Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
#269 - Balancing Maintenance, Attitudes & Machines
204 Plays3 years ago
TOPCIS:
- Lending companies for buying machines & early payment policies.
- Sauders root story, attitude towards prepayment.
- Saunders shop tour with Adam Demult
- Horizontal machining challeneges.
- Air compressor maintenance time with Grimsmo.
- Willemin updates.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Focus
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 269. My name is John Grimsmo. My name is John Saunders. This is the manufacturing podcast where John and John talk about our businesses and the growth and the challenges and the questions and purchases and all the decisions we make on a weekly basis. It's nice.
00:00:20
Speaker
I see a bunch of bloom boxes in your background. Yeah, they're actually bloom the woodworking company, not like CNC bloom. I'm getting a little dizzy here. I know.
Saga Pens and Bloom Boxes
00:00:32
Speaker
Help me out. Those are actually the wood cases that we get for the sagas, for our saga pen to ship. So they're made by a local company and he buys a lot of bloom. They make like cabinet
00:00:46
Speaker
hinges and drawer slides and things like that for your kitchen. So he must have tons of bloom boxes, so they just get delivered in bloom boxes. Got it. Well, that's far less exciting than I was thinking. Yeah, exactly. Oh, John brought
Financing Equipment Purchases
00:00:59
Speaker
the brother. Yeah, yeah. I know, but I got financing approval yesterday, so now it's just fine tuning the price and the purchase and the options and stuff like that, which hopefully happened this week. Got it. Do you use the same bank or lender? Good question. When I can.
00:01:15
Speaker
But I think at the moment we have four different lenders. We're kind of, I ask them all for every new piece of equipment and I see who gets back. It'd be nice. Like I know one of our buddies was saying he's used the same vendor for the past 12 years. And I'm like, that sounds really nice. You know, you call them up and be like, I need another one. And he's like, okay, yeah, you're good.
00:01:36
Speaker
You know, whereas with each new vendor or a guy you haven't talked to in a long time, there's a lot of, you have to establish that relational trust and you have to send them your financials and you have to like, it's kind of a new process each time, new credit application. You know, it'd be nice if you had a guy that like, I'm pretty close with two of my lenders and it's not always the way to go though, you know?
00:02:03
Speaker
That
Negotiating Machine Purchases
00:02:04
Speaker
situation that you alluded to was one I had never contemplated, which is big machines, big price figure, maybe add a zero to most of the things you and I have looked at. There's more long-term
00:02:21
Speaker
ownership relationship agreements between the vendor and the customer. And there's even like lawyers are involved in negotiating the purchase agreement too. Like I just signed, you know, POs. I'll read them usually or like the terms, but it's like, you know, I'm not really going to negotiate in many of those cases, but this is a little bit different. And one of the things that I think was this idea of the ability to effectively withhold payments if a certain uptime
00:02:48
Speaker
isn't maintained, which basically means if it goes down, you as the machine tool builder have an obligation to both have service parts available and a service rep out to get it fixed. But then that's so strange because if the Acme machine tool company
00:03:04
Speaker
sells you the machine, but you're financing it. Usually the way that works is the bank buys the machine, owns the machine, and then you pay the bank. The Acme machine tool has already been paid in full, so I don't know how that would work about- That's a good point, other than like warranty, but that's machine tool builder, not your local distributor.
Machine Warranties and Breakdowns
00:03:25
Speaker
But I think the point is, warranties are only as good as the paper they're written on. It's always that big boy world of, what do you do next? I may have a piece of paper that says I have a warranty, but when my spindle's down and they say it's eight weeks to get a pardon from a company in not America, what's your next move? Even if you think you're going to call your lawyer, which
00:03:46
Speaker
It's easy to say the reality is that costs a lot of money and also may be completely toothless. What are you going to do? Try to get the company in a lawsuit in the states and do what? I mean, again, if the bearing or whatever isn't available, that's the problem. I know our business insurance has some form of disruption of income, what do they call it?
00:04:11
Speaker
loss of revenue insurance. I know they like to know at least our annual revenues to factor that in. I've never pushed for it. We've never had really a loss of revenue situation.
00:04:26
Speaker
I'm curious how easy or difficult that would be to actually cash in on. A buddy of mine probably five, six years ago had his basement shop flood and he had two Haas office mills, new machines, other stuff, all his equipment and he lives next to a river and the river just flooded and his basement was toast and he was out for six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment.
00:04:55
Speaker
And depending on people's situation, like that stuff happens, you know, a tornado could rip you up. Uh, not in Canada, but really you don't get tornadoes. Not where we live anyway. Yeah. Ever. Interesting. I've heard of like little ones in Ontario, but I don't know. It's never a problem. Interesting. But yeah. Yeah. I don't, um,
00:05:17
Speaker
I feel like that sort of insurance is excellent for what you said, like, hey, a plane crash landed in our building and no one was hurt, but we're down and we want to keep our employees hired or we need to buy new machines. That I get. I don't think, and I'm not educated here, so I don't want to misspeak, or I say this with hesitation, I don't think it's meant to gap six weeks or even six days of downtime where a customer's mad at you and you.
