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Transcript

Whether you're a large material supplier delivering both orders to your customers or your drop shop, you do you're cutting on your floor to get that material out there. You understand the challenges that come with working that bandsaw. And let's be honest, the bandsaw area is the first step in your manufacturing process. It's literally how you get the material onto your floor. So if that gets bottleneck, if that gets backed up, that's going to cause you challenges that you don't need. So what am I hearing when I'm out in the world at any of these facilities? It's usually these three things. How can I get material to my four faster? How can we just cut costs, and how can I just work smarter? I'm here to answer all of those questions and many more at the Lennix HQ in East Longmeadow, Mass, where you and I are going to be learning how to get the most out of your bandsaw. When it comes to your pants off, choosing the right blade is going to be a challenge that you need to address. Another is going to be making sure those operators are getting the trading they need. We're going to be talking about all of those things and more with Michael Ford, a senior industrial solutions manager here at Lenox, and Jacob. How's it going, brother? Thanks for being here. So I want to jump right into this. You and I, we've been to manufacturing metalworking facilities around the world and the bandsaw era isn't always the most well kept or just the area of the shop that's given the most attention. What are you seeing as a professional in that sector out in the world? Yeah, the band song operation is typically a fairly neglected part of any metalworking facility. And that can pose a problem because when you're manufacturing something, bandsaw is typically the first process that you hit. And if you are not performing well in advance, lying operation that they're affects every process that happens after the cut. Really it's almost two categories. You have the big metal suppliers where. I don't know. They have 40% of their business is just sawing, cutting all day long and you have these job shops, you have people that are putting out parts from different customers and they need to get material done on their site. I feel like the way that we address both of those types of metal working facilities needs to be different. Every metal working facility is different in in what they are looking for. The the objective, the objectives of each facility is something that you have to consider with the tooling that you're using in that facility from the tooling to the machinery. And like you said, all the way down to the operator who's running the machine and we're going to be talking about all of those things out on the floor. We're going to be going through demos. And specifically what we're going to be hitting on is bimetal versus carbide in the blade department. I'm going to be honest to everybody out there that knows my experience as a machinist. I, when I was a machinist, I had to go on The Dirty bandsaw. I used the same exact blade to cut 6061 aluminum if I was cutting 1018, if I was cutting 3/16. Painless, I didn't care, I just had to turn the dials until it didn't sound bad and that was that. You're not the only one. Is that? Is that wrong though? Was I wrong to do it that way? I wouldn't say that you're wrong, but band sawing, even though it's neglected, it can be fine-tuned and honed in to make it more and more efficient. And that comes through selecting the proper blade, whether it's by metal carbide, and also training your operators to understand what piece of tool they are working with and how to run that machine. In the most efficient way. I'm ready to go. See that now? I got safety glasses. I got safety all ready to go. You mind showing me? Let's go get it. Let's hit it. So this is it, man. The R&D facility here at Lenox, I am pumped up, brother, especially talk to you, Matt. Larry, senior product engineer here, correct? Correct. Super excited for you to be here with us and the House two team today. Do you mind helping me out, getting this up and running? I have a quick question for Michael. Sure, absolutely. Thank you. Michael, how do you truly understand how to pair the right blade with the right training? I think it's different and I need to know what your thoughts are. It's all about everyone in the facility having a complete understanding of the objective, right, so. You can put the best blade on the saw possible, but if the operator does not know how to run it, then we have an issue, right. So we want to understand what what it is we're trying to do in our metal working operation and making sure that everyone in the facility, including the operator of the soft yeah, has that same goal. Is this the bimetal blade that's in there right now? Yep, we're running contest your GT today kind of 17 four precipitation hardening stainless steel. What is your idea of people doing a changeover from bimetal applications to carbide applications? Sure. So I think a common misconception out there is that buy metal is really for those easier to come and serials with carbide right now exactly running crazy seal yeah, we're running a contest for GTA5 metal blade today on 17/4 precipitation harden. Love you. Application for either bimetal or carbide. But I think the message here is that you can use carbide in some of your easier to cut materials too. Not just your exotic materials and your harder materials, but you can put it on your 1040 fives or 1070 ones and what have you really increase the production output of your facility, whether it's for the downstream operations in your own plant or through your customers, getting them a service level that you haven't reached before. Well, if you guys are trying to impress me as a metal working owner, I need to see that carbide. Played run and not just this 18 minute cycle time. Do you mind if we do a quick changeover? Let's get it, sweet. We got that new carbide blade in Matt, are we ready to roll? OK. That is my faster than what I saw with the biomaterial. I get what you mean talk about this efficiency for me, I'm seeing an action now. So the bimetal blade we had before was pretty typical contester GT blade. We were running at about two to 2 1/2 square inches per minute. As far as the material removal rate here we're running around 10. So we got about a 4X increase with carbide and this play is going to last a whole lot longer than your bimetal blade. I mean depending on where you're using for rates this kind of. Application is something that we see out in the field a lot. It's a pretty typical material. A lot of users use bimetal, but when they put a carbon carbide blade on there, it's really kind of a wow factor of how much they can actually put out of that one machine. So when you're talking about the cost saving stuff, this is what you mean. This is what you want the customers to see, correct? This is what we want the customers to see. This is what we want them to experience. We want to see the entire Lennox value proposition brought in and put onto the song. This is beautiful. I love that you're OK. It's already halfway through you literally. Three more tips coming off of this guys. I appreciate the time here. I wanna hit some more bullet points though and make sure we really get all of you out there the information you need to better your business, who we go get after it. Dude, this is awesome. You guys even have a classroom like on site. I love this. OK, I need all of you to understand and grasp what we have really been diving into today. That's what's about to happen. I want to start off with you, Michael. So you've really been discussing a lot about the cost ratio, the savings ratio. Hit that again for me. Yeah, this is really what we've discussed today is how we break through bottlenecks. In a manufacturing operation, we can sit there and cut all day long with the bimetal blade and some people are totally content with that. But if you really want to get some production out of your machinery and you have the means to do that, we put a carbide blade on advanced machine and we can see unbelievable feeds and speeds and we can really see production on a different level. You, you Sir, really dope in to showing me out there what it's like going from bimetal going to carbide and what's something that you want to still send home to those operators when it comes to choosing that blade? Why do you sometimes go that material route or the carbide route? Well, I think a lot of people are are so focused on using carbide for those harder. But really, you can use Carbide blade on really anything that you're putting on a bandsaw and improve, improve your production efficiency and get more pieces out the door to your customers or your downstream operations a lot faster. I think a lot of people can take advantage of that today, getting it downstream. That's what bandsaw is all about. Brother, I appreciate your time, both of you. That third bullet point, it's coming for me and it's about the people. Everything that we've learned today, everything that we're constantly putting into the industry, it's about you. Nice. It's about us putting this into action in our businesses. It's about training. We need to better our operators, better our people. And above all else, we need you to learn how to get the most out of your bandsaw. For more metalworking tips and industry best practices, stay tuned for the next How to episode and subscribe to the MSC Industrial Supply YouTube channel, a source of original manufacturing content built to make you better.