Starting a new idea venture, sharing what I am learning in personal development and the following is my first post and first of hopefully many videos, I plan to upload and share my experience!

One thing I find in common from almost every autobiography, business books, and great leaders is some form of the phrase "I wish I knew now at an earlier age". 

Wisdom is something I think everyone wants, but the means to gain wisdom is not always easy. For my own generation, there is a massive disconnect between parents and their children. We will often discount the wisdom from our father or mother and consider it not relevant or "old fashioned" where in reality, they are sharing with us mistakes they made and how to avoid them for ourselves. 

I am very rebellious, rebellious from my own generation. I cannot stand being just like everyone else, I want to be different, and one major way I've found to be different is doing my best to take advantage of the wisdom shared by older, wiser individuals and do my utmost to understand and apply them to my life. 

I want to take the fifth commandment, "honor thy father and thy mother," and take it to a further level than it is commonly seen. There are amazing rewards for showing honor and following their commands, as well as recommendations! 

Not everything I've learned is useful or connects, but it's worth trying out, for the things I have found helpful have been huge life changers!

I rest in the knowledge that I will never be in the know. I will always be a student; the second I think I have "arrived" is the second I slow my capacity for gaining new thoughts and insights. 

I spent a good portion of the day just cleaning up the shop and restoring it to its former (mostly) organized glory!

The small manual bandsaw has been out of commission for a few weeks now due to a worn-out belt on the lower wheel, so we've had to use the larger, self-feeding one to cut all the raw stock. I spent a frustrating hour cleaning the wheel from the old rubber and plastic bonder that sealed the belt to the metal frame. Getting the new belt on proved to be much easier of a task, and after letting it sit in a bath of hot water for a few minutes, I was able to get it on and set the bandsaw back up again!

Unfortunately, the little guard plate that goes around the blade was lost years ago, so my boss used a make-shift plate of acrylic with a slice to the center of it to prevent anything from falling and getting caught in the blade. I was given the task of making a new guard plate out of some scrap aluminum stock, so after a few quick measurements, I came up with a simple design in Fusion360! 

I'm actually quite pleased with how little time it took to design, program, set up the machine, and run the part! All in all, there were maybe twenty-two minutes of work before the piece was complete. I only needed to do a single operation, so once it was finished, I flipped it over and surfaced the top until I got my desired thickness! The fit was a little snug, so I filed the edges a bit to get it to sit better.

Working on a 3D design project today and got to explore some more of Fusion360's design features!

I was tasked with re-creating a vehicle only product images provided by a third-party source. I have no access to technical drawings and wouldn't even know how to use them properly to re-create the car's 3D model.

I started this project a couple of weeks ago and had mostly finished the model; however, there were some small design changes my boss wanted me to make machining it easier. One was to make the top cab half of the vehicle parallel from the bottom base to the roof, to contour the whole top piece with a single swarf toolpath. 

The whole upper cab consisted of a 3D surface and was tapered from top to bottom, so conventional "block" modeling wouldn't work in this scenario. I ended up using a loft toolpath and drew two reference sketches to pull the model from. This created exactly what I was looking for, and I had vertical lines connecting the two surfaces.

One of the problems I ran into, though, was making small edits to these 3D surfaces, like the top roof of the cab, which had a crowned shape from one end to the other. I was brought into the whole 3D design world primarily using what I call the "block modeling" method; the basic idea is you start with a sketch, pull it into a 3D model, from there, I either add or subtract from the design until I get my desired shape. 

I started looking more into the different design capabilities of Fusion360 and found that the surface modeling would work really well for my purpose! The surface design method creates flat planes, intersects with one another, and then trim and stitch what you have leftover to create a solid model. Compared to the solid modeling method, you can only create solid objects and aren't able to remove faces.

I finally finished the eight sets of Delrin part today and got them shipped out!

This was quite an intense job, with a fairly short timeline of a week to get all these pieces out, but I've learned quite a bit from this job, which makes it worth the stress I went through!

I finished the final set of parts this morning, which consisted of facing the backside and chamfering the edges, which required a straightforward setup. I used parallels to hold the piece upright in the vice. A hard stop at one side for repeatability, decked the top off manually by one thou to ensure I had a flat surface, measured it, and offset the height to get the correct tool offsets and dialed my work zero to one of the holes. 

