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#348 Bad fixtures are bad!
412 Plays1 year ago
TOPICS:
- Grimsmo's CMM is producing interesting results!
- Bad fixtures are bad!
- Probing too much isn't always a good thing
- Personal goal failures
- "The Machine That Changed the World" book
- The era of lean manufacturing
- Mailcall request - businessofmachining@gmail.com
- Mentors and advisors
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction of the Hosts
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machine episode number 348. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. And John and I talk each week trying to both share and keep each other up to date on our businesses as well as a level of accountability and goals for where we're headed.
00:00:22
Speaker
How are you doing? Good. Yeah. Yeah.
Thanksgiving Vacation Reflection
00:00:25
Speaker
Good. We had American Thanksgiving. I took a change things up and took a vacation with the family and went to the beach. Amazing. Yeah, it was great. I mean, it's not a huge, I don't have a huge family. It's not a huge thing. So it wasn't controversial in that sense per se. Yeah.
00:00:45
Speaker
a combination of why not and also we generally don't love pulling the kids out of school. We actually did. I'm a big, big fan of travel smart. So we did not want to travel on the travel high travel day. So we left a day early and sure enough got along great on traveling and had a really good time. That's good.
00:01:09
Speaker
It was actually too much time away. I was so focused on the joy of knowing that, hey, we're doing this. And we went for six days, and four days would have been great. Great. Yeah. Good to know. Yeah. That's cool.
00:01:27
Speaker
I would have actually, with the benefit of hindsight, I really, not because I, you know, couldn't, I would have rather been home and off work or something, you know what I mean? Yeah. But anyways, it was good. Good. Good. No. How you doing? Things have been good here. Busy, busy.
Company Culture and Hiring Insights
00:01:46
Speaker
Lots of little things. Angela and I are really trying hard to, we're hiring a new person and going through some interviews and trying to figure out what is the future of the company and what's the culture and what are we trying to build? What are we trying to do going forward? So I've been spending tons of time thinking and chatting with him and other people about that. It's been really good and insightful. Sometimes you don't step back enough and get the overarching view.
00:02:15
Speaker
Like what are we doing? What do we want to be doing? Yeah, and what are we doing? Well, what are we doing poorly kind of thing? Yeah, and it got to the point where I am in our Monday meeting the other day.
Lean Principles and Manufacturing Issues
00:02:25
Speaker
I brought up the lean eight deadly wastes Because we used to talk about them on every meeting just bring them up and give an example of one or many of them
00:02:34
Speaker
And we haven't for a year or two. And I kind of miss it. And we've hired several new people since then. So some of the people haven't even heard it before. So it was really good to go over it. And I kind of basically said, real quick, defects, overproduction, waiting, overprocessing, inventory, transportation, motion, and unused employee potential.
00:02:54
Speaker
And I basically said to everybody, we're guilty of all of these in different areas. And that's just the nature of manufacturing and continual improvement lets us view it and see if it can get better and things like that. But a couple of things like there's a part on the Norseman knife that we've
00:03:12
Speaker
We've been doing it wrong and we don't know why for a long time.
Norseman Knife Production Challenges
00:03:16
Speaker
And it's, it's causing more defects and scrap than we're comfortable with. Like a lot more, um, to the point where they, they don't go together consistently. So there is a variable somewhere and we haven't been able to find it. That's why we bought the CMM is to be able to find that. Right. I was going to say, I don't remember the issue, but I remember you, I do remember this like a year ago, still dealing with that to a degree. And, um,
00:03:42
Speaker
Sky and Eric and Larry and Gabe up front, they basically all came to me and they're like, we're frustrated. And I go, okay. And they're like, only Eric can work the magic to make these knives work. And it's not scalable, not sustainable. And many of them don't work anyway. Like the lock will fail. Obviously, we only ship a knife where the lock works, but that means our scrap pile is growing faster than it should.
00:04:09
Speaker
And it's been bugging me for a long time and I couldn't find what's different about these two blades that scan on the CMM, very similar. And so I spent hours at home thinking about it, literally pacing around my house when everybody else is asleep and just crunching it through my head. Okay, what is it? What is it? What is it? And I finally came to the conclusion that there's two dimensions we're not comparing properly.
00:04:35
Speaker
Two dimensions were not compared properly. Okay. Because when you open the knife, the lock bar moves over and gets in the way of the blade from closing so that it's locked. And Eric does a test where he spine wax the knife and basically opens the knife and beats it against a piece of wood, making sure the lock won't fail in an extreme scenario. And that's a pass fail test. And too many of them fail.
00:05:00
Speaker
I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about it. And the lock face of the blade is an actual radius. It's a one inch radius curved feature on purpose. But quite small. It's almost hard to see. Eighth inch wide blade. Some people do it straight taper angle, 7, 8 degrees, whatever. We choose to use a radius. I have my reasons for that. But we measure that radius in the CMM, and we track that. We have been for 2,000 blades now.
