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Two successful entrepreneurs talk about manufacturing, lean principles, and the freedom they are pursuing in life and business.
lean built 97 prescript
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[00:00:00]
Andrew: So do the cool things we get ever let us down stuff breaks doesn't work. You have not a great experience with things.
Jay: Oh, let me think about that. Yes, yes. Every cool thing I've ever owned has at one point eventually let me down, but there's, uh, an opportunity to create solutions to those. What's on your mind, Andrew?
Well, we, we were talking
Andrew: before we hit record about laser engravers stuff. Some stuff you were trying. Yep. Uh, I got bamboozled. Last week and accidentally bought a CliffNotes version of the five Pillars of the visual workplace, essentially. . Yeah. I wouldn't say you got bamboozled. I think there was some Well, I would, I would say
Jay: that's bamboozled.
Andrew: Yeah. Well, at, at the time I'm like, I'm not sure this is the right thing. [00:01:00] This seems a little suss. Sure, sure. But I did track down the actual book. It arrived today. It's in my hand. It's a nice 350 page full size. Hardbound book. . Hero, Yuki, anos, the Five Pillars of the Visual Workplace. . And I'm actually really excited to start to go through
Jay: it.
So you haven't gone through it, but can you just rattle off the five pillars?
Andrew: Uh, we only three asks. We sweep, store and standardize. That's two, uh, the five Ss.
Can you read about the five S's I'm looking for? I'm looking for one thing that I did skim earlier.
Jay: Five pillars or five S's. Oh, you know,
Andrew: I don't know
Jay: because it, yeah, okay. We're, yeah. Yeah. Five S's is sweep, sort, standardized, shine, sustain, which it, it's always shine. That
Andrew: I forget. I just forget. Shine.
Jay: Yeah. It's, I don't know. Sweep and shine. That's why we combine those. You sweep enough. There's not gonna be any more to sweep, and so you'll eventually [00:02:00] shine. You do that enough and you're automatically by default sustaining. So that's why I really like, you know, the, whether it's Paul Aker, I'll give credit to Paul Aker, but the three s just makes sense to us and it's easy to memorize.
Case in point you and I are both lean practitioners and every now and then I'm like, wait, what was that fourth one, fifth one. And now I've seen six s, which I don't like for complicating things.
Andrew: Yeah, simplicity is,
Jay: Such
Andrew: an undervalued thing.
Jay: Absolutely. Yeah. That's, I mean, so safety, quality, simplicity, speed, that's your improvement ladder.
There's a reason why simplicity makes that list and it's not number four.
Andrew: Yep. Yep. So, looking forward to this book I really appreciate things that give us strong color coded clear visual controls. . I*. I'm always frustrated, especially in softwares where you're not dealing with physical objects like you're dealing with pixels on a screen.*
*Yeah. And you have the ability to set scripts and styles and like, you could choose the color and shape. I watched a series of *[00:03:00] *really interesting videos one time about a guy who was a UI ux designer for mobile apps, and he was talking about the various ways of shaping and shading a button. *
*. *
*To give you an understanding of which things on the screen are pressable and which ones aren't like it.*
*It's really subtle, but good design there. *
*. *
*You immediately understand what to do. Yeah. Oh, *
Jay: *of course. Yeah. *
Andrew: *And the thing you're looking for is in the place where it would most obviously be. *
unknown: *Yeah. *
Andrew: *It's not necessarily strictly logical. It is intuitive. It becomes. Easier and easier to use, but the first time you look at it, you're not going, I don't, I can't make heads or tails of this.*
. You can get started.
Jay: Yeah. Hey, I'm sure maybe your church uses planning center for scheduling. Do you guys use that? Yes. Okay. So the other day I'm putting in my blockout dates, times that I'm not available to, to play. Yeah. And I put in my dates and I'm like, where's the save button? I'm looking for a check mark.[00:04:00]
I see an icon. It's in the top right corner. I don't think, my brain doesn't go, oh, that's how you save it. It's an icon of a *floppy disc, which anyone under the age of like what 30 will have no clue what a floppy disc is. And Inc. And it looks specifically like a 3.5 inch floppy disc. But I'm like, oh, that's funny.*
*They haven't changed that. They could do a check mark. They could do a save. It's just one of those things that doesn't go away, but it's, it's now Ubiquiti ubiquitous with saving stuff. Yeah. But, um, but it's not intuitive and especially when you're creating something new the fact that it's gotta be intuitive has gotta be, like when we're creating new products, it's just gotta you gotta be able to put hands on it like a Rota device.*
*You know what it does? You look at it for 10 seconds, you're like, got it. I know how to work this thing. *
Andrew: *the other thing, I'm trying to think which app it was. Anytime you're having to select a range of dates on a calendar, whether you're looking for a banking statement or you're searching for a transaction, I find those *[00:05:00] *interfaces often to be really poor.*
Jay: Yeah. Like, is this calendar view, am I only selecting the start date and then I accept it and then another calendar pops up and I'm doing the end date? Yeah. Or in that same calendar, I might click on the 20th and then immediately click on the 24th and it blocks out. Yes.
Andrew: Yeah. Can I grab the front and then grab the end date, and then grab the start date.
Do I have to grab the start date first? Like all these different things? Yeah. It's all decisions. Somebody's deciding. I was talking, we actually, we are hiring part-time, well, we're contracting an additional guy to help us with some of the ui ux work on our shipping software that we're building.
