Within Tolerance Episode 240 - Roast My Shop with Justin Gray

title: Within Tolerance Episode 240 - Roast My Shop with Justin Gray
author: Within Tolerance
contenttype: podcast
publication: Within Tolerance
published: 2024-11-08T14:29:53-05:00
sourceurl: https://anchor.fm/s/ca43718/podcast/play/94158496/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2024-10-8%2F22223b1a-9cd5-453e-bede-5053d3df7e4f.mp3

word_count: 16175

you are listening to Within Tolerance, a podcast for Machinist by Machinist. I'm your host, Dylan Jackson, a protea machining. And this week, I have our second intern and past guest, Justin Gray back on. How's it going, Justin? Hey, thanks for having me for the whole week. Yes. It has been a fantastic week. I really appreciate you coming out. I, I, I really enjoyed it. Like, like I told you earlier, like even if you weren't engaged in learning, just having a friend out and being able to hang out all week is super cool, especially when it's usually just me and Brad in the shop. Yeah, I empathize with that. My shop is either just me and Ben or just me a lot of days. And so it gets kind of lonely. Yeah. Sometimes you just want somebody around to share the pain with exactly. Yeah, exactly. And it's always fun. I mean, you just had your ex-nasticals out and we're talking about that. Yeah. It's always fun to just like get to show people what you do. Even if like they do something very similar. So yeah, I appreciate you coming out. Yeah, that was having them at the shop was really interesting, especially when I was like, oh, yeah, everybody likes the Freddie. And then I walked out into the shop and there was a cool and spill all over the floor. Yeah. Well, I mean, you were saying how it was a little hard to explain why you would spend that kind of money on the vacuum and then you're like, we'll see. This is why it sucks. Quite literally. Yeah. So how has the week been for you? Really eye opening. Just everything here was a little bit different than I expected and a few things were a lot different than I expected. I think the biggest thing is that I expected this place to feel very much more rushed than it is. And when I'm, I've been like trying to figure out why it hasn't been in a little bit, I think it's just that like you take less orders than our higher value, which is great. Like everybody should want to do that. But even in that situation, I know that if I was taking those orders in my job in my shop, they would feel different. And what I came to was like the level of confidence. And I mean, obviously, like I've been saying, like, hashtag be a machineist over here. So like you just, as confidence comes with making more parts, right? But I think ultimately that was like the biggest surprise to me is that I know you guys are like short turnaround specialists, right? I think you once told me that like you ship parts out the same day sometimes. Yeah, we have for sure. And maybe those ones are rushed. Yeah. I mean, like I think that you came on a week two where like I personally, I'm working on a much, I mean, I'll say longer term project, longer term, meaning like I've had like a week we can have to do it versus a couple days. Right. And we finally had kind of caught up to our backlog end of last week or middle of last week. And so we're on top of it this week, which is great. I can't get right. Yeah. But I will say that like we try to, it's stressful enough to this. Like there's no reason to make it more stressful for ourselves. And like you said, we've been doing this long enough now that we can kind of divorce that. Like there's still days where I am rushing and like the other day I ran into FedEx just before they closed. And like I was like, man, you buzzer, Peter. Like you just barely made it. I was like, yeah, I was packing parts while the last part ran and then had to rush and clean that one. And then throw it in the box and so that we have those days, but I don't think that they're the norm for us. Yeah. Are we trying not to? Yeah. Well, I mean, look at shows. I think it's important because like you couldn't run a shop like that for too long, which I'm only realizing now that I say it. But right. Yeah, it would. Yeah, that kind of stress, I think, would just kill any kind of more, uh, yeah, morale, like really quickly. So. Yeah. But I mean, getting to see the new place is cool. I tried to like you showed me the tape line on the floor where the old shop was and I try to imagine all of this stuff. It's a little bit less because the Hurmley wasn't here, I guess, but three machines and like all the rest of the stuff from the shop like crammed in there. I have your room full of engine parts was hiding in there somewhere. So yeah, like I have video of the old shop walking through it before we moved. And I've been meaning to do one here, but things have been changing so much that I've just never been like, oh, yeah, this is a good time to take a shop tour video and I should just suck it up and just be like, well, this is the state as of November of 2024. Well, when we're done here, I'm now I'm going to make you walk on camera and video. And that's what I've been doing all week. Yes. Yeah, Justin's been doing a great job of telling me to just suck it up and and make the video. So like we were going to calibrate the Hurmley before this big 3D servicing part that I'm doing this week. And we got through it once and I had Justin basically do all of it. And he was like, all right, now we should do it again. And you should record it. And I was like, well, I've been meaning to do it. Yeah, okay, let's do it. Like I'll get you know, bring your camera. Let's do it. And so the next day we did it. And well, the reason I said that though is that like while you were walking me through it, you were like stumbling over. Oh, what button do I press? Or how do I set this? And I'm like, like, like if you can't even remember it. Right. Right. Yeah. And I think I think this time doing it with you was probably my smoothest time of doing it so far. Like I think the last time I did it, I had the manual out and was like still referring back to some of that stuff. So every time I get a little bit more proficiency, but like now I don't need to have that. I mean, I still want it. It'll get better. But it's like easier to recover if you could. Oh, I'm going to watch this video or play it in the background on programming a part or something. Yeah. I'm going to throw it in our obsidian. I've it all labeled and stuff. And it's made me realize that I just need to start doing that with even the little stuff. Like even the bubble wrap machine just be like, Hey, this is how we do that. It's a cool machine. It I mean, I think you can see now why I keep saying on the podcast like it's not a need, but it is definitely a want. Like it's really cool. It's just cool to watch it like shoot bubble wrap out. That is fast. Yeah. It's way faster than you would think. You think like, oh, bubble wrap machine. All right. It's like one sheet every second. It's like, no, it's like a printer or something. Yeah. But like that little things like that. Like I should go in the shop tour video. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. We should start it with that. I'll have you hold the camera. I'll have it shoot bubble wrap in the camera. Yeah. But I really appreciate you pushing me to do that because it's showing me. I just need to like suck it up and stop being like, oh, it's got to be 100% effort. Otherwise, there's no point in doing it. Really. And I think like, Ariel and Devon have talked about this on their podcast where it's just like, just get it done. Like just do a video. If you got to do it again later or update it, sure. But like, I mean, how many times on this podcast have I said, like, oh, I've got a video coming soon. And it's like never, right? So no, I'm excited. I appreciate that mind shift that you've kind of pushed me into this week. But what about, I mean, other things that you've seen, I definitely want criticisms, comments, all that stuff. You made a list. Let's go through my list. Only has me partially worried. Honestly, most of it is pretty small stuff. And I think you'll probably say some of it isn't. In fact, you already checked one off the list. Oh, sweet. The first one was by a second printer, a bamboo, second bamboo. Oh, yeah. Did that this week without even talking to you about? Yeah. Awesome. Well, because I like recovered one of your, like, when the print blob failed and I was like scraping it out of the printer, which is totally fine. Like 3D printing happens. But like Brad needed the printer for like packing parts and then you needed a printer to like make a critical part. And I was just like, you have like one of your vices is more than the printer and like you should just have another one. Yeah. And they have to be on sale. Yeah. Yeah. When when? So that was a big one. I was surprised how much you manually probed parts on the brother. And you told me why because you don't have the zero points on all of them until recently. Yeah. But then you also told me that the vices almost never move. But still, yeah, I'd still say you could have like a zero point on the corner of the vise or something. Yeah. I think you could work on that. But even if you don't, I also watched you manually scribe a part with calipers, which YouTube people yell at manual machine us all the time for. Yes. But I have specific calipers for it. That's fine. It's totally fine. It's still slow though. And annoying versus what? Print out 3D print a scribing divider. Oh, okay. There's a bunch of different ones of them. All kinds of designs. I have some links to share with you. I went and looked them up. But basically you just snap it onto your part and geometrically it finds the center. I like that. And then you just like drag it across with a scribing tool, which you can cut apart your caliper and stick it in there as your scribing tool as a statement of it being okay. But I think it would just save you a little bit of time. Okay. I like that. And make it a little bit easier. I think you need a little bit more organization on the benches next to the machines. Nah. I think you should just print out some of the files you already have to hold the torque branches. Yeah. You just need a little bit more bench space. I agree. Yeah, for sure. And I like the real irony of that is that I