Safety Over Throughput: The Leadership Test Shop Owners Fail | Lean Built - Manufacturing Freedom E136

0:00You're listening to The Lean Built Podcast. I'm Jay and I'm Andrew. In this podcast, we discuss our manufacturing companies, lean principles, and the freedom that we're pursuing in life and business. So Jay, Bloomington got hit by a tornado last night. Man, everything okay for you? Yeah, so we had a few employees who were right in the danger zone and we had some near-misses. It was okay. Okay, definitely damaged the neighborhoods. This wasn't an EF-0. It did damage to hangars at the airport, tore up a bang, blew a bunch of roofs off, took a car dealership roofed off and dumped it on top of all the new cars and a lot of trees down, a lot of poles down. It was a mess. Have you been in other tornadoes? So we've had several tornadoes in 2023. We had, I believe, an EF-3 pass about a half mile from our shop and it did kill several people. We've had, I could think of probably three or four tornadoes in the greater Bloomington

1:02area since I've lived here. It feels like they've been more and more recently, but that's not strictly, tornadoes are not actually up overall, but it's always sobering to realize how quickly the weather can change. And all the best laid plans can just get blown away. One of my friends lives west of the airport out in the woods. His house is sheltered down below a ridge and the tornado basically went directly over their house, but because of the topography, it wasn't on the ground when it passed over them. So they have a whole strip of trees down in line with their house across their property and because of the ridge line, basically BMX ramped, hopped over them and came down on the far side and then continued on and hit the airport. It's like a disruption of airflow. It just jumped right over it or something like that. Yeah, just enough change in topography that just kept getting carried in the wind, but

2:03they had a ton of trees down. We don't, obviously, we don't really have tornadoes here in Southern California, but we have, we have fires, wildfires. We've, ever since I was a kid, so it's nothing recent. We have these things called the Santana Wins. They're fast moving winds that sweep across the desert, the Mojave Desert, and it's dry, and it's warm, and it's just ripe for fire conditions. And not many people die in the fire, so businesses and homes and lives are disrupted. The last one was this time last year and it was Malibu, you know, I drove through it personally. It was just, it struck me like the destruction. It struck me in a way that I did not expect. I was driving through and it was just, it felt like a war zone. It felt like all the media coverage I had seen in different wars and it's just like, I started getting choked up and I realized these are, these are just one mountain range neighbors away from us. And certainly there's always been like, kind of like a warnings or just like a vacu, we've had friends get evacuated. Here in Seamye Valley that have come over to our house because it's on the other hill of the valley.

3:03And it is sobering and it just causes us to think this is not defensible, but there are certain things you can put in place personally or business-wise to help mitigate risk and keep things moving. But yeah, it is sobering. I get that and I'm glad to hear that you and apparently everyone you know is okay. So yeah, there have been no major injuries reported, but certainly scary for a lot of people and you don't really realize there are some real advantages to having a house on a slab. If you don't have a basement, your basement can't flood. There are nice things about it. But at the same time when the weather gets pretty rowdy and you're going, the best I've got is an interior room on the ground floor with no windows. I have no way to get below ground. That's not kind of an alarming feeling. The closest I ever was when I lived in Austin, we lived in technically Cedar Park. There was a... It was something... Oh, we were watching the office and the office went to commercial and the first thing right at the commercial break was a weather report saying, you know, hey, we got to keep an

4:05eye on this. You know, and they were doing this every commercial break, then they would go to commercials. But then it just stuck and you could see that it was starting to form in the meteorologist talking about like, here's this little hook part of it we want to watch out. And I'm going, man, I'm watching this. And it didn't really hit me until I look out my window and my trees were blowing hard. We were probably a mile or a mile and a half from the tornado, but you could see it was just the cloud movements and it was startling. It was sombering because I had only seen it just digitally through a screen. And it was something that I went, no, I don't want to do this. I don't like this. Do you get used to it? Like the tornado warning, things like that? So you can, unfortunately, there's a sort of Midwest dad trope, which is as soon as the tornado sirens go off, dad goes outside to look for the funnel. And that's a, and that's a, that's not a good thing to do. Okay. But it also is challenging like, obviously detection has gotten a lot better. Sure. Radar has gotten a lot better. There are signs you can see.

5:06You can see a hook echo. You can see if it starts hitting structures, you can see a debris ball. But if you overuse, like most of the time when the sirens go off, nothing happens in your area. The challenge is if you alert to large an area, everyone thinks, okay, yeah, the tornado sirens went off and my phone got texted, but it's probably not me. It looks fine outside. Mm-hmm. True. And some of those people are right. Most of them are right and some of them are wrong and they don't know which ones are which. Yeah. So it is not an unusual or necessarily an inappropriate approach to the second you hear the sirens, take a quick peek outside to gauge, is this a 20 second away problem or is this a 20 minute away problem? Yeah. Do you or other businesses in the area have like procedures if there's a tornado warning everyone? So what does that look like? We have marked storm shelter rooms in our building.