. And has sit down with him today. And my goal, he is longtime friend of mine, like him a lot. *He's, he is a programmer who cares about the utility of design. . Which is not, uh, many of them. Okay. But saying whenever we get this ready to actually go out into other shops and start beta in it I *[00:06:00] *want it to be clear that it is software built by users that everything about it, it's, it doesn't have any, um.*
*Whistles and boondoggles built in that an actual user of the software wouldn't touch and use every day. . It doesn't need to have, I want it to not have feature creep. I want it to not have visual clutter. . And one of the things that I actually liked as I was skimming through the, her book, he was talking about overcoming different kinds of objections.*
Resistances, he listed 12 resistances. And one of them was about, essentially
saying, oh, well we're not a factory. Or like, oh yeah, five Sing is great for the production floor, but in the office we don't need the five s.
.
And what he said was in some companies, while the manufacturing people energetically implement the Five Ss and other improvement in rationalization measures, the clerical and salespeople assert that such measures have nothing to do with their kind of work.
They do not [00:07:00] realize. Allowing documents and memos to litter their desktops is the same as allowing dirt and cutting debris to litter factory floors. This is why five s implementation must be a company-wide program.
Jay: Yeah. Makes sense. I love it. That
Andrew: clutter is my desk is a lot less cluttered now than it has been in the past, but even, even now, I still.
Have things here that I don't use often, don't need. . And it's not great. I should make, I should make my office even easier to work in. . By having to be less stuff in it.
Jay: *So this is one thing that I think there's a, I wouldn't even call it a fine line. I would just say a de a defining line.*
*My desk looks cluttered, but each little pile of clutter represents a different project that I want front of mind and some things I look over and I'm like, oh a zip tie wrap that I got as swag from. This would've been West Tech *[00:08:00] *2023. No, that just needs to go on the shop floor for the guys to use, or in the trash.*
*That's the type of three s that I would say needs to depart. But like, here's a lock ring from a max four. Here are some 3D prints for the, uh, robot fixture. We're. Designing, you know, and I, I need to have these so that when I have these moments of like, wow, I've done my top three for the day now what mm, max four is gonna need, you know, an hour.*
*Yeah. These little finger things, I could probably knock out a tweak in about the next 15 to 20 minutes. Yeah. So it, it does have some utility that I do have these projects kind of open-ended projects for me to think, and I, I've got a pile of parts. I just want on my desk at all times. 'cause they're reference components.*
*If I'm designing something, well, you know what? I really want to have our standardized shoulder bolts right here. That we, we make literally like 10,000 per quarter. You know, I want this, I want to design products and components around this if possible. So, I don't know, like the goal isn't to be *[00:09:00] *organized.*
*Like a lot of people come and go, wow, your shop looks really organized. Which, I did a video for John Saunders, gosh, I'm gonna say it's like six, seven years ago, where I talked about like, Hey, if you want to be really organized and your goal is to be organized, you really need to break down that word organ organization, or organized.*
*You are turning something into an organ, like a heart, lung, a kidney, it does one thing and it does it well. *
*. *
*And so if you have everything, it's really, it really should be like systematize. This is the one thing that it does no half measures. It doesn't do anything else. This is not a Swiss Army knife.*
*It is a, a chisel or it is a deboning knife or whatever it may be, but is, is the one thing that it's meant to do. And so for me, like, you know, I, when I think of organization, I think does everything around here. Have an exact purpose for an exact process at an exact time. That's what I define as organization and it, and the, the byproduct of that looks like cleanliness.*
*It looks like, order, things *[00:10:00] *like that. But really organization I see is like no making something really di dialed in for the process you're trying to achieve. *
Andrew: I do the same. A very similar thing with like open projects and reference parts. I have a few. Standard pieces of hardware that just live at my desk, so I always can, if there's any incidental measurement on them, I want to check.
I don't have to walk and go get one. . But I have a small set of wire shelves behind my desk. So I have two desks. I've got my desk in my office, and then I have a work bench out on the shop floor in the programming area. And I spend more time there than in my office during the day. And on my office desk, I'll typically have.
Mostly paperwork, if anything piles up there, it's typically paperwork. . But I don't have a lot of paperwork piling up. I'm pretty good about clearing it off and things I need for reference, I just magnet to the whiteboard behind me so they're not on a horizontal service, they're not cluttering up my workspace.
.
And then things gradually move off that board as they either get delegated delegate relegate or done. Yeah. [00:11:00] And. My, my CAD workstation, I have angle gauge, got my calipers. I've got a 1 2, 3 block. I've got a handful of small things that I use regularly.
.
And then the left hand portion of that desk is where stuff that I need to do something about in the near term future, but not today.
unknown: Mm.
Andrew: That's just kind of the bullpen, right. Of those kinds of things. So I. I don't wanna find other places to stash all that stuff and then try to keep it on a list for myself. . Yep. I just want the thing there.
Jay: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew: Until the desk gets too cluttered and then some of the stuff has to leave.
Jay: Right. Well, well, yeah. The rest of the stuff is being a, a factor of interference. In Paul Aker's original shop tour video, which is at least a decade old at this point. He talks about their nudge section, their KNUJ, which is junk spelled backwards. And we have, we have nudge, we have a little nudge kind of corner.
We have a nudge spot upstairs. It's, it's not nudge, it's, it's, my personal [00:12:00] stuff. Call it, owner's, uh, privilege to have a little, public storage facility upstairs, but it doesn't interfere. I wanna make sure that it doesn't interfere with the workflow at the shop. It's tucked in the corner in the loft.
And then there's, there's other things like you can, kind of put out temporary junk. You're *like, I, I know that I will one day eventually get to this, but I have quite a bit of leeway just knowing that like, we're humans, like our job if we, if we're hyper-focused on not having any junk around, in a way, in kind of a backwards way, it stifles creativity.*
*More so it's one of those things where. You, you just won't, you will never address it. But in other ways, like, I wanna walk by that air cylinder that's tucked behind the VM three. 'cause I go, you know what? In a moment of inspiration, I might just stop by and pick that up and think, yeah, how can we put this together and create an auto door so we don't have to spend a few thousand dollars in our margin time?*
So, I don't know. It's, it's very much like every company. I'm not, I would never, criticize another company at their [00:13:00] junk. I would criticize it if it's interfering with their core, company objective to make, you know, components, holsters work, holding knives, you know, whatever it may be. But no, I'm, I'm kind of, I just know that junk is a natural part of life.
