BIG DAISHOWA and the Importance of High-Performance Tooling

Wade Anderson:

Hey manufacturing world. Welcome to another episode of ‎Shop Matters. I'm Wade Anderson, your host for today's episode. This is something a little bit special to me, this is the first time I've been able to record a podcast on the road, so Denny Arcus, if you're listening, beware because I have microphones and will travel, I may show up on your door someday. Today I'm recording from my friends at BIG KAISER, in their showroom here in BIG KAISER in Illinois. I want to thank you guys for letting me come into your place here and make a makeshift studio.

Jack Burley:

You're very welcome and glad you could make the trip to Chicago. I'm glad that this is your first experience out, and you picked us.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Jack Burley:

That's really appreciated. Chicago is a great city to come to.

Wade Anderson:

Absolutely. Let's do a quick round of introductions. Nick, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Nick Jew:

Sure. My name is Nick Jew, Research and Development Engineer here at BIG KAISER. I work on a lot of new products, new developments, as well as machining works down in here in our showroom.

Wade Anderson:

So you're the brain power of BIG KAISER?

Nick Jew:

I guess so, I don't really know.

Jack Burley:

Yes he is.

Wade Anderson:

Jack, tell the world who you are.

Jack Burley:

Hey, thanks. Jack Burley, president of BIG KAISER. I've been with the company for over 30 years now. I've grown through it from engineering like Nick, maybe not to his skill, but through the sales, marketing a little bit, and now I'm, I guess, running the show. So yeah.

Wade Anderson:

Fantastic. You've been in the industry a long time, you started when you were 12?

Jack Burley:

Not quite 12. Yeah, I think I was 16, no. It's been an interesting journey. Yeah. I started on the old manual drafting boards as a design engineer and just worked up through. I liked a lot of the going out and meeting people and getting interactive on the machining side, so solving problems. That was more my forte, it was like applying the tools, not so much designing. Design was fun and it certainly wasn't as fun when you didn't have an AutoCAD or SOLIDWORKS behind you, but it was fun and it's always a great tool that I rely on still today. I think a good tooling or a machine tool person has some expertise in engineering to fall back on, to talk to customers.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. I think there's a lot of people, yourself, myself, we restored out the machine shop, we ran machines, but then over time you find that you really enjoy dealing with people. I think that's one of the things that once somebody gets to working for the OEM, like an OEM machine tool builder, or a supplier, once you get a taste of that it's hard to go back different direction.

Jack Burley:

That's for sure. A lot of people have tried to leave and one way or another, they seem to come back.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Jack Burley:

You think you've seen the last of somebody and five years later here they are, it's because, "I just couldn't get away from it, it's just too much fun."

Wade Anderson:

You get to see so many different projects, so many different applications, you see so many different customers. Even if you see five shops that are making similar parts, all five of them experience different problems, need different solutions. So to me in this type of a role, your brain is constantly working, you're always trying to come up with new solutions, new ways to solve problems for customers, and keeps it exciting.

Jack Burley:

Oh, I totally agree with that. You've always got to keep an open mind. As we get older you start to think, well, I know more than everybody. You don't. You'll learn from somebody young like Nick, on something that you wouldn't have thought of. Because they're approaching it from a different side than we ever did and that's how we all learn. So you've got to keep an open mind, open ears, open eyes, and yeah, you go into the customers and you might see something in the back of the shop that, I don't know how this escaped me all these years, that is an interesting thing that they're doing over there.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. Anybody that's heard me talk or I've probably said it before on podcast, but, "Knowledge has a shelf life." You can have a lot of knowledge and that's got a lot of value for a certain period of time and then technology or somebody's new idea is going to leapfrog it and if you don't stay immersed in what's taking place in the industry, all of a sudden technology passes you by and what was once valuable to you, now has become a commodity. It's not nearly as important.

Jack Burley:

I totally agree that. I think inherently, we have to have a certain amount of curiosity. That's what drives us. To say, "I'm curious to know how that works, I'm curious to know how to do that better." The curiosity of us or the curious part of us drives that innovation. That's what I try to push down to everybody, is, "This is how we can do it, but be creative, see if there's a better way that maybe we haven't thought of." Our engineers in Japan and Switzerland, they're relying on us, the people out on the street or so to speak, to find out what is the customer's pain points and how do we improve it?