00:05:46
Speaker
you know, had to try to get a third party service in, it's not, I don't think it's that kind of band-aid or certain like profit, like you're just going to be, you're going to be as well off as you were had a annoying maintenance hiccup not happen. That makes sense. Yeah, exactly. I don't know. I don't know either.
00:06:04
Speaker
So with lending, I know you initially started buying all your equipment, cash, which is amazing.
Financing vs. Buying Outright
00:06:11
Speaker
And then the bigger they got, the more financing came in. Are you financing with the same company every time or do you have a couple?
00:06:17
Speaker
So we financed a couple of our Haas machines through, what do they call it? CNC Associates, but it's the Haas one. Yeah, exactly. And I get to give them credit, they make it super easy. And they just don't ask for a lot of information where if you borrow from a bank, it's pretty probing. I mean, tax returns and signed personal statements and updates and all these forms and it took a lot of paperwork. I think Haas can do that because they understand the collateral
00:06:46
Speaker
Really well and they make you punch in a code ours was pretty like every six months Because we were I think a good borrower and honestly we didn't even leave them we paid off the loans Quickly and I had negotiated that's actually a good example. I did negotiate those to have a
00:07:07
Speaker
no prepayment penalty. Um, I don't know how unusual that is to get, but I made it. I wasn't going to use them if they wouldn't give that to me. Um, and, um, in this environment today, I don't know that they would care as much about that because, um, rates are almost, it's almost universally accepted that rates are going to continue to rise. So they'd be happy for you to pay off cheap money.
00:07:34
Speaker
Now, if they can redeploy that money at a higher interest rate, I just want to be willing to prepay off and not have them require... There's like all these complicated things like defeasance and yield maintenance where they basically want to get made whole on this if they had received the interest for the whole duration of the loan.
00:07:50
Speaker
Right. I guess you want to be careful not to get tied into that if you do have plans on paying it off early. I know I've asked several of my lenders for an early prepayment plan or penalty reduction or whatever. Some of them are like, a lot of people ask and almost none of our customers actually prepay, actually pay out early. They all just ride it out.
00:08:11
Speaker
I was like, well, I'm still asking because you never know. I might do it. We have on the building mortgage as well as the machine. That's one of those, I don't really care what you're telling me the average person does because I'm just telling you this. I'm not the average person. Well, I'm not about to get cocky. I'm just saying I wouldn't have asked for it if I
Loan Agreements and Risks
00:08:31
Speaker
didn't want it.
00:08:33
Speaker
In some cases, they will give you language that isn't what you said, and I cannot emphasize this enough as like a business life lesson. Do not agree to language that you don't like. And frankly, I'm having that argument right now. We borrowed money to purchase the horizontal.
00:08:49
Speaker
And I signed the loan docs and I really don't like them because they have a default. This gets super complicated. I enjoy this stuff. I worry that there's probably people switching to SiriusXM right now to change and listen to a different topic.
00:09:06
Speaker
This is business though. This happens. There are all these conditions of default. I may have an issue with those, but I have a bigger issue with what I'm about to tell you, which is a lack of notice and cure. Basically, the default conditions are a bit annoying.
00:09:24
Speaker
Well, basically, if you don't pay the loan, of course, it's a default. But then there's more technical things like if you don't provide your financial statements. Okay, I get it. That's fine, or reasonable, I should say. But then there's another one, I don't have the docs in front of me, that's basically a prospective
00:09:39
Speaker
opinion by the lender that you might default in the future, which is complete baloney. This idea that if it's July and they think for whatever reason, they think, oh man, this guy's not going to make it in four or five months for whatever reason. That's the problem. There's a lot of weird things going on in the world with Ukraine and material supplies where
00:10:04
Speaker
It's definitely the case I've thought about, hey, what happens if we can't get plate material and stuff? But the lender's not going to have that level of visibility. Regardless, it's not to me kosher for a bank to say, we think you might have trouble in the future servicing this loan, so we're going to put you in default today. No, this is a deal where as long as I'm making payments and conforming to
00:10:28
Speaker
normal covenants, if you will, like just being a good guy. You can't put me into fault, which raises the interest rate astronomically and it means they can call the note immediately. And it means I have to pay all their legal fees. It's a very, very large hammer. And even if the lender says, well, we don't do that and that's not how we carry business and we obviously have to keep lending to people. That's great, but that's just talk from a guy who may not be sitting across from me
00:10:57
Speaker
in a year when this could be an issue, whether the note sold or the bank sold, the employee moves. I'm not in the business of taking that kind of risk, but the bigger issue with all those default things isn't just the default language. It's the fact that in that set of loan docs, there's no
00:11:17
Speaker
notice and cure. Normally, a lender should say, hey, by the way, we think or we're alleging that you are in default, you have three days or 30 days to fix this. It could be something as simple as the money got the banking system or the checkout loss or screwed up or
00:11:36
Speaker
a well-intentioned bank employee filed our financials under a different customer. The bank has flagged that we're not in compliance with our reporting requirements. These things happen. The reason that there's no secure is that it's like, hey, something's not right here. We need to make this right really quickly. They wouldn't give that to me. It's funny because I'm about to tell you that it's a great relationship and it's the reason I went with this lender and I value it. That is all true. But the lender dug their heels in on this and I left it as, okay, well,
00:12:06
Speaker
It doesn't sit right with me. It's not what you should want either. It's not healthy. It's not the right way. This isn't a high interest rate, hard money, bridge lender from a sketchy guy. This is an ongoing relationship where we're still very modestly levered, if you will.