*We all kind of have a junk drawer. *
Andrew: *Yeah. And , there needs to be a process of some kind for things to get cleared out. Yeah. You give somebody autonomy to say. Certain things that fall within some defined category. Yes. If these two criteria are true or if this or then I can get rid of it.*
*Right. Scrap it. Sell it. It can leave. Yeah. And I. There are gonna be times when you're like, oh, we used to have a thing that was like, every* once in a while you'll, you'll end up having gotten rid of the, the one thing that you actually, that might have been useful later. Like that one 10 inch piece of two by four, the perfect length to just talk right in here and fix this problem.
. But in the majority of cases, [00:14:00] you're never gonna miss it. Right? Yeah. You're just never gonna miss it.
All that crap that clutters up the shop. Really does clutter up your mental space.
Jay: Very *much so. Yeah. That is a core tenant to a hoarder is I might need it one day. Or number two is, do you know how much I paid for it?*
*Yeah. Um, and I certainly have way more, uh, grace towards the man. That means a lot to me. Great. I That's wonderful. It's like, like we have a roto vice, the original roto vice that we ran in the shop for about a year. . junk. It's made out of the wrong material. I can't say it's crashed, but it's not, it's not beautiful and I'm just not going to throw that away.*
*It, is a significant milestone in the company history of us developing a product that came to market and it's junk to everyone* else, but not to me. . Hey, I was thinking about, uh, so we're just coming off Memorial Day, right?
.
How was your Memorial Day, by the way? It was nice. [00:15:00] Great. Did you come to work?
Andrew: I came into work for part of the afternoon with one of my kids. We did some chopped cleanup things. I mostly reorganized and I cleared out clutter.
Jay: That's awesome. I
Andrew: wasn't, uh, I didn't have any projects that I urgently needed the machine, and
Jay: Yeah.
Andrew: Yeah, it was, it was nice.
Jay: So, *so here's why I bring it up, is because every, uh, you know, throughout any, national holiday, whether it's Memorial Day, um, 4th of July, labor Day, you know, I, it would crack me up because I would go in on those days for at least the early morning part of the day before any after noon festivities would happen, and I would see one car in front of every business. And it was typically the owners just hustling, getting stuff done.*
*And I, I loved that because it was one of the times where I could have the shop to myself. During a weekday with no obligations, you know, for like, uh, weekend events. And I kind of, I definitely stopped doing that when my boys were about, well, probably when my first son was around two or three. I just, felt convicted about being around and enjoying his childhood rather than, you know, *[00:16:00] *just trying to hustle the business, just taking it one step forward.*
I did come in on Memorial Day just for a little bit just to poke around and just put eyes on things. And this time it was fun 'cause my boys came with me and so they were playing tag in the shop, which is probably a bad parenting allowance, but, they're hide and seek. That's what it was, not tag.
Um, and, you know, I was just putting around and it was it felt like quote unquote the good old days. And I thought, you know, this is one of those things where I just remember back in those days, I got so much done. It really took me down this like mental evaluation that I want to get your take on of just the thinking within the framework of constraints versus the framework of opportunities.
So any day when the shop is open and people aren't around, that's an opportunity to get ahead. It's a full potential 8, 10, 12 hours of uninterrupted time.
.
*But for me, I realized like, hey, if. Just that one day allowed me to get ahead. *[00:17:00] *What if I took that one day and chopped it up into two hour chunks and just spread those out?*
*Just put those two, two hour chunks in one day per week where I am literally to this point. It turned into the do not disturb vest, or Jay is out of office, don't talk to him. Time, which is on Wednesdays, which I call my secret weapon. And I just, I came to the conclusion that working within a framework of constraints is, is so much easier.*
*It's, it gives you so much more freedom rather than looking for an opportunity. Like a lot of people say, man, I wish if there was just one more hour in the day, I could get that much more done. To, which I would say if there were one more hour of the day, your inefficiencies would spill over into that hour.*
It wouldn't be like, oh, now here's an hour of clarity. You'd, you'd waste that hour too. You sure would. So, I don't know. It's I know I've talked to a lot of different entrepreneurs over the years that have, uh, not, we haven't spoken in these specific [00:18:00] terms, but it, I look at the people, at least in my convene group that are very successful and, you know, have lots of freedom in their, in their companies.
A, they're older. And they've just hired and delegated, they've mastered that but b, they really prioritize like, Hey, this is when we end, this is when we start, this is when we end.
Andrew: Very much approach Saturdays and vacation holidays as opportunities to do things.
And for me, the big difference between whether those are productive or not is whether I allow myself to have fun in the shop.
Jay: Oh yeah.
Andrew: I* like that. And it can be really, it can be really fun to just say, Hey, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna. Take care of a couple things that have bugged me. I'm gonna do something I like, like on, on uh, Memorial Day, I retaped some spots on the floor.*
*And retaped I was adding brightly colored visual controls for trash can placement. *
*. *
*And it was just one of these *[00:19:00] *things where we have a couple, we have different trash cans. They're all on roller bases so they can move around different places. And this is, these are more like, these are like scrap bins*.
These are not, they're for trash, but it's mostly like cardboard and plastic off cuts. We're not putting food or liquids or anything in them. Okay. Yeah, so they live on the shop floor and some of 'em get stored under benches. Some of 'em live by certain machines, but we have two different sizes. And if they get mixed up and you try to put one of the tall ones under a bench,
unknown: oh,
Andrew: it'll just barely fit.
