00:23:07
Speaker
non-machinist sayings, which is that possession is 90% of ownership. If my data is not there, you may have an explanation for what happened or you may think you might know where to get it, but the reality is I got it. It wasn't an issue. There are a couple of quirky things with projects we had joined, which we got fixed. I actually give them a lot of credit. It did go pretty smoothly, but nevertheless, I think of it from an emotional external standpoint, which is if I'm buying
00:23:31
Speaker
into a project or company and you don't, quote unquote, own the data. You do own the data. There's a lot of conspiracy, I think, out there from the naysayers about concerns around the cloud that just aren't real. But what is real is, hey, I want to be able to keep a local backup copy or archive copy because ... Yeah, I actually, last night I was looking for a sketch because a few months ago I had a fusion problem and I had to redo
00:23:55
Speaker
one of my major CAM files for the Kern. I had to dig through old versions and old versions and actually look at Instagram posts to be like, when's the last time I made these blades? Okay. May 25th. I found the Fusion file from May 24th or 5th.
00:24:12
Speaker
And I found the sketch I was looking for, and it was gone in all future versions of that thing. And I'm like, I'm glad I could go back and dig through this sketch and copy it to the new file. Yeah. That saved me a lot. It did work. Yeah, it worked great. Cool. There's some bug going on. I don't know if they've got it fixed, like a hotfix, where when you start selecting stuff in Fusion, it selects invisible sketches and body. Yes. It's driving me insane. Not the only one. No, no, no. It's, I think, documented. OK.
00:24:41
Speaker
Because you're just hovering your mouse around trying to select a face, a big one. And there's all these invisible sketches that are getting selected instead. I'm like, no, no.
00:24:50
Speaker
I discovered it on last week's live stream and I'm like, okay, why am I, why am I looking like an amateur here on, on the live stream? But I think they'll get it fixed. Yeah. Um, we did a hybrid days off at the shop. I haven't done it. It's hard, man. It's really hard. Like it's always fascinating to see what is hard for people.
Proven Cut Enhancements and Quality Improvements
00:25:10
Speaker
Uh, and, and why is it hard? And I'm just telling you it's hard, but we started to look at, look at what we're,
00:25:17
Speaker
what's good about what we're doing and where we can do better. And one of the things that just got me super pumped up is how we're a new feature we're adding in Provencut. So Provencut, you log in, you have the library. You can search by all these factors, tool material, but it's just the library where you can watch the videos. What we've added, and I was actually blown away at how quickly we got this like coded and developed, is called the Provencut part series.
00:25:43
Speaker
So we're starting with a T-nut, simple part, and there'll be many parts. So assume T-nut plus auto, and decide which part looks like maybe what you're trying to figure out or learn. So you pick the T-nut, and then you can pick a variety of material and machines.
00:26:00
Speaker
So let's say you're trying to machine a Tina on a shape OCO or on a little benchtop machine or, or Tormach, but in steel or a hospital titanium. And there'll be a finite number of these permutations, but, you know, a shape OCO in this example happens to be a great example because we'll be doing that in UHMW or HDPE or, or ABM, maybe even aluminum. I think actually Vince did the Bantam one in aluminum to start with.
00:26:25
Speaker
and then you hover over the tea nut and it's like a, there's a fancy tech term like mouse region hover. But when you hover over it, it tells you this section was say both roughing and finishing and here are the two recipes and we think we can even do a quick teaser video. So if you're hovering over the part, you can quickly see that happening. So think about
00:26:47
Speaker
the future parts that we can do, which could be a sample of like, hey, a demo knife handle or a little engine intake manifold was like, Hey, how did he do the surfacing here? How did he do this? Fill it here? How did they rough this? And that's okay. I see what you're saying. So you're giving an example part could be random, anything, and you're sectioning it and giving suggested recipes per area. Yeah. The profile one for the surfacing one for this pocket facing things like that. That's really cool. And
00:27:15
Speaker
you are able to pick parts that are obvious, like have clear features and a lot of good information.