cleaned a lot of those before you showed up. Like there were much worse last week because we had also until the you showed up, all of them were facing the same way as the door of the machine. So they were up against the machine and they weren't perpendicular to the machine. And then we did that with the you because it kind of looked wonky now. The you is so so much smaller than the S 700s that it looked kind of wonky. And so I was like, Oh, what if we put it like this? And then both Brad and I were like, this is way easier to work with when you're when it's turned towards you while you're at the machine. And so then yeah, before you showed up, I was like, Oh, I should just turn them all. And then I turned them all. And then I was like, well, I should probably clean them up. And yeah, so this is clean. But yes, I agree. They need to be better. I think a little effort and that would go a good ways. It's clearly not a problem for you, but I think it could be better. Yeah. I think your main programming workbench where you guys sit, you should get a drawer and put some great vanity dividers in it and just give yourself a little bit more space to work. I mean, it works for you guys. It's fine. But I think honestly, I think it probably slows you down more than you're realizing. Like I watched you guys struggle to find like, Mike's a couple of times and stuff. Or the USB. Yeah, the USB right in front of me and I still have somehow lost. And it's just, yeah. So I would say clean that up. Especially like if you're going to get an employee, like you're kind of, I don't think you'd accept that from an employee. And so yeah, I agree. You got to, got to meet your own standard kind of thing. For sure. Talked about this one a little bit. I would recommend putting desiccant that you into your, all your fixture cases and stuff for like your gauge balls and everything. Yeah. I like that. If you do that, you have to establish a desiccant trying, like maintenance schedule. It's just because otherwise, we, the desiccant can absorb enough water to become a problem we talked about that. But also there's no point to it if it's not dry. So you have to swap it out. I guess the reason I wrote that down is that you had me clean off everything with ethanol before I put it back in the case. And I was like, well, now it's completely unprotected and you don't want to wreck these things. Now, I guess you normally oil them before you put them away. But sometimes and also we just live in Arizona. So like, surface rest on gauge quality things is few and far between. I'll say that. But also like a couple of desiccant impacts is like, I think it's a good idea. It's nothing that living here I would ever have thought about though. Yeah. Not even. Oh, hi over here. Right. Right. Like it did not even enter my mind of like, oh, there's an easy way to like prevent stupidity. I don't know. Maybe somebody will like spill a bottle of like sulfuric acid or something on the floor in your shop and rust all your crap. Or you forget to wipe down a gauge before you put it away or anything like that. Like it, yeah, it's just not something you really thought about. Yeah, I was just dealing with rust on Sharon's car and like my one, two, three blocks and stuff rust if I don't keep them oiled in my shop, even though it's air conditioned and everything. So that's rough. My garage was worse, but my shop is yeah, anyway. You have like the world's best desiccant dryer that oven, which is apparently like the best thing every shop should have. It's pretty awesome. So like, and we wrote a, well, we didn't write a desiccant drying program, but write one stored on there. And then like as part of your maintenance schedule, just throw the desiccant in there. It's dead simple and that thing will do a great job of it. That's a really good idea. And if you do that, you can then keep desiccant in all of your 3D printing stuff. You have a lot of filament. And so yeah, it's, I don't understand how it took you telling me that to be realized, like, I guess we do have a fair bit of 3D printing stuff. Like you were like, you need to do this. And I was like, no, like they're 3D printing is not an important thing. And then like this week, I bought another printer because I realized how important it was and bought all this filament and had you help me dry all this filament and use, you know, Spencer Web's fancy Mylar bags and it's like, oh yeah, I guess it's maybe not like top mission critical priority, but like it's, it's pretty important. So yeah, it's, it's just a weird mindset change. Like I think of people in the community like, you know, Justin at PDX who like sells printed parts. Right. You know, people like that that like I'm like, oh yeah, like those are the 3D printing people. Like those are the people who use it all the time and should be thinking about this. Or like Andrew Henry who like constantly is showing off lean stuff and I just never kind of lumped it as that kind of priority in my head and thinking about it now. It's like, well, yeah. So I'll turn that over and say you bought the bamboo and were like amazed that now you like to print stuff because like your ender was, so I've had a lot of printers like I way back all the way. I think I looked in all the way to like 2010. I've been printing. And I found very, very recently, even with the bamboo that filament that I use very infrequently is bad. I get bad prints if it's not kept in a dry box with desiccant that I'm regularly changing. So yeah, since you have so much of it, I don't, I mean, you're printing like 10 times more than it seems like you're printing, but that seems like a year's worth of filament in there. It, what we'll see, it depends. We go through like very big spurts of it. We're like, I'll blow through eight rolls of PLA and like two weeks. Okay. And then we'll have a month and a half of like, I've gone through half a roll. Yeah. And PLA is not too bad, but PETG is pretty hydroscopic. So yeah. Yeah. Well, and this stuff from bamboo, it's the first time that they on their product page, I've been like, you need to dry this before you use it. Yeah. Yeah. Cause they're trying to print it so hot and so fast. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how you guys will feel about this one. I think you should figure out FedEx pickups. We've talked about it. Yeah. And I think I would love to get one set up. I need to find out how much they cost because they don't cost anything. Like you can just on the app, you can just schedule a pickup. I think it costs money if you want to get on there like regular schedule. Okay. Okay. Then I need to look into that. Because servants actually told me this, there's literally just a FedEx app and you can be like, I have a package come pick it up. Okay. Cool. I don't know how much we do it because a very often we do ship right at the end of the day where they won't come and pick it up. Yeah. We're also close enough to the airport that maybe they can hit us on the way back at five an hour before the. Yeah. So I agree. But even if it's just like once in a while, it's a package that's done early, it just would save you guys like half an hour. Yeah. I like that. I like it a lot. Replace the outfeed hose on your thread. Yeah. It sucks. Doesn't it? Yeah. No blows. And since I did like two coolant swaps on your machine, replace the replace hose. That's every like Justin. I love your work ethic. It makes me feel bad. Like I was out for something and Justin's like, oh, you said you needed to replace the coolant on the U 500, right? I was like, yeah. He's like, oh, take care of it. I was like, you don't need to do that. He's like, well, unless you specifically tell me not to, I'm going to do it. Like try and stop me. You're not here. And I was like, I'm not going to tell you not to do it because I don't want to do it. But like, I'm happy to do it tomorrow. And then I see on the camera that Justin's just starting to do it. Because they hear it's like 730. I mean, I don't know if anything else to do, but honestly, like it wasn't that big of a deal. And the Freddie makes it pretty easy. And I was just happy to do it. Take one thing off your plate. Well, I do appreciate it. But yeah, the outfeed host has bothered me for a long time. Like we talked about, there has been many things that both you and Ethan have brought up where it's like, that has been on my mental list for months. And I just have, I don't have a good way to formalize a list of to-dos. Like I have that board in the break room, but I for like I will forget the things I need to put on the board. So before I put them on there. I think Jay Pearson on, I think he might have even been on your when he was on your podcast. But anyway, he has the best method for this, which is he has a list of to-dos. And if any of them take less than two minutes, he just does some of them. Yeah. And like you just kind of have to like make it part of your like Wednesday routine or whatever. And if you just do a couple of them, eventually the list will never empty, but you'll move through it. Yeah. It takes a little bit of personal discipline to be honest with you, but gross. But it's the kind of thing like you have to go do a cool thing and then your life is better because you didn't, you know, so. Yeah. Oh, it's been months, too, that I've been meaning to do that because every time I use it, it takes forever to empty the Freddy because it's so kinked right at the nozzle. And I just need to email the sandwaring guys and say, send me a, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, here's my card. Send me on. Like please. I'm on that same note. I don't know that this is a thing, but I believe you can buy an extension to get more capacity out of a Freddy. I think so. I don't know if it's more capacity or just an additional filter. And that's the thing I need to talk to Simon about because I know I've seen it. I think Andrew's Freddy has the extra or he just got the extra thing. Yeah. If it's more capacity, um, otherwise, honestly, just sell your Freddy and buy a bigger one. Yeah, the eco back. Like I have the micro plus, which is a little bigger than yours. That's what I have. The micro plus. The micro plus one hundred then. Oh, yeah. That's what you have. And it, it would have done, I think, I think I took three rounds on the Freddy on the brother, but like if you have to do the hurmly, like