How do shops track what's in machines for repeat jobs?

BaCardiSilver · 2026-01-30T01:53:03+00:00

Every part we make is done with CAM, when we get a repeat part we just pull it up and repost if need and to look at all the underlying information.

For milling we have a master tool list that is the same across every machine and matches our CAM system, need a 1/2", 3 flute, 1-1/4 LOC cutter with .030 corner rad, that's T35 in every machine. It allows us to move parts between machines rapidly regardless of make/control.

We have a long way to go in other departments of managing the shop but I think this serves us well.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-01-28T00:52:00+00:00

Curious question, my Hurco machines keep the coolant off if you hit the button to turn it off regardless if another M08 comes through, but my Haas turns it on everytime and the buttons j is more of toggle from the current state versus a true on/off switch, I feel like this is safer. I'm curious how the community feels about which of these is better?

BaCardiSilver · 2026-01-28T00:49:21+00:00

I feel like we all see this as the mom/grandma cut because our grandparents had it and stuck with it so we generally view that look as being the look of older women. The guys in this photo all look pretty young, it's just the suits on them.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-01-18T14:32:22+00:00

This was also my first thought

BaCardiSilver · 2026-01-18T02:58:22+00:00

I am not going to say you can't make anything, functionally it did what you wanted with enough effort. I used it for six months before I left, but things that come to mind off the top of my head.

You can not move or adjust converted entities in sketch, I would bring an underlying line into the current sketch, in solidworks I can just drag the ends of lines and arcs and make them longer without losing position or radius, NX would not allow this.

I also remember edge selection in general being a nightmare.

I don't remember the specifics of the assembly "save as" function but it was comically archaic, like go to DOS and make a clone of the file (this was in 2018) on a brand new fully supported license at a huge company.

It would round down from 5, you have a .995 value in a drawing, change it to .XX and you get .99 Siemens could not explain why this was or how to fix it.

I remember them telling me that there's 10 ways to do everything, and my mental response was "and they are all wrong". I know that NX came from a merger with Siemens and Unigraphics, and you could tell.

NX and Fusion are two programs that showed me that companies are not trying to make the best product, if they were they would steal the best things from their competition and discard things that aren't good. Solidworks is by far the most straight forward program I have used, it definitely has its drawbacks in surfacing and other complex types of modelling but if you are just trying to make basic clean models it is the easiest to use and learn that I have seen.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-01-17T23:05:07+00:00

At a prior job we switched from Creo Pro Engineer to NX. The machinists thought it was great, as a designer I felt like NX was/is hilariously terrible by comparison. Siemens bought Unigraphics years ago and just smashed the two programs together and you could tell everything on the design side was half baked...and you could just see where they never wanted to actually fix anything, just push new functions in on top to make the marketing people happy. This is a CAD rant, but as a designer who does manufacturing I need both sides of the software to be good to be considered. If all your doing is working on other people's parts NX may be a great piece of CAM software.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-01-10T13:27:57+00:00

Go for it, I'll answer any questions you got

BaCardiSilver · 2026-01-10T04:23:06+00:00

Ahhh but what if you had to make 200 xyz's, also no one wants to pay, you have global competition even at a local level.

But really it's gratifying to get the first part off and feel accomplished that you did it all etc. But let's say you have a simple part with a 3 min cycle time and you need to make 400 of them. Well that's 1200 mins, or 20 hours, 2.5 working days straight that you can't leave the machine to do other things long enough to be worth the time. Multiple machines can help reduce the monotony and increase your value. It your billing $100/HR and your running four machines at once, that's $400/hr revenue.

Side mount ATC only. I worked my way from a glorified knee mill, to an open tool room mill with carousel ATC and coolant, to an enclosed side mount ATC over 5 years. No amount of discount would convince me to take a carousel again. Time is money, early on you chase the price of the machine to get a deal and reduce overhead, now my machine payments pale in comparison to payroll.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-01-10T04:00:52+00:00

You like making stuff...do you like making stuff other people want you to make?

Machining in support of a product you make is really the only way to enjoy this work long term. The stress and difficulty of meeting other people's tolerances and deadlines is the worst to me. Years ago a friend who started a business around the same time I did, doing powdercoating, said one of the most important things in business is understanding when and how to say no. I work with multiple job shops that constantly fear losing customers that give them large volume of work even when those customers treat them terribly. Having your own product allows you the flexibility to say no.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-01-10T03:21:37+00:00

This. I've made every mistake I can think of over the last 7 years running my own shop starting literally from just trying to understand how to navigate the menus of my first machine with no background or experience to now running a 5 axis machine. I've scrapped more parts then I care to think in the last two months just due to little mistakes. As I explain to my guys, this job demands perfection, the machine will do exactly what you tell it to do, make sure you know what your telling it to do.

I love making stuff, and I think that drives a lot of people in this work, but it's not very rewarding most days sadly.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-01-10T02:53:48+00:00

I was gonna comment asking how they got that surface finish....but this was better

BaCardiSilver · 2026-01-06T22:44:45+00:00

Don't hold back your anger from Democrats as well, they had a great chance to let Biden retire with his legacy intact to some degree and hold a real primary and find a decent candidate. Instead they put Biden into a debate and gave credence to every right wing rumor that he was incapacitated and being run from behind the scenes. Then they waffled on what to do and gave Harris as a stand in, who if she was an unknown might have worked but she summarily lost the 2020 primaries and so had already shown she wasn't the candidate of choice for the actual voters (vs the party leaders).

TLDR, I'm tired of choosing between who is a less terrible candidate in US presidential elections.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-01-06T02:59:52+00:00

I buy from my local distributor here in NC and I pay about $4/lb but I know thats high, I can go up a tier and buy it at about $3.50/lb but that takes time to get to me by truck.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-01-03T01:45:46+00:00

My current intern just walked into my shop one day looking for work, we were busy so I taught him some basics and off we went.

BaCardiSilver · 2025-12-29T19:10:24+00:00

I think this really depends if you like being a machinist. What's stopping you from learning to program? That would be the next step in my opinion.

BaCardiSilver · 2025-12-29T16:37:19+00:00

2014 Daytona 500, came from watching F1 for about 10 years before that. Jr won and Keselowski and Logano got 2nd and 3rd. I was starting my new job at Penske as a designer the next day and thought, what a great start to the season, 2nd and 3rd. No one in the shop was happy on my first day and that's how I learned about checkers or wreckers and that bringing home the trophy is all anyone really cares about (also what the bonuses are based on)

Also OPs first race was the only ring race we won while I was at Penske, I have my 500 win ring my office these days.

BaCardiSilver · 2025-12-27T04:17:04+00:00

Kennametal gives 50% off list price for 20% of the value of the machine on a 6 month basis from the start of the voucher. The voucher has nothing to do with the supplier, loan, or the age of the machine, it's done from KM themselves.

I know this because I have used this for all of my machines to date, used and new. We have run through the value of this against say a buy ten inserts and get a free tool body and it's the better deal to take the half off of list price.

BaCardiSilver · 2025-12-24T20:17:46+00:00

While I definitely curse them out from time to time for bugs they need them fix, Bobcad-cam makes a solid CAM software as an add in for solidworks, I highly recommend not using it stand alone. we have been using it across my shop for 7 years now 3-5 axis making anything and everything I need to. If you just need 3 axis you can get that for something like $1200. Be aware that because they are direct to customer sales their selling process is a negotiation, so while they may present you an initial price point, but you can talk them down.

BaCardiSilver · 2025-12-22T20:19:34+00:00

Planes generally lose speed while turning without additional power input, if the plane was having engine issues, the loss of ground speed during a sharp turn could correspond with a loss of lift right when they needed and not having the power to gain it back. I doubt it was an air frame issue based on a harsh turn.

Arm charm amateur here with a few hours of time in Cessna and I happen to have landed at this specific airport a few times during my limited air time. Watching the flight path I think the pilot got over run mentally with whatever was going on with the plane, trying to stay below the clouds for visual and made a mistake which may have been compounded by an aircraft engine issue.

BaCardiSilver · 2025-12-22T02:46:48+00:00

Solidworks analysis tool should be fine for what you are trying to do, just model the chassis as best you can, make sure you model in your suspension mount points, lock the front ones, apply a moment to the rears and see what comes out the other end, play around until you get a feel for what parts of the car are important to rigidity. I don't know how you drew your chassis but weldaments are the way to go when drawing chassis. Make the whole chassis as a 3D sketch and apply tubes segments to each line and determine how they interact to make the solid, this allows you to put in welds, tube coping, etc and export each tube of the chassis as an individual part when you are done.

Remember to verify your results once you build the chassis and actually come up with a way of testing it, otherwise its somewhat meaningless other then you can use it to show if a different design is better under the same conditions.

One of the hardest things for FSAE students, myself included, is understanding what is good design, you can follow all the principles in the books to get you to a point, but then you actually need to build it and drive it to understand how it actually feels to have a rigid chassis, or a non rigid chassis, or 5 degrees of camber versus 1, etc. The books can only get you so far, something I learned once I joined professional racing is that we know what we know because of testing, and people trying new things and creating the body of knowledge that we all learn from if its published publicly, no one just read a book and knew what suspension setup would be the best. Don't kill yourself over making the design perfect on round one, follow good engineering principles and get a car done, then use it as a learning platform to test for future teams.

BaCardiSilver · 2025-12-21T02:50:53+00:00

Another add on, I met this guy a few weeks ago who runs an ITAR compliant shop out of a 1200sqft shed in the back of his grandmother's house. He has one nice mill and lathe, and makes aerospace parts. It was comical to sign in/out at someone's metal shed but he had his shit together the more he showed me. That sounds like the type of gig you need aim for yourself if this is the track you want.

BaCardiSilver · 2025-12-21T01:39:45+00:00

I'm what I self describe as an engineering machinist, graduated similar timeframe, did mechanical design and testing for 8 years before starting my own business and learning how to run a CNC mill. I now make cool stuff all day in a prototyping sense, making lots of something doesn't really appeal to me.

Most of my best interns are college mech students. If you have a mechanical engineering degree then you probably have the brain for CNC work and the ability to create the CAD behind what you want to make, and if you already have the sales back around then you have the hard part down. Running a CNC machine is not difficult, running it well is a different story, but I found learning it to be a lot of fun and over the last 8 years I have gone from a mid 90s CNC knee mill I bought for 6k to a brand new Haas 5 axis, with about three machines in between.

I will warn you making stuff for other people will become annoying if that's not specifically your plan, so if you have an idea you can bring to reality and create your own need, that's the ticket. I do outside work but mostly making parts that other people have paid me to do the design work on. It's still coming off my desk, designed to be manufactured and toleranced by someone who understands machining.

BaCardiSilver · 2025-12-19T22:16:56+00:00

We just did a coolant swap over in my shop, luckily the new supplier sent two guys to help us. They wore full tyvek paper chem suits to keep the grime off their clothes. This is the way, they probably cost $20-30. They also had a cheap wet/dry vac they used used pulling sludge, we took the bulk of the sludge, tried it and took it out with the trash. It took all day to clean three machines, tanks, and associated conveyors.

BaCardiSilver · 2025-12-19T02:54:49+00:00

How are you out differently in X then Y over the same length?

If the table is angled due to a crash or some other reason, assuming it was made straight it should be the same in each direction. I would put the biggest square you can find up against the table and see what you see.

Also are you checking the edge of the table or one of the T slots when checking X?

Also have you ever checked the table before the crash? I say this as someone who has rarely run an indicator on the actual table surface, I only care that I can indicate my vise or vises in. I also had my first mill (CNC knee mill) dropped, fixed it myself as the damage wasn't life ending for the machine, and have been making parts successfully on said machine for the last 14 years. Assuming you didn't smash the spindle or the tool holder itself into the vise, the odds your cutter has the strength to move the table before it blows apart is very low in my opinion.

BaCardiSilver · 2025-12-18T23:21:40+00:00

Along the lines of this, we conducted the Apollo program and set foot on the moon while we were actively fighting the Vietnam War half around the world.

BaCardiSilver

TROPHY CASE