Mechanical engineer here. I do not understand how is it possible to design something without machining experience. When I am not sure about manufacturing I go to a machinist and ask. The pieces of advice that you get from people with hands-on experience (e.g. machinists) are gold.
I'm a hobbyist 3D printer/designer and I 100% agree. You have to know if a feature is difficult or cost effective, or at least know if it's possible to begin with before implementing it and sending it to production.
Yes..even for tolerances and tolerance zone is important to know little bit about machining..I am working in aerospace and it's so funny how engineers think that cutting through the steel is the same as cutting through butter.They end up with part 0,2mm larger than it should be because material push that tool outside the given pathline. :'D
In recent years, I had a design for a tesla turbine, for which I had already acquired several discs, which I was checking around for initial pricing on drilling 4 holes in. One shop stopped answering my emails entirely after I told them that the discs had been coated in titanium nitride... the next 'prototype cnc' outfit, I visited in person; in talking to the guy (who looked like he personally power-lifted all of his machines into place), it seemed like the apparently simple project was some sort of rocket science beyond his head (I guess maybe his education stopped at his high school shop classes or something!?); first he had to be informed that tungsten carbide should cut titanium nitride, then addressing the problem seemed too difficult to him to fathom (I prompted him indicating that maybe they could just use some sort of ~jig to do it), at which point he quoted me $100 'per part' just for drilling said 4 holes in each disc!? It would seem that I could buy my own equipment for what it might cost to complete a project of any significant complexity with that kind of pricing & attitude.
For nearly 46 years, I worked in the tooling end of a fairly large company where the things we produced stayed in-house. It was at one point, nearly the same scenario you described about the clocking in and out and trying to put a number on an employee was tried. Some success was gained, but everyone cheated on their reports anyway. The CFO came to our department and wanted to know what was going on and would spend a day or MORE with every guy in the department to see first-hand how the jobs were done. He gained a better respect of the technical nature of what we had to do and learned that it wasn't a production type environment, and EVERYTHING required different machines, different setups, and a vast knowledge of the steps involved in something as simple as a few parts nests for a testing machine or a set of holding jaws. It was actually refreshing to see someone in upper management actually get involved instead of picking up the phone and bitching to the department head.
That’s good leadership. As a general you have to humble yourself & seek info from the front line troops. They are seeing things first hand & have the best info on the situation.
I believe the best thing that engineers can do when Improving a process, part, etc., is to grab machinists from the floor and have small meetings. For me, the meetings help me believe that my opinion is Important and that teamwork is the best aid. When we sit in separate pods and complain that one department isn’t right or wrong , nothing gets accomplished. I’m trying to push this, because we have a lot of this toxic workplace environment at my current employer. It’s a work in progress. It’s a lot more exciting when everyone is on the same page working together too.
I would do the same, but in reverse direction: make the engineer come to the machinist. It's all nice and well to CAD a part, but to see the machining (and all the prepwork, fixturing etc.) is kind of abstract behind a screen, even though software can visualize the toolpath on screen. I have to be honest, my background is somewhat different. I've been a process engineer in the steel industry for just over 9 years. That meant a combination of sitting behind a desk but also on donning the required protective gear and stepping onto the production floor or the control room, seeing production, chatting with operators. There is such a wealth of practical useful information to be learned from them.
Yeah. Somehow, when two parties disagree, discussing the problem seems like an absurd idea to some... Or, in this case, simply complaining was easier and provided the satisfaction of "I told you this process would be bad, therefore everything is your fault."
We used to have a similar problem until we started safety meetings every morning they didn't have to be long but we had to have them kept everybody in the loop on the same page and made everyone important and productive. It's amazing what you can do in 5 to 15 minutes while everyone's drinking their coffee and normally would be out on the floor talking not producing a thing.
Then they find out that letting the machinist build all the automation is cheaper than an engineer. Then the new HR lady fires you for working on the automation and not running the parts on the machine. that's what the did to me. And that's when I went from employee to supplier.
Want to improve the situation between a machinist and an engineer? Every engineer has to be able to machine parts if they don’t it stays an academic discussion. In Germany those engineers usually make an apprenticeship before university. Mixing people is the best way to improve the quality and speed.
This is exactly what I told to my team leader before I quit my job. Now I have no team leader, no engineers, no programmers above me - can't be happier
I'm a CNC programmer and machinist myself. I finished my apprenticeship around 3 years ago so am still fairly fresh and learning. At my company the entire quality department have no machining experience at all between all 4 of them, the mangers also have either less programing skills than me, or just haven't done any machining in 20 odd years, they are great men, smart too but they deny needing help or that they can be wrong, they don't even ask me to sit in meetings or let me join meetings with new parts, even despite the fact the multiple times I have spotted complications on parts they have not noticed.
@@JS-cs8gz i did walk out, tried a few other places, went back 3 months later, but this time they had a new attitude and so did i. i am now pushing to be more involved in meetings and working with our quality department to help them understand machining processes. Plus most of the management retire in like 2 decades, i'm only 25
@@wendull811 I did go to college, got a foundation degree and all, i can program long milling machines by hand with just a drawing. i can program better than my production manager
There are always 2 sides to every coin, titans. Presenting just one point of view is never good. I am a mechanical engineer in a company that produces hydralic products (not parts mind you, whole products). Our company has >500 people working in it and about 120 CNC Machines. I can work and setup about 90% of them. Every time I go and talk about a new part for a product with some of the "older" machinists and setup guys, all I hear is how this part is impossible and it can't be done. And in my 13 years of work experience, we've never failed to produce the "impossible" part. Now you talk about how bad engineers are, but I've seen machinists intentionally crashing machines just to "prove" you are wrong. I've seen machinists writing programs to keep the spindle running, so the time efficiency tracker won't detect idle time. Smart people are very creative. We don't know the whole context here, except what the narrator wants us to know, but there are bad aples on both sides of the fence. And they are usually much less than the good apples. Now I am following you mostly for entertainment value, I don't know if you have an engineering department, but from what I've seen from your videos and attitude towards engineers, I would guess not. Don't be narrow minded, stay hungry.
I have the same feeling. I find that in general, it's not really known what an engineer actually does. Only the 'bad' things are often stereotyped in my opinion. As if we think we are better and can never make mistakes.
Good on you. I’m tired of hearing all the engineer slander and the “us vs them” mentality that goes on within departments of the same damn company. The most important thing a business can do is stop tolerating the fragile egos of managers and have open communication and cross training between departments.
I was thinking the exact same thing when I watched this video. This is one of if not my favorite youtube channels, but this video is tone def and one sided. I did not hear any suggestion that maybe the engineers should spend some time on the shop floor learning "why" things are done a certain way. I got to witness first hand last week that 30 years of machining experience does not mean you are immune to making mistakes that cost the company thousands of dollars and days worth of lost production time. It was a perfectly preventable problem that could have been avoided had the machinist followed some pretty standard best practices when it comes to programming. Clocking in and out of jobs takes next to no time when compared to the time required to setup and run the job it is literally a mater of seconds. I don't know why the "degrees n' stuff" comment bugs me so much, but as an engineer I know that my degree doesn't mean that I know everything. Just like having an engineering degree doesn't make me an expert machinist, having 30 years of machining experience doesn't mean you are the worlds greatest machinist or that you are constantly working on improving run times, tool, life, part quality, reducing down time etc. For supposedly being a channel dedicated to learning and education, this video has done nothing but give young machinists reasons not to work with or trust their engineers. If they really wanted to make things better, this channel would find an engineer they trust and do a whole video series on how machinists and engineers can and should work together.
As an engineer with only a few years of career experience, I've seen exactly what Trevor describes. I've also, like you, seen production sabotage themselves to spite engineering and management. So yes, it goes both ways, but don't discount the one side just because the other was not presented in this one anecdote. Have you ever heard/read an anecdote that shows both sides intentionally screwing the other? Me neither. That's why they have many anecdote videos. They have a video similar to each anecdote you presented - go look. Re: "I don't know if you have an engineering department, but from what I've seen from your videos and attitude towards engineers, I would guess not." Barry doesn't hold a degree, but he is an engineer. He and Trevor both design parts and tooling. Barry meticulously calculates machine capabilities for their extreme cuts. Since many engineers are glorified designers (I dip in and out of that category), I would say that Titans of CNC doesn't need a dedicated engineering department because some of their machinists fill the role of engineers. Don't be narrow minded - don't judge a library by one video.
The company that I previously worked at is using a similar system for inspector and machinist. Every morning both departments have meetings to go over how efficient the whole group is doing. If it’s low and one person is to blame then they get called out during the meeting. The metric is calculated by how long each part takes to inspect or machined. So on the traveler if it says that a part takes 5 minutes to inspect and there is 12 pieces then you will have to measure it in 60 minutes. Even if you are new to the trade the company expect you to run a part like a seasoned machinist. If you don’t meet the time then your efficiency is low and the mangers will pay you a visit. The micromanager don’t want to hear any set up slow down issue since they all want numbers. This system is very flawed and it is making everyone put speed over quality of work. You can’t thoroughly inspects or machined parts if you are being rushed. The quality manager who is also a DQR don’t even inspect the parts that they are require to. They are assuming the previous inspectors thoroughly checked the parts. The company is saying that this system is to help quote jobs better which is a lie. This system is in place to track employees. An engineer said that this employee tracker is called a Baan system. The managers is always requesting process improvement forms to make a job faster. No machinist is helping with that even if they know that they can improve the machining time.
That's just a failure of the system implemented. No greenhorn can machine or set up the same as a skilled machinist. Most cost calculation or timing programs will have a fridge factor for new vs skilled personnel and illness and so on. Any company worth it's salt will be using this and expect some time differences over the amortisation of the part. One offs are expected to take much much longer than any batch or series part
Damn, sounds just like the place I got fired from recently. A new supervisor came in and just killed the flow by prioritizing numbers over quality, and _then_ complained to the higher-ups about part quality.
I worked for 7 years as a machinist and then 35 years as an engineer for what was, at that time, probably the largest and best machine too builder in the US. I always used to say that they never sold one of my drawings, the best I could hope to do was to help the guys in the shop make parts and build machines efficiently and quickly. I retired 7 years ago. There are pretty much no machinists or engineers left there. Only beancounters, buck passers, and mouse clickers. I'm glad I don't have to put up with that crap!
A good machinist is an engineer. Should be able to programme on the machine awell as using CAD. Also a good machinist is one that started on manual machines. I think ypu get the tactile feeling of maching and materials.
Hold up. Being a good machinist doesn't mean you can use the laws of physics to calculate the static and dynamic stresses on a part in service and sometimes during production (usually you use rules of thumb for production). Machinists are skilled workers and engineers can't replace them, but don't ever conflate the two, they're chalk and cheese. I respect the physical side of the process enough to know I can't do it but most of the physical side doesn't even know enough about engineering to even have a clue about what they don't know and just circle jerk about how engineers don't know anything.
@MiG82au We all come under the bracket of engineers my friend. I wasn't knocking Engineers who work on the mathematical and theory side. I'm a machinist and a fitter and come under the bracket of engineering department at my work place. Engineering just has all different areas of expertise. I was getting at the fact a good machinist is a good engineer and not just an operator of a cnc machine 👍🏻
Whenever you have two parties arguing about what is possible and what will damage the machine ultimately reality will be the deciding factor. I work with engineers and I worry less about being right all the time and just try to make sure I’m communicating my best estimation to those stakeholders involved. If I tell someone something might not work and it doesn’t work that’s OK but if I tell everyone that this won’t be a problem and it fails miserably than I have done a poor job of estimating and communicating expectations
Another mechanical engineer here. I worked in a machine shop before I started to college. I had a better idea of what it took to make and assemble designs than most engineers. I still took my "in process" designs ( I was still creating drawings) to the machine shop and asked for the machinists advice. My designs were not perfect but they were better than most. Pretty soon the shop personnel were fighting over who would run my designs. I still had to take a charge number (time was charged to a project for billing purposes) to talk to the shop personnel. Years later when I was supervising engineers, I tried to create a training system where new engineers (new grads or experienced) would spend a week working in each "department" (planning, purchasing, manufacturing, quality, etc.) so engineers understood how their designs actually worked. The only one I managed to get approved was field test. The bean counters would not come up with a way to "charge" the training time. Only Field Test dept understood how important it was for engineers to understand what their designs caused. Eventually two other departments approved a few hand picked engineers for "special projects". None of this is as bad as the system your video described. Management needs to understand what they are managing. Otherwise the whole company breaks down. Southwest Airlines Christmas 2022 is a perfect example. Unfortunately, it take a long term vision that seems to be lost now days.,
I am a machinist, and have worked many times with customers/engineers who have no idea how machining works, how long it takes and impose unnecessarily tight tolerances. I remember a engineer who required a tolerance on an 800x110x25mm plate with a parallelism requirement of + - 0.015mm on a plate that they were only going to weld.🤦♀ didn't seem like he understood that having strict tolerances increases delivery time and price. I have more than once received a part to be made, and we have given them a delivery time, and then the engineer comes the next day and is angry because we were not finished long before the specified delivery time that we had given to the engineer/customer. funny enough, one of these engineers who called about the delivery time several times a day, when the part was ready and could be picked up, there was no hurry and the part was left for almost 3 weeks before it was picked up.😮💨🤷♀
i think to optimize production times is a task for both engieneers and machinists. Machinists know their machines capabilitys and how long if takes for certain features to be manufactured. If you design a door knob with all kinds of crazy contures that need to be made on a 5 axis machine in hour long finishing passes with small tools to get in small pockets and stuff, the programmers possibilitys to reduce cycle time while maintaining the quality are pretty limited. However if the machinst and the engieneers are talking to each other and are both looking at the part and figuring out what features are even necessary or can be changed in a way that makes them much easier and faster manufacturable, thats when you will cut times down significantly
You don't even have to go that far, I generally include handwritten notes on my drawings that explain why parts were designed the way they were, and which features are actually critical and which tolerances have to be met for which reason. Found out years and years ago that if you explain to the person doing the manufacturing what you're actually trying to achieve, that they'll usually figure out a way to make it do exactly what it's supposed to do. Especially for a one-offs, the main thing is that it works and that you know what you actually manufactured, it's kind of to be expected that you'll have to make little changes I think? And trying to do time tracking on such parts is inherently ridiculous to begin with, it takes as long as it takes to manufacture it. If you want it done quicker, figure out a way to build it entirely out of laser cut sheet metal and off-the-shelf nuts and bolts... Now if we're talking volume production, that's where engineering comes more to the forefront when trying to hit certain production volumes. For example, sometimes it's more efficient to go for a slower process with more overall throughput. It's sometimes hard to explain why you'd go for the method that takes 20 minutes instead of the one that takes 5 minutes, but if that machine that takes 20 minutes to achieve the same result only costs a fifth of the price and takes up a tenth of the space, then it's way more economical to have five of those machines chugging away at it for 20 minutes each. I think a lot of misunderstandings between engineers and other staff arise from such decisions.