00:27:25
Speaker
That's cool. Yeah. And like even a T-nut, when you pick it and you pick the machine and the material, it gives you a list of all the recipes done and the fusion files there and all that. But like, it'll be helpful in that case for beginners, but then in the future, like, Hey, I want to try to figure out, you know, I've got this against surfacing question or feature question, and this will give us a more visual way to look at parts and then kind of quickly sift through stuff to find out what you're looking for.
00:27:50
Speaker
For surfacing, something Rob told me years ago was to try to match your inch per tooth with your step over. I remember hearing that. Yeah. So your step down, depending on which way you're going. But I thought a lot about this over the past few years, and I've been doing it, and it works great. But it matches the scoop depth, the scoop distance with the scoop depth. So theoretically, your cusp height in all directions will be equal. And we've got a 3D surface on our Norseman knife.
00:28:21
Speaker
that Eric buffs down and it goes through the tumbler and we were just looking at it under the microscope yesterday and he's like, it's not good enough. I'm sorry. It's causing lock stick. Can you do better? I said, yeah, I can do better. I can tighten it up. I can slow it down. I realized
00:28:39
Speaker
the Maury, like most machines, have an accuracy setting, so like one to four. One being a roughing strategy, and two being like medium. I run it on three for everything, and then four is your super high accuracy 3D machining. It might go slower, but it's going to hit the accuracy perfect. And I realized I need to use setting four for this feature.
00:29:00
Speaker
Oh man, remember when they used to do those Friday cam webinars, like lunchtime, like three years ago? They were pretty good. Lockwood did one and he showed the triangle of when you're looking at higher end machine tools, you've got the triangle of speed, accuracy, and surface finish. So careful because
00:29:19
Speaker
Accuracy is not service finished. Accuracy means the machine is going to make sure it goes all the way to each point versus arc filtering, which is in Haas World, G187, and there's similar things for Fannock and Heidenheim, where you're basically saying, hey, you don't need to hit that point. You can round the corner like you would turn a car. You don't actually go to a point and turn the wheels 90 degrees. And so you care not about accuracy at all, frankly. You care way more about the smoothness of the machine kinematics.
00:29:47
Speaker
It's a good point. I'll look at the point spacing density and fusion before I get too far ahead of myself. Yeah, that's a good point. But you can see I think Mark Terry very hostage a video demo with CJ actually from Autodesk on what exactly the whole G187 smoothing thing is. And a good example is more blatant examples when you're cutting an interior pocket, you can see how much it cuts the corner. And again, for roughing, that's fine. But it's surfacing, it's a little bit different.
00:30:15
Speaker
Are there levels of smoothing you can do with that setting or is it just you turn it on and it's better? So my understanding is there is levels like one, two, three, four, but then within that you can set, and I think for us it's an E value, which is the actual inch or metric equivalent of what your acceptable deviation is. So yes, you can grimsmow it. Interesting.
00:30:40
Speaker
Because there's a G5.1, which is, I forget. I think it's arc filtering or something. I don't know. And that's on. But there's no value to that. It's just on or off. You should be able to add a value to it. Maybe. Maybe it's just not. OK. I'll look into that. Is this on the mori or the gun? On the mori. Yeah. The current's different. The current has a cycle 32 smoothing setting. And there's several variables. The main one being an inch value, like a tolerance setting.
00:31:09
Speaker
So if your fusion tolerance is at 4 tenths, you can have your cycle 32 at 4 tenths, or 2 tenths, or 1 tenth, or whatever. And I changed it from 1 tenths to 4 tenths. The cycle 32 in parts got way smoother.
