Inside Matsuura: Andrew's Japan Trip | Lean Built - Manufacturing Freedom E108

In this solo debrief, Andrew recounts his visit to Matsuura’s plants in Japan, where he observed firsthand the discipline and detail that define Japanese manufacturing. He describes how Matsuura trains new employees years in advance, the precision of their hand-scraping process, and the consistency achieved by grinding every pallet on a single master machine.

He also discusses the innovations he saw in Matsuura’s hybrid LUMEX metal 3D printing and machining technology, spindle balancing rigs, and integrated chip briquetting systems. Beyond the machines themselves, he reflects on Matsuura’s culture of multi-generational leadership, long-tenured employees, and a genuine curiosity about how customers use their equipment.

Andrew explains the real opportunities in palletized five-axis automation, from reducing setups to unlocking flexible, high-mix production. He emphasizes that these machines require not just investment, but vision and continuous learning to realize their full potential.

What is Lean Built: Manufacturing Freedom?

Two successful entrepreneurs talk about manufacturing, lean principles, and the freedom they are pursuing in life and business.

Andrew: Good morning, lean Built listeners. Today is gonna be a solo episode. I'm gonna debrief my last week trip to Japan to visit Matsuura. After I got back and I just got back last night, Jay and I had not yet been able to find a time to get together and record. So I opted to jump on a solo episode, and what I'm gonna do basically is go through all my photos on my phone, just in order, a quick time, walk through the trip and comment on what stood out to me because I use my phone.

As a way to capture basically anything, receipts, signage, people, anything that I want to hang onto and have a timestamp on and know where I was and what I was doing at the time. I take photos I prefer that overtaking notes. And here we go. [00:01:00] Here's my Japan trip to Matsuura. So first off, I don't travel internationally very often.

I'd never flown to Japan or anywhere that far away before. So this was a first time for me. Taking a long distance international flight. Furthest I'd gone before that was France and couple things hydrate on the airplane. Make sure you wear comfortable shoes and or take your shoes off during the flight.

And if the airline food doesn't taste good, don't eat it. By the time I got to Tokyo, I had eaten several meals on the flight there, and at least one of them didn't really agree with me. And so I got to Tokyo. And I wasn't feeling great 'cause I'd eaten, I'd sort of made myself eat food thinking, oh, this is a long flight, I should eat something.

But if it doesn't appeal to you and doesn't quite sit right, just it's okay. Don't finish the meal. So I got to Heida airport and met up with Billy Bogue, who's the president of  Matsuura. USA. He was in Japan for the same trip. Billy and I had not met previously. We've talked many times on the phone and also via [00:02:00] text.

This is our first in-person meeting. I like Billy a lot. I appreciate his enthusiasm, the energy he brings to  Matsuura. USA, but also I think a lot of folks don't know that he had a career as a machinist. He's been a carbide salesman. He's been deeply into the tooling world. He not look like what I think of as a typical machine tool salesman dude as ripped.

And we had some really good conversations, especially you know, when we were like on the train going to Kui City and we had time where we were not doing anything particular but sitting around and talking. And it is very interesting to me what he's doing with  Matsuura us and the vision and drive that he has to get these kinds of.

Compact palletized, automated five access machines into more shops. I'm really excited to see where that goes. Just a note, I thought it was interesting. In O'Hare Airport in Chicago, they have these green cannabis amnesty [00:03:00] boxes all over the terminal. So if you've got weed, you can just throw it away and not get in trouble.

Apparently, it's an extremely American thing. The flight to Haida was pretty uneventful. It was high and fast. We were in a Dreamliner and weather was good. There wasn't a lot of turbulence. We were staying, we were in Tokyo for one night and then took the shin sen, the high speed train to Kui City, which is where Matsuura Corp is.

, The hotel we were in Tokyo the first night was near the Ginza District, which is a lot of your high-end shopping. Think Louis Vuitton, Rolex, all that stuff. It was my first experience of Japanese hotels and what I know about Japanese hotels is only what I've seen in videos from Paul Aker about Japanese hotels.

The room was compact. It was very clean. The closet had like a shoehorn and a brush and variety of other tools. Everything had a place, everything was clearly organized. The bathroom was very, very simple. Obviously there's Japanese toilets everywhere and it takes a minute to [00:04:00] learn the control panel 'cause there's like usually eight to 10 different functions.

On a Japanese toilet. Interestingly at our Tokyo Hotel, there's a little wall box just inside the door, and you have to put your card, your room card, or a business card, something card sized in there, and it turns on all the lights. Now the premise is you put your room card in there and it turns on all the lights, and then when you leave your room to go out on the town, you are out of the hotel.

You take your room card and it automatically shuts off all the lights, and unfortunately also turns off the AC in the room. One of the things I was surprised by. Was that a lot of spaces in Japan were not air conditioned like the the Tokyo terminal for the high speed rail, the main terminal, not air conditioned.

They have small waiting areas that are air conditioned, but the terminal itself is not air conditioned. Most of the halls and public spaces in our hotel in Tokyo were not air conditioned. The rooms were individually air conditioned, but the system was designed to turn that air conditioning off if you weren't in the room.

And so when I first got into my [00:05:00] room, it was hot. I did not realize that I could use some other card besides my room card. So I took my room card with me and left to walk around Ginza a little bit and I came back and my room was hot. And also along on the trip were Tyson Lamb of Lamb crafted Jeff Kin and Crystal Allen of cutting time and Kylie Grau of Titans of Scene C.

