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Business of Machining - Episode 65
184 Plays7 years ago
Hiring is RISKY business...
But Grimsmo’s gotten super lucky so far! Saunders points out that Skye might just have been Grimsmo’s riskiest hire, but so far it’s all good!
How long should it take before hiring = more product produced?
First it’s necessary to get a system set up! Grimsmo is in the midst of switching from temporary solutions to permanent solutions. Looks like it’s time to talk ERP SYSTEMS!
How to sketch a pen without a pen to sketch?
The Johns talk about Grimsmo’s process for designing and making pen parts on the ever slow Fusion.
Also, if you didn’t document the process, did you even make the pen?
Grimsmo feels bad about not making progress videos for the pen.
BACK TO BASICS
Sometimes the best improvement you can make to a shop is getting rid of everything that doesn’t make your product. Saunders would tell you BE BRUTAL ABOUT IT! Go for the purge.
On a softer note, you can read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. Grimsmo mentions this book as a method of organizing your life.
It’s nice when things take a while.
Okay, this maybe isn’t the case if you’re waiting for Fusion to load, but if you’re learning something new or making a decision, the Johns agree that rushing doesn’t equal results.
“Everything of value comes after much hard work” - Grimsmo
Are you in the Chicago or Hartford, Connecticut, area? Do you want to meet Saunders and the Saunders Machine Works team? Now’s your chance!
- Wednesday May 8th Saunders will be in Chicago for the DMG Mori Innovation Days
- Tuesday May 15th Saunders will be in Hartford, Connecticut, for Matsuura’s Open House.
Both events are free, and the Johns are always thrilled to meet listeners!
Recommended
Transcript
Impact of New Hires on Workflow
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode number 65. My name is John Grimsmo. My name is John Saunders. Morning buddy. Good morning. How are you? I'm really good today. Good? Yeah. What's been going on? Oh man, things are, things are flowing really well. So we've had our new guy on for a week and a half and it's just like, that was such a good decision. I literally just thought you were talking about Angelo.
00:00:26
Speaker
And then I know he's only been on for two months or something. Wait, is he serious? That's right. I was thinking it was all 2018, but no, you're right, huh? I guess three months, February, March, April, I think it was, or was it just March, April? I can't remember. Yeah, but yeah. Oh my gosh.
Overcoming Hiring Fears
00:00:44
Speaker
Okay, so Sky is week and a half and how's that? It's still
00:00:50
Speaker
Tell me something that's surprisingly not going well, not like bad drama, but you know, unexpected. I don't know. I'm digging deep. And I got nothing. Seriously? Like you mean with him or with work? With everything? Just, you know, there's so much.
00:01:17
Speaker
he's not your first hire, but in some respects, you, Aaron was different because that's not, that's a little bit tangential to like running machines or, or the, um, core of what grooms so nice is. So I hate to say that cause obviously Aaron, what Aaron does is part of the core of knives, but you know what I mean?
Challenges in Production Scaling
00:01:34
Speaker
Um, not a sort of mechanical type job. And then Angelo.
00:01:38
Speaker
You knew him. He was a knife maker. He was a trained machinist. There's a culture fit in question there, but really less of an integration to me. Sky is the riskier one. Younger, intern, green. This is your first. It was a quicker hire, and you didn't know him like you knew. All that stuff is risk, right? Yep. Yep.
00:02:03
Speaker
Like I was thinking about that this morning, talking to my wife and it's like, I was so, so afraid to hire people for years. Like you and I have been talking about this for so long and you jumped into it probably a year or two sooner than I did with hiring people. But,
00:02:20
Speaker
I feel like part of the success with the people that I've had is due to all the painstaking time that I spent kind of thinking
Improving Systems and Processes
00:02:30
Speaker
about it, making sure that these would be right choices. Even though with the various people, I kind of jumped into them quickly, but I was more ready in the position as opposed to like, I need people. Let's just put a job posting up on the internet and see what happens.
00:02:32
Speaker
um,
00:02:45
Speaker
Yeah, so I was thinking about that. And every person has worked out very, very well. Super. It feels awesome to have a little team around me of skilled, talented people that I get along and do. Yeah, it's awesome. As far as complaints in the business, I think April closed out. It's May 1st now.
00:03:09
Speaker
We didn't make the most knives in the world this month. And it was kind of- That's great. Finally, we didn't have a- I know, exactly. Okay, good. Exactly, right? So I'm not disappointed, but I'm certainly, I wish it was better, especially as we're hiring more people. You're like, on the surface, you're like, oh, we should be making way more knives. We've got way more people. Yeah.