6:07Okay. Both in bay one and in bay four. We have two rooms in bay one and one room in bay four that are rooms inside rooms where you have an internal room built inside the structure that has no windows that can hold a number of people. And those are our designated storm shelter areas. Are they hardened? Like, or is it just a room in a room basically? It's just a room in a room. Okay. We're not doing like a cinder block or a concrete walled room inside a pole one quarter and seal plate on the walls, no, it's not, it's not, we're not trying to make a safe. Just a place where you won't be exposed to any flying glass and you have additional structure keeping the roof off of you if the roof is compromised. And so those things, we actually just went over it this past week. We went over on Monday in our morning meeting because we had weather forecast this week that we were expecting storms on Thursday. And so we revisited the here are three marked storm shelter rooms. If these alarms go off, please do not go outside.

7:08Please go straight to a storm shelter room. One other upgrade we did this past year in the building is there are a number of battery powered security lamps that we added in the building where anytime the power goes out, those lamps automatically come on floodlights inside the building. And that made a big difference because the front office has windows, they one has windows, they two and they three don't have any windows. So if the power goes out, it is dark in there. And putting up enough flood lights in those spaces so that you can easily and safely navigate around through the aisles, through the shelving, through the pallet wrecks to get to where you need to go was a really worthwhile upgrade. We also, we keep some emergency lamps that run on Milwaukee 18 volt batteries and we keep them docked right next to the Milwaukee chargers that are mounted by our backpack vets. So any place there's a charger station, there's a high output LED emergency lamp right there. You can just pick up off the wall, stick a battery pack in it and you've got portable light. Okay.

8:08There's a flashlight in your pocket. I love this. Can I throw in what if you can you have walkie talkies in each one of the three shelter rooms? We haven't done that. There really isn't. If you're in a storm shelter on something bad start happening, the other people in the other storm room, shelter room at the other end of the building are not going to come help you right then. Yeah. But if the storm passes overhead, hey, we're done. We're coming out. We're staying in place like it could, you know, yeah, how the power goes out? How are you going to talk to each other? We have not experimented with walkie talkies. We do only some walkie talkies. I suppose we could try it out. Yeah. I like that idea. That's cool. I'm writing that down. Okay. It's just, you know, my, my boys, we don't believe in cell phones for underage kids. You know, I just one of those parental things is, but you know, when they go play, hey, we're going to go to the park, which is walking distance is a five minute walk. And we're like, just take the walkie talkie because I don't want to come get you. But, you know, we'll be on channel seven dot one and, you know, you better have it clipped on your belt.

9:09That type of thing. And it's just, it's fun, you know, and walkie talkies. I had the radio shack big fat six D cell batteries, you know, and that was amazing. You're talking to truckers, you know, a mile away. But that was one thing that I loved as a kid. And my, my kids just think, oh, gosh, it's just one more thing that I have to carry. And I'm like, you don't understand how the technology is, this, this is awesome stuff. You should appreciate it. So other things to think about as an employer, if you have employees and you know the weather is going to be bad, there is, there's nothing you're doing at work that is so important that you have to keep your employees there in a way that endangers them or their families because they can't be home. They need to be. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We definitely have had times like where there are certain kinds of weather events that can come up suddenly, you can know there are thunderstorms coming, but a tornado can develop relatively quickly. But if you know, like, hey, there's a big storm front coming through and it's going to snow a lot at the, you know, starting around 3 p.m., we're expecting a bunch of snow.

10:11Because six hours west of here, it's snowing and it's headed our way. Those slower moving, more stable, big problems that are clearly predictable, send everybody home early and you'll call half days out. You'll do that. We definitely have sent people home early for weather. Yeah. Okay. And in some cases, we'd say like, hey, we know the weather's going to be a little bit sketchy overnight. If the area you're coming from and your roads aren't good in the morning, don't come in. But if we're at work and we know the weather's going to get bad, we've sometimes dismissed early or taken a half day, it really is a question of how much of an emergency if you put yourself in. So you feel pressure to pressure people to stay. True. Very true. If you're doing your work well and you're on time, you're on track and you're not stressed, setting up a half day to make sure everyone's home with their families. They can pick their kids up early from school, whatever needs to happen. Yeah. That's easy. Yeah. Yeah. If your business is the make or break factors, if you can actually squeeze all 40 hours

11:13in, you know, out of your team, that's no margin. That's not a great place to be. We have inclement weather hours. We have eight hours, you know. And it can vary like, hey, we're not going to have power at all for the shop. That would be an inclement weather full day. But it's like, you know what? The roads are going to be, maybe there's power out like this time last year, the stoplights were out. I'm like, I do not want you guys driving in the dark because, you know, the first AM crew comes in at 530, it's dark. They get to the shop. We have lots of natural lights, skylights, but when it's dark AM, it is dark, dark, you know, it's pitch black in here. And so I'm like, well, we're just going to use an hour and a half or two hours of inclement that weather out of the eight hours, just get here at 830 or something like that or 8, you know, whenever it's, whenever it's manageable and that, that's worked well. And yeah, it doesn't affect the company at all. So, yeah. An example of what not to do is in 2021, the EF4 tornado that hit Mayfield, Kentucky, hit the Mayfield consumer products plant and collapsed the roof.

12:14There were over 100 employees on site at the time. And there are still multiple lawsuits ongoing, both on behalf of the employees who died and others who were injured, alleging that supervisors told them that they would be terminated if they left early, essentially forcing them to remain on site. Now, whether or not that's true, I don't know. It's a legal case. It's ongoing. But if you, as an employer, put your people in a position of having to choose between their safety and their job, that's wrong. Oh, yeah. Don't do that. So, yeah. So, the first thing my mind goes to is, you know, in people centric lean, it's safety, quality, simplicity, speed. So if you're prioritizing productivity, which has a hand in speed, over safety. And really, if a guy's like, man, the storm is coming, but they told me I had to keep working, that's not a focused individual. That's someone that's got, you know, their minds in their car, they got the mind with their friends and family at home.