And Jeff was like, oh yeah, you just take a business card and you put it in the little wall thing and it keeps the AC on so your room is cold when you get back. And I know that now, but I didn't know that then. And I was. Frustrated that my room was hot and I could have had it cool when I got back from my walk.

It was hot. August in Japan is hot. I had not really ever thought about how much Japan is a low lying Pacific Island. And in August we were seeing temperatures in the nineties every day with high humidity, lot of sun, not a lot of breeze. Man, I barely packed enough clean clothes. 'cause basically everything I put on, you'd wear it [00:06:00] once and you got so sweaty you could not wear it again.

I was really glad to have multiple pairs of shoes and a good set of wool socks. I packed a lot of socks. I'm a big fan of whoa. For socks I like. I like smart wool. I like tough socks. There's a, there's a bunch of d different brands of wool socks, but if you've never really worn wool socks, they're amazing.

Highly recommend. We went out for sushi first night in Tokyo. I was still feeling kind of off from the plane flight and the plane food, and there was a little bit of confusion about how much sushi was included in each thing we ordered, and we ended up with too much sushi. It was delicious. But. It was also a lot and the tuna in particular was amazing.

But at that point I also just really wanted to go to bed 'cause I had flown out of indie. Let's see, what time was my flight? I had a 9:00 AM flight to O'Hare, an afternoon [00:07:00] flight out of O'Hare to Tokyo. By the time I got to Tokyo, it was feeling like about 2:00 AM my time. And we were getting there at like four 30 in the afternoon.

Then getting to the hotel, dropping our bags, doing some walking around, and then going out for dinner. And so by the time we got back from dinner, it felt like seven or 8:00 AM like I'd pulled an all-nighter and I was unprepared for how much the time zone difference was gonna screw up my clock and mess with how I felt during the day.

So sushi was delicious, slept okay in the hotel, but Billy said you're probably gonna wake up right around 2:00 AM And sure enough, I woke up in the middle of the night because. I'm in the wrong time zone and it was, that was a thing that happened consistently, basically every night that I was there, it was, I didn't sleep through the night any night.

I woke up multiple times during the night 'cause my body was confused about what time of day it was, breakfast. Places don't open early. There was basically no place to get coffee at six or 7:00 AM [00:08:00] most places opened at eight or later. A lot of the shops in Ginza didn't open till 10 30 or 11.

And so, we walked down the street to a little cafe and had, I had coffee and a crock maeu a sandwich, cheese toast with some meat on it. It was delicious, but a lot of things weren't open. So we walked around Kinsa for a little bit that morning before we had to hop on the high speed train to go to Kui City.

Basically all the shops were closed, which was disappointing for me. The one thing that was on my list to get while I was in Japan was a new pair of Onitsuka Tigers. Those are my favorite sneakers. I've worn them for years ever since I discovered them in college. So it's been 20, 25 years almost, and they are no longer easily available in the us And so I wanted to get some while I was in Japan and there was an Onitsuka Tigers store in Ginza and they weren't open.

And so I didn't get a chance to stop in there. There's mini trucks everywhere. I walked around and took a bunch of photos of interesting buildings around Ginza, places like Louis Vuitton, Rolex [00:09:00] Seko. Saw some really cool cars. Obviously you're gonna see your basic Lambos, Porsches, Ferraris. They were also, I saw the car.

I really want a nice neutral gray Audi RS four. I love fast wagons. And the RS four is the fast wagon I want, but it is not imported into North America, so I can't get that here. But I saw a beautiful one. I would've preferred it in orange, but the gray looked pretty awesome. I will be putting up a bunch of photos from this trip on Instagram over the course of the following week, but I didn't wanna just dump them all at once.

Tokyo was very orderly. . The streets were really clean. I saw almost no trash anywhere. I saw people with green sashes walking around with trash bags and gripper tools, picking up the small amounts of trash, cigarette butts and things. Overall, very orderly. People are very conscientious about crosswalks.

There's a lot of people in small cars, mini trucks on bikes kind of zipping around. But [00:10:00] overall, traffic flowed and was orderly. And I re recall thinking, I hear almost nobody honking. In Chicago or New York. Even in Indianapolis, if you're downtown, there's you. You're hearing horns constantly.

People are always honking about things. There are seven 11 stores everywhere. I had not realized that seven 11 was so ubiquitous in Japan, but they're everywhere. Like in Tokyo, like every three or four blocks, there's a seven 11. That is kind of the go-to convenience store. They have fresh food, they have cold, a cold section.

They have tons of different kinds of snacks. They have some home goods, some personal items. They have a beer and liquor section. They have all kinds of beef jerky. It's just like, it's the place to go to get something quickly. So if we needed, if you needed Advil or you needed some snacks for the ride on the high speed train, or you wanted to actually buy breakfast, there was stuff at seven 11, which was interesting.

And then from there we got an Uber and went to the Tokyo [00:11:00] station for the high-speed rail. And there we had a bit of an adventure , we were in a hurry.

'cause there's lots and lots of Ubers and taxis pulling in and people are piling out and getting into the station. Kylie's purse got left in the Uber and we realized that as the Uber was pulling away and making the corner, so we saw it leaving and couldn't catch it. And we knew the driver's name, but there wasn't any way directly to contact him through the Uber app.