But it fits so close to the bench top. You can't actually put any trash into it.
unknown: Okay.
Andrew: Right. And so that, that had happened the last time those got moved around and put away on Friday, somebody had parked a tall trash can under my workbench. . And I had a bunch of stuff in my hands trying to throw some things away, and I had to drag the trash can out with my foot to drop the stuff in.
I'm like, all right, we're recolor coating these, we're fixing this. Got some, some brightly colored tape remarked the floor. We had a few trash cans that had been color coded previously, so they had color tape on them. But as we'd rearranged the shop. The [00:20:00] floor marking for their home location had gotten peeled up and hadn't hadn't gotten picked in a new place.
. So they were kind of homeless trash cans. And so I picked homes for them and I taped those spots. And then we had a few trash cans that had never been marked, and I decided which one was going where. Color taped them, color taped the floor where I wanted them to be, and then took a quick picture and sent it out to our shop.
Lean Chat.
Jay: . Nice. I love it. Hey, do you require, like people acknowledge those things? Do you check if people, no. Do you check if they even look?
Andrew: Nope.
Jay: Does it, does It move the needle? Does it inspire? Do people,
Andrew: I mean, we have, we have a lot of improvements where somebody does something and then another version of that gets done by somebody else in the shop. In a different place. In a slightly different way.
unknown: Yeah. So
Andrew: certainly the ideas do spread.
Across the organization.
unknown: Yeah.
Andrew: And there often is very rarely does an improvement go by without anybody interacting with it. . Oh, okay. But it, I'm not going through and saying, Hey, did every single person in the shop, every single person in this group chat, did they all [00:21:00] look at this one ten second video that I posted?
. No. Yeah. Because
Jay: it's overprocessing for you to do that anyways. Yeah. And what would you do with that information? Yeah,
Andrew: yeah. Eh, nothing. Yeah. We, uh, we have two high school interns working for us this summer. They started today.
Jay: Okay.
Andrew: *And that's gonna be really fun when we introduce them, everybody at our morning meeting, and then reminded them that they have a, an extremely valuable asset, which is a fresh set of eyes.*
*. *
*And neither one of them has any manufacturing experience. They're high schools, high schoolers. So saying you're going to see a lot of things that you won't necessarily understand. Please do ask questions. Why do we do it this way? Why is that the tool we use for this? Why is this over here? Why is that, that way?*
unknown: . Yeah. And
Andrew: at a certain point, like there may be a point in which you say, you know, we've tried 12 other ways of doing this and this is the best we've found, and we're not gonna tear this completely apart today, so do it the way we're gonna show you for now. . Love it. [00:22:00] But, but the ability to an ask those questions and really be heard.
Is a valuable thing that they bring to the business.
Jay: It's probably the most valuable thing they can bring. That's what I've found. You know? Yeah. A new set of eyes of, uh, a new employee regardless of their experience. They may, you know, they're seeing it for the first time, so going back to the desk full of junk.
I do not see certain things on my desk anymore. They've just blended into the background *and a fresh set of eyes. That's inquisitive, you know? Well, oh, you know what? In fact. One of the things that I kept a sharp eye out for when we were doing our recent hiring spree, uh, was the curiosity factor, you know?*
*So, you know, I was the last person in the company to interview, so I'd be like the number three once they went through number one and number two. And when it came to me, I'd say, Hey, I know that, you know, you had this shop tour. I wanna walk through one more time with you. I want you to ask questions.*
*Just if there's anything you don't know or *[00:23:00] *you have questions, whatever it may be, please don't hesitate. And the guys that work here now that we ultimately hired, were one of the few that ask questions, Hey, what is that thing called? Even if it's just like wanting to know what it's called. That was golden to me.*
People that, you know, I'd get to the end. I'm like, so do you have any questions? No. Okay. All right, well let's get you doing the Lego test and then kind of out the door. And so, you know, it was, it was one of those things that you, like, what, how are you going to rate curiosity and creativity and any metric in an interview?
And for us it was just like, Hey, you see something? And I said, please ask a question. Don't hesitate ask. I just I want to answer any question. And the ones that had like no questions when they're trying to put their best foot forward. Mm, not good. Not good.
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Prob probably. A highly desirable survival skill in many other business contexts, which is Oh yeah, no, I'm, keep my head down.
Keep my mouth shut. Don't rock the [00:24:00] boat.
Jay: Yeah, I, I can see that that could, yeah, that's kind of the common thing. I'm the new guy just gonna lay low. No we're hiring rock stars here. So how did you vet these high school students? Was that part of the process?
Andrew: Uh, so they came in for interviews.
One of them is the son of one of our former employees.
unknown: Okay.
Andrew: And one of them is the son of a current employee. But that, that parent child relationship, their, it, you know, dad is not the direct report Yes. For the son. Yes. So both these kids came in and interviewed with our production manager, who is who they are reporting directly to.
And we're interested. One of 'em is working here more hours than the other, but they both wanted to be in this summer and get to put hands on a lot of different stuff and see how it works. . we're looking also potentially at having, , an apprentice next year, hopefully from equal manufacturing.
Jay: Yeah. Cool. So
Andrew: we're in talks with them to see if we can get that set up. I'd love to.
.
And I do want to. [00:25:00] Consistently be a place that introduces young people to manufacturing in our area.
.
I wanna be like the go-to place anytime teachers from any of the schools in our area wanna get kids in the door somewhere and just let them see it.
.
And by high school
it's almost too late. It's not too late.
.
*But like. I really want, some of my, my favorite tours are like, middle school kids, some even some later elementary school kids, like fifth and sixth graders, and they are just fascinated by machines, by processes. They ask tons of questions.*
*They're not, they're not too cool for school. They wanna know like, okay, well how does that machine know how to pick that part up? *
.