13:14Yeah. That's not a quality mindset right there. It certainly violates a simplicity principle somehow, but man, that's terrible. Yeah. Profit over safety. No thanks. Yeah. Not good. Yeah. Other stuff going on here, we are, we just purchased a chip conveyor for our R650. Okay. I didn't know how it exists. Huh. Yeah. Yeah. You can put chip conveyors on brothers. Yeah. What brand? Oh, hang on. Let me pull up the, let me pull up the details. It's an LNS MH140. That's what I was going to say. Yeah. LNS. Yep. Do we have one? No, we have only Germans. Yeah. But LNS. Yep. It's going to do sons. It's an LNS. I think I have the number wrong. Okay. Pretty sure it's an LNS. I wasn't the one who handled speccing it. Okay. But we're doing more and more aluminum production work on that mill and being able to not have to go around and rake a lot of chips out and scoop them out into a bin is really helpful and that will have more coolant volume as well.

14:15So we won't have to top it up as frequently. It'll be a little bit more stable that way. It'll just be easier to deal with the volume of chips that we will produce if we're running that machine more cutting aluminum parts. Some of those can be configured for like right or left hand discharge. And so we're going to have to play with our layout a little bit because where that machine currently sits, the bin that the conveyor would dump out to no matter which side it was routed out is going to block a walkway on either side of the machine. So we're going to have to play around with it. So for now, we may just stick the chip conveyor back in bay three for a couple of weeks because we had been planning to order one later. And apparently somebody else had put in an order and then change their mind after the conveyor was already ordered. And so when we came available, way ahead of the lead time that we were scheduled for and they just said, hey, do you want to get it sooner rather than later? We're like, sure. Take it. It's the model we were going to buy and you have it right now. We'll go ahead and take it. And that way the ball is in our court to move the machine and place the conveyor whenever we feel like.

15:15Yeah. Nice. Yeah, that's definitely one thing I dislike about conveyors is the space that they take up relative to the low value they provide. Sure. It's great that they're cleaning them out. That's not a human that's doing it. That's fine. But yeah, we've got one conveyor that sticks out, you know, over almost four feet. And it's not in a walkway. It's not in an aisle, but it's caused the machine to be offset to where it just takes up shop floor space, takes up Genba, you know, productivity space. It's funny to me that you say the relatively low value they offer. Have you owned a machine that net that didn't have any conveyor at all where you could only get chips out of the bin in the back by scraping them? Yes. I have, well, two lates right now. So the smaller late that we have, I'm sorry, it's a midsize lathe, but it only turns parts that are one inch in diameter and smaller. And the volume of chips is small. Now on our big Puma or definitely our big MXs, those have chip conveyors and they're top and off bins daily.

16:16But you know, every, you know, four hours, maybe they can go in with the pitch fork and, you know, scoop stuff out. It hasn't bothered us or myself enough to really invest. And it does take up space on the right hand side where we would have to reposition the machine in a significant way. That's my very first mini mill. I hated it. Mini mills are already small and I was always cleaning it out. But when you're in startup mode, I'm like, well, I could add a chip conveyor for back then is probably like $1,200. That's like my rent for a couple months. So it was hard to justify. But no, I think moving forward all machines I would buy now is would be basically chip conveyor absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Anything where I'm going to run aluminum production parts to generate a decent volume of chips, and obviously you can make the chips take up left space if you use tools with chip breaking. Yeah. I'll build into them. That'll help compact everything. There's strategies for that chip management, especially when you get into the lights out production, chip management and planning around chip size is a whole thing all of its own. But I've spent a lot of years raking chips out of the chip bins behind brothers and there's

17:18small chip bins. They fill up quickly and it's really easy to start overflowing at the corners. If you get a pile of chips in just the wrong place, so you really have to stay on top of it. It's just one whole extra layer of stuff. So until the Matsura, I had never owned a mill that did have a chip conveyor. Okay. And so on the Matsura, it's like, I just all I have to do is make sure the bin isn't overflowing. Yeah. This is amazing. Yeah. Yeah. On our EC400, I love that chip conveyor because it's integrated into the structure where it doesn't take up any extra space. It doesn't create anything. Even the barrel 55 gallon drum can tuck under the chip conveyor within the footprint of the machine. It's a great design. Yeah. So you're probably loving it, right? Yeah. And if we didn't have, if we had a smaller volume of work on the 650, we would just continue doing it the way we're doing it, sure. As we are trying to put more and more work on there, we're actually going to be, we're planning to extend. We have a T200 rotary with a Lang three-sided tombstone on each table.

18:21So we got three Lang Knight King vices on each table. Well, we're actually going to be adding an extension onto those and a support at the end to be able to add another set of three or custom fixtures with the goal being to on each table run close to the T200 three-opt ones and out by the extension, three-opt twos and have one piece face to face flow where the operator is just transferring, pulling the finished piece, transferring one to two loading fresh stock to one, torquing it, rotating, finish out, one to fresh stock, go. Yes. And we decided to do that rather than looking at a, a gripper automation system at this point, just because we have about nine different parts in this family currently and they're not all the same size. Okay. And so just trying to standardize in a way that all we have to do to change from job to job is just change the soft jaws for op two. I see. Yeah. Easy peasy. Yeah.