And so for the next hour we were making phone calls, sending text messages, trying to figure out how to get her purse back 'cause it basically had all her travel documents in it. And eventually we found. There were a lot of taxis are also Ubers, so we figured out what taxi chain it was. Found another car from that taxi company.

Talked to the driver in person, said, do you know this or that driver? And he said, well, I, I, one of my friends knows him. And so we sort of played the radio telephone chain and got [00:12:00] to a driver who could get to the driver who was driving the car that had the person. And eventually the guy came back to Tokyo Station and Kylie got her purse back.

it was an, it was tense because we were running out of time before we had to get on our train and travel across Japan for several days. But it was also really pretty awesome that we could get ahold of somebody. The purse hadn't been stolen, the driver came back as quickly as he could, and that was our first adventure at Tokyo Station.

So we're going into the station and it's not air conditioned. There's tons of little shops. Everyone was carrying these small battery powered, portable, personal fans. Everybody had them. There were tons of them. I also saw so many more umbrellas than I've ever seen before, and I found out why. Once we were in Kui, I got caught.

I had taken a walk. I got caught in a downpour, like 15 blocks from our hotel by myself. And everybody else around me immediately just reached into their bags and pulled out umbrellas. And I, the dumb American got stuck standing [00:13:00] there in the rain and made it back to the hotel. Extremely wet. But I'll tell a little more of that story in a minute.

In Tokyo Station, it is bustling. There are people hustling everywhere, and it's hot. At least when you were outside on the street, there was some breeze inside the station. The air is still, and it's hot. You get a card, a transit card for your train ride, but we also upgraded to a green car, which is a reserve seating, kind of think sort of your first class on the train, and you have these two tickets and you put them through an automated machine that punch scans them and punches them and it gives them back to you.

And I was the last person in our party. I was last in line in our group. The machine is supposed to take both your tickets, punch them both and give them both back to you. And for some reason, the machine aired out and punched apparently a bunch of public tickets, but only gave one of them back to me. So I ended up with my green car pass, but I did not have the main [00:14:00] ticket that authorized to get me on the train.

And you have to go through this initial set of gates to get into the passenger area of the station, and then a separate set of gates to get to your particular line of the train. And I was going to get through the second set of gates. Everyone's ahead of me, and I throw my one ticket through and the machine turns red.

And one of the security, one of the guards there was like, no, I'm sorry, you have to, you can't go through. You have to go back. And his English was workable, but not particularly detailed. He just said, no, no, go back. Go back. And I was standing there and I had been holding onto Kylie's. Suitcase while she was trying to sort out where her purse had gone.

And when the guy finally came with the purse, I said, Kylie, I'll roll your suitcase for you. Don't worry about it. So I'm stuck at the gate. Now everybody else has gone through, they don't realize I didn't make it through and I've got my luggage and somebody else's luggage. I'm missing my ticket. And we've got short time till our train comes.

So I was having a great time. So I got on my phone, I called Tyson and I said, you've [00:15:00] gotta get back here. I'm stuck at the gate. I just need to hand you the luggage so that if I have to go back and I can't make this train, that I'm not stuck here, and Kylie loses her bag, doesn't have her bag when she gets to Fukui.

So Tyson came running back. I basically tossed the luggage over the turnstile, and then I had to run through Tokyo Station all the way back to the initial gate, and then find a customer service person who spoke English and explained that I had scanned two tickets, but the machine only gave me back one.

What they actually did was walk me back to the gates, ask me exactly which lane I'd been in. Then they paused one of the machines, unlocked the side of it, pulled an appropriate ticket and gave it back to me like they didn't reprint something or reissue something. They actually went to the machine and pulled out a ticket to match the route that I needed and gave it to me.

And then I went running all the way back through Tokyo Station, all the way up the stairs. There's a lot of stairs, and scanning my two ticket, two tickets through and got up to the platform. I was drenched. It [00:16:00] was so hot. So we had only maybe a 10 or 12 minute wait till our train got there, and there's a number of staff members on the platform.

And as soon as the train shows up, they put a cord across the entrance, says, please don't enter until the train is clean. And then they quickly go through all the cars and pick up any trash, anything anybody left behind. And they were incredibly fast. And then they pull that cord off and you can enter, and the train system does not wait.

It arrived on time and it left on time. And when we got to subsequent stations and people were getting on and off, if you don't get ready to leave before you arrive at the station, you might not make it off the train before the train leaves again. So when it says the next station is so and so people.

Several minutes ahead, get out of their seats. They pull their overheads down, they double check their stuff. They empty their seats, and they are standing ready to get off. When the train stops, they pile off and then [00:17:00] immediately people are piling back on and the train is only stationary for maybe a minute, minute and a half.

It was surprisingly quick. The green car was super comfortable. The chairs have tons of space and they recline. The view out the windows was beautiful. It was a very misty morning. The topography of Japan where you have a lot of low lying flat-ish areas that are heavily densely settled. And then in between them you have these big spiky ridges and hills that have basically nothing on them except power poles.

It was really beautiful and interesting to see. Tokyo is huge. It takes a while to get out of Tokyo, and it was really interesting to see the mix of different size communities that we drove, went through or passed. And there was obviously industrial. There was some very large spread out residential areas.

