Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Business of Machining - Episode 38
193 Plays7 years ago
ARIEL. CANADIAN THANKSGIVING IN OCTOBER. BYE BYE, BOOTSTRAPPER? Saunders chaperones students to Ariel. If you're looking for inspiration, you may not have to fly across the ocean to find it. Click HERE for Ariel Video. Geeking out at the local computer shop, Grimsmo purchases a much needed new laptop. Despite the new technology, a problematic Fusion file hasn't improved. The Johns discuss potential causes, solutions and the best ways to structure a large file. Take notes! Once a bootstrapper, NOT always a bootstrapper! This mentality has its merits but when your business evolves, it may no longer serve you. Is it time to let go? Saunders and employees are vetting ASANA, a software to keep track of projects and Grimsmo works on finishing some fancy knives promised.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Episode 38
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning, folks. Welcome to the business of machining, episode 38. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough. Morning. Good morning. How are you? I've been sick this week, but I'm just starting to feel better. So if I cough or sneeze or sniffle a lot, then that's that.
00:00:22
Speaker
like super productivity cutting sick or just annoying? It's slowing me down a little bit. Yeah, it's really annoying, but I'm starting to feel better, so it's good. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, and how are you doing? Great. I woke up this morning. I felt like you last week. I just woke up and I was like, this is, yes, awesome. It was great.
Inspiration from Ariel's Factory Tour
00:00:45
Speaker
I had a life-changing factory tour on Tuesday or Wednesday.
00:00:51
Speaker
Oh. So I'm on the advisory panel for the local high school machine program. And they asked if I would chaperone this trip to a company called Ariel. A-R-I-E-L. This is so cool. The car company? So funny you say that. It apparently used to be, or the founder of the company did take the name from a defunct motorcycle company. Is that what you mean?
00:01:18
Speaker
No, there's a car called the Ariel Atom. Oh, no, that car is awesome. That race car? Yeah. No, no relation there at all. OK, OK. Go ahead. So I'll put a YouTube link in the podcast description of a little overview video of this company.
00:01:36
Speaker
What I loved about it, it was so inspiring, and I get to go on factory tours. I love factory tours. I've done it a lot. This one stood out, partly because it was also literally close to home. It was only about 30 miles from Zaintal. We're in a relatively quiet part of the country. We're not really big auto here in this part of Ohio.
00:01:57
Speaker
This guy started the company in 1966 with a drill press in his basement. There is a picture of it and they now have a, I mean, John, it was better than the machine centers and the machine equipment. There was better than a trade show. It was literally.
00:02:16
Speaker
four horizontal Makinos, next to new Akumas, next to brand new DMG Duo blocks, next to 75 Mazax, multi-ax. I mean, Johnny, it was insane. They make natural gas compressors, which is something that I have, I struggle to understand myself, but they had to do with like pumping when you get natural gas out of the ground and when you pump it down pipelines. So this is all big industry stuff, but.
00:02:42
Speaker
It's effectively like an engine. It has pistons and cast iron, headers, and that kind of stuff. And what was amazing was, again, this guy started, 1966 is not new, but it's not one of these 34 generation companies. He retired, but his daughters has taken over, and she's done a tremendous job leading the company. And I think that's an awesome story, because she took over,
00:03:10
Speaker
having previously been a mom who raised her kids. And that's one of those stigmas. A woman in manufacturing, let alone someone who was a stay-at-home mom, raising her family versus trying to be in the corporate world or the manufacturing world is not the cookie-cutter answer. And she talks about how that experience raising kids helped her learn things like triage and negotiating and how to handle situations.
Leadership Transition at Ariel
00:03:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:35
Speaker
And they've just grown. And then what was amazing was it felt like the energy I get when I go to California in terms of how they interact and deal with their workforce and their team. They treat people incredibly well. They have world-class facilities. They have incredible benefits. I mean, everything you could think of is there. And I told the high school kids, I said, look, this is incredible. You will never find something else this good. It just got me so fired up.
00:04:02
Speaker
Nice. Oh man, I'm jealous now. That's awesome. Yeah, it was close to home, hey? Yeah, 30 miles away.
00:04:09
Speaker
They have four factories throughout Ohio now, but this was their headquarters. And that's what also kind of blew me away, is I go to IMTS or something, and I see these big, you know, Makinos or these big crazy machines. You know, they had Mazak Integrics were like candy just laying around all over the place. You see these crazy machines, and you always think that that's somebody else's world. That's something you see somewhere else. And then all of a sudden, it's in your backyard.