*Well, that's a good question. And they have fun doing the hands-on demos. You know, does anybody wanna try running the robot or does anybody wanna try doing this or that?*
*And they, and they all wanna do it. They're all into it. And if you can get *[00:26:00] *them to see that this is a place, this is part of the grownup world *
.
*And we can be let into it, we can see inside it, we can understand a little bit about. How and what the work is that's getting done here. And not just be like, yeah, my dad goes to an office.*
*I don't know, he just leaves in the morning and he goes to an office. *
.
*And I have no idea what he does there. I don't know who he hangs out to or who he talks with or what. He just, he spends all day on his computer and then he comes home. Right. When they come here. There's always stuff happening.*
*Yeah. Machines are running. There's interesting smells, there's, there's interesting sounds like the smell of coolant, the smell of hot plastic, the smell of. Different kinds of hot processes, the smell of different solvents and oils and things like, it just, it's a whole thing. *
*. *
Andrew: *And getting kids who are young enough to just be unselfconsciously curious.*
*. In the door. Fantastic. *
Jay: Yeah.
Andrew: Really,
Jay: really enjoy it. [00:27:00] That's huge. Do you have conversations with their dads? I know one is an active employee, but like, hey, if your kid is not great, he will be terminated.
Andrew: Is there an understanding? Uh, I didn't have those conversations, but they def they definitely did get had.
Okay. Which was like, you know, this is you, these two real, these two kids had to come in, they had to fill out an application. Yeah. They had to come in for an interview and interview with the person they were gonna be working directly under. . And if they don't do a good job, we're not going to say, yeah, you're kind of, kind of a waste of space.
. But because your dad works here or because your mom worked here. We'll just let it ride. We'll just let you sit, you know, you get to stay on the team, but you're gonna be in the dugout for the rest of the season and then No,
Jay: yeah, I, I just remember years ago, one of my employees said, Hey, you know, we need a little help around here.
I was thinking of bringing in my kid part-time, and I said, , well, first of all, you have to understand, I didn't know his son at all. So I said, well, are you okay with me firing him? And [00:28:00] he said, yep. And I went, okay, great. And this was one of those non-optimal situations where his dad was his direct report and ultimately I was the one that fired him after just I'd say six, eight weeks.
It's just bad. Attitude. I said, Hey, you didn't do this box right. Let me show you how to do it. He's like, but I did like 20 others, right? And I went, okay, A that's the wrong answer. Hey, and by the way.
You cannot talk to people like that, especially the owner. I'm not flexing the owner card, but I'm flexing the, , superior person, the person that knows more than you at this point. And it's my job to properly train you. He did something a few days later and I told his dad, I said, Hey, I'm gonna fire your son
he's like, all right, what did he do? Is there anything we can do? Yeah that's exactly what I would expect a dad to reply as. I said, no it's the decision's been made and, um, hopefully he'll learn from it.
This is what he's here to do. He's here to learn and he's gonna learn that you can't. Have a bad attitude and slow walk to the bathroom and spend 20 [00:29:00] minutes and be disrespectful to superiors. And the next boss he works for will probably fire him on the spot. And I gave him, you know, several more weeks, probably like two more weeks and it's not getting better.
So, okay. That was it. You know, so, but one of the powerful things that we did was at the point of like the, um, the evaluation process, I said, let's just get to the worst point. He will be, he will depart with, from this company due to termination. Are you okay with it? And if the answer is yes then we're good to go.
Andrew: By the way, I think we both misused the term direct report. I think the way that works is that if I have a direct report, Uhhuh. That's the person below me who reports up to me. Oh, yeah. So I messed up by saying, the production manager is his direct report? No, no, no. He is a direct report Yeah.
To the production manager. Right. So
unknown: supervisor, I'm just sitting here thinking,
Andrew: boy, I, I goofed that up. I got that backwards.
Jay: Right, right. That makes sense. Yeah. Hopefully the audience understands. Yeah. Okay, so we were talking about the Matsuura and the little side project that you're embarking. So
Andrew: [00:30:00] I, one of the things that I've noticed, like I.
I really do care a lot about little tiny ergonomic things. . And the little details of exactly where the buttons are. And a great example is every place on the Matsuura , you have to turn a key to change between modes. . With 3D printed press fit knobs for all those key heads so that it's obviously a knob function, not a lock unlock function.
Okay. That, that as an affordance totally changes the way that those keys exist in my brain when I'm in front of the machine. But also the big pallet pool door. It's a big round door. It just has small rubber bumpers at the limits at both ends. . If you close it too hard and you don't ride the handle all the way shut, it will bounce back slightly open, and then the safety interlock switch in the pallet pool.
Will not be connected and you have to ride the handle all the way shut. . [00:31:00] And then turn the key, the knob and toggle it from pallet load mode into auto mode when the machine can then pull pallets outta the pool.
unknown: Okay.
Andrew: And I'm looking at that going. I would really like to find a way, 'cause I used to work in furniture.
We built a lot of things that had soft clothes stuff in them. I, I wanted to find a way to add a modular soft clothes thing. So that there's some kind of bumper that you can install on the machine. Initially I just bought a variety of kinds of small, soft, close mechanisms. . And I'm 3D printing different kinds of mounting systems for them.
unknown: Yeah.
Andrew: To try them out. To figure out, how firm . Uh, a mechanism do I want, do I need one at the top and at the bottom of the door? Do I want, you know, just to spread the surface area out? Do I want two at the top, two at the, like all these different combinations? And I look at this and go, if I get this to work well, if I get this to make the door like nicer and cushier to open and close without any slamming.
Without any bumping, and you can give you a little more room to just sort of [00:32:00] glide it home and not have to ride it all the way to the wall.
.
I should sell that to every Matsuura owner in the us.
