MIni vacation

It is almost time for the machine gun shoot. Starts Friday. Tomorrow, get some work done around the house. Friday, watch mayhem and destruction at the shoot. Been a while. I got off work today and picked up a load of river rock and got it laid out around the house. One more trip should do it. Hopefully the rain blows past us tomorrow and I can get it done. Got rid of most of the moles. Smoke bombs choked them out pretty good, so far. No new tunnels. I am trying to get the grass fixed. Hope to get the house on market next month. I have found a few houses of interest.

Getting use to the new machine at work. I absolutely hate the safety interlocks as they do make setup unnecessarily hard. Haven't crashed it yet. It is a sweet machine. Get to train next week on grinding threads and non-rounds. It is going to be interesting grinding square stuff in an OD grinder. I have seen videos, get to see it first hand. Should be able to crash the machine really good with a 14 inch square block of steel spinning on the chuck :)

Mole patrol

Moles have moved in, and I am having fun evicting the vermin. Smoke bombs and spades are making some progress. Poor elderly gentleman that live behind me has the Scotts yard of the neighborhood, and they are tunneling through his yard as well. His cat is helping out. He gives the cat treats for every dead mole he brings him. Said cat likes to torment my dog. He sits under the bushes just outside the fence and it drives Spike nuts. I am taking a nap on the couch, generally happens after I eat whether I mean to or not, and the dog starts going insane. He is throwing himself against the screen door and frothing at the mouth. I jump up thinking intruder. I wish I had a camera handy at the time. The stupid cat was sitting a couple inches on the other side of the screen door, staring the dog  in the eyes. I went to open the door, the cat leaped on top of the fence and stared down at the door. Silly cat loves tormenting the dog. Smart little critter.

Gun auction was a bust

I went to the preview for the gun auction yesterday. The Garand sniper rifle was a hack job. Homemade, and you could tell. It still pulled $1700 out the door. The Rocola M1 carbine was in horrid shape. No finish left. Sights damaged and partly missing. Mismatched components. It went for $1000. Even some of the lower end plinkers I had a slight interest in went high. When I saw the shape the main guns I wanted were in, I just stayed home today. I was able to see the selling prices online. My buddy texted me that it was a madhouse. I did go to the gunshow. It was a bust as well. More cheap Chinese knife booths than gun booths. Nothing even remotely interesting there. I did manage to get in and get my haircut, so I did accomplish something today.

New machine

The new CNC grinder is awesome. I love how it grinds, except, being brand new, it has all the new OSHA safety devices functional. Thus making the machine a real pain. Having a brain, I tend not to place my appendages into harms way, so having access to the machine while running so I can do minor adjustments to the coolant lines is nice. Being able to test the machine motions out with the wheel off and seeing everything is nice as well. New machine, you have to have the doors locked before anything moves. Total pain. Have not crashed it yet, but that is because I am overly cautious. She is sure to have a misadventure somewhere in the near future.
I get to go to school to learn how to thread grind and do non-rounds. It is only a three day condensed course. I have seen videos on you-tube of threads and form grinding. It is really cool to watch. Not sure how fun it will be to actually grind and check the finished product. Everything we grind we have to hold a .0002 tolerance on. Not much room for error. Ridiculous tolerances seeing as how the molds make single use containers which are thrown out once product is consumed. But, you have to hold tolerances set by your customers. All parts are checked and documented through our CMM's. I still prefer working on the round containers as they are very simple to rebuild compared to the square tooling. Glad I am closer to the retirement age than just starting out. Making the molds odd shapes is making the job much harder than it needs to be.

I think winter is done, if it even started

I have seen two days where a few snow flakes were in the air. None survived the ground. Perfect winter. Perfect. No ice. No snow. Awesome. Almost made it through the season with no ailments, almost. They have been passing a bug back and forth at work all season long. I managed to get it last week, but am finally on the verge of feeling human again.
New machine at work is freaking awesome. Took a bit to get the menus down. It has a CAD feature built in so I can draw the components out, or import them. I can then turn them into 3D images. You can click on an object line and pick what you want to grind. Programming is a breeze. I love it. Best of all, it isn't twenty plus years old, so it doesn't alarm out and need attention all the time. It does require extra care as there are an infinite amount of ways to crash it, but the challenge is fun. New CEO isn't afraid to spend money. Hopefully this is just the beginning and we see more new equipment in the future. Keeps me updated as well should I decide I need to find employment elsewhere. Nice to be able to run the new controls. 
A couple more weeks until the gun auction. They have a Garrand sniper rifle setup on the block. An M1D complete. Also have a Rockola M1 carbine and a few other treasures. All at the beginning, so I don't have to sit through several hours of auction for the five items I want. Hopefully I won't come home empty handed. The other good thing about all the items up front is, I don't have to wait in a long line waiting for the firearm to get called in. Most people will wait until the end of the auction to check out. I hope to be home by ten in the morning, instead of afternoon.

Very rough school week

Had a condensed course on running the brand spanking new grinder last week. It is a brand new studer S33 CNC grinder with all the bells and whistles. She has an OD head and two ID heads on it. Costs about $600,000. And the silly people in management are letting me run it :)  It is a bit more complicated than the old G code machines we have currently. It is down right amazing what it can do. Eventually, I will be grinding threads and non rounds. Non rounds being anything not round. In the grocery aisles, margarine containers and such are all going square or rectangular shape. We make the molds that make those containers. We also rebuild those molds when they wear out. Those are examples of non rounds. It can also grind the threads that form the inside thread on the medicine bottles and caps we manufacture. It is going to get a lot more interesting than just round stuff.

It has a built in CAD/CAM set up as well. I can either draw the parts from prints, or, import them as dxf files and pick what I want to grind. It really is an incredible machine. A ton of menus and commands to learn. Hopefully get her set up and running on jobs tomorrow. It is fun trying to train people on the old grinders while learning the new one. And, trying to put together machines that got moved to make room for the new one. Very busy at work. I can't believe I actually got the weekend off with all the work going on. I am enjoying the 60 degree weather. GO Global Warming :) :) :)

Busy Busy Busy

Been back to work and very busy. They actually bought me a brand new CNC grinder with all the bells and whistles. Came in last week. We moved a whole lot of machinery around to make room for it. Suppose to start training this week. Should be interesting. I am use to older equipment. All G code driven. This one is suppose to grind threads, non rounds, ID and OD. Pretty much anything you can throw at it . Personnel is going to be interesting as well. Obama is out, Trump is in. Industry in the area is picking back up by leaps and bounds. A lot of the people we picked up last year through other companies cutting back, are now going back to their old better paying jobs. Going to be fun learning new and trying to train replacement kids on equipment at the same time. It is good to see the industries rebounding already. Obama did a lot of damage in eight years. Looks like overtime will stay in the foreseeable future. Every time I feel we are catching up personnel wise, we lose some more. Money is great, but I am getting to where time off sounds better.