Though frustrating at first, I'm actually starting to enjoy setting up vices and finding the center of holes using my Mitutoyo tenth indicator. I'm starting to get the hang of it, and setting up a vice takes less than five minutes; compared to when I started, it took me upwards of twenty! And I've got my hole location time from forty minutes to about six!

All in all, the time taken for these parts comes out to about 32 hours over 1.5 weeks, which isn't too bad considering the learning curve for this new material!

One of the features of a few of these pieces is some location pins placed outside the parts. Initially, I thought I would have to machine these directly into the stock, but my boss consulted the client, who said it would be fine to drill and use pins instead. My boss made the pins for these pieces due to the time crunch to get the order out, and I found it very interesting how he went about it.

He used a scrap cut-off stock from the previous parts, set it up in the vice upright, then used a 1/8" endmill and interpolated the pins from the top down with a very slight ramp. This left each pin in its own little pocket, and he took another pass down from the top, this time only cutting two tenths (approx 1/20th the thickness of a human hair) off the side of the pin. I asked him afterward why he made the parts the way he did, and he said that the interpretation from the top was because all the cutting pressure would be found up and down and not side to side, thus creating an almost perfect part. 

He also said that the two-tenths cut was to clean up any tool drifting from the cut before. Before cutting the pins out, he put a layer of tape over the whole block of stock, which would keep all the pens upright and prevent them from moving around while getting sawed off. Finally, he used a slitting saw blade and took two passes on either side of the stock to cut the parts loose leaving a few thou in the center to keep them from getting marred by the saw. The pins came out looking absolutely beautiful, and every single one was within a few tenths!

Getting the pins put in place was also extremely easy and only took a few minutes to do each piece. My boss set up a small plate equal to the desired stick out the length of each pin and showed me how to use an Exacto knife to gently scrape the pin's side that would be inside the part. This would allow the air to escape while putting them in, and I wouldn't have to force anything down. I then flipped the plate over and pushed the pin through it into the part until it was flush with the top surface of the guide block.  

I've wanted to join a mastermind group for some time now and was recently allowed to apply for one hosted by View From the Top, specifically for young men!

A mastermind group typically consists of 5-8 people getting together regularly to discuss ideas, keep one another accountable, and set future goals. It's basically a converging of several brains together to create a "supercomputer," from which the name mastermind came. Most mastermind groups are centered around business, and the one I am joining is divided between career, family, faith, and personal development. 

I led this group through a close family friend who I was asking for advice on starting my own mastermind group, and he referred me to Paul Edwards, one of the men in his own group who mentored younger people in his church. He invited me to apply for the young men's View From the Top, which then led to an interview, and later got accepted to join!

I was asked to record a short video introducing myself to the rest of the group and decided to post a copy of it here for future reference :)

Finally, getting the last of this Delrin project finished up and got the final pieces' first operation!

This last part really threw me for a loop, and when picking up the initial stock for it, I mismeasured the size of it, leading to a rushed order that only arrived this morning. The piece has very minimal features and could almost be done in a single operation; however, the tricky part about it was its size. 

This piece is fairly similar in shape to the skateboard truck assembly I made a few weeks ago, with a flat plate, then a large block in the center. Because of the large block in the middle, the machine would take quite a bit of time removing the material from the sides. I was able to shave a bit of time off the complete run by manually cutting out the corner pockets in the vice before putting it back on the fixture plate to finish up.

Delrin is an interesting material to say the least, its got hard solid chips when cut with a sharp endmill, but with dull ones, it gums up quite bad. It also can fluxuate and move depending the temperature, which really confused me when I found my parts a thou or two under after pulling them out of the machine, then nearly spot on a few minutes later.

The maximum flute length we have is barely 1," and the part is approx 1.5"; this requires multiple stepdowns, which leaves marks on the finished surface from the tool depths, as well as chatter from the endmill jumping around. Unfortunately, there wasn't any way of fixing this on the machine, and would have to be cleaned up by hand with a razor blade, taking very light passes until the surface was smooth.

Once the first operation is complete with these last two parts, I can hold it in a vice, deck the top, and chamfer the edges before shipping everything out!