19:21Interesting. Hey, have you, I see you're wearing an Okuma hat. Where did you get that? Oh, I got that. I am T.S. Okay. Fun. So this is a machine that I'm actually quite surprised that more people don't talk about or I just don't see it, but it's, it's an Okuma MU S600V. It's this tiny. Oh yeah. I am T.S. 2018. Whoa. Historical. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Had this hat for a long time. Yeah. That's nice. Well, broken in. This is my backup shop hat. In case I forget to wear a ball cap to the shop. A ball cap because it's critical for me with safety glasses and a very bald head to have to keep my glasses up because I put them on my head. They just fall off the back. You know, the only thing that throws me off Andrews is it's a bit, the colors are a bit muted for your personality. I know. It really needs, we need orange. You need to pop up something. Yeah. So anyways, this machine MU-600V, it's this really compact 5-axis machine. It's amazing. And it has, it's so close, like the cutting area is so close to the side panels that you

20:25can put two of these next to each other and program a part handoff. And so it's 5-axis. You can hit it on like all five sides. It can rotate 90 degrees to the right. The adjacent machine is to the right. It will have jaws that open and it will go 90 degrees to the left. It'll program this handoff between the machines and it'll finish to the bottom. I, like what's the catch here? You know, the catch is 16 tool standard. Yeah, you know, upgrade to 30. So I could see that easily being an awesome cell for a dedicated parts production line. Exactly. Where you're like, we need 14 tools. And we're good. Or yeah, we pay for the upgrade. We need, we have 30, we need 26 of these and so we've got a couple of spots for redundant tooling, sister tooling. If we need it, and these just munch on one thing all the time. Anytime you start getting into situations where you're shopping a machine to munch on one thing all the time, then you have wildly different criteria. Yeah.

21:25Like so true. Does this need to be able to handle huge volumes of chips? Well, in this case, the part we're going to be making on this is going to be near net size turned out of round bar stock. So the chips are going to be tiny and we're chip breaking them. And so no, is this going to need to have enough clearance to tool change super long drills on top of a tall part? No. It's not a very big part. We don't have any 14 inch long drills going into here like when you can get the situations where you have a long term contract for a part and you're just going to dedicate a machine to it. It's a totally different way of thinking about the entire thing and machine tool manufacturers sell a lot of machines to companies who are like, this is the part that I need this machine to make. Absolutely. And that's so foreign to me. Yeah. One of the things that, you know, I look at this machine and I go, JWIJ wants it. But when what crushes me is that like one of our high volume components would be the

22:27left and right of our, it's a two piece assembly of our vacuum power units, you know, our smart back three system. But really when you sit down and do the math, just a vertical machine with palatized work holding high density beats these machines all the time. And it's because it's still, it's one piece flow, which I love. It's a hand off. There's automation. I love. But there still needs to be something that loads the material in the first op machine and then takes off the second op machine. And every part has, you know, if it's 14 tools, it's 14 tool changes. Whereas high density, it's like, man, there's 28 parts on this palette, but it's still 14 tool changes. And, you know, that's as a high density work holding manufacturer, this is where my products kill me, you know, it just crushed me, but I don't know, I saw a really cool machine cell at flying J, it was a conveyor fed robot cell that was positioned in between two five axis brothers. Okay. And so the robot was loading.

23:28So one robot in the middle with a conveyor feeding it parts and it's loading them. And then there's an outbound conveyor. So it's a double decker conveyor bound on the top, out on the bottom. And they're making fairly small curved parts that are done in one. It's like a little curved panel with some holes and some tabs and like got a lot of surfacing, a lot of surfacing on it, pretty much all surfaced, a couple of drill holes and then all surfacing. But they are done in one and you just snap the part off afterwards and the machine's just loading in stock and then loading out parts and loading in stock and loading out parts. And in that case, yes, you are tool changing all the tool changes per one part. But you're running around the clock and all your operators have to do is walk by their palette of pre-saw and stock that's right there and just make sure that there's enough stuff on the inbound conveyor to keep the machine running. Yeah. Yeah. We kind of have that set up because we have a UR5 on one of our lates and we have this

24:32Lego build, we have, I think we have four or six Lego build plates, you know, it's probably a grid of Lego posts, maybe 50 by 50 and then we 3D print these little fixtures that hold the parts in place. And if it will go from A1 to A2 to A3, then B1 to A3, when it gets to like V12 and there's no, it's done with that part, it goes to A1 again and so anyone walking by can just top off the, the fixture that's on this table and when it finds that there's no part there, it's just going to run, it'll go to another part of the program and say, all done or empty, that's nice. But were you talking about the brother system, what is it called the something two or junior gosh, what's it called? I think what I was seeing was the, in that case was the brother flex three, flex three, yeah, yeah. I believe. Okay. Okay. Second. But it was feeding two machines. Yeah. Okay. It was the flex three automation conveyor system. So it's an inbound outbound conveyor that feeds into a five axis, that feeds into a multi

25:35axis robot and it has open panels on both sides. You can put it in between two machines and you can, you can do cool things like it takes finished, it takes, it takes raw stock and puts it in the machine to the right and then transfers that part to the machine to the left and then puts fresh stock into the machine to the right. So you can do multi outflow or in this case, I think they were doing just a right and a left hand version of this part, one inch machine and the robots, the stock size is the same. And the robot's just loading one of the left, one of the right, one of the left, one of the right. It's like cringles. Yeah. You just keep popping them. Did we see this at IMTS? I don't think it was there, was it? I don't know. I've, I've seen it before. Okay. This was not the first time I'd seen it, but I don't recall where I saw it last. I don't remember. I've also been, I've been to the Yamazan showroom in Chicago. Okay. So almost certainly it was there. Yeah. Make me believe it's, it's an, we're in an IMTS year. That's going to be for you. It's going to be awesome. Yeah. But what made, what makes you really want this Okuma?