I worked as an engineer for 35 years. I always tried to work and lead with the belief that as an engineer I knew what we were trying to accomplish. At the same time I worked with the belief that I needed the expertise of the people I was working with to accomplish this goal. This included; office staff, draftsmen, welders, inside machinists, outside machinists, layout personnel, fitters, operators, etc. If I saw something that I thought was wrong or I didn't understand I started by asking questions. At times, like any human, things could become confrontational. I can say I was not always correct. I can also say I encountered errors that cost tens of millions of dollars. In general, errors of this type came not from tradesmen, but from middle management taking shortcuts. If you want to reduce the time it takes to make something, ask the person making it. If you want to have something work, ask the users. I used to get complaints from operators about how dark the work environment was. The next time I designed something similar, I increased the lighting as much as feasible. Lights are a small cost compared to the $2M for the end product.
At the last place I worked at they had all the part times set for manual drilling and milling. But once we got CNC’s and my supervisor and my self started building programs for them. To speed things up they started complaining we were taking too long to make the programs and it was costing them money. But when they seen that we could run the same parts in a fraction of the time they were happy. Well at least the owners were. The engineers always told us the stuff we we’re trying to do could not be done and we proved them wrong. Than they wanted to know how we learned how to do it we just showed them your videos. Now they just bring us the new blueprints and see if it possible and how long it will take. Currently using a Haas TM3. we had to learn how to use these on our own because even they did not know how to use them. Anyway thanks for all the great information I have learned so much from just watching your videos. As I have never ran a CNC till now.
There is a big difference between the "in theory" mode of some engineers and the real world. As a person with a degree in accounting and a father who was a registered architect and structural engineer, I learned the best of both sides. Fresh out school with a degree, my first task for the company was to learn how to empty a 48 footer as a team member that was loaded with random packed boxes of merchandise. This was way before shrink wrapped pallets were the norm. Thus, this was my first experience with "theory" and "the real world".
when doing prototype in the past i got alot projects wants you to do laser cut size with a CNC milling. i think this problem happening all around the world, so i think CAD/CAM/CNC should be same person. i can do all but doesn't have any advantage in a company, unless u work on ur own...
As a mechanical engineering student, I wish to clarify that this behavior is a minority of engineers. I don't always understand why we are stereotyped like this. We also want the best for everyone. Ps. Currently learning on a 5 axis CNC
I agree it’s not a majority, but it’s not a small minority either. I imagine once you get out of school and into the field you’ll have a better understanding of why this has been a topic of discussion for decades in manufacturing. Good luck on your journey, thanks for watching, and thanks for being an engineer that takes the time to learn about machining 👊🏼
How would u know that as just a student? Lol no offence but ive been doing machining for years and from the 20 companies ive worked for. It is certainly not the minority. Ive met maybe 1-2 out of 100's that even understood the machining process. Most sit in their plush office's, and only come out to complain about why my machine cant run at lightspeed. But im glad ur trying to be better, keep it up and change the game.
This goes back to manufacturing industry tribalism and "us vs. them" attitude that is super easy to materialize. When successes and failures are determined by a work of 2 separate groups then it's very easy for conflict to appear. You need to have some solid leadership to understand that both groups just wants to look pretty to the main boss.
@@verakoo6187 you should be worrying why you’ve been through 20 shops bud 😂 I’ve met plenty of you in my 15 years. I’m still young and I’m sure I’ll meet plenty more. Your a dime a dozen
I understand, but it's not that I have no work experience. I often work in companies during the summer holidays together with engineers and then I learn a lot. Hence my experience and I can't agree that engineers are such tyrants. In Europe you have something like technical education and general education in secondary schools. I come from technical education and now study in university. Unlike my fellow students who come from general education, I have already stood behind the machines and I do have that experience.
Ive been a machinist for 20 odd years now. I constantly come across extremely difficult to machine features or tolerances on components that really dont need to be so small because the engineers have no machining experience. If they spoke to us about parts we could probably help reduce cylce time therefore cost. Also i think a tooling expert should be involved. There are some amazing tools available nowadays
The engineers at my job are notorious for tightening up dimensions. A lot of our parts get nickel plated, instead of doing the math and giving me the most tolerance, they get lazy and just take .0005 off the mean and cut the tolerance in half.
They'll stop doing that when they request quotes for expensive things like molds that have aerospace tolerances instead of necessary tolerances. When each reputable mold shop says, "No quote", or quotes some super-high value, they'll start to think twice.
Honestly I don't think the system was a terrible idea, yes I agree it slowed down production and yes I hate unrealistic deadlines. However, if they used the metrics to figure out if 4 out of 10 machinist were slacking and stealing time from the company. I don't see an issue with it and would actually see it as a good idea for weeding out the bad eggs. Obviously the way you describe it, they were using those metrics to threaten you. That's not okay. But, I've worked in plenty of places where 5-6 lads just don't give a damn and it leads to their work being piled on everyone else who was doing their job right.
Yeah, we make prototypes every single day where I work. You have to clock in on the parts so your times gets registered. If youre then the only one working on that parts and it takes longer than calculated - as long as you can address why, its often cool. This also means that the slacking morons can't just hide, which is fine.
'Software & Computer Engineer'(+) here : sounds like they were attempting to implement what would be considered effectively a 'profiling' framework to analyze what would otherwise to them be a 'black box' system; in software, profiling does often indeed slow the system down considerably (the objective is to identify the bottlenecks, so that they can be optimized, routed around, or the system itself rearchitected {or capabilities added} for improved performance, at which time the profiling framework would be removed to allow for optimal performance again). I doubt that they considered the egos of the humans involved all that much (in my day, engineers had to score in the top ~2% of the populace just to get into an engineering program, much less get out of one [~50% at my U], so they probably didn't think that any competition on the basis of relative problem solving intelligence was likely even a factor, though it sounds you may have effectively tried some sort of ~one-upmanship games with them : I think it likely might have improved things to just give them a few 'day on the job' activities spent meeting tolerances in front of a lathe, or programming cnc's in gcode, or something). Such data could be used for a wide variety of analytics, inclusive of all that you've covered & more.
I graduated from mechanical engineering school and got into the design/manufacturing scene right after. And I truly believe that to be a good engineer, you need to also be heavily involved with the manufacturing process. I run, a machine/fab shop and do design work. I talk to all my old professors about how important this is.
Right on - it's perfectly fine to run time studies to track costs. Not cool to use those numbers to beat on the machinists without a baseline of comparison, like farming some parts out and comparing costs. Root of the problem is people who can't do what you do and have never walked a mile in your shoes thinking they are qualified to judge. I was a design engineer for many years and promise the same thing happens to us.
Lol sounds like the company I work for, they also slap the quoted time for programming and machining for one off parts, so if a programmer takes 9 hours (and usually does and still gets it wrong because he isn't a machinist, go figure) to do his part on a 10 hour job, the machinist is left with 1 hour to correct programs, setup up machine, prove and cycle. And gets the blame when the hours are over quoted. Just have to keep telling them it is what it is. Shoddy management. Cant wait to leave.
I don’t understand why there is such a divide between engineers and machinists. Here in the UK it is almost drilled into you that you are either one or the other and never shall the two skill sets cross! Absolutely ridiculous mentality in my opinion. I am an Engineer with a “degree n stuff” but I am also a hobby machinist, and do some manual machining at work when required, and I simply don’t understand how you can be an engineer without At least an understanding if not a passion for machining. I often discuss order of operations and machining processes with our machine shop when I design a product because if you want the end result to be competitively priced, you have to make it as quick and easy to machine as possible. Engineers need to swallow their pride and take advice from production. After all “if in doubt Ask” works both ways! Or at least it should do in my opinion.
As a machinist i think i could help a lot if i got to see the engineers drawing before release for manufacture. I could just highlight any difficult features or tolerances. Just bring it to their attention. If its still needed then at least the engineer would know 💶💶💵💸
@@EVOMAN14 if your company operates a quality management system such as ISO 9001 they should be doing design reviews that you could ask to be involved in. Not sure of the intricacies but the quality manual should be available for all employees to read and should highlight who is responsible /required for each process such a design reviews. Be warned though, you might open a can of worms 😆.
@@alexjamieson3822 we are a sub contract machining company. We make a lot of prototype parts for the oil and gas industry. I think earlier collab between us and the customer would be benificial for everyone 👍🏼 i wish i could communicate this to our customers. Im not the boss 👎🏼😂
@@EVOMAN14 yes being a subcontractor does make it a touch more difficult. We are in the same boat but we design subsea oil and gas products that we have made by a subcontract machine shop. We are fortunate to have a really good relationship with our subcontractors and welcome any feed back from them. I always try to make their lives easier whenever the design intent permits.
@@alexjamieson3822 where in the UK are you if you dont mind me asking? I am between Inverness and Aberdeen. Most of our jobs go to Aberdeen. Downhole tooling mostly. Its a great job. Another issue i have is that i would love to see some of our products assembled and working. Or even some more info about what they will be used for
I’m an engineer that started as a machinist. From my experience it’s about a 50/50 split on responsibility of why jobs take longer to run than quoted. I had one operator half speeds and feeds because quote “it was too loud.” A lot of guys also just crank out programs and don’t ever see them run. If the engineer isn’t standing next to you on a virgin program how do you know what’s a good move and what’s not. We are approaching a job with a preconceived notion of what might be problematic and try to mitigate those problems before releasing programs and fixtures but there’s frequently things that might be overlooked or things that aren’t problems at all. Continuous improvement only works when there’s a foundation for what’s already a place that can be improved
Situations like that are created by people that hate the ones they're ostensibly helping. These controlling haters are attracted to positions where they can torment the ones they hate. Similarly, people that liked hurting children were attracted to positions with organizations like the former Boy Scouts or Brownies. I wish company owners were more savvy about the reasons that some people would be attracted to leadership positions. It, like a lot of situations, boils down to a literal battle of good vs evil. That might sound simplistic but it fits the bill. Most of interpersonal interactions reduces to that very battle. Life is often a war zone and we're here to survive and learn. It's a shame it's that way but it is. Cling to God and pray your way through it. He'll help if you'll ask Him.
Dear Old Dad was an engineer, but before he went to engineering school (BSEE, MSME) he worked as a machinist. And he was always having issues with the "beancounters" in the front office, similar to what was described in the video.
As an Electrical Engineer that knows how to run cnc machines from a cheap desktop 3d printer to a Hass mini mill and a Stratasys Fortus 450mc. Also worked in an additive manufacturing lab. I've seen a lot of changes and blaming in different industries so it mostly depends. If I need to quote a part I go based on what machines that will be doing the work and if I don't have good experience using that machine I wont quote it. If I can't quote it i would talk to a machinist that will do it and let them look through it. If its an external job or personal piece that I cannot make in house i will talk with the machinist and see the easiest way to make it with their tooling and there comfort, especially with tolerancing. I say tolerancing because some rather use a manual machine for some parts and I use a metric CNC that I've tuned for micron precision.
I currently work at a company that does the same thing, just that the times are set from 30 years ago and all the old timers keep buggin me for being too fast so the manneger dosent reduce the time, even tho all the times are set for manual machines and we now run cnc, it fustrates me seeing these old timers just standing around doing nothing as to not get the time reducet, i get punicht for upping my effecncy. Ps english isnt my first language so sry for bad spelling.
The problem is one of communication. I'm a mechanical engineer who started out in the shop building the components I designed, assembling, testing and creating drawings, so I have a good idea how to machine things. Before I hired people for my company, I was the only engineer machining components for our (3 engineer team) designs. However, I put all that aside when dealing with my machinists. If I approach them with a project, I give them as much information as possible (design may be in conceptual stages) so that they can tell me how much time THEY think it will take to make each component. Simple way of doing this is a design kickoff meeting. Concept is proposed, machinists can weigh in on any concerns they may have about the design or at the component level. If you're doing any kind of project management, and you should be, then this is a great time to get their feedback and to set priorities; who needs what and by when. IMO, it is then fair game holding them accountable for meeting dates and critical milestones. The reason it should be this way is not only for accountability, but so the machinists, assemblers, technicians, electrical engineers and others may weigh in and feel that they are a part of the project, rather than a cog in the wheel.
We have an ECR (Engineering change request) system where the engineers (most have shop floor and machining experience) decide the set up and run time however if they are off, the machinst can complete an ECR form which will flag the times when the job comes through again. The times can be adjusted as we've done the job before where everyone is happy :)
I am at a good spot that I came from the floor to programming. I create all the programs and documentation for the set-up crew. I occasionally will go on the floor to do set-ups on new projects with them to brainstorm the best possible outcome. I feel that it is very important for any NC programmer to understand the whole concept of machining, it makes a huge difference. You must be open to suggestions for improvement because if you are uptight and think your way is the only way you will fail, and your team will not have your back! There is no one way to do anything in this trade, great ideas can come from anyone within the workplace regardless of position. Keep your mind open! Have a safe and Happy New Year's everyone! Cheers!
So it's not CNC related but my wife was a PA in a private medical practice out in Arizona. We had our first child and she went back to work, federally you're protected to have time set aside to pump for breastfeeding purposes. Well in two separate occasions shortly after returning to work they called her into the back office to try and say she wasn't working fast enough and they brought up her pumping times and also the patient wait times. Technically at that moment if they actually did anything we could take them to court but they really needed my wife and the community needed the practice to stay open. I knew what was up and so I told my wife to start tracking the time it took the patient to get from the waiting room to the exam room and then also track the time it took the nursing staff to see the patient and tell her they were ready to be seen. We then wrote up a steaming rebuttal to both "corrective action" meetings detailing how the greatest time factor was not in fact the pumping time set aside by law but was in fact mainly an issue with the understaffed and overworked nursing department. Showing that waiting and rooming times took up over 2/3rds of the patient's total time in office. As with any situation if you want to measure the time spent on a given job you can't just leave it at the primary times and expect to get a total picture of what's going on. Instead you need to break things down and get a complete picture including the time list to the new admin time spent tracking time. This way you measure what matters and you're able to properly determine what the cause is for long lead times.