00:12:26
Speaker
So where we left it was I'm going to talk to other banks. I said, if I find the language from other lenders that, because I'm like, Hey, maybe I'm out of touch. Maybe I'm wrong. It doesn't sit right with me regardless. But I thought, well, let me just hard for them to argue that if I find it from other banks that say, no, of course we would have that notice and cure. That's very reasonable. So yeah, that's my story. No, that's really interesting. Yeah. It's like, I find it sometimes
00:12:51
Speaker
Boring to read through the seven pages of loan documents, but I do it as a principle like I need to understand what I'm signing here And sometimes yeah, there's little things like that that you just pick up on I had a question for you with the
00:13:07
Speaker
You said on your building and on some of the machines you did early prepayments on purpose. Are you doing like, oh, we have an extra 50 grand. We're just going to throw it on the thing. Or are you doubling your payments every month and doing it consistently? Yeah, way more of the doubling. Consistency. Yeah, just curious. I feel like this is kind of personal. Not that I don't want to share it, but more just
00:13:32
Speaker
It's hard to think back to how crazy this journey was for me in 2012, you know, I'd made a little bit of money, but it wasn't, I couldn't look at my wife or loved ones in good faith and be like, Oh no, like you should, you should hop on the train. Cause I'm going places with CNC machine. Like, no, it was very like,
00:13:52
Speaker
It was awesome, we had the Tormach, we were making GoPro mounts and the Targets and job shopping and I loved it and it was fulfilling. And look, there's a lot to say for that in life. And I very much enjoy conversations with friends or books where it's kind of like, I don't mean to sound like morbid or sad, but was I happier with a Tormach in my basement versus the sea of machines that we have now?
00:14:17
Speaker
So anyway, I think my attitude is kind of like this is not an industry that I have any
00:14:26
Speaker
business being in and so I was just wanted to be really Conservative and so I thought hey Let me build up some equity in the business by not face staring down a bunch of payments and I do ultimately think there's a lot to be said for The Dave Ramsey ethos and people that don't borrow a lot of money But now we've hit I've kind of chosen to flip it around a little bit and say I don't necessarily I value
00:14:55
Speaker
Saunders being a huge part of my life and my main focus, but not my only thing and meaning like, does your business own you or do you own your business? And really at this point, I wouldn't have a problem with looking at Saunders from an outside view of being like, okay, yeah, they've got whatever pick a number, half the machine's paid off, half are financed. It's still a very comfortable debt service coverage ratio, meaning they have plenty of cash flow to cover the interest payments.
00:15:22
Speaker
And that's pretty darn common in the manufacturing space. It's not like a truly wise advisor, I don't think would stand up and start congratulating the guy who's never borrowed money at this point. It's not. But to me, it was just different when I got started, I guess. Yeah, no, that's helpful, I think, for a lot of people to hear.
00:15:44
Speaker
We've been cash strapped since the beginning. I mean, less so as we got further along. But from the beginning, it was like, finance every machine as we go, basically. And all the payments were on automatic. So we just kind of paid them every month. Like, we talk about paying them down extra, throwing a lump sum of things. But we've never actually done it so far. But it's something I still consider doing. And our Maury has paid off. Our Nakamura has just about paid off. Tarnos is like, Tarnos is more than halfway.