It was really interesting. The ride to Kui was very, very smooth. The train obviously is going extremely fast and it's especially a little alarming. There's a lot of tunnels and at one point we passed another high speed train head on in the tunnel. [00:18:00] And so you're sitting there kind of in the dark flying through this tunnel, and then another train is flashing past your window seemingly only inches away.

And it took only a few seconds for those two trains to pass their complete lengths end to end. It was shocking what the passing speed was. When two trains are going opposite directions we got to Kui City and Kui is known apparently for dinosaurs. There were a bunch of big public statues of dinosaurs.

And Fukui City is, I did a little bit of reading on the history. It's called the Phoenix City because it was firebombed almost into oblivion during World War ii. Then during the recovery restoration, after the war, I believe in 1948, there was also a major earthquake that destroyed 70% or more of the structures in Fukui.

So in a single decade, the city had been completely destroyed, just demolished twice, and they still rebuilt, and then became a center of heavier industry. And [00:19:00] Matsuura is one of the main manufacturers in Fukui City. We were staying in a courtyard Marriott. What was interesting is it was kind of a hotel in the upper half of a building.

So to get to the lobby, you have to go to the 16th floor. The hotel is floors 16 and up. There were other shops and other things in the lower floors, but it was interesting to go into a building and not get to your hotel lobby until the 16th floor. Once again, Japanese hotel room. Very neat and clean.

Simple decorations, the complicated Japanese toilet, which was becoming more familiar. These, this one didn't have the put your key card in the slot in the wall to turn lights and AC on, but in most cases, AC units in the hotels were limited to 20 degrees centigrade. You could not go, you could not set them any 20, any colder than 20 degrees.

So even if the room was hot and you were trying to cool it down quickly, you couldn't set it lower. There was no like. Ultra freeze, set it at 60 degrees high air blast to [00:20:00] drop the temperature quickly. It was just, you could set the temperature you wanted it at and it would get there eventually. I watched basically no TV while I was there, except one evening when we were in Kukui City, when I just wanted to sit down and I turn on the tv and almost all the channels were either news, public broadcasting, other stuff, and their only channel showing movies was showing Terminator two Judgment Day.

And as a. A man of a certain age, I think I'm required by law. Anytime that movie is on that I sit and watch at least part of it. So I sat there and watched 20 minutes of Terminator two. This is where I got caught in the rain in Kui City. Our first afternoon there, after we got off the high speed train, I dropped my bags, changed my shirt, and put on fresh socks and then went for a walk because there are ruins.

Not very far from the hotel of Fukui Castle, which is from the IDO period, which is 1600 to 1850 ish. And I was curious to see that. And I also just wanted to walk around Fukui a little bit. And this was the first block of time where we had a couple hours where there wasn't anything planned. And [00:21:00] we were gonna be having dinner with some of our hosts from Matsuura that evening.

But I had a few hours to kill. So, I went for a walk. I looked at various cars, checked out cool buildings, visited a couple of shrines, went to Kui Castle. Which was beautiful. It was very, very calm and peaceful. It's a large lot of large cut stone and a big moat, but the remaining ruins are only a small fraction.

In contrast to the sort of European castle where you would have a town and the castle sits inside the town and the castle is kind of the keep the retreat in case of an attack in Fukui. The town was inside the castle walls, so the castle exterior walls would've been large and a lot of residences and things would've of, a variety of people were inside that protected area, which I thought was interesting.

They have cicadas. There were a lot of cicadas in the trees in the park around Kui Castle. Being from Indiana, I'm very [00:22:00] familiar with cicadas. We've had the swarm a few times. The cut stonework and the trees and the, the castle itself were very beautiful and peaceful. They had several indoor rooms that had exhibits and displays, and those were all, hardwood floors.

And they provided slippers and a little sign that said, please remove your shoes. And I think I was the only, I was the only westerner that I saw walking around in there. And there were only a handful of other people in the castle ruin. So nice, peaceful chance to walk around. Read the signs and Google Translate is amazing.

In a number of cases, I could quickly read entire large signs that were all in Japanese. Just hold up your camera and pull it up in Google Translate, and it will give you a very legible translation that gets sometimes little it'll miss some things. It'll skip over sections or garble things. But on the whole, I was able to read all the Japanese signs at the Qi Castle.

Quickly and easily enough to get a good sense of what they were saying about the history, the geography, the economy of the [00:23:00] time when the castle was built, who had managed it, which key or important people, whether they were swordsmiths or poets or politicians who had lived there at different times. So that was fun.

And then I went hunting for one of the few things that I had forgotten to take on my trip. I had forgotten to pack a scrubby. Some people call him a loofah, but. Just a scrubby anyway. Didn't have one. So I was trying to find a seven 11 that had one and I checked both a family mart and a seven 11 and apparently in Japan, both in our hotel in Tokyo, our, the two hotels in Tokyo at the beginning and end of the trip.

And the hotel in Kui City, they provide a washcloth and a body towel to use in the shower. And it's also very common to see a stool in the shower because a lot of people sit down when they wash themselves, which is interesting. But I just wanted a scrubby. And I went to these two different convenience stores and neither one of them had it. So I was getting further and further and further away from my hotel looking at the map going, is there another convenience store I can check?