Had a similar experience. Wonderful thing about the journeyman card and mastercam certificate I can walk to my car and have an interview scheduled by the next morning
As a student getting a degree in mechanical engineering........and stuff, I love when you guys tell these stories about your experience with other engineers. I not only get the Titans of CNC machining/grinding/swiss machining education, but also an education in what NOT to do as an engineer. Thank you for putting out this video. Please do more of them.
I was a project management intern for Premier Technology Inc. when Titan toured their facility in 2019. I’m a big fan of the way they approached the way the majority of the PMs I supported interfaced with their production personnel. In a lot of the cases I saw, a machine programmer there had a better grip on the reality of when parts would be completed than a room full of PMs, and they were typically consulted accordingly. More often than arguments, meetings were conducted with leads and PMs so PMs could get a handle on the statuses of their respective projects.
I am a mechanical engeneer since about six years, and got the same time in machining. Vertical, horizontal mill with pallet change system, and got some expedience on the lathe too. Huge experience in machining, at the machines, right in the middle of the "trade" from quote to deburr. Huge experience at the designer table too. It gives me a dissociative personality disorder when I have to design something. I sincerely think that a drawing or a design is never perfect, nor ready. I only like to design something if I get to make it. That is the only way to have a peace of mind. The worst thing is, if in a company like You mentioned, two departments get so estranged. I once saw Metropolis (1927) and a quote still resonates with me: "There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator" Sincere communication and brotherly love, both ways. There is no other way.
In principle tracking the workhours required for each part is not really a bad idea, at least when clocking in and out doesn't create that much unnecessary overhead. But especially for these custom parts that system certainly doesn't make sense like that manager implemented it: It's difficult to give a reasonable estimate for these parts, and it creates wrong incentives to overestimate it when you then have to do the job yourself, or underestimate it when someone else has to do it. And why don't the engineers simply talk to the machinists about these parts when the get the impression that they take much longer than expected, or even get them involved in the design phase of it, to maybe come up with a design that is easier to manufacture? I'm not a mechanical engineer myself (I'm a process engineer), but we make sure to always get the other disciplines involved that actually have to do the job that we design and then put on the drawings. EDIT: And don't forget that safety, as well as the quality of these custom parts always plays a big role as well: No point in being very fast with the job, if it then fails inspections or you create dangerous situations because you have to reach an unrealistic goal.
I started out in a fabrication shop running CNC press brakes. I learned very fast that the design engineers can be oblivious that their stuff actually needs to be made. My whole job was bending stuff and the engineers didn’t account for bend allowance or different radiuses for different materials….but it was my fault when parts didn’t fit right.
The amount of insanity I've seen from engineers is mind boggling. Every single week I see 3d models with things on them that either can't be made, is waaay too expensive and simply stupid. - It can be countersink holes literally touching the edge of a part - which seems okay on the 3D model but in real life that edge wont be there after machined. - Tapped holes that either goes through the part or way too deep. Often just because it was "easier to draw it like that". - TINY inside corner radius on tall parts that are near impossible to make. - Extremely tight tolerances on shafts with no real purpose. When asked why - the answer is "well, we just want a good looking surface... the tolerance isnt really important"
This is sadly very common as most designers don't seem to understand anything about manufacturing today. This is not limited to machining either, it applies to many other areas as well. This is because designers come from schools where they specialize in exactly that, designing and nothing else. It's bass ackwards in my opinion, because a design is absolutely useless if it's not manufacturable or hasn't been designed for manufacturability. A competent designer - whether engineer or otherwise - would be very interested to listen to and learn from those doing the manufacturing to become more competent designers. There's even a word for that mindset, design for manufacturability. If i remember correctly, you guys have mentioned it sometimes, too.
I’m an engineering manager and the engineers and machinists all answer to me. Most of my engineers are also experienced machinists and we all help each other out all the time. I never got the engineer vs machinist thing, but hey I paid for my engineering degree by doing machining work.
Ironically I'm a machining manager who doesn't answer to an engineering manager. Most of our companies engineers took one class in college and then think there machinist. Never understood the entire im an engineer therefore smarter thing...
Where I'm at the department supervisor typically quotes times. Even though we're a manufacturer of gun drills, many of our orders are customized to fit the customer's needs. So there are a lot of first time builds and processes in our plant. We do track our time for every job and part, timing in and out at a computer station. I'm sure they also use this to evaluate our performance also, although nothing has ever been said to anyone, and we have a couple of extremely slow workers.
Engineer here, but one who machines, assembles, welds etc. things at work on a weekly basis. Idk the situation at your shop, but the machinists at my work often have similar complaints. "These meetings are pulling me away from what I should be doing"...no, you're watching UA-cam videos at work dawg "I don't have the right welder to do this"...the right welder shows up and it takes him 2 weeks to even start using it "I don't wanna make it twice because you're not 100% sure it'll fit"...we are a prototype facility, It's rare but possible for me to make mistakes. So I end up making a lot of things myself because I don't want to deal with them. In your case, a lot of what they did seem messed up but I question why machinists would be so mad about a performance metric system. If you all do within 10% of each other, as one would expect, nobody would compare you to a theoretical machine time quoted previously. Or at least they shouldn't.
The vid talks about reducing lead time, not cycle time. Lead time includes cycle time, and many more activities that are not controlled by the machinist. The machinist does not control material availability, machine capacity, support resources, queue time between ops, outside processing time, inspection, just to name a few. Often lead time can be reduced by using a wholistic approach and better preparation.
I'm a technician at a telecommunications company and they implemented a similar system for us called ESM 15 years ago. Complete with unrealistic goals. I don't remember what the original initials stand for. We just call it Extremely Stupid Management. Of course being a bunch of smart guys we found ways to game the system and got our times down to meet our goals so of course they shortened the amount of time we had to do the jobs in question. The company has a choice do you want us to do quality work or do you want it done fast? They chose fast. There's never enough time to do the job but apparently there's always enough time to fix the mistakes later. After 20 something years at this job I'm old and jaded, I just do my job and eff the numbers, just listen to my first level complain about my efficiency, let it go in one ear and out the other, and do the same thing I've always done: I do it carefully the first time because I'm too lazy to do it twice. And the first levels know, we've had that frank discussion. Their job is to tell us, our job is to listen. I care more about our customers than I do management. When the revolution comes: The bean counters and efficiency experts will be the first ones up against the wall.
It seems short sighted that they are concerning themselves with the one off costs of items intended to speed up processes down the line. Often the design of parts eats into the lead time of a project like this and it is the people at the end of the process that come under the microscope to makeup the difference. Also it can be annoying when making parts to speed up processes could be more optimal if only the people involved in these processes where asked for input at the design stage. Good places to work have respect and communication flowing in both directions, nothing worse than a place full of a lot of us vs them bitching. It is so counter productive and dissatisfying.
Machinist are not exactly perfect either I am a 30 year machinist/manufacturing engineer I’ve been on both sides of the wall. Communication is key to a project success. Establish action items and owners for accountability.
This is exactly why I am self-employed. Too many places I've worked over the 40+ years I've been in this trade I've seen people in a supervisory position with mediocre skills at best will try and make people under them look bad just to cover their asses. Especially if that "underling" shows talent. If you posses skill and are confident in you own ability then you try and teach without fear of someone taking your job. If not... find something else to do, but you'll probably suck at that too.
I'm an engineer and have been for 9 years now, but I have over a decade of machining experience specialty was programming and fixturing both of the VMC's and 8 Swiss machines. I basically ran the whole shop I started as a button pusher on a 1997 haas VF-02. The owner was the programmer, and the x axis failed after a year, and he picked up a demo VF-02SS 2006 machine with every option unlocked but ran the old code. I pulled the code converted from line by line to sub routines and added a ruffing tool and 5x the sfpm with my OWN carbide tools and did an entire week of production in 1 afternoon. After that he was shocked I talked him into getting me a Mastercam license and let me redoing all the machines within a month I had the shop dropping more parts in a day then it was doing in a month before. Also contracted with a local metal company to buy back are chips given we ran 99% cast aluminum at the time. I never asked for a raise, but 6 months after the changes. John dropped a 50k check on the table as a bonus and had me sign a bunch of paperwork, making me at 21 a partner in the company. 13mo later, he passed away from cancer and left the entire company to me I ran it for 9 more years and sold it off as the equipment just was to worn out and the cost to rebuild was so high most of the machines had 20k hours or more at that point. Took the cash invested in tesla and bought a house met my with a year after she to this day has no idea that I bought 5000 shares on tesla ipo and currently have 82800 shares in tesla and 10800 shares in Motorola. I personally know Elon from PayPal, so it wasn't a big deal to toss 75k at his startup. My wife has zero clue. We have a prenuptial agreement because she wanted to protect her savings and life's work (not from the usa) it basically makes everything from before the marriage 100% our own, and only the joint account can be split in case of separation. She lives a high life with fancy bags and shoes watches. I'm more the blue jeans and a jacket type, always working on something can't sit still. I work from home on and off make around 120k a year she makes around the same kids go to a reasonably good school and she has around 480k in savings and tends to treat me as the dead beat with only 80k in my 401k and 20k in my bank account she has never seen my brokerage accounts and never will, things have been falling apart for the relationship the last 2 years trying hard to make it work for kids but who knows what will happen. That's my life story.
Mechanical designer myself, before this I did a 3 years degree with handson machining and 2-3 years fulltime machining on 4 axis lathe, 4 axis milling and conventionnals machines. I don't know how I would design something without all that machining experience!!
Engineers with no machining experience are nearly worthless. They simply do not know how things react and wear after they are spun up. I've seen countless examples of feed rates that "should have" worked.
Materials change, but the song remains the same. For me it was architects and structural engineers. I worked as a trim carpenter for years, cabinets and stairs and anything else that no one else wanted to do. Overall I liked what I did, just finally had enough of the constant undercurrent of discontentment. Now I have my own shop, and guess who is happy again.
Engineers have machining experience. Machinists are a bit intense when it comes to quality. Sometimes a bit too much but it depends on the product. The word arguing sounds bad, but I believe arguments have to be presented in order for anything to upgrade. It starts with arguments. Arguing is fine. Complaining is not.
In Québec, Canada, there's two ways of becoming an engineer. Either its lots of books or you go through pratical trainning before going to Uni. So in Québec, most engineers have choosen the pratical path and therefore in Québec, most engineers have machining, welding, fabricating, 3D printing, material science background :)
Had the same issue got tired of him crying all the time so made him come out to the floor and asked him to show me how this part could be made faster he didn’t even know what to say
We had a credit score system that was implemented. It didn't work. I moved away from the CNC, to specialise in manual hand made produced components. But eventually we went back, after getting rid of a few undesirable engineers. Problem solved.
i work in a production shop, and they ask why production is stopped to make prototypes, and if they ask why the prototypes arent getting made. cant make every one happy, I had a production planner that would write 20,000 piece orders on 2 minute parts(240 parts a shift is 6 weeks at best ) and wonder why he couldnt get the other part they needed off the machine. Ultimately I've outlasted 4 "managers" in 8 years because I can make the parts and they can't.
I think this applies to every industry. In a number of odd jobs I've worked, process improvements are made from top down, and solely end up causing slowdowns, safety hazards, and angering the people on the floor.
Mechanical engineer, here. I argue/debate/discuss with my CNC programmer (who is a journeyman toolmaker) all the time. He's excellent, and I think I'm a great engineer. Either of us can individually do well - but working together we are way better.
Chief engineer's perspective here: No doubt that it could be handled better, starting with engineers putting on a pair of safety glasses, going down to the shop, understanding the challenges - how to design a part easier to fixture or design the fixture in parallel - and generally be part of the team and part of the solution. An "us" vs "them" culture is unproductive and unacceptable on my teams. That said, I have the customer, the CTO, and program management all breathing down my neck, "when will it ship", so as the engineer, you go to the design department and the prototype department asking "when will you finish", and you get a big shrug, or a guess hidden as an overconfident commitment, or worse, a bold face lie. Productivity isn't the only metric. Predictability can be as important as productivity. If a part will take 12 weeks, maybe I get a quote from outside if my in-house shop is backed up, maybe I 3-D print one piece for fit-up to take the part off the critical path, maybe I dual-source the part, or maybe I go to the customer, and say they won't get the system until next fall, but what I WON'T DO is give a shrug, a guess, or a lie when I will deliver a solution. I work in the truck powertrain industry. The EPA changes the emissions law, and we need to launch a new technology when the law comes into effect, or my customers can't sell trucks - PERIOD. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) don't care how backed up the prototype shop is - once 2024 hit, the tailpipe emissions drop 4x, from 0.2 to 0.05 g/bhp*Hr NOx for diesel engines. Be on-time, or go out of business. So, deadlines matter, and the ability to estimate jobs and hit your promises is as critical as cycle-time and exceeding tolerances. The only way to get better at estimating and delivering on-time is to spend the effort to track actual time vs forecast, promise vs delivery, and have the most experienced guy in the shop involved in estimating, or you will be perpetually out of control and late. So, challenge yourself to estimate how long a job will take YOU, write it in the little book with your speeds and feeds, and write down how long it ACTUALLY took you. When a new job comes in, you look back and say, "it was like that job, so probably about this long". No different than looking back at speeds and feeds from a similar job. Strive to be better at forecasting each month, each year, then you will be indispensable to me. Continue to miss your commitments, and my parts will be at an outside shop.
10 years of CNC machining and for the last 6 I had to deal with a programmer who had to rush every program and push everything to its limit. He didn't even run the graphics on his CAD software. We had SOO many mistakes. Like stupid, lazy ass mistakes along with crazy, inconsistent feeds and speeds. It was infuriating. I can write G&M code manually so easily now because I spent soo much time fixing his mistakes by hand. Then of course, when the boss comes asking why jobs are taking longer, we tell him why. Then he goes and asks the programmer (who is his friend) and the programmer blames it on us machinists. Said that we must be slowing everything down. I finally had enough and left 6 months ago. That job made me decide to make a career change. I'll get back to machining one day. For myself, not some company.
As a prototype machinist with 45+ years under my belt. I would say it takes over 1000 difference setup to become proficient not just putting a vice up and indicating it in and setting up 2 tools don't count. Faster is not always the best way. I ran parts slower and in the long run it was faster. You always have to add in time to change the tool when they wear out. You may go faster but after adding time for changing the bad tool and sometimes have to rerunning that tool again take time. If you have 1 part to setup for and run take more time to per part the 100 part per part. Engineers take one or two semesters of machining. When the new Engineers come in put in the shop for 1 year as a ME or manufacturing engineers that works.