00:03:30
Speaker
And that just hasn't happened yet. But it all stems down to various little problems that we're tackling one by one. And it's basically the past seven years of knife making that we've been struggling and working our butts off. And now that things are scaling, it's like those
00:03:50
Speaker
poor systems are crumbling, right? So we need to replace them, you know, spend money or time, um, get a better tools, better systems, offer all the little stuff that we used to be able to struggle through. But now it's like a thousand dollars here, $500 there, $2,000 here, uh, to fix the issue. Um, and then the goal is hopefully very soon, like May, we should be able to see significant strides in, in actual output of stuff.
00:04:20
Speaker
That's interesting because it is freaky how parallel our stories continue to be. It sounds like we're making this up, but I told somebody that my whole Australia trip was actually just a green screen and they believed me for a minute.
00:04:40
Speaker
We're doing the same thing. And what's interesting is that for us, it's really not much money. I had to buy somebody, I think, a printer or a couple little things. But really, it's about a deliberate intent and process. It's like common cards continue to be the easiest example to use, or redoing how we organize tooling, or how we have the carts out in the shop floor, how we clean.
00:05:08
Speaker
Most of that stuff doesn't take money it just takes time but it's more than the consumption of time it's the adaptation of a mindset mentality and i don't. I don't wanna say we're bad at it i just wanna say we're getting better at it we have to continue to get better at it.
00:05:28
Speaker
because I'm sure we'll look back and realize as much as it felt disruptive and difficult now, it's frankly easy to do these changes now. It's a small team and you don't have that much to do and yeah.
00:05:43
Speaker
Yep. Yeah, I agree. It's the same thing here. Like I'd say probably half of the tasks that Sky has been doing in the week and a half he's been here have been just little housekeeping things like, Oh, can you go, you know, organize that? Or I bought a new shelf for the office. Can you assemble it and, you know, bolt it to the wall and put a strip lighting underneath this shelf, put up the shelf first kind
Organizing Parts and Production Planning
00:06:06
Speaker
of thing. Like so many little things. You know, I spent two hours at the hardware store the other day and spent 600 bucks on like
00:06:13
Speaker
Garden hoses, and fittings, and shelves, and brackets, and things like that. And I just kind of gave it all to Skye and be like, well, here's your day. Yeah. No, but it was awesome. What was it, the shop life video quality of life where you put in plumbing water lines so that you don't have hoses dragged across your floor? It's like, oh, it's so nice.
00:06:36
Speaker
So nice. And I mean, the sinks that we got installed are like, why didn't we do this three years ago? Like, holy cow. So the I would love I should do this. I don't know why I don't, but I really want to just run.
00:06:52
Speaker
We've had inconsistent Wi-Fi on the tormachs, and I don't think it's the machine problem. I think it's the fact that the Wi-Fi chip is inside a Faraday cage that is the machine base. I love Wi-Fi for life, but I don't love it in the shop. Wired connections are a phenomenal thing.
00:07:14
Speaker
I just like we should just spend the time to run. Good grief. We've got a scissor lift. We've got four thousand feet of cat five in a closet somewhere. You know, we've got the crimp tool. I could tell you, was it white, orange, orange, white, green, brown, white, brown, white, green, blue, brown. Oh, man. I used to know that the pairing off the top of my head. Wow. The crimp, the yeah. Anyway, it's so nice to have.
00:07:40
Speaker
And actually, Ed was saying, you know, we really need to label the machines now because it's like, Hey, go run this on, you know, I don't know what, what do you, how do you do that? Like, like on, you can't say on the tarmac, you have to say on. Yeah. Cause we have two of each of the Tormox, the two Haas machines it's, um, and you know, we're, we're not gonna.
00:08:00
Speaker
We're going to grow like we're not going to win, but you know what I mean? So it's like, um, yeah. Um, and some of that ties into how we're running with more people and more. I mean, we've done, we have a lot of work going on, uh, on concurrent machines and spindles, which is super cool. Um,
00:08:18
Speaker
So it's like, oh, so the reason I brought that up is, is a pretty easy and awesome way, just to network, um, the network, the path pilot drive from any windows machine or any computer, which means you post right to it, but then you've got to have a labeling system so that you know what machine you're posting to. Um, especially if you inherit a generic file name, like 1001 dot NC, uh, you pull up the wrong program. That's a great way to crash a machine. Um, so I gotta figure that out, but that should be easy. Yeah.
00:08:46
Speaker
Awesome. Yeah, we were thinking about that too for labeling our parts. So Angelo is a process engineer, right? And his job has been to like, all right, we're going to make this big assembly today. So let's look at all the parts. Let's look at all the components. Let's look at the stress points. Let's look at the hard ones, the easy ones, the lead times,
ERP Systems and Part Labeling
00:09:10
Speaker
all this stuff. So we broke it down for the pen project.