Is there another convenience store I could check? And the last place I went was the seven 11 and I was at that point, probably 15 or 16 blocks away from the hotel, [00:24:00] and they didn't have what I wanted. And as, as I was walking out, I noticed that they had a little liquor shelf. They had a small bottle of Suntory Japanese whiskey for like $5 and 85 cents.

And I like whiskey. I've not tasted very many of the different varieties of Suntory, but I was like, for six bucks I should try this. I should just buy this bottle and take it back to my hotel. And it was a seven 11 n Centura co-branded bottle of Japanese whiskey. So I paid. $5 and 80 some cents for it.

And then the second I stepped out of the seven 11, it started pouring and everybody around me immediately got out their umbrellas and just kept on calmly walking. And I had to walk all the way back to the hotel with my little bottle of San Tori whiskey in the rain. And I was drenched. Tyson and Kylie were gonna meet up with me at the hotel lounge, and I got back there and they both ordered a drink.

I came in looking like a drowned rat and said, [00:25:00] Hey guys I'm not gonna hang around and, get a drink. I need to go upstairs and like, change and dry off, but I got this cool bottle of whiskey and I'll, I'll let you know how it is. And I went upstairs, I changed my clothes. I was drenched, my shoes were wet, my socks were wet, I was completely wet, changed everything.

And I opened that bottle of whiskey and I had a glass, and then I pour the respite down the drain. It was, it tasted like a $6 bottle of whiskey and it was not terrible, but. it was not worth having the whole bottle. So I, my curiosity got the best of me. I spent six bucks on a bottle of Centura Prime, and it was, worth $6.

Then we met with Matsuura. We had dinner in Kui City, and then went and crashed out at the hotel. And the following morning got picked up at the hotel and went Matura actually has two separate factories. One right in Fooo City and one in Tofu. And the one in Ku City is primarily manufacturing of parts.

This is where they have all their big mills. What used to, they used to call the big moms, but they also have a number of Okuma [00:26:00] and other large open bridge mills for , working on their large castings. So this is where they're grinding all their pallets and making all the large parts. Then their tofu plant is entirely focused on assembly.

And so these were two very different facilities, both very interesting. A few things really stood out to me. This was my first time I'd met Katsu Matsuura at IMTS last year. I had never met Yuto Matsuura, who's the son, who's just a little younger than me. And when we got to the first Matsuura plant, we had a sit down and an introduction where we met various members of their staff and introduced all of ourselves.

Each of us gave a brief explanation of how we'd encountered Matsuura, what our companies did and, and what we were hoping to learn on the trip. Then we were given these bright yellow caps and name tags or badge holders and earpieces, and one of their staff members who spoke English would take us around the facility and narrate and help translate any questions we had for the staff in the various [00:27:00] places.

*And the facility is incredibly clean. They have a big board that shows all their employees at that plant, and a big sign over it that says, one team. And in keeping with the ity dinosaur theme, they have green, yellow, and red dinosaur emblems icons for their staff members. A green dinosaur is one to 10 years of experience.*

A yellow dinosaur is 10 to 20 years of experience, and the big red T-Rex icon is for employees with 20 or more years of experience. I think probably close to half of the employees on their big one team board had 20 or more years of experience and a number in the top left corner had been there for 30 or 40 years or more.

So we asked them how they do their hiring and they said they hire every spring, they always hire, and there were some new, there were obviously some new people on the board. They were their most, most recent hires because they said it takes about three years. [00:28:00] To really get somebody trained and fully up to speed in one of those specialized areas in the plant.

*And so their expectation is if three years from now we're gonna need more people, we better hire them and start training them today. So rather than waiting until it's emergency and then hiring and training as, as much as they have time for, they have a consistent process and a consistent training flow that they bring new people in to get them up to speed so that when they need more capacity, they have more capacity and they've added on to their tofu plant several times.*

We were able to see an overlay of their building and they showed, you know, this section was built in this year and then this section was added on here and this section was added on here. And their most recent expansion, I believe was in 2024. I love seeing machines cut, big iron. The it's awesome to see Matsuura machines making Matsuura machines.

They're also using large bridge mills [00:29:00] from Okuma and then also from, what was the other company we find a picture,

TMD and also from she, she Bauer machine. And these were really big open bed mills that were set down in the floor. They had. Large pallet changing Okuma open bed gantry mills that were, that had huge work pieces on them. We saw a bunch of cool work carts, some neat mist collection things. We walked through their whole spindle grinding area 'cause they produce their own CIA spindles and they have a variety of ID and OD grinding setups.

They have some robotic loading cells, the. The overall facility though, everything was moving, people were work, were moving around, machines were running. It felt busy but not hurried. And everywhere we went, anytime we had [00:30:00] questions, the staff that were working there were very gracious and answered our questions through a translator.

There were a number of really neat things, but also being a huge nerd, I'm always looking at small details like how these tool holders are stored, what kind of cart this is, what kinds of. Hooks and bolts they're using to lift these heavy work pieces on and off machines. So you'll see some of this in my Instagram photos.

They have a single machine that grinds all their pallets for MXs, for MAMs, for their horizontal series. It's done on this single master machine. And part of we looked at that and said, well, that seems like a risk. That seems like a point of failure, but they maintain that machine. Incredibly diligently.

But the idea that if you buy a pallet three year you, you buy a mam and then three years later you buy more pallets for the mam, you're not buying pallets just from the same factory. You are buying pallets, ground the same spec, literally off the same machine. And so their pallet to [00:31:00] pal consistency, the ability to.