00:04:36
Speaker
I told my wife, I said, if we didn't have kids, I would not joking, I would go work. They have a Friday, Saturday, Sunday shift there. I would literally go work there for a year because of the culture. I'm actually trying to work with them to see if they'll let me come do a film tour, which could be a win-win, because they're having problems. They're hiring so much. They're trying to build interest and recruit. But their training facility, John, had
00:05:05
Speaker
had brand new VMCs that were all state-of-the-art. Again, they were big Nasac shops. They had the Integrics. They had all state-of-the-art, brand new multiplexes. Everything is insane.
00:05:18
Speaker
Wow. Debt free. They don't believe in borrowing debt. Tuition reimbursement for people that are there. Just all the right things you want to hear about.
Fusion 360 Performance Challenges
00:05:30
Speaker
It's awesome. Inspiring. Yeah. How was your week?
00:05:36
Speaker
Good, it was Canadian Thanksgiving up here, so we actually took a Monday off. Usually we kind of work the holidays, but this time, you know, spend time with the family. So yeah, shorter four-day week, but...
00:05:49
Speaker
Six, I'm slowing down, but it's been pretty productive. It's been good. I got a new computer. Sweet. Which was sweet. So it was that benefit between cost, time, performance, et cetera. So I wanted to get one locally, both to support the Canadian economy, but also just because I'm impatient and I wanted to be able to drive somewhere and pick it up instead of order it. So yeah, I went to the local geek computer store.
00:06:18
Speaker
I spent two hours there talking with the guy and I got basically exactly what I wanted, which is really good. It's an MSI GE72 or something like that. Laptop, right? Laptop. Recently specced out performance-wise.
00:06:38
Speaker
Pretty impressed so far. However, I've got this one Fusion file, as I was texting you yesterday, that it's slow on my old computer and my new computer. And I wonder if there's a problem with the file. Because when I go back in the versions and I open up an older one from many months ago, it opens up a lot faster. Is the older one also as obscenely large in terms of just pure data file size? Yeah, basically.
00:07:07
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm going on 921. You're on version 921? Yeah, version 921. I'm going for 1,000. Yeah, that's funny. I mean, I've gotten easily to 200s before, but never that high. But also, so it's funny you mentioned that.
00:07:27
Speaker
I just did that on one of our projects that was up in, I don't know how high it was, but I just said, look, this thing has got some problems. So we, what do we do? We export, this is a pain in the butt, but we exported it as a solid model, like a step file, re-imported it.
00:07:43
Speaker
which got rid of a ton of basically bad modeling habits. And look, I hate to say it, but that's one of the things that happens because we've got me, Ed, Jared, and probably even Noah, we're all kind of in this file at various points and times. And so it's so easy infusion to make sketches in the wrong component or just do bad fillets or something or patterns that cause problems. So we started from scratch, had to reapply the tool pass. That's the part that's in pain, but nevertheless, like a breath of fresh air.
00:08:13
Speaker
Yeah, because I've been working on this file for literally two years now. And since I got Fusion, I've been working on this file. So I've been constantly learning and evolving and growing and new methods and everything. So you've got four people in that one file. I've probably got four different methods or more of work style in this one file. And this is something I wanted to talk to you about or ask, and I certainly need to do my research, was
Strategies for Managing Large Files in Fusion 360
00:08:42
Speaker
What is the best performance oriented way to structure a file? Like I've become a fan of just doing everything within the one file as opposed to creating components and dragging them in. Because then you have full access to all the sketches, all the original extrudes and fillets and all this stuff within the one file, you know what I mean? So we, there was actually, at Autodesk University last year there was a good class on
00:09:12
Speaker
Well, it was called something like large file or large assembly design best practices. And it talked about this. So see, a lot of those AU classes are online, like the slideshow or even the video. Yes. See if you can find it. I'm going to write that down. The guy who ran that class, his name I believe was Phil Eichmann or something. Phil, PHIL, something. He's a really good dude. He works at Autodesk, a really smart guy. The other thing is that conversation that I think Ben Benz was having on Instagram about
00:09:42
Speaker
this debate of do you do what you just said which is put everything in one file or
00:09:47
Speaker
do you basically go back to what I call the solidworks way of I have every component is its own file. And then Ben's example, this was his light. Or for you, it would be your knife. So it's kind of weird, but a Norseman screw is its own file. A blade is its own file. A pivot is its own file. The reason I have done that on one of our new projects is
00:10:14
Speaker
And this is super annoying. So then we have a new file that acts as an assembly file that brings all of those together, which is important to see that the knife works or our machine works in this case. But then we have a separate file that takes that one knife handle or that one part and lays it out on a fixture, which has completely different joints. And you can't have
00:10:41
Speaker
Fusion won't let you do both, which is super annoying in one file. What do you mean both? So take your Norseman. I can't have the Norseman assembled in Fusion, which is important because you need to see how it functions and fits all together. But then let's say I also need to have that whole Norseman laid out on a pallet.