00:05:31
Speaker
and that varies a little bit due to tool wear and things like that, but that's not the issue. The issue is, where is that radius in space compared to the top plane? Like a Gs and T type issue. Is the center point of that radius compared to the top plane higher or lower, which affects your taper angle, your radius angle. Sure. And that's a feature we haven't been looking at specifically. So in Fusion, it says it's 59 thou.
00:05:59
Speaker
whatever that number means, but 59 thou above the nominal surface of the blade. So then what's cool is I was able to go to Angelo and explain my case and say, let's look at a scan that you've done from before. And can you reanalyze these two features and give me that number? And yes, we can. So we have 2000 blades worth of scan results that we can one by one go through and achieve this number. Um,
00:06:27
Speaker
And there's actually four ways in the Xi software to achieve this number. And they all give slightly different results. So that's the interpretive answer, right? But I was like, okay, here's eight blades that were made on one fixture. Show me this number I'm looking for for all eight. Let's compare them. Here's a blade from Eric that works great first try. And here's a blade from Eric that failed on eight knives.
00:06:49
Speaker
tell me the number of those two, right? So that was my weekend and early this week kind of process so far of analyzing and figuring out and crunching my head around like what's different? We have a current, we have a CMM, we have expert people here. Why is one blade different than another and we can't figure out why? And I think we're starting to figure out why.
00:07:13
Speaker
Okay, so you don't have- I don't have answers yet, but we've looked at like three or four blades so far, and there's enough variation so far to know like, whoa, whoa, we got to dig into this hard. So I actually put a hard stop on Norseman Productions until we figured this out. Interesting.
Decision to Halt Production for Quality Improvement
00:07:30
Speaker
Which was a bold move, let's just say. We've left with some murmurs in the meeting, but it's okay because A, we have a good amount of inventory.
00:07:42
Speaker
We have a good amount of knives ready to sell. We're good for a month if we made no more parts. Let's figure this out. We can't keep making bad parts. It's almost putting that pressure on me and on the team to it's crunch time. We're not making more parts until we figure this out, which is sometimes necessary. It's a fun,
00:08:05
Speaker
that I'd love to come back to on this. So assume for the sake of the question, you've got a hole. Let's say that that's the critical feature, the hole, and then 59 tile above it or whatever, this one inch radius feature, OD feature. Are those two key features being cut in the same fixture, same operation? No, currently.
00:08:34
Speaker
Yeah. And so there's like, what is happening? There's what is right, what, what gives Eric the result he wants. And then there's the why, you know, what, where, when, why, how kind of thing. Um, and I think I need to confirm this, but I think the cause, the root cause is the tombstone fixture that I've made. Um,
00:08:58
Speaker
It's basically a rectangle, right? And I have two blades mounted on each of the four faces. So there's eight blades mounted. But the two blades
Fixture Design and Production Consistency
00:09:05
Speaker
on one face, one is 180 degrees from the other. So I have a pattern fusion, pattern tool path infusion that patterns the same thing over. And then there's four sides. And on a five axis with a palette, if there's a chip under the pad or whatever, there could be tilt difference between every path. There could be loading differences between different blades, although I am probing and comping for that.
00:09:28
Speaker
But I think the nature of the fixture, the accuracy of the fixture, the probing and over probing and overcompensating combined with five axis tilts, plane spatial compensation, I think all of this stuff is just causing too much variation and I should be able to prove that with measurement results.
00:09:48
Speaker
Yes. That's what I'm thinking. Okay. Yeah. We've spent, it probably doesn't come through because it's not necessarily the top podcast subject du jour, but we have changed
00:10:02
Speaker
all of our fixturing, I mean so much of it to recognize how bad fixtures are, meaning stacking the deck in our favor. So critical, you can design excellent features that one thinks are rigid.
00:10:20
Speaker
but the reality is we will go to extreme lengths to design simple fixtures. They may be difficult to come up with, but they end up being simple. You've seen a lot of those 3D printed clamps I've kind of shared privately.
00:10:35
Speaker
And all of that has to do with the fact that we have, I usually am playing with the Okuma horizontal. So basically machine tool, not a problem. Overall machine stability, rigidity, fixture, tombstone rigidity, not a problem. Tooling, pretty good. But the reality was
00:10:55
Speaker
Let's just say you take a typical part and do op one and then flip it to do op two. There's something I didn't appreciate in the beginning and frankly, I'm continuing to appreciate is how difficult it is at the levels that we want to work with.
