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Business of Machining - Episode 67
192 Plays7 years ago
Saunders is in Connecticut for a Yamazen/Matsuura event. A new technical center was opened; there’s going to be lots of learning to do!
Getting info is great--but info for the sake of info isn’t always a good use of time. You’ve got to know when to get your head out of that Rabbit hole! At the end of the day, you’re making parts, and only need to know so much before getting started.
GRIMSMO PEN PROJECT IS A GO #writeyoursagaWhat’s the hardest part about designing a pen? Cutting it on a lathe. Grimsmo works out the final bugs in producing a pen (the Saga), and debates new methods of machining it.
“That should not go on a lathe, but I can do it.” - Grimsmo
Keep an eye out on Grimsmo’s channel for the first “Saga Saturday” video!
Also, is there a replacement for general ER collets? Saunders talks about what he learned from a presentation last week.
Busy doesn’t have to mean stressed, and it doesn’t equal success.
“Make sure you own your business, it doesn’t own you” - Saunders
It's definitely...something! Maybe even a milestone?
Grimsmo can focus without interruption now! It may not seem like a big deal but this is actually a milestone for his business.
Question of the Day:
How do you market your first product?
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Good
Introduction and Event Setup
00:00:01
Speaker
morning, folks. Welcome to the Business of Machining, Episode 67. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough. Good morning. Good morning, buddy. I see you're in a hotel room right now. I am back up in Connecticut. Actually, it's great to be here.
00:00:19
Speaker
I were up here for the Yamazen, which is the dealer, but it's really kind of this Matsura event around there opening a Northeast technical center. So kind of a showroom on steroids where they're going to have not just training, but more machines on the floor. It's a glorified sales showroom, but nevertheless, very cool. And they're putting a lot of resources into this. And
Insights from Matsura Event
00:00:45
Speaker
that's what I've been enjoying is kind of trying to learn
00:00:47
Speaker
who are these tool builders? What's their brand? What's their story? It's pretty cool. We had the chance last night within a large group, though, to go to dinner with Katsu Matsura, who carries the name of the company. So it's not just a little showroom opening. I mean, they've got the heavy hitters here in Nintown. Nice. Did he sing karaoke? He did not, but he's a very charismatic person. Yeah, he's really cool. Yeah.
00:01:15
Speaker
I was sitting at the other end next to an apps guy and a fellow from Camplete and then a couple sales guys, which actually ended up still being a great conversation. It was a great conversation.
00:01:30
Speaker
Love it. Yeah. So we're headed there today to film and I am really, you know, because you, it's like, it's the boiling water syndrome. You know, you forget how little you knew three months ago or six months ago, but that being a good group, John, think about when you and I were at IMTS two years ago and we could barely put sentences together about four axis or five, like three, you know, we've been like, the questions that we were asking about three axis are look funny in hindsight and now,
00:01:58
Speaker
you know, it's funny just whenever you talk or I talk or we have these tidbits, like Rob Lockwood and Lawrence were talking about the bearing style on the knuckles of some of these mill turns. And
Learning Machine Controls
00:02:07
Speaker
I'm like, I don't even know what that bearing is called. I've never heard of that. Yep. Yep. Or the subtle differences between Heidenhain and Siemens control and Fannock and all this. And I'm like, I've only touched Fannock like it's all I know so far. Where do you learn this stuff? You know? I don't know. Just
00:02:25
Speaker
Well, where do we learn any of it? Just experience, practice, research, talking to people. It's just amassing information for what purpose? I don't know, but hopefully it'll come in handy one day. Right. I do worry about that. I worry that information for the sake of information is not always good. You're almost getting
00:02:48
Speaker
too, too informed to like, at the end of the day, we need to make parts or make understand how these machines run. And the more you know, it can be very difficult to not get stuck in the weeds. Yep, yep. And it depends on what, what your goals are, if your goal is just to learn to like be a student, a scholar, kind of a mass information, that's one thing. But at the end of the day, like you said, you and I are making parts and and I do find myself
Managing Information Overload
00:03:15
Speaker
Killing a rabbit hole being like I'm done. This is enough. I know enough for now Move on I gotta make something right like the the speedio robo drill you could debate that Ad nauseam, right? But it's like while we're debating and some guys off by and like I bought whichever machine was available to fit my need Exactly. Yeah Yeah, and Yeah, what are you up to what's going on?
00:03:44
Speaker
Cool.