you're going to regret it. I'm already dreading it. So get a bigger one. Yeah. You have one solid shelf on the palette rack behind your desks, but the other shelves should get a piece of puxy glass or something. We have two more of those wood boards that just need to be cut down on our table saw. Okay. Yeah. So I'm going to do that before I leave today. You can't actually. So they need to be cut on the bandsaw and then also need a circular saw. We don't have a circular saw here. But yes, I agree. We bought those and I didn't know if they were going to go on the, we have one on the shipping one over here and then one behind our desk. But I agree. Yeah. At least on the one where the place where the gauges come on and off. Yes. It sucks. Yeah. This one I'm going to insist on. Mount the power strips and the APC under your desk. The sideways or upside down on the desk itself. Yes. Because I went to plug in my laptop this morning and noticed that they were covered in like metal chips. It's like you're going to have a bad day. You're going to burn your shop down. That's a good idea. So like, I'm not leaving here until that's done. You're going to get the same treatment I give some of my family members. All right. Yeah. Yeah. We could do that today. That one's a safety no. That's fine. They're less accessible that way. It's annoying, but like you can't cover your electrolytes and chips. I agree. Yeah. Sorry to shame you there. It's fine. Like I said, I, what's funny is we had those mounted at our last shop. Yeah. But we were, our desk was up against the wall. And so it was very easy to mount. And we just, yeah, just hadn't done it since then. Yeah. This one is going to be a little contentious because we've already talked about it. But I understand why it's contentious now. And I think it's interesting. You need to integrate the Z probe calibration macro for the hermly so you can just call it. As long as everything's calibrated, like probe the surface to find the top of it, then come down and take like five thou off, face it, look like a toolpath or something, and then probe it again. And I know, like, so we talked about it and how like the effort of getting all of that integrated feels like too much when you can just do it. And I was like, it would take me like a couple of hours to figure it out. And then I realized it won't take you a couple of hours to figure out because like you're not all up on the macros and stuff. So just like pay somebody to do it. Right. Like, you know, like send Zach an email and be like, okay, I'll give you 500 bucks to do this. I think it will make it a lot lower friction for you. And this is like my personal thing is that like macros like that, like maintenance macros like that need to be idiot proof because sometimes you're here at like two a.m. Right. And you're like really tired and you might forget something or you might have an employee sometime in like, if that's something you don't have to teach them, then I'm going to email, well, actually anybody who listens to this can also tell me, but I'm going to email support and make sure that I can do the radio calibration before the Z calibration. Like we talked about because I think that that's a fantastic idea. Is that eliminates the whole part of it of kicking chips for cutting that surface? Yeah. And if that's the case, then I'm even more motivated to do that. But even if you can't do that, just automate the Z height calibration and then do the rest of it manually. The probe, the laser, you mean like all the way from laser, like laser to calibrate and then cutting with the gauge tool and then cutting your skim block and then probably that whole thing could be a macro in and of itself. Yeah. And then you can automate the rest of it on top of it, which would be great. But even just that part, then you could just make that part of your like warm up routine as like you could warm up the machine and then do that. Right. I'm sure Ethan is listening to this and there's like, dude, I got you like 90% of the way there. You said you're right to code. Yeah. But I understand now that like it was it was enlightening for me to realize like programming for me is not a like a hard thing. So it's just different syntax. So like I could probably figure it out. But the activation energy for you to get there is like really high. Yeah. And so that's why it feels not worth it to you. So I get it. That's fine. Like calling a favor, you know, pay somebody to help, but like you should, you should do that. I agree. And you should do it on all the machines. Like the brothers, if you're going to do that Z setting on all of them, then do it there too. Yeah. So it is written and ready for the you right so far. And I need to do it for the rest of them. If I decide to change all the other ones to that same method of like putting a block in the skim cutting it, which I think I will like. Yeah. This makes more sense. Don't have to worry about the Z axis encoder or anything like that. Well, also just for consistency on all the machines. Like how do we set Z? You just put them in and run this program. Yeah. Also, it would let you share a calibration palette across all the machines if you wanted to. Right. Yeah. Here's a list of smaller things that probably aren't worthwhile. But that I'm just going to tell you anyway. The two ones are, I don't love your water solution for like how you have the hose running to your coolant thing. Okay. Because there's not a ton of room between the machines and the wall. And so like when you have to drag the coolant bucket like over to a machine to fill it or the Freddy, like you're navigating like the electrical cords and it's just like a pain. It's not something you have to do all the time. But like filling your machines that this one I think in particular because you're looking at that liquid tool system. Maybe so the problem is going to kind of solve itself. Yeah. But you also have the quick connect hose on there. So I would just put some hard line water things with like quick connect fittings and then it's good to do. And then yeah. Also I tripped on the hose once. Oh, well, yeah, that's not good. It's funny. You say that though because to Brad and I coming from the old shop, which you didn't see yeah, it feels so spacious behind the machine. Right. Like we are both like, oh my god, it's so easy to move around back here. It is because we had between the end of the sump and the wall and all of our machines literally two feet next together. Right. Just fit in that. Yeah. So like for us, it's like moving blind. The machine is fine. Yeah. It was navigating the barrels and stuff with the hose and everything. I understand that. That one's a pretty low priority one because it's not a thing you do a lot. But also plumbing, the nice thing is I think no matter what, I need to plum lines from the water to the machines, even if I go liquid tool. Right. So that might just be something grab some packs, plum it all in call it a day. And then on a similar note, this one will be a little bit harder to do. I think you have to add like a transfer pump or something, but I would recommend you add like a shop floor sink, like a slapsink to the shop. We have one. Where? That's where the water comes from. Yeah, that's like off in a corner like put it like where you can get to it. Behind one of the machines or something. Okay. Just because like sometimes you want to wash your hands or wash a part or something. And I suspect you guys are going into the kitchen to do that. No. We would never do. So just get like a stainless steel shop or even a plastic one. Like we have one in our shop with a transfer pump. And I just like every time I need to use it, I'm like, yes, this is the thing it should be. Right. So that's it. That's my whole list. Really? That's it? Yeah. That's doable. I can solve this. It's fun. It's I enjoy having people like I told you, you know, I yes, I talked to a lot of people in the show. I'm active in social media, whatever. But like for the most part, I'm building the shop in a vacuum. Like it's Brad and I come together, spitball and thinking that we're doing the right things. So having somebody here with outside experience and different experiences is just so valuable of like, dude, why are you not mounting your power strips? Like the easy, you're going to burn down your shop for something stupid. Like that one's not okay. We're going to fix that. We'll fix it right after this. It's fine. It's literally a five minute job. It's just one of those things that we don't think about. But it's nice to have that pair of eyes because those are just fixtures in the shop now. They are on the floor. That's how they've always been since we moved in. It's been 10 months. Like you just forget that it's an issue. So I appreciate that. Yeah. I guess what have you learned this week? I think we got a good question about what what are your processes are surprising? No. Ryan from the Patreon asked, what is something you observed or experienced about the workflow in part processing at ProDM that might influence the future of toolpath? So talk to me about what you learned and the things you came here to learn. Like, did you learn what you wanted? I did. Yeah. One of the big ones for me is that I want you to tell toolpath how to program, not the other way around. And so this sounds like kind of a small thing. But like if you have a contour surface that comes, it's like a computational thing we've been dealing with. Sometimes people do the philates wrong and you're in the flat next to a philate has a little sharp corner. So you have to ball mill the flat, at least a little bit, right? And so we had this big long discussion about how toolpath should handle that with roughing and finishing and sort of my general assumption was that nobody would ever ball mill like a big flat because it's just like really, really slow and inefficient. And then you showed me a whole bunch of parts where like, oh yeah, I just ball milled that entire thing like with like a microscopic step over because I really don't care about spindle runtime and I just didn't want to deal with the blends. And whether I think that's right or not is irrelevant. Like if it doesn't program that way, if toolpath doesn't give you the option to tell it to do that, then it's not going to work for you like period. Yeah. Right? And if you see it like