00:11:14
Speaker
to not just in the nominal accuracy, but just how much it will repeat and vary. In the beginning, we were big fans of things like probing and G68, how easy Fusion did it and how cool Renishaw is. We do still do that in certain products, but we're very deliberate with how we do that.
00:11:36
Speaker
It's also, there's something to be said for quote unquote probing is slow. Uh, no, we're not, we're also not running a race. So it's kind of an, okay. But, um, I have found so much better to spend the upfront effort to design something that is, um, you know, bulletproof, pokey.
Manufacturing Approaches: Asian vs Western
00:11:56
Speaker
Okay. Like it can't do it incorrectly. Yes. Yes. Rambling here, but yeah, I love it. I love it. Um,
00:12:02
Speaker
And I'll continue. So Greg Luma Labs on Instagram, he's, he works at Yamazin. He's like the brother speedio Lord now. Um, he basically said, I'm paraphrasing and I'm generalizing, but he's like, nobody in Asia uses probes.
00:12:18
Speaker
They all just develop overbuilt fixtures that just work. They're tolerance properly. They're fixed properly. And I'm pulling probing off of the current in a couple of areas. Like when we grind the blade bevels on the rasp blade, I used to rough mill, probe, finish mill, probe.
00:12:40
Speaker
rough grind probe, finish grind probe and it's too much and it jumps all over the place and I end up comping the next blade which is irrelevant because it's on a different fixture, it's on a different thing and just last week I stopped probing
00:12:57
Speaker
And I was like, now that we have a rougher grid grinding wheel that's not going to wear down and load up as much, we don't probe. And we're holding way better accuracy than we've ever had by probing every single blade and trying to chase our tails. And same thing on the Nakamura. We used to probe every part and comp the next part. And it works. But it works for thermal. But that's linear and plateaus, thermal comp. But as far as probing every part, you chase your tail too much.
00:13:26
Speaker
And like we found those, some of the new fixtures are working.
00:13:33
Speaker
ish. And that's not acceptable. Interesting. What I found is we don't have to do a lot of work on the part with some of these fixtures. So you work piece security need not be the same as when we rough them in dual station mod vices with our castle grips, town grips, where we're whaling on the part. We do all the dumb work there and leave three thou or so
00:14:03
Speaker
And the problem with the new fixture that I was literally dealing with this morning is that it works unbelievably beautifully and all of a sudden it won't work. And what I believe that we're seeing is there are certain frankly unpredictable times where the tool pressure probably from a face note, which certainly makes sense because of the larger diameter of it will cause the part to just change how it's sitting in the fixture.
00:14:33
Speaker
To be clear, what we're talking about here is 7 tenths of tip or pull or twist. Like a permanent move? Like it slides? Rocks.
00:14:47
Speaker
Interesting. Because I'm holding on effectively ID clamps. And so they should be able to hold quite well. We are in a little bit of a compromise situation. Like I said, it works a bunch until it doesn't. And that's the same as it not working, period. I don't want that because it scraps parts. And it's just not like I'm over. That's not going to happen anymore.
00:15:11
Speaker
But we don't have we, we want access, we want the unicorns here, we want access to the full top surface of the part, and we want access to two of the four sides. So I do have two additional outside faces that I can clamp on. And so
00:15:31
Speaker
First step I'm doing is I'm actually just remaking the fixture today or having the guys remake the fixture with a couple of minor changes that I think will actually help it. I don't know if they'll solve it, but that's an easy first choice. Then the other option would be to use the ID clamps as the primary for colding. And then we would add effectively a small uni-force that would act as a force multiplier, both literally and figuratively. And I suspect that will work.
00:16:02
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, just to hold it in place. It's frustrating and interesting chasing, chasing microns basically is what we're doing. Like on the current pallet changer, we have two sizes of pallets. We have our 148 mil pallets and the 72 mil pallets, like a six inch and a three inch little pallet. So the little pallets, we use them all the time.
00:16:24
Speaker
Since not probing the blades, I had just asked this morning, I was like, so how's consistency been? And they're like, good, except for this one pallet has been a little bit off every now and then. And I just, it happened to be on a bench. I happened to look at it and there happens to be a chip stuck to one of the bottom feet. And I was able to just kind of smudge it off with my finger and I'm like, how long has that been there? And then I looked under and the pad is dented. It's this hardened steel pad, but it's dented. And so I'm like, okay, so it's no longer flat.
00:16:53
Speaker
Stop for a minute. Let's take a breath. Oh, no. I'm late for my podcast. Sorry. No. But it leads to awareness because the guys loading the machine are like, OK, load parts and put in the machine. Go. We need to continually add checks for them and things to be aware of and wipe the pads every time. And a couple of years ago on the current, I established a.