Updates on Pen Project
00:03:45
Speaker
So I've been working on my pen project a lot. I showed you a picture yesterday of the clip. This clip is probably one of the most challenging things I've made for a single part. And it's absolutely phenomenal. I'm super duper happy. I made one test in brass yesterday. Well, it was the third test that was successful. The first one broke in half. The second one has a bunch of weird crap on it. And the third one is almost perfect.
00:04:13
Speaker
It broke in half after machining or during? During. Interesting. This clip is, if and when John shares it, it appears to be a work of art and how it is made is, I mean, it should be 3D printed. Well, we have. We 3D printed like four of them in plastic. And we've thought about doing it in metal, but they'd end up costing like over $100 in metal to 3D print.
00:04:45
Speaker
Even for production, I think. 3D printing is not that cheap. And then there's still lots of post processing work you would have to do to metal 3D print it. So I'm like, wouldn't be good enough anyway. But yeah, being able to turn this thing on my lathe and have it come off in a fully milled component with 3D machining and all this stuff on it is mind blowing. It's like, this should not go on a lathe, but I can.
00:05:11
Speaker
Well, there's the primary, there are cylindrical surfaces on it, but generally speaking, a substantial portion of the time is milling on the lathe? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, the turning takes two minutes. Got it.
Achieving Quality Finishes
00:05:27
Speaker
And then the milling will probably be another 10 to 15. How are surface finishes on surfacing with live tool, like radio live tools in your turret?
00:05:38
Speaker
I'm finding a 3D surface finish to be quite good, but a 2D wall finish to be kind of crappy. I'm not exactly sure why yet. That's odd. If you've ever stood in front of a live tool lathe and you grab it and you kind of jiggle the live tool, there's playback and forth because there's like a slot and the drive dog that rotates.
00:06:08
Speaker
I just wonder if that causes a vibration through the, you know, through the machine. No, I'm no expert, but you would think if the tool is engaged in a clock, whatever motion clockwise and under the, you would think that the forces driving it in one direction couldn't be overcome by back drive pressure from the tool or work material.
00:06:33
Speaker
And it's not hmm trying to think it's hard for me to visualize this But when it does 2d when you're does what you're talking about is it actually an interpolated move along multiple axes because of the y Because of the nature of the art It'd be xy basically No, okay. So it's just to it's not having to do I'm trying to think how do I describe this like when you know when you
00:06:57
Speaker
if you did like polar rotation turning or milling where it looks like it would just be one axis moving, but it's actually like three moving to make it one constant. Right, right. It's not doing that. No, it's not doing that. So I don't know the solution. And I've certainly done some
00:07:13
Speaker
2D milled finishes like the inside of our hex, you know, the torques on the screws or something like that. Like a beautiful wall finishes there from a tiny 20,000 mill. But sometimes, I don't know, maybe it's vibration in the workpiece. Maybe it's a lot of things actually. So instead of side milling the sides of the clip, I'm going to 3D them and add a purposeful
00:07:37
Speaker
feature pattern using a ball mill. And then it doesn't have to be perfect. It's purposely ribbed. The goal is to spend time machining so that we don't have to spend time hand finishing and so that we get a consistency.
00:07:58
Speaker
Oh, I love that. Like getting rid of the... Man, it's not that you can't appreciate or nail down recipes on post-process for things, but like done off. I mean, yeah, love it.
00:08:11
Speaker
I was literally after last week at DMG, I was like, could we make our fixture plates on a horizontal in, you know, kind of like two ops, but op one is a low risk, poke a few holes in it, and then op two does the rest of the whole thing. It was just with that idea of your it's more than just
00:08:31
Speaker
It's more than just getting rid of the labor of the setup. It's like that whole risk profile of process reliability and the one and done. And you're letting the machine use its accuracies across the whole part. It's a wonderful thing. Yeah. And like yesterday, we had our Elliott, Matt Sarah sales guy come in,
Choosing the Right Tool Holders
00:08:51
Speaker
and we talked about the MX330 and a robot drill and things like that. And he was trying to tease out of us what
00:09:00
Speaker
what the future looks like, what the goals look like, like why we want a five axis. And, you know, more tools was one of the big, big reasons. We've only got 30 on the Maury and it's like, I need more. I have no redundant. I can't run more pallets than one. Um, right. I'm changing tools several times a day just cause they wear out and you don't like having more tools. Oh yeah. Wow.