trying to select a bull nose and then switch to a ball and like blend, you're going to be like, no, no, no, this is crap. Right. And so that's like an idiot. I don't know if that's an idiot's in courtesy of only your shopper. If lots of people do it that way. But so what's funny though is you just brought up a memory. So when I first got into the instant machinist community, I don't know if you were machining them, but there was it was Cal pay at Cal pay on Instagram. Come on. Yeah. And he used to finish every pocket with the smallest tool that he used in that pocket given in three access. Right. And I remember thinking the exact same thing of just like, well, why the hell would you do that? And he's like, well, it just looks nicer and there's less blends and whatever. And it's just funny that it's come full circle. We're like, now I'm doing that in 3D. Right. Because even thinking back on it, like even now I still think like, well, I would never do that. Like I would pick out the corner with a smaller tool, but like, I would almost never do that with ball nobles because I just don't want to mess with it in five access. Right. It's just easier to let it eat and go do something else on another machine. So yeah, it's very funny. Yeah. So that's an area where I have to figure out how to give you the ability to tell it, to tell toolpath, that's how you want to handle those situations. And somebody else may want to pick out the corner. Right. So those are the kinds of things that perpetually thinking about. We haven't implemented a whole lot of them. They're in the cut config, but those are the things that I was really interested in. The other thing we got to talk a lot about was your workflow and your work holding. We don't have vices and work holding in toolpath yet, but we do use toolholders for three access stuff. And obviously, the big thing going through plus two is you need to have work holding in there. And so I'm trying to think really intentionally about what they should look like. And so we had lots of talks, but your perspective on like how to absorb the work holding and also just how you use your vices and stuff was really surprising. And you've talked a lot about moving over to Lang and stuff. So I was a little surprised to see the orange vices on the table. I knew you had them. I knew you used them, but I figured you'd use them for mostly bigger parts. We've moved over to just using self-sentering vices for the most part, because they're just, I don't know, easier to get on and off the machine and use. But yeah, so that was a little surprising to me. And so just the way you use your work holding and the way you use your zero points is less on the three access machines, less for like the flexibility of it and more for the repeatability of it. And I was a little surprised by that given like the range of parts you do. And that's why we stick with the orange vices for a lot of things because yeah, I could change from a 125 to a 77 or I could have one six inch orange vices that handles a hundred thou part to a 10 inch part or a 12 inch. I can't remember how big I can on the outboard sides of those jaws, I think I can hold 14 inches on the orange vices. Oh, and it's so obvious in retrospect, but like one of my biggest frustrations on the orange vices was that if I needed to switch to the outside jaws, it's just like a process. And it's great that you can do it. But you guys have the, I don't know, the talent grips or something. You have like grippy things on the outside. And then you have car smarts for when you want to use the inside one. And I was like, oh, that's way better way better way to do it. Yeah, well, we that was a hard one lesson of like switching it around a million times. And then realizing like, why are we fighting like the strip is already built into the job. Just do it. Right. And so then we finally bought it. And then the dumbest part of that is that I think I bought one set because I wasn't thinking like, oh, we're going to want to hold big stuff. I just needed to hold one big thing in a six inch vice. And then the next time I came around, it was like a 12 inch long piece. And I was like, why did I only buy one? And so I bought enough to fill every vice that had the slots because we have enough generations of the vice that we've got a few with it. We've got a few without it, which is kind of annoying. I don't think we're going to, if I was going to spend the money to replace the jaws, I would just buy a new vice or invest in laying ultra vice or something like that and just put that money towards it or something. But yeah, it helps a lot for sure. Yeah. So that was cool. Oh, actually, one more thing on the list that I didn't write down. I think you should use a drill to tighten and loosen your vices. Like I watched, I spent a bunch of time like cranking and I watched you guys do it. We have them. They're there. I'm missing sockets for some, I got a few of them. And so we stopped using them, but all the mini quarter inch pork guns. That's what those are for. Like they have adjustable torque on them. They're for loosening and getting the vice close enough that you can use the wrench to the last tighten. But like I literally bought enough for every single machine. We just, again, like something happens, you stop using it for a day, the day becomes a week and then it's like just sitting there for some reason. Yeah. Well, that would be a good one to like just order when you're ordering the new tube for the Freddie and then go back to using them or just find it. I don't know where it went. I had ample sockets and extensions for every single vice in the shop. I have an uncle who has like seven of everything in his basement and it's because he figured out that it was actually just cheaper for him to buy a new one than to go find it in the basement. Yeah. So maybe just buy new ones. Maybe just buy new ones. Yeah. I like that. Put them on your next McMaster order. Then they will be ordered. Yeah. Yeah. If I have to order them from actually you could do that with the Freddie hose too. It's just tubing. Yeah. That's true. I don't need to. I'm sure Sam Bourne would send you one but like to lower the friction just like find it on McMaster and put it in your cart. And I wonder if I should just find they have the like the spring in the case one. Cross proof on the king proof. Yeah. Man, I feel like I just got rid of some of that hose too because like the that size though, it's big. Potentially because the the the pre speedio brother we had the TCS to a use that kind of hose. We like bought like the fancy Japanese matching brand that matched the one that was in there. And I feel like I just got rid of it recently. Should we go dumpster die for it? It wasn't that recent. But yeah, I'll just have to get something like that because then it won't crush again. I think it just gets soft with the coolant. Whatever coolant we use or whatever. Maybe it was just hot when we moved it. Like, you know, we moved. We have moved it outside in the summer before it gets 100 something here. Yeah, zap keeps stealing it, right? Yeah, he has. He's had his turn with it. So yeah, I just need to replace it. I agree. That's it's been far too long. How why don't we when we wrap this up in a bit like, you know, in a while, we'll mount those power strips and then I'll measure the hose and do it. All right, we got plenty of other questions. Unless there was anything else about the week you wanted to go over. So speaking of zap, he from the Patreon asked. Well, if you're comfortable talking about it, what brought you to AZ and how much Soilent did you bring and did you get a burrito here and if it didn't have me? So I actually just came for my shop intern week here. And to be honest, I hope I get to do more with other people out there in the community. I really need to have pictures in my head of like all these different shops. And so that's what brought me here was my shop intern week. So if anybody else wants to have a guy come change their coolant for a week and stare at them and criticize their shop, I'll be there. How much Soilent did I bring? Is that believe it or not, I brought no Soilent. I debated bringing it but Dylan insisted that he that that proteum was buying lunch while I was here. And I usually go out to dinner when I'm on travel. So and there was breakfast at the hotel and so I just didn't need the Soilent. But otherwise I would have brought two bags or three bags of Soilent. Wait, you'll hear too. You did? Yeah. I might have to try that. Oh, actually since it's here, just to see what it tastes like. Of course. And then did you get a burrito and did it have meat? I did get a burrito and I ordered a vegetarian burrito and I got like a third into it and realized no, no, there's meat here which is fine. I'm not like a strict vegetarian or vegan or anything. I try to eat like mostly vegan on many of my meals when I'm traveling on less strict and when I eat out on less strict. So it was fine but yeah, it was like surprise, you know, carne asada vegetarian burrito. Well, and they screwed it up because you guys thought that you had just switched my burrito as well as because I wasn't here for lunch but you guys ordered me one. And then I came in and started eating mine. And I was like, no, this is what I ordered. This is the California burrito. What are you talking about? So they just decided we decided earlier that they just thought, oh, nobody would ever make this mistake. Let me fix this for you. Yeah. Let me give you a correct vegetarian burrito. Exactly. It was good though. Yeah. They have some of the best burritos I've had in Tucson. It's like a little food truck in the middle of nowhere in Tucson and it's fantastic. They became like kind of TikTok Instagram famous for a while because they will fully bacon wrap your burrito if you want. Brad mentioned that. Yeah. That's a step too far for me these days but it sounds good. Everyone of our guests we have offered it to, I think I can't remember if Travis from Alien Tools took us up on it. I think he did. But everyone else has been like, no, I don't need a hard attack. Thanks. I'm good. So yeah, I understand. I made a fully, well, my friend made a fully bacon wrap turkey for Thanksgiving one time. Oh, really good. Really? Yeah, that's really good. That sounds like one of those things where it either goes horribly