26:37It's awesome. I just think like, you know, handing off parts is, is one thing that humans have done since the history of making parts. And I just feel like, like that's why I love Maine and sub spindle lathes. They're handing off parts and it's a finished product at the end of the day. And I just, there's, I would just love to see that in, in mills, probably 20, well, how long has YouTube been around, whenever a very early video on YouTube was, yeah. So, so a guy had a mini mill, he, I looked like he either took off the side panel or plasma cut the thing and he had a rotary, like a small 5c rotary. That was, it must have been pneumatically powered or something and it kind of barfed just parts. And it was this early, simple automation thing before, you know, there were any of these co-bots or, there's always been, you know, fanic robots, but it wasn't even that and it was the coolest thing and I'll try and find that. And I just, I just remember thinking, man, that's, that's the way to do it.

27:38You're just bar feeding. You can actually walk away. You don't have the wasted motion of loading parts, even in, not just a vice, but onto a pallet and moving the pallet. It's just done. You load the bar and let the machine do it. I'm just fascinated with that. I think that's the future. One of the other things that I really like about palletized work holding and we've talked about this before is the idea of, if you have a production machine and you're running a mix, anytime you have more than one master pallet, you can always get variations across pockets and across pallets. And so there are places where, generally, if someone was asking me if they should consider high density work holding, I would ask, first of all, how tight are the tolerances on these parts and how much cutting forces are you putting on them to understand how much holding force you need per part? Because you can put, when we pre-stamp a piece of aluminum in our lane press and then put it in a match toothed jaw and torque it, it's not coming out. It is really securely held in a way that I'm never going to get when I tighten a couple

28:39of pit bulls, even good ones by hand with an Allen key. It's just not the same thing. They're not in the same category. But a lot of things don't require that. Are you mostly drilling and doing light side milling and pocketing? Great. Awesome. Are you trying to just rip through full whip slots and have a lot of lifting force on the part? You may need more security from the work holding than high density can easily provide you. But the mix part, if you have a mix of different pallets and you build in some kind of encoding program into the pallet, either a bore that it checks or a feature that indicates what program to run, and the operators are never having to, even at armatsura, you say run pallet 7 and you have to manually assign a program to it. Now you could do the same approach where you have a master investigation program, a master choosing program at the top where every time a pallet comes in, all pallets run the same program and then the first operation is call up the probe and check the pallet to see what should actually run as the main sub program.

29:42We haven't done that at all yet because we're not running production parts consistently enough. But that idea that you could have one pallet each and do one piece flow, even one, two, three op to get finished parts on a single pallet and let your operators load them and run them completely interchangeably. That is bananas. Oh, yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. Well, I mentioned the thing that we haven't yet implemented. We have the plan in place, which is, gosh, it's probably year in at this point of serializing the pallets for our horizontal and then we just have a master program that is tied to a database. That's great. As long as things work, you know, and then it's the, for example, an automation, it's easy to program a robot, a cobot to do exactly what you want to do, but the beauty and the difficulty is in what to do when it, when it doesn't, when there's some type of thing that's non-standard, like I didn't find the part or the part slightly undersized or it's out of position. That's, that's a tricky part.

30:44That's where the brain slides. Yeah. I don't know. I, I would like one of these machines. I just, even if it weren't attached to another, like a sister machine, just the compact nature of these. Have you downloaded the brochure yet? Is, does it ask for a lot of my personal information? Oh, yeah. You bet. No. And if I did, they got fake junk. I don't, you know what? Andrew, I think this is the site. Donald Duck asked for a quote on an M.U. 600 V. So I went through and I filled out a form to get a brochure and first name, do not last name, put barriers, address between your information, one, two, three, you know, and it was, I'm trying to send this, this message and like, I don't know, that's one of the things to Haas's credit. All their information is freely available. So at a certain point, though, you make enough connections in the machine industry that you could probably just send somebody a text or a DM and get the answers you need. Like the first time I walked into IMTS, I knew nobody except the couple of guys from

31:45Yamazan who would sold me my brother. Nobody there knew me. I didn't know anybody. I was active on Instagram, but not, I wasn't really popular yet. Like I just hadn't made that many connections with machinists. I was a lurker who was watching other people's stuff. But these days, like if I had a random question about a machine tool, I'm probably not going to even get on their website necessarily to look, I'm going to go ask a direct question from somebody who has one if I know someone and say, hey, tell me about this machine and who Edo Kuma should I talk to about it? Yes. Well, I think the popularity, well, you let me know. I think, you know, brothers, when I got into machine, weren't really, I don't think they were like ubiquitous with like a legitimate, you know, machine. It's just that there weren't that many guys that had them. And then in our class, Instagram class, like you, some other guys I know, you know, had them. And it was like this brother community as a brotherhood, essentially, and it was, and it really kind of like propelled the brand based on how, how you guys were vocal, like