00:09:25
Speaker
When you have a 1-16th tool or a 1-32nd, what holder is it going in? Typically, ER-16.
00:09:35
Speaker
If I can pass along a suggestion from a pretty good presentation from Big Kaiser last week, who's a little bit biased? Well, everyone's biased, but nevertheless, I tend to respect it was a very data-driven presentation, which is what I liked about it. It's basically that your general ER college, especially those that are non
00:09:58
Speaker
non-bearing nut collet nuts, which I've never even held a bearing nut collet that I know of, don't have a place in our shops anymore. Especially given what you're doing with these phenomenal quality tools, products, and machine tools, their port sort of point was hydraulic. Excuse me.
00:10:17
Speaker
milling chucks for roughing and then moving to potentially shrink or hydraulic for finishing. Better TIR, better concentristy. There's some downfalls and you've got nominal size issues and hydraulics can be misused if they're closed without it and they've got to have a tighter shank requirements on the carbide you're buying. But nevertheless, I think you would probably spend less time dialing in, get better surfaces, finishes better, get too high.
00:10:44
Speaker
For what you're doing now, it's not a big investment, especially if you start with a couple. Yeah, we could certainly choose the finishing tools that we want to start with, for sure. But for all the critical tools, we now measure runout on every single one. How often do you adjust? Depends on the holder. Is that right? Some holders would put it in, and we're like, holy crap, it's awesome. That was perfect. It's got a quarter-tenth of runout.
00:11:15
Speaker
But yeah, some of them were dicking around two or three times to get them to be centered, but yeah.
00:11:22
Speaker
It really opened my eyes and they make a good point about people that and there were a bunch of customers there. They did this like breakfast event where it's really kind of sad and frustrating. They've got these amazing top tier mill turn centers and five access centers and they bring in a couple of people brought in holders. They're like HSK holders that I wouldn't sell to my worst enemy. They are just beat to just in terrible condition and they're like, yeah, this is what we have to deal with at work.
00:11:52
Speaker
And you're like, oh man, like how do you, you know, you wouldn't want to put that into a new spindle and you wouldn't want to have, you know, you're buying these really good tools. You know, everyone wants, you know, Sandvik and everybody wants, you know, Akuma or whatever, Matsura, but then you don't think about one of the most important thing that goes between the two of them. Yep. Yep. The linking. Right.
00:12:16
Speaker
I think they sent me a copy of the presentation.
Reflections on Stress in Business
00:12:20
Speaker
I think I'm allowed to post it. I think they wanted to pull out. They did some cost analysis stuff that they didn't want to share because they didn't want it to be viewed as them. They wanted to take the numbers out, which I actually kind of respect, but I've still got a lot of that data behind. That's all I wanted as I was like, put your
00:12:41
Speaker
put the name of your company on the, not on the line reputation, but like tell me what to use where instead of being this esoteric fluffy, like we make all these different holders, blah, blah, blah, like, no, just tell me, you know, when do I use hydraulic? What do I look at shrink? What are the weaknesses of that? What are the benefits of collet systems? What to think about? You know, some of those no zero collapse collet systems that allow you
00:13:04
Speaker
They allow you to have a tool holder that can use collet, so you can use different diameters, but the collet itself, which is not an ER, it would be generally like a proprietary system or a different style, they have no collapsing range. So, a 1 eighth inch collet requires like an H6 or some shank tolerance of the carbide and it does not, you cannot put a tool that's 5,000 smaller or larger in there. Much, much smaller.
00:13:30
Speaker
Some of the milling chucks that I have are like that. It's got an on-size, we call it. Yes, we've noticed for our finishing tools, like finishing the outside of a handle or something like that, we're starting to use some of the best holders we can buy, even though it's like super light duty cuts, but we just want the best finish, right? We've got an Albrecht Uber chuck on the low, and I think I still got to pay for it actually.
00:14:00
Speaker
But yeah, so from Imugi, except they don't call it the Uber Chuck. The sales guy had zero clue what Uber Chuck was. Really? As it were. He's like, yeah, we just call it the, I don't know, whatever he called it, PC5 or whatever. And I'm like, no, no, it's called the Uber Chuck. Everybody in my industry knows that it's called the Uber Chuck. Really? You've never heard of that? Yeah. Have you not seen your Christmas commercial?
00:14:27
Speaker
Exactly. But I wonder if Emoogie just rebrands it, you know, buys it from Albrecht and rebrands it and just, they don't know any different. It's weird.