00:31:24
Speaker
Well, and I think with Heidenhine, you don't want to use fusion smoothing because you want to just feed it more points and Heidenhine will handle all of it. Because you effectively, at all machines, you end up double arc filtering because fusion cam is going to do some of it in the actual CNC controller, circuit board, motor, path. What do they call it? Look ahead. Patch generation is going to do some of it as well. Yeah, exactly. So there's a point where I'm basically giving it
00:31:49
Speaker
what, 10 millionths of tolerance on Fusion, five or six zeros, and then the one. And then in Heidenhain, I've got a four-tenth Cycle 32 value, which huge difference in surface finish, way smooth. Whereas before, you could see the facets across the surface. And it's driving me nuts. I'm like,
00:32:08
Speaker
I got a nice machine. Why is it giving me a faceted surfaces? Well, clearly, it's just a setting. And as Marv says, the current will move to where you tell it to, and it will abruptly move to the next point and accurately give you this faceted surface. And it's actually quite impressive. But yeah, you bump up cycle 32, and it's golden. Sweet.
00:32:27
Speaker
Yeah. So I'm in the home stretch of this Rask, man. I've officially made all of the parts. I've made a pivot on the Swiss. I've made every single part on the Kern. Now it's just putting it all together and kind of doing the fine tuning, getting the surface finishes down, getting the fit down. It's still got some lock stick that's kind of bugging
Toolpath Strategies and Optimizations
00:32:45
Speaker
me. What is it?
00:32:46
Speaker
It's, you know, when you open the knife and the lock engages, and when you use your thumb to disengage the lock, there's a little click, like a little stick. And I want that to be as butter smooth as possible. I mean, some knives out there are so bad you need like two hands to unlock the knife and it pops unlocked. And you're down at blade show feeling all these cool knives, all these internet grails, and it's got like insane lock stick and you're like, no, no, thank you. But yeah, so we've got a,
00:33:13
Speaker
a level of quality to step up to here. Yes, it's got like five or 10% annoying lock stick, and I just got to figure out what's wrong with it. Is the rest the knife that you carburize the face of that on? Yeah, carbides. Okay, sorry. It's a carburetor, right, John?
00:33:30
Speaker
I guess, yeah. Yeah, carbonizing is when we take a Dremel engraver, like a buzzing tool, and put an end mill into it, basically, and apply electricity to it. And it sparks, and it applies layer of carbide to the titanium, to the lock face. And then we smooth it out on the buffing wheel. And we've done that for every knife ever. Now with the Rask, we've switched to a lock insert. Ah, heat treated, 58 Rockwell stainless.
00:33:56
Speaker
insert that goes in, and we will not be carbonizing that. But now the insert is, so it's a whole new variable that we've never done before. So I'm just trying to figure out the right geometry, the right surface finish, angles, hardness of the of the insert. Like is 58 Rockwell the right answer is 56, 54? I don't know. And they can all make different, different variables. So, you know, I'm trying to make the perfect recipe here. So we can just make a consistent product. I mean, that's so close. So close.
00:34:25
Speaker
And are you good with going with the grinding? Yes. OK. I have one variable infusion. So there's like four operations to grind the blade. And variable one, two, and three are good. But the fourth one is bad. What do you mean? You lost time. Operations. So like the roughing, milling, and then a rough grinding, and then a finished grinding on the left side and on the right side. And there's one mistake in one of the sides. So I just kind of have to equalize.
00:34:54
Speaker
all of the operations so that it's perfect across all sides of stuff. You know the checkbox called Make Sharp Corners that I never used or knew really what it did? That changed my world and caused Heidenhein from complaining every op to not complaining.
00:35:11
Speaker
Yeah, it extends hilarious. You mentioned it because we actually today's Wednesday widget, or if you're listening to this two days ago, we had a guy reach out and say, Hey, I want to make a spline shaft like a, I think of it as like a PTO takeoff shaft on a tractor on my Tormach using a fourth axis with a form tool. I need to make that form tool out of high speed steel. Can you guys help me figure out how to machine high speed steel, which we've done a number of times. And I thought,
00:35:36
Speaker
Yes, this is awesome. We did a little video tutorial on machining a high-speed steel form tool. The problem we had was a combination of the hardness of that material, your cam strategy, and frankly, the fact that the Tormach is the great machine that it is. You've got to work to make that machine go at or beyond its normal precision level.
00:35:57
Speaker
What we were seeing was a minor amount of rounding on a very small lip when we put it under an optical comparator, but we didn't want it. We were like, it's probably acceptable, but no, I want better.
Shop Reorganization and Workflow Efficiency
00:36:09
Speaker
So and Jeffrey was working on this it ends up that the best thing we did was spring passes with make sharp corners which basically in this case was the effectively the same as doing a individual each line individually with extent tangential extension distance So it was basically strafing strafing the past before and after rather than going around a three-sided profile all at once interesting
00:36:33
Speaker
So if you're going around a square, what will the toolpath look like? Making mouse ears on each corner. So it'll go beyond the corner, loop around, come back, and then re-address that line straight on. See, on my Rask bevel, I have a perfectly sketched tangential curve. I draw the lead in. It's a very gentle radius, and then I draw the lead out. There's no sharp corners. There's no nothing. But the Kern, the Heidenhine, would get halfway through the arc, and it would say tool radius too large.
00:37:02
Speaker
Right? Every time. And I'm like, No, it's not. Stop it. Because you're you're it's not really a lead out because from a camp standpoint, because you're just sketching the toolpath with a effectively a trace, like just do what I'm sketching. Don't lead in around. I've got the whole thing. Okay.
00:37:17
Speaker
being on and there's enough like say it's a 0.5 radius tool and it's a 0.55 radius arc. And so there's room, it's not too small. But anyway, make sharp corners change that completely and makes it work. So I just need to go through each up and turn on make sharp corners so that every side of the blade is, you know, identical. Got it. Watch your clearance and collisions too there because you got a relatively big tool in a, I guess it's an open-ish area but
00:37:47
Speaker
Except for the lead in, the lead out. There's clamps and stuff in the way. It's got to go where it's supposed to go. But it's working so good. And tool life, grinding life has been good so far. As long as you don't abuse it, you don't load it too much, it works great. Sweet. And the blades are thinner and better than ever before. And the surface finish is just stupid good. So good. Good, good, good, good. It looks amazing. It's everything I've ever wanted. Good. Yeah, that's great.
00:38:18
Speaker
We, uh, I'm pretty excited. We spent some more time thinking about that maker pipe or there's equivalents again of it, but, um, I kind of liked this guy. He, I think he had a Kickstarter campaign. He's passionate and they already had this in the works. They renounced it the day we found them where they have all these little 3d printed things you can buy or make yourself to 3d print minis to, uh, I could, I wish everyone could see the reaction on John's face.
00:38:43
Speaker
No, I'm thinking of a couple different scenarios here. So you can pre-build because that's even better. You pre-build all of these benches and desks and carts out of this little quick just plastic push together stuff. So you could build one in, I don't know, three minutes. And then once you're good, then you can go buy the EMT, you can cut it. And Home Depot and Lowe's don't sell colored EMT, but our local electric
00:39:06
Speaker
like locally owned supply warehouse does sell colored EMT. He's like, yeah, we keep 5,000 feet in stock at all time and 10 foot sticks. It's cheap. They only stock red, which is the color I wanted.
00:39:20
Speaker
Is it current? No, I don't think it's precision ground. But yeah, so the guy asked, he's like, Hey, what are you to offer? He's like, Do you want me to come up and help you guys with it? I was like, How about this? We'll buy all the stuff from you guys. If you want to come up for a day or two and help us start put these together, because frankly, we're busy. And could you we could use the help and his expertise.
00:39:41
Speaker
And we'll turn it into part of our video on everything we're doing here with the shop overhaul this year. And hopefully they can use some of the footage on their end to kind of share and spread the word and love and all that. But we're building these, I mean, like the product specific assembly tables that have breadcrumbs hidden on the back rack on wheels with all the tools you want in place and portable. Oh my gosh, it's oxygen.
00:40:06
Speaker
Yeah, it's going to be everything you've dreamed about. And you can do exactly as you want. And if you don't like it after two months, oh darn, just change it. That's the beauty of it. We can add a monitor clamp for a TV, for the ERP system, or even order queues. We got our additional racking assembled, so we're starting to do. And Alex got location tagging and Lex working. So now we're starting to assign locations to stuff.
00:40:31
Speaker
And we ordered all the custom, all our mod vices, shape, OCO plates, and pallets. We sell these 12 by eight pallets for our stuff and for Pierce and stuff. Those all now have custom boxes coming, but we ordered like a thousand. So we got to store those in some place where it's not just, well, Julie and John and Ed know where those are. Like it's now in a spot and you can look it up in the system if you need to.
Managing Stress and Emotional Resilience
00:40:52
Speaker
And then we want to tear, we're going to tear out some of our old material storage because that's just not what we're doing anymore. It's just like,
00:40:59
Speaker
I know I say it in the past few podcasts, but John, but it really is coming together. It's like a breath of fresh air. Obviously, we're proud of what we do and where we've come and where we came from and all that stuff, but it's refreshing when you have something that changes everything. Six months ago, this was an idea.
00:41:19
Speaker
You and I have been talking about ERPs for three years now. And in the past six months, you've taken it head on and be like, OK, yeah, this changed a lot. I didn't know my business could change this much in this short time. It's a lesson for everybody. Some of the guys here have been like, it's about as efficient as it can be, this process. And I'm like, I want to hear that. I understand you're proud of it, and it's good. And that's fine. But don't tell me it's as good as it's ever going to be, because that's just false.
00:41:50
Speaker
The other thing I want to go out on my way to mention is a big change this year is really not letting stuff get to me and recognizing that that doesn't make you a weak person. So whether I'm frustrated with a vendor or a freight company or Time Warner who renamed them Spectrum because they have such a bad reputation. I have done a much better job of
00:42:11
Speaker
whatever you want to call it, ignoring that stuff, compartmentalizing it, not letting it get to you. And I'm not perfect, but I've always been sensitive about not misrepresenting the journey that this is. There are stressful days, there's frustrations, there's concerns. And I mean, there's countless examples of not letting that stuff rule in my mood, rule in my day, my morning. And I get this question a lot, it's come up on our forums and it's not a skill that you can just switch on and off. You've got to kind of recognize that it's going to happen and yeah, just do.
00:42:40
Speaker
build it over years, it's an awareness more than anything. I've worked very hard on this for very many years, and I'm a chill guy. I don't let a lot of things get to me. I brush things off probably too much sometimes. There's very few things I'll actually fight for, but that lets me put energy into the ones that matter because there's so much garbage going on that if you worry about all of it, you have no energy for your own productive actions.
00:43:09
Speaker
maybe I take that a bit too far and don't care about most things, you know, news, politics, blah, blah, blah. But, uh, I got my own stuff to focus on and I'm doing great at it. Like I have so much emotional energy. I'm going to focus it to my family, my business, my life, and, you know, enjoy that. And that works for me. It doesn't work for everybody. That's fine. But just be aware what your emotions are doing to you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. That's a good, uh,
00:43:38
Speaker
I hope that inspires or helps folks because it's like getting cut off on the road. Yeah, I was hoping. That does not help me at all. Ever? Barely. I laugh at the guy. I'm like, whoa, buddy. And that's it. And then move on every day. Whereas Eric will come in and be like, this idiot pulled in front of my car. Yeah. You and I are wired differently for sure. It absolutely does upset me, especially if the person is being in not a nice person or texting or whatever. But I've generally retrained myself and said, hey, it's all good.
00:44:09
Speaker
Yeah. Anyway, good. I'll see you next week. Have a great day.