32:46vocal in a positive way, sharing your information, yeah, all that good stuff. And yeah, I would not reach out to Yamazan if I had a question. I would DM you or, you know, half dozen other guys that I know that have brothers. So shout out to Jared Drinkwater, binary engineering. Yeah. I watched all of his speedio videos on YouTube back in the day. Yeah. And gosh, I thought, I thought it was older than that. But there's a 400 inch per minute cutting. He was cutting a shifter knob. I finished deep 125 wide in, I think in a seatle. So plastic just crews. But I remember I had my little desktop CNC at that point and watching him just rip. Yeah. So that was May 10th, 2015. I think that was right around the time I was ordering my speedio because I got my first speedio late summer 2015. Okay. And I'm sure that I saw that video before I had my machine.

33:47I was like, that's what I want. Look at the speed. Yeah. Yeah. No. I mean, I'm not a brother owner, but they're on the top three. You know, I think this behind the haws and do some because we have those brands, I would definitely consider brother next. If you had a part that it was a good fit for in terms of number of tools, size of part and what kind of spindle you needed to do the work like, do you need a dual contact taper? Do you need a 40 taper or can you do it with a 30 for the things that they do well? They do them really. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, the interface is super friendly, right? I mean, that's the point. The plate work right down the table, miserable on a brother. Not good for that at all. Oh, you're doing it. If you're doing lots of thin, flat, large parts, you don't want a brother. It's not the right machine for you. We considered selling brother risers. Well, you have a brother riser. Do you want to share us a file with you for this? Yeah.

34:47We modified it and it made a bunch of them. We have risers under all of our MPSs because, yeah, brothers have a high Z-axis bias. You can't reach the table with standard length tool holders. That's funny. And they did that specifically to make room for fourth and fifth axis setups on the tables without giving away all your Z. Oh, I see. Okay. So, it's funny when I take a tech support call and they'll say, hey, do you happen to have like a riser? And I'm like, oh, you have a brother, huh? How did you know either that or a robot or a brother's a way more popular? I'm like, yeah, I'll send you, we don't make them, but I'll send you the step file and you can just cut it yourself. Yeah. So, I've been really, really leaning into coding using Claude and Claude code specifically and installing different skills and I'm going to be finishing my second software solution for the company, which is going to be rolled out in a few days here. Well, when this goes live, it will have already rolled out and AI is changing so fast that

35:49when Claude, you know, they're always incrementing their models and Claude went from, I want to make sure I get it right, I was using Sonic 4, Sonic 4.6 and then Opus 4.5 to 4.6. And there, even that jump is an iteration that is night and day. And I'm talking to a buddy who he has a software development company and he says, GPT just put out codecs and I'm like, yeah, but I'm done with GPT. He's like, no, it's given Claude a run for its money and I think they announced them within hours of each other, that type of thing. And I feel like this, like, yeah, AI has been amazing for the past couple of years. I really do feel that in 2026, it's going to be a watershed year where, you know, if this is the people that get on board with AI and creating these little, little tiny applets or, you know, these, these things that help an applet, yes, yes. Like, like a simple calculator that instead of banging it out on, you know, Windows calculator

36:52or like an Excel spreadsheet, you just put it live on your site and you don't even have to, who cares if someone accesses it from the outside world, you know, a security or something, you know, but just that little thing, it's so easy. Like, I did that instant calculator where I don't want to hit like plus and minus signs or enter equals all that stuff. I just want to type in a number and I just want to see what the conversion is, to metric or out of metric or into metric, that type of thing. And then hotkeys, ASDF, just a clear copy paste, that type of thing. So easy. Yeah, I think the new economy is going to be heavily shaped by these things that make your day just that much easier. I had my convene meeting this past week and one of our members said, hey, I don't know anything about AI. What can it give me some practical examples of how I can get 15 of my 40 hours back? And my buddy next to me, who's a software developer, said, no, no, no, you have to understand that that's kind of the wrong way to think about it.

37:54It's not getting 15 hours back. It's taking your 40 hours and turning it into 400 hours. I mean, that's about as good as I can say it because it's just things that can be accelerated that we don't even recognize can be accelerated. And this is going to be an amazing year. That's my prediction for AI. Yeah. So one thing we were just working on and we got it working yesterday and I was using it today, I'm always interested in machine monitoring. And we, I signed up for chatter very early on. We still have chatter. It's now folded into toolpath. Oh, right. I didn't know that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But there's a different thing I'm looking for in the, so all of our brothers were ordered without status lamps because the status net was like a thousand dollar option, which is silly. A beacon. You can buy. Yeah. A beacon. Okay. Okay. You can buy an LED 24 volt beacon, three colors off Amazon for 30 bucks. And then you can buy a couple of Rolex connectors and do a little bit of crimping and then plug it

38:55into the back. For under 50 bucks and under an hour of work, you've got that on your machine. And so initially we put those on the machines and we just like bolted them in place in the quote in front corner. And then we changed to using a magnet base for them. So as we move machines around, wherever we were sitting, we could actually reposition the status lamp easily, toollessly, to someplace where it was clearly visible from the angle we'd be viewing it from. And if you have one operator running multiple machines, depending on the layout, the operator may not always be able to see every status lamp of every machine from where they're standing. Yeah. And now that we've moved for a long time, I had a literal rear view mirror above my computer monitor. Just a little curve mirror pointed back behind me toward the corner of the room where Mill 2 was. So in any time I was running a test mold, I could just look directly above my monitor, not have to turn around and peer, but just raise my eyes and see in the mirror whether I was green or amber. Amber? You could have fresh pot, pardon, hop off.