00:16:14
Speaker
the current is going to take a very long time to pay off, but it's good to know where you're at and that whole debt service ratio is a conversation I've had a lot with the banks and the lenders and our financial advisors that like, what does that mean? Like you said, it's
Balancing Business Growth and Personal Wealth
00:16:30
Speaker
they taken all the factors and it's your ability to pay down the loans and the interest and the safety factor. And if as an owner, if you take out too much dividends, they use that as a factor too. And they're like, well, you took out too much money last year. And I'm like, how does that affect my ability to borrow money? They want you to keep some money in the business, but not too much money in the business. And you can't take it out for yourself too much. And it's this whole balancing act. So like, are you in business for yourself to make a profit? Are you in business for the business to
00:16:58
Speaker
to gain equity and to grow and to be powerful and things like that. Are you in business to make the banks happy so that they can give you whatever you want? This is a game we're playing. Yeah, it is. The more I
00:17:14
Speaker
grow in an age and experience as an entrepreneur, the more I'm comfortable saying, there's things I'm not good at. And I don't have your and any other appetite for like, I don't see risk, because risk just, I think everyone already understands what they think of as risk, and so you don't necessarily think of it with an open mind. But
00:17:33
Speaker
I am a little bit of a wimp when it comes to that stuff. I remember hearing a long time ago, a guy who was like, instead of borrowing money for your first car, work your butt off, waitressing or Ubering and buy that first car for three grand cash. Then all those monthly payments you would have made, set them on autopilot to go
00:17:53
Speaker
direct automatically each month to an online savings account that you don't even log into. And you do that when you're 16, 18, 20. And I'll tell you, man, the world will be kind to you. On that note, I'll flat out admit something I have done that I told you I wouldn't do. So I'm kind of very much wrong here was I told you years ago in this podcast, you know, show me somebody who's built up all this equity and never borrowed money, and then goes and starts borrowing money.
00:18:22
Speaker
I said that that doesn't happen and I'm completely wrong. I've chosen to do that. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. Change your attitude towards things. I think there's a turning point where you
00:18:37
Speaker
shift from a cashflow business to a, well, we want to actually get a half million dollar machine, a million dollar machine. I'm not going to cashflow that. You know what I mean? We can afford the debt easily. We can get approved for it. We can handle the payments very safely, very securely, 5,000 a month, 10,000 a month, whatever it is. We can handle that and we need the growth. We need the production. We have a stable business. This isn't day one for either one of us anymore.
00:19:07
Speaker
Yeah, and yeah, you've reached that point, which is cool to see that it's just a logical business decision, like, yeah, nothing good or bad about it. I really enjoyed the last
00:19:21
Speaker
shop tour video I did with Adam Demuth. I'm comfortable sharing this because it was a topic he and I covered on the video, which is one of our YouTube videos from probably two years ago. He had this wonderful attitude of recognizing that he has the ability to do pretty darn good job shop work or tool and die work and grinding work. He's got a mini mill and he has a really cool, unique
00:19:45
Speaker
Um, kind of like a mini Kern, it's the DMG or maybe it's a Maury, maybe, maybe may predate the merger, but it's a DCG, like it's the dual center gravity, dual ball screw, tiny. Do you know this machine? John, it's like the 12 by 12 travel.
00:20:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's my dirt vertical, but it's a tiny one. But it's like the size of a detron. Yeah, super accurate, super high RPM spindle, one of the tiny HSK 20 type collets or something.
00:20:17
Speaker
But he and I had this kind of conversation where he was kind of like, look, these machines are not going to be part of my retirement plan. They will depreciate to not zero, but close to zero, and they could depreciate to zero, meaning if you wear them out and the repairs cost more than it's worth or you crash them, you can't look at
00:20:36
Speaker
your iron in your shop that currently produces a lot of parts and thus money as your retirement plan. That's a great example for the current, which to me, I think of it as like, holy cow, the holy grail. It's pretty weird to think that that machine will at some point be in a scrapyard.
00:20:53
Speaker
Yeah. Well, hopefully not for decades and decades and decades, but still. Right. But it also speaks to why financing the machine effectively forces you to look at it as a depreciating asset, meaning I make payments each month. I make money with it each month. But ultimately, the payments go away and the machine goes away. It's not like I'm looking at when I turn 65, I can sell it for the fund the next five years of our lifestyle. You know what I mean?
00:21:22
Speaker
Once it's all paid off and then the business views it as depreciated, as zero value, right? Doesn't it? But you know it has, like my Maury, I could get 70 grand for it today, but it's written off, right? It has zero value according to the banks and our business, but we still own it as an asset.
00:21:43
Speaker
Absolutely. So that's the difference between book value and market value. So book value is a tax-driven accounting thing, which is how you handle your... I'm sure I would be shocked if you, Crimson Knives, is not on an accrual kind of tax-based accounting.
00:22:00
Speaker
The machine is worth zero, but it shows up on your balance sheet as what's called accumulated depreciation. But obviously, it's not worth zero. It's very much worth tens of thousands of dollars to your point. But if you sell it, at least in the United States, and I'm not familiar with Canada's tax code in the United States,
00:22:17
Speaker
Because you've depreciated it, depreciation is an expense which reduces your regular business income. If you sell it, it's no different than selling a product for that much money. Let's say you did sell it for $65,000. That's the equivalent of selling $65,000 of Norseman knives with zero costs tied to them from a revenue standpoint.
00:22:44
Speaker
It undoes the tax benefit. You end up paying tax unless you re-buy another machine. I see what you mean. So it's like you're gaining $65,000 of revenue. It is. Yeah. So your tax, the end of the year, your total revenue is profit and everything goes up by $65,000. You have to pay tax on that. Got it. And there's nuances based on whether you're a pass through LLC or an S Corp, but it's generally the same. Interesting. Yeah. And then the other value is the
00:23:13
Speaker
We don't have to get into this too deep, but where's the line between business equity and personal wealth? You know, like all my money is tied up in the business. Yeah. And I have a lot of equity in the business, but it's in machines and tools and I can't pull it out as cash. I can't ever pull it out as cash. You know what I mean?