Run a job in different places on different machines, move it from machine to machine, from pallet to pallet and have the accuracy be maintained is extremely high. So we saw a lot of pallets in their rough milled state, in their initial ground state and in their finished ground state. They're using a lot of locomotive grinders.

We saw several brands of Grindr, notably OK Komodo. Also, I think Ichi was one that I saw, and the machines were humming interestingly, on their big linear pallet system that runs a lot of their castings. They had these small chip briers called a voxa neo pack, placed directly under the chip conveyor.

So that instead of going out to a bin and then getting transported and loaded into a hopper, that then puts them into a tting machine. The conveyor of the CNC machine is dumping chips directly into the Etting [00:32:00] machine. The Etting machine was tiny, the smallest one I've ever seen, and it was then dumping those pucks.

Into a rolling bin directly next to it. So you basically a two stage conveyor. A conveyor, the main conveyor of the machine dumps chips into the brier, and then Brier has a small conveyor that dumps pucks directly into this rolling bin. And, I haven't tracked down pricing or sourcing in the US on that yet, but I grabbed a brochure and photographed that whole machine and I am definitely interested.

And then we went into the Lumex area. If you're not familiar with Lumex, Lumex is Matsuura's Hybrid Metal, 3D, printing and machining machines, and it's really cool. I've seen they had a whole bunch of sample parts and it makes a lot of sense, especially in relatively high accuracy. High complexity, injection molds because you can do conformal cooling, internal routing lines, cooling channels that are not able to be drilled conventionally.

And you can also very rapidly [00:33:00] produce geometry that would otherwise require extremely long machining cycles due to super long tool stick outs because you are laying up a thin layer and then machining it and then laying up the next layer and machining it. The lumax is able to use extremely stubby tools to do all its machining, which means tool life is good, tool accuracy is good, deflection is minimized.

And you can get a lot more accurate features done down deep in the mold. That would be very difficult to do from a solid block of material. So that was fun. We also got to handle some of the driver heads that Bryson De Shambo is working on right now. 'cause he is working with Matsuura us as part of their partnership with Titans of CNC to produce some interesting titanium 3D printed drivers.

And that is. Really cool. We also saw some, uh, some EDM cutaways of things like shell mills or face mills that were Lumex 3D printed where all your coolant distribution [00:34:00] is is just built into the cutter body. And you can do really interesting things with the volume of coolant, the placement of coolant lines, the direction of the coolant nozzles spraying toward the chip.

That would be conventionally impossible if you had to just. Mill these cutter bodies and drill all their coolant holes. Then from there we went out for lunch. We had some Korean barbecue at a place not very far from Matsuura facility, and Jeff and I ate our weight. It was very good. I was also extremely hungry and I got to sit with Katsu and talk about the history of Matsuura, and I was particularly interested in.

How in a multi-generational family owned business it was coming up as the son and deciding whether or not to take on the family business or do something else. And while I can really appreciate the value and the excitement of, being part of your family business, it also seems like as a [00:35:00] westerner, that there's a lot of risk of there being pressure and expectation that would be.

Very hard to cope with, especially once you get into the third or fourth generation. And it's one thing to, work in a company that your dad built from nothing, where you were there when it was small and you worked in it as it grew. It's very different to take on leadership in a company that has hundreds of employees and millions and millions of dollars of production every month.

To step into that. So I admire it, but I'm also glad that that's not my situation. I don't think I would like that. We went from there straight to the tofu plant to see assembly operations, and there I saw yet another Audi wagon. This time an S3. Parked in the employee parking lot, looked pretty good. I would love a little Audi wagon, so the machine assembly area, they have dedicated sections of the building focused on assembling different [00:36:00] types of machines.

So they have a whole area that is only for their H plus 300, 4 0 5, 506 30. Their big horizontal machines, they have a section of the machine that is only for MX four twenties or only for MX three thirties or only for MX five eighties, and then a big section that is for their entire MAM line from the 72 35 V up through the 100 H.

And I had never seen a MAM 100 H in person before. Those machines are enormous. We got to see a bunch of their spindle assembly process. There is an intense process to balancing these spindles. Interestingly, a lot of companies have a main center spindle, and then the drive keys are bolted in and then ground in place or ground first, and then bolted in.

Matsuura drive keys are integrated into the spindle. They're not bolt-on units, and so there's a multi-step process where they balance the spindle assembly. Then they balance the motor and then they balance the [00:37:00] motor and spindle and they're balancing each part of it. And they have these really cool flip-up rigs where depending on whether that spindle is going to go into a horizontal or a vertical machine, they're doing all their balancing in the orientation.

The spindle's going to be in when it's doing the work. So they're not gonna balance a spindle vertically and then install it in a horizontal or vice versa. They have these test rigs that allow them to. Tip the whole carriage 90 degrees and do their balancing horizontal for spindles that are going to go into horizontal machines.

We actually got to touch a, an in-process lumex spindle that was running at 35,000 RPM, and it was amazing how little vibration and how little noise that spindle was making. E even being run off at that speed. We went onto the main floor. We saw machines at every step of assembly from the barest castings, getting their linear rails installed and aligned to [00:38:00] almost complete machines with all their sheet metal on who were getting that were getting last minute electronics I installs and final calibrations and things.