00:17:18
Speaker
between every pallet change, empty the chuck and do a spray down with through-spindle coolant, wash all those chips away, air blast them all away, and it adds like two minutes for every pallet change, but I don't care because it eliminated a lot of chip problems. But clearly, we still have some. You're still doing that, but you're still getting some chips. Exactly. Yeah. And like you said, some is too many. Yeah. Some is not working.
00:17:46
Speaker
So this is a story here about a bunch of different topics that all kind of converged together, which includes vacation and my failures this year, personal goal failures of reading books and I'm okay with it, but like I'm just owning up to it. I told myself that's something I wanted to try to do and I just don't. I get up early and I've been very good and disciplined about practicing piano between that and then my morning routine with like the kids and breakfast. I just don't
00:18:16
Speaker
find the time to read. So you kind of like, okay, accept that trade off. And then at night, I watch TV, just to be honest, like, why didn't I enjoy it? Like, not gonna, I could probably compromise read for 10 minutes. But haven't gotten in that routine. So I did pick up a book on the way out the door for vacation. And it was the machine that changed the world.
00:18:39
Speaker
Okay. I don't know if I forgot this one. It is the academic research book that turned into more of a nonfiction book for you would want to be interested in some amount of lean production of business. It's not like a novel, but it's not an analytical research paper either. It is the story of
00:19:01
Speaker
effectively Detroit versus Japan, mass production versus lean production throughout the history of our industry in the 20th century. I'm sure at some point somebody recommended it, which is why it was on my bookshelf.
00:19:21
Speaker
You know, what stinks about what I'm about to say is that it's my own hypocrisy. Like, I want to sit here and tell you how ecstatic I am that I was I'm almost sure I'm not quite done. Like, I loved it. I want to recommend it. I want to encourage you, but I can't take my own medicine. So yeah, but uh,
00:19:40
Speaker
I mean, I could spend the rest of this podcast or sharing some of what I learned, which I won't. But a couple of things. Number one, something I'd like to ask of you in this podcast is help push me to either read books. And one way to do that is, frankly, just jealousy. Like if I hear you talk about a book you've read and how it's helping you, that's going to motivate me to pick up a little bit.
00:20:02
Speaker
But there were also a lot of fringe knowledge things about both mass production and lean that I now have a much better understanding of. And that makes me really happy that I read it. It's not a particularly long book either, by the way.
00:20:19
Speaker
And there have been a number of things that we're already doing here that are, quote unquote, lean by nature, which makes me really proud and happy. There's some things that we are going to do better. And that's, you know, when just stuff clicks and you know,
00:20:37
Speaker
You know, look, I think Jay Pearson and now Andrew kind of have, have cornered that space in this, in our little online world. And so I'm a little bit hesitant to start putting on the lean hat. More is better. Like more perspectives from everybody is better. I found a channel on Instagram or on YouTube last night, wire cutters or something like that. Um, and they're, they make, um, steal great fencing.
00:21:02
Speaker
There's 200,000 square foot factory in the state somewhere. They've got these 59 second lean videos on YouTube that are fantastic. What's it called? I think it's called wire cutters. What would be another search term? Fence company or something? Good question. Do lean. Wire cutters, lean.
Exploring Lean Culture and Practices
00:21:26
Speaker
I won't start taking a look at that. I can't find it because I spelled it wrong.
00:21:31
Speaker
Wire cutters. Maybe it's not wire cutters. We'll tell you what, we'll find it in the description. Yeah. It was wire something for sure. Just do wire lean maybe. Yeah, it's wire crafters. That's the one. Bingo. And their thumbnails are great. And it says lean. Yeah. And they're cool. They're quick little videos, very Paul Akers style about how they're doing lean in their company.
00:21:57
Speaker
Last night, it got me thinking about this, so it's so funny you bring it up tonight, today, this morning. Lean is that sort of seductive thing that every time it comes to my attention, I'm like, oh, we should do more of that. Yeah, yeah. And then you kind of don't, or you do some of it, you don't do all of it. And I don't know if I see a future where I'm like full Paul Akers or full Jay Pearson. That's my life now.
00:22:20
Speaker
But it doesn't matter because progress is progress. Continual improvement is the goal of everything. And I just want to get a little bit better. Something Angelo says to our team all the time is 1% better every day. So after a year, you're 300% better.
00:22:36
Speaker
Yeah, when I like this book, because it's old, they did a 2007 update in the beginning of the end. So it has some more relevance than certainly a book from the late 80s, which is a very different world. But it's before a lot of the MBA buzzwords took over. So there's no five s or three s or eight sins is none of that. It's truly
00:23:01
Speaker
the extremes of the Ford, Henry Ford method of vertically integrate everything and then let's build, I'm going to exaggerate a smidge, but let's build a dedicated stamping factory that has a dedicated press for every machine, every part so that we have one
00:23:17
Speaker
100,000 pound press that only makes door handles. It's only going to make door handles for the next 10 years. To do maintenance on it, we have a dedicated maintenance team. To do a part changeover, we have the dedicated tooling team. To do clean in and other stuff, we have a dedicated team. Take the extreme opposite, again, paraphrasing. Japan post-World War II didn't have anything. They didn't have any steep material. They didn't have any people. They didn't have any real estate.