00:23:32
Speaker
That's something you need to think about because for sure that kind of ties back into what I was saying earlier. It's hard to think about like I'm all in on Saunders. It's not like I'm looking for an out or to sell it or retire or anything like that, but it's also like I'm okay. I hate the word diversify, but it's okay.
00:23:52
Speaker
Yeah. To think about that. Same reason, I think it's 1,000% completely foolish when W2 employees are proud that all their 401k is in their own company's stock. It's like,
Managing Tools and Equipment Efficiency
00:24:07
Speaker
to be blunt, you're an idiot and you're drinking the Kool-Aid. Whether it's the Enron or WorldCom risk of just massive fraud or existential risk that you don't control about regulation or tech stuff like
00:24:18
Speaker
No, no, no, no, no. You can tell me all day long how proud you are of it. I'm not in that. That's foolish. Yeah. Anyway. Anyway. That was cool. All right. That was wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's get technical. Shoot. What was I working on? I don't know. What are you working on?
00:24:40
Speaker
Okay, I got a question for you. Yeah. We are doing great with horizontal. It is going better than I thought in terms of having gotten it tooled up and being productive. Like Arie 409 has really said that they were over, not over one, but they didn't kind of appreciate how much it was going to take. I think we were more ready for it, maybe because of that comment, but also, you know, we pulled some fixtures over. I had done some work ahead of time tooling from the vertical. So we were rock and rolling there. What's kicking our butt?
00:25:08
Speaker
is it's so productive that it's not, I don't have a good system of handling tool life right now. I don't want to like management like you have right yet at least. I just mean tool 110 is our three eighth inch roughing end mill. I've got it doing a bunch of work right now across about two different product lines. I could separate that.
00:25:34
Speaker
an identical tool, just splitting the workload. But my thought is right now I kind of like it because I basically can run parts for two or three days and know, okay, I need to look at, take a look at tool 110. So this idea of like, look, use one tool to do as much as you can run the
00:25:51
Speaker
run the jeepers out of it, but no, it's going to get replaced a lot versus I can have four of them, right? Two roughers, two semi roughers and the finishers kind of last forever, if you will. And that will slow that cycle down. What's your. That's a great question. So, I mean, because you have 200 tools, like 218 John, 210 on my machine. Oh yes. But it's, you don't just want to keep throwing tool holders in the machine.
00:26:19
Speaker
And you don't want to have too many duplicates in there, I've found. So like my T136 is a quarter inch five flute, like regular length from Lakeshore. It's my beater steel. If I have to make fixtures or do anything, I just use that tool for everything steel. It's my rougher.
00:26:38
Speaker
But different programs use it differently. Use just the tip, just the face, just the side flutes. Some are hogging. Some are semi-finishing. Some have different usage case on it. So if one fixture puts 100 minutes on it and the other fixture puts 10 minutes on it but heavier roughing, it's a different use. So as I'm programming, I try to program all the use for that tool similarly so that it wears similarly.
00:27:05
Speaker
Or if I have two completely different use cases for the same end mill, I might separate and have two different tools. Like I have a couple that are different. Like some are meant for super shallow cuts and some are meant for full depth slotting. So I'll separate them. But my point is sister tools are great, but you can't sister tool every tool in the machine.
00:27:29
Speaker
However, the ones that run out every couple of days, I do have a few sisters in there. And even with our tool life monitoring, it's still nice to have that little backup of like, the machine's not going to stop because we ran out by 10 seconds on that tool life. So call the sister automatically. So basically we don't rely on the sisters at all right now. They're like a super backup. Like if we fudged our numbers, but for you, a sister might be a great call for the five to 10 tools that run out quickly.
00:28:00
Speaker
Actually, I'm glad we're talking about this. I was overthinking it because right now, look, I'm taking baby steps. I'm doing things the wrong way because I haven't just stopped to do them the right way. So when I want to look at a tool, I'm calling up into the spindle. I know I could go back around to the machine in the tool matrix and call the tool up just to the matrix station. I'm just not doing that yet. That will save some time, and I could be checking tools while the machine's running.
00:28:29
Speaker
I also am just kind of like, oh, I think tool one 10 should get checked. Uh, what I should do is figure out how to just have a time in the cut, uh, information alarm, keep running it. But then I'm not, then it's, I don't have to try to think about what would be the run for eight hours or is it at 30 hours? I don't, I don't even, because I'm, I've got like four tools now that I keep a little post-it note for him. Like, eh, I should keep, keep an eye on these. Absolutely. I do the same thing. Um, and, and since Angela and I are now both running mostly him actually running and loading the current, but
00:28:59
Speaker
I'll put notes on the door being like, check tool 55. It needs a check. It needs to be visually inspected. And as you're learning your processes and the tool life and the usage case and things like that, there's months of learning involved before you get things so dialed that you're like, oh yeah, that tool, if you replace it at 100 minutes, it's always good. It never breaks.