00:14:38
Speaker
Those things are, we have one, Jared likes it. I haven't had the time to do like AB testing or really like dive into it, like I'd like to. It's weird though, because there is a little bit of fussiness to setting the tool in those, you can't have it too shallow, you can't have it too deep. And then it's a very different style of tightening it down. It's one of the things where I want someone to do like a 40 second video showing tips and tricks on the Uber Chuck. Nice. Yeah, maybe we'll do that actually. That'd be good because there is trick to it.
00:15:07
Speaker
tightening it is weird. There's a bunch of warm gears inside and it just doesn't feel natural until you understand how it works, right? But yeah, we're getting pretty good tool life out of it and good finishes. What diameter tool do you have in it? A quarter. Okay. Oh, I think we run ours at a three-eighth inch or yeah, three-eighth inch.
00:15:28
Speaker
Yeah, we've tried to, we try not to use carbide bigger than three-eighth inch because you it's so much more expensive to jump up to half inch and we can so far have been able to run, you know, run the piss out of three-eighth inch on even the stuff like, yeah, the mod vice is a decent amount of material removal 41 40 there and yeah, it works fine. Yep, yep. What was I just going to say?
00:16:00
Speaker
I had my list of things I wanted to mention. Oh, so I had this really good... I got stuck in the airport for a long time yesterday and I was just doing some... It's actually like totally like just made the best of it. And I've been thinking a lot about the role stress plays in business and entrepreneurship and how it's inevitable and I don't think... I think like getting stressed or being stressed is a bad thing. Like it's okay, it happens.
00:16:16
Speaker
Can't remember.
00:16:29
Speaker
techniques to deal with it and what to think about it and to remember that it's not good. I think there are people and I sometimes myself think that just because you're busy or just because you're stressed doesn't mean that that's a sign of success. That's not actually a good thing. Don't view it as that. But the big realization that occurred to me was that
00:16:50
Speaker
I don't really get stressed anymore. I'm actually really happy and proud about that. But I do find myself simply tired. And I think there's probably different levels of being tired. I think there's just tired within the day. But then I think there's kind of like the
00:17:08
Speaker
I hate to use the word burnout, but the longer term tired and I think I was confusing. Sometimes you just, I just don't want to do it. Like as much as I love all this stuff, I'm like, I don't want to, I just want to like relax or do something else right now. Um, I don't want to sit there and pound out fusion cam or, or write a paper type thing or article. And that's okay. Yep. It's cyclical, right? Like you have your ups, you have your downs, but you have to realize that, that,
00:17:37
Speaker
you will come out of it. And it usually doesn't last that long, even though when you're in it, you're like, Oh, man, I'm just so burned out or stressed or worried or, you know, sleepy, right? Don't you don't don't diagnose it. Yeah, yeah, it's okay. It very much ties into that ethos of make sure you own your business, it doesn't own you, right?
00:17:58
Speaker
And that's difficult. I've been really good the past few months, I'd say, with stress and dealing with it. And it's just been better. I don't know if I'm better than I've been in a long time, but I'm feeling pretty good about it. I would say you are. I mean, you deserve to be. Exactly. And I was just thinking yesterday that
00:18:24
Speaker
I've been putting a lot of focus into the pen and the clips and other side projects like that that I haven't been working in the business as much. I'm working on R&D and stuff. But I've got Eric and Angelo and Barry and Skye here cranking out knives. And we're still holding our knife numbers. And I'm doing other stuff. And it's like, this is amazing. But it's like we talked about, I don't know, four or five podcasts ago. You're just getting started.
00:18:54
Speaker
Yeah. Like it's now just becoming something real more than you. It's no longer the solar partnership. Exactly. So cool. Yes. And we, we jumped to that scary quickly, you know, like I feel like, I mean, even just three months ago, Angelo and Sky weren't even here. So I was running a hundred percent production. And if I wanted to do something like the pen, everything else would have to shut down.
00:19:22
Speaker
I mean, I can run it on the side, but I can't focus on both things at the same time. Whereas now I can almost, I don't want to say I'm being rude, but when I'm focused on something, I'm kind of just like, leave me alone. I just need to do this right now. No, that's what you're good at. Don't apologize for that.