00:23:43
Speaker
And so if you're the Toyota founder and you're trying to build a car, you need to take a stamping press and you need to be able to have a die set that can do part A and then pull that out and do part B without taking two days to change it over and having a three week part runoff where you're continually finding mistakes or over producing those bad parts only to find out three months later they're all scrapped. So, and it's kind of, I kind of like it because
00:24:13
Speaker
It's not like they sat down and realized they're going to do lean because they're smarter or more. Yeah. They're full of wisdom. It's more like, no, this has just made sense. And it's the simplicity and that part of it, you know, the.
00:24:29
Speaker
laying it out on paper with the benefit of hindsight, knowing that Detroit took two days to change a die and you had lots of problems when it were first running off, whereas Japan invested the upfront time to able to change a die in three minutes with minimal hassle.
00:24:48
Speaker
and then you can make a few parts, put them on the car, test them, and iterate more often, change the car. It ties in with the marketing aspects, the customer offerings, your real estate, your capital.
00:24:59
Speaker
I alluded to some changes I think last week. I don't think it was after we kind of hung up the recording, but we are considering some major equipment changes and subconsciously or semi-consciously what I realized is a big part of that is consolidating a number of machines down to one that is, it is the three minute eye change.
00:25:22
Speaker
It's not necessarily perfect for any one part. It's more expensive than I'm frankly comfortable with. And it's putting your eggs in one basket. But it is that idea of, no, we can produce anything we need. And it's a simple minutes to switch between parts. That maybe just all of a sudden, oh my gosh, yes. Yep. Yeah, like our Swiss lathe could take, our worst part takes a day to set up and then another day to prove out.
00:25:52
Speaker
gone. I'm sorry. Which is why I love the Wilhelmin so much and the concept of the Wilhelmin is that should be like a few minutes to change. Call it and vice jaws and hit go kind of thing. All the tools are loaded, everything's going. That's my dream kind of machine and that's what those mill turn style machines can get you theoretically. Kind of the same thing on the Kern because we have the palette changer and we have up to 200 tools, always loaded, always ready.
00:26:19
Speaker
We just put new work in and hit go. It's ready. It's there versus a three axis with bad fixturing, which is why fixturing companies exist. It takes so long. You got to load new tools. You got to load new fixtures. You got to align them. You know the rule. It made me smile because it's something I've
Role of Automation in Manufacturing
00:26:43
Speaker
Always challenged about automation for a company like ours. You see it with our friends like Dennis and Lawrence who are running job shops with robots and cells and so forth.
00:26:53
Speaker
It changes your part production capabilities or the machine that's spent a lot of time capabilities, but it also involves lots of skilled labor and engineering and automation intelligence in both before and during the project. I liked how this book directly addresses
00:27:13
Speaker
the fallacy. I'm not saying the automation is bad. I love it in a lot of forms, but replacing certain operational roles or work roles just to hire more expensive engineers might scale well, but it isn't necessarily work well in certain sizes to have on-staff FANUC experts or integrators and troubleshooters. I liked how they talk about how Toyota
00:27:38
Speaker
has a ton of baseline automation and stuff, but they actually have made a decision of a lot of things that don't make sense to automate.
00:27:48
Speaker
It got me fired back up to both, integrate some of that stuff. One of the things was as simple as like move a small support machine 30 feet across the shop floor to the guy that actually uses it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I was talking about this last week with the guys is when you place a piece of equipment, even a small lightweight thing, that's its home. No, we were talking about at home, Meg and I. You place a sofa there, you're like, that's where it lives. And who thinks to move a sofa?
00:28:14
Speaker
It's like when you're a kid and you get angry and you rearrange your room and your bed's now on the other side, like, I like it better this way. This is great. The other wonderful takeaway, this almost makes you want to throw up.
00:28:32
Speaker
Detroit in Western auto production had, and European, frankly, as well. The book spends a bunch of time trying to make sure it's not a cultural wars piece of like that country. But I'm not interested in the geopolitical. Yeah, or, you know, putting on my, like,
00:28:53
Speaker
Kindness gloves, I'm just saying the facts about what was it. Mass production and often what's all in US and Europe had something like 30 to 40% of vehicles left the assembly line and went straight to the rework department. Oh my goodness. To fix countless mistakes that are so much harder to fix at that point.