39:56But now that mill is all the way around the corner through the breezeway and around another corner in the back of Bay 3. So I have to walk to even look at it. So I said, okay, how can I get a remote monitoring solution where I can have at my desktop computer a status lamp that tells me what Mill 2 is doing? And so Ben Vibco did for me a little program that ran a simple LED lamp that could be any color we wanted, and it just plugs into USB on my computer. And when the machine is in cycle, it's green. When the machine is power, but not in cycle, it's yellow and when the machine's off, it's off. Great. Super easy. I didn't really need the red status because the only thing I'm using that for is to tell when a program has finished cycling. Sure. Yeah. Because I'm not, whatever. Yeah. And so that worked really well. We did that beginning this week. The work great. And then I thought, you know, it would be really nice to have a dashboard, a remote dashboard that showed me the statuses of all the machines all the time, just machines one through seven, three colors, tell me what's going on.

41:00And so initially, we were trying to ping chatter because we have all of our machines would have to chatter and have some kind of visual dashboard that would key off that. They would really only show me the tricolor lamps. I don't, I don't want to know, this chatter has tons of data in it, but this is really an operator oriented visual management tool where you can just see what machines need to be fed right now. And I wanted to be easily visible on either a wall mounted screen or a portable tablet. And Ben spent some time on it on Wednesday, some time on it yesterday and showed me the functioning thing at the end of the day yesterday. And then today we made some tweaks, changed the colors a little bit, made the, you know, work on the layout to get as much visibility out of as possible. We're currently running it on an iPad. We had found this problem where initially we were having the iPad ping a standalone computer here in our shop on our network. And that computer was pinging chatter for a status and then going back to the iPad and giving it the update. The problem was you can't do that continuously.

42:02So the iPad was pinging the computer every 15 seconds, then it would take 15 more seconds to ping chatter. And chatter was checking it on the machine about every two minutes. Which for brother cycles, is a full day, is work, you could easily, yeah, you could easily miss an entire cycle in that check window. Now for when I'm running prototype molds, my average cycle times are like 35, 35 minutes to 60 minutes. Sure. So I'm not going to miss a cycle. But if we're using that to look at production machines, they're cutting holster shells, two minutes and 20 seconds, very average cycle time for those parts. Right. And so we realized, no, we have to go back to square one on this. And we have to figure out how to talk to the machines directly. We have to be able to just ping the machine and get an answer immediately back. And so Ben was working on that and was working on it. And he came up to me and was like, I got to work and I can see the machines directly. I'm talking to him right over the network.

43:03I rewrote this whole little application and here's how it works. And I said, great. I was about to walk back to my machine and run four parts in a row that had nine second cycle times each, which was just pre drilling some alignment pin holes in some stock to go on a vacuum palette. And I said, I'm going to go, I'm going to walk back there right now. And I'm going to run these four sub 10 second cycles back to back. And I want to see if the system can even catch that those cycles existed. Okay. Sure. Or is it just going to blink and miss them? It didn't blink and miss them. It caught them. It showed them. And that was really encouraging because I want to be able like Christian Watson, who's one of our machinists in Bay one does a lot of our aluminum work. And also there's a lot of our parts blasting parts masking and runs our ultrasonic cleaning systems. He often is floating between Bay one and Bay two, whether he's masking and blasting or loading a mill. And from where the blast cabinets are, he can't see the machine status lamps. And so the first place we're going to put one of these tablets is directly on top of

44:03the blast cabinet. So he can look at it while he's still blasting. And then just see, hey, mill one's done. Mill three's done. I can walk back in there. Top those both up and come back here and blast and not be un-gloving and walking around the corner to check and be like, oh, no, they're still good. And then five minutes later, be like, I should check them again and go, oh, no, they're still good. I'll wait 10 minutes next time. And of course, they finished 30 seconds later. Nine and a half minutes after that, he checks and they're done and he goes from changes. So that ability to have an idea, vibe code it real quick, try it out, realize it doesn't quite do what you want. We architect it completely and go again in the same week only for the cost of our time is bananas. So let me ask you. I realize we have not talked about our machine monitoring system that we have now. We have these little devices, they're little dev boards that look at the color of the beacons and we program, hey, you know, you show it red and you should say, this is red, you should go to yellow, this is yellow, you go to green and this is blinking green. Then we have little dashboard, like little tiny micro displays, they're probably

45:08inch and a half square. Some of them around the guys in the shop want round ones and it's just a remote beacon. And so we've, you have mentioned that before. Okay. Yeah, because it sounds like the same thing and I'd love to, I kind of want to like maybe bring these to the, you know, machining summit and yeah, give them out and just say, dude, play with it because we're going to make this into a product and it's going to be cheap. Have you done a video about it? No, no, we have not. Dude, do a quick iPhone video about it. I'd like to see because you've told me about it multiple times. Okay. And I think I understand it. But if I saw it, I'd grasp it instantly and I would go, oh, okay, I think this clicks and now hold the device in my brain. Yeah. Before we hopped on the record, I was talking with my, my guy that's developing it Nathan and we're, my whole thing is like simplify it, simplify it, simplify it. It's not even going to use internet. I don't want to internet connected. I know there's eye-truck concerns there. And it's just so easy. Like here's, here's the hub. It just needs power and turn on this device. It sees it online and it has its own kind of network.