00:19:43
Speaker
No, exactly. Or if I'm standing on the lathe with one hand on the feed hole and one hand on the rapid override and I'm leaned over and I'm looking at the thing, just don't talk to me. Just don't come up to me. Right. That's like the standard machine shop etiquette. Yeah, exactly.
00:20:01
Speaker
But I think there's the actual takeaway of having a team and a staff and help and employees and a culture. That's all important. But I think what's equally important is you've also proven that you can and are doing it.
Building a Supportive Team Environment
00:20:15
Speaker
So you'll hit a roadblock or something will happen. But you've done it. You've been through it. You'll be able to do it again. Exactly. That's, I think, what's... I mentioned that people ask, you know, when do you hire your first person? And I really feel like
00:20:29
Speaker
You and I probably both waited a little bit too long, and it's hard to always say that was a mistake. But I remember once you see what that can do for you, it's phenomenal. But also, again, trying to find a way to start easy. I mean, you knew... Well, who came on first? Aaron or Angelo? Aaron. Aaron. It wasn't a cold relationship. You knew who she was, right?
00:20:57
Speaker
Yeah, not well, but yeah. But you never know what's going to work. I think there's something to be said for getting somebody in, whether it's an intern or a temp or something where it's finite and sort of a test that both people know is a test. And that starts to let you understand what it is. Because I'm sure your days are very different now. Oh, completely different. Like lately, I've been focused on the pen, so I'm like in my zone. But a lot of days, I'm just kind of running around talking to everybody, making phone calls,
00:21:26
Speaker
sending emails, ordering things. It's really nice to be able to run the business instead of have the business run you or working on your business, not just in your business. And I'd say on most days I'm spending 80% of my time working on the business and that's fun. So when you move to a new shop, where's your office going to be? It would depend on the layout of the shop, but I don't know.
00:21:55
Speaker
I don't know if I'd have or want an office or maybe I'd have both. I'd have an office where I can do quiet time, but then I could also have a shop floor computer that I use a lot. That's probably what I'd do.
00:22:11
Speaker
I obviously have my office and I don't, it's fine. I actually, I do like it and it's, but I'm now realizing that I'm spending, if I go, I'm just spending all but 20 minutes of my day inside my office. But we do a lot of video voiceovers, reviewing, I'm on the phone.
00:22:29
Speaker
It seems like an exorbitant amount of time. You need all those things where you need to have not so much privacy, you just need quiet space. But I feel like I might try to figure out a way to put, I'd almost rather my home base be out on the shop floor. And then I can always duck in there if I need to. Yeah, try that. I think it could change things, right?
00:22:53
Speaker
Yeah, I agree, especially as we've got... I just like... I don't like... It's something that has to do with the layout of our shop. My office is a little bit... It's like one room even further removed from the... It's just... It's been fine for the last while, but I'd like to get back out there some more. Okay, here's another question for you. Sort of a quaintance is...
00:23:17
Speaker
manufacturing entrepreneurship, thinking about bringing a first product to market, very excited, but green.
Launching New Products
00:23:26
Speaker
I think it's in the... I can't remember if it's bicycle or motorcycle, but it doesn't really matter. It's just a small, widget-y type product, sub well under $100. What is your advice on a
00:23:38
Speaker
If it's just the first product, you're just getting tested. Do you go Shopify? How do you market it? What would you tell somebody who came up to you and started asking your advice? That's a good question. It depends on your personal level of social media prowess, whether you just want to
00:23:56
Speaker
kind of go into Instagram and do pictures or do YouTube videos like you and I are a big fan of being that kind of personal brand showing not just what it is but how it is and why it is and all that. I think there's so much value in that and you can do that on Instagram too. Definitely I'd say simple like Shopify web store kind of thing. People go way too crazy with websites and I got to learn WordPress and I got to do this.
00:24:22
Speaker
just like get it to market, worry about the product, worry about the audience, worry about the reaction. But better to pay whatever it is, 30 bucks a month for Shopify versus trying to do the PayPal me and I'll ship you one. That's how I ran my business for like eight years. But Shopify wasn't as easy or commonplace or popular.
00:24:51
Speaker
I mean, there were lots of options, but it's so easy now, with like a Dymo label printer, and I used to hand write all the labels for years, and all these little things you don't think about. If I could suggest that people set up like that from the beginning, that's worth the investment.