00:09:15
Speaker
yesterday and he's like I know this is all in your head but let's I just need to I need to understand I need to write this down on paper he's telling me and so we wrote down like every component and we're like okay that's easy one day easy one day this one's gonna be hard let's give that five days to figure out next week this has got a 15 day lead time which is actually like three weeks because they're working days right right custom spring made and all this stuff and then it became clear
00:09:43
Speaker
You know, I kind of knew it in my head, but clear that the clip and the spring, the custom spring are going to be the two. What's the spring on my Norseman pen? Oh, I was like, what are you talking about? Got it. Got it.
00:09:57
Speaker
Yeah, so on the pen project. So he's going through all that. And then he's like, so what's every part called? And I'm like, well, this is the slidey thingy. And this is the threaded thingy. Right. It doesn't call it anything. I have a picture of it in my brain that's perfectly clear. I fail to see the problem.
00:10:14
Speaker
Exactly. Like infusion, you have to label it something. So I'm like sliding lever and threaded adapter and all this stuff. And I'm like, well, it's better than AS247-B. He's like, I don't know. I kind of like those because they make sense. I'm like, I don't know if I can do that. So what are you going to do? I'd be clear that he wins here, right? Yeah. Although I cannot adopt the random
00:10:42
Speaker
letter slash number labeling system, but we're just going to come up with a standard of what everything's called. And then, you know, that way we all know what.
00:10:53
Speaker
what each part means and everything. Yeah, that's fair enough. Numbers are a powerful thing though, like we're thinking about that. We've been playing around with similar types of stuff where you've got the primary key, like database term of being able to have something that goes across, it kind of speaks to that like ERP thing, which it's funny, now that I, probably a whole another conversation, but now that we've gotten to kind of where we are, I actually don't,
00:11:20
Speaker
I'm less interested in ERP than I was a couple months ago. But the idea that for the mod vice, we use a certain fastener or bolt, like calling that bolt number with an internal serial number or some number that's unique that lets us recognize
00:11:40
Speaker
Hey, we share it across two different products and we keep it. We use them for shop general use and it needs to be in our accounting system. It needs to be in our website Shopify system. It needs to be our inventory system and like not needing those to all talk to each other because that's the ERP kind of complication, but also just needing to know what is this product like?
CAD Master Modeling for Efficiency
00:12:02
Speaker
and try not to use, it's not always great to use like a McMaster or MSC or distributor part number because sometimes you multi-source it or I don't want to say those change, but it's, I don't like inheriting somebody else's system. If anything, across your bill of materials, you'll have very different numbers then because McMaster numbers are very different than MSC numbers.
00:12:29
Speaker
Yes, you come up with your own label for it and then someplace to store MSC McMaster partner variation of that thing, right? Exactly.
00:12:43
Speaker
On your pen, did you end up using that fusion master modeling technique? I did. And coincidentally, I had Rob Blockwood in the shop last Thursday. Oh my God, yeah. That was the first thing we're talking about.
00:13:01
Speaker
Because it feels like it was so long ago. So I'll finish and I'll segue into that. But yeah, so Rob gave us kind of the idea or the push to use the master modeling technique. So I have three files now. I have my drawing file, which is just a sketch or a couple of different sketches. And since the pen is a revolved like cylinder, they're basically just half sketches.
00:13:27
Speaker
with the center line and then everything's dimensioned off of that and it's kind of sweet to have just one sketch that has like there's probably
00:13:35
Speaker
you know, a hundred dimensions or whatever it is in the thing. And they're all referenced to each other. So I can just change, you know, my sliding tolerance is three thou. And I, if I want to make it two thou, I just change it once and then it changes everything that moves. Um, so that's really cool. And then I have a, an assembly file where everything gets revolved and kind of put together and assembled. And then I have a cam file. So the assembly gets dragged into the cam file.
00:14:00
Speaker
Interesting. In theory, we'll make the CAM file work faster, et cetera, because I'm having problems with my Rask and Norseman files, where they can take minutes to open up in Fusion, because there's just too much going on. But how will the CAM file? OK, so you're linking. What do you call that? It's the break link is the termination, actually. But it's insert object into the design. Is that the thing you're doing?
00:14:29
Speaker
Basically, yeah. So meaning that file has a linked version of the CAD data, but doesn't have the individual calculations of the CAD revolves and simulations or assembly joints and so forth.
00:14:46
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So does that actually make it more lightweight? I think so. Yeah. Look, I can see that now that you say it. Right. And your drawing file has numerous sketches in within one sketch and obviously one plane for different what end up being different components like the cap.