Wade Anderson:

Right. Innovation, that's something that I've always thought is very interesting because it takes somebody that's got a little bit of fire in their gut to look at something and go, "I can do that better. What they're doing is cool but if I tweak it here, if I add this, if I change that, I can make it better," and then that just builds on each other and you get that compound effect over time.

Jack Burley:

I think the better ideas aren't ego-driven.

Wade Anderson:

Oh, good point.

Jack Burley:

Not so much about being, "Hey, I did this better, look at me." No, they just wanted to see if they could do it better. They weren't out to prove a point.

Wade Anderson:

Right. A lot of innovation happens by accident.

Jack Burley:

Yeah. I don't know if Henry Ford believes that, but...

Wade Anderson:

Very good. Nick, how long have you been with the company? How long have you been with BIG KAISER?

Nick Jew:

Mine's a little interesting, because I've been with BIG KAISER as a full-time employee for about three years now.

Wade Anderson:

Okay.

Nick Jew:

However, I was actually a summer intern for the past four years before that. Right out of high school, I became an intern here for the summertime, and every summer I just kept coming back. And then Jack and all of the other upper management wanted to take me on full time.

Wade Anderson:

Jack locked you in a corner, wouldn't let you leave.

Nick Jew:

I don't think about it that way.

Jack Burley:

Well, they say develop your talent from an early age and keep your talent and keep them driven and keep them focused. Of course, we had an idea, "Hey, we got this young kid out of high school coming in. Well, let's just give him this little project, he sounds like he's pretty smart, but it'll take him all summer." Two weeks later, he shows up with a completed solution that our engineers probably would have had a hard time doing. It's like, "Okay, now what do we do for the rest of this summer?"

Wade Anderson:

Got to keep him busy.

Jack Burley:

He's very sharp and he makes things look too easy for the rest of us.

Wade Anderson:

Oh, nice. Excellent. Tell me about some projects that you've worked on. What some cool things that you've been working on?

Nick Jew:

Sure. As an intern, I started with actually working with our products, mainly in the presetter lines. Created a new software for some presetters that we were testing with and trying to make a better solution for our customers to improve their workflows. I worked on building a new software for that. I also developed some prototyping drawers and stuff like that for our Rousseau benches and all these little electronic things. My background for college was electrical engineering so I have that different approach to it. I actually never was a machinist before that. I didn't have any experience with CNC machining or anything mechanical. But being here as an intern, I got to see the machines a lot and got to see what you can create with a CNC machine and that's what drove my curiosity into more of the mechanical side, even though I graduated with an electrical engineering degree and a software minor. So I have that as my education, but the machining side, the hands-on stuff is the stuff that really draws my attention to.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. I find that a lot of creative people, once you start working, you're doing stuff with your hands and creating things, it just creates that energy and you want to do more and uncover more and develop new stuff.

Nick Jew:

Oh, definitely. I mean, as a kid, I always loved taking apart things and putting them back together. So I've always had that in the back of my mind to be able to do hands-on things like that.

Wade Anderson:

So you were the one taking your dad's radio apart?

Nick Jew:

Oh, I was probably the one fixing it whenever something was going wrong.

Wade Anderson:

Gotcha. Jack, I kinda leapfrog, I automatically want to get into products and what do you do, but let's talk about BIG KAISER. Who is BIG KAISER? For people listening that aren't familiar with your products. Growing up in the industry, I've always been synonymous with BIG KAISER and the BIG-PLUS tooling. You guys do a lot more than that. Tell me just a little bit about BIG KAISER in general.

Jack Burley:

Yeah. BIG KAISER is subsidiary company of BIG DAISHOWA from Japan, near Osaka. They are about a 45-year-old company. They started in the business for tooling systems. They're growing, they had some key license products that they brought into Japan. One of those products was the KAISER and that's where the BIG DAISHOWA and the KAISER merge came in and it's been known as BIG KAISER, is because in Japan they promoted the KAISER boring tools from Switzerland as BIG KAISER. And when we got associated or affiliated or working with BIG DAISHOWA here in the United States in 2003, we said, "That's a nice name." They wanted to come into the United States with some buy-in, if I could say that, due to the market, not just as another company representing them like they were before. So there was some buy-in to our company, which eventually ended up being now a hundred percent where it's at today.