00:25:11
Speaker
Well, yeah, right. So when I was talking, I was like, well, look, there's the fail, fast, fail, cheap route, which is kind of just get it out there. PayPal works. Don't get burdened down with two weeks of decisions and pay fee structures and set up accounts, domains, all that hassle. On the flip side,
00:25:27
Speaker
the businesses of that is having the personal belief in the conviction of no i wanted to do this for a long time i am going to do this making sure your product is branded making sure it's easy to purchase and it doesn't look like it's some really big mom and pop i may i may be gone in a week you know
00:25:44
Speaker
I can go back to thinking about, your site actually looks great now by the way, but in Jay Pearson, these sites look very robust and Shopify makes it easy to do that quite quickly and it looks like you're not buying something through a dubious web store.
00:26:01
Speaker
And that's the thing, like I'm all for small businesses and people doing the kind of made in your garage kind of direct to market thing. But there is an image of professionalism with a proper website and a shopping cart and things like that. So it depends on how personal your brand is. If you're like a guy on YouTube, like I was just saying, here's my product, let's do this email me and PayPal and then there's a connection, but otherwise it could just be a little
00:26:31
Speaker
a little off-putting, you know, untrustable. Right, right, right. Actually, it's funny. I don't know why I never thought of it, but Ben Benz is doing this as we speak with the Synergy Lite. I mean, kind of documenting the process and I haven't even been on his site lately, but good examples that I think are inspiring and just start to show and break. I mean, I think what you and I have to remember is
00:26:57
Speaker
It's so much more daunting when you've never done it. If you've never opened a Shopify account, you have no idea how hard it's going to be. And I would generally say, just do it. And it's actually not that hard. It's actually really not that hard. Yep. I think it's hard if you want to design something custom, if you want to learn WordPress, if you want to do all this and hire website editors and all that stuff. That makes it more complicated than it needs to be to get running. There's no reason to do that.
00:27:26
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. But there was 10 years ago. Holy cow. I remember with strike mark, we got some government contract, not contract, but sale opportunity. But the guy was like, I've got to use when he was at budget. He was high enough where he had the, there's something in the government where they can, certain people can spend up to three grand on a credit card without a
00:27:47
Speaker
approvals. And so he's like, I need you to process my credit card by 2pm tomorrow or something, 5pm tomorrow if you want this sale. It's not an emotional thing. We want these, but that's what has to happen. And we had no merchant account at the time.
00:28:02
Speaker
Yeah. And 10 years ago, it was hilarious. There were all these different players involved about how to get a credit card processor running because there are different people that play different roles. There were four different companies involved in this transaction, including we had to sign some indemnity of holdback because of chargebacks of like up to $20,000. I was absurd. And now it's like you go on and you sign up for a Stripe account and you're done in like 14 seconds. Exactly. Yep. Super easy.
00:28:33
Speaker
which is good for small business. Yeah. Speaking of that, though, too, I got to say it's like going back to getting people on your team and helping out and interns and so forth. One of our interns is working on our new project and you don't
00:28:49
Speaker
not always going to work out everywhere, but don't ever underestimate the capabilities of people. He's now pulling in API call scripts, ironically into a custom WordPress site, but this is a very different example. But working with some online automation or lean software that's going to let us interact with that to a front end through these API calls, which
00:29:13
Speaker
I like saying the word API because I don't really know what it is, but you know what I mean? He's like, yeah, I wrote a little bit of PHP. I'm kind of figuring it out. There's so many custom examples. And it's like, yes. Just you keep, yes. Awesome. Yeah.
00:29:28
Speaker
And you, you, John Saunders, want to be able to feed these people and just be like, go, just have fun. This is awesome. Just keep it up. You're like, you're creating magic here. Just go, go, go. Yeah. I think it took a while for them, for him to get comfortable and realize like, I'm going to tell you where we are today, what we have, and I'm going to tell you where I kind of want this to go. And I'm not going to give you a lot of direction. I'll react if you got questions, but like,
00:29:51
Speaker
Just keep running with it and when you hit a roadblock ask or Google or stop or whatever and and so far He's just keep plucking away and it is free and awesome Yes Yeah, I love it. Yep. You're an enabler in a good way What is uh, so what did you do you have a good conversation about the MX 330? What do you with your dealer? What you talk about? Yeah
Exploring Matsura MX 330
00:30:14
Speaker
with the sales guy and What do we talk about?