00:15:07
Speaker
Yeah. So I have one file, one sketch called my mechanism and it's got almost everything. Then I've got a different sketch for the body or the tip. You could break it down by piece, but like the whole, all the sliding mechanism and everything, I wanted it in one file because everything's interrelated.
00:15:25
Speaker
No, totally. Right. So you need that in one document. Yeah, it's working really well. The only downside that I hate is that if I change the sketch, I have to save, I have to go to the assembly, I have to import the latest, save that, go to the cam, import latest in the model environment, and then save it again. So that step is a little cumbersome, but it's working really well.
00:15:53
Speaker
We're going through a long effort of trying to move over to an actual fusion team hub. Oh, yeah. And I've mentioned this because you almost wish certain things like that could be set to like push instead of
Transition to Fusion Team Hub
00:16:10
Speaker
pull. Yeah. But it's a good idea if.
00:16:14
Speaker
It's so funny how complicated this idea of distributed teamwork is with concurrent usage and files and sharing, but with the Team Hub, knock on wood, we should have shared templates and much better file management and settings and permissions and
00:16:34
Speaker
But the big thing is the shared tool library and templates across the user accounts within our organization. And it sounds super simple until you really dive into all the nitty gritty. The first of which is that none of our, all of the people that use Fusion here have the Fusion accounts under, all of us have them under non Saunders accounts.
00:16:55
Speaker
names. Like my fusion account is under my personal email and as are other people here. So we actually own licenses, but they're all not under the right domain and name. And it's been an interesting process. I'll leave it at that. But I think we're close to getting that stuff cleaned up and then that'll let us then finalize the merge to a team hub. Nice.
00:17:20
Speaker
Yeah, I've only ever used Fusion with one account and like Eric will log into my account or something, but I don't have a lot of people actually using it yet. Doesn't Angelo? Not yet. He's a solid work sky and he wants to get into Fusion too. We just haven't really dived in yet. And so him and Sky are both going to want to spend significant amount of time on it.
00:17:41
Speaker
Yeah, sure. I got to figure out whether they get their own account or set up like an educational license or whatever. I don't know. I don't know what they're going to do. Sure. Interesting. I'm surprised that we always repost just because we're always tweaking and we don't ever save code on the machines.
00:18:05
Speaker
And that honestly, it's funny, as much as I want to say that won't change because I like this idea of always pushing, you know, that's a push versus a pull. I can also see us standardizing some stuff where there's a couple of things where we're not really tweaking anymore, but also something that I'm just being honest. We have I have never once used a setup sheet, partly because we're you and I are kind of solo printers, solo machinists and.
00:18:32
Speaker
So the idea of the thing that jumps out immediately is setting the right gauge length and length on your tool, of course, which is which is I'm sure there's a lot more to a set up sheet that can convey, but that would be the one that really jumps out to me.
00:18:48
Speaker
Yep. And I agree. I haven't used one either. But now that we're having so many people set up jobs and everything, and it's all in my head or in Fusion, and they can't exactly pull that information easily, yeah, we need standardized. All the tool lists, all the stick outs, all the details, all the torque values, all the material details and everything. There's a lot of information to be able to scale what we do. And I'm spending a lot of time detailing that right now.
00:19:18
Speaker
I'm laughing because instead of a setup sheet, I'm going to see an Instagram post of John Grimsmo 3D printing the full pull stud to tool tip and it'd be like, make the make the setup look like this. Yeah, exactly. Which actually isn't like a terrible idea. Yeah. OK, so talk about your visit.
00:19:41
Speaker
Yeah, so Rob came by, I think, Thursday last week. And he spent basically the whole day here. And it was, I mean, we just talk the whole time. Like, we did some work. We played on the lathe. We made one pen part, which it's been, it's Tuesday now. So I finally just finished that pen part as far as tweaks and final designs and things like that. But yeah, what a smart dude. He's a really smart guy. There's a reason why we're friends, you know?
00:20:11
Speaker
Yeah, he's very smart, very cool, very helpful, and just a great guy to talk to. And so we dug into my post processor for the Nakamura, and he showed me some things. And I was digging through the sketch environment in Fusion, just trying to do something real quick. And he's like, wait, what do you just do right there? What's that? I've never done that before.
00:20:35
Speaker
So it's like we're both watching each other kind of learning little things that only come up in direct showing capacity.