wrong or really good. They, they, one of the, my friend worked for a bacon company. So it went fine. Okay. All right. Let's see. Joe Roganbuck asked, are you devastated as devastated about the closure of HDR as he is? What closure of HDR? Yeah. Are you serious? I didn't know about this until you asked this question. And yes, thank you for ruining my entire day, Joe. Yeah. I actually only found out about a HDR after I started to a path. And Ben was like, let's go to HDR. And I was like, what's HDR? And then we went and the rest of my day was just wandering around. It's like 25 minutes from my shop. Knowing you, I am shocked you have not spent more money there. Like you, you very much strike me as the person of like, well, I can fix that. Like I'm surprised you don't have like four C and C's and like three CM's and like, well, they're all almost fixed. Like don't worry about it. That takes a lot of will. Yeah. But yeah, that's where Joe got, I think his saw and his Freddie and like, oh, they had a Freddie there. We're like an old Freddie. Like, like the early logo and everything. And then Simon helped him with like new filter bags and everything. And it works like brand new. I also got my saw from HDR. It's just a little like seven by 12, you know, Japanese bandsaw, Chinese bandsaw, mind slabeled MSC. And it was a lot more work than it was worth. I should have just bought a hardware freight one and knew would have been like $400 more expensive and worth every one of those dollars. Yeah. I wanted to buy like I was very tempted to buy a autosaw from HDR. And I just like couldn't do it. I was like, this is not what I need to be spending my time on right now. Well, now you've got to experience the autosaw here. Yeah. It's only, there's only like one janky bit about the control with like the poor translation of first cut, no first cut, but it's pretty good. Yeah, it's cool. It's cool. I did find a use for the jobsaw still though. Yes, yes, you did. Yeah, I was cutting some material for my dad who showed up today and stupidly decided I needed to do it on the auto bandsaw. What it would have been done in about five minutes on our old jobsaw. But I couldn't use that because we just got our new saw and so I was going to use it damn it. But yeah, that was, that was dumb. Let's see. No, that was you learning to use the saw better. That was, that was, that was time well spent. Yeah. You, you let me fail gracefully. I appreciate that. I, let's see. Zach Pentington asked is five access or three plus two configurations on the roadmap for toolpath. And will you integrate into other cam systems like Mac, Mac Mac faster master. You can actually you can buy a cam system from Mac master. Did you know that? You can just order an extra. No, I'm just kidding. I was going to say, I would believe it. You go buy a robot. Why wouldn't you be able to buy a cam system? So yeah, it's five access on the roadmap and our other cam systems on the roadmap. We don't plan to support five access. You don't think it's an important part of it. Five access is farther out on the roadmap. Simultaneous five is is harder because of tool clearance issues and things like that. Also tool matching is more challenging. Three plus two is on the near term roadmap. I hope to be able to get to three plus two in 2025. Okay. The big thing that's holding me back from it is actually getting work holding like into the system in a way that a user can use it because I like I could do a stunt where I showed some three plus two stuff. I don't want to say it's easy. It's not easy, but like we have the raw technology to do three plus two. I could show it where I like made all the tool. There's really big and stuck it out far enough that I know it's not going to crash in it with like look cool. Right. But I would not dare give that to anybody else because like it just it's like one of our core philosophies is that like the AI has to be smart enough not to crash the machine and tool matching is a critical part of that. And so like it doesn't matter if the tool fits if the tool doesn't fit with the holder. And that's like sort of a problem in three access. Like you don't run into that too often. It can happen. But it's like a problem on every tool path for three plus two. So it's just I just am not going to do it until we have that work holding. I do have a plan though. You and I talked about it. And so we have a plan to integrate some of the stuff from Phil met Miston Howzer's stuff that he did at AU and allow people to sort of define their work holding and pull it all up from fusion. So I hope to be able to get to that at the first part of 2025 like January. We're working on clearing out some other backlog of sort of table stakes stuff that we have to do. And then once that's in there, then three plus two will be shortly behind that is the goal. The other big challenge there, which I've learned just playing with the fourth axis, but also got to learn talking with you and watching you work is that the order of operations into three axis is a little bit less critical than in a lot, a little bit less critical. Yeah. Three plus two. And so figuring out how to give you like giving you tool matching and helping you estimate, I think we'll be fairly straightforward for us with the technology we have. I'm not sure how to handle the rigidity issue and sequencing. So I think for a good while toolpath will like help you pick out your tools and give you like a jump start, but it's not going to be able to fully program that part except for really simple and like stuff or rigidity is an issue. Yeah, that's a hard, that's a hard nut to crack because it's, it's not like you're going to implement third wave right or in, you know, 10x the cost of toolpath or something like that. Like you can't. Yeah, and even a compute time. Yeah. Right. So we have to come up with some kind of heuristics or some kind of understanding of just like simple moments or something. But I haven't even started thinking about solving that problem other than taking some effort like machining real parts that way so that I have enough experience to at least not sound like a complete moron when I'm thinking about that stuff and talking about it. So I think for estimating three plus two, we'll have something in 2025 that's pretty good. It'll give you a good tool list. It'll even kind of give you a good idea of what toolpaths to use. I suspect that rigidity will be an issue and that like a lot of either reordering or still like modifying of the programming strategy will be needed before you can actually cut stuff that's like delicate. I mean, to be fair to even if toolpath gave me roughing strategies that it couldn't use, but then handled that all of the holes at a bunch of different tool orientations. And I don't have to think about that. Like that's a giant win on its own. Yeah. That will not do. It's not a 90% solution. But man, it like, although even if it solves the 50% that sucks for me, like that's awesome. On the toolpath logo emblem hats that I did vriomed. Yes. I screwed up the drilling order on those and it was a rigidity problem. Oh, really? So I like took it all the way down to the pedestal. I didn't tab off the pedestal, but I like took it all the way down and then I interpolated a flat spot, but it needed to go deeper than the end mill could go. So I tried to drill it and the first time I did it, I watched the part like bend as I was drilling. I mean, it was fine. It didn't hurt anything, but I was like, ah, yeah, that's not going to work. So then I had to do it when there was more stock and I had to interpolate a bigger flat spot. So even drilling rigidity can sometimes be a problem. Oh, yeah. Well, and that's not even to take into account prints or anything like that. Like if you had tight true positions on those holes, it's like, okay, I got to take into rigidity, but also like I can't have these holes now move to my datums when I take away some more material. Right. To get rid of that rigidity, like the whole thing just becomes kind of a really tough juggling act, I think. Yeah. I don't know that toolpath will be able to solve that part of the problem for quite a while. I think it just doesn't have enough information to do it right now. Yeah. But hopefully you can still give you a good jumpstart there. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, like I said, even if it just makes the drilling toolpaths and like if I have to drag them later or earlier in the thing, right, if they're done already, and they have the right tools and the right speeds and feeds, like, that's a giant win. Yeah. I think anybody listening has spent too much time assigning drills to holes and just hating life about it. So like that's a super big win. And I think that that's it sounds like a much easier thing to deliver than like, oh, yes, we have a rigidity model that gives you the perfect surface finish and all your model. Like that's a tough one for sure. Yeah. Doug asked, how do you feel about ebikes? And also what are your top machining lessons learned in the last few months? Hey, Doug. I like ebikes. I've built a few of them for my father. They're a lot of fun, especially when you're on like a recumbent ebike, then my dad rides recumbents. He had a recumbent trike that he put together one time. And when you're on recumbent trikes, everybody assumes you're really slow. And so I got passed kind of rudely by somebody one time and it pissed me off. So I put it on turbo and like just moked him. Just like absolutely like dominated them for like five miles or something. I was like, well, this is this sucks for you guys now. Right. You have to watch me just be faster than you can be. And so that was fun. I like ebikes a lot. I don't own one right now. I've been thinking, I've been biking to my shop. My shop's about three miles from my house. I've been thinking about getting an ebike, but I honestly could use the exercise and it's good for me. So I haven't done it yet. On really hot days, it sounds nice. And the thing I kind of want, like I really want, but it's just a one is like a really nice e cargo bike. And I would, I won't want big enough that I can pick up like a full sheet of plywood and like go to Home Depot and like push you to plywood on the thing. I don't know. It's hopefully it's not a windy day. Right. Yeah. But it's just like, that's what I want. Okay. I like