Testing the process | Smith Blade Update | 27

Indexado: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]We have a problem. And the problem is air quality. I got this fancy meter here. You can see where we are right now. The air quality is good, right?

[00:00:08]Follow me.

[00:00:12]Now that we have more machines running, number one, you walk in here, you can feel the humidity. Oh, there it is.

[00:00:21]So, the the particles per liter has gone way up and it's unhealthy.

[00:00:26]So, we need to do something about this.

[00:00:29]Let's talk about solutions. Simple solution is we have more air flow in here. We turn on fans. We open the doors. We do that sort of thing. So, we've been doing that. But someone forgot to turn the fan on this morning.

[00:00:42]So, I'm going to do that now.

[00:00:46]That switch turns on a big fan in the roof. It's something like 4,000 CFM.

[00:00:50]It'll suck up a lot of the air. Um, and we have other doors open to kind of get the air flow out. The fan works well when it's cold outside. When it's it's not yet summer, so I can't I won't be able to run the fan in the summer. It'll get way too hot in here. Better solution is something called a mist collector.

[00:01:10]The idea with a mist collector is that it sits on top of the machine and it it sucks up the the the misty air and it removes the removes the mist. It's kind of like a dehumidifier, right? It filters the air, removes the particulates, the coolant then drops back down in the machine. So something we're actually running something like I don't know 100 gallons a day of water that we're adding to the machines. And so a lot of that can just be sucked out and put right back in. So it'll make our jobs easier. We'll save on coolant.

[00:01:45]We'll save on water. We'll save on the the HVAC equipment. So right now our air conditioners are running hard to to take that that moisture out of the air and instead the mist collectors can can. So we found a company called Arowax mist collector that just sits right on top of the machine. Super easy to install. Um they're made right here in Canada which is great. So your options are yeah you add one mist collector per machine or you add one big one and then you duct it to each machine. And there's pros and cons to each, but the way that we've decided to move forward is one unit per machine. If you ever move the machine, you just move the machine. You don't have to worry about changing duct work or anything like that. The other piece of that is that if you're only running one machine, hypothetically, you're running one machine, but then you have to have this big mist collector running in the background. Whereas, if you have one unit per machine, it turns on and off with the machine. So, it only runs when the machine's running. The other thing is a a blow box. So, sometimes you take some parts out and you get a an air gun and you spray it off and you're you're blasting that coolant into the air and so you put that into a blow box where you have a hepailter and it just sucks it in there. 5 minutes later with the fan running and we're back into the green. Um, so we're just gonna for now we're going to leave the fan running all day until we get the mist collectors so that everything's good for the employees.

[00:03:21]>> It's an M390 blade, but what's the HRC?

[00:03:24]>> The hardness we've we've been measuring between 58 and 61 HRC.

[00:03:31]>> What feedback do you guys have with your own knives?

[00:03:33]>> I'm rocking a prototype version. This is one of the oldest Smith blades in existence. I've been pretty happy with it. Feedback is that personally I don't really like the glass breaker. It has been my go-to knife where I I have a bunch of knives and this is my go-to knife. This this is my everyday carry, not just because it has to be. I carry it at all times, not just while I'm working, but I'm I'm constantly have a screwdriver and a pry bar and a knife and all these things on me, which is incredibly useful.

[00:04:09]>> Have you found the root cause for the QC issues yet?

[00:04:13]>> These past few weeks have been a combination of of issues. It's not just one root cause. It's kind of a few root causes across many different parts. And so we had an issue in the machine shop where there was an issue, a program re a revision was made to the program and then that caused another issue and then we were making parts that needed to be reworked. So that's been resolved. But then at the same time, we were having issues with some of the pins and we were having issues with some of the blades and we were having and so all of those together, you need to have all four of those good parts together.

[00:04:57]And we were having problems with each of those parts. And so right now, I think we have majority of that solved.

[00:05:07]But it's not just a single root cause.

[00:05:10]Once Kickstarter fulfillment is done, will you offer more anodization colors for future Smith blades?

[00:05:15]>> We would love to, but we will see.

[00:05:17]Something we'd like to offer in the future is actually PVD coating. Um, we could we'll have to see if we can get a PVD machine in house. Um, but it would open up a lot of possibilities for some really cool designs. There are a lot of really cool ideas we have, but we can't focus on them right now because we have to make the Kickstarter units as our top priority.

[00:05:38]When are we going to see the return of main channel content?

[00:05:41]>> I hope soon. There are some projects in the pipeline to return content to the main channel, but projects take a long time.

[00:05:54]Little bit of an update. So, this is the start of week seven. We uh have done quite a bit of stuff in the assembly layout uh and the machine shop. We did a couple of trials. Um what we did we started with doing a line balance of all of our stations timing all the stations and setting them level so that each process is con is consecutively faster than our slowest process which is combined knife. We did three trials.