Jay: Yeah. So, let me ask you this, 'cause I kind of want to like mentally workshop this. Let's say you're closing the door and you stop one inch short.
If you let go of the handle, will it automatically close? Is there something that's pushing it to a positive stop? No. Okay. So it relies they're expecting the operator to fully bring it to the stop. Yes. And then let go. Okay. Yes. Wow. Yeah.
Andrew: It's not terrible. I mean, this is the way most CNC machine doors are.
. Brothers are this way. It's just a sheet metal door and you have to pull it all the way to close. Yeah. There is a little, there is a little magnet. Magnet latch in the brothers. So like if you get it like a quarter inch away from being closed, it'll close the rest of the way. Okay. Right. This Matsuura door doesn't have that, so probably I'm gonna end up incorporating some form of magnet and these soft closed bumpers.
To allow it to, 'cause the bumpers will wanna spring [00:33:00] the door back open a little bit. Right. It's like, it's a cushion, but there's a little bit of a rebound. Yeah. So we need enough magnetic force to overcome the rebound.
.
Not so much that it actually makes opening the door laborious. .
And if we can get that right and it's just a surface mount thing that you bolt to the outside of the door it would be super easy. I. Super easy, super fast. Yeah.
Jay: I'm thinking to this issue on the HAWS machines. I think there's like some type of inclined plane that is on a spring so that once it gets passed a certain threshold, like the barriers opens all the way will ride, to the closed position.
. Because you can, there's a little force when you're open the double doors and it's resistance, resistance, then boom. Then you can open them. Or when you're closing them, I, I actually kind of remember, we did something, maybe we can cover it in the next podcast where, where there's one machine where you have to bring it to a positive, [00:34:00] like human induced full stop or else it will bounce.
And I think we had a robot connected to it years ago where the robot would close it. The robot to open it couldn't quite get past that. You know, that inclined, you know, that plane that would, that keeps it closed. So we just took out that bracket. Gotcha. I like the magnet.
I kind of like the, the magnet thing. Magnets, they collect chips. I don't know. You're not cutting steel, right?
Andrew: No, not that. I mean, we cut a little bit of steel, but this magnet's not gonna be directly exposed to chips. Right. Yeah. Huh. So, so we'll see. That was my little afternoon project. I had a meeting and I took a break and spent about 15 minutes quickly CADing up in 3D printing a couple different little carriers to hold these different kinds of soft closed plungers.
Yeah. So that I could quickly magnet them into place.
.
Not in their final position, but then just closed the door on them.
unknown: Yeah.
Andrew: And you see, okay. How much bounce back do eight when I have one of this. Okay. Add a second cylinder. Okay. [00:35:00] Too much. Okay. Let's try a, a really firm one and a softer one so you get kind of a two stage bump close.
How's that?
.
And all these different combinations you can try out really quickly and cheaply and start to get a feel for what is the balance like, I don't wanna be able to slam this door, right? Nobody should be slamming this door uhhuh, but just making the, the window, the margin of. Minimum and maximum force that the door will still function calmly and close properly.
Yeah. Widening that window will be good. .
Jay: What's the component you bought? Uh, just soft closed bumpers because I, I typed in dampener into McMaster car and it's essentially, it calls it, uh, it's a shock absorber. That's super generic. Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew: I mean, a lot of, there are all kinds of, when you have sliding drawers, there are soft closed mechanisms on drawer slides where like, you can literally like try to slam the drawer.
Like you shoot it in as hard [00:36:00] as you can and it buffer stops it and then slowly retracts the last like inch and a half closed. Right. I'm not trying to do anything that fancy. . just a more capable system than just a couple of rubber bumps. Yeah.
Jay: All of our cabinetry at Pola Tiny Homes has those soft clothes and it's just so nice.
You just don't. It's this one less brain cycle. You have to think about. To properly decelerate a drawer, you just grab whatever and you just toss it and it does the rest. It's it is a quality of life improvement that, uh, you and I obviously we pay attention to. It's just, it just makes the day go by that much easier.
So
unknown: yeah,
Jay: I prove
Andrew: those little things. Like I, I've gotten pickier about controls and knobs and things inside cars as I've gotten older. there have been certain cars when I sat down inside and I'm like. Everything's in the wrong place. Right. Literally everything is in the wrong place in here.
Jay: Yeah. Right. I mean, so my mod, my Tesla, you [00:37:00] know, it's the model three. It's, they simplified it to the point where my wife is like, ah, it's so frustrating. I just want to turn down the, I just wanna move the vent, or I wanna turn down the fan speed. Like, how do I do that? Well, if you're in auto mode, you have to bump up the temperature, but I like the temperature, you know, it's, it's just too much.
So you can oversimplify. But I just think like, so No, no, no, no. So that's an
Andrew: interesting thing. Yeah. They didn't oversimplify. Okay. They camouflaged the, they actually probably created more complexity in the course of trying to create a more streamlined looking interface.
Jay: Yes. Yeah. That's accurate.
Andrew: Yeah. They did not comply. So you don't need to have a single function button for every single thing. Like there's plenty of reason. Now with touchscreens in cars, a lot of the stuff you need to do in the backend, like EQing your sound system.
.
Like there's all kinds of things that you don't need to be doing that while you're driving down the highway.
Yeah.
Jay: You do it maybe once a year.
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. But if the goal is to have there be [00:38:00] as few controls as possible, what you end up with is too many multimodal controls. . Where you have to, turn the knob to this and then turn this to this, and, and it just,
unknown: yeah.
Andrew: There is real value in like, no, no, no.
I wanna turn that off.
.
I really like the controls in my Audi and it has no touchscreen. The Audi TT has no touchscreen. . I really enjoy
Jay: that. Yeah. 'cause you can touch, you know where everything is located. Yep. You can adjust, fan speed, temperature, volume without taking your eyes off the road.