ebikes a lot. I've been talking about building a mid drive a recumbent ebike with my dad. So very cool. You know, my spare time. Yeah. Yeah. Just add it to the list of projects. Justin has spent much of this week me being like, well, this sucks about this part of my business. And he's like, oh, well, I just build this. It's like, you know, it's a lot of fun. There was another question there. Yes. And the machine lessons learned in the last few months. So many. The rigidity thing on the as I started doing a little bit more forth access work was really eye opening. And you actually mentioned it too, just like having a part clamped in a vice like the versus like machining it. It's just like, it's kind of crazy how not rigid these things can be. And like, like, ball mills especially seem to want to set things ringing. And oh, yeah. Well, it's like taking, it's so weird. Like you, you just change your entire idea of what rigid actually means because you go from, yeah, vices where like, yeah, sure, you might have a thin part that you think is not that rigid. But like machining in 5X is very often is like machining all the fins in a heat sink, all the time for every operation and having to add stuff to the sides of those heat sink fins. Right. It's just always sticking up an error or on the your fourth axis, always sticking outside ways in air. Right. And it's just weird. It's very weird. So that was a big one. Trying to understand a little bit more about tool selection, working with Tim on this thing we put together for pre tool. One of the challenges with toolpath is getting your tool library ready, the number of presets we want and everything. So we built this tool called pre tool, which helps just sort of get your library ready. And trying to understand feeds and speeds, working with Tim was really crazy. He was like, yeah, actually most of the manufacturers just do everything as like a straight percentage of tool diameter. And I was like, no, no, I can't be. And then sure enough, I like went to Frages website. I went to MSC or not MSC Harvey's website and like almost without fail. If you just take all their data and like it just it all just worked out that way. What you asked me about this and I had the exact same reaction. I was like, what are you talking about? Right. And you're like, no, no, look at your speeds and feeds and I was like, oh, damn it. Is it really this simple? I guess so. And so like all of the speeds and look, every machine is different and you cut different speeds for different reasons. But like if you're just looking for a baseline, when he showed me that I was like, it's all the same. Like there's no magic here. Uh-huh. And where the magic comes in is like sometimes for like really like long reach next tools, the tool is more stable by doing like a high efficiency milling path with like a lung width of cut, which makes sense when you get into the physics of it because like more flutes are engaged. So the cutting forces are like a little bit more less peaky and more consistent things like that matter. Like it really didn't come down like like three flute, four flute, five flute. Like it, you just adjust the chip a little bit, but it's like one number you're changing. It was kind of insane. The where that falls off, the hardest is at the top end when you run into rigidity limits. And okay, so what's a rigidity limit? So I learned that and this is shocking to me that like the taper rigidity is like a big problem, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me because you have this like little spindly little tool is big chunk of metal, but it's like a vibrating system. So sometimes it's your taper. Sometimes it's you don't have enough drawbuff for it or whatever. Yeah. So like a really long tool in the 30 taper versus a 40 taper is going to behave differently. Sometimes it's a spindle horsepower problem. And so like or your or grip problem on the tool and like all of these things, you can hit different things at different times, different tools and different materials. And so like talking through it with Tim, we were like, yeah, you hit the top of that curve and all of a sudden there's no logic to it anymore. There's like every situation is different. And like what works fine on one machine doesn't work fine on like the exact same machine with the same tooling, maybe because the spindle's not in his good shape. And so we just kind of gave up on like trying to solve that top problem and we basically just said like just tell us where the limit is because once you hit that limit, you just kind of flatten it off and like kind of hold constant constant power. It's not really constant power, but you basically just try to stop cutting any harder no matter how much bigger the tool is at that point. And it'll probably kind of work. So how do I quantify that to toolpath? Like what you can't right now. You can't right now, but in pre-tool, I would like to give you the ability to like change the set points. So like right now Tim just made some pretty good set points that'll work for pretty much any 30 taper or 40 taper machine. But like will that be like will I give you an MMR limit or how are you going to backtrack that because I think the problem there is that a lot of people don't know where that limit is or if they do, they know it on a per tool kind of basis. And that's how you give it. Okay. So you'll just say like, Hey, my quarter inch cannot go faster than 150 inches a minute. So we this is a little bit of a simplification, but we tell you we basically say like tell us the smallest tool you care about and tell us tell us the first tool that you run into a rigidity limit on. And then you basically give us like data at the bottom of that and data at the top of that. And if you want to give data in between you can, but linear is probably fine for 99% of people. And then basically outside those two limits, we just hold it constant. Cool. And so you just kind of have to know like, okay, well, I have rigidity problems at a half inch and above. And so I'll set that point. And we don't have the interface for you to set that data yet. It's all just kind of hard coded and pre tool, but that's how you're going to do it. So you'll basically say, I like to run this hard with this tool and that's my limit. And everything above that is going to ride that limit, please. Awesome. I hope that works for people. As good as an option as I've heard yet, I mean, I think that that's just that it's a weird that as machinist, we haven't really thought logically about that. Like I mean, the idea that Chip load is a function of tool diameter, never crossed my mind. And it should have 100%. Like it's not like I'm that dumb in math. Like you know, I don't know for such a simple relationship that should have been on the minds of many people and discussed in your fusion as an equation and never think about it again. Exactly. Like that's what's so crazy to me is that so many of these things have been quantified forever in, you know, like machine or handbook and stuff like that. And never once has anybody ever told me like, oh, yeah, it's just a function of tool diameter. Like that would have blown my mind at any point in my career. But especially that I've gotten this far. And then then you know, you told me about it. You showed me graphs. Like, no, I have the data to back this up. And then I started doing some calculations, you know, and I was like, damn it. He's right. I hate it. So yeah, that's still kind of blows my mind. This is a really good time to take a short break. Give us an update on toolpad. Like we haven't talked since before I'm T.S. You guys absolutely killed it at I'm T.S. I don't think anybody doesn't know that at this point you guys were, you know, the bell of the ball. Everybody wanted to hang out there. That's new in toolpath since we last spoke. A lot of what we've done since I'm T.S. is actually trying to fulfill the promises we made to folks who came out of the booth and talked. So a lot of effort has gone into making the toolpads that export from toolpath into fusion better, better, both in terms of having less of them. So adopting more 3D roughing strategies instead of 2D roughing strategies and just grouping things together, like making sure when you drill all the holes are grouped together. A big one that Yon did recently, Yon's one of our developers automatically finds the tip offset you need for a chamfer tool so that you can hit all the features that are selected. And it does it a little smarter than that. So it like groups as many features as it can. And then if there's like features that have non overlapping ranges of tip offset, it will separate them. I've personally sat there like messing with the tip offset in fusion to like get toolpath to show up for all the features. So I'll be happy to have that that capability in there. Beyond that, it's been a lot of refinement. We're adding parasolid in. We've been using open cascade. I don't know how many people listening will know the difference between those two things. But I'm sure everyone has heard the word parasolid. Add nodes of the file type. I don't think they understand the technology. Most people, me included, did not understand the technology behind it and what that allows you guys to do. So there's a CAD kernel. And there's really only two or three CAD kernels out there for all the CAD systems. And there's one open source one called open cascade. And it's great that it's out there and it's free and it's awesome. But it's not like an example like Linux where open source is like awesome and is taken over the world. It is just far inferior to the commercial CAD systems. And so beyond that, there's basically two or three other kernels. Parasolid is the one that almost everybody who wants to license a CAD kernel for other stuff that's not CAD uses. And so we did. We got a license of that and are integrating it into our product. It has caused a little bit of a change in our pricing model. So keep an eye out on the toolpath website for that but just be warned. Cost money to integrate Parasolid into the software but you'll get a much better experience. That'll let us handle more file types. That's not out yet but that's coming. It'll also give us a much more robust import. So parts that we're failing before won't fail in the same way now. It's not a, I think anybody here who has bought