46:09It's called ESP now. And it, it's very robust, it goes long distances, small packets, you know, really durable. If one, one device is at the end of the shop and the hub is at the other, they'll piggyback over each other. They'll relay information. And so, you know, you just hop on, you tell it what you want. And then you just, you, the setup process is going to be, it's more secure, but it's a little bit more cumbersome. You log on to its Wi-Fi network that it's broadcasting. And then you see the dashboard and you, you kind of set it up there and then you can sign on to, you know, the shop's Wi-Fi. So it is independent. And it just sees little devices that just sit on top of the, the controls or wherever the, the pendant is and it just looks at the lights and it works amazing. Now, as an owner, I had a hard time introducing this. Like, I kind of did this back in 2018, 2019 and the guys are like, man, I don't know, like, we get the work done. Like, this feels like big brother, you know, why are you trying to drive us? The guys now are like, hey, we feel bad because we have these two aisles and sometimes we

47:09can't see the machine. It'd be really nice if, while I'm programming or, you know, doing something, if I could just have a little beacon on my desk, I want to keep the machine running. We're like, yes, this is great. This is for you. This is not data extraction. There's no analytics. There's none of that. It's just for you. That feels easier to implement in a shop. And if you want to use it great, if you don't, whatever. But yeah. Yeah. I also wonder about like, enough of us have smart wearables, Apple Watches and things that an Apple R I can set up pretty granular controls and say every time, you know, Mill 3 finishes a cycle, give me three vibration pulses on my bracelet on my, on my Apple Watches. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Or like a long time, like, so I go like attention, one, two, three, yeah, sure. Those kinds of things like anything we can do to make it easier for the information to be visible to the people who will take action on it to do the work, that's like, it would

48:14be one thing to say, oh, I've got a desktop app or I've got a website that shows this status. But I have to be at my computer and I have to think to look at it. It's totally different. If I can just have a single purpose thing. Yes. Right. I'm glad to go all green. Yeah. All red. Yep. A tiny appliance that does the one thing and it just does it well. So I've had lots of conversations over the years on this, you know, can we do an app? Can we do notifications? So in aviation, there's this, there's this warning chime, like it, pilots call it bitch and Betty because it's like, hey, it's the thing that sells you terrain, pull up or traffic and, you know, and oftentimes when you're coming in for an approach, it may be like one of my friends is a commercial pilot with the United, he's a captain and he said, yeah, I know it warns us on every single approach. And we just, we disable it. We know we can see the runway, but, you know, if you're disabling it every approach, what happens when it is a terrain pull up situation and you've just grown weary of it?

49:19And that's why I opted to just go, hey, this is not anything that I want to integrate. And you could integrate because it's got this open source backend system. You could probably integrate it with an Apple watch. I kind of like that. Like three pulses means it's machine three. Absolutely. I just wanted something simple and so did the guys and where they could just go anywhere. And I just want to start there. That's why I keep going simplify, simplify, simplify. But yeah, we'll see. We'll see how people take to it. Yeah. And too much data, too much information just becomes a wash. It all becomes noise. It's all noise. And you don't take any action on it. Yeah. It's a balance. So it's a balance. So that's what we're working on. Circling back, spinning around. I'll be back to the beginning in tornadoes. Yes. The question of how, when and how should alerts be issued and how large an area should they be issued to? That's a real question. It amazes me that we continue to have this confusion about tornado watches and tornado warnings. These are two needlessly confused and interesting. Yeah.

50:20Huh. Like, what is the difference, by the way, like a tornado watch means or tornado is possible beyond the watch. A tornado warning means or tornado has been cited. So warning is more severe than watch, but the act of watching, like as a kid, I got this backwards and it's always hard to undo. It's like, it means that somebody watching saw a tornado. Yeah. They're watching the tornado. And those two terms are ambiguous enough. They actually created a third category, which is tornado emergency. And even that is like, it's rarely used. But the tornado emergency is, if we issue a tornado emergency in your area, it means that catastrophic damage and serious loss of life is expected immediately stop everything and get underground. Like, it's only used like when big tornadoes are going to hit very populated areas.

51:22But the downside of any kind of warning system, bitch and Betty or anything else, if you train yourself to selectively ignore it, that becomes an automatic routine that runs in the background. And you are way, way less likely to react the way you need to the one time it's actually really real. Yeah. Yeah. Your brain hits the snooze button basically on these things. Yeah. And then all the Midwest dads go outside to be like, is there actually a funnel otherwise I'm going to go back inside and watch the game. Right. Right. Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah. Had home and enjoy some pizza and a movie. Enjoy it. My kids. Take care, Jay. See yah Centia. Bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Lean Build Podcast. Jay and I are very grateful for you, taking the time to listen in and we hope that it was helpful to you. Please leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice. And don't forget to subscribe and share the episode with somebody you know who would enjoy

52:23it. Thanks. You