00:11:04
Speaker
So that's a different orientation. Instead of the- Well, in that scenario, I would just have duplicates of, especially if you're importing the components, and they're linked to the original component. Well, that's required. Right, so you do it linked. Yeah, so I would have two, like, within the assembly file, I'd have one Norseman assembly, and right beside it, I'd have the fixture with all the duplicate parts laid out. And then reference to the original thing, so that
00:11:30
Speaker
You know what I mean? Yeah, but that means within your data panel, within Fusion, you have a separate Fusion file for each component in this scenario. And I'm kind of going back and forth between both. Which is not how Fusion was really, that's not how they talk about it being meant to be used. Okay, to find that real quick, it's meant to be used as? Fusion, the idea was you have every
00:11:55
Speaker
every Fusion project or file, whatever they want to call it, is an assembly. So they want you to build that whole Norseman in one file. Everything is in one file, and you're doing CAD work and render and all that, and there's just one file.
00:12:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting that you suggest kind of exporting it and starting over again from the design. I mean, this is a deep file. I mean, there's not a million parts in it, but there's a ton of CAM and there's a ton of sketches that I probably want to keep.
00:12:30
Speaker
Although maybe it's not as critical as I'm making it out to be because all the designs work right now and all the previous work that I did to get there, it doesn't really matter anymore because I'm at a good starting place. And if I need to create a new sketch for an engraving or to change the size of something like that, it's fine tuning that I can do from here.
00:12:51
Speaker
as opposed to needing all that old crap information from before. So that's a good thought because this file takes up to eight minutes to open on my computer, on my fast new computer. And that's ridiculous.
00:13:06
Speaker
Like even going to click and edit a sketch one time took me 19 minutes to open that edit sketch. And there's just two letters in it. Something's wrong. If you're comfortable, I would send this to somebody at the Autodesk team. I'm trying to think of who would be a good person. But they should see this. I would say, quote unquote, let go. Start over. You get to keep this file so you can always reopen it and look at something.
00:13:34
Speaker
And did you go to under, let's see here, when you're in the model under modify, did you go to compute all? Let me check here. In the model, where? The modify tab at the top bar. Like when you got it that has press and extrude and all that. No, what does compute all do?
00:13:58
Speaker
So compute all forces Fusion to rebuild the model from the scratch. It kind of just goes through all your stuff. So sometimes this can fix glitches. See if that helps. Cool. I'll try that. Thank you. Don't do it right now on the podcast because it might freeze you. No, I know, because we're on there. That's funny.
00:14:19
Speaker
Your best bet is probably going to be to start over. Yeah, it's the cam that I'm worried about because it's going to be a lot of work all laid out. And this is a fixture that takes three hours to machine. So that's a lot of camp to go back through. But yeah, it's all possible. I thought about hiring somebody on Upwork and be like, just copy this over to here and do it.
00:14:39
Speaker
Okay, so here's what I would also try. Try save up a new version as a test 2 version and convert the model to a direct model. So go right click on the component and say do not capture design history and that's going to consolidate. It'll keep your sketches but it's going to consolidate all those parametric events.
00:15:04
Speaker
So you're turning off capture design history? Yeah. But then you can turn design history back on. What you're doing is you're collapsing a parametric build, and you're turning it into a direct model, a part that was made as a dumb part. Yeah. Which is fine. Right. And that's the great thing about fusion. So you're going to lose a parametric fillet, but you can still
00:15:28
Speaker
you literally click on that feature and hit delete and get rid of it and then rebuild it parametrically or edit it and so forth. And honestly, I don't utilize the parametric functions much at all. And I learned a lot about it at AU and it was really good. And I want to dig into it because I learned some mind blowing stuff like, oh my goodness, you can do that? And I still haven't really taken it to heart yet, but there's some cool stuff. You mean direct modeling or parametric modeling?
00:15:59
Speaker
I don't know. Parametric modeling is when you have the features along the bottom of your fusion, like kind of above your Windows taskbar. It's like, first you may have sketched and you extrude it, then you fill it in. That's parametric. Direct modeling is when you just have... That's what design history being captured, basically, right? Exactly. Yeah, of course I used that. I guess some of the things I was referring to was like,
00:16:25
Speaker
like saving a dimension as a variable and then using that for other features, which is awesome. Like really cool. Sorry, totally. But it's funny too, because the extreme opposite of that infusion is also cool, which is that direct model where it's like, I don't care what that is. I'm just going to click on this feature and hit delete and get rid of it. Right, right.