Jack Burley:

We still represent all the KAISER boring, which is still known as the BIG KAISER, which is the trademark items. And then we have all the tooling systems made by BIG DAISHOWA. Humbly speaking, I like to say this, that they are probably the largest tool holder and collet producer in the world of the class of product that they make. I'm not going to say they're number one by volume in numbers of tool holders they produce, they do produce half a million tool holders a year and 30 or 40,000 collets a month, but at a very, very high level accuracy.

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Jack Burley:

That's very, very unique. They don't do that with just 50 or 60 different line items, they do that with tens of thousands of different product lines. When you take a collet chuck with a BIG-PLUS CAT50 interface, you're already talking just for one ER32, four gauge links, and then you got all the other ER sizes, and then you got all the other interface sizes and you've got HSK and CAPTO that we make and you start to multiply these numbers of families, it's a lot of varieties.

Jack Burley:

When you look at somebody tooling up a machine, usually you need 40, 50 tools to do that. You can get by with 20, but you might even need 300, and they need them right away because tooling is not always first thing that they think about when they buy a machine, but they don't always put that on the front end when they're looking at that. So they rely on our inventory. They have an incredible inventory of all these different products in Japan, which we also carry here in the United States. We have shipments from Japan all the time. To help support that, as well as what we get from Switzerland, we have some licensed production here in the United States too. Because a lot of that's fairly basic product that we can still support and make ourselves.

Jack Burley:

So we're a competent company in fine boring from the KAISER boring side. We've been in that field for 60 plus years. I really like to, again, humbly say that, I think we're one of the leaders when it comes to boring tools. We've got a lot of legacy products. We were one of the original companies that equipped all the SIP and Dixie machines that were ever sold to all over the world.

Wade Anderson:

Oh, no kidding. Wow.

Jack Burley:

These products were copied, or tried to be copy and that experience they've drawn on. Now we're into the digital age and guys like Nick are able to take up some of these challenges of going from what we were as a mechanical company, to more of an electro-mechanical focused company. Because now you got to put the two together. We hadn't done that before five years ago. And so we're doing that ourselves.

Wade Anderson:

Okay.

Jack Burley:

KAISER in Switzerland is not outsourcing this because we don't have the competency to do it, so we'll just have somebody else and we'll put our name on it. No, that's not how our companies work. They are very vertically aligned to produce it all and design it and develop it all themselves. So they get into other stuff that most people wouldn't associate. They have a full electronics department in Japan where they produce a lot of vision systems and touch off probes and leveling device. And most people wouldn't think, "You guys make a leveling device." "Yes, we actually make that and designed it ourselves."

Wade Anderson:

No kidding. Wow.

Jack Burley:

Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

That's incredible.

Jack Burley:

They're very diverse and very large. They get seven different factories running production, highly automated and not as many workers you'd think for the amount of work that's coming out of there.

Wade Anderson:

Right. I had the pleasure here. What was that? 2018?

Jack Burley:

Yes, it was.

Wade Anderson:

We did a tech tour and I took group of customers throughout Okuma. I got to be the host from the Okuma side. We went from Okuma and went to BIG KAISER, we stopped in Osaka, that's where the headquarters is.

Jack Burley:

That's correct.

Wade Anderson:

Then went down to Awaji Island where a lot of the manufacturing is. Pretty incredible when you walk in and see rows of spindles. All these machines and every one of them, or it might've been, was two to one, two machines, one robot. I can't remember now top of my head, but just an amazing amount of automation taking place. And to see that much manufacturing on an island in Japan and high-tech equipment fully automated- I mean, it's truly what manufacturers in the NTMA group that we took there, that's what we want to show them is, "what's the future of manufacturing? What are people in other areas doing to be more efficient, more profitable?"

Jack Burley:

Well, that's an interesting story about why they settled on Awaji Island, which is up until they built the Akashi Bridge, there was no way to get to it except for driving all the way around the main island to get to it from the other side or taking a ferry boat. But the owner, the president of the company, he was from Awaji. It's like a farm area. That's where the Kobe beef is grown, and that's where that widely known famous beef is made on Awaji island. But he grew up-

Wade Anderson:

Which is fantastic, by the way.