I also was able to finish up the final drilling and pocketing operations for the other parts, using the jigplate I setup last week (see previous post). Had no issues setting it all up and ran through each part smoothly!

For these larger pieces, I'm using 5" round stock cut into slabs 1" thick. The benefits of using round stock are the greater strength in the material with the parts holding together better, and with it being round, it makes setup extremely easy. The downside is a material waste since the parts are rectangular, there is a significant portion of the disk that gets thrown away. 

I ran into some issues when cutting the parts out where the contour toolpath would snap my endmills when it did the lead-out. Since these parts have flat walls, I'm able to use contour toolpaths to cut it out of the main block; the problem I ran into was with the tool exiting the material, it would pull out to the side crash directly into the remaining stock. Unfortunately, the contour toolpath is a 2D operation, so it only reads the geometry you reference and nothing else. 

One solution was to drill a hole down to the bottom to have the tool move into the hole before retracting; the downside is that you have the extra run time with the tool change and drilling. Another solution was to remove the lead-out and have the endmill pull straight up at the end. This isn't ideal, as if there is any vibration, the tool would leave a mark on the side of the part. 

I talked to my boss a bit, and he said in Mastercam, the contour toolpath does a spiral down to each step in the same spot; this creates a naturally occurring hole in the side of the part. This got me thinking about what I could add to the contour toolpath in Fusion360 and emulate this same idea. By default, the tool has a short, 90degree angled lead into the contour, but space is a bit tight for the endmill to retract without hitting a wall. 

Playing around with the lead-ins and lead-outs, I found that you can change the 90deg angle significantly higher than I initially thought. After setting it at 200 degrees, I got a really smooth double arc that curves in on itself before leading into the contour. This was exactly what I was looking for, and it created a small bump in the side of the contour with plenty of room for the finishing endmill to retract in! 

Once I got all the disk-made parts finished up, I set up a jig plate in the vice for each of the parts' final operations. There are a few small features, like holes and small pockets to clear out on the sides of the parts that I didn't have access to in the first two operations. Instead of setting up some soft jaw setup, I'm able to use the back wall of a flat plate to brace the pieces upright and take advantage of a pin to use as a hard stop, thus creating a repeating work origin with each tool set off the top of the part. 

Making enormous progress on these Delrin parts, got into a "flow state" where everything is moving really smoothly and effectively with so far no mistakes. It's not as fast as I could probably push it, but I can't really afford to make mistakes on these pieces.

The geometry of each piece is fairly similar, so creating the CAM template library has been extraordinarily helpful in the parts' programming. 

I'm also putting together a new system of operations for setting up the models for programming. The basic premise is to import the model into a new workspace, then create a manufacturers model and set up the stock as a solid model directly tied to the design's geometry. I'm finding that the stock's actual location isn't as critical as I once thought; it can be moved almost anywhere to encapsulate the piece; it just can't be moved after the first operation has begun. 

From there, I set up a "sub stock model," which is typically a plate that matches the width and length of the stock, but the height matches that of the part. In this, I can create reference geometry and/or location features for the CAM program. For an example of these Delrin parts, I made a 3D model plate with a few holes that I can use to locate when flipping the part over, and I'm able to use this sub-stock as a hard refrence. I find that adding this sub-stock model directly into your CAM setup files works really well and even acts as blocking off of milling certain features I don't want to touch until it gets flipped over. 

Another neat trick I picked up from my boss is securing the material down on the fixture plate. I'm using double-sided tape to hold it down, but to ensure that it's had a proper adhesion, I take a bar of metal and clamp both ends down across the plate, thus creating an even and applied pressure. It's a bit of a pain to move around, but I haven't had any Delrin issues coming up yet, so it's worth it in my books to prevent mistakes.

For some of the larger plates where I don't have long enough 0.25" pins, I'm using old endmills to slide the Delrin plate over, then remove them after it's properly secured on the fixture plate. 

I'm actually quite enjoying using the fixture plate, I haven't used one up until this point, and it's proven to be an excellent way of quickly locating multiple operation jobs! I'm currently trying to figure out a way to combine some of the tricks I've used for these fixture plate workholding setups over to a vice style. I really enjoy the versatility of the fixture plate. Still, I can definitely see how it's not ideal for some harder materials, especially those with many features. 