Everything in between the place is very well lit. There were cranes, big gantry cranes everywhere. We got to see some of the first black mam, 70 twos in assembly there. That was pretty cool. And we've been talking about the whole grinding process. 'cause one of Matsuura's main features that they talk about when they talk about their quality is they grind and then hand scrape all the critical mating surfaces in the entire machine assembly.

And we got to watch some of their scrapers. Doing that work. And we got to then try our hands individually at scraping a, a ground cast iron ring. And it's a lot harder than it looks and it doesn't even look easy. So it was very fun for all of us to each take a turn scraping and then see our work next to the work of somebody who's been [00:39:00] scraping for more than a decade in the Matsuura plant and see how consistent, how accurate their scraping work was.

Then watching guys using, you know, a crane to hoist the upper part of the frame of a machine into place and then slide it back and forth a few inches at a time to get an an accurate read of exactly where the remaining high spots are, and then lift the whole thing off and scrape it until it is an incredibly accurate clean joint.

That was super fun also. That was a great chance we got to hang out there while we were all taking turns doing the scraping demo. And Jeff and Crystal had brought their son Everett along on the trip, and he had little Matsuura branded booties on, which was hilarious and cute. But several of the Matsuura staff members at the factory took turns pushing his stroller around and entertaining him.

And it was very sweet to see our Japanese hosts taking great care, not only of us, but also of Everett, while Jeff and Crystal were trying out the scraping demo and checking [00:40:00] out machines. So that was, very fun. We got to see machines in all states of assembly. The process of aligning the linear rails I don't know what machine that was going to be 'cause we were seeing only the base casting, but the largest ceramic straight edge I've ever seen.

And a pair of dial test indicators mounted on the linear guides. And they have a whole system for using. Flathead screws and little round bumper rails where they can tighten the screws down and push laterally on the linear guide so that when they run the indicator from end to end across the entire linear guide, the indicator basically doesn't move a bit.

It was wild to watch skilled installer working on this piece that is so foundational to the accuracy of the machine, but it's also deep, deep inside, like you don't. You don't think of? I don't think of all the work that goes into making sure that those basic parts are as accurate as they can possibly [00:41:00] be.

The floors at Matsuura were spotless and were really kind of bright, lively, green, which was a color I would never have thought to pick, but in a lot of the rooms in their CMM rooms, in their inspection rooms and spindle balancing in the hallways, it was all this very warm, bright green. From there, we actually went and visited a really cool knife manufacturing facility.

I didn't buy any knives 'cause I was flying checked luggage only. But several other folks bought themselves some Japanese chefs knives, which was really fun. The actual forging workstations weren't active the afternoon we were there, so we didn't get to watch the knives getting made. But it was really cool to see and apparently that region Kofu has a long, long history of.

Sword making and blade making and forging, so that was super fun. And then we said goodbye to the Matsuura staff, got a group picture. It was really a fun visit. It highlighted lots and lots of ways to [00:42:00] me that the team at Matsuura is really, really deeply interested in quality in all the small places, not just, oh, we have the best compensation, and so the machine will stay accurate.

Building the machine so that it has accuracy and quality at each part of the assembly. And I understood my MX four 20 better after seeing how they were putting them together. that evening we had dinner in Kuy City. We had some saki and some very fun conversation, and then went back to our hotel and crashed out.

The next morning we had our hotel breakfast, and the hotel breakfast in Fukui was lit. There were so many food options. There was tons of fresh fruit, a whole buffet line that was all more traditional Japanese breakfast foods. But they also had scrambled eggs, fried eggs, fresh tomatoes, bunch of different kinds of cheese, bacon and sausage coffee, [00:43:00] tons of different juices.

They had smoked salmon, I loaded up and that made a huge difference in my ability to stay focused and stay attentive throughout the day. 'cause we were seeing so much stuff that without a good breakfast and good coffee, I would've been hurting by 10:00 AM. So the breakfast buffet at these Japanese hotels, uh, smoked any breakfast I've ever had at any American hotel.

It was delicious. We then hopped the Chinen back to Tokyo and we stayed in a hotel, in a, an area and took it called Shibuya, which is kind of a shopping district, and spent some time out there, walked around. I visited Tower Records, got some souvenirs from my kids. Tokyo is amazing.

The streets were bustling. There were tons of people. Lots and lots of tiny little shops actually stopped off on a side street. And saw a number of little, it was not a touristy area, a number of little restaurants that only had three to [00:44:00] four seats each, and that was awesome. I got myself, uh, some cool souvenirs.

I like pens. I'm always kind of a pen and pencil nerd, so I bought myself some nice pens and mechanical pencils. There were tons of cool shops. Tyson and I checked out a bunch of tools. Found a place ahead. Fuji and Nex and a bunch of other brands that we like, and they had an amazing selection of sockets and ratchets and pliers and all kinds of stuff.

Saw some cool cars. There were a number of whiskey shops. There was actually one cool one, I don't remember what the name of the company was, the store, but they had a variety of barrels of whiskey and you could buy a small bottle and blend your own. So they had scotches and bourbons and you could make your own.

Unique blend, which I thought was kind of cool. It was still freaking hot though. After a few hours walking around in Shibuya, I was drenched and went back to my hotel and just rested and cooled off for a bit. I did not ride the Tokyo [00:45:00] subway at all. I did hit some secondhand shops in secondhand shops, in Goodwill and places in, in, in Indiana.