00:29:20
Speaker
If you start pushing it 150, you're going to have problems. But we're at the point now where we don't break tools. We replace them on schedule. We do what the program tells us to do. And it's just good. Yeah.
00:29:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny. I took that 3-2-1-10 out this morning. I was like, I'm sure I could run it probably all day today and it would be fine, but I'm looking for today to be a smooth sailing day. Not a, you know, I'm on the podcast or on the meeting after this where, you know, the machine stopped because it broke or something.
00:29:51
Speaker
I just replaced it and then Garrett was like, Hey, I'll take that tool. He's like, I know it's a little bit rough, but we've got an application where we don't like, we're okay with that. I was like, Oh my God. That's so funny that I was just, I loved it. That little nugget of like, no, we got, we can use that again. That's awesome. I used to save so many end mills with that theory in mind that, Oh yeah, it'd be fine for a beater and mill for stuff. I don't do that.
00:30:13
Speaker
Oh, yeah. We're not pack rats either. I think he was going to use it right then. Otherwise, they go in the recycle bin. Exactly. But I feel guilty taking a tool out of the current that looks fine. Yes. Any new machinists with a tormac would like
00:30:29
Speaker
pay money for that kind of tool, you know? And here we are recycling it. I remember when I first started out, I had a YouTube subscriber. This is when I had like a hundred subscribers. He sent me like a box of Niagara end mills that were used. To me, they looked brand new, but in his big fancy shop, they were dead. Just like how I am now, I have a box of dead end mills.
00:30:52
Speaker
that are essentially fine for anybody who doesn't care about ultimate surface finish and corner radius and chipping and things like that. So it's cool. Oh, my other thing on my other list, which I haven't done anything with, but we rented that compressed air moisture meter. I only had it for a week and I
00:31:24
Speaker
Didn't pick the best week to rent it. But I realized, OK, well, look, I've got it here. Take your measurements and send it back. So I took three different days of measurements at three different places. And they are, for all intents and purposes, the same, which is, I think, good. The original concern here was, is our new compressor putting out a lot less moisture than our old compressor? And if so, is that a sign that something's wrong?
00:31:53
Speaker
But what I don't have a clue on, and I'd love if anybody listening can chime in on this, was what these values really mean. So that measured relative humidity, dew point, and wet bulb
00:32:06
Speaker
Relative humidity came around, the range was 31 to 42 with most closer to the mid 30s. Dew point was mostly, I track more of these in Fahrenheit, 37 to 42, one was 46. So in Celsius that is 3.2 degrees up to maybe one high, one was 7.8. And then wet bulb in Fahrenheit was
00:32:31
Speaker
all in the mid-50s, 52 to 56 Celsius. That's something like, I think, 11 to 14. I don't really know what to make of that. The goal here was to make sure our compressors are functioning correctly and that we aren't having too much moisture. They both have dryers on them, but they're both wet tanks.
00:32:51
Speaker
hot air from the screw goes into the tank wet, but also gives it a chance in the tank to cool down. By being able to cool down, it is able to hold less water and it's less taxing on the dryer when it goes through the dryer. Okay. But it means you're going to have some kind of rust and you can see it in the tank. There's not like an auto drain at the bottom of the tank that spits out the water?
00:33:18
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. There is. Yeah. But still moisture. Exactly. Yeah. So that's where I'm at. Yeah, we had our oldest Kaiser screw compressor serviced last week. And then the day after the guy leaves, it's all serviced. And then this guy comes over and he's like, it doesn't work anymore. And I think two fuses popped.
00:33:42
Speaker
Um, so he replaced those works fine again. And then the next day the condenser fan for the, um, you know, moisture condenser stopped working too. So all of us are joking, like, is it the service guy that like didn't do a good job or whatever? And so he called them and he's like, no, no, I know, I know that's what it looks like. Obviously it's not, I'll be right back. I'll look at it. Um, and, uh, the fan just wore out the little blowing fan.
00:34:12
Speaker
that keeps the condenser cool or something? I don't know. Close air over the coil or something? Yeah, exactly. You have two? Yeah, we have two. We have one in each building. The old Kaiser 7.5 that we bought used in 2015 has been total solid workhorse, aside from the odd fuse and fan motor.
00:34:34
Speaker
And then the Kaiser SM 10, which we actually had the guys out a couple of weeks ago and we said, just look at it. Look at our shop. Look at our needs. Is it big enough? It runs all the time. Like it's got 15,000 hours on it in two years or whatever it's like.
00:34:51
Speaker
And I did the math. There's, what is it? 18,000 hours in two years and it's run for 15,000 hours. Wow. So it's constantly running, but they said that's what it wants. Those screw compressors, either they want to run all the time or be off. Not the cycling on and off and on and off and on and off too much. And it's got that idle function where if there's no load, no need, it'll idle for the next five minutes until there's still no need and then it will turn off. But that never happens in our shop if the machines are even turned on.