CAM software, CAD software, it's not a meaningful enough price change to not want to use toolpath. Doing the math, you're like, all right, it's a little bit more per month if I was doing it monthly. Yeah. It really, I think for the added benefit you guys did the right thing. And we were a little bit shocked at how much faster and better it is. I knew it was faster and better than OpenCascade but as we've gotten into it, it's a lot faster and better. The other big changes we've been working on are actually fulfilling the promise of giving you control. So CJ likes to say that 100% automation is pretty bad but 90% automation that lets you change it after the fact is actually really good. So we've introduced features to let you choose your first setup and to control the tool list a little bit more so that you can exclude tools. I don't want to use that drill, take that drill out. Just trying to give you more capability and more of that is coming but that's a core ten in here is that the AI is supposed to help you program. It's not supposed to tell you how to program, you're supposed to tell it. But it's going to get you a lot of the way there. Giving you more capability to customize that in tool path itself in the web interface is useful even if it's just for improving the quality of the estimate. It's awesome. I got to play with it today for the first time with you watching over and like man it's slick. It's something that I, we had talked about a long time ago. That was something that I knew you would have to have and seeing it now in the flash is like, this is sick. So the next version of that that we're going to work on starting soon is we'll let you control all the setups. Like I have to say I, we didn't like anything or sure I like the setups but I want to move features from one setup to another. So that's coming next. We're trying to figure out what that UI should look like. It's an interesting challenge because it's kind of like building a UI around how machinist would talk about making a part. I want to do these two holes in the same setup. That's not a geometry selection problem. And when you, when you put a hole in one setup, then the option to do it in the other setup has to go away. So building an intuitive interface for that is we're not totally sure how to do it. We have some ideas but that's what's coming next. Cool. I think those are the major highlights of what's changed. And then pre tool. Oh yeah, pre tool. So a big, a big hurdle of adopting toolpath is your tool library. And fundamentally like I think a lot of folks out there just don't have a tool library that's good enough for like full cam automation yet. Even people who have like really great tool libraries have some small inconsistencies and preset naming or the way they define their holders maybe is not always 100% accurate. And you just like with automation, it just needs all that information. And so we found that the effort of like upgrading your tool library, even if you have really good geometry, your presets aren't good enough, was just a lot. So we built pre tool to like at least let you be able to play with your tool library a lot more quickly and experience the product. But we hope to turn it into something that'll really help people get a handle on feeds and speeds and just input them across their tools a lot more consistently, a lot faster and things like that. Yeah, I need to go through and do all that because like we have we have our core tool library. But yeah, I think that even my naming convention between them, like there might be rough on one and then like roughing another one. Yeah, I think it'll be nice to just have that consistency for sure. All right, other questions, Justin at PDX said spaces or tabs. Is funny we were talking about this because I actually ran into a weird problem that took me like I don't three hours to debug on my brother. I can't push code to it if there's any kind of error in it. Apparently, there's a setting I can change for that. But at first, I thought my network was broken or my FTP client was just like, what is going on? And finally, I figured out it gives you no information other than to know we reject this file. Do better next time. And so finally, I figured out that there was errors and I was trying to figure out where the error was. I thought there was a problem in my post and it turned out no, I like named my tool paths with underscores instead of spaces because I don't put spaces in anything and brothers don't like underscores. underscores are bad. Maybe all machines don't like them. I don't know. I bet the height 9 is okay with it. Probably. Yeah, I'm sure it knows to just not even look at it. I bet you can name your tools with emojis and height 9. I have underscores in all my tools. So it must be okay. Yeah. I'm not going to try emojis. I don't want to brick my control for a group. Name your face mill with the poop emoji. Right. Exactly. I got a brick my control for that. That's it. At least. In truth, I'm a spaces guy. If you code in Python, tabs versus spaces is actually a holy war. There's some jokes online about it. It's a thing. Apparently, like, people really care a lot about it. I don't care that much about it. And modern editors, you can just tell them to like force override. Sometimes you can get stuck in a death loop, though, where you're like code, linter, enforces one thing and your code editor wants, like, somebody hasn't set the other way. So like, it's just always like churning on tabs versus spaces and. But no, I'm a spaces guy. Yeah. Okay. All right. I wouldn't break up with somebody over it. Like they did in Silicon Valley. I think that's a real story, though. Really? Yeah. All right. His other question was something that seems crazy or silly in CNC machining coming from another field. I mean, so many things. To be honest with you, like, the controls, high-dine is like nice, really nice. Like the brother control, which is also really nice, feels like it's out of 1982. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's just like insane that this is the HMI that we're using. The amount of memory that comes on these things is insane. So just the interface of CNC controls and I get it. I understand the history. I get where it comes from. I know there's a whole industry of folks out there who like programmed at the machine and like need access to all these settings. I get it. But it's still just kind of like jarring, right? Fundamentally, to be honest with you, it is odd to me that you can crash a machine. I don't think you should be able to. Or I think you should have to try way harder than I have to try to crash a machine. Right. These machines are dumb. They know nothing. Right. And I know on high-dine stuff, they have the virtual machines now. And they're starting to get better about that kind of stuff. But you just really shouldn't be able to like ram your spindle into the table. It just shouldn't be allowed. I agree. I would say counterpoint to that is you can still bluescreen a machine by having bad code. And that's a much more power playing out modern thing. So like I think at some point, like it's just a human error. It's just going to screw anything up. Yeah. Yeah. Beyond that, I would say the amount of energy that goes into like drilling holes is insane. Like how have you not figured this out? Yeah, like I toolpath will solve it. We'll solve it. But also like, how is toolpath going to be the one that solves this? Right. That's kind of insane. Yeah, it's almost 2025. Yeah. Like kind of not okay. Beyond that, I would say I've been a little bit surprised at how open the modern instant machine is community is because there's this like culture of not, right? And so I haven't had to experience that. I've met a few crusty machine and I've worked with a few crusty machine. From my time in NASA, but I haven't experienced that. And so that has been a little surprising to me. I expected like a much bigger battle on my hands than I've had to like just get people's opinions on how to do stuff. Right. That's a good surprise. Yeah. I'm happy to hear that. Yeah. Yeah. As somebody who has worked with my fair share of crusty machineists, like even I've worked with people near my age that just learned from so many crusty machineists that they were crusty machineists. Crusty by osmosis. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Right. So yeah, it's really nice to hear that that's the community that you're coming into. Like I think it's like, like I think I've said it before on the show that the instant machine is community is like the best community I'm a part of on all social media. Right. Like it just sets the gold standard. Like you got to like the machine is Facebook group and you're just like, oh, all right, never mind. Like this is not no way. And that's better than practical machine is for home. So yeah, exactly. So yeah, it is a really good community. Let's see. Ryan M said, you want to hear more about your NASA optimization stuff. And what's the best practical uses for it? So like we've kind of gone into it. But like, what is this program that you developed actually do? Like you kind of talked about it a little bit with Jeff at IMTS, but like, yeah, what is it do? So the program's called openMDAO. And I don't know. I'm a little afraid that people are going to get bored. So I'm going to try to keep it really high level and Ryan ping me and we can go deep. But it's an optimization software. It does, in short, if you know what FEA or CFD are, finite element analysis or computational fluid dynamics, they're basically really expensive simulation programs. And it specializes in helping you apply optimizers to that. So if you don't know what an optimizer is, the joke is it's a computer program that instantly finds every bug and weakness in your model. I mean, so kind of like a five axis machine is to programmers. Uh-huh. Yeah. But it's goal is to like help you get the biggest of a number and respect constraints. But these like incredibly computationally expensive systems that a lot of engineers rely on nowadays can't use optimizers. And so when you deal with things like aircraft, you have a lot of degrees of freedom. So like how many different degrees of freedom if you're trying to solve a problem in machining, like a rigidity problem? How many different variables can you consider in your head and like create