Yep. Yeah. Love that man. I was in a rental car recently and um, I think it was a Kia and they had, you know, the central touch screen. But just below it, there was rows of buttons for climate or volume and I, I don't remember what it was, but I went, see, this is how it should be because within 30 minutes of me being in the car, I could be on the 4 0 5 freeway and [00:39:00] I could just feel down there it is, this is the fan speed and I, or here's the volume.
Even like my F-150, it's company truck at this point, but it's got, thumb controls on the steering wheel that I could navigate perfectly when I drove it for about five, six years. But it doesn't have a play pause button. And so now I'm having to go to the touch screen to play pause, and I go, ah, so close.
Andrew: Yeah,
Jay: this is where I, I kind of want like a little bit of, um, like if you had like. Oh, what the brother has where you can assign hotkey. You want
Andrew: programmable controls? Yes. Like that. User, user programmable, user assignable functions. Yes. I would design the, uh, a lot of cars have too many buttons on the steering column.
There's just too much stuff. And, uh, on my Audi, like my volume and my volume controls and things are all on the right. Under my right thumb. I got in some other car, it was a Nissan Altima or something where [00:40:00] like all the control functions are all basically there, but they were all flip flopped to the opposite side of the wheel.
Jay: Right.
Andrew: And I was so, I was just on the struggle bus.
unknown: Yeah.
Andrew: Um, and the difference, like the Audi has a little roller wheel For volume.
It's not a knob and it's not a button that you have to press, you just swipe it up or down with your thumb. Yeah. It's, neural metal. Has a nice tactile feel to it and you can really be fine with it.
I really like that. Anytime I have to get in my wife's car, she has a Toyota and the volume is a button you have to press. Like okay, I want either press and hold, at which point you're not really sure. 'cause there's no, there's no, uh, tactile feedback in the system.
You're not really sure how quickly.
The rate of change is happening when you hold the button down, right? Or you end up just like, okay, well press four times. Okay, too much back two times. Now back one up. And I just like being able to just ride the volume knob. Ride the volume roll with my thumb. [00:41:00] Really nice. So, uh, this is good design.
Although Germans have a reputation for making their cars overly complicated. One of the worst I've ever been in was A BMW that had so many redundant controls, Uhhuh. Like there's a full set of controls down by your sh you know, by your stick shift. Yep. By your, by your shifter. There's a full set of controls on the center dash, and there's a duplicate third set of all the same controls all over the steering column.
It's just like too many things. This remote has too many buttons. Right. I only need four of them. Yeah, that's, yeah.
Jay: Well, this is why I think the cult, uh, you know, one of the, our other cultural, things that we focus on is continual improvement. And if I could continually improve, I. A car, I would just give it two, maybe even two.
Programmable hotkeys would be pretty amazing. And when my wife gets in the car, it knows she's in the car. And those are totally different buttons. Like that would be super slick. Yeah. But in the shop, I would probably say, Hey, we don't all get to program the hot keys to what [00:42:00] we want. There's gotta be some standardized keys.
Let's vote on that. And I know we've talked about this in your shop in the past.
Andrew: Yep, yep. Um, the really cool thing is the brothers have two side-by-side menus for shortcuts. So you could have shortcut menu one. Okay. Have all your standard shop things, Uhhuh, and then shortcut menu two is any personnel based additional shortcuts that they wanna use so they're not being cluttered into the same list.
They have the same shortcut functionality. You just choose menu one, choose menu two, and then you press anywhere on your nine key pad to jump to that. To that thing. Okay. Okay.
Jay: Okay. That, man, I just need to put hands on a brother for a day. Oh, you should. They're so fun. Yeah, I know. I would love it. I should have spent more time at the brother booth at IMTS.
They're really fun machines. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I mean, I've, I've thought over the years, man, what would, what would we do if we actually moved away from the shop? Standardize of our haws mills and Doosan lays. The Lays would be easy to move away from because all four of my [00:43:00] doosans have different interfaces.
It's so frustrating. It's model year 2015 to model year 2021. So it's not like, decades apart. It's just a handful of years and it's still problematic to the point of just, I like the guys are fine with it, but I'm not. That's why I just, Stay away. It's just not my thing.
You guys handle it, just let me know how to power it off. If someone turns it, you know, doesn't do so at the end of the day. So,
Andrew: yeah. Yeah. I mean,
for, for compact five access machines, I
think the U 500
is a
really amazing workhorse of little
machine.
.
And the R series machines, R four 50, R six 50, I think those machines are phenomenal.
Yeah.
Andrew: . The, the speed with which you get the table changed and get the next parts in and running. Is really quite incredible and you can get a surprising amount of walkaway time if you use either. Either your parts have longer run times or you're using high density work [00:44:00] holding, and the ability to have a couple of pallet bases and just drop whatever parts you want on those pallets and have the machine read the program code by probing the fixture.
. Check which pockets are currently filled with stock. Verify stock size, and then. Off and running. Yeah. A machine like that could be insanely productive.
Jay: Oh yeah.
Andrew: There's a particular shop that lives in my brain. I won't name them, but they're in the firearms space and they've grown, they've expanded their shop, they've built a new building, and every time I see, I've seen photos over the years of their growth.
They're always moving to bigger and bigger and bigger machines so they can fit more parts on the machine.
.
I think they might have made up like up to a VF six, okay?
.
And they're making small parts, aluminum parts that fit in the palm of your hand.
unknown: Okay?
Andrew: So like they have like 400 pit bull clamps on a giant fixture, [00:45:00] which means when they go to unload those parts, somebody has to loosen.
Every single screw on every single clamp on that table to take all the parts out. And the machine
.