00:30:18
Speaker
He was kind of going back and forth like, well, do you need the pallets? Do you need the unattended? You know, is the goal to run for 120 hours unattended or something like that? And I'm like, not exactly. The goal is to have the variation of different pallets. Like you can have your run and then you can have a blank that's going to become the fixture on the next pallet. And then you can have the next fixture and then you can run this one-off thing and you can schedule all of this. I mean, at the end of the day, if I could just run all night and come into
00:30:48
Speaker
finished parts, that would be amazing. I don't need it to run 24 seven all weekend. Maybe eventually, but I mean, there's a critical mass with us because we have so much hand finishing work that if I made 30 knives a day, we can't finish them. Can you if you had better machine tools, you know, in terms of five axes and surfacing and so forth, could you offload some of that finishing work into the machine work?
00:31:11
Speaker
some of it, we would have to do like deburring on the machine, which I don't know if I'd want to do on a half million dollar five axis machine putting all that dust into it. You don't mean chip deburring, like cutting, you mean like grinding or polishing deburring stuff? Yeah, a little polishing brushes or something like that. But if we got a robo drill and we could put the polishing steps onto the robo drill,
00:31:33
Speaker
then I would absolutely do that. I was looking a little bit at the, is it called Chippex, the company that makes the, not the Vornido, what's the Dyson technology for the vacuums called? Vortex, no. Someone who's listening, tell us right now.
00:31:54
Speaker
Just yell it out your corner. I think you're right. Well, regardless, they have done that for somehow with liquids for chip stuff. I've started to get some data points and everyone I've heard seems to say pretty darn good things. And I think that makes in this situation when you're investing in this overall solution, yes, that might be a relatively expensive quote unquote add on, but it doesn't matter because it's going to let you run really good clean coolant with
00:32:22
Speaker
Again, get the fines out of there and deal with a reliable cleaning system. Actually, I'd love to know if, ask Angelo if he's heard of it or you've seen it. I know at the trade show we just went to, the joint open house, there was a guy selling this, it was called like Sharknado or something. There was a shark on it.
00:32:45
Speaker
Cyclone, laser, coolant, filter thingy. And he talked Aaron's ear off for about 10, 15 minutes. Maybe she knows all about this. Yeah. Cool.
00:32:59
Speaker
Well, I'm off to go film. They've got a MAM, they've got an MX330, they've got the MX520, they've got their hybrid. Actually, I don't think they have a Lumix here. I think they've got like a demo machine that's not functional. Because I think a Lumix, which is Metzura's centering and machining center hybrid, I think it requires a special room because of the temperature
00:33:23
Speaker
Well, I don't know, I'm going to learn more about it. And they've got a, because it's Yamazin, they've got their other lines there, which is one of the turning companies, is it, can't remember which brand of Lays, and then also all the brothers are there. Nice. Cool. So it'll be fun. Well, that's gonna be awesome. Yeah, I'm excited.
00:33:48
Speaker
Yes. Awesome. What are you up to today? Oh, is any of your pen machine? Is it all laid? It's all laid. There's nothing on the mill. I mean, it's all machined on the lathe. But even if you had an MX 330, you wouldn't tombstone up a pen. I don't think so. Right. Nope.
00:34:11
Speaker
And given how long the clip is going to take to make, you know, it could be like 15 to 20 minutes to 25 minutes for one part. And I'm like, okay, for one part, that's fine. But that's only three an hour. And it's tying up the lathe. You know, like getting all the little parts take two minutes. Is it is there? Well, it is how do you get that cut in half?
00:34:37
Speaker
one option, long-term, second machine. Honestly, because then you can have one machine running the time-consuming part and the other machines running the fast parts and then you have capacity. Is it the surfacing toolpaths that take all the time? Yeah, I'd say so. And the roughing, because we're starting with a five-eighths round and we're turning it into almost nothing. So there's a lot of material removed.
00:35:02
Speaker
Now that we've made one, we can analyze the process and we can look at it and be like, okay, that's obviously taken the longest time or this, this and this, and then maybe we can find better solutions. I've got like three completely different methods to make this clip. And the first one worked all right. So cool. But yeah, next, today's job is to make one out of titanium. Yes, we have Swiss brass. Awesome. That's gonna be fun. Yep. Yep. Except with tie. I can't see anything because there's cooling everywhere.
00:35:30
Speaker
So brass is so nice because I can watch it and I can hear it. Godspeed. Good luck. I'm super excited. Awesome. Have an awesome day. Awesome. You too, bud. I'll take care. I'll see you. Bye.