00:16:49
Speaker
Yeah, I bet you your fusion problem is on the CAD side, not the CAM.
Entrepreneurial Lessons: Small Victories and Failures
00:16:54
Speaker
So if you can clean the CAD side up, maybe that's a compromise. Good point. Good point. Your sketches are CAD sketches or CAM, like construction or containment zones for CAM? Both. OK.
00:17:09
Speaker
Yeah. Basically, if I can do it, I did do it, and it needed to be done. Right. But yeah, it's all there. So if I can keep my sketches, great. As you said, I'll need to for some of the cam operations, but not a lot. Right. Most of them are just the outside shape of a handle. Do 3D machining within this shape. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Could be a good or an engraving sketch.
00:17:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's always tough to, I'm assuming this is a knife file. Yeah, so this is tough because this is like some of the secret sauce of Grimsman knives. Exactly. Yeah, so I can't just share it. If I were in your shoes, I would say, Noah, start rebuilding this. And that's a good example of where
00:17:59
Speaker
you're going to have to be heavily involved, but your job is going to be much better to check somebody else's work because this is going to be a lot of work and you'll get fatigued, you'll miss stuff. So you be the QC guy on that rebuild, not the guy who's actually doing it from the ground up. Yeah. It's just a time thing, right? Like it doesn't need my expertise. I'm better somewhere else. This is just basically redo it from here to there. Yeah. So interesting.
00:18:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny you mentioned the computer thing because that was one of my takeaways. I feel like we've kind of talked about this before, but one of my takeaways from the aerial tour was your bootstrapping days, both of ours, are gone.
00:18:42
Speaker
And I'm gonna say, this may sound a little extreme, but it's like if either of our businesses fail, they fail. But not investing in the equipment and technology and processes that we need is not an excuse. We believe, we both believe that we have businesses that have visions and they have the ability to be profitable and generate cash and they have the ability to do something that we believe in greatly, so do it. And I literally came home, this is not a joke, I came home from Ariel,
00:19:11
Speaker
and I bought a new desktop and I bought a new laptop. I needed both of them. My laptop is five years old. My desktop is three years old. They're both slow. They both cause me problems. They have physical problems with them. But I was like, oh, I'd rather spend the money on Fixturing or I'd rather have a few more bucks in a bank account. No, that's irresponsible at this point.
00:19:31
Speaker
I want to be clear, this is a different conversation when you're bootstrapping a startup in your basement and you have no revenue and so forth. But same thing, I called a crane company because for six months we've needed a jib crane to safely load some of the bigger parts and we've been using an engine hoist or forklift or two man teams. No, get the company in here, install the crane.
00:19:56
Speaker
I had the same line of thinking with getting this laptop and with a few other things like, I can't afford to be slow at this time. Anything that slows me down, anything that causes me delays and time and eats up things like it eats into production and it just eats money. It literally reduces the amount of cash we're making by making us slower.
00:20:17
Speaker
So I'm starting to look at everything now, both from a lean perspective and just from a productivity thing, like the decisions you make, the choices of things that you do throughout the day. It got to be fast. You got to be productive. You got to get it done. It's funny you say it because sometimes fast, I worry about that word because I'll get into these modes where I get too fast and I get kind of overwhelmed and it's not fast. It's deliberately efficient.
00:20:46
Speaker
I bet you Jay Pearson, who uses Fusion, I bet you he doesn't have to wait 10 minutes to open any of his files. You know what I mean? If I need to hop in, change a piece of code, get a machine back up and running, we need to go. You want to briefly talk about the call we had with the contest winner?
00:21:05
Speaker
Yeah, go ahead, start us off. So we did a contest where we asked people to give iTunes reviews to help. Apparently that's a big metric for the podcast's success or getting the word out. And we had a lot of folks submit reviews, thank you very much.
00:21:23
Speaker
We did a random number generator. We had a really good call with a guy. We'll keep it. I think we announced it publicly. His name was Nate. But he ended up having a project that he's working on. So we told him we'd give him like a month, and then maybe we'd give him a shout out or some visibility on that project, because that's pretty darn cool. But what an awesome story. I know he followed you. I think he followed both our channels, right, for a while?
00:21:51
Speaker
garage shop, he was a morey lathe in his garage, right? Yeah, it was cool to see. Right?
00:21:59
Speaker
Making it happen. Yeah, it was an inspiring story. And I think you especially were able to open his eyes to new ways of looking at the things that he's working on. And we could see it in his eyes in the video chat. It was just like, oh, I never thought of that. That's a great idea. So it was really cool to be able to see you offer those suggestions and see his immediate reaction of he can take that and run with it.