[00:06:19]Last one was April 24th brought up a ton of quality issues that uh we started resolving but the one prior to that is pretty successful. The we have our hourby- hour board that number combined knife. So we did that in an 8 hour shift. We built 150 knives in 8 hours.

[00:06:35]We built about 42 the first four hours of the day. Brought the afternoon shift crew in. Loaded up the line as if we were to have a full station at each area. So in those 4 hours, we built another 108. Uh which gave us 150. So good moment. Uh we were quite happy with that that the line balancing worked. Uh the people liked it. We sat back after every trial. We kind of have a little team huddle. We sit back and we talk about the trial and some of the flaws that they had or some of the issues that they had. and go through and and work them. Our next trial that we have coming up uh as soon as we get some of these quality issues worked out is this one.

[00:07:10]Uh hope hoping to do that by the end of next week where we do 200 at combined knife, 200 at pack, 200 at FQC. We build them by backer number in order um founders and the German blade. So we started doing builders, we started doing founders uh really good. We want to do another mass trial to make sure that we can hit that 200 to 220 every shift, eight hours when we have a full crew.

[00:07:34]So, couple of the changes that we did.

[00:07:36]This station used to be box pairing station. We print off our print off our order, go through, load it, and assemble it in that line balancing that we looked at. If we come to the very first station back to our laser station, we now subasssemble not only the springs in there, we put in a bulb, we put in uh tweezers, we put in the detent plate, uh the bubble level, then it comes to uh box pairing. So, it's already kind of matched. box pairing patches it or creates it whether it's an anodized scale or a natural scale, loads it up, sets it through to the combined knife prep station where basically we took a lot of the work away from combined knife and kind of pulled it forward to help balance that out. These new stations now takes the scales, puts the uh uh the washer, the hinge pin in, sets the blade in, does a quick check, and fires it off to combine knife. we get to combine knife. Basically, they're just marrying the two scales together, putting it through, doing a ton of quality checks, the flushness check, the 180 check, uh the lock up on it, making little adjustments if they need to make adjustments. Two of those stations now, these two produce roughly 30 uh an hour.

[00:08:45]So, that'll give us our 240 when we have all of our staffing from combined knife.

[00:08:49]It now goes to middle QC over on the other side. So any of the work in process that happens here all the way through goes to middle QC where it gets inspected. Uh they basically do all the function checks, they do the visual checks, the u appearance checks uh and through when we're done we now go to tridium and laser. So that used to be in the back room. We move tridium out. Uh it comes out laser. I'm just waiting for an enclosure to put the uh the enclosure on and then laser will be out. So now we have a a perfectly smooth flowing line and it gets to our final station where we do our our packaging. Uh we do our final clean, we do our final inspections and then we ship it off to uh final QC.

[00:09:29]The assembly process we've proven works.

[00:09:31]Um now it's a matter of staffing them up. A lot of the issues that we had, if you remember uh Ian's video about maintenance, we had some maintenance issues. The bead blaster would go down whenever we turned on the dry ice blast cuz we were drying all the air. We had the filter issue. we had uh what have you. We inadvertently made a uncontrolled machine cutting change that threw us into a big dizzy. We ended up having bore issues. We end up having tweezer issues. We ended up have the um uh lack of marking. We didn't have the scale marks, all sorts of stuff. We found out when you started looking at the pile of parts, like I mean, we had a a ton of pile of parts. A lot of the quality defects were getting through the actual machine shop process. So we started doing something new, implementing first article inspections off of every pallet that comes out of the machine shop, making sure that they validate and check. So we have our key product characteristics, we have critical quality, we have good, no good, and what the passes are and what the checks are. The other thing that we have as a result of making an uncontrolled change is a new engineering change process. What we did was we changed all 30 machines uh to run the new program or sorry the 20 machines. It was the host machines which created a ton of defects uh going through the system. We didn't control that trial which is a mistake that we should have done with an engineering change process. We actually go through take one machine down do a trial run it validate it make sure it's good and then change all the other machines. Um we didn't do that. That was a huge mistake. So we have to do that.

[00:11:04]The other thing that we didn't have is work instructions in the machine shop.

[00:11:08]So last week, this week our big focus was creating work instructions for how you do each job, how you do each check, what the process is, and flowing through uh that system. So as of Saturday, we actually started getting great parts out of the machine shop. We done about 3 weeks worth of rework um and we got our program fixed. We got it all dialed in.