Jack Burley:

Yeah. It's like butter. No. They got into the point at Osaka, they had one plant there that they were growing and the literally big comes from their vision as a company. When they started they wanted to be a big company someday. There is not any Japanese word behind it, it just means English, they want to be a big company. They quickly outgrew Osaka. If you've been to Osaka, you remember it's landlocked. There's nowhere to go, but up or buy somebody and that's very expensive. Our president at the time, Mr. Komine, he said, this is back in the early '80s, "I grew up in Awaji Island, what if we had the opportunity to build a plant over there and staff it and do it without any preconceived ideas of how to do things?"

Wade Anderson:

Nice.

Jack Burley:

So he took literally farm boys, young guys, and I hope this doesn't go over there and they take this the wrong way, but he took fairly educated, well-educated, from high school and some basic trade schools. He said, "We're going to do this our way. Don't look at what everybody else is trying to do." They developed these factories, which were highly automated. To them, they ingrained it from a very early start. We deal in less than five microns. That went down to less than three microns and everything grew. So it became natural to them that, this is normal for us. Three microns is our normal.

Wade Anderson:

It's not difficult, that's the normal.

Jack Burley:

Right. When you achieve that kind of look that you want to be that good and don't have another expectation that's much easier, you don't always say, "Oh man, we're always trying to hold these tight tolerances," and things like that. So they left all that behind and they were able to grow that culture from zero.

Wade Anderson:

Wow.

Jack Burley:

And it's still there today. Everything they do is with the highest pride and precision. Every product is inspected completely and they are very meticulous on every little detail. If you look at chamfers or you put a collet in your hand and you feel it, it's not sharp. You can rub it around in your hand and you're not going to get any little nicks or edges that can cut into you from those slits. That pride, milling features that don't need to be milled. But at the end of the day our customers are buying high precision products. They want it to come out of the box, which is a quality looking piece of packaging, and it looks like, "hey, this was worth the money." This is a high quality looking product.

Jack Burley:

Other companies are trying to duplicate that with- You can make a shiny looking part, but at the end of the day you still have to have that precision under it. You can't just hard turn things and say, "Look at how good it looks." Yeah, it looks good, but you have to have that precision. One of the things they're known for is the surface finish on their tapers. They are right there with every single one as good as any spindle ever built.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. That's incredible. Let's talk a little bit from a quality standpoint, because from an Okuma perspective, we've seen some service issues at times with products. And where I'm leading to this, the BIG-PLUS spindle. There's the BIG-PLUS. All of our mills come in standard with a BIG-PLUS taper on it. But a lot of times you'll hear dual-contact tool holders. And there's a difference in how it's measured and the quality that goes into it. So let's peel the layer on what is BIG-PLUS? When we talk about that, what does that mean? And then what are the problems that can happen if somebody buys a dual-contact taper, but it's out of spec?

Jack Burley:

Yeah. That BIG-PLUS is a dual-contact system where we rely on a taper and face context simultaneously. That's not what our patents were about back in the early '90s when we developed it. I'll talk about that in a second, but it just achieves higher rigidity because you have a much larger contact zone than ones you get off just a standard steep taper to spindle contact. There's other companies before us that have done dual-contact, but those previous designs always left the gauge line of the spindle face, where it is. So normally the gauge face or a gauge line is at the face of the spindle. That dimension can float plus or minus 5,000, either direction because it doesn't really normally matter.

Jack Burley:

And so to make a dual-contact system off of that gauge plane, you of course add all that material to the tool holder, eighth of an inch or whatever that would be, and grind it to fit. And because that now is built to that gauge plane, I can't take that tool holder anymore and put it on a different machine because it might interfere with the face, because it might be in a different or wrong location. So you're kind of mirroring these tool holders to machines. While that works okay in a non-commercial environment, how could we make something commercial?

Jack Burley:

So BIG-PLUS, the whole concept and the patents were written around interchangeability. That, let's just move that gauge plane out half of the normal distance of that gap, and then make up the other difference with the BIG-PLUS tool holder, so that I can now put a BIG-PLUS tool holder into any spindle ever made without interfering or achieving dual-contact when I have a BIG-PLUS spindle and vice versa. I can take BIG-PLUS spindles and I can accept standard tool holders without interfering when I don't want it to.

Jack Burley:

And so that concept that, hey, you don't have to go down the road of BIG-PLUS. Japan likes a lot of their BT and steep taper tooling. They wanted to improve on it, but this is a way to segue into dual-contact without making big changes to HSK or big CAPTO or something like that because you had now the choice. Companies like Okuma, they were brought in on how to use the license and get the gauges, and it's really simple. All you have to do is add some material to your facial spindles and we're going to qualify with our gauge where that goes. They took an early decision, Okuma did, and said, "Why don't we just grind everything this way? Make that final part of the piece and then we'll give that over to sales and marketing and they'll decide how they want to do this."