00:29:13
Speaker
And it speaks, the book spoke a lot more than I've seen in other, some of the lean topics about lean, not just from put machine A next to machine B, but also the culture and how you hire and job responsibilities and expectations and how you, what you ask of the team and how decisions are made that I think for me was missing. I needed to, I need to learn more about that and how
00:29:39
Speaker
In Japan, they were able to produce more efficiently, more nimble, with much higher quality, with a much better feedback loop when there were chronic problems. And I know you've talked a little bit about how you're not loving your scrap rates, and I don't know all the details of it. And I don't think either one of us are the idea of like, hey, let's make 300 mod devices or 300 endorsement and then start figuring out if we have a goof. That's not how we've ever run. Nevertheless, kind of ties will circle back to this idea of like,
00:30:07
Speaker
Let's pull the assembly line e-stop and stop making the Norseman. We're going to fix this. I've heard about that. I read it in a book or something. Definitely lean manufacturing. Maybe it was in the goal or something like that. But if there's a problem, full stop. The assembly line stops, which causes everybody to get hungry because the next guy's waiting for a part. And then everybody heads together, pencils down kind of thing, and attacks the problem, which
00:30:33
Speaker
I've been super hesitant to do for so long and I was like, we're fine. We have parts. We'll be good for a week, a month, I don't know, and we'll fix it and we'll figure it out. And even in the first day, I learned a lot that I've been avoiding. And honestly, I knew this would be a big challenge and I've been avoiding it and very happy I finally took it off. When Sky came up to me and said, we're frustrated, I'm like, okay, it's my frustration now. Okay, let's do this. Right.
00:31:00
Speaker
Yeah, these are not, I mean, I enjoy what I do. I'm proud of what we built. I think some of the best advice I've heard from folks about being an entrepreneur is being willing to listen to others and recognize what you're not good at. And there's for you and me both,
00:31:19
Speaker
because of our roles, our positions, our tenures here, it becomes more difficult to change things up or admit you're wrong or recognize we have
Leadership Challenges and Adaptation
00:31:27
Speaker
a problem. And I don't want to be like that. I just think, again, if you had hired a very seasoned person to come in and take over,
00:31:35
Speaker
of course they're going to do things differently, but the point isn't that they will because they're a different person, different experience, but they won't be burdened with some of the things that you and I think about. Having built this from nothing, wanting that to work or just different. I think we need more of that in our lives, Sean.
00:31:56
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with you. More perspective and let people run with it more, even if it's not the way you would have done it. I'm seeing that in myself and I'm seeing that in those around me and I'm allowing myself to let those things slide and let them happen and be like, oh, he did a great job. Totally different than I would have done, but it's done and I didn't have to touch it. Oh, that's amazing. More of that please. Yeah.
00:32:19
Speaker
On that note, I want to do something on the podcast. We maybe have done in the distant past of mail call.
Engaging Listeners with Mail Call Segment
00:32:29
Speaker
I want to encourage and ask viewers to email us in.
00:32:35
Speaker
questions or things that they'd like us to cover or answer. They can be questions about either one of our businesses or the podcast or to accept possible questions about their business with some limit on how much we can learn or dive in and offer any decent advice.
00:32:51
Speaker
I also bring this up genuinely, not with the intent of driving to our Patreon, but I will also say if you want to support what we do, all we do for the Patreon is roll into the minor amount of production costs that we have for this podcast. I enjoy not having it be a commercialized podcast and the intent is not a charity request.
00:33:14
Speaker
But we also appreciate the folks on Patreon. And without apology, we'll give first priority to the folks that want to be a small investment in what we're doing here. And on an upcoming episode, let's do mail call and dive into some questions. Love it. What's the email you want people to reach out to? businessofmachining at gmail.com. I hope you guys can remember that listening to this podcast. Perfect.
00:33:42
Speaker
The other thought, I think we should do them. It was actually my wife's idea, so credit to Yvonne. I think we should do it as an upcoming episode. The other thing you and I could do is we could pre-report a mail call episode at some point and keep it in the bag for when we are off a week. Yeah, we used to do that. Did we? We've done a couple emergency episodes. Oh, man. Years ago, four years ago kind of thing. I don't even remember.
00:34:06
Speaker
And they expire sometimes like i remember we had to make it generic we could post it in six months and it won't be like what do you yesterday but no i love it i love it we could work it into our next episode or whenever we can but it's always interesting to see what people are curious about or want to know more about it so i can i give a shop tour here people ask questions i never thought of before i was like.
00:34:33
Speaker
or things that are so obvious to me that, you know, my uncle comes by and gets a tour and he's like, why do you have tape around all the machines? And I was like, Oh, so that the guy running that machine is responsible for cleaning that cell and everything common area. We all clean. Yeah. And he's like, yeah, that makes sense. I would never think to explain that in an Instagram post or a video, like we just do it. Yeah.
