or more correctly, some better help.

Cripes, this has been a bad week. The lead's on vacation. Dad's out of town on business. Everyone at the shop is sick, including me. Productivity this month is in the toilet and our customers are constantly calling to chase late deliveries. And to top it all off, my classwork is pretty piss poor.

( Rant on )

So the vacation relaxation kick was short lived. As none of our current machinists had worked on a specific project before, we had it stopped at 50% before I left for Chicago. I wanted to be present when they worked on the next operation's setup in order to make sure that the critical dimensions were maintained. I left explicit instructions not ( Read more... )

Lately, I've been tied up with front office and engineering work. Consequently, it's been awhile since I've spent a lot of time on the shop floor helping the guys trouble shoot things. Perhaps it's because of the heat - today got up into the higher 80's with a good bit of humidity; perhaps it's because our production has been lagging so far this ( Read more... )

Laugh. We got one of our two ancient CNC milling machines up and running today. It's still got plenty of quirks and desperately pleads for spare parts, but it powers up and the spindle turns. Thankfully most of the parts can be ordered off the shelf from the local McMaster-Carr distribution center. The other one has a couple show stoppers that ( Read more... )