In 1992 I was 19 years old running and programming horizontal CNC mills with dual tables. I thought Id be doing that forever and loved it. We machined weld gun castings made of beryllium/copper alloy for spot welding auto bodies. I became the nightshift foreman leading a crew of 10 with 8 machines ( 2 setup guys) with FANUC controls using G-code. I learned CAD 3d modeling and CAM programming tool paths. I got off the machines and on the computer full time and then management made some bad choices so i quit and went to a competitor. I got out of the trade in 2003 and into residential remodeling. Boy what a difference. I went from holding .001 tolerances to 1/8" in carpentry/drywall and tile LMAO. I miss the precision machining trade but I dont miss working 55-70 hours per week. Seeing your machines in action brings back a lot of memories. Later I learned a CNC router for making patterns for the castings as the pattern shops ( made of wood) couldnt keep up with our needs. We cut patterns out of a slab of bondo like substance in 2 halves that were then put together in dense sand boxes to form the mold for the molten material to be poured into at the foundry. Technology is amazing!! If my remodeling business ever ends Ive considered getting back into machining but Im spoiled working my own hours for much higher pay than working in a shop for somebody else.
Yeah, once you become your own boss it's hard to go back to being an employee, no matter the trade. I'm a professional mechanic and the only "Boss" I've had for close to 15 years has been my wife. LMAO Since she doesn't really turn wrenches, she does my paperwork. Which works out really good. Because I'm no good at wielding a pen. 🤣🤣
Love that you're showing this kind of detail - so many folks today never see how these machines work and the precision required to setup the machines to make more machines!
I'm always amazed by how far manufacturing tech has come in my lifetime. I was 7yo when I watched Neil Armstrong pretend to walk on the Moon. They did that using slide rules, hand operated machinery, micrometers and calipers. Your making race car engines with machines using more processing power and precision than all of NASA and their contractors had combined at the time... CRAZY!
Once the machine is making money, paying for itself. You need to do something for a overhead crane. A dead man crane would work. Almost every machine I have seen that loads with a fork truck, there's a mark from hitting the machine with it. Glad to see the machine is up and running. CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!
They use granite because it does chip. Metal, resin can mushroom or dent. There are no high spots on granite. Love the videos and enthusiasm. The stress is real!
That's not true that there are no high spots on granite. There can absolutely be high spots on granite if it wasn't cut right or the block hasn't been taken good care of. Anyone who has a granite surface plate that is using it to measure things against - that block has been worked to achieve that surface finish with high precision straight edges. Granite stones are ground down very very very slowly to achieve their surface plane. It's quite literally a job itself just to make surface stones measure flat. They have their own special tools, computer software to measure the hills and valleys, special procedures to work the surface with powders to bring things to micron tolerances. They use granite simply for all the obvious reasons - Due to its hardness and wear qualities, non denting property, smoother action, greater precision and low maintenance cost.
They use granite because its stable 😂 and as said by the other guy most certainly does have high spots, we used to calibrate and lap our granite squares back into tolerance in house.
@@aSinisterKiid I think what they mean is if you ding granite, you don't raise a high spot around the ding like you will with metal. The material doesn't move like it does with metal.
@@aSinisterKiid Lapping has absolutely nothing to do with what I just said. I'm talking about a localised impact that moves material to the outside of the dent causing the surface there to rise. Lapping is abrading one surface against another so that they conform to each other. I'm not sure where you're seeing any similarity.
Steve, I know you have to be proud of having the machining capabilities in your shop. It goes without saying that you have eliminated one more bottle neck in production. What excites me is that if you need changes, you're only limited by the programmer's time and any limitations of the end product. Back in the 1980's, I was in Keith Blacks shop. He had the largest Muzak I had seen. I think the tool chain on the side had around 200 different tools in it. As I remember, I was told that every 4 hours, a casting was shifted from flywheel to pan rail for machining. It took 8 hours per block. he had 2 employees that worked on shifts to keep it in operation. There was a time that block orders were many months out. The 1st alum KB block I saw was $2500 dollars. A complete iron head 426 from Waterman was $6500, manifold to pan. Yes, I'm very old. :) Good luck with the learning curve. :)
Precision is fascinating. I have watched hour plus videos on gauge blocks LoL. Never thought I'd watch a video detailing flat vs level either yet i have watched way more than one🤦♂️
Scientific metrology is fascinating. Having a Moore rotary table that is orders of magnitude more accurate than our machine's capability puts things in perspective along with checking flatness with wavelengths of light is pretty nerdy. Seeing that bar hanging out there made us wonder how they accommodate for droop in the steel due to gravity as it's not on the same plane as the table. Guess it's due to the length being constant over the length of travel. That massive granite square put ours to shame. LOL Our buddy Dewey wasn't real keen on the vise packaging. That's a first! Congratulations on getting that beast up and running, Steve. Cheers!
Love these highly technical videos! Makes me wonder if you couldn't save a ton of scrap by roughing in the block starting with a cnc vertical bandsaw. Fixture off the cam centerline since a bunch of the material remove is between the pan rail, and the deck, lifter valley, could probably source an aluminum block where the scraps are enough material for a set of heads... might save machine time and tooling too.😊
That was most interesting and informative.I am so glad to see this machine finally being able to do what it was intended to do. A very long road. Many thanks Steve , greatly appreciated.
Stone does shift with temp, but less than steel surface plates do. Black stone is less temperature sensitive than pink so you can get away with a thinner plate which makes them more affordable. Pink plates are harder than black and wear less. Red is even more wear resistant than pink. They use pink granite in the asphalt mix in the area my family is from. It's kinda neat driving on pink roads. You can see it on street view if you go to the intersection hwy 75 & 7 intersection in Ortonville, MN. The shoulders are a more typical asphalt mix while the travel lanes are pink. There are old granite quarries and granite outcroppings dotting the landscape around that area. My parents both grew up trespassing into abandoned quarries to cliff dive into the ponds that form.
I’m so happy for you all at sme. I’ll never be able to afford one of your engines but that does not stop me from appreciating your dedication and skill levels. I can’t wait to see the first block.
also would recommend a small swiveling overhead crane for handeling material in and out of the machine, forklift, shure good to move pallets around, all else is mostly sketch, shure works as we see here, but it should just a temporary helper in a shop.
Tanks again Professor for more of your awesome videos. As a content provider I can fully appreciate the effort and time it takes to be a consistent content provider. I am currently producing videos about setting up a prototyping machine shop from a WWII era lathe to a 70's mill. You sharing your shop with us is inspirational!
This was cool as all get out! Thanks for sharing this with us. Yea, you said facing that block was boring...I can understand how excited you were and thats all that matters. You have come a long way and in your journey and its something to be damn excited about!!
I spent a couple of decades programming. It's interesting what's going on under the covers. Our punishment for breaking the machine was having to fix it or help a tech fix it. That's a heck of a mill. I love what you make with it. Thanks for your time.
Steve's video seem like he's live right now explaining stuff to me and engaging with me. It doesn't feel pre recorded. That's the only way I can describe it. These videos are really meaningful and heartfelt.
Steve, another great video as always. Very interesting seeing how they calibrate a machine with a bunch of new parts on it. I really enjoyed seeing your new toy do some machining. I hope you continue to take us along your journey as you program and cut more of that shiny new block of aluminum.
Thats a beautiful machine. Musta set your viewers back a pretty penny. I love it. You should do a giveaway street engine on that machine. We all would appreciate it, at least one of us.
👍🤘👏 Lmao 🤣 The two pieces of steel fuzz are on the magnet before they stick it in there… 😉😆 I know how those guys are… I use to scrap $15-$20K at a time worth of copper motor windings. They try everywhere they can… I bought the most accurate pallet scale I could find and had it constantly calibrated to put it up against there’s which was mounted in the box truck… They were always 20-35 lbs off from mine… Guess who’s numbers we went by… Mine lol 😝
So this is absolutely fantastic so he now has a program that he built and designed I'm sure he patented and he can actually have this block built at any time. Absolutely fantastic
Steve, do yourself a favor to avoid a catastrophe. I've been around machine tools. The new mill is nice, but I've been around bigger ones. You have smart people there. BEFORE you even get a raw block near the mill drill and tap some lifting holes. Figure out how they'll survive the longest as they won't last forever as they get truned into chips. Maybe even have the supplier do it, but that device you used will fail, and if it does, all the time and money to square the machine is gone. BTW, if it was me, I'd use parallels to set the raw block on, not machined surface of the big dollar vise.
Just remembered this machine and wanted to check in on the progress, low and behold! You uploaded this yesterday! Great to see it making chips, rigidity is key
This would be a pretty amazing operation, of your own doing, absolutely, you said what you want, you worked up the numbers, you programmed to do what you want, you did the final operations, I'd say that pretty cool, also Steve! Cool to see you advancing, with so many cool operations, your willing to share with us, you never cease to amaze, KEEP IT GOING, SIR!!
I make my living doing this kind of work. I’m glad to see you getting this thing up and running. Machining and programming are a lot like race cars, it not fast enough and with a few adjustments you can make a faster pass. Your at the 13.00 second street car stage, you’ll keep making changes to the tune and putting better parts (tools) in it until you realize the next smartest thing is to get a new chassis to work with. Congratulations on a milestone achievement.
Thanks for showing this. I have a slightly smaller vmc & I'm just a tinkerer in my shed working to make my own blocks from scratch one day for a z1 based motorcycle dragster I'm slowly building (and I mean for myself only, aint got time or tolerance for customers). I have a bunch of smaller cnc'd parts I've done already and I always mill something sacraficial to test the program so just loading a huge block of raw graded stock for the first cut like you do is scary territory, because being a diy'er material costs are huge. Small tip if you don't know it, to get a good view of the process for youtube etc if you spray wd40 on the inside of the perspex viewing windows, it stays cleaner for better visibility when chips and coolant are spraying round. I've got a gopro in a waterproof case I put inside the wire edm but that's just deionised water no chips/coolant so a bit more forgiving but I guess you could do the same in the vmc too.
Thanks for the in-depth look in getting the machine up and running. I find that very interesting. I know the feeling about the scrap issues, I have a 500mm horizontal which only ever does ally yet somehow small amounts of steel end up in the bin.
In my old company, we had built (McGyver style) a small system in the coolant temp that would make sure the coolant was always moving so that it wouldn't go bad. Because it will go bad if not used enough and that will mess things up...
Congrats bud, 1 step closer to never waiting for the blocks to come in. Now you gotta figure out how to melt that scrap down. That is a huge mile stone from a business standpoint. We could feel through the camera the pure joy you felt.
Great video love the machine repair and technical calibration side of it. Always best to get the physical machine as close as possible before doing any control side compensation. Looks like they have it dialed in ! Can’t wait to see this thing machining blocks and your technique and fixturing evolve .
I worked in a machine shop for a while and our main contract was making break rotors. We had a new machine installed and we had to zero the rails like they are doing in the 1st part of this video. We had issues with being. 30 out so I made a rod to connect the 2 trucks so they moved at the same time. Just a piece of useless information that I thought someone might want to know or use. It seemed to help because we wound up being. 002 different from side to side. It helped or the rest of the table or jig was installed better the last time or idk. I want to think it was because of my idea 💡 😊😆
It's cool seeing someone like Steve live the excitement of (and be able to afford) CNC machining, and of his own blocks. I spent 30yrs in CNC processing - setup, fixturing, machining, programming and 3D programming, before that I ran manual machines. I never lost the excitement of what I could make CNCs do, or the 3D programming. Unfortunately, I never got the open machine time to cut my dream project - a 1/2 scale small block Ford. I'm done working, and I'm thinking a VF2 would be perfect in my garage.
It does take a lot of time and money to turn an expensive, solid block of billet aluminum into aluminum chips to sell for scrap! Looks good and am excited for your company and where this machine and your design knowledge will take you from here!
Great to see the "Big" Haas making chips. I would truly recommend that you schedule your laser guy to come back on at least a yearly visit to completely check the machine to make sure it is still aligned and that the control offsets ,that you use to compensate for feedback inaccuracies, to update any axis that may have changed. (and believe me they will change). I would also suggest that you contact the Renishaw Corp and get their software and probe that will allow you to uses the Haas as a big CCM which is very handy to maintain and check machined accuracy. Looking forward to seeing the first SMX block machined on the Haas!!! Rex
I never realized how many steps, and how many people it takes to set up a CNC machine for precision accuracy.. It's something to keep in mind when buying a used machine like the Haas or any other and having it moved and then set up in your shop. 0.0002 tolerance over what looks like about a 5 foot span.. That blew me away. That's about as close to 'perfect' as anyone could ever ask for.
That looks like a million + machine and tools ..I'm also guessing when you get it running efficient it will probably pump out a bilet block every 4 hours . It's going to be a game changer
I have a buddy who flies around doing laser leveling for machines. Some places he gets blind fold after being picked up from airports, and they hang sheets up around his work area so he can't see whats being produced. And they'll have guards babysitting him . They get paid very well doing that laser calibration.
Your a lucky guy Steve. Brock seems to be a very intelligent machinist. I know alot of shops who would like a guy like that. You guys make some beautiful looking engine parts. Quality👌
To all the set up guys, Steve and team - that machine is freaking awesome. The precision and talent needed to just set it up to micron precision is off the charts, let alone using it and programming it Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Please, can we have more videos on the programming, the CAD/Design/ FMEA all behind your designs. Not forgetting the skill of the operator on setting up/dialling in the raw material and engine blocks and how it's actually used. Trust me I shared your excitement! Dewey approved so you just know it's going to good! Thanks for sharing! 🙂😎😎😎🤓🤓❤
I'm a retired A&P mechanic. My God Father Gary was a tool & die maker. He could do everything that 5 axis machine could do on a rotary table. He worked 44 years in tool & die. His last 20 yrs were at Corpus Christi Army Depot. He passed on easter Sunday 2 yrs ago. One of the greatest persons I have ever known.
Your right on the scrap deal, im just commissioning a part for a new project where the billet weighs 1139lbs and the finished part is 46lb when I called to see what the scrap was worth I was told $110 🤣 the billet cost is $5k