Organizing the Shop Inspired by Rob Lockwood
00:20:43
Speaker
I wouldn't tell that trick, like how to use the intersect curve, et cetera. Yeah, so what else? I asked him, and we got some video of this, I asked him, I said, literally I said,
00:21:01
Speaker
So Sondras has been talking about this concept of if an investor came in and threw whatever money you needed at the business, I said, Rob, if that were you, what would you improve first in this shop? If you look around, you've seen a lot of great shops, probably some of the best in the world, or at least in North America. What would you do first? And he goes, oh, you put me on the spot. Well, he's looking around. The first thing I would do is just remove everything that doesn't make a knife. Yes.
00:21:30
Speaker
you know, just I see a lot of stuff around here, a lot of stuff you've obviously had for a long time. And it just doesn't need to be in your face anymore. And I'm like, Yeah, it's been on my mind. But it's one of those things like, just takes time and effort to do. You know, like we were talking about in the beginning of the podcast, right? But it takes a reframing of your mind to be like, Yeah, this really shouldn't be here. This can be hidden away. And I'd almost forget about it. You know, no, not hidden away gone.
00:21:58
Speaker
Yeah, or gone. Yeah, I I literally yesterday and I didn't do it because I've got a lot going on right now in a good way. Not that's not an excuse, but I've got like a speaker audio system left over from last year's open house. I've got some personal like rifle brass and random stuff here and I've got other stuff and it kind of tied back to
00:22:22
Speaker
my interests a few years ago, which was kind of like anything and everything in any way possibly related to everything that we do. And we have really, really, really done a good job of focusing in. And the stuff is literally baggage. And like part of me, the bootstrapper in me is like, I want to extract maximum value in a greedy way. But, you know, it's always stinks if you sell something for five bucks and you're like, gosh, that was really seventy dollars of something. But at the end of the day,
00:22:48
Speaker
It's got to go. So we're teeing up for the same thing. A giant, a giant purge. Yep. It purged exactly. Yeah. So I haven't started that yet, but I'm certainly conscious of it. And it was weird being at the hardware store with that in mind, buying all this new stuff. And I'm like, am I just adding to the fire or is this like important stuff that we need? Of course it is. We need to purge the old stuff that nobody's touching anymore. But yeah, that's good advice.
00:23:19
Speaker
Yeah. And Rob has a fun perspective because he has had the benefit of being around environments where money tends to not be the limiting factor in the same way it is in most machine shop or manufacturing environments or job shops or family owned businesses. And that's not to say that they're whimsy with it or just frivolous.
00:23:41
Speaker
the ability to make decisions that are not constrained by capital in most respects really changes the framework of your mind. And it did when you brought it up the other week. I was like, wow, that's...
00:23:55
Speaker
that, you know, just reframing that in the current mindset that we both have, you know, I think we're getting past the struggle point of business and now we're getting into the point where they're, you know, $500 here and there is, is less of a big deal than it ever has been before. Um, but like you and I have grown this bootstrap entrepreneur business where like everything we have
00:24:19
Speaker
we have value in and we have emotional attachment to and oh yeah but I used that thing back when I was getting started and you know like that was important to me was being the key word like you haven't touched it in six years and you're probably never going to
00:24:35
Speaker
So it's like you have to, um, have you ever heard the, there's a Japanese lady that wrote a book called the art of tidying up the magical art of tidying up or something like that. KonMari. Um, yeah, it's a really cool thing. Meg's into it. But in the classic Japanese way, like she's talking about, you know, cleaning your clothes, closet and all that. And it's like pick up, pick up every t-shirt and go, does this spark a joy in my life? Right.
00:25:01
Speaker
So I think about that here in the shop.
Importance of Patience in Business Decisions
00:25:03
Speaker
And if you honestly look at everything and say, does it spark joy, or does it mean anything to you, or is it useful in any way at all? If the answer is no, then there's no reason to keep it.
00:25:13
Speaker
I would I would almost argue that that's too much of an emotional process. Yeah. And I would really just argue, come in with a sword, come in with a fierce. This is this is gone, like sort of with the attitude of everything is leaving. Now, of course, you know, there's and then there's a meeting of something like I can't get rid of my D.M.G. Maury Dura vertical. That's important. But like everything goes. And that will help.
00:25:41
Speaker
avoid. Actually, the funny the podcast, how I built this that we were talking about a couple of episodes ago, one of the guests was the guy who founded one 800 junk and his original partner, I think, kind of had a problem when they got started. And it was just the two of them where he was going into these people's basements as the service when they said, hey, we want our basement, your attic removed or the foot like he and he was like going through their stuff.
00:26:13
Speaker
The other partner was like, dude, we're here to get rid of this stuff, not to go through and look at cool antiques. It's gone or recycled or whatever. We keep some cool namesakes that bring up some fun memories in the past for sure, but on the flip side, purge, purge, purge.