00:34:55
Speaker
And that's very rewarding to just share stuff that helps other people. Like that's the fuel of life of paying it forward and leaving the world a better place.
00:35:06
Speaker
Yeah. But I also, same contact info, would like some recommendations on books. I'm just finishing up this machine that changed the world. I'd like to read more relevant, actionable books on lean culture and lean production because it's
00:35:28
Speaker
I would love to spend, we need to get Gen 3, my advice is like really rock and roll. We had one fixture setback last week, unrelated to one I'd mentioned, no big deal. It'll get fixed. We chose to not worry about getting those done for the holiday season because it doesn't need to be.
00:35:50
Speaker
mod vices, puck chucks, which are going well, lots more. We could talk about that maybe next week, but those need to get through more work and process. Then I could spend all of 2024 just
00:36:03
Speaker
join stuff like this. And then frankly, if we do the equipment change up, actually I'll throw out a little teaser. We have a page on our Saunders Machineworks.com website. I think it's in the, Alex put it in the footer of the website, but it's equipment for sale. The plan and intent, and hopefully some of those are up as soon as this podcast is airing, may include Tormach machines, Haas five-axis machines, compressors,
00:36:33
Speaker
I'll share more candidly down the road. Some of the long-term plans are not nailed down, but intent is not to be elusive, but rather we are going to be moving some iron. Nice. I like the Tormach CNC mill for one cent. Placeholders. Yeah, sorry. I need to get that fixed. Cool.
00:37:02
Speaker
You have to step back and realize that nothing is permanent and we're allowed to change and modify things as we see fit. Sometimes you don't have the perspective to be like, wait, if we did change that, sell that and get that, we'll change everything. Why was he struggling with that? Why was he still making bad Norseman blades when we could stop production and fix this? I think I'm very close to that. It's good.
00:37:26
Speaker
What else? Oh, yeah. I had a conversation with an entrepreneur who's got a lot more going on on their plate in terms of the companies are running and so forth. Pretty, pretty legitimate operation. And they said something. It wasn't in passing, but it was close to being in passing.
00:37:52
Speaker
That is another one of those things that I don't know what the answer is, but it's something I want to solve. They used to have a mentor and advisor that was involved. I don't know why, but it was no longer involved. And that person pushed them.
00:38:12
Speaker
challenge them in the right way, ask them the right questions, gave them a sense of accountability. It wasn't their boss. It wasn't anything like that. And that is juxtaposed with sometimes wanting to be
00:38:31
Speaker
more collegial or friendly as a cultural thing versus pushing employees. It's something that I think I need to do a better at job, both me downward to within the organization or within the team. Downward is certainly not the right word, but you get the point. Even more importantly,
00:38:49
Speaker
It's that peril of not having, you know, board of advisors, directors, a boss, even lenders really that are like, hey, you need to explain this income statement, like what's going on. I wish I had more people that were truly challenging me. Yeah. Yeah. And it's hard. Like, like, we can't even really do it to each other. We're, we've got a relationship. We've got, we're friends, right? Yeah. I actually had this, I had a,
00:39:18
Speaker
Mentor I don't think he was ever a customer, but he was in the scene for sure 2014 ish somebody I met at a knife show
00:39:28
Speaker
wealthy real estate guy, really good at business. He'd done this for a couple other knife makers with varying results. He didn't live close, so we did emails and phone calls often. He really pushed me almost to the point like it broke our relationship because the push was so hard, but for a good six months there.
00:39:51
Speaker
It caused me to see things and do things that I would never have done on my own. It caused me to be accountable to him. He's like, you have to email me every Friday morning at 8 AM no matter what. If you're late, this deals off. I won't help you anymore if you're late. You have to tell me what the plan is for the week, and you have to tell me what you did, and you have to tell me if you're happy or not, things like that. That's even more detail than I'm looking for. This was me and Eric in the garage days.
00:40:22
Speaker
And he did another thing where he's like, you need to spend the last half hour of every day or once a week or whatever and call your customers. No reason, just call them and be like, hey, John, how do you, how do you like your knife? Like what's going on? And that was at a time when I was super shy and super nervous, still am quite a bit, but now I can do no problem. But that was at the time when it was like hard to pick up the phone and call a customer. And he knew the benefits from that. And he knew it would build me and it would build the customer base and it did. And it worked.
00:40:52
Speaker
That's like the hidden advice. I've never told anybody that because it left sour. It ended kind of weird with him for a lot of reasons. I don't talk about it much. He was the guy that had the best of intentions, didn't want anything out of it. There's no money exchanged. He just wanted to see me grow and he wanted to help and use his knowledge and experience and push me. He did. I appreciate it greatly.