Had a extremely relatable experience in the machining industry. I absolutely loved doing the work but was never able to find a company that valued me like I valued my work. Ultimately I ended up leaving the trade.. Not a day goes by without me missing the it.
Ive been in the high end church furniture 5 axis machine environment, countertop/solid surface/ granite industry with robosawjets, cnc's water jets and now in the plastic injection mold machining industry all in a operator, cnc programmer and or management position. I can tell you the most inefficient disconnect I have see in most companies is there is a lack of cross training or trying to bridge the gap on understanding the processes, the ceo is only a business man and knows nothing about machining, engineers, sales people have no machining background yet their bottom line is based off quoting. Its like a baker that knows all the ingredients and doesn't know how to operate a mixer or how long it takes. There will always be this disconnect when dealing with a high level of complexity but unfortunately most companies wont have the hard discourse to improve, reassess or dissipate the ignorance that dampens peoples livelihood and patience. This also takes a massive toll on culture and morale in any shop.
Same thing with software development. Measuring people on lines of code per day means people spend less time thinking about the best way to solve the problem and get actively penalised for writing efficient code - or even for removing redundant code.
Sounds like a shop I used to work at, giving a blanket 90 minute setup time no matter if you had to dial in a 13 tool turret with boring jaws and tapping in parts to absolute zero tir. I loved the work but hated the management!
I'm both...I'm a mechanical engineer that runs a sole proprietor cnc shop. I get it. My colleagues are learning because of my 7 years cnc experience. Things we all do not understand until we try to actually do the task we judge.
Iv had this exact situation at my last job. It’s toxic , and something similar but not as bad at my current one, when we get a new part, most of the time engineering quotes the time to program , and make the parts without asking the machinists for any input , we have a traveler system, so every step in order you clock in to to log your time. The only time they ask any questions is if the part is borderline too large to fit in our machines, and when they do ask, they don’t even ask the machinist they ask the supervisor who doesn’t do any machining. It’s down right impossible to hit any of the quote times on our. Parts and it makes us look inefficient, but they at least are willing to change the time per part most times. How can you quote jobs and charge the customer without talking to the machinists! It baffles me . None of these engineers know how to machine.
One of the big cost and time drivers is engineers not having a good background in GD&T which results in conflicting call outs or tighter tolerances or surface finishes than what is truly required for the part being designed.
Work about a year as a manufacturing engineer in a grinding cell at a bearing plant. I quickly learned that the operator knew more than the company MFG engineers about cycle time and product quality. I gave them the bonus to get better than 20% scrap rate. AIRCRAFT BEARINGS ARE TRICKY.
In order to improve a process, especially in a large company, you need a feedback loop. You start by documenting a process, performing that operation then confirming the legitimacy of the process and changing that process as needed using the feedback, with new SOPs introduced and more feedback afterwards. It should be a never ending cycle in order to improve constantly over time. This is also a ISO 9001 requirement. A feedback system in the form of quoting parts, tracking hours ect sounds like a fantastic way for management to begin to improve and understand their own process over the long term, so I see no problem with this. When engineers are telling machinists why a part is taking too long, it is because nobody has a good understanding of eachothers trade. The best thing to happen in these situations is education, you can actually show them the how and why and perhaps once they learn more they can put their new understanding into future parts for better ease of machining. Regardless however, an engineer believes there is a problem, contacts management, management begins to track time , material and costs (good thing). Quotes are not matching up with real life costs (good thing, now we know adjustments need to be made during quoting)..... ditching the entire feedback system so nobody knows what is really going on... that is a bad idea. There is a book id highly recommend called the 5th discipline, the art of a learning organization that gives some fantastic insight into these types of situations.
I worked in an ISO9001 registered company for 33 years. I spent most of it as a process planning and methods engineer. This entailed, amongst other things, creating job sheets complete with times for each process. I used established times for the initial estimated time then, after the first production of a part, corrected the times I was often called to the shop during manufacture to discuss times or manufacturing problems with the guys on the shop floor). The management and accounting departments were always trying to stop me from upping times and wanted existing times to be reduced to make the part cheaper! As I kept pointing out to them, this produced bad data on the system and the result of bad data is making a loss not a profit. I told them if they wanted the parts cheaper then find someone else who will make the parts to the same standards but cheaper. They always failed, standards always make thing expensive after all. I liaised between the production shop and the designers and was in the loop for drawing release so made sure parts were designed in the best way to keep costs down and that errors on drawings were corrected before I would sign them off for release. It also gave me advance warning of the need for any special tooling so it could be in place before it was needed. Fixing drawing errors always costs more once they are released into the system. If we required machining at any point in the production process I always went to the machine shops to get an estimate because it was not my area of expertise, my usual aim was to design out such requirements wherever possible to keep the part in one department and so keep control of the lead time on a part.
feedback loops can be great, but bad data can be much worse than no data. when you have all sorts of people trying to game the feedback loop, you have LOTS of bad data.
That is exactly what happens at my job now. Idiots want to give us a special smartphone to input what part on machine now, and all timings and stuff described in video. And time quotas are smaller and smaller. Performance will actually drop.
My inside shop is small and we farm out a lot. I’ve been using the same shops for years and usually let them make the parts and charge me time and material. If it’s a large qty I let them make a few and then quote. The few times I’ve been surprised I went to the shop and watched them make a part. Usually I end up buying them a special fixture or jig and they require.
I had a boss that did the same thing to us ! He also added that I can get these parts made on the outside for a lot less ! We said do it then we can compare ! Silence followed and he said just try to do better !
For things like that it does sound like a system that could help, if the motives were different. Say the fixtures could create a better idea on run times, faster machinists could be used to help the slower machinists, etc. if they worked in unison rather than creating a way to lower the persons subjective quality it could’ve worked better. Best way is usually find the best or the fastest machinists and work with them in a focus group thereafter until more standardization can take place
happened to me too. clock in , run parts clock out , never giving time to put parts in stock and not enough run time, then jumping your butt for not getting 85percent or better plus wanted to be clocked in on jobs the whole shift, 100 percent of the time .
Bean counters: the bane of every machinist. However, not all are bad, you just have to be ready to bring your A-game when dealing with one. In other words, know what you are talking about. The owner of the shop I manage is one and it's been one of the biggest learning experiences I've ever had. He isn't a machinist or an engineer. He's a businessman. I feel very fortunate because my uncles, who started the shop, were machinists and the new owner brings a whole new perspective. I wish I would have met him when my body was in my prime, my body wouldn't be so broken and my financial outlook would be a lot better. Most of the engineers I've dealt with are reasonable but I've also dealt with some that think we just throw a piece of stock at the machine and it just spits it out perfect. Probably the biggest issues I've had with engineers before I was quoting and programming full time was them shipping/dropping off material for a part with a flatness requirement but they leave little to no material to compensate for springing/twisting of the part when pocketing or face milling. All in all, I think this was a good story but I can see how some engineers are a little offended. Just keep in mind, they need us just as much as we need them. None of us are perfect. PSYCH! I'm a machinist, we're perfect.😜🙄
I rely on Mom and Pop shops and have to respect that some of my jobs are worth enough money that I could put a shop out of business over a dispute. There is a lot of trust and communication of motives.
I've been an engineer for a small company for a while now. I had the same question, why was it taking so long to make these parts? Instead of changing everything though, I just learned how to program and run the machines. Now I understand, and thanks to you guys.. I'm the best machinist we have 😅.
@@ThyialIndustries you were a button pusher not a machinist. There is a big difference between pushing buttons and programming a CNC and operating a Manual mill and lathe.
So I am an engineer, but I worked in production for ten years before I got a degree. This is not a case of engineering vs. machinist imo. This is a problem with management. When engineers come up with manufacturing times it is an estimate based on math, estimate. Management needs to account for that and there needs to be efficiencies but in place to correct. There also needs to be an open line of communication between engineering and manufacturing on how times are calculated. Engineering does not get to dictate the final method of calculating.
I had my supervisor come to me to tell me the Boss didn't like the way I was machining the part I was making. Of course the Boss sat behind the window of his office and watched us in the shop. I told my supervisor I was open to suggestion on how the part should be made. What does the Boss suggest ? My supervisor said the Boss doesn't have a suggestion he just doesn't like the way I was making the part. I told him to go pound sand. Part was made and passed inspection. We had one older machinist quit over stuff like this. Another filed a lawsuit against the company and Boss. He got a raise and the Boss was not to bother him again. This machinist later started his own CNC company. We had a contract to machine a 130mm o-jive for a anti=tank missile . We could machine the o-jive in 20 minutes . The company set up another department to machine the same part. One day the 2 young fellows from the new department told me they cut our machine time in half. I said great. After inspecting the parts they machined all came to us to be recut and back to the 20 minutes run time. I left this company and went to work at a university for the next 25 years where I was my own boss. The university hired a engineer from another university to design a physics device for research. The device required a driveshaft 4 feet long to drive a turbine from an electric motor. When I got the drawings I asked the engineer if we would be using drawn-over-manrdul tubing ? He said no just regular tubing. I made 6 driveshafts and even had them balanced. The device would walk off the table at 750 rpm. I made my own drive shaft out of 3/4" diameter shafting. I didn't tell anyone. I tested my shaft to 3500 rpm and it was smooth as butter. I called everyone in to watch the test. After I told them it was my shaft they were not happy. They used my shaft.
Data is a wonderful thing when used for good but if there is weakness in the management it inevitably becomes a club for punishment rather than a spear for improvement.
Sounds like the directorship needs to step in and give all the departments some air time to work on internal process flows and provide training company wide on responsibility and accountability. Does the company actually know the unit cost of manufacture? If not then someone asking to collect time stamps and how they go about doing that wouldn’t be my primary concern. If they do then question; How strong is the part scoping and design control and how can it be improved. Why are parts making it to the machine that can’t be run and how can it be mitigated. Obtain from each department and all individuals in it any details of any known non-productive/lost time incidents and their ideas of ways to improve. Then; Department heads harmonise, formulate a plan, build up a proposal, communicate proposal in the department. Department heads provide calculated cost of improvement(s) and operational loss/risk they relate to. Business analyses risk/opportunities. Once this process flow is smoothed out/the business has furnished you with knowledge of these processes/you have without doubt upheld your part in the quality management system/ then moan about the Engineer. If not then you should be aware of how accountable you are for your situation right now progressing into a rant worthy video. As you aren’t aware of the problem the Engineer has, you don’t respect the financial interlock and the business process that is fundamental to supporting your platform to practice your skill, pass on value, earn money. It should be as ingrained as health and safety in the workplace which you do care about as you demonstrate a lot of good practice. That is a blunt factual truth. A good example of a healthy workflow would look a little like; Example: Memo: Machine Department agrees that we have no idea why we are missing unrealistic deadlines and impossible tasks. All departments concerned have reviewed the process flow to the shop floor and we agree it is flawless and we as a company of people are acting flawlessly also, we require an operational review and data capture to highlight our inefficiency. Cost: 5k, Risk: Full toxic environment resulting in staff leaving and becoming direct competitors or the business knowing all their strategies and weaknesses. Business highlights opportunity/risk and allocates capital. Engineer and department discuss execution of a previously agreed and well thought out proposal for improvement, so all are reminded and/or made aware of the intention, scope, roles and responsibilities. Scope review, plan and budget established by Engineer and department. Obtain key data points and type of analysis required to analyse issues as previously scoped out and agreed upon. Engineer contacts OEM to find best practice for extracting data points to export for analysis and discusses the Company of people’s mutually agreed requirements. Extracts data with support of machine department and proofs data set and analysis type. Engineer allocates or automates analysis. Engineer reviews outcomes. Engineer highlights issues and solution. Business, Engineer and Machine department discuss and implement solution or request capital as required. Monitor and review. No requirement for Rant video.
Great job. The only thing that helps segregation withing a dysfunctional company is exacerbating the problem with "us vs them" mentality. Of course, you weren't at fault at all, it's the stupid engineers who did not cooperate with you.
This is not an engineer vs machinist issue at all, it is a humanity issue, the issue being the desire of some humans to control others. I am a mechanical engineer who has owned and run a job shop for 32 year (currently 20 employees). Success is based on earning the respect of machinists, leading by example, and understanding and applying laws of energy and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle to your workers, as in, they have limited ability and motivation to stay focused and perform so you can push here and there but expect push back over there. Also, the more you monitor the more you create a state of distrust hence disrespect and ultimately burnout. Knowing the strengths of each worker and capitalizing on that in a laissez faire style is key. There are some worker who don't immediately respond to this environment, I have seen it take 6 months for the light bulb to click (and some NEVER get it it's true), but I would never run any business with Nazi like management.
Wish I could talk to the fellow who told this story. I agree with certain topics but short-sighted in others. Engineers have there responsibilities as well as machinists, at the end of the day the company as a whole need to make quality parts to ship.
Sounds familiar and I do not work in machining. I am industrial engine technician by trade or a fancy way of saying a mechanic on big engines and the company I work for has been implementing employee performance metrics even though the manufacturer of the engines does not have flat rate metrics for the engines. Needless to say they give unrealistic expectations for meeting a flat rate which is determined by a salesperson who has no experience working on the engine or understands the scope of work. This company also wonders why they are losing employees left and right during the preludes to a recession while constantly nitpicking performance.
Mechanical engineer here. I do not understand how is it possible to design something without machining experience. When I am not sure about manufacturing I go to a machinist and ask. The pieces of advice that you get from people with hands-on experience (e.g. machinists) are gold.
I do this too, it’s the only way to truly get the best of both worlds and save everyone’s time!!
I'm a hobbyist 3D printer/designer and I 100% agree. You have to know if a feature is difficult or cost effective, or at least know if it's possible to begin with before implementing it and sending it to production.
Yes..even for tolerances and tolerance zone is important to know little bit about machining..I am working in aerospace and it's so funny how engineers think that cutting through the steel is the same as cutting through butter.They end up with part 0,2mm larger than it should be because material push that tool outside the given pathline. :'D
In recent years, I had a design for a tesla turbine, for which I had already acquired several discs, which I was checking around for initial pricing on drilling 4 holes in. One shop stopped answering my emails entirely after I told them that the discs had been coated in titanium nitride... the next 'prototype cnc' outfit, I visited in person; in talking to the guy (who looked like he personally power-lifted all of his machines into place), it seemed like the apparently simple project was some sort of rocket science beyond his head (I guess maybe his education stopped at his high school shop classes or something!?); first he had to be informed that tungsten carbide should cut titanium nitride, then addressing the problem seemed too difficult to him to fathom (I prompted him indicating that maybe they could just use some sort of ~jig to do it), at which point he quoted me $100 'per part' just for drilling said 4 holes in each disc!? It would seem that I could buy my own equipment for what it might cost to complete a project of any significant complexity with that kind of pricing & attitude.