00:26:32
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Like you're not going to get rid of your strike mark original target thingy, right? Like that's, that's important, but maybe the tooling and the fixturing that you used for it, if you still had it, uh, it would be the useless, right? We just got rid of it. Seriously. That stuff is six years old, seven years old. Um, we recycled it, uh, reused to what we could. And even the extra amounts I sold them, you know, I need a couple to keep in as a memory and the rest are gone. Yep. Exactly. Good.
00:27:02
Speaker
Although that's still a cop out, Rob, I want to hear more, a more, did he, did that conversation continue? Um, Oh, and he said, we need two Robo drills like in the shop. And he's like, you can fit them. You can fit them right here. I do think you said one. I agree. I totally agree. And, uh, I'm loosely working on that, but who knows if it's going to happen anytime soon or not. But, um,
00:27:29
Speaker
But yeah, that, and he said you just got to work on your kind of workflow process, everything we're doing basically. Yeah. That sort of alludes to a thing that I've been conscious of, and I think it's under appreciated or under focused, which is time.
00:27:51
Speaker
Things just take time and time is a good thing. It's good that things take time because they've got to sort themselves out. You've got to let things kind of flow. It's easy to want things more quickly. Even just we just we certainly live in a world that that rewards expediency of shipping and delivery and information and news. But things take time and let them take time, you know.
Debugging Processes and Solutions
00:28:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's like I've heard everything of value comes after much hard work. And it's totally true. But like even when I am working on something right now and it was.
00:28:28
Speaker
my instinctual reaction was to finish it, stop for 10 minutes, re-review it, proofread it, read it again, and then distribute it or do this thing with it. And then I was like, no, sit on it for a day, let yourself get into a different mood, go do different things, chew on it more, think about it more, let other things happen that will influence it. I know this sounds very vague, but like,
00:28:53
Speaker
It's a good thing. And it's something that I tend to see the people that I look up to and respect.
00:29:01
Speaker
They usually actually aren't in rush. They aren't around chop chopping orders, you know, making quick brash actions. They're deliberate and slow. And that's something I think in my somewhat limited interactions with Rob, he will, he'll run the conversation or he'll run a thing at his own pace. He's not, boom, boom, boom, I need to think. Or if somebody else is really fast, he doesn't match their speed. Like, no, we're going to talk this through or think about this way. And that's a really good thing.
00:29:30
Speaker
Absolutely. And as you were mentioning with your higher level friends, your super successful people that you know, I wonder if they've passed the point of needing to be rushed. You and I have certainly gone through the past few years where things are quick paced and you got to get it done. You got to work hard and you got to do all that. And now that we're distributing a little bit, we can slow down and put in the more time. But that said, I've always put in the time.
00:29:57
Speaker
I've always found the time to go full grimsmo on whatever it is I'm doing. Even if it's, you know, hand editing a post processor that I've probably put 20 hours into in the past month, right? You know, um, yeah, yeah. Even just yesterday, it's funny because I remember you, I don't know, six months ago or whatever saying like,
00:30:23
Speaker
You basically can't work for more than five minutes without somebody interrupting you or an email coming in or, you know, yesterday I like, I put my earphones on to kind of shove myself out and I had to like stare at my post processor text file for like 10 minutes just to get this, this, I need to run through the math. I need to get this figured out. Why is this not working? I'm trying to do a transfer on my lathe. So the sub spindle comes in, grabs it, pulls it out, cuts it off. And my parts were coming out, I think seven thou too long.
00:30:53
Speaker
And I'm like, oh, that's $7,000. I got to get rid of that $7,000. There's some bad math in there. And it turns out I was doubling up my stock to leave. Oh, interesting. In some ways. Sure, sure. I had a plus instead of a minus, and then try that. And oh, now it's twice too long, and now it's $14,000. And so anyway, it was one of those, I almost got it, and then I got distracted, and I had to do something else. And then when I came back to it, I looked, and I go, oh, there it is. I'm doubling up. Yep.
00:31:20
Speaker
It's like you can stare at it all you want, but sometimes you just need to leave and come back. Or bring in Angelo or somebody else. Yep.
00:31:30
Speaker
Yeah. And it helps. Like I was doing that yesterday, just kind of explaining it. I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this. And I'd have like a call it in my hand and I'd have the pen part here and be like, this is what I'm doing. And sometimes just the act of explaining it, um, helps you work through it. And I've found that over the years, that's actually like a hack. Um, you know, I'll explain it to my wife or I'll explain it to Eric and
00:31:52
Speaker
you know, they might have no idea what I'm talking about. But if I can explain it in a way that kind of makes sense to them, then I'll find the issue. I'll find the problem, you know, I actually some of my fondest memories.