Jack Burley:

For years I think they just kept grinding them, but weren't actually promoting them. So as BIG-PLUS now is out there as a defacto standard, I call it, it's not an industry standard, so you can't call up ISO or ASME or DEN, and somebody say, "Give me the spec on BIG-PLUS." It just doesn't exist. So because these are fairly critical tolerances and you have to reverse engineer it if you're a copier of it, you don't know what these tolerances need to be and what those gauges really should look like to do this properly. And for this to work properly, of course we work on elastic deformation of the spindle during clamping, which is not very much. On a Okuma machine, for example, some of the are going to be half a thousands or eight tenths total. That's the amount of elastic range that we deal with to make sure that we get the taper contact and the face contact, and that you can buy any one of our BIG-PLUS tool holders and put it on any BIG-PLUS spindle and achieve that accuracy.

Jack Burley:

We have very specific and known licensees that we work with, that can build BIG-PLUS tools. Arguably everyone has come back and said, "This isn't easy." But it is possible and once you get it dialed in, it does work. So it's very important that you use the gauges and we get it right, because it's a small window.

Wade Anderson:

Right. One of the problems that can come up if that is not correct, is you get the face contact but you don't have good contact on the taper. So now you've got this tool floating around inside the tapers. So we've seen experiences like that, where we've had spindles that get fretting up inside the taper. And of course people will point to Okuma. It's our spindle, it's our taper. But then you go in and that's one of the first things we do, is we'll take the customer's tool holders and we'll start inspecting the tool holders and find out that they're not in spec.

Jack Burley:

The easiest way to determine whether you're getting that bad fit that direction, because once it goes in the spindle, you're closing up that face, you can't really determine, you can't wiggle around-

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, and see that. Right.

Jack Burley:

Check the run out. That's what I use as an indicator and say, put a gauge pin in there and a really quality collet check or something like check your run out. Usually it's going to be like over a thousands or maybe even two thousands. That is like alarms going off. Yeah, definitely it's not connecting on the taper. And we usually see that with the wrong, or not made properly tooled, or is from somebody else. But if a spindle goes through a grinding process where they didn't qualify that face again, that can be another problem too.

Wade Anderson:

Okay. So they regrind a taper, machine's been wrecked or something like that. Forget about the face. That makes sense, I could see that. They grind the taper and forget about the face on it. Yep.

Jack Burley:

Yeah. The run out is the easy one. The other thing I've suggested to people if they're not sure is, take the pull stud off and just try to push it up in my hand, and when you push it up there, you should still see a small light gap of like half thousands to a thousands. That's the elastic draw I was talking about.

Wade Anderson:

That's when the Belleville washer or whatever your draw bar is pulling at.

Jack Burley:

Got to pull that up in there, it's going to elastically move that taper wall a little bit and suck it up till the faces connect. And that's how it all works.

Wade Anderson:

Okay.

Jack Burley:

In essence, when you do use the dual-contact right and a BIG-PLUS system, it acts like a stopper. Over time, you're going to see that the spindle doesn't degrade out of its tolerances as quickly as one that doesn't have it. Over time, a steep taper spindle that doesn't have any kind of a dual-contact to it, it's going to keep elastically and then more L-mouth out of tolerance completely. You start seeing a lot of improper taper fit. It's basically like wearing in a shoe to your foot and all the time it just happens and the machine and the tools adjust. But now if you take a tool out of a different spindle or try to introduce a dual-contact at that point, a new tool, it's not going to work because the L-mouth and all that's in the wrong place.

Wade Anderson:

Right. That makes sense.

Jack Burley:

Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

Very cool. Let's talk about some new products. What do you guys have new coming down the pipeline that customers should be looking for from BIG KAISER?

Nick Jew:

Sure. The first thing I guess we can talk about is boring, boring applications. As of now BIG KAISER, we have our digital boring heads, which have Bluetooth capability. You can read the current position of the adjustment from your phone or tablet. But the next iteration of that would be to make that fully automated. So instead of manually adjusting a boring head, you just type it in your phone, just adjust by a couple of thousands, and then it'll just move to that point and lock it in place and then you run it.