00:35:22
Speaker
Are they linked? No, they're separate. I guess that's things because you don't have redundancy. Correct. How far are feet distance? A hundred foot hose might reach. Yeah, that's pretty far. Yeah, pretty far.
00:35:39
Speaker
But yeah, so we talked to them about do we buy a second identical SM10 or do we have a bigger one and do we daisy chain them and link them and like have them automatically switch from one to the other every first of the month, something like that. And he goes, we can do all of those things. Did you just tell me what you want to spend money on and we'll do it.
00:35:59
Speaker
Because man, air, I've said it before, air is that thing. If there's no air in the shop, everything's dead. Dude, now that we've had our second compressor for six, nine months, I will never go back to having one compressor. Yeah.
00:36:12
Speaker
Um, just way too much. Um, I always kind of told myself that I just could drive over to home depot and buy a five horsepower piston. Um, and I guess that could be done, but like, uh, at this point, like I actually need to do, uh, filter maintenance on the one and so nice to be able to do that in the middle of the day, just isolate it and do what you need to do. How are they plumb together? The two compressors?
00:36:37
Speaker
So they're not, I mean, they're both just, they're kind of opposite ends of the shop and they're just both feed into the rapid pipe or whatever we have. But the, in theory, the new Fiat is supposed to kick on
00:36:53
Speaker
at a higher PSI, so it'll, as the peer pressure's dropping, the Fiat should kick on first. It doesn't actually seem to be doing that. It's something I kind of want to look into, but they both kick on. We don't really need, if I had to guess, there's probably only 5% of the time where we actually need both.
00:37:12
Speaker
or else we would get low air alarms, but we need it. I mean, there's been some times, even once when I did some maintenance and forgot, I kind of was casual about leaving one bald out closed for a while and we tripped an air, a low air alarm. So. So they're, they're kind of both scheduled when not even scheduled. They both turn on often enough that it's not like one is just sitting there doing nothing.
00:37:38
Speaker
I honestly don't have a great answer for that. Our shop's noisy enough to where it's not really possible to listen to which one's on and when. I'd like to have a... I'd love to have a little report. I was even thinking like, man, can I get like an amp meter graph log over time? That'd be sick.
00:37:58
Speaker
I kind of wanted to either alternate or just have the Fiat do the heavy lifting since it's newer. And I could just raise the pressure. For some reason, I think we're getting a fairly big PSI differential throughout the shop, which doesn't really matter because the regulators are below that at most of the machines. But I think that's why the Copco kicks on first, even though the Fiat gets said to kick on at a higher pressure.
00:38:24
Speaker
So keep playing with it. Yeah. But it's, it's one of those things like it's working. So I don't think about it anymore. Even though I should.
00:38:32
Speaker
Well, the weird thing that Garrett saw is that the copco puts out way more water, which is full circle back to why we rented that meter. But I legit think it's just because the copco is running more. If we had, I think if they were both, and maybe that's what we do. Actually, that's a really good point. I think I'll, I need to buy another compressor for the shop next door. I think I'll buy a new Fioc. And then those two can, I think, talk to each other better, I think.
00:38:59
Speaker
Um, to even have a schedule where one week it's the lead the other week, it's the lag. Yeah. So you're saying put the two Fiat's in your main machine shop, put the scope, go in the, in the other building. Yes. Yeah. Do that. That's what I'll do. Cause then you have the full reliability in your production shop. Yes. And the other building is training and having fun.
00:39:24
Speaker
training and videos, um, you know, the tools, research stuff. Yeah. The training classes would not be good if a compressor went down. I mean, not to be naive, but I think that's less likely, but still, I mean, it might be worth getting a little compressor to run a couple of machines. Worst case anyway. Nice. Yeah. What do you have to do today? Today I'm going to continue to pick away at the Wilhelmin. Um, I got to,
00:39:50
Speaker
wire up the 25-pin connector into the machine. I have a handful of pigtail of colorful wires and I got to know which pin out they go to. Not difficult, just got to really focus and get them in the right spot. I was talking with Marcus from Willaman last night just about wrapping up the final little things I got to do. I've got these two small hoses. One does
00:40:14
Speaker
taper blast for the tool changer and one is positive crankcase pressure for the spindle housing. Keep all the crap out of the bearings. Um, I don't know which hose goes to which, so I need his advice as to which is which and then just little things. Um, he said you have to align the reference position before the spindle goes back on. Um, so I'll figure out how to do that. And then both a ball bar test and also a, um,
00:40:43
Speaker
What's it called? A test tool holder? Like the 12-inch gauge length. Yeah, the thing. Test bar. Put that in the tool changer. Indicate it for up and down. Because the B-axis is the spindle rotational axis. It's a totally
00:41:03
Speaker
servo driven device, there's no actual home, there's no physical home, right? It's just like, as I could move it by hand, when I had it all apart, I could just rotate the belt. And I was like, oh, the spindle is moving very, very slowly.