00:32:07
Speaker
are things I really enjoy are exactly what you just said because it's so challenging. It's like when I'm doing programming and I'm not a programmer and I don't really program, but things like post processor or Arduino code or stuff. I suppose a programmer would just call this debugging, but for me, I feel like it's some level below that of just like
00:32:27
Speaker
people who don't know how to program, but who are programming. I'll add in fake variables that are placeholders that display what's happening along every step of the way. When I really get backed into a corner, I'm like, okay, well, that variable is getting modified in this way here. I'll duplicate it and fork it off and say, well, do they track together? Then I add a bunch of comments in. It's fun and it's something we've been putting into our Fusion Friday videos on post processors. It's like, you have to
00:32:55
Speaker
add in comments and add in stuff to like walk your way through it because then you just break it down and you'll figure it out. Yep. Yep, exactly.
00:33:06
Speaker
Fun. Love it. Can I share some traveling news? Yeah, absolutely. So if anybody wants to come hang out, we are going to be somewhat short notice. But next Wednesday, the 8th of May, we're going to be in Chicago for the DMG Morey Innovation Days, which is kind of their open house
Industry Events and Networking Plans
00:33:33
Speaker
They've got like a couple of, I think of US debuts and maybe even world debuts, but it's there kind of showing off all the machines and they've got quite a few set up and making chips and so forth. Cool. Yeah. So I'm excited.
00:33:48
Speaker
It's sort of a continuum. We spent a lot of time at the DMG building at emo because that's kind of their home turf and Amish had such a good relationship with them with his five axis machine from them. But I'm excited to hear more and learn, especially after having spent some time with Matt Sura and kind of seeing that.
00:34:10
Speaker
You know, it's funny, before this, I would have not been able to articulate how those companies were so different, both as a culture, but also as an actual machine tool. And then the week thereafter on Tuesday, on Monday and Tuesday, I think it's Tuesday, I'm really there. May 15th, I'll be in Hartford, Connecticut area for Matt Sura's open house as well. So actually pretty similar type of event. So this is the thing I was at helping film behind the scenes.
00:34:39
Speaker
weeks ago, but happy to, both those events are free and open. I think you just have to register, but would welcome anybody in either the Chicago or Hartford area to come on by. Cool. That's going to be awesome. Like back to back comparison basically between the two cultures, right? That's awesome.
00:34:59
Speaker
But it's cool, too, because both of them are are focusing. You know, Metzer has kind of always been big on the automation through the MAM machines.
Exploring Automation Technologies
00:35:07
Speaker
But we're now we're seeing it more with their MX line with the PC 10, which is the 10 pallet, as well as the four pallet on the larger. What is it? The MX five 20, I think it's called. Yeah. But DMG has.
00:35:23
Speaker
I think, I mean, I'll learn a lot more next week. I think they have been always well integrated with third party solutions, but now I think they're rolling and I, you know, they're rolling their own. I don't know if that's actually a third party that they're just integrating at the factory level or whether it's actually their own system, but they've got some multi-palate integration for everything from their three access to just, they've got one machine that is
00:35:50
Speaker
just a four plus one machine or three plus two machine. So it doesn't do simultaneous five, which seems like such a limiting factor. But then it's like, man, but that also is so much of what it would commonly be done or used for. Yeah, exactly.
00:36:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think three plus two is much more common, or I don't want to say useful, but more common than a full simultaneous five you do in all this fancy crazy stuff. But it's like, if you're going to spend the money. Well, that's what I want to understand is, do they save money by changing the actual hardware requirements of the machine in an acceptable manner? Or is it literally a software type of unlock where you're just trying to
00:36:36
Speaker
And there's no, I don't criticize them for anybody for doing this, but the value is not what it costs. The value is what it's able to do, right? So if they just massively reduce the price by disabling that sort of functionality, like, okay, I get that, but I'm with you like, man, that one time I want to swarf a little chamfer, you're going to be kicking yourself.
00:36:56
Speaker
Exactly. Well, and you and I, I think look at it from, I guess, the bootstrapper mentality of like, if we're going to spend, you know, half a million dollars, I want to, I want to be able to do everything. Whereas a lot of shops might be like, look, I've got this product to make. And that's all this product is going to make. Like when I was at the LA of Maths or open house, they showed an MX 330.
00:37:16
Speaker
which often comes with a 90 tool palette, but like the standard model is 30 tools. And I'm like, why would you ever get 30 tools? And the guys were showing me that one of their automotive customers got one and it's only ever going to have four tools in it ever.
