Dear Friends,
I realize that there may be some of you who have missed a few of these missives, and newcomers who never got them in the first place. Thus, I have made a place on our website where you can go read them all if you would like. Check out https://murdycreative.co/blogs/bts
For those of you who saw this weeks podcast, you already know that we have successfully been making bars. Not the way I wanted to, but making them nevertheless. To recap in brief, I called the mill manufacturer and was able to talk on the phone with one of their lead people about power tapping. He said that in their internal tests they had successfully power tapped at 1500rpm at the smaller tap size and that he would suggest between 500-1000rpm for our application. This seemed like insanity since the idea that we would power tap at 250 rpms seemed very high, but he was right. After switching to a higher rpm we were successfully tapping the holes each time without breaking the taps.
This meant that the machine could properly spot drill, drill, and then tap the holes in the correct position. The issues with the temporary fixture we had designed somewhat prevent me from using it to cut the outside of the bars. Mainly the temporary fixture does not provide the proper rigidity for the material (nor the fixture) and thus any attempt to cut the material is destined to fail. This was determined last Sunday night when Skiddy came out again for us to keep working on this issue. He was able to test the limits of the machine.
The main thing I am working on correcting in my mind is that I can not perceive the level on which the forces that are happening in the machine. The machine cuts chips off that are the width of a human hair at speeds far faster than I can see. The required rigidity of the fixture, the spindle head, and the tool is far beyond what feels solid to my hand. The only tool that can really be effective for determining if things are running properly is the sound, and that can only be learned through experience.
Skiddy coming by that night was a big help. We were able to cut a variety of things at different speeds and feeds with different tools, and slowly I began to understand the different sounds that the cutting makes. A high pitched whine or squeal is almost always bad. It indicates that something is vibrating at a very high speed (likely the material being cut) and those vibrations cause the material to slam into the cutting edge, damaging it at a microscopic level, until it snaps. What you are listening for is a deep growl like Mongolian throat singing.
After a lot of dialog that night about the various aspects of this project, we revised the previous idea I had for the proper fixture. I had planned on having one large fixture that completed the first operation on a 18x4" piece of steel, getting the bars halfway done. Then after a bunch of those had been made, we would swap the fixture and do the second operation to complete them. This had some practical problems that needed to be solved, mainly that if all our tools broke in the first operation we would be stuck with a lot of material in limbo and no bars.
Thus the new plan would be to have three fixtures in the machine at the same time, each with its own subprogram and when the operator pushed the go button it would run through all three programs back to back. This would take awhile, but that is fine. We have plenty of machine time available. When the operator would return they would take a set of finished bars out of the last fixture, move everything one fixture forward, put new stock in the first fixture, and hit go again. Even if all the tools broke, we would only have a little bit of material stuck in limbo this way.
Unfortunately (or fortunately if you like sleep) we had computer troubles that night and couldn't begin to make the new ideas come true then and there. I would have to wait for the blueprints to get rolling. Monday rolled around as it always does and we needed more bars.
Thankfully with the old fixture able to run the holes and then tap them, we had a method that could make the bars. Trevor would cut the bars to length and width, and then I would drill and tap them in the machine. It was faster than the new system would likely produce bars, but it required both Trevor and I to be constantly working to make the bars and unable to do anything else. At this very moment we finally have some extra stock on the shelf. Its been almost a month in progress, but we are getting somewhere now.
Once I get the new fixtures made I will finally be able to put this project behind me, at least until I need to do it all over again for the bars that go in our other journals...
Speaking of our other journals...
One of the things that I can finally turn my attention back towards after this fiasco is the launch of some new designs. Hopefully by the end of next week three of the new products will be live. I don't want to spoil the surprise for them so I'll leave most of the story with those until next weeks update, but I can say that one of the designs is much better suited to the "Composition Cut" name.
We have gone round and round on what to do about this for weeks. In the end I decided that the best thing to do would be to use the Composition Cut name for the new product, and rename the largest journal we have to something else. That prompted a whole new round of what to call it. Quite a few ideas came to us, but the final two that we liked the best were "Ledger Cut" or "XL Cut" and we couldn't decide between the two.
So I asked the studio audience for input and after the poll had been live for 48 hours I can proudly announce...
Drumroll please...
The largest journal in our No. 2 lineup will be henceforth known as the Ledger Cut Journal. It won by a 3:1 margin and it stayed at that ratio for virtually the entire time the poll was live so I'm pretty confident in its validity. Hopefully by tomorrow this will be reflected on our website and across our marketing efforts. We will be able to get The-Journal-Formerly-Known-As-Compostion-Cut updated in our backend with new SKU's and will have all our ducks in a row for the launch next week.
On the subject of backends... (not that kind)
We for years have known we need to rebuild our Inventory Management System. This critical tool has been vital to our success during bad economic times. The monstrosity is a cobbled together web of google sheets filled with formulas. In its beginning it was far better than us just running out of raw materials and then deciding to order more, but its been years, and we are significantly larger than we used to be. The additional scale of the data combined with our addition of new tools has caused the beast to slow to a crawl. It is nearly non-functional now, and we haven't been able to add any of the new tools we have designed.
As we add new operations and tools, it has become perfectly clear we will need a robust and custom built system to accommodate our behind the scenes technical work. We did spend a few months evaluating some off the shelf options, but there isn't anything that is really properly setup for our use case.
We have always had a real DIY attitude towards our tech (and virtually everything else here) so I spent a good amount of time researching database building solutions. In the end I found a company called Five that I really like, and we are now in talks with a custom developer to help us figure out exactly what we want and need (and can afford).
This week had one of our early meetings with her, and I think its a great start on this project. There is a long way to go to getting it done (and a lot of money), but I know it will be absolutely necessary as we expand further and further into new materials and product lines.
I want this tool to be designed for when we are a do-everything company. I have dreams of the Murdy Creative Co. expanding into every kind of product with manufacturing capabilities that span all materials. That way when I have a new idea, I can build it all here under our roof to ensure its the very best it can be.
To do that though will require a system that can scale massively and account for a much more complex operation, but if I build it well now while we are small, then it will be something that can power us forward for years to come rather than being something we need to spend a lot more money on years down the road when it is more complex.
My world is a strange place of super detailed moment to moment expertise, and high level future planning all wrapped into one. It can be exhausting having to jump between those two mindsets, but I have a good team and a great support network that includes you guys.
I can't wait for you to see the new products we have launching next week!
Stay tuned for more letters on Thursdays in the coming weeks and be sure to go subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you like and watch the videos it helps us get promoted more by the algorithm to people who may never have heard of us.
Ever your servant,
Colin Murdy
CEO/Owner
Murdy Creative Co.
Cell: 414-434-9001
MurdyCreative.Co