Currently working on the final few sets of parts using 5" round stock for square-ish pieces, which I'm really excited to share in my next post!

I will occasionally reach those times in my life where I feel kind of lost, and like what I'm working for doesn't really have a purpose or I'm not gaining traction. A ship drifting in the ocean of life, occasionally hitting islands of inspiration and purpose, but always by accident and never intentional. There'd be several periods where I would have a period of time where I am excited and focused on a goal for the future, but I would inevitably fall off course and lose interest in the idea. 

I took a chance on an excellent book by Michael Hyatt titled 'Living Forward' on building an envisioned future, then reviewing and revising it regularly to stay aligned with moving to your ideal life. 

Two weeks in advance, I planned for a perfect day of complete focus and escape from my normal work; I would go to my favorite place, the beach, to write my Life Plan. I envisioned a peaceful, lightly overcast day alone on the shoreline with a pen in hand, letting my mind run free with ideas! It would be just me alone with my thoughts; I wouldn't talk to anyone that day, from morning till evening, I would be dedicated to this plan! I would come back refreshed and focused with a clear vision on the next actionable steps I could take in my life. 

I really hyped myself up for this day. I started the morning off just right, with the longest run of my life before the break of dawn in a quiet, upscale neighborhood, returning to a hot cup of coffee with some lively discussions with one of my closest friends and got caught each other up with our personal lives and wellbeing. Leaving for the ocean shortly before noon, I made it to a lovely course beach full of happy people showing their smiles through their facemasks. This will be an amazing and productive day!

After finding a comfortable spot on the rocky shoreline right above the ocean spray, with the sunlight shining down on my laptop screen, I got down to putting my thoughts into a structured plan showing me the steps I need to take my life to the next level. After a few minutes of ensuring I wouldn't get distracted by reading my messages and giving myself the peace of mind knowing that there wasn't anything or anyone waiting for me, I put my fingers on the keyboard and started writing! I got a few paragraphs in on my expected 14-page life plan before I took a break for lunch.

I climbed to the top of the steep hill overlooking the scattered camp of tents by the ocean and enjoyed my chilled fried veggies, sausage, and cheese, as the warm fifty-degree wind blew by. After spending an hour enjoying the view and lightly meditating, I got back down into my focused mind space, where I cranked out a few pages before it was time to go home. I left there knowing I put in a good hard day of focused and intentional work, not succumbing to procrastination and distraction. I enjoyed a pleasant evening with friends huddled in the corner, furiously writing the last few pages before heading to bed. 

My life plan was not pretty, but I was able to get the basics out, and having an imperfect plan was not ideal but I had something to work off of. I didn't put it off that day and I was able to build and edit it over time to more closely match my envisioned future. I am not entirely happy with my focus that day and definitely could have done a better job setting myself up for success by preparing in advance for those inevitable distractions. However, I came out with a product of my work, and that is why that was one of the biggest pivotal changes in my mindset. Producing an imperfect result, something that can be refined down the line.

I got to work on these Delrin parts this morning, and I'm extremely pleased with how my new CAM system is working so far!

As mentioned in previous posts, I'm working on building a CAM template library inside of Fusion360 for specific sets of toolpath operations to speed up workflow and reduce the programming time. I'm taking my time making small tweaks to the program for these very basic 2.5 operation parts and ensuring everything works just like I want it with no changes done on the machine. 

Once I got the first set of parts finished and CAM templates saved, I could do the second in about 30 minutes. Granted, they were almost identical, but the process of setting up the stock, machine coordinate system, and updating each toolpath from the template still would have taken me a pretty good amount of time to do from scratch.

I find the manufacturer's model increasingly useful and works surprisingly well even under small changes with updating all the reference geometry. It was also useful to set up programs even if you don't have all the information yet, like your stock material size. You can create a box around your material, setting the origin point to the center of your part, so when you scale it, it scales on all sides.

For this particular project, I'm using a double-sided tape workholding method to fixture my work on the table. The first operation consists of facing the top surface, doing the minimum amount of work necessary to get that side finished, and drilling the location pins. I'm using a grid fixture plate drilled with 1/4" holes and have my work zero set to one of the pins' center. This allows me to drill two location holes on the first side, then when I flip it over, I can use one as my work zero, and the other sets the rotational origin, giving me incredible accuracy.