You do not see. Hundreds of pairs of vintage air. Jordans, like the, both the price tag, but the kind of stuff you saw in vintage and secondhand shops in Shibuya was pretty, pretty wild. We stopped and had smash burgers, Tyson and Kylie and I at a place right in Shibuya. And I'm not sure if it was just 'cause we were hot or because we've been walking a lot, but that might be the best double cheeseburger I have ever had.

Tyson said the same thing, we just. It hit the spot like nothing else. And the next morning after that, we then hopped our flights back and made it back to the US And I'm still recovering, my internal clock is still adjusting, but I had a lot of good conversations with Tyson and Kylie and Billy Bogue and I'm very excited to be part of the Matsuura family.

I think there's a lot of opportunities for small [00:46:00] shops in the US to really take advantage. Of very flexible, high mix palletized five axis. I think for shop owners that have the vision to look ahead and see how that high mix and that accuracy and repeatability can mean that they can pivot on a dime to and from new jobs.

Prototyping, production runs running overnight, running over weekends. It just unlocks a whole new potential for creativity, but it's not easy. I had breakfast with Jeff and Crystal and we was asking them, 'cause they have a number of mats and they both commented that, yeah, these machines are really powerful.

But you don't just buy a five axis and then immediately understand how to run it. You don't just get a pallet pool *machine and then all of a sudden have it all Make sense. You have to be continually investing as an operator, as a programmer, as a business owner, in finding better ways to use it, understanding where it can *[00:47:00] *continue to save you even more time, where it can cut down on setups, figuring out the balance of what's the appropriate style and approach to fixturing for what you need to make.*

*Do you need maximum density? Do you need maximum flexibility? Do you need the absolute fastest open and close cycles to change parts? Are you gonna be loading in the machine or pulling pallets out? How are you going to be managing standard tools? All the different things that go into actually making palletized work for you long-term* and.

When we were at Matsuura, they had tons of questions for us. They wanted to know what kind of work holding we were using and what kind of tool holders we were using, and they just, they wanted to find out about us, and it was really gratifying to see the degree to which they clearly, genuinely cared about understanding what their customers were doing with the machines that they'd built.

It wasn't just, we're happy you're here. Thanks for buying a machine. Here's our factory. [00:48:00] They really wanted to know a lot more about how we were using the machine, which parts of it were most effective or valuable for us, and which features and which functions we weren't using or hadn't discovered yet.

And I think there probably are, and this is true of almost any kind of advanced machine tool, there are probably dozens of improvements, better processes that are right there. That are right in front of you. You just don't use them 'cause you don't know about them. And this is one place where I think Haas has done a fantastic job by sharing so much information, so publicly, so widely, and fostering an extremely vocal and transparent community of users.

*The number of unrealized benefits that are latent in Haas machines is much lower. Most people know how to use almost all the things on ahas. When I got my brother understanding how to use the high accuracy modes. To be able to cut my cycle times and improve my accuracy while getting *[00:49:00] *more reliability out of my processes.*

*I didn't know how to use those modes at all. For years, they were right there. They were an available tool, but it never got communicated to me how to effectively use them until grad current. Published a paper* about how to set up and use high accuracy modes, how to understand them, what they're for, what each different mode is good for, and what basic parameters are a good starting point for each modes you can actually start to use 'em effectively.

And I think I'm actually, I'm really excited about the collaboration between Titans of C, c and Matsuura. And I know if you're listening to this program, you probably have an opinion on Titan and I. I'm really excited to see that exposed Matsuro machines to more shops in the US because I really think there's something really incredible about Matsu, having now seen it up close.

As a company, they're producing a little less than 400 machines annually currently, [00:50:00] and that is a totally different scale of production than what Haa is doing, than what DMG is *doing. They are not trying to put a machine in every single job shop in the us. They're trying to find the shops that can benefit most from the accuracy, the quality, the repeatability, and the thoughtfulness that they build into their machining centers.*

*Because a Matsuura could easily be wasted in a shop that wasn't going to use it in a way that took advantage of all the things that it could do. So it'll be interesting for me to see if you are a Matsuura owner, user operator you've programmed for Matsuura, I would love to have some comment. Shoot us a DM over on the Lean Built Instagram page.*

I wanna know what were some things that you kind of discovered on your own that made your experience with the Matura better? 'cause I want to. As quickly as I can learn all the lessons everybody else has already figured out [00:51:00] and not have to figure them out from scratch myself. So that was my Japan trip.

Keep an eye on the Henry Holster's Instagram page for photos from my trip. You can also follow Tyson Lamb and Matsuura us. I think Billy will be posting some photos. I'm not sure, but I know Tyson's been posting some. I'm gonna be going through I take tons of photos and then sit down at the end of my trip and delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, and pair down and pare down and pair down until I have only the photos that I want left.

I'm almost done with that, and I'll start posting on Monday or Tuesday the day that this episode airs or the day after. So you will start seeing some of those and look forward to your comments and questions. I had a great trip. I'm super glad to be back in the us. Hopefully I can get my sleep clock back into a normal schedule before Monday morning.

'cause right now my body has no idea what time it is and that could lead to a rough Monday morning if I don't get that reset. So thanks for listening. As always, go innovate your [00:52:00] production and Jay and I will be back together for next week's episode. Have a good night.