00:22:24
Speaker
Yeah, but you said it, Bescrenzo, with the University of YouTube. He was asking you, it was baking soda, right? Like, I've been experimenting with the heat anodizing, or the anodizing titanium, or is this what you do? And I was like, this is awesome. This is awesome. Yeah, it was a really good conversation. I'm glad we did it.
00:22:46
Speaker
Yeah, I'm excited to see what he does with his project because it'd be awesome to see him. It's not even that I want him to succeed, it's that I want him to have a rewarding process.
Learning from Market Competition
00:23:02
Speaker
I just started writing an article on small victories, because I think that's so important as an entrepreneur when you're new. Partly because it's one of the mistakes I made. My first ever real product I tried to bring to market was that Target, which was way too complicated with sheet metal parts and machined parts and electronics and motors, batteries. You need small victories. You need to create a product that has
00:23:29
Speaker
it's a single machine part and then go through the process of fulfilling orders and selling it to customers and generating cash. You need to kind of catch that bug.
00:23:38
Speaker
That's a good point, because you do not realize how complicated all that stuff is at the beginning. Like a knife, there are 41 individual components in our knife. It's insane. And yes, 21 of those are ball bearings, and I'm kind of inflating the number a little bit. But there's 21 machine components in the knife, and we make every single part. That's not an easy thing. I'm jealous of all these kind of Kickstarter guys and Instagram buddies that we have, friends of ours,
00:24:07
Speaker
have a one-skew item part. You make this, you sell it, you get to work on the process, you get to work on the customer relationship, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It really complicates things to have 21 separate parts to have to make and make them all perfect. Right. And when you do that, the trick is to find a super, super specific niche. So pick people that only do, I have no idea,
00:24:35
Speaker
Bass fishing in Minnesota who like this certain brand. And try to get into that little crowd. Don't go for a nationwide crowd. We're just going to make something super generic and try to compete in this huge market. No, just create something super niche and try to get the word out there. And it's cheaper for Google AdWords. And little victories are really cool.
00:25:01
Speaker
Yeah, it gives you focus. It's funny enough, that's actually the exact advice you gave to Nate, the podcast winner, that I won't go into details, but you remember what you said, that you defined this niche audience that made perfect sense to him. He was going for broad market before, and you gave him a niche audience. He can run fast and hard with that and make real results in a month.
00:25:23
Speaker
And then it's funny because he wrote back to, I think both of us, maybe on Instagram, and he was like, kind of like an, oh no, there's somebody else in this space. And I was like, great, great. I don't want to, I absolutely believe there's significant amounts of innovation left in the world, for sure, undisputed. However, oh yeah.
00:25:44
Speaker
Rarely is a brand new entrepreneur going to break into a brand new product or space. In other words, I don't want to, as an entrepreneur, create a market. Usually I want to create a new value proposition or a new product or a new twist within an existing market. So the fact that there's somebody else in there, great. Go look
00:26:07
Speaker
at what they've done, go analyze how they market, go analyze what they have, go learn off of their, I'm not saying copy any of their products, I'm saying learn about what their, you can see what their mistakes have been and you can see how they have succeeded in mimic that.
00:26:22
Speaker
But I totally get his perspective of you do your research, you find somebody else, oh man, you're so defeated, you're like somebody else has already done it. It gives no indication of how well they've done it, of how many things they've sold, of how much impact they're having on their customers, how tight-knit their customer base are. You can crush almost anybody with all of those features.
00:26:43
Speaker
But just because you found somebody's website that shows they make the same thing that you're thinking of making, it doesn't tell you anything about the brand, about the customer loyalty, about anything like that. Right. And you've got to build a little bit of a thick skin, too. I mean, there's going to be competition. You could try to grow a market, or you can try to kind of quote, unquote, steal market share. But I wouldn't get too worried about that. I would look at, again, find an industry, go see how other people work. I forget to do this sometimes when you're like,
00:27:13
Speaker
How would I do that? How would I start rolling out XYZ, Google AdWords campaign, or how would I start product photography for this product? Go look at what your competitors are doing. Yeah, I've found that over the years, I'm kind of terrible at sitting alone in a dark room and just coming up with genius ideas.
00:27:33
Speaker
Although I'm getting better at it, but especially years ago I used to just research the market, research everybody else, research all the competition and formulate my own version from there. I'm not the kind of artist that can sit down with a blank piece of paper and just draw a new knife or draw a product. I need input from outside sources and then I can modify it towards myself, my own tastes and all that.