Those are the best engineers.. They are gold.
For nearly 46 years, I worked in the tooling end of a fairly large company where the things we produced stayed in-house. It was at one point, nearly the same scenario you described about the clocking in and out and trying to put a number on an employee was tried. Some success was gained, but everyone cheated on their reports anyway. The CFO came to our department and wanted to know what was going on and would spend a day or MORE with every guy in the department to see first-hand how the jobs were done. He gained a better respect of the technical nature of what we had to do and learned that it wasn't a production type environment, and EVERYTHING required different machines, different setups, and a vast knowledge of the steps involved in something as simple as a few parts nests for a testing machine or a set of holding jaws. It was actually refreshing to see someone in upper management actually get involved instead of picking up the phone and bitching to the department head.
That’s good leadership.
As a general you have to humble yourself & seek info from the front line troops. They are seeing things first hand & have the best info on the situation.
I believe the best thing that engineers can do when Improving a process, part, etc., is to grab machinists from the floor and have small meetings. For me, the meetings help me believe that my opinion is Important and that teamwork is the best aid. When we sit in separate pods and complain that one department isn’t right or wrong , nothing gets accomplished. I’m trying to push this, because we have a lot of this toxic workplace environment at my current employer. It’s a work in progress. It’s a lot more exciting when everyone is on the same page working together too.
I would do the same, but in reverse direction: make the engineer come to the machinist. It's all nice and well to CAD a part, but to see the machining (and all the prepwork, fixturing etc.) is kind of abstract behind a screen, even though software can visualize the toolpath on screen.
I have to be honest, my background is somewhat different. I've been a process engineer in the steel industry for just over 9 years. That meant a combination of sitting behind a desk but also on donning the required protective gear and stepping onto the production floor or the control room, seeing production, chatting with operators. There is such a wealth of practical useful information to be learned from them.
Yeah. Somehow, when two parties disagree, discussing the problem seems like an absurd idea to some...
Or, in this case, simply complaining was easier and provided the satisfaction of "I told you this process would be bad, therefore everything is your fault."
We used to have a similar problem until we started safety meetings every morning they didn't have to be long but we had to have them kept everybody in the loop on the same page and made everyone important and productive. It's amazing what you can do in 5 to 15 minutes while everyone's drinking their coffee and normally would be out on the floor talking not producing a thing.
Then they find out that letting the machinist build all the automation is cheaper than an engineer. Then the new HR lady fires you for working on the automation and not running the parts on the machine. that's what the did to me. And that's when I went from employee to supplier.
Want to improve the situation between a machinist and an engineer? Every engineer has to be able to machine parts if they don’t it stays an academic discussion. In Germany those engineers usually make an apprenticeship before university. Mixing people is the best way to improve the quality and speed.
This is exactly what I told to my team leader before I quit my job. Now I have no team leader, no engineers, no programmers above me - can't be happier
There are 2 educational path in Germany. There are also engineers without apprenticeship before university.
I'm a CNC programmer and machinist myself. I finished my apprenticeship around 3 years ago so am still fairly fresh and learning. At my company the entire quality department have no machining experience at all between all 4 of them, the mangers also have either less programing skills than me, or just haven't done any machining in 20 odd years, they are great men, smart too but they deny needing help or that they can be wrong, they don't even ask me to sit in meetings or let me join meetings with new parts, even despite the fact the multiple times I have spotted complications on parts they have not noticed.
If management doesn't allow for you to grow, then eventually you will walk. And you will be better for it.
From where are you Brother. That thing happens sometimes to me
@@JS-cs8gz i did walk out, tried a few other places, went back 3 months later, but this time they had a new attitude and so did i. i am now pushing to be more involved in meetings and working with our quality department to help them understand machining processes. Plus most of the management retire in like 2 decades, i'm only 25
It's that way everywhere. We are the lowly stupid grunts that we're to stupid to go to college
@@wendull811 I did go to college, got a foundation degree and all, i can program long milling machines by hand with just a drawing. i can program better than my production manager
There are always 2 sides to every coin, titans. Presenting just one point of view is never good.
I am a mechanical engineer in a company that produces hydralic products (not parts mind you, whole products). Our company has >500 people working in it and about 120 CNC Machines. I can work and setup about 90% of them.
Every time I go and talk about a new part for a product with some of the "older" machinists and setup guys, all I hear is how this part is impossible and it can't be done. And in my 13 years of work experience, we've never failed to produce the "impossible" part.
Now you talk about how bad engineers are, but I've seen machinists intentionally crashing machines just to "prove" you are wrong. I've seen machinists writing programs to keep the spindle running, so the time efficiency tracker won't detect idle time. Smart people are very creative.
We don't know the whole context here, except what the narrator wants us to know, but there are bad aples on both sides of the fence. And they are usually much less than the good apples. Now I am following you mostly for entertainment value, I don't know if you have an engineering department, but from what I've seen from your videos and attitude towards engineers, I would guess not. Don't be narrow minded, stay hungry.
I have the same feeling. I find that in general, it's not really known what an engineer actually does. Only the 'bad' things are often stereotyped in my opinion. As if we think we are better and can never make mistakes.
Good on you. I’m tired of hearing all the engineer slander and the “us vs them” mentality that goes on within departments of the same damn company.
The most important thing a business can do is stop tolerating the fragile egos of managers and have open communication and cross training between departments.
I was thinking the exact same thing when I watched this video. This is one of if not my favorite youtube channels, but this video is tone def and one sided. I did not hear any suggestion that maybe the engineers should spend some time on the shop floor learning "why" things are done a certain way. I got to witness first hand last week that 30 years of machining experience does not mean you are immune to making mistakes that cost the company thousands of dollars and days worth of lost production time. It was a perfectly preventable problem that could have been avoided had the machinist followed some pretty standard best practices when it comes to programming.
Clocking in and out of jobs takes next to no time when compared to the time required to setup and run the job it is literally a mater of seconds. I don't know why the "degrees n' stuff" comment bugs me so much, but as an engineer I know that my degree doesn't mean that I know everything. Just like having an engineering degree doesn't make me an expert machinist, having 30 years of machining experience doesn't mean you are the worlds greatest machinist or that you are constantly working on improving run times, tool, life, part quality, reducing down time etc.
For supposedly being a channel dedicated to learning and education, this video has done nothing but give young machinists reasons not to work with or trust their engineers. If they really wanted to make things better, this channel would find an engineer they trust and do a whole video series on how machinists and engineers can and should work together.
You're a rare breed bro, don't read too much into it.
As an engineer with only a few years of career experience, I've seen exactly what Trevor describes. I've also, like you, seen production sabotage themselves to spite engineering and management. So yes, it goes both ways, but don't discount the one side just because the other was not presented in this one anecdote. Have you ever heard/read an anecdote that shows both sides intentionally screwing the other? Me neither. That's why they have many anecdote videos. They have a video similar to each anecdote you presented - go look.
Re: "I don't know if you have an engineering department, but from what I've seen from your videos and attitude towards engineers, I would guess not."
Barry doesn't hold a degree, but he is an engineer. He and Trevor both design parts and tooling. Barry meticulously calculates machine capabilities for their extreme cuts. Since many engineers are glorified designers (I dip in and out of that category), I would say that Titans of CNC doesn't need a dedicated engineering department because some of their machinists fill the role of engineers.
Don't be narrow minded - don't judge a library by one video.
I'm a mechanical engineer and a senior CNC programmer and machinist, I never argue with myself
LOL!
The company that I previously worked at is using a similar system for inspector and machinist. Every morning both departments have meetings to go over how efficient the whole group is doing. If it’s low and one person is to blame then they get called out during the meeting. The metric is calculated by how long each part takes to inspect or machined. So on the traveler if it says that a part takes 5 minutes to inspect and there is 12 pieces then you will have to measure it in 60 minutes. Even if you are new to the trade the company expect you to run a part like a seasoned machinist. If you don’t meet the time then your efficiency is low and the mangers will pay you a visit. The micromanager don’t want to hear any set up slow down issue since they all want numbers. This system is very flawed and it is making everyone put speed over quality of work. You can’t thoroughly inspects or machined parts if you are being rushed. The quality manager who is also a DQR don’t even inspect the parts that they are require to. They are assuming the previous inspectors thoroughly checked the parts. The company is saying that this system is to help quote jobs better which is a lie. This system is in place to track employees. An engineer said that this employee tracker is called a Baan system. The managers is always requesting process improvement forms to make a job faster. No machinist is helping with that even if they know that they can improve the machining time.
That's just a failure of the system implemented. No greenhorn can machine or set up the same as a skilled machinist. Most cost calculation or timing programs will have a fridge factor for new vs skilled personnel and illness and so on. Any company worth it's salt will be using this and expect some time differences over the amortisation of the part. One offs are expected to take much much longer than any batch or series part
If efficiency is being measured in anything other than "late deliveries," you're wasting too much time tracking efficiency.
Damn, sounds just like the place I got fired from recently. A new supervisor came in and just killed the flow by prioritizing numbers over quality, and _then_ complained to the higher-ups about part quality.
I worked for 7 years as a machinist and then 35 years as an engineer for what was, at that time, probably the largest and best machine too builder in the US. I always used to say that they never sold one of my drawings, the best I could hope to do was to help the guys in the shop make parts and build machines efficiently and quickly. I retired 7 years ago. There are pretty much no machinists or engineers left there. Only beancounters, buck passers, and mouse clickers. I'm glad I don't have to put up with that crap!
I promise, not all engineers are like this.
I promise you most of them are.
A good machinist is an engineer. Should be able to programme on the machine awell as using CAD. Also a good machinist is one that started on manual machines. I think ypu get the tactile feeling of maching and materials.
Hold up. Being a good machinist doesn't mean you can use the laws of physics to calculate the static and dynamic stresses on a part in service and sometimes during production (usually you use rules of thumb for production). Machinists are skilled workers and engineers can't replace them, but don't ever conflate the two, they're chalk and cheese.
I respect the physical side of the process enough to know I can't do it but most of the physical side doesn't even know enough about engineering to even have a clue about what they don't know and just circle jerk about how engineers don't know anything.
@MiG82au We all come under the bracket of engineers my friend. I wasn't knocking Engineers who work on the mathematical and theory side. I'm a machinist and a fitter and come under the bracket of engineering department at my work place. Engineering just has all different areas of expertise.
I was getting at the fact a good machinist is a good engineer and not just an operator of a cnc machine 👍🏻
Whenever you have two parties arguing about what is possible and what will damage the machine ultimately reality will be the deciding factor. I work with engineers and I worry less about being right all the time and just try to make sure I’m communicating my best estimation to those stakeholders involved. If I tell someone something might not work and it doesn’t work that’s OK but if I tell everyone that this won’t be a problem and it fails miserably than I have done a poor job of estimating and communicating expectations
Another mechanical engineer here. I worked in a machine shop before I started to college. I had a better idea of what it took to make and assemble designs than most engineers. I still took my "in process" designs ( I was still creating drawings) to the machine shop and asked for the machinists advice. My designs were not perfect but they were better than most. Pretty soon the shop personnel were fighting over who would run my designs. I still had to take a charge number (time was charged to a project for billing purposes) to talk to the shop personnel. Years later when I was supervising engineers, I tried to create a training system where new engineers (new grads or experienced) would spend a week working in each "department" (planning, purchasing, manufacturing, quality, etc.) so engineers understood how their designs actually worked. The only one I managed to get approved was field test. The bean counters would not come up with a way to "charge" the training time. Only Field Test dept understood how important it was for engineers to understand what their designs caused. Eventually two other departments approved a few hand picked engineers for "special projects".
None of this is as bad as the system your video described. Management needs to understand what they are managing. Otherwise the whole company breaks down. Southwest Airlines Christmas 2022 is a perfect example. Unfortunately, it take a long term vision that seems to be lost now days.,
I am a machinist, and have worked many times with customers/engineers who have no idea how machining works, how long it takes and impose unnecessarily tight tolerances.
I remember a engineer who required a tolerance on an 800x110x25mm plate with a parallelism requirement of + - 0.015mm on a plate that they were only going to weld.🤦♀ didn't seem like he understood that having strict tolerances increases delivery time and price.
I have more than once received a part to be made, and we have given them a delivery time, and then the engineer comes the next day and is angry because we were not finished long before the specified delivery time that we had given to the engineer/customer.
funny enough, one of these engineers who called about the delivery time several times a day, when the part was ready and could be picked up, there was no hurry and the part was left for almost 3 weeks before it was picked up.😮💨🤷♀
i think to optimize production times is a task for both engieneers and machinists. Machinists know their machines capabilitys and how long if takes for certain features to be manufactured. If you design a door knob with all kinds of crazy contures that need to be made on a 5 axis machine in hour long finishing passes with small tools to get in small pockets and stuff, the programmers possibilitys to reduce cycle time while maintaining the quality are pretty limited. However if the machinst and the engieneers are talking to each other and are both looking at the part and figuring out what features are even necessary or can be changed in a way that makes them much easier and faster manufacturable, thats when you will cut times down significantly
You don't even have to go that far, I generally include handwritten notes on my drawings that explain why parts were designed the way they were, and which features are actually critical and which tolerances have to be met for which reason. Found out years and years ago that if you explain to the person doing the manufacturing what you're actually trying to achieve, that they'll usually figure out a way to make it do exactly what it's supposed to do. Especially for a one-offs, the main thing is that it works and that you know what you actually manufactured, it's kind of to be expected that you'll have to make little changes I think? And trying to do time tracking on such parts is inherently ridiculous to begin with, it takes as long as it takes to manufacture it. If you want it done quicker, figure out a way to build it entirely out of laser cut sheet metal and off-the-shelf nuts and bolts...
Now if we're talking volume production, that's where engineering comes more to the forefront when trying to hit certain production volumes. For example, sometimes it's more efficient to go for a slower process with more overall throughput. It's sometimes hard to explain why you'd go for the method that takes 20 minutes instead of the one that takes 5 minutes, but if that machine that takes 20 minutes to achieve the same result only costs a fifth of the price and takes up a tenth of the space, then it's way more economical to have five of those machines chugging away at it for 20 minutes each. I think a lot of misunderstandings between engineers and other staff arise from such decisions.