Wade Anderson:

Very cool.

Nick Jew:

That is what our next product is. It's our automatic boring head. And with that, there's a whole bunch of different technologies that need to be added. There's so much motor technologies, electronics, battery power too since we don't have it connected to any spindle power. We're using it all isolated in the tool itself. Then there's also the communication. Right now you could connect with your phone or tablet using Bluetooth as I mentioned before, but in the end, in an automated cell you would want to have the control. The machine control kind of do all this commands itself. Measure the-

Wade Anderson:

The handshaking between the two?

Nick Jew:

Exactly. And like use a touch probe or bore gauge inside the machine to measure your bore, make the head, okay, you need to adjust out by a couple of thousands and then it rebores it and then checks again. If it's qualified, then you move on to the next part. That could be all automated if the boring head is able to make these adjustments automatically.

Wade Anderson:

Okay. Very nice. So I got to see, I think it was probably one of the prototypes, was it EMO? Backing up my memory here.

Jack Burley:

There've been a couple of places.

Wade Anderson:

Right before the EMO before pandemic, I guess we could say. Yeah.

Nick Jew:

Yeah, we have that in the line. I guess going with that, working with an Okuma machines, since we have one here now in the showroom permanently, doing that integration was so straightforward because we can actually put our software that controls the boring head directly on the Okuma OSP Control. Since it's a Windows-based computer, we can put it in there and it was very streamlined on connecting it. We actually have it fully integrated now on this machine.

Wade Anderson:

Very nice. That's one thing I've talked a lot about with people over the years, is that OSP Control, literally, if you can do it on a desktop or laptop computer, chances are you're going to be able to do it on that control. So that really opens up the window of imagination of what you can do. If you can envision something communicating from your phone to a laptop, chances are, you can do that with the control.

Nick Jew:

Yeah. It's so user-friendly too. I guess as an example, I didn't actually develop the software that controls our automatic boring head here, we actually developed it in Switzerland. Our Switzerland team doesn't have an Okuma available to test it on. They just kept creating the app, they sent it to me and I did all the testing here. Even though it's like that disconnect of, I don't have a software developer right next to me to diagnose the issues, we didn't have any issues. It was just the first time we added the API libraries in, we did a few tests here and there, and then it just works. So being able to use the Okuma control like this, where it feels like just a standard computer, a desktop or laptop computer, it makes it so much easier to develop and integrate with.

Wade Anderson:

I heard you say something, I hear it a lot obviously working for the company, but you mentioned API. Anybody that doesn't know what that is, what is an API?

Nick Jew:

An API is pretty much just a software library so that any third party softwares can communicate with this device that you're working with. So Okuma develops their THINC API. That API makes us able to create our own third party software and talk to the control directly without having to have some sort of handshake file or text file or something like that. We can just read the macro variables from the machine, the common variables, or adjust the tool data if we need to. Which also leads me into another product, a new development product that we're working on, is for our presetter line where we can take our preset data from a presetter and send it directly into the control without needing to manually type in with the keyboard or going all the way to the route of RFID, Balluff chip, stuff like that. We can just scan a barcode that a presetter generates, and it will save that data from the tool offsets directly into the machine's tool offset table. That's yet another integration that we've worked with for Okuma.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. Fantastic. All right. Well, we're running in on our closing time here. Jack, people want to learn more about BIG KAISER, what's the best way to go about it?

Jack Burley:

Well, certainly to contact us on our website, bigkaiser.com. We're open to any challenge. We can have people come out and see them if that's what they'd like. We like to work with people in their world and what's going on with them. But we're open to all kinds of challenges, whether it's looking for higher accuracy or boring systems or tool presetters, we have a work holding system for quick change that may help some setup reduction. That's all about trying to reduce the amount of spindle hours. And one of those is making sure that the spindle's turning.

Wade Anderson:

Right. Fantastic. Nick, thank you for joining us. I really appreciate all the work and the integration you've done on that machine, looks fantastic.

Nick Jew:

There's definitely more to come for sure.

Wade Anderson:

All right. Good stuff. Thank you for joining us on this podcast. If you have thoughts, ideas, questions for future podcasts, hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm Wade Anderson on LinkedIn, or you can hit us up on the okuma.com website. Till then, we'll see you next time.

*Since this recording, BIG KAISER has rebranded to BIG DAISHOWA.