00:41:20
Speaker
I was having that sort of, certainly not that level of period like weekly updates, but I had sort of a bounce back and forth relationship with somebody and then that relationship came up with another sort of friend or mentor who flat out just said, you are just picking people that you think are either like-minded or will reaffirm stuff.
00:41:45
Speaker
I mean, the actual reaction is to take offense to that and to challenge it. But I think the second level way of reacting to that is to sit back and think, okay, why are they saying that? Like maybe they have a point, I don't actually have to agree with them or you change anything, but like to not be so arrogant and not say, well, is that true? Because you want people that will
00:42:09
Speaker
It's a fine balance. Like I sort of said to you, I sometimes I think I come off as too abrasive or rough to you. But the point is, let's leave it better than you found it. Well, yeah. And if I die, of course, there's the sorrow of losing a friend, but it's also like, man, this is one of those moments where I wish I could bounce some things off of
00:42:30
Speaker
I knew he wouldn't just say what I wanted to hear. It would be that answer I needed to know of. You take that into account. It doesn't have to be the decision.
00:42:39
Speaker
And the same thing for a leadership role. You're in a leadership role. I'm in a leadership role now. And we have that accountability to our team, to our staff, of saying what needs to be done. And frankly, I'm not very good at it. But I'm much better than I was five years ago. Way better. And I'm continuing to get better. And I see it in myself now. And I feel bad when I didn't say what I should have said kind of thing. I'm growing. And it's cool. And I'm building the people around me that are able to do that as well. And we can all drive each other.
00:43:09
Speaker
Yeah. It's good stuff. Um, it's good stuff. Yeah. We have to, uh, we have today. So today, um, ordering, so we added a OMP OPT laser to our CNC router last February or whatever. Uh, it's been working awesome. Um, but it just stopped working like last week.
00:43:32
Speaker
No explanations, just stop working. We're digging through all the wires, did a wire break, continuity checks from everything, emailed them what's going on. They gave me a whole list of things to check. I'm at the machine, I'm checking continuity of wires, and the guys are like, we've already done that. I was like, okay, but I need to answer their questions specifically, so I'm going to do it again. A little bit of overworking there.
00:43:57
Speaker
It turns out it has signal voltage to the head, which tells them and us that the head is the laser body, diode, circuit board, whatever is faulty somehow. Whatever. You can order another one. They gave me a discount code because it's a replacement kind of thing. Then I'll send this one back for repair and then I'll have two. No warranty.
00:44:18
Speaker
No, apparently not. I don't know, actually. I didn't think too hard about that. One year wouldn't be crazy, but maybe. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. They didn't mention it. Whatever. It's not that expensive. Yeah, it kind of sucks because we're out a laser and I was like, well, we really use this. It was working good, yeah. It was working great.
00:44:38
Speaker
And this whole conversation of lasers has me thinking about fiber lasers more and more and more, and we still don't have one. And the more I think, the more I'm like, God, if we had one, we'd use it for all kinds of stuff. So now that you have one, how much do you use it? I've never touched it. Use a company. Every puck chuck itself gets it. And then the puck chuck has different pull studs for different purposes. And so the pull studs are also marked, I believe.
00:45:08
Speaker
Have you ever, as the team, gotten a little wild and crazy with it and you start laser engraving your calipers with your name on it or stuff? You're not playing. You're using it for production, which is good. We could. I think Alex is probably the only one who knows how to run it. If there are smart ways to do it, that's great.
00:45:29
Speaker
A big part of what I'm thinking about with this whole Overhaul reorg stuff is kind of focusing back in and then once we get focused back in there's look I'm not against playing for sure frankly for fun or creatively growing but And again, I don't mean to apply that we have any problems. We're actually Sales are great profit is great cash flows. Great systems are great everything's checking the boxes, but I also
00:45:59
Speaker
want to focus back in before we because then it feels it's kind of like how I've always run sort of weird segue but my wife and I have tended to not be on a budget for the past number of years and we're not on a budget because we pay ourselves first and so I don't have to worry about a budget because if I know I'm
00:46:18
Speaker
saving and paying our bills, et cetera, et cetera. I don't really care what's left over because we invert it. I want to focus back in the team, the resources, what we need to do, the production expectations, inventory, lead time to customs, get all that stuff in a better place. And then if Caleb and Garrett want to mess around on the laser for 40 minutes, engraving calipers for fun, then I don't care. Right now I would care. Yeah, same here.
00:46:45
Speaker
Yeah. And that ties into the lean stuff as well from a kind of a culture and, you know, pay yourself first, take care of your machines first. Once all that stuff's good, then I'm good. We're good. Yep. Yep. Yeah. The company at a base level, broad level has to, has to work or else it doesn't work. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Sweet. Well, go fix the laser, I guess. Yeah. Easy peasy. Sweet. All right. I'll see you. See you. Take care.