I worked as an engineer for 35 years. I always tried to work and lead with the belief that as an engineer I knew what we were trying to accomplish. At the same time I worked with the belief that I needed the expertise of the people I was working with to accomplish this goal. This included; office staff, draftsmen, welders, inside machinists, outside machinists, layout personnel, fitters, operators, etc. If I saw something that I thought was wrong or I didn't understand I started by asking questions.
At times, like any human, things could become confrontational. I can say I was not always correct. I can also say I encountered errors that cost tens of millions of dollars. In general, errors of this type came not from tradesmen, but from middle management taking shortcuts.
If you want to reduce the time it takes to make something, ask the person making it. If you want to have something work, ask the users.
I used to get complaints from operators about how dark the work environment was. The next time I designed something similar, I increased the lighting as much as feasible. Lights are a small cost compared to the $2M for the end product.
When I run into this problem, the first thing I say is " show me" . Trying to rush people, especially on prototypes, usually ends taking more time.
At the last place I worked at they had all the part times set for manual drilling and milling. But once we got CNC’s and my supervisor and my self started building programs for them. To speed things up they started complaining we were taking too long to make the programs and it was costing them money.
But when they seen that we could run the same parts in a fraction of the time they were happy. Well at least the owners were. The engineers always told us the stuff we we’re trying to do could not be done and we proved them wrong. Than they wanted to know how we learned how to do it we just showed them your videos. Now they just bring us the new blueprints and see if it possible and how long it will take. Currently using a Haas TM3. we had to learn how to use these on our own because even they did not know how to use them. Anyway thanks for all the great information I have learned so much from just watching your videos. As I have never ran a CNC till now.
There is a big difference between the "in theory" mode of some engineers and the real world.
As a person with a degree in accounting and a father who was a registered architect and structural engineer, I learned the best of both sides. Fresh out school with a degree, my first task for the company was to learn how to empty a 48 footer as a team member that was loaded with random packed boxes of merchandise. This was way before shrink wrapped pallets were the norm.
Thus, this was my first experience with "theory" and "the real world".
when doing prototype in the past i got alot projects wants you to do laser cut size with a CNC milling. i think this problem happening all around the world, so i think CAD/CAM/CNC should be same person. i can do all but doesn't have any advantage in a company, unless u work on ur own...
Absolutely right...👏
A good programmer is a machinists best friend.
Most software takes care of the "engineering" nowadays? 🤔
As a mechanical engineering student, I wish to clarify that this behavior is a minority of engineers. I don't always understand why we are stereotyped like this. We also want the best for everyone. Ps. Currently learning on a 5 axis CNC
I agree it’s not a majority, but it’s not a small minority either. I imagine once you get out of school and into the field you’ll have a better understanding of why this has been a topic of discussion for decades in manufacturing. Good luck on your journey, thanks for watching, and thanks for being an engineer that takes the time to learn about machining 👊🏼
How would u know that as just a student? Lol no offence but ive been doing machining for years and from the 20 companies ive worked for. It is certainly not the minority. Ive met maybe 1-2 out of 100's that even understood the machining process. Most sit in their plush office's, and only come out to complain about why my machine cant run at lightspeed.
But im glad ur trying to be better, keep it up and change the game.
This goes back to manufacturing industry tribalism and "us vs. them" attitude that is super easy to materialize. When successes and failures are determined by a work of 2 separate groups then it's very easy for conflict to appear. You need to have some solid leadership to understand that both groups just wants to look pretty to the main boss.
@@verakoo6187 you should be worrying why you’ve been through 20 shops bud 😂 I’ve met plenty of you in my 15 years. I’m still young and I’m sure I’ll meet plenty more. Your a dime a dozen
I understand, but it's not that I have no work experience. I often work in companies during the summer holidays together with engineers and then I learn a lot. Hence my experience and I can't agree that engineers are such tyrants. In Europe you have something like technical education and general education in secondary schools. I come from technical education and now study in university. Unlike my fellow students who come from general education, I have already stood behind the machines and I do have that experience.
Ive been a machinist for 20 odd years now. I constantly come across extremely difficult to machine features or tolerances on components that really dont need to be so small because the engineers have no machining experience. If they spoke to us about parts we could probably help reduce cylce time therefore cost. Also i think a tooling expert should be involved. There are some amazing tools available nowadays
The engineers at my job are notorious for tightening up dimensions. A lot of our parts get nickel plated, instead of doing the math and giving me the most tolerance, they get lazy and just take .0005 off the mean and cut the tolerance in half.
They'll stop doing that when they request quotes for expensive things like molds that have aerospace tolerances instead of necessary tolerances. When each reputable mold shop says, "No quote", or quotes some super-high value, they'll start to think twice.
Sometimes tolerances are company policy or a coustomer requirement and nothing can be done about it. We have this problem n aerospace a. Lot
Honestly I don't think the system was a terrible idea, yes I agree it slowed down production and yes I hate unrealistic deadlines. However, if they used the metrics to figure out if 4 out of 10 machinist were slacking and stealing time from the company. I don't see an issue with it and would actually see it as a good idea for weeding out the bad eggs. Obviously the way you describe it, they were using those metrics to threaten you. That's not okay. But, I've worked in plenty of places where 5-6 lads just don't give a damn and it leads to their work being piled on everyone else who was doing their job right.
Yeah, we make prototypes every single day where I work. You have to clock in on the parts so your times gets registered. If youre then the only one working on that parts and it takes longer than calculated - as long as you can address why, its often cool.
This also means that the slacking morons can't just hide, which is fine.
'Software & Computer Engineer'(+) here : sounds like they were attempting to implement what would be considered effectively a 'profiling' framework to analyze what would otherwise to them be a 'black box' system; in software, profiling does often indeed slow the system down considerably (the objective is to identify the bottlenecks, so that they can be optimized, routed around, or the system itself rearchitected {or capabilities added} for improved performance, at which time the profiling framework would be removed to allow for optimal performance again). I doubt that they considered the egos of the humans involved all that much (in my day, engineers had to score in the top ~2% of the populace just to get into an engineering program, much less get out of one [~50% at my U], so they probably didn't think that any competition on the basis of relative problem solving intelligence was likely even a factor, though it sounds you may have effectively tried some sort of ~one-upmanship games with them : I think it likely might have improved things to just give them a few 'day on the job' activities spent meeting tolerances in front of a lathe, or programming cnc's in gcode, or something). Such data could be used for a wide variety of analytics, inclusive of all that you've covered & more.
I graduated from mechanical engineering school and got into the design/manufacturing scene right after. And I truly believe that to be a good engineer, you need to also be heavily involved with the manufacturing process. I run, a machine/fab shop and do design work. I talk to all my old professors about how important this is.
Right on - it's perfectly fine to run time studies to track costs. Not cool to use those numbers to beat on the machinists without a baseline of comparison, like farming some parts out and comparing costs. Root of the problem is people who can't do what you do and have never walked a mile in your shoes thinking they are qualified to judge. I was a design engineer for many years and promise the same thing happens to us.
Lol sounds like the company I work for, they also slap the quoted time for programming and machining for one off parts, so if a programmer takes 9 hours (and usually does and still gets it wrong because he isn't a machinist, go figure) to do his part on a 10 hour job, the machinist is left with 1 hour to correct programs, setup up machine, prove and cycle. And gets the blame when the hours are over quoted. Just have to keep telling them it is what it is. Shoddy management. Cant wait to leave.
I don’t understand why there is such a divide between engineers and machinists. Here in the UK it is almost drilled into you that you are either one or the other and never shall the two skill sets cross! Absolutely ridiculous mentality in my opinion. I am an Engineer with a “degree n stuff” but I am also a hobby machinist, and do some manual machining at work when required, and I simply don’t understand how you can be an engineer without At least an understanding if not a passion for machining. I often discuss order of operations and machining processes with our machine shop when I design a product because if you want the end result to be competitively priced, you have to make it as quick and easy to machine as possible. Engineers need to swallow their pride and take advice from production. After all “if in doubt Ask” works both ways! Or at least it should do in my opinion.
As a machinist i think i could help a lot if i got to see the engineers drawing before release for manufacture. I could just highlight any difficult features or tolerances. Just bring it to their attention. If its still needed then at least the engineer would know 💶💶💵💸
@@EVOMAN14 if your company operates a quality management system such as ISO 9001 they should be doing design reviews that you could ask to be involved in. Not sure of the intricacies but the quality manual should be available for all employees to read and should highlight who is responsible /required for each process such a design reviews. Be warned though, you might open a can of worms 😆.
@@alexjamieson3822 we are a sub contract machining company. We make a lot of prototype parts for the oil and gas industry. I think earlier collab between us and the customer would be benificial for everyone 👍🏼 i wish i could communicate this to our customers. Im not the boss 👎🏼😂
@@EVOMAN14 yes being a subcontractor does make it a touch more difficult. We are in the same boat but we design subsea oil and gas products that we have made by a subcontract machine shop. We are fortunate to have a really good relationship with our subcontractors and welcome any feed back from them. I always try to make their lives easier whenever the design intent permits.
@@alexjamieson3822 where in the UK are you if you dont mind me asking? I am between Inverness and Aberdeen. Most of our jobs go to Aberdeen. Downhole tooling mostly. Its a great job. Another issue i have is that i would love to see some of our products assembled and working. Or even some more info about what they will be used for
I’m an engineer that started as a machinist. From my experience it’s about a 50/50 split on responsibility of why jobs take longer to run than quoted. I had one operator half speeds and feeds because quote “it was too loud.” A lot of guys also just crank out programs and don’t ever see them run. If the engineer isn’t standing next to you on a virgin program how do you know what’s a good move and what’s not. We are approaching a job with a preconceived notion of what might be problematic and try to mitigate those problems before releasing programs and fixtures but there’s frequently things that might be overlooked or things that aren’t problems at all. Continuous improvement only works when there’s a foundation for what’s already a place that can be improved
Situations like that are created by people that hate the ones they're ostensibly helping. These controlling haters are attracted to positions where they can torment the ones they hate.
Similarly, people that liked hurting children were attracted to positions with organizations like the former Boy Scouts or Brownies.
I wish company owners were more savvy about the reasons that some people would be attracted to leadership positions.
It, like a lot of situations, boils down to a literal battle of good vs evil. That might sound simplistic but it fits the bill.
Most of interpersonal interactions reduces to that very battle.
Life is often a war zone and we're here to survive and learn. It's a shame it's that way but it is.
Cling to God and pray your way through it. He'll help if you'll ask Him.
Thx..❤💙🙏
@@Defender_928 :)
Dear Old Dad was an engineer, but before he went to engineering school (BSEE, MSME) he worked as a machinist. And he was always having issues with the "beancounters" in the front office, similar to what was described in the video.
As an Electrical Engineer that knows how to run cnc machines from a cheap desktop 3d printer to a Hass mini mill and a Stratasys Fortus 450mc. Also worked in an additive manufacturing lab. I've seen a lot of changes and blaming in different industries so it mostly depends. If I need to quote a part I go based on what machines that will be doing the work and if I don't have good experience using that machine I wont quote it. If I can't quote it i would talk to a machinist that will do it and let them look through it. If its an external job or personal piece that I cannot make in house i will talk with the machinist and see the easiest way to make it with their tooling and there comfort, especially with tolerancing. I say tolerancing because some rather use a manual machine for some parts and I use a metric CNC that I've tuned for micron precision.
I currently work at a company that does the same thing, just that the times are set from 30 years ago and all the old timers keep buggin me for being too fast so the manneger dosent reduce the time, even tho all the times are set for manual machines and we now run cnc, it fustrates me seeing these old timers just standing around doing nothing as to not get the time reducet, i get punicht for upping my effecncy. Ps english isnt my first language so sry for bad spelling.
As we live different part of the world but Your story is same like me man...wow 👀
I feel like its the same story at a lot of the older machineshops unfortunatly
The problem is one of communication. I'm a mechanical engineer who started out in the shop building the components I designed, assembling, testing and creating drawings, so I have a good idea how to machine things. Before I hired people for my company, I was the only engineer machining components for our (3 engineer team) designs. However, I put all that aside when dealing with my machinists. If I approach them with a project, I give them as much information as possible (design may be in conceptual stages) so that they can tell me how much time THEY think it will take to make each component.
Simple way of doing this is a design kickoff meeting. Concept is proposed, machinists can weigh in on any concerns they may have about the design or at the component level. If you're doing any kind of project management, and you should be, then this is a great time to get their feedback and to set priorities; who needs what and by when. IMO, it is then fair game holding them accountable for meeting dates and critical milestones.
The reason it should be this way is not only for accountability, but so the machinists, assemblers, technicians, electrical engineers and others may weigh in and feel that they are a part of the project, rather than a cog in the wheel.
We have an ECR (Engineering change request) system where the engineers (most have shop floor and machining experience) decide the set up and run time however if they are off, the machinst can complete an ECR form which will flag the times when the job comes through again. The times can be adjusted as we've done the job before where everyone is happy :)
First off: you have engineers with floor experience
You have basically won assuming corporate also has some
I am at a good spot that I came from the floor to programming. I create all the programs and documentation for the set-up crew. I occasionally will go on the floor to do set-ups on new projects with them to brainstorm the best possible outcome. I feel that it is very important for any NC programmer to understand the whole concept of machining, it makes a huge difference. You must be open to suggestions for improvement because if you are uptight and think your way is the only way you will fail, and your team will not have your back! There is no one way to do anything in this trade, great ideas can come from anyone within the workplace regardless of position. Keep your mind open! Have a safe and Happy New Year's everyone! Cheers!
So it's not CNC related but my wife was a PA in a private medical practice out in Arizona. We had our first child and she went back to work, federally you're protected to have time set aside to pump for breastfeeding purposes. Well in two separate occasions shortly after returning to work they called her into the back office to try and say she wasn't working fast enough and they brought up her pumping times and also the patient wait times. Technically at that moment if they actually did anything we could take them to court but they really needed my wife and the community needed the practice to stay open. I knew what was up and so I told my wife to start tracking the time it took the patient to get from the waiting room to the exam room and then also track the time it took the nursing staff to see the patient and tell her they were ready to be seen. We then wrote up a steaming rebuttal to both "corrective action" meetings detailing how the greatest time factor was not in fact the pumping time set aside by law but was in fact mainly an issue with the understaffed and overworked nursing department. Showing that waiting and rooming times took up over 2/3rds of the patient's total time in office.
As with any situation if you want to measure the time spent on a given job you can't just leave it at the primary times and expect to get a total picture of what's going on. Instead you need to break things down and get a complete picture including the time list to the new admin time spent tracking time. This way you measure what matters and you're able to properly determine what the cause is for long lead times.
