What it's like owning a KERN Micro!

hey everybody john grimsmo here i just want to give you guys like a total package update of where we're at with the current i've given you lots of little projects and everything but um fraser's been pushing me to do like a wrap up you know just where we're at things are going really good here i want to show you a stunningly beautiful smooth pattern rask it's got a two color flake anodizing to it and oh man they're they're going good they're going really good i'm really really happy with how these are coming um here is a set of smooth handles that are contoured and fully 3d machined with such an amazing surface finish that it tumbles right out and looks gives you this like it looks flat it looks lapped it looks super smooth but it's actually contoured it's actually 3d machined with a ball mill and it's just so good that it comes out in tumbling i love it blade grinding is something i've been working on for the past like year and theoretically working on for a very long time and it is so solid and so reliable now and we're getting an amazing finish this is the grinding wheel we're using it's a company called die cut it's a die-cut thin wheel so it's just a little super thin 100 thick grinding wheel this one's loose so i can take it apart that's it it's like a 60 dollar grinding wheel this one is not the one we normally use but it's a good example on the arbor it works well except my problem with it is a quick throw back together come on this head the little cappy thing um likes to run into my clamps and doesn't give me the clearance that i need to really grind as we're grinding the bevels we go like this near near near a whole bunch of passes like tons and tons and hundreds of passes down as we get down to the bottom there's these clamps here that hold the blades like this and you can imagine the bottom of the tool is hitting the clamp so i'm clearancing the clamps i'm clearancing this hat um a little nick and as eric is polishing these blades out he's like so you get rid of that line yet have you gotten rid of that line yet i'm like no i've got other projects i will though i'll do it so once i make new arbors i can get rid of that line for eric his life will be better we're good to go um yeah okay let's do a walk around of the kern and uh it's running right now things are going awesome just did a tool breakage detection which is something i had to kind of add and program in but this thing when everything's good i've had it running 15 hours a night almost every day for the past week almost two weeks it's fantastic every now and then there'll be a broken tool that'll stop it after an hour or six hours or whatever but when you come in in the morning and it's still running after you know 12 hours or whatever you know it's still got some time it's the most amazing feeling it's great so my goal is to increase the reliability to increase the consistency and just keep this thing running so it's kind of my my mentality towards most some of the machines in this company and just towards work is like do all the work at night just make the process so reliable and so repeatable and so brainless really put all the effort up front even if it takes me longer even if it takes me like way too much time then you have a sweet sweet sweet process so so we're there almost mostly this is the eroa palette changer so basically it's a robot that will automatically put this in the machine and say go and make the next part uh it's working really good so we have one of my i've got this pallet nine is in the machine right now that's the first pallet that i made if you guys were watching like a year ago when we were doing the quarantine vlogs and i was by myself and i was just getting this machine all dialed in we made one of these tombstones with a big ol cut out in it and it was kind of vibrating and we filled it with two-part epoxy so there's this big yellow goo inside um it worked and that's the palette that's running right now and then uh one of the youtube commenters like emailed me and suggested instead of having a big cut out here to make the tombstone lighter um what you're doing is you're creating a u shape so it's it's like this from the side profile and vibrations as you're machining on the side are going through the u and then back and then back and then back and i don't know the science behind it but it kind of started to theoretically make sense so i redesigned the tombstones let's go with this one to have a huge cored out hole in the middle now my buddy matt mittler from michler machine works made these blanks for me um and cored out on his haas vf2 some that's some hogging of material there and cored them out for me and did the bolt pattern on the top and then i machine a mating surface for the aurora pallet and then i mount it to the pallet and then i do all the surfacing and get them all prepped for whatever i need to do with them so these tombstones oh and instead of having the u-shape with the big cutout here the theory behind this is that any vibration on the side is gonna go around the surface and doesn't like change directions so i don't know if it's a real thing or not but these work they don't vibrate they sound amazing they work amazing and they're significantly lighter than the old one you know still heavy but it's like many pounds lighter than the old one so every time i pull one of these out i like it every time i pull out the old one it's like oh this thing is heavy okay so last night i had a run where i did three rask pallets including the one that was on it there's a little tool error on the last pallet so that's why i'm re-running it right now finishing that up so we'll take one of these out i'll show you guys how i'm clamping everything how i'm you know organizing it and one of them i'm not sure which one has a new pattern or dragon scale pattern that we did do like four years ago but not very many of them we only did a couple so i wanted to bring it back into regular production so check this out this is the handle top plate smooth pattern notice these holes on the side and this little brass thumb screw there so each of these is a different position one two three four four is my dragon scale uh engraving code so the probe comes in it goes nope nope nope yep okay so because you put that there now i'm going to run this certain dragon scale program except maybe i did something wrong i thought it was fine so one of two things could have happened either the programming is wrong that didn't choose the right pattern or the tool path that does the dragon scale like actually ran but it was too high or something um not going to figure that out yes i know the inside works i proved that out so i made it nice and light and subtle on the inside and i want that matching on the outside i expected it to work and it didn't actually also this should have been crosshatch pattern not the smooth so i did something wrong programmatically so that that didn't run that's okay but anyway uh yeah this is a full ras like this is one rask right here so it starts out with the inside of the handles handle starts out as a water jet blank these are cut from a big sheet of titanium they're not thinned out they're not ground or surface ground or double disked or anything for the rask all i gotta do is i gotta grind off these little tabs from waterjet so we go to the belt and we just grind them off then they go here between these clamps and then all the inside all the guts all the stop pin holes the pivot hole the bearing surface these lightweight pockets uh the stop in holes and these threaded holes for fixturing and especially on the lock bar side the lock bar insert cutout the detent ball date engraving lock bar slot all this stuff even surfacing the flat of the handle happens on this first operation super super super critical and also here i have my pattern picker choice so i got one two three four four is dragon scale um so this works the probe comes in says dragon scale we're good to go and then it does the clip on the back side and then it rotates the tombstone and it says you know what pattern i want to run it does the handles and the clip top side and then when that's done it rotates again and it does the soft blade so this starts out as a piece of water jet stainless steel that we have already surface ground made to the perfect thickness and then it does all the super critical features the pivot hole the stop pin arc the stop pin end points very critical the d10 hole or slot in this case you know the flipper tab the corner round the jimping the lock face angle geometry beautiful work on the profile i work really hard on that to make it nice and shiny and then also the engraving if you can see that right in there it says rask number 441 rwl34 so i mean this is a perfect example where having a five axis mill lets you do more than one thing at once we get to machine the thing flat and then we rotate it and the tool comes in and does the engraving from the side oh it's so cool and then when that's done it flips over and it does the blade grinding so after the soft blade is made it goes to our hatred department and then it goes to our lapping department and then it comes back to me and i put it on here and an end mill first comes in and roughs out the blades and then the grinding wheel comes in and it takes forever way way way longer than a norseman to make but the results are insane so i'm balancing that i'm trying to find little ways to shave time to make it faster but without reducing that quality but yeah that's how the tombstones are working right now they're i love them it's it's like the plan that i've had for two years now getting the kern making rasks bringing them back into production we're here it's working um and i'm even doing little hacky things like writing with my engraving tool op1 opt2 because these clamps are different and kind of special to the one side so i just need that visual indicator to be like oh that's the first one oh that's the second one it helps now here hang on so originally when i had my buddy matt make these for me like i said he cored them out and i had him machine this flange on the top and he made these uh aluminum top plates and the bolt pattern is like weird so that it only goes in one way i think it goes in like that and then an o-ring goes around there because theoretically i'm like well they don't want cooling and stuff cooling up inside of there at the end of the day i'm not using these i don't like them i don't want them because of the drilled holes and the screws and everything and the the pattern picker holes like coolant is getting inside anyway so it doesn't matter and with the five axis so it'll machine the parts it'll be done and then at the end i do a dump i tilt tip it out and i spin it and i spin dry and i blow dry it and i let it drip for 30 seconds and then it comes out clean and also it gives me a nice handle right here as i'm loading it to go and rotate and rotate and rotate so unfortunately i'm not using these at all but that's kind of funny um yeah so i've got two pallets done so later today when we're done filming i'm going to reload these with all new parts put them back in the machine good to go um yeah i've also been working on getting our norseman knives partially off of the mori and onto the kern get the really critical tolerance things onto the machine that's the best so i've got handle back sides so our norseman handles will go here i made two separate fixtures that all they do is handle back sides whereas the rasp fixture is super multi-purpose like one fixture for one rask here i'm breaking it out this will make um you know one set of insides two set of insides four per fixture and i made two fixtures so that i can do theoretically eight sets of norsemen handles in a run and then i also made a blades fixture doing the same thing so there's eight blades on this so one fixture for blades does eight blades two fixtures for handles does eight knives of handles and uh i'm not in full production on these yet but i think i've made good parts i'm doing them one season twosies and i think everything's rocking pretty good so i just kind of need to pull the trigger and make a lot of parts but i'm pretty much there so it's it's neat seeing how i'm like trying to work through my head how i organize this and what parts i'm putting on it and how many more pallets to make and i had matt make 25 of these tombstones because there's 25 positions here so that's great so i always have them and like this one i i broke a drill so i clearly wrote broken drill um so that whole thing might be scrapped which whatever a couple hundred bucks to matt um i have enough extra it's it's fine yeah and then i got my two fifth axis vices here in different configurations that i do all kinds of weird vise work in them making all those clamps and like the rasp tombstone [Music] making all of these clamps and the top fixture and everything it's it's a lot of parts so a lot of these are norseman clamps for all those norseman fixtures and the rask ones and all kinds of stuff if we go over here [Music] this side of the pallet changer has 55 positions to hold these 72 millimeter pallets like just under three inch and it's funny because this this pallet changer can do 80 pallets and i don't have that much throughput i'm putting all my work into multiple into singular tombstones um if you had the kind of work where you're like okay i got to make you know 400 pieces a day and they're this big this kind of situation would be amazing but i'm still glad that i have it and i'm still trying to utilize it as much as i can so like this fixture right here pallet 50 is a tungsten or tantalum or some sort of dressing stick for that grinding wheel i was showing you before so i've got a program that after about 300 minutes of grinding the machine knows that and it goes oh i'm at 300 minutes i got to auto dress that grinding wheel to kind of clean up the sides and keep it nice and crispy so it puts away the rasp pallet it calls a pallet 50 and it grabs this and it puts it in the spindle and then it pulls up the grinding tool spins it probes it the touch probe comes in probes the top of that so i know exactly where it is i probe the top of that and then i probe the top of the nut so i know exactly how much grinding stick is left so i'm not grinding into the chuck um and then it does this auto dressing routine where it grinds the grinding wheel against the dressing stick for a minute or so whatever the cycle is and then it's refreshed and then it resets the counter in the machine so i'm not at 300 minutes anymore i'm at zero minutes and then that has been going so fantastically well i've had this vision in my head for two years i was like yeah i'm going to grind on the kern and it's got to auto dress and it's got to do this and it was a big deal to program that and get it all to do what i want but for weeks now months it's been running flawlessly and i just don't even think about it anymore and that's great and then i've got my two lock bar insert fixtures i've showed these in the past few videos one for ask one for norseman these are loaded and ready to run so they'll be running soon and then i've got more work planned for the rest of this as we grow and as we continue to make more cool stuff so it's overkill this palette changer is much bigger than i need but i'm really glad that i have it because i can grow into it and i plan to so in our last video i told you guys about the yogurt tub coolant fill sensor um it's been like almost two weeks it still works great it's so good uh i don't know it just works man it's just so good uh curran did reach out to me and said they're gonna hook me up with the proper um basically that exact one that i showed in the last video the ifm kind of infrared guided laser or whatever it's called uh sensor because that is it's like an easy upgrade for this this chip conveyor so um this coolant tank so yeah they're gonna take care of me for that which is awesome that's not why i made the video i didn't i'm not asking for anything i just wanted to share an experience i had but it's kind of sweet they you know stepped up and took care of that so that's great uh but until then this thing works so good it's cycled twice in the past that we've been talking right now and it just works when i did it i stole angelo's noga arm that he was using on the nakamura so i can see this morning he placed this here which is basically telling me please go to this one that i bought for you and so i can have my little noga arm back so that's fine i'll um i'll switch it out soon enough [Music] but yeah flawlessly running it's going great all right so this this whole unit right here is the paper band filtration unit it's basically your coolant tank if you look in there you can see coolant that's draining and dripping through the paper filter so basically the coolant is being pumped out of the chip conveyor on top of the paper band filter there but you can see the paper media here this is i think it's 20 micron i'm not totally sure now that i think about it my my roll is getting kind of near empty i should think about getting a new one running the machine more than i ever have before so things that have lasted for so long are now not lasting so long so i have to really stay on top of things um so yeah the all the coolant floods through that paper there's actually these rollers that pinch the sides of the paper so that coolant kind of only goes in the middle and then it all collects here so you can see how many chips this thing is collecting and you can actually see the roller marks on the side [Music] so the coolant is directed and even the color change between the side and the rollers shows how much grinding dust is being collected by this relatively coarse grit paper so periodically we have to go in here with scissors and you know cut that off dump this out put all the chips in the recycle bin and then throw away the paper but paper man filtration is quite amazing relatively simple technology that we're starting to implement on a lot of our machines now so that's cool um and then i think i talked about in one of my most recent videos the the two filtration system we have here so if the paper ban is 20 micron then it's going through a 10 micron and then it's going through a 5 micron and all of them are catching everything after about a month i pulled out a 10 micron filter and i kind of looked inside to see how many of these chips are being caught by the next filter and it's it's almost nothing like [Music] nothing there's if i shine my flashlight in here there's like three tips that i can see but my point is that the paper band is getting all all of the big stuff pretty much and nothing's getting through the line to the filter which is great but what this is capturing is you know supposed to look like this it's dirty this is after a month this is all grinding dust and then the five micron catches the five micron grinding dust and uh apparently if you go lower than five micron you'll start to actually strip the oils and stuff out of the coolant um and not perform as good cooling wise so five is kind of my limit but uh oh i don't think i showed you guys this this this is cool this i'm proud of i showed a couple instagram stories a few weeks ago when i made it but this is my coolant dispensing unit and i've got it magnetically attached using these rubber neodymium magnets that i was talking about before so filling coolant has always been annoying we have now we have our central coolant tank that pumps coolant throughout the shop pre-mixed coolant but you're still standing at the machine with the coolant gun for a few minutes you're washing it down but you're topping up cooling these machines the more they run the more they evaporate the coolant and your coolant level goes down which makes your mixture go up which means you have to put more low percentage cooling in and i've always for years now i've always wanted an automated solution that's either float level like fills itself or at the very least like push a button walk away so now i have the push a button walk away system i have a circuit board on the inside that goes to a solenoid valve that is basically a timer if it's off all i have to do is i have to turn it on let it boot up for one second and then i hit the button timer on i printed uh the words on the inside so that they show through with the light on there's some orange leds in there telling me the timer is on i have a 10 minute timer that is slowly counting down and as you can see here we're flowing coolant i can stop it if there's a problem i can turn it back on again 10 minutes now 10 minutes is kind of an arbitrary number maybe some machines will take 2 minutes or 5 minutes or 20 minutes or whatever but i know the 10 minutes on this machine as they push it and walk away and stop thinking about it is amazing because before i had this ball valve here with just the red hose pointed in there and i'd turn it on i'd set a timer on my phone for five minutes i'd walk away i'd come back but every now and then i'd forget and we've had a couple overflows because you forget and that's just not acceptable so i wanted a electronic solution that basically says yeah 10 minutes should be good i know 10 minutes is going to give me whatever it's not going to overflow it's still somewhat operator dependent because i can't push it six times or else i will overflow it but if once or twice a week i'm hitting that then i'm good to go so i'm i'm really happy with that that's like a vision that i had that is now reality that i want everywhere and it's great and i actually do need 10 minutes to cool it maybe 20. so we can just move on and stop thinking about it you can see it says 9 right now and then it'll say eight and then it'll say seven so having a set it and forget it thing is great um fraser you don't know i found this on the side of the road last night this office chair it's going to be our new shop office here that's fantastic i was out for a walk and it was garbage day and i was like that's a sweet office chair i'm taking that so i got home and then i got in my car and i went back to the house it was great um okay and then the tool cabinet i do want to talk about that this is great so when i was first setting up this machine i really spent a lot of time thinking how i would organize this massive wall of 210 tools um do i do it randomly and then have some some document some spreadsheet that tells me what goes where do i group them it's like ball mills go here engraving animals go here square end mills corner rounders uh corner radius tools chamfer mills etc so i went with the ladder i have basically this entire row is ball mills and engraving tools uh you got a ball ball engraver ball tiny ball eighth inch ball engraver engraver engraver engraver i have there's so many tools i have one engraver for soft stainless steel i have one engraver for hard stainless steel i have one engraver for titanium i have one engraver for norseman blades i have a beater engraver and i have like a backup engraver for the rast blades because it goes pretty quickly that's amazing material specific tooling is great because titanium and stainless steel they cut differently and they wear tools differently and having them separated is awesome so then here are my flat end mills some big ones some small ones and then i've got thread mills here and then some whatever tools some beaters tiny thread mills all my chamfer tools and back chamfer tools are right here and then uh drills drills are here and then these are my quarter radius end mills and then down here is where all the weird stuff is the uh face mill my detent ball presser inner detent ball grinding tool dovetail tool this is my air blaster 3000 a little tool i made on the swiss so with through coolant coolant or air i can blast off tools and then my um grinding tool the die cut yeah and then one of the if i do say so myself brilliant inventions was this guy i don't have a name for it but the word forget-me-not just came into my head it's basically an hsk taper that i glued a magnet to because so many times as i almost did while filming this video just now but i'm like looking at a tool and i'm like okay is that thing is that thing done yet and then i go uh where did i just take it from literally i'm not joking this happens all the time so i have this thing magnetic right there and i literally always now go like this both hands switch done i will never forget where the tool goes back i don't have to think about it i don't have to remember also notice how i put it upside down not this way because for one thing it's easier to hold but also i notice if it's right side up the tool changer will actually grab it it'll see it there's a little laser sensor on here that shines a light and says oh yeah something's there so it'll grab it and it would put it in the spindle if i let it if i put it upside down the little laser sensor says oh there's no tool there so sometimes i've had to replace a tool that is getting called next that's coming up very next and uh i've had it try to grab this thing so this is what the upside down situation is for but yeah having this little hack has been life-changing for replacing the tools it's so simple and so dumb but like every machine should ship with this basically um but yeah i love it it's great the curtain's been great the i'm putting so much detail and effort into the rask that the cycle time the machining time is pretty much twice what it takes to make a mori no to make a norseman on the mori and that's kind of ridiculous when you think about it because we sell them for the same amount but it takes twice as long on a machine that's five times as expensive so there's an roi battle there in my head but like dude the quality the consistency the repeatability the hands-off nature the palette changing the coolant filtration all on all having multiple tools for every operation like i can shave cycle time on that i can make it less than that and i will especially the grinding i can save a lot of time in that but my my initial goal for the kern for the rask is at any cost at any cycle time make it work perfectly and that's kind of where i'm at and then i can peel back from there i can save time save money save tools save whatever but i need to find the most efficient like process and then i can make it easier or cheaper or faster and that's where i'm at and uh and and take it out of myself and start to teach everybody else in the shop how to run this machine because right now pretty much i'm the only one that does it which part of me loves and part of me is like dude get out of your own head and like let somebody else run it too so i'm almost there it's good but uh but yeah that's about it that's about all i got actually i have a lot more but i'll save that for future videos so okay yeah i hope you enjoyed the uh current walkthrough and i certainly enjoy this machine all right guys take care bye

Channel: JohnGrimsmo

Views: 77,820

Keywords: full grimsmo, how to, instamachinist, norseman, rask, grimsmo knives, cnc machining, knife making, edc, engineering, cnc, vlog, damasteel, made in canada, john grimsmo, erik grimsmo, eric grimsmo, knives, entrepreneurship, manufacturing, maker, machinist, knife making tuesdays, saga saturdays, saga pen, grimsmo saga, write your saga, dmg mori, grimsmo norseman, canada, machining, grimsmo

Id: _ywnDBg2PEw

Length: 31min 47sec (1907 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021