Is sitting there doing nothing. Oh, the entire time.
Jay: So it's not palletized?
Andrew: No, it's a fixture. It's, there's no palletization. And every time they needed more, they just like, okay, we're gonna get a bigger machine so we can fit more parts on the table.
I'm like, but your big machinist, you know, first of all, your chip to chip tool change times. Those bigger machines are slow, right? Oh yeah. Like it's a big slow machine.
unknown: Yep.
Andrew: I bet that if we set up a pair of brother R four fifties with high density work holding palletized . That one operator running those two machines could smoke the output of a VF six VF seven size machine.
. And. Everything [00:46:00] would be tighter. Like you, when you have all these parts out over the table, like if you break a tool and then just go cram a broken tap into all these holes on all these parts. Yeah. And you're like, oh, well we just, uh, we just scrapped 350 of these pieces. Yeah. Great.
Jay: I was watching a shop tour and it was cool.
It's guy, you know, I don't remember his backstory, but I just saw this thing which he justified, I think, I don't think he was intending to justify, but he had, three, four or five Kurt vices on the table, which is fine. I'm not anti vice. Just anti vice. If it slows you down and you have like hundreds or thousands of, you know, parts to make, like we have vices around here because it's a big, 12 inch diameter piece of material, an adapter that we have to make, that's fine.
Or prototyping. We're not gonna build a fixture to prototype something. So I'm not anti vice. Just want people to know that. Yeah. Getting into the like, you know, [00:47:00] if it ain't broke, don't fix it. No, everything's always broken. At some point you just haven't identified that it's broken. It is one of those things where you get a, a bigger and bigger machine and you're doing more and more parts per cycle.
You know, one of our pro palate systems sounds like a shameless plug, but I, we believe in them. We use them. So our pro palate system. Mini pallet system like you have, yeah. Some high density workholding. It's like the easiest cheat code in machining. And we're actually gonna make it easier. I'll give a soft announcement.
We have a product coming out this year that kind of takes away the, uh, extra investment you have to make in creating dedicated pallets and fixtures for parts, it's going to kind of be like a, a series of like easy, like think of Legos, but for work holding, that type of thing.
Andrew: Mm.
Jay: Yeah. Stay posted.
Andrew: Like the sound of that.
Jay: Yeah.
Andrew: Anyways, uh, I'm trying to think if there's anything else I wanted to bring up. I had a great shop visitor today. This was really fun.
My dear friend Conrad Miller, who works at Holster. Holsters,
Jay: yeah.
Andrew: Um, was passing through on his way from Oklahoma back to Pennsylvania [00:48:00] today with his wife and their kids, and they stepped in.
I've been friends with Conrad and Rachel for a decade. I have, Some very fond memories of hanging out with them at Shot Show in Las Vegas having steak and egg breakfast and then go hitting the show, but it was so fun. To take somebody through the shock, who's been making holsters for more than a decade. . Because that person can really understand what they're seeing.
Mm. Yeah. And has a deep memory of how bad the processes were comparatively 10 years ago. How much harder it was to you could holster, molds, made good, tooling made how everyone was kind of floundering around as a bunch of shops were getting started into real cnc. . In that space, everybody was trying different approaches.
Some guys went for like big vacuum former and big router tables and got all the problems that come with that, and some guys went for everything by hand, completely. One off [00:49:00] everything custom and they got the benefits and the problems that come with that. All these different approaches and business models.
It was really gratifying. 'cause I've seen a lot of companies in our space fall off and go outta business in the past 10 years.
Jay: Interesting. Yeah.
Andrew: Partly because it's a, it's a business and industry with very low barrier to entry. You can start a holster company with a few hundred bucks worth of tools and material.
.
It's not, it is not capital intensive to start. It's capital intensive to scale.
unknown: Yeah.
Andrew: But it's not capital intensive to start. And especially now that there are a bunch of companies that specialize in making. Fully prepped replica mold, replica gun molds specifically for holster making. That really wasn't a thing when I started.
Nope. You had to make your own molds. Wow. Yeah. There entire companies that just exist to build molds, sell molds to holster makers.
Jay: Wow. I had no idea.
Andrew: Yeah. Something on, on target. Gun molds. Shout out Tony Kaner. Nice. Um, but the memory of how those processes used to be. Remembering the different companies, different [00:50:00] owners that I used to talk to who now are not in the business anymore.
. It's, there's only a handful of people that I've known that long and that well, who are still in this business, still doing well at it and still enjoying it.
unknown: Oh,
Andrew: they're not burnout, they're not bitter. They're not like, oh, this sucks, but I can't do anything else.
unknown: Right.
Andrew: And so it was just really sweet.
To be able to show him and his wife and kids around the shop. Rachel thought that our ceiling status lamps for bathroom occupancy were hilarious. You know, one of the, one of the kids asked like, where's the restroom? I'm like, it's right over there. And uh, and I looked at the ceiling. I'm like, yep, one of the restrooms is open.
Go for it. And Rachel's like, what? I'm like, yeah, that amber lamp up there, that means one of the bathrooms is open. And she just laughed and laughed.
Jay: So my guy Nathan, is playing around with different, like communication devices, specifically ESP 32, and he's just run. I've said, dude, stop editing. Start learning this because we have all these little quality of life improvements.
And that's a, that's a legitimate one. A guy walking across the shop to find out that the bathroom door is locked. And then [00:51:00] him being in a human condition, having to like relieve himself going, when's it gonna be open? When's it gonna be open? Lemme just go back and work. And then I come back and someone stepped in.
That's a real actual problem. So, yeah.
Andrew: Not, not fun.
Jay: Yeah. That's good stuff. But
Andrew: yeah. Anyway, good place to stop. Yep. Thanks Jay. Sounds good. I will catch up with you next week. See you next week. Good
night.