[00:11:30]So we're running good scales now, which is fantastic. We got our blade rework um actually dialed in. So that's good. We took care of one of the quality issues with the hinge pins. Um, so now as of this morning, we are actually building at combined knife, they're passing almost 100%. When we did these trials, our first time quality, the very first trial, it was about 42%. If we talk about a capability index or we talk about CPK, um, that would put us at less than one, which is your process is completely out of control. When we did, uh, trial number two, we actually bumped it up, made some quality changes. We got up to about 60%. I'm hoping when we do this one next week, uh, we have a a CPK greater than 1, 1.33, 1.37, which means that our process is good, our quality is good, our process is stable and reliable. That is the quality issue. Ton of issues in the machine shop that we're still working through. Let's uh pop down there. So, we started talking about bottlenecks. One of the things that we actually got, if you take a quick look right up there at that little TV screen, you'll see a bunch of green lines. Let's slide up there. So, this is now going to help capture uh OE. We talked about that in one of my first uh first vlogs. Um that is every HOS machine that we have.

[00:12:43]The top ones that you see up there, the red, green, red, green, green, green, red, that is this set of machines. That very first one, red is sitting right there. It's not running. We're waiting on tooling for it. The next one that's red, so uh DCC, um is waiting on a motor. We have the motor in the box. We're just waiting on HOS to come in and fix it. The other one that's uh down number two, a collet. A simple little collet that broke off.

[00:13:12]Look at how thin that wall is.

[00:13:15]So thin. Um so we're waiting on HOS to get us one of these uh and get this machine up and running. We had a couple other issues with uh the siles. Waiting on a couple probes. So I'm down one, two, three, four, five machines right now running. So we're running about 25 machines. um 16 hours a day, uh 6 days a week because of that screen. What that allows us to do is it allows us to see how a machine goes down. Right now out in the out in the tent, there's 12 machines out there. We take a look at this one here. The yellow one means it's stopped. It's probably cycled out. It needs a change over. It's been down 30 minutes. So, what that does is it triggers the lead hand. We have lead hands training right now. Uh to zip out to the tent and get that one back up and running. So all of these little issues that are breaking down now that we're tracking it, we're getting them a whole lot quicker. We're getting up faster. We needed a motor for that machine. We already have the motor sitting in house.

[00:14:11]So we're down for a big change like a motor. We're down roughly about a week.

[00:14:16]For the little changes, we're right on top of them. We're getting through uh getting them up and running again quick.

[00:14:23]So the next biggest bottleneck that we're uh facing is our finishing station. Right now, like I said, I'm only running two shifts, uh, 60 hours, but we're running six days a week. We have mandatory overtime on Saturdays. Is our finishing station. I need to put a a tumbler and a finisher on every shift that we're running to match what's coming off the machine surface. I feel good about the quality. I feel good about our response time for the equipment. Now, it's just a matter of staffing up and and lining up. And Ian and I talked about that yesterday. I've got some stuff in the boardroom if you want to take a look at that. Now that we've kind of dialed in on our quality and getting our quality processes in place, we've got our machines running, we've got people training uh to increase our shifts to get to that magic number over 400, 440. Um we need some spots filled. CNC uh my day shift, I'm completely full on dayshift. Afternoon shift, I've got one open spot. And the reason I have an open spot is we promoted this gentleman to the midnight crew. Once we have our sign off process in place to make sure that we're not just transferring people to the shift or whatever, just saying, "Yeah, go run it." Um, we have them in for 3 weeks, they get a week and a half on the siles, they get a week and a half on the horses. They get to learn it. We have a complete check sheet to say, "Okay, can you do the touch probes? Can you do uh the filter changes? Can you uh load the pallets right? Can you uh do tool changes and and the work the tool setter?" So when we have all that in place and they're following it and they're and they're doing the quality checks the way that they need to do, I'll feel comfortable transferring them.

[00:15:58]So I'm looking to go to midnights starting May 19th, next Tuesday. And then the weekend warrior crew, good progress there. So we have two people starting uh Lou, the lead hand, uh Vassor, um Amnite, uh he starts on the 19th, but I still have a couple open spots to fill that. So, uh, two for the weekend warrior shift, uh, the day shift, uh, one for the night shift, and then one for afternoons. And then my machine shop is full. Um, and I can run 24/7, which is the end goal. We'll have our weekend warrior crew either June 5th, June 12th. Uh, we'll be up to a 24/7 shift. So, roughly about four weeks away. Not Not bad. I'm I'm quite happy with that. The assembly department, same thing. Couple of open spots in assembly.

[00:16:42]uh three open spots on afternoons. We created what's called a a PSG group. So the PSG stands for production support group. There's two people, Ashley and Christian. And those people go wherever we have a a hole. So if somebody calls in sick, that person can go fill in one of those spots. Um if we need to, we're doing blade rework. Ashley is working on on blade rework. So any of those things that we kind of need to fill that we want to don't want to take our labor away from making parts, we use our PSG group. Also good. We have five interviews this week, two for CNC. Um, so I'm hoