Machine Smarter, Not Harder

Wade Anderson:

Hey manufacturing world, welcome to another episode of Shop Matters sponsored by Okuma America.

Wade Anderson:

This podcast is created to discuss all things machining and manufacturing. I'm your host, Wade Anderson, and today in the studio we've got two gentlemen from Mastercam, as well as a young man from StarHagen Aerospace.

Wade Anderson:

So to my left I've got Stas Mylek. Stas, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Stas Mylek:

Sure. Thanks, Wade. Thanks for the invite. My name is Stas Mylek, I work for Mastercam, been there for about 13 years. Originally started out head of product management, so a lot of technology that we introduced. It was my guys that brought that to market.

Stas Mylek:

Now I've got an opportunity as a Partnership Program Manager to actually get out in the field more, kind of evangelize what we're doing as far as the technology, take a look at new stuff coming out. We're seeing a lot of advances in both the machine tool side and, of course, cutting tool side and across our entire partner channel.

Stas Mylek:

My role is pretty fun. I get to see all kinds of new stuff, just work with the partners and try to help each other bring our advantages and benefits to market.

Wade Anderson:

Excellent and across the table is my friend, Chris Kozell, who's getting over some jet lag from the Philippines, right?

Chris Kozell:

Oh yeah, trying to. Thanks, Wade.

Chris Kozell:

So yeah, I work for Mastercam direct and I actually work out of Okuma Partners in THINC I'm there pretty much every day working with the partners down there, the machine tool distributors and I go down there and support for if they do a turnkey or if they do any kind of time studies and post-development.

Chris Kozell:

I've been there for about five years now. Before that I was a mold maker and I worked actually for a Mastercam reseller. Starting off in the trade, like a lot of guys, I wouldn't call myself an honor roll student, kind of struggled through the high school stuff, but my dad was in the trade and all my uncles were in the trade so I started off as a machinist and kind of worked my way up as a mold maker and then became a Mastercam customer myself. The reseller there saw that I was excelling at it and I got the opportunity to start off working with the reseller doing training and stuff and worked my way back up the ladder.

Chris Kozell:

Now flash forward, work for Mastercam corporate. I get to not only work at Okuma, but I get to actually travel all over the world meeting the different Okuma distributors, working with them, seeing the technology and it's just such a privilege to be able to do that. I'm just grateful for the position I have and what Mastercam has offered me.

Wade Anderson:

That's awesome and across the table from me is Fred Seeley. Fred, you're with StarHagen Aerospace, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Fred Seeley:

Yes, thanks. So I'm with StarHagen Aerospace. I've been there for about two years now as manufacturing manager. I got to do a little contract programming ahead of time for Scott, the owner, Scott Anderson, the owner of the company, and I've been in the industry now for about 10 years. I've kind of got to touch on a lot of really neat, I guess, industries. I got to do after market automotive and went from that to a NASCAR team, left NASCAR team and went to a die mold shop for a short stint and then left that and went to the Haas F1 team. That was like something really cool to be on.

Wade Anderson:

Mm-hmm.

Fred Seeley:

They were the first team in the States in like 20 years that actually made it to the track, and to be on the front end of that, the rush. We were working like 14-16 hour days and it was just a crazy time in my life.

Wade Anderson:

Intense.

Fred Seeley:

I was once told that you know how to get twice the experience in half the time. I was like, "Ah, I don't know. Work twice as much?" and that's what we did and it was insane. We got really, really good, really quickly at what we did.

Wade Anderson:

All right.

Fred Seeley:

And then I was able to leave that and start my career at StarHagen.

Wade Anderson:

Excellent.

Chris Kozell:

So at F1 did you have to like really thin pancakes.

Fred Seeley:

Yeah, yeah. It sounded like a dog with peanut butter in my mouth.

Chris Kozell:

Yeah, exactly.

Wade Anderson:

So Chris, you talked a little bit about your background, coming into manufacturing, your father was in manufacturing, you got into mold making, things of that nature. Fred, what got you in? You're a young guy. It's good to see young talent in the industry. What got you into the manufacturing side?

Fred Seeley:

Yeah, I think it's really cool. I've worked with a lot of older guys that are in their 40s or 50s, and even guys that have retired and moved on.

Fred Seeley:

I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but you’re old guys.

Chris Kozell:

Ouch. Seasoned.

Fred Seeley:

Yeah, seasoned.

Fred Seeley:

So you talk to these guys and they're like I'm third generation machinist or my grandfather did this, my dad did this, my uncles did this, kind of like Chris. I'm a first generation programmer, so I'm no longer a third generation machinist. We're moving past the machinist title. We need programmers, we need people, we need young guys that are going to come up into this industry.

Fred Seeley:

It's cool. You're not going out there and hand programming these machines anymore in a dirty environment. It's really clean. You're on fast, awesome computers.

Wade Anderson:

So talk about the environment at StarHagen. What's the shop look like?

Fred Seeley:

Yeah, so the shop, if I drop my food on the ground, I'm going to pick it up and eat it.

Chris Kozell:

So it's a ten second rule now, not a five.

Fred Seeley:

I'd give it a minute. I'd give it a minute. Yeah.

Fred Seeley:

I think our coolant's so clean. We use a Blaser Synergy 735. It's a full synthetic and the shop doesn't smell. It's just nice. It's different from when I started. I think it's great to get the exposure out there to young people, that manufacturing's not the pictures that you see of people standing on an assembly line putting together Model A's or whatever, back in the 30s and 40s.

Wade Anderson:

Sweatshop days.

Fred Seeley:

Yeah, it's a cool, clean environment.

Fred Seeley:

I've always been really big into video games. I grew up around computers and I had the first Nintendo that came out and kind of got to go up through it, and I probably still play video games more than I should with three kids, but...

Fred Seeley:

That's kind of like what the industry's going towards, is like a video game, the cam software and work's fun. You're not out there sweating, you're not cutting your hand open because you had to get in the machine and shovel chips out. It's just a lot of fun, the simulation and going from point A to, or I guess, cradle to grave now. You can do it as one person and you really don't have to get your hands dirty.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, that's excellent.

Wade Anderson:

So people listening to this, we know that finding good talent, especially young people coming into the industry, from Maine to California, everybody says that you can't find good people to hire and you're a shining example that there is good talent out there.

Fred Seeley:

Well, thank you.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

So tell us a little bit about StarHagen, what do you do that differentiates StarHagen from the rest of the aerospace competition?

Fred Seeley:

Right, so I guess the big thing with aerospace in the United States right now, is we're competing with the rest of the world. We're competing with cheap labor, people that run three shifts a day, I guess around the clock work. Here we have to figure out how do we make our- don't work harder, work smarter. Let the technology do the work, let the machine do the work. I guess zero point work holding, just making sure that when the program comes out, you go through your simulation softwares, you're not sitting there at the machine with the rapids and the feeds turned down with your head stuck right up next to the window watching like what is this thing going to do. You want to, I guess, build the confidence in your shop and build the confidence in your guys on the floor because I do all the programming in the shop.

Wade Anderson:

Okay. You're really using technology then to create a differentiation between you and your closest competitors.

Fred Seeley:

Yeah. Yeah. 100%.

Wade Anderson:

When you look at machine shops, as you talk about, especially aerospace, but manufacturing in general is a global competitive field now.

Fred Seeley:

Mm-hmm.

Wade Anderson:

The days where machine shops knew the people they were competing against and would drink coffee with a lot of them in the morning is over right?

Fred Seeley:

Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

Because you're competing with people across the seas, but everybody has certain aspects that are common. Everybody has a machine tool, everybody has to have material, everybody has to have cutting tools, but then it's the technology behind it that can really advance you from that aspect.

Fred Seeley:

Yeah. Right. So like your pallet systems...

Wade Anderson:

Mm-hmm. Driving the efficiency process.

Fred Seeley:

Yeah, driving the efficiencies, lean manufacturing, making sure that you're going to be able to run for 24 hours unattended and when you come in the next day, you don't have a tool stuck in your part and the machine's alarmed out because the spindle drove into the table, and you're sitting there with, "What are we going to do now? We're going to be down for two weeks because the machine's crashed."

Wade Anderson:

Downtime is a killer.

Fred Seeley:

Yes.

Wade Anderson:

Chris, you're grinning ear to ear, like a Cheshire cat over there. Tell us what's going through your brain right now.

Chris Kozell:

Well, just him bringing up about the technology out there and really kind of letting that leverage what we can do today. One of the things I was kind of laughing about, was one of the old things we're working on late at night. We left the machine unattended and I was laughing because a comment that Stas and I were talking about earlier, it's 11:00 PM at night, do you know where your tool is?

Chris Kozell:

The technology today, you can actually walk away and be unattended.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah.

Chris Kozell:

It's great to see companies like StarHagen and other companies out there that are really kind of leveraging the technology. I think in today's environment that's the only way you're going to stay competitive because if you're not looking at things as... I go back to people ask me what I used to be. "What'd you do for a living Chris?" I always used to tell him, "Hey, you know what? I'm a mold maker. I'm a machinist."

Chris Kozell:

Well, once I started working with Mastercam Corporate, it kind of changed my philosophy when I started looking at the technology. I don't view myself as a machinist anymore. You know what I do? I'm a chip maker, I make chips, and if you don't have that mentality where it's all about material removal rate, you're getting left behind and you're getting left behind by maybe the guy sitting next to you, maybe it's the shop across the street or, like Fred mentioned, it's worldwide. You have to start leveraging this technology in order to stay competitive and to keep yourself at the upper echelon.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Stas Mylek:

Yeah and I think Chris brings up a good point. The technology has advanced in so many areas. It's not just the CAM system, it's the machine tool, but even on the cutting tool side. We'll go out, we'll start working with some of our other partners and what I keep reminding people is even the cutting tools side, those cutting tools, even two years ago, they're not your dad's tools. There's been advances to the point where now you're taking some very contemporary tool paths, you're able to guarantee a certain chip load and now you're putting yourself in a position where you have much more in the terms of predictability that you build up that confidence and now somebody like Fred can be dialed into that program, he can run the machine and yes, you do have that comfort level, you can walk away and that's talking at automation.

Fred Seeley:

Yeah, because I think it was what, X4, X5, when the dynamic toolpath started coming out from Mastercam?

Fred Seeley:

I think it was like X6 when I first got into it and I was working at Michael Waltrip's at the time and it was like here it is. I think Helical had just came out with their first five flute end mill and we got one dropped off to us and it was like "Here, try this out.", and "Look at this tool path." At the time, we were doing core roughing. It was like you stepped down 100 thou [sand], step over a quarter inch and your half inch end mill was like waa, waa...

Chris Kozell:

Well and you could hear it in the corner too right?

Fred Seeley:

Yeah.

Chris Kozell:

You'd be just listening and all you'd hear, err, err, err and you're going "Oh, man." That was one of the things on how I got to learn about speeds and feeds. It wasn't necessarily...

Chris Kozell:

The online catalogs give you a good starting point, but it's really what it sounds like and that's the one thing that I've learned over the years, that anybody that cuts parts, they don't have to look and see what the machine's doing. It's all by its sound and you hear that nice harmonic as it's going through as it's making that cut. That's how you know the machine is actually running really well.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Chris Kozell:

And a good machinist will call that from across the room. "Oh, you've got to get that speed up a little bit higher. You're going too slow."

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. Interesting. You mentioned automation earlier, how big of a shop is StarHagen? How many employees do you have?

Fred Seeley:

So I think right now we're about 16 employees.

Wade Anderson:

Okay.

Fred Seeley:

We have five machines. We have two [GENOS] M560 3-axis machines, two 5-axis—an MU-4000[V], MU-6300[V] and then we have an MB-5000[H] that's on a 10-pallet Fastems system.

Wade Anderson:

Okay.

Fred Seeley:

We have a lot to keep busy. I do all the programming and then I have two guys on the floor that keep the machines going.

Wade Anderson:

Okay.

Fred Seeley:

Anymore it's not one guy per machine. It's how can we make this happen with as few people as possible?

Wade Anderson:

That's an interesting point.

Wade Anderson:

So you're saying you as a programmer, two guys running machines, three people basically, actually in the chip making process.

Fred Seeley:

Mm-hmm.

Fred Seeley:

Yep.

Wade Anderson:

That's interesting.

Chris Kozell:

And this is where the simulation and the verification, I think, comes in so importantly, because you mentioned it earlier Fred, about how important just having the verification and the simulation before it hits the machine to know that you've got a good part.

Fred Seeley:

Oh yeah, definitely. So we use CAMplete TruePath to do all of our verification and simulation. CAMplete's really cool. It's kind of like a post-processor on steroids. In the past the end user of the software, it's like if you get something and you want to make a change or at the end of your program you want this to do this or you want the coolant to turn on at this point, you had to be a rocket scientist to go in and change the post or do what you needed to do. This software is really cool. With any verification software you can watch what's going to happen down to the sheet metal hitting the table. It's really, really neat and it gives you the confidence as a programmer that I'm going to program this one-off part right here and we're not going to go out, and we're not going to sit there for 20 hours looking through the machine making sure that every last thing is good.

Wade Anderson:

Right?

Fred Seeley:

It has full kinematic awareness. It knows the solution that the table is going to go to or where the head's going to go to and you can watch it all right there. Something that's going to run for 20 hours, you can get it through simulation in an hour.

Wade Anderson:

Mm-hmm.

Fred Seeley:

You can go out, you can hit the green button and you can go home.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Chris Kozell:

So simulation and verification is the Call of Duty for machinists.

Wade Anderson:

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

All right. Very good. Well guys, we're starting to run down to our time limit here. I want to thank you guys for joining me in the studio here today and as always, all of our listeners, if you guys have thoughts, questions, technologies that you want to talk about, shoot us a line, let us know. We'll be glad to look into it.