I'm a mechanical engineer working as a CNC programmer. CNC programming/machining has definitely made me a better engineer.
Had a similar experience. Wonderful thing about the journeyman card and mastercam certificate I can walk to my car and have an interview scheduled by the next morning
As a student getting a degree in mechanical engineering........and stuff, I love when you guys tell these stories about your experience with other engineers. I not only get the Titans of CNC machining/grinding/swiss machining education, but also an education in what NOT to do as an engineer. Thank you for putting out this video. Please do more of them.
I was a project management intern for Premier Technology Inc. when Titan toured their facility in 2019. I’m a big fan of the way they approached the way the majority of the PMs I supported interfaced with their production personnel. In a lot of the cases I saw, a machine programmer there had a better grip on the reality of when parts would be completed than a room full of PMs, and they were typically consulted accordingly. More often than arguments, meetings were conducted with leads and PMs so PMs could get a handle on the statuses of their respective projects.
I am a mechanical engeneer since about six years, and got the same time in machining. Vertical, horizontal mill with pallet change system, and got some expedience on the lathe too. Huge experience in machining, at the machines, right in the middle of the "trade" from quote to deburr. Huge experience at the designer table too. It gives me a dissociative personality disorder when I have to design something. I sincerely think that a drawing or a design is never perfect, nor ready. I only like to design something if I get to make it. That is the only way to have a peace of mind. The worst thing is, if in a company like You mentioned, two departments get so estranged. I once saw Metropolis (1927) and a quote still resonates with me:
"There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator"
Sincere communication and brotherly love, both ways. There is no other way.
In principle tracking the workhours required for each part is not really a bad idea, at least when clocking in and out doesn't create that much unnecessary overhead. But especially for these custom parts that system certainly doesn't make sense like that manager implemented it: It's difficult to give a reasonable estimate for these parts, and it creates wrong incentives to overestimate it when you then have to do the job yourself, or underestimate it when someone else has to do it. And why don't the engineers simply talk to the machinists about these parts when the get the impression that they take much longer than expected, or even get them involved in the design phase of it, to maybe come up with a design that is easier to manufacture? I'm not a mechanical engineer myself (I'm a process engineer), but we make sure to always get the other disciplines involved that actually have to do the job that we design and then put on the drawings.
EDIT: And don't forget that safety, as well as the quality of these custom parts always plays a big role as well: No point in being very fast with the job, if it then fails inspections or you create dangerous situations because you have to reach an unrealistic goal.
I started out in a fabrication shop running CNC press brakes. I learned very fast that the design engineers can be oblivious that their stuff actually needs to be made. My whole job was bending stuff and the engineers didn’t account for bend allowance or different radiuses for different materials….but it was my fault when parts didn’t fit right.
The amount of insanity I've seen from engineers is mind boggling. Every single week I see 3d models with things on them that either can't be made, is waaay too expensive and simply stupid.
- It can be countersink holes literally touching the edge of a part - which seems okay on the 3D model but in real life that edge wont be there after machined.
- Tapped holes that either goes through the part or way too deep. Often just because it was "easier to draw it like that".
- TINY inside corner radius on tall parts that are near impossible to make.
- Extremely tight tolerances on shafts with no real purpose. When asked why - the answer is "well, we just want a good looking surface... the tolerance isnt really important"
This is sadly very common as most designers don't seem to understand anything about manufacturing today. This is not limited to machining either, it applies to many other areas as well. This is because designers come from schools where they specialize in exactly that, designing and nothing else. It's bass ackwards in my opinion, because a design is absolutely useless if it's not manufacturable or hasn't been designed for manufacturability.
A competent designer - whether engineer or otherwise - would be very interested to listen to and learn from those doing the manufacturing to become more competent designers. There's even a word for that mindset, design for manufacturability. If i remember correctly, you guys have mentioned it sometimes, too.
I’m an engineering manager and the engineers and machinists all answer to me. Most of my engineers are also experienced machinists and we all help each other out all the time. I never got the engineer vs machinist thing, but hey I paid for my engineering degree by doing machining work.
Ironically I'm a machining manager who doesn't answer to an engineering manager. Most of our companies engineers took one class in college and then think there machinist. Never understood the entire im an engineer therefore smarter thing...
Where I'm at the department supervisor typically quotes times. Even though we're a manufacturer of gun drills, many of our orders are customized to fit the customer's needs. So there are a lot of first time builds and processes in our plant. We do track our time for every job and part, timing in and out at a computer station. I'm sure they also use this to evaluate our performance also, although nothing has ever been said to anyone, and we have a couple of extremely slow workers.
Engineer here, but one who machines, assembles, welds etc. things at work on a weekly basis.
Idk the situation at your shop, but the machinists at my work often have similar complaints.
"These meetings are pulling me away from what I should be doing"...no, you're watching UA-cam videos at work dawg
"I don't have the right welder to do this"...the right welder shows up and it takes him 2 weeks to even start using it
"I don't wanna make it twice because you're not 100% sure it'll fit"...we are a prototype facility, It's rare but possible for me to make mistakes.
So I end up making a lot of things myself because I don't want to deal with them.
In your case, a lot of what they did seem messed up but I question why machinists would be so mad about a performance metric system. If you all do within 10% of each other, as one would expect, nobody would compare you to a theoretical machine time quoted previously. Or at least they shouldn't.
As a machinist I would listen to the engineers and discuss issues/ ideas.
As an operator, having an engineer around who gives you helpful answers is gold. All of our engineers quit, I guess one stayed and ended up CEO.
The vid talks about reducing lead time, not cycle time. Lead time includes cycle time, and many more activities that are not controlled by the machinist. The machinist does not control material availability, machine capacity, support resources, queue time between ops, outside processing time, inspection, just to name a few. Often lead time can be reduced by using a wholistic approach and better preparation.
I'm a technician at a telecommunications company and they implemented a similar system for us called ESM 15 years ago.
Complete with unrealistic goals.
I don't remember what the original initials stand for. We just call it Extremely Stupid Management.
Of course being a bunch of smart guys we found ways to game the system and got our times down to meet our goals so of course they shortened the amount of time we had to do the jobs in question.
The company has a choice do you want us to do quality work or do you want it done fast? They chose fast.
There's never enough time to do the job but apparently there's always enough time to fix the mistakes later.
After 20 something years at this job I'm old and jaded, I just do my job and eff the numbers, just listen to my first level complain about my efficiency, let it go in one ear and out the other, and do the same thing I've always done: I do it carefully the first time because I'm too lazy to do it twice. And the first levels know, we've had that frank discussion.
Their job is to tell us, our job is to listen. I care more about our customers than I do management.
When the revolution comes: The bean counters and efficiency experts will be the first ones up against the wall.
It seems short sighted that they are concerning themselves with the one off costs of items intended to speed up processes down the line.
Often the design of parts eats into the lead time of a project like this and it is the people at the end of the process that come under the microscope to makeup the difference.
Also it can be annoying when making parts to speed up processes could be more optimal if only the people involved in these processes where asked for input at the design stage.
Good places to work have respect and communication flowing in both directions, nothing worse than a place full of a lot of us vs them bitching.
It is so counter productive and dissatisfying.
Machinist are not exactly perfect either I am a 30 year machinist/manufacturing engineer I’ve been on both sides of the wall. Communication is key to a project success. Establish action items and owners for accountability.
This is exactly why I am self-employed. Too many places I've worked over the 40+ years I've been in this trade I've seen people in a supervisory position with mediocre skills at best will try and make people under them look bad just to cover their asses. Especially if that "underling" shows talent. If you posses skill and are confident in you own ability then you try and teach without fear of someone taking your job. If not... find something else to do, but you'll probably suck at that too.
我的老師曾和我分享他離開公司的原因是管理機制變嚴格，大家不能在工作時間使用手機，不能聊天，必須完全準時的上下班
導致大家對於工作失去了動力，而創意性的設計產出也因此降低了
I'm an engineer and have been for 9 years now, but I have over a decade of machining experience specialty was programming and fixturing both of the VMC's and 8 Swiss machines. I basically ran the whole shop I started as a button pusher on a 1997 haas VF-02. The owner was the programmer, and the x axis failed after a year, and he picked up a demo VF-02SS 2006 machine with every option unlocked but ran the old code. I pulled the code converted from line by line to sub routines and added a ruffing tool and 5x the sfpm with my OWN carbide tools and did an entire week of production in 1 afternoon. After that he was shocked I talked him into getting me a Mastercam license and let me redoing all the machines within a month I had the shop dropping more parts in a day then it was doing in a month before. Also contracted with a local metal company to buy back are chips given we ran 99% cast aluminum at the time. I never asked for a raise, but 6 months after the changes. John dropped a 50k check on the table as a bonus and had me sign a bunch of paperwork, making me at 21 a partner in the company. 13mo later, he passed away from cancer and left the entire company to me I ran it for 9 more years and sold it off as the equipment just was to worn out and the cost to rebuild was so high most of the machines had 20k hours or more at that point.
Took the cash invested in tesla and bought a house met my with a year after she to this day has no idea that I bought 5000 shares on tesla ipo and currently have 82800 shares in tesla and 10800 shares in Motorola. I personally know Elon from PayPal, so it wasn't a big deal to toss 75k at his startup.
My wife has zero clue. We have a prenuptial agreement because she wanted to protect her savings and life's work (not from the usa) it basically makes everything from before the marriage 100% our own, and only the joint account can be split in case of separation. She lives a high life with fancy bags and shoes watches. I'm more the blue jeans and a jacket type, always working on something can't sit still. I work from home on and off make around 120k a year she makes around the same kids go to a reasonably good school and she has around 480k in savings and tends to treat me as the dead beat with only 80k in my 401k and 20k in my bank account she has never seen my brokerage accounts and never will, things have been falling apart for the relationship the last 2 years trying hard to make it work for kids but who knows what will happen. That's my life story.
Mechanical designer myself, before this I did a 3 years degree with handson machining and 2-3 years fulltime machining on 4 axis lathe, 4 axis milling and conventionnals machines. I don't know how I would design something without all that machining experience!!
Engineers with no machining experience are nearly worthless. They simply do not know how things react and wear after they are spun up. I've seen countless examples of feed rates that "should have" worked.
Materials change, but the song remains the same. For me it was architects and structural engineers. I worked as a trim carpenter for years, cabinets and stairs and anything else that no one else wanted to do. Overall I liked what I did, just finally had enough of the constant undercurrent of discontentment. Now I have my own shop, and guess who is happy again.
Engineers have machining experience. Machinists are a bit intense when it comes to quality. Sometimes a bit too much but it depends on the product. The word arguing sounds bad, but I believe arguments have to be presented in order for anything to upgrade. It starts with arguments. Arguing is fine. Complaining is not.
In Québec, Canada, there's two ways of becoming an engineer. Either its lots of books or you go through pratical trainning before going to Uni. So in Québec, most engineers have choosen the pratical path and therefore in Québec, most engineers have machining, welding, fabricating, 3D printing, material science background :)
Had the same issue got tired of him crying all the time so made him come out to the floor and asked him to show me how this part could be made faster he didn’t even know what to say
We had a credit score system that was implemented. It didn't work.
I moved away from the CNC, to specialise in manual hand made produced components. But eventually we went back, after getting rid of a few undesirable engineers.
Problem solved.
i work in a production shop, and they ask why production is stopped to make prototypes, and if they ask why the prototypes arent getting made. cant make every one happy, I had a production planner that would write 20,000 piece orders on 2 minute parts(240 parts a shift is 6 weeks at best ) and wonder why he couldnt get the other part they needed off the machine. Ultimately I've outlasted 4 "managers" in 8 years because I can make the parts and they can't.
I think this applies to every industry. In a number of odd jobs I've worked, process improvements are made from top down, and solely end up causing slowdowns, safety hazards, and angering the people on the floor.
Mechanical engineer, here. I argue/debate/discuss with my CNC programmer (who is a journeyman toolmaker) all the time. He's excellent, and I think I'm a great engineer. Either of us can individually do well - but working together we are way better.
Chief engineer's perspective here:
No doubt that it could be handled better, starting with engineers putting on a pair of safety glasses, going down to the shop, understanding the challenges - how to design a part easier to fixture or design the fixture in parallel - and generally be part of the team and part of the solution. An "us" vs "them" culture is unproductive and unacceptable on my teams.
That said, I have the customer, the CTO, and program management all breathing down my neck, "when will it ship", so as the engineer, you go to the design department and the prototype department asking "when will you finish", and you get a big shrug, or a guess hidden as an overconfident commitment, or worse, a bold face lie.
Productivity isn't the only metric. Predictability can be as important as productivity. If a part will take 12 weeks, maybe I get a quote from outside if my in-house shop is backed up, maybe I 3-D print one piece for fit-up to take the part off the critical path, maybe I dual-source the part, or maybe I go to the customer, and say they won't get the system until next fall, but what I WON'T DO is give a shrug, a guess, or a lie when I will deliver a solution.
I work in the truck powertrain industry. The EPA changes the emissions law, and we need to launch a new technology when the law comes into effect, or my customers can't sell trucks - PERIOD. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) don't care how backed up the prototype shop is - once 2024 hit, the tailpipe emissions drop 4x, from 0.2 to 0.05 g/bhp*Hr NOx for diesel engines. Be on-time, or go out of business.
So, deadlines matter, and the ability to estimate jobs and hit your promises is as critical as cycle-time and exceeding tolerances. The only way to get better at estimating and delivering on-time is to spend the effort to track actual time vs forecast, promise vs delivery, and have the most experienced guy in the shop involved in estimating, or you will be perpetually out of control and late. So, challenge yourself to estimate how long a job will take YOU, write it in the little book with your speeds and feeds, and write down how long it ACTUALLY took you. When a new job comes in, you look back and say, "it was like that job, so probably about this long". No different than looking back at speeds and feeds from a similar job. Strive to be better at forecasting each month, each year, then you will be indispensable to me. Continue to miss your commitments, and my parts will be at an outside shop.
10 years of CNC machining and for the last 6 I had to deal with a programmer who had to rush every program and push everything to its limit. He didn't even run the graphics on his CAD software. We had SOO many mistakes. Like stupid, lazy ass mistakes along with crazy, inconsistent feeds and speeds. It was infuriating. I can write G&M code manually so easily now because I spent soo much time fixing his mistakes by hand.
Then of course, when the boss comes asking why jobs are taking longer, we tell him why. Then he goes and asks the programmer (who is his friend) and the programmer blames it on us machinists. Said that we must be slowing everything down.
I finally had enough and left 6 months ago.
That job made me decide to make a career change. I'll get back to machining one day. For myself, not some company.