an experiment for? Like, okay, is it the holder or is it the spindle? Am I running out of horsepower? That's three, right? That's probably your limit. And like beyond that, you're starting to get really saturated. In the engineering world for like modern aircraft, like 10 is a small number and like a thousand is like not unreasonable. And there are some problems with geometry that have like millions like when you design a wing or an impeller or a turbine disk, you have millions of design variables. And so openMDO is a software that helps you do that optimization and more to the point it helps you do coupled optimization. So a place where that would be relevant in machining would be like thermal models for machines. You have a structural rigidity issue and that rigidity is affected by the thermal dynamics of the machine. Hot air it gets the internal stresses in the geometry of the machine change. And so if you wanted to design a casting with the specific goal of being making it really rigid and really thermally stable or like rigid under thermal change would be a better description. That's like a coupled problem because the two things affect each other and you can't design one without changing the other. And so you could use openMDO for something like that. NASA I did it for like designing aircraft where the engine was like embedded into the fuselage and was ingesting the boundary layer. And that was like actually what I did my thesis on. And it's really cool stuff, but also like super Matthew and super boring. So if you want to talk more about it hit me up. I'll do like a, I don't know like an ask me anything or something. Okay. Yeah. I would love to know more like we are deep in the area of like I don't know what I don't know. And so like I don't know how to ask good questions to know more about this, but it does sound very interesting. He also said that he loves his toolpath magnet, Cornhole. Oh, that's cool. Thanks so much. We have it in our shop too and I was showing my son. He's never actually played Cornhole so he didn't get it. But it was the first time in the last two years that my son's 13 that I was better at a sport than because he didn't know how to throw the magnets to like tag on there. So it's really cool to see those out on folks machines. We have actually I think we're out of them now, but we'll probably get more. So sign up for toolpath if you want to get one. There you go. Yeah. It's on the side of our F600. Yeah. Let's see. Tron industry said, are you planning to expand into turning at some point? We'd love to get into turning. I can't tell you when I hope it's within the next three years, but I can't promise that. We just need to nail milling. It's the harder problem for estimating. We've talked to a number of people who say that they don't really struggle with estimating for turning in the same way. Obviously, programming for turning is easier and harder all at the same time. And so it's just like the, I don't know, I need to conquer milling first. Right. I would imagine the jump from three to three plus two is much smaller than like it's turning basically a rewriting of a lot of the code because like it's a completely different removal type. I don't think it's like a fundamental rewriting of it. It's like, it's just like spun geometry versus like pocketing and things like that. Yeah. But still, it just feels different enough that it's going to be a significant hurdle. It's more, I think it's more about like the fact that like the sequencing in which tools you use is so much less well defined in turning. Right. If you have a pocket with a quarter inch radius, there's probably like three tools in your library that you can use to mill that pocket, right? Unless somebody made it like 20 inches deep in which case, it's a no quote. Right. But like hopefully, toolbar can tell you that. But like on a lay, it's just like whatever tool you feel like using is probably going to work for the most part, right? Right. So like, it'll remove the volume, whether or not it looks how you want or whatever. Yeah. I understand. Yeah. And then it's just such a different world. Yeah. We started with milling. We felt like that was the the harder problem to solve. I'm not sure it is the harder problem to solve anymore, but it's the one we're going to solve first. And when we get there, yes, we'd love to do turning. I'd love to especially to do like, like, mill turn and stuff, even to just even to just let people say like, these are turned features. And like the rest, like you, I'll do that part, but these are turned and then milling. Like that I would love to absolutely do. But we got to get milling first. So I can appreciate that. A text garage asked favorite part about being in the speedio brotherhood. I like my favorite part is honestly like making it do rapid tool changes and like present the part at like warp speed at the end of machining to somebody who hasn't seen a speedio before. Uh-huh. I like speedio was like holy grail machine when we bought it. Like, and he was super excited about it. And so the first time he came out, I was like, you're not ready for this because he runs a tourmot in his garage. He's like, it'll be fine. And I'm like, I hit go and he like jumped back and like, whoa. And I've gotten used to it now, but like the sound of a tool change, it sounds like it's crashing. Yeah. And so it's just, I don't know, it's just kind of cool. No, it's, it really messes you up to like look at other machines after you run a speedio because I know when I started posting videos of the U500 running calibration cubes, I had so many people DM me and they're like, it's so fast. I'm like, I don't know, I felt kind of slow like I was hoping that the rotors would be a little faster. Like, it was, yeah, it just ruins you. Actually, my favorite part is something they've taken away on the DZ zero zero. The door, yeah. Although it bit me because I didn't run the style for a while. And so I ran the sound. I just opened the door and covered myself and it was like, what just happened? And then Ben was like, you've been running this video too long. Uh huh. Yeah. His other question was, what's the next big feature from toolpath that you can't wait to finish? So is there anything you can share? Yeah. The ability to move features between setups is the one that I really can't wait to finish. I think that'll be like a big sort of step change in the way you feel when you interact with toolpath. And that sounds weird to talk about feeling, but like again, AI that you can't correct is like infuriating AI that's like pretty good. And then you can be like, no, change these three or four things. Now it's great. Okay. Push into fusion is like pretty chill. Yeah. And so I'm really excited about that. And then after that, we're holding epically excited about because like right now we're pushing parts down into like free space, which is how I started programming and it just, it feels dirty. Yeah. I mean, I think that there's me included a lot of people that still do that for three access stuff. So it's not unheard of. Like you're definitely, I wouldn't say you're like behind the curve doing that. You're just not doing it. It's different with automation. Yeah, exactly. Because like you're not doing like what is the ethos of toolpath? Yeah. Yeah. It's different. Yeah. Because the automation has to know that it's not going to crash your machine and know that it's not going to like ram into your parallels and like wreck your drill and scrap your part. Right. It's your, because you're telling grips or whatever. Somebody does that. Well, that wraps up all of that. Anything else you want to talk about from this week? No, I think that's it. It's been a great time. I really enjoyed it. I hope I get to come back sometime soon. Like Brad said, and I completely echo it, you are welcome anytime. You've been a great guest. It's been a ton of fun having you. Yeah. More than happy to have you back anytime. I hope it, you know, as long as it doesn't burn down from an electrical fire before I come back. We're going to solve that right now. We got a little bit of time. Not gone wood. Yeah. We're going to take care of that. But well, hey, thanks so much for not only coming out, you know, changing my cool end, putting up a thermostat today. Like I felt bad that we did not do more fun stuff, I guess. I got everything out of it. I wanted to get out of it. Even let me press some buttons on the hurmly a few times, which is great. Yeah. I think it's good to get you to do as much as I possibly can because I wanted to give you the experience. And I think that it's just different enough that I would get your mind kind of thinking. Like it, it hides a little weird. I think you can agree. Yeah. It's cool. Like the tool library, all that stuff. I do have to do some quick videos for our YouTube. You absolutely need a macro to set up. Clear. You need that. That one you need. That one you need. Yeah. Like that's where you draw the line. Like for me, doing the cat probe calibration seems much higher on the list than me just having to go through and unchecking 20 boxes or whatever. No, because that tool is going to keep getting longer. Yeah, that's true. That is true. But it will never be longer than 30 tools, at least on this machine. Oh, I see. Yeah. So I'll only ever have 30 tools loaded on this machine. But still you're right. I'm, you're right. That one, that one's like easier to write. Yes. Yes, it is. There's almost no validation. Yeah. Like you just, yeah. Yeah. But for everybody listening, after you run the full kinematic calibration, I usually go through and uncheck that the tools are all measured so that they will remeasure. The next time I use them with the new kinematics and the laser calibration and all of that and Justin's on it. And it was just like, what are we doing? This is so stupid. You can't do the batch to do this. And I was like, no, I asked the apps guy. He said he can't do it. And he's like, I hate this. We need to write a macro. Like, immediately was just like angry about this. So yes, I agree. Well, we'll do something about it. We'll do something about it. Well, thank you so much, Justin. Really appreciate it. Thanks to new Patreon members, Ryan, Jared, Evan and Eric and Preston. Thank you guys so much. You make the show possible. Thank you all for listening. And I will be back next week.