00:37:32
Speaker
So they special ordered it with a 30 tool magazine. And he's like, yep, only ever four tools with a robot loading it. And it's just gonna do these ops forever. That's weird. That's super weird. That is quite odd.
00:37:51
Speaker
Yeah. The other thing which I'm super excited for also came out of left field is Sandvik invited us to go. It is technically called a VIP customer. For some reason, they're also inviting me to factory tour in Stockholm this summer. No. Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. So it's weird. I don't actually know a ton about
00:38:15
Speaker
I don't know a ton about how much we're going to see. I just don't know. Is it really like a behind the scenes we get to see where they do the inserts and centering and machining and all that? Or is it more of a corporate type of tour?
00:38:31
Speaker
I think you need to ask your way into every door. Well, so I sort of said, hey, look, thank you. Super cool. Would love to come, but, you know, I really, really would want to spend my time there if I'm able to kind of share it with our audience. And so the current status to us filming is a yes, subject to making sure
00:38:55
Speaker
There's a couple little things, but basically the attitude is let us figure it out, but yes, so that's super cool.
00:39:02
Speaker
Wow, that's awesome. So I'm going to go. It actually worked out pretty well. My sister-in-law is getting married, and so I'm going to be up in Boston. So I'm just going to leave after the wedding from that. But I'll be in Stockholm. I'm going to stay the weekend in sightsee.
Reflecting on Documentation Practices
00:39:17
Speaker
But if anyone lives in Sweden or Stockholm on Friday, June 22nd and Saturday, June 23rd, I'm happy to get together or hang out or do something. Because I've always wanted to go to Sweden or the Scandinavian countries.
00:39:30
Speaker
Yeah, that'll be so cool. Cool. What else do you have to do today? More pen parts. So we got one of these parts dialed. Now I got to make two parts. I got to decide if they're going to thread together or press together permanently. I'm sort of up in the air. Thread together. OK.
00:39:50
Speaker
So it's like either you make a permanent assembly that never comes apart or you make it just take apartable. I haven't decided yet. But yeah, these two parts will be easy aside from the joining technique. There's not a lot of crazy stuff going on to them. And then I think I have pen version two done. And I've been utterly terrible about documenting this process. And I actually feel really bad about it. It's OK.
00:40:14
Speaker
You know, like the Norseman was like, I filmed everything from day one, and it did the whole knife making Tuesday thing. And it's just so much faster to not document it, you know, just to run. So I kind of feel like I'm letting my audience down and the marketing potential of not sharing the process. I just I disagree. Yeah, because I know how you feel. Yeah, because we we did this.
00:40:43
Speaker
We what we documented was organic. You documented stuff back then because partly because you didn't know and because you were going a little slower and it was a way of paying it forward and share. You can still go back and document a lot. But the reality is the instant you change who you are just to stop and grab the camera means it's not the same. Right. Like, OK, don't I guess I guess who I am now is different than who I was. Don't feel bad about then.
00:41:12
Speaker
Yeah, you will still do it. I know that. And it's something I try to be mindful of. It's like, oh, if I feel bad about it, then don't feel bad about it. Like, it's OK. Then it's that it's not fun anymore. Right. I mean, I think we do owe something to our audiences because, again, it's been a big part of how we got to where we are. And I don't ever want to, you know, act like we're too big for that. But you also it's also got to work, you know,
00:41:40
Speaker
Yep, cool. Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of potential that was missed in the sharing phase. Like all the challenges I've gone through, so many challenges, so many milestones achieved and things I've learned and all that. And just because the camera was rolling now, it's only in my head. I don't get to share it with the world unless I go back and kind of talk about them.
00:42:02
Speaker
You know, most of those you forget about the day after they happen because it's just move on. Right. Like then start this compromise, start a Trello story or whatever they're called. It's just just all you got to do is is write down a memory jogging fact. Like, you know, it's a good idea to fit on threads didn't work. Insert was wrong radius or something. And then all of a sudden you'll have this list that you can then go back and walk through and talk about and show. Yes. Yeah. No, I love it. That's all you got to do.
00:42:32
Speaker
I love it. Yep. Sweet. I actually got to run because I am off to remember that guy, Paul Diebolt, who has the shop in town where we've done the lathe speeds and feeds stuff at. Yeah. Last time we were there, we didn't finish all the parts because we ran out of time. So I'm going to go back and we're going to machine some stainless steel and maybe some cast iron. So I'm actually pretty excited to go get my learn on there.
00:42:55
Speaker
That's awesome. All right. But I'll see you next. Oh, actually, I'll email you because I don't know. I'm going to be on the road next week. So I have to figure out maybe we'll do it Tuesday morning again or something. Sounds good. But have a great day.