00:27:58
Speaker
I do definitely lack that artistic skill. Right. It's fun though. You get cooking. It's turned into five Arduino projects that have taken a little longer than I wanted, but it's for a really good reason.
Innovation: Arduino-Controlled Strip Door
00:28:16
Speaker
And we're now like, there'll be videos soon, which gets me excited. But I'm like, holy cow, we can use an Arduino to solve that problem. This is so silly. But we put a new plastic strip door up between the office and the shop side so that the noise is a little reduced and so that the air quality, the air conditioning in the shop doesn't get out and all that. And it's annoying. I don't like this door strip. So we're going to build a little Arduino device that will
00:28:44
Speaker
keep the plastic warehouse strips, but it'll also slide open when it sees a person. But it'll do so super quick. And the benefit, I think, of keeping it as the rubber strips means we don't have to worry about the safety element so much, because it's not a solid door that may close on somebody if it malfunctions. And this is cool. Yeah.
Project Management with Asana
00:29:11
Speaker
That'll be awesome. I can't wait to see that. The other thing that we did is we're working on a project with somebody else right now that they're quarterbacking. And so they pulled us into an Asana, A-S-A-N-A.
00:29:27
Speaker
Which is a, it's one of these like, okay, so do you know it? I've heard of it, yeah, and I did a quick research on it a while ago. Yeah, and I just gotta spend some time on Trello again. I think there's quite a few of these players, but...
00:29:43
Speaker
It all of a sudden kind of saw the light. So this lets you pull in projects and team members. And you can push things into different buckets. So to give you an example, in one Asana page, I can have all of our employees and projects. And those projects could be just CAD models. They could be machine parts stuff. And it could be video stuff, video projects with Julie.
00:30:13
Speaker
When Julie's, I could create a project and say, hey, Julie, there's some footage in the drive. Start editing this. And then she could drag it over to the review for John. And then it would pop up on the live screen that, hey, I need to review that. And Jared could do the same where, hey, I finished this CAM for this fixture. Will you review it? And right now, we spend so much time emailing each other back and forth or walking over.
00:30:37
Speaker
and they could even create like a, almost like a Kanban system where there could even be like a urgent reviewer when Jared's like, hey, I just need you to review this real quick, like right now versus a 10 minute video review from Julie or something. So it's like a project management software basically for your team. Right.
00:30:53
Speaker
But it's been really good working on this project with it because it's so easy to visualize what's where and what's important and who's responding and what the status is. I'm very
Streamlining McMaster-Carr Orders
00:31:05
Speaker
pleased with it. Good. Yeah, I heard some really good suggestions from guys on Instagram about that. I think because I mentioned Trello, or I took a picture of a Trello thing. And somebody's like, yeah, Trello, his comment was, Trello and Asana are life. Oh, really? OK, so maybe they're different. Yeah.
00:31:25
Speaker
Well, so Trello is an app on the computer and the phone. It's basically a notepad document that you can just create different boards they call them. So different notes, different categories, different notes, different fields and pages and things like that. But it does nothing more than that. I don't think there's emailing. There's no notifications. I don't think. But you can have different people on these notes. So I use it as my to-do list.
00:31:53
Speaker
just brain dump file, my buy list, if I need to do, so I have a hardware store buy list, I have my master buy list, I have et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's just my giant notepad that everything goes into. I have it on my phone, Eric has it on his phone, and I use it on the computer a lot too. So it's, yeah, it's just a dump that I put everything into. Do you and Eric interact with each other's Trello?
00:32:16
Speaker
Eric doesn't use it as much as I'm making it out to think that he does. But I use it. But like if Eric goes to the hardware store, does he pull up the hardware store Trello pad and look to see if anybody at the shop needs anything?
00:32:29
Speaker
Yes, exactly. OK. That's a problem. I have a contact at McMaster Carver now, which is super cool. So I was emailing with him. And I was like, this is one of the absurd things about McMaster is we have this shop now where different people need stuff from McMaster every day. Literally, Jared, Noah, Ed, and I all have stuff from McMaster, often multiple times per week. And there's no way to have a shared cart system or to
00:32:59
Speaker
Ed can't send me a link with a bunch of, he can forward me a cart, but when I open that, it's a separate order and I can't merge the orders. It's very antiquated for McMaster, who's normally so progressive. You can't just all log in on the same account?
00:33:18
Speaker
You might be able to, but what I've noticed is a lot of times you'll end up, if you've ever seen this in McMaster, if you use McMaster on a couple different computers, sometimes that works. Sometimes it accidentally starts creating different orders. It's almost like you have two different orders at the same time and you can't merge them.