As a prototype machinist with 45+ years under my belt. I would say it takes over 1000 difference setup to become proficient not just putting a vice up and indicating it in and setting up 2 tools don't count. Faster is not always the best way. I ran parts slower and in the long run it was faster. You always have to add in time to change the tool when they wear out. You may go faster but after adding time for changing the bad tool and sometimes have to rerunning that tool again take time. If you have 1 part to setup for and run take more time to per part the 100 part per part. Engineers take one or two semesters of machining. When the new Engineers come in put in the shop for 1 year as a ME or manufacturing engineers that works.
Had a extremely relatable experience in the machining industry. I absolutely loved doing the work but was never able to find a company that valued me like I valued my work. Ultimately I ended up leaving the trade.. Not a day goes by without me missing the it.
Ive been in the high end church furniture 5 axis machine environment, countertop/solid surface/ granite industry with robosawjets, cnc's water jets and now in the plastic injection mold machining industry all in a operator, cnc programmer and or management position. I can tell you the most inefficient disconnect I have see in most companies is there is a lack of cross training or trying to bridge the gap on understanding the processes, the ceo is only a business man and knows nothing about machining, engineers, sales people have no machining background yet their bottom line is based off quoting. Its like a baker that knows all the ingredients and doesn't know how to operate a mixer or how long it takes.
There will always be this disconnect when dealing with a high level of complexity but unfortunately most companies wont have the hard discourse to improve, reassess or dissipate the ignorance that dampens peoples livelihood and patience. This also takes a massive toll on culture and morale in any shop.
Same thing with software development. Measuring people on lines of code per day means people spend less time thinking about the best way to solve the problem and get actively penalised for writing efficient code - or even for removing redundant code.
Your right, quotas are for communists.
Sounds like a shop I used to work at, giving a blanket 90 minute setup time no matter if you had to dial in a 13 tool turret with boring jaws and tapping in parts to absolute zero tir. I loved the work but hated the management!
I'm both...I'm a mechanical engineer that runs a sole proprietor cnc shop. I get it. My colleagues are learning because of my 7 years cnc experience. Things we all do not understand until we try to actually do the task we judge.
I am a mechanical engineer and I worked on 3,5,7,8 axis machines swiss lathe etc and I respect machinists
Iv had this exact situation at my last job. It’s toxic , and something similar but not as bad at my current one, when we get a new part, most of the time engineering quotes the time to program , and make the parts without asking the machinists for any input , we have a traveler system, so every step in order you clock in to to log your time. The only time they ask any questions is if the part is borderline too large to fit in our machines, and when they do ask, they don’t even ask the machinist they ask the supervisor who doesn’t do any machining. It’s down right impossible to hit any of the quote times on our. Parts and it makes us look inefficient, but they at least are willing to change the time per part most times. How can you quote jobs and charge the customer without talking to the machinists! It baffles me . None of these engineers know how to machine.
One of the big cost and time drivers is engineers not having a good background in GD&T which results in conflicting call outs or tighter tolerances or surface finishes than what is truly required for the part being designed.
Don't get me started on engineers lol
Work about a year as a manufacturing engineer in a grinding cell at a bearing plant. I quickly learned that the operator knew more than the company MFG engineers about cycle time and product quality. I gave them the bonus to get better than 20% scrap rate. AIRCRAFT BEARINGS ARE TRICKY.
In order to improve a process, especially in a large company, you need a feedback loop. You start by documenting a process, performing that operation then confirming the legitimacy of the process and changing that process as needed using the feedback, with new SOPs introduced and more feedback afterwards. It should be a never ending cycle in order to improve constantly over time. This is also a ISO 9001 requirement. A feedback system in the form of quoting parts, tracking hours ect sounds like a fantastic way for management to begin to improve and understand their own process over the long term, so I see no problem with this. When engineers are telling machinists why a part is taking too long, it is because nobody has a good understanding of eachothers trade. The best thing to happen in these situations is education, you can actually show them the how and why and perhaps once they learn more they can put their new understanding into future parts for better ease of machining. Regardless however, an engineer believes there is a problem, contacts management, management begins to track time , material and costs (good thing). Quotes are not matching up with real life costs (good thing, now we know adjustments need to be made during quoting)..... ditching the entire feedback system so nobody knows what is really going on... that is a bad idea. There is a book id highly recommend called the 5th discipline, the art of a learning organization that gives some fantastic insight into these types of situations.
I worked in an ISO9001 registered company for 33 years. I spent most of it as a process planning and methods engineer. This entailed, amongst other things, creating job sheets complete with times for each process. I used established times for the initial estimated time then, after the first production of a part, corrected the times I was often called to the shop during manufacture to discuss times or manufacturing problems with the guys on the shop floor). The management and accounting departments were always trying to stop me from upping times and wanted existing times to be reduced to make the part cheaper! As I kept pointing out to them, this produced bad data on the system and the result of bad data is making a loss not a profit. I told them if they wanted the parts cheaper then find someone else who will make the parts to the same standards but cheaper. They always failed, standards always make thing expensive after all. I liaised between the production shop and the designers and was in the loop for drawing release so made sure parts were designed in the best way to keep costs down and that errors on drawings were corrected before I would sign them off for release. It also gave me advance warning of the need for any special tooling so it could be in place before it was needed. Fixing drawing errors always costs more once they are released into the system. If we required machining at any point in the production process I always went to the machine shops to get an estimate because it was not my area of expertise, my usual aim was to design out such requirements wherever possible to keep the part in one department and so keep control of the lead time on a part.
feedback loops can be great, but bad data can be much worse than no data. when you have all sorts of people trying to game the feedback loop, you have LOTS of bad data.
That is exactly what happens at my job now. Idiots want to give us a special smartphone to input what part on machine now, and all timings and stuff described in video. And time quotas are smaller and smaller. Performance will actually drop.
My inside shop is small and we farm out a lot. I’ve been using the same shops for years and usually let them make the parts and charge me time and material. If it’s a large qty I let them make a few and then quote. The few times I’ve been surprised I went to the shop and watched them make a part. Usually I end up buying them a special fixture or jig and they require.
Requote
I had a boss that did the same thing to us ! He also added that I can get these parts made on the outside for a lot less ! We said do it then we can compare ! Silence followed and he said just try to do better !
For things like that it does sound like a system that could help, if the motives were different. Say the fixtures could create a better idea on run times, faster machinists could be used to help the slower machinists, etc. if they worked in unison rather than creating a way to lower the persons subjective quality it could’ve worked better. Best way is usually find the best or the fastest machinists and work with them in a focus group thereafter until more standardization can take place
happened to me too. clock in , run parts clock out , never giving time to put parts in stock and not enough run time, then jumping your butt for not getting 85percent or better plus wanted to be clocked in on jobs the whole shift, 100 percent of the time .
Bean counters: the bane of every machinist. However, not all are bad, you just have to be ready to bring your A-game when dealing with one. In other words, know what you are talking about. The owner of the shop I manage is one and it's been one of the biggest learning experiences I've ever had. He isn't a machinist or an engineer. He's a businessman. I feel very fortunate because my uncles, who started the shop, were machinists and the new owner brings a whole new perspective. I wish I would have met him when my body was in my prime, my body wouldn't be so broken and my financial outlook would be a lot better.
Most of the engineers I've dealt with are reasonable but I've also dealt with some that think we just throw a piece of stock at the machine and it just spits it out perfect. Probably the biggest issues I've had with engineers before I was quoting and programming full time was them shipping/dropping off material for a part with a flatness requirement but they leave little to no material to compensate for springing/twisting of the part when pocketing or face milling.
All in all, I think this was a good story but I can see how some engineers are a little offended. Just keep in mind, they need us just as much as we need them. None of us are perfect. PSYCH! I'm a machinist, we're perfect.😜🙄
I rely on Mom and Pop shops and have to respect that some of my jobs are worth enough money that I could put a shop out of business over a dispute. There is a lot of trust and communication of motives.
I've been an engineer for a small company for a while now. I had the same question, why was it taking so long to make these parts? Instead of changing everything though, I just learned how to program and run the machines. Now I understand, and thanks to you guys.. I'm the best machinist we have 😅.
Good lie
@@lilcourtny08 lie good
@@ThyialIndustries you were a button pusher not a machinist. There is a big difference between pushing buttons and programming a CNC and operating a Manual mill and lathe.
@@lilcourtny08 ohhh weird... You should check out a few of my videos.. maybe then you will realize I am a better machinist then you.. 😘
That's why I left my old job and opened my own shop. I was in that screwed up BS you talked about. 18 years later, happy I did it.
So I am an engineer, but I worked in production for ten years before I got a degree. This is not a case of engineering vs. machinist imo. This is a problem with management. When engineers come up with manufacturing times it is an estimate based on math, estimate. Management needs to account for that and there needs to be efficiencies but in place to correct. There also needs to be an open line of communication between engineering and manufacturing on how times are calculated. Engineering does not get to dictate the final method of calculating.
Hey bro, I heard you like remachining corners, so here’s some .020” corner rads for you. I was nice, and only made them an inch deep, this time.
I don't understand. I can model this in CAD just fine.
I had my supervisor come to me to tell me the Boss didn't like the way I was machining the part I was making. Of course the Boss sat behind the window of his office and watched us in the shop. I told my supervisor I was open to suggestion on how the part should be made. What does the Boss suggest ? My supervisor said the Boss doesn't have a suggestion he just doesn't like the way I was making the part. I told him to go pound sand. Part was made and passed inspection. We had one older machinist quit over stuff like this. Another filed a lawsuit against the company and Boss. He got a raise and the Boss was not to bother him again. This machinist later started his own CNC company. We had a contract to machine a 130mm o-jive for a anti=tank missile . We could machine the o-jive in 20 minutes . The company set up another department to machine the same part. One day the 2 young fellows from the new department told me they cut our machine time in half. I said great. After inspecting the parts they machined all came to us to be recut and back to the 20 minutes run time. I left this company and went to work at a university for the next 25 years where I was my own boss. The university hired a engineer from another university to design a physics device for research. The device required a driveshaft 4 feet long to drive a turbine from an electric motor. When I got the drawings I asked the engineer if we would be using drawn-over-manrdul tubing ? He said no just regular tubing. I made 6 driveshafts and even had them balanced. The device would walk off the table at 750 rpm. I made my own drive shaft out of 3/4" diameter shafting. I didn't tell anyone. I tested my shaft to 3500 rpm and it was smooth as butter. I called everyone in to watch the test. After I told them it was my shaft they were not happy. They used my shaft.
Data is a wonderful thing when used for good but if there is weakness in the management it inevitably becomes a club for punishment rather than a spear for improvement.
Sounds like the directorship needs to step in and give all the departments some air time to work on internal process flows and provide training company wide on responsibility and accountability.
Does the company actually know the unit cost of manufacture? If not then someone asking to collect time stamps and how they go about doing that wouldn’t be my primary concern.
If they do then question;
How strong is the part scoping and design control and how can it be improved.
Why are parts making it to the machine that can’t be run and how can it be mitigated.
Obtain from each department and all individuals in it any details of any known non-productive/lost time incidents and their ideas of ways to improve.
Then;
Department heads harmonise, formulate a plan, build up a proposal, communicate proposal in the department.
Department heads provide calculated cost of improvement(s) and operational loss/risk they relate to.
Business analyses risk/opportunities.
Once this process flow is smoothed out/the business has furnished you with knowledge of these processes/you have without doubt upheld your part in the quality management system/ then moan about the Engineer. If not then you should be aware of how accountable you are for your situation right now progressing into a rant worthy video. As you aren’t aware of the problem the Engineer has, you don’t respect the financial interlock and the business process that is fundamental to supporting your platform to practice your skill, pass on value, earn money. It should be as ingrained as health and safety in the workplace which you do care about as you demonstrate a lot of good practice.
That is a blunt factual truth. A good example of a healthy workflow would look a little like;
Example:
Memo: Machine Department agrees that we have no idea why we are missing unrealistic deadlines and impossible tasks. All departments concerned have reviewed the process flow to the shop floor and we agree it is flawless and we as a company of people are acting flawlessly also, we require an operational review and data capture to highlight our inefficiency. Cost: 5k, Risk: Full toxic environment resulting in staff leaving and becoming direct competitors or the business knowing all their strategies and weaknesses.
Business highlights opportunity/risk and allocates capital. Engineer and department discuss execution of a previously agreed and well thought out proposal for improvement, so all are reminded and/or made aware of the intention, scope, roles and responsibilities.
Scope review, plan and budget established by Engineer and department. Obtain key data points and type of analysis required to analyse issues as previously scoped out and agreed upon. Engineer contacts OEM to find best practice for extracting data points to export for analysis and discusses the Company of people’s mutually agreed requirements. Extracts data with support of machine department and proofs data set and analysis type. Engineer allocates or automates analysis. Engineer reviews outcomes. Engineer highlights issues and solution. Business, Engineer and Machine department discuss and implement solution or request capital as required.
Monitor and review.
No requirement for Rant video.
Great job. The only thing that helps segregation withing a dysfunctional company is exacerbating the problem with "us vs them" mentality. Of course, you weren't at fault at all, it's the stupid engineers who did not cooperate with you.
Excellent video guys, keep it up!
This is not an engineer vs machinist issue at all, it is a humanity issue, the issue being the desire of some humans to control others. I am a mechanical engineer who has owned and run a job shop for 32 year (currently 20 employees). Success is based on earning the respect of machinists, leading by example, and understanding and applying laws of energy and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle to your workers, as in, they have limited ability and motivation to stay focused and perform so you can push here and there but expect push back over there. Also, the more you monitor the more you create a state of distrust hence disrespect and ultimately burnout. Knowing the strengths of each worker and capitalizing on that in a laissez faire style is key. There are some worker who don't immediately respond to this environment, I have seen it take 6 months for the light bulb to click (and some NEVER get it it's true), but I would never run any business with Nazi like management.
Wish I could talk to the fellow who told this story. I agree with certain topics but short-sighted in others. Engineers have there responsibilities as well as machinists, at the end of the day the company as a whole need to make quality parts to ship.
Sounds familiar and I do not work in machining. I am industrial engine technician by trade or a fancy way of saying a mechanic on big engines and the company I work for has been implementing employee performance metrics even though the manufacturer of the engines does not have flat rate metrics for the engines. Needless to say they give unrealistic expectations for meeting a flat rate which is determined by a salesperson who has no experience working on the engine or understands the scope of work. This company also wonders why they are losing employees left and right during the preludes to a recession while constantly nitpicking performance.