00:41:16
Speaker
but wait, oh no, I just lost my home position, but I don't think it cares. I think it's, yeah, exactly. It's like you put it visually up and down and that's your close to home and then use the test bar to dial it into dead nuts and then you reset your B home and you're done. Um, so I'm close, but it's, it's taken a lot of time.
00:41:39
Speaker
It's okay. Progress. It's okay. Progress. But yeah, I definitely have the thought in the back of my head like, man, I should have just called Wilhelmin to have them come up here and spent the 10 grand and just it'd be done like nine months ago. Why not do it now? I'm so close now. You say that. I know, but I hear you. You're not going to have it running next time we're on the call. Yeah. It's half challenge, half reality. Yeah, exactly.
00:42:09
Speaker
Good. Well, it's exciting. It really is. Yeah,
Project MFG and Modern Machining Skills
00:42:11
Speaker
it is. Before we run out of time, I got a random, literally as random as they come call from, I'm honestly still kind of learning about this, but it's called Project MFG. It's somehow sponsored or involved with the Department of Defense, and it is a competition amongst community colleges or two-year type vocational schools across the country on welding and manufacturing and machining.
00:42:37
Speaker
And I'll tell you, as soon as I started looking at what the machining portion was, it was all yeses because they're doing, you know, not only CNC work, but cam driven multi axis stuff like it's very much
00:42:51
Speaker
Great to see compared to what I often see which seems to be that these Curriculum are so far behind because they're still focused on things that just aren't relevant, you know manual machining and Even handwritten g-code. So I thought that was really cool. But there's it's not funny. It's not a TV show They just I think they just stream it online but they have enough funny where they it's produced like a TV show like really apparently the people that do America's are Ninja Warrior, okay anyway
00:43:20
Speaker
They asked if I would be one of the three judges, but it's in like two weeks in Kansas, and I was kind of like, it's a little tight all the timing, but ultimately when I saw how cool it was with the machining content that they're doing, I was like, this is really cool. That's so cool. I'd rather say yes than say no, and we'll see how it goes. Right. Well, it's one of those, remember back in the day we used to talk about it, it's either a hell yes or it's a no, and this qualifies.
00:43:49
Speaker
Yeah, but look, I really mean this. I don't really care about my exposure, which I think they were excited. I was like, look, I don't care. I like what I'm doing. I don't need this. I want this. But this needs to be about the kids. And it's a weird way. I hope my involvement helps them out, bringing some attention to it.
00:44:10
Speaker
So that is at the end of the day, you know, kind of coming full circle about or was I enjoyed my basement garage and a tormach more than I do today. What I do know I enjoy is like, you know, troll me all you want, say anything you want about me, you know, the fact that more than five kids, 50 kids, 500 kids have, you know, found rewarding careers and paths and pursued manufacturing jobs, businesses, all that. Check the box. We're good. Yeah, absolutely.
00:44:41
Speaker
Yeah. That's very cool, man. Awesome. Cool. Yeah. Anything else? The Yamas and Brothers sales rep is eight minutes out, so I better hang up. Hold on now. No, no, no, no. What was that? Is this a race? We'll leave that nugget for last week. No, it was actually sort of scheduled. Yeah, yeah. So it's more of a get to know you. Right, right. But yeah.
00:45:04
Speaker
Well, if it's a race, I'm going to win. We'll talk about it next week. Win. Win. I want you to smoke me. I want that. Yeah. I want that Willam and cranking out caps. Yeah. I can call it the speedio is what I mean. I know. But all of it. It's like I've got four machines coming, three. Yeah, yeah.
00:45:25
Speaker
with all new controls. Every machine in my shop basically has a different control. Yeah, that's no joke, John. The Wilhelmin is going to be different because it's a six-axis lathe mill hybrid thingy. That's going to be a whole new programming challenge. The Speedio's got its own B00 control or C0, whatever. The Zeiss CMM has its own Calypso control software. Then the CNC router I'm building is going to use a Maso
00:45:51
Speaker
like not Mach 3, it's Masso, it's a different brand. That's a whole other control. And part of me is super duper excited for all of this, but sometimes I step back and I go,
00:46:00
Speaker
That's a lot of new controls to learn. Dude, it's why we just did that post video on all the little tweaks we made to the Okuma post. Nothing was really wrong with it. A couple of things are kind of missing, but boy, it's a lot to integrate that workflow. We got a lot more work ahead of us, but I'm glad we did it the way we did, which is like, I'm not going to worry about some things. I want to get it working, and we'll tweak as we go.
00:46:25
Speaker
I love how we're at the point in business when we know enough. You're like, that's how I want it to act. And I know how to tweak the post to make it act like that. That way, all my machines at least act kind of the same, even if the interfaces are totally different and the buttons and layout and everything. All right. Cool. Take care. I'll see you. Thanks.