00:33:39
Speaker
Interesting. OK. But it's frustrating, because I'm like, I don't want to place. I literally, a lot of times at 3 o'clock, will walk around the shop and say, anybody need anything from McMaster? I'm like the milk man. Yeah.
00:33:49
Speaker
Yeah, and that's not very efficient, because then guys are like, oh, I thought I had something, but I forgot, but I needed it. Right. Yeah, and I've got my shopping carts to the point where if I put it in the shopping cart, it's out of my mind. It's there for the next time I need to order something else. And if that shopping cart gets deleted, I'm screwed, because I have no other backup saying I needed to buy this. Yeah. I do that too. I don't think that's irresponsible. Yeah. But I've had the odd shopping cart.
00:34:18
Speaker
get deleted or disappear or not cookie remember or whatever and it's really frustrating. Oh yeah, that's brutal. I make sure I'm always, like some sites log you out, like Lakeshore logs me out a lot more than other sites so I can make sure when I add my cart stuff I'm always logged in. I don't think I've ever had a problem with that. What else am I going to mention?
00:34:42
Speaker
But no, the other thing with like Asana, especially, well for me and for you is like, now's the time to fail with that because the stakes are lower. We don't actually have anything in place. But like as you grow, you kind of want to have that system. A better idea what that is. What are you into today?
Custom Knife Projects and Craftsmanship
00:34:59
Speaker
Today, I've got a few little projects. I've got a few fancy knives that I've been putting off for way too long. I kind of promised people a long time ago. Cool.
00:35:08
Speaker
So, yeah, some tymasca stuff. I'm making more pivots on the lathe, which has a... I'm trying to hold these stupid tight tolerances and the probe is doing its magic. My reject rate is kind of high, but as long as the lathe is running, I kind of don't care. It is pumping out good parts. Sorry, you cut out for a second. Is it not getting to the tolerance you want?
00:35:32
Speaker
No, it's the probe is making it jump around too much because it's compensating and then measuring and then making another one, then compensating. And I'm talking tents here. But I've got a really tight range window that I'm trying to shoot for. And it's just a little frustrating. But at the end of the day, I am making good parts. Yeah, that's fair. Are you willing to share what you sent me on WhatsApp with the October run? I forget what we're talking about. The inside text?
00:36:02
Speaker
Blend, goof, mistake, spelling, month? Oh, yeah, yeah, right, right, right. Yeah, I am going to post that on Instagram. So it's October 13th right now, and we've been making Norseman handles all month. And I pulled one off yesterday, a fancy Timascus one. And I look at the date on the inside. It says, Norseman, October 2017, except it just says, October.
00:36:26
Speaker
The line on the B. The line on the B never got engraved. And I'm like, how many handles did we just make? And none of the three people in here noticed this. Myself included. I'm the worst culprit. I should have seen this a long time ago. So I feel kind of stupid about that. But I texted you, and you're like, that's an Easter egg. That'll be so expensive. That'll be rare. People will love it. I'm like, yeah, I guess so. I felt stupid for the mistake.
00:36:53
Speaker
It's the upside down Jenny. It's like that rare stamp of the Grimso Knives world. I thought you misspelled October. I didn't look at it close enough to realize you just missed the straight line in a lowercase B. But you could just drop them back in and remake them, right? No, I can't anymore. Just the way they're pictured? Yeah. Interesting. That's no big deal.
00:37:17
Speaker
Yeah. It's just silly. Yeah. But shout out to you. If anyone's listening who's never seen a Norseman or a Rask, that's one of the things that John does that's insane is almost all of the hidden surfaces and the hidden features and the inside cavities all have this level of detail and finish that are better than most of the best part of the outside features of other products. It's insane. Unless we have fun. Yeah. No, it's amazing. It's really cool.
Tool and Chip Examination in Machining
00:37:48
Speaker
I've been playing around with that microscope. Did we talk about that last week?
00:37:52
Speaker
No, but I saw your Instagram post. Oh, yeah. Well, we'll talk about it next week or something. But yeah, sounds good. One of the things that I actually I'd love to hear from people if anybody uses a microscope for like looking at tools. So I want to look at tools, but solid and solid carbide tools as well as insert edges and also chips. And I find that I need to rotate and orient the tool with the object while I'm looking at it. So.
00:38:18
Speaker
that's really hard to do with your hand because it ties up your hand and you always lose focus because you're up and down or in and out of this of the zoomed range. So I'm thinking about building a little like a little four or five axis simple positioner that'll let me kind of use knobs to you know to rotate it on a certain axis or a certain angle to look at it.
00:38:40
Speaker
That would be awesome. Maybe little joysticks or something you could control it with. Well, yeah. So that was the other idea was, OK, so you could do this by hand with just gears or why don't you do it with Arduino's and what you can do is teach it and then hit repeat or something and then maybe have it do that slower or faster or I could do it and then say, hey, John, come look at this and hit the go button and have you watch what I just saw.
00:39:06
Speaker
Nice. Right? That would be cool. Yeah. Good stuff.
Shop Efficiency Improvements
00:39:13
Speaker
So you got a good day lined up? Yes, we are. I've machined some Maycor, which is like a ceramic glass stuff. Most of it last night, I got to just finish up a few things on it this morning.
00:39:28
Speaker
And we are, both hoses have been cooking, which is good. We've been starting to get into that rhythm of both machines. In fact, it was funny. Yesterday morning, we, I just posted this on Instagram. Yesterday morning, we had a job, we had the VF2 running and we needed to run something that is normally set up on the VF2. So it's got the tools in there, but more importantly, it uses Pearson, the Pearson fixture plates.
00:39:53
Speaker
So Jared was like, what do you want to do? And I was like, uh, and then Jared was like, wait, we'll just do what we did before. So we literally take the Pearson, uh, what do they call their smart change pallet system? We just take the pallet and we put it in the orange vice on the VM on the VM three and it works great.
00:40:14
Speaker
And you just probe the corner of it? Yeah, it's fine. Yeah, so it's kind of funny. We kind of switched the jobs on us. So it's a neat idea to have kind of interchangeable machines. Yeah, it is important. And God, neither one of us had to really deal with that. But downtime, it still scares me. Oh, in fact, I've just put into mind the Master Cart, all of the parts for that Pearson
00:40:42
Speaker
the coolant filter system that he put up with the canister filter. Did you do that? I did. Happy?
00:40:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's super happy, especially since we've been doing the grinding in the mill. Yeah, so we've got these two big clear filter canisters, like home water filter kind of things, and it plums together. I had to modify all the things that I ordered from McMaster. Once I started assembling everything, I realized you can't physically do this kind of U-shaped thing with how the fittings all work, so I had to go to the local store and get these
00:41:20
Speaker
swivel JIC fittings to be able to actually tighten things. So I thought I had it all planned out. I thought I had it all perfect. But because they were all rigid connectors, there's no swivel involved. I wasn't able to assemble it at all. So keep that in mind maybe. But yeah, the filters are amazing. We've already gone through a couple of them.
00:41:41
Speaker
I was dumb, I literally put it off because I just assumed that a, it's one of those, how do you, it looks like a fog buster, like the canister filter size. And it's like the equivalent of, it's about the size of a two liter pop bottle. And I was like, oh, that's expensive, you know, whatever, don't worry about it, whatever. And then I added all the parts in. The canister filter is like 27 bucks on McMaster. Super cheap.
00:42:10
Speaker
a few hundred bucks into the whole project and you're rocking with clean coolant. Yeah. No, literally we'll do a video on this because I'd like to show exactly what you said, which is what are the lessons learned about, um, like, Oh, we need to have swivel fittings here because otherwise there's no way to lock the whole thing down. But I have enough to do two and two filters for one machine for a little bit higher flow. And it's literally $129 and 73 cents.
00:42:34
Speaker
That's insane. And I've heard two stories. This is what kind of got me over the hurdle. I've heard two stories recently about people who have had machine problems because of coolant particulate, especially when you're using through spindle coolant. So no one ever looked back and said, you know, I probably shouldn't have taken as much care to keeping my coolant clean.
00:42:56
Speaker
Yeah. When we changed our filters last month, and then we put the new filters in and run the coolant, and already the canisters are dark, just on the first run basically. So we're going to have to change filters probably every month or two for a while until it's all cleaned out. Right. Right.
00:43:15
Speaker
But I mean, think about that. You're going to keep your coolant better, which is better parts. Literally, you will get better surface finishes with better coolant, period. People are talking about that on Instagram with how some of those guys like Calpe and Frontline Fab get such good finishes. And a lot of that comes down to the quality of your coolant and then the bricks and the tool. And there's a lot to it. But you can't have everything right and then be using year-old coolant, which is OK to have year-old coolant, but not if it's got contaminants in it or debris or particles and stuff.
00:43:46
Speaker
and it's at such a small level, you don't even think about it, but it's literally spraying onto your part into the cutting tool and it's sandpaper. It's abrasive grit coming into your cutting edge. Sweet. That sounds good. Awesome. Crush it, bud. I'll see you next Friday. Have an awesome day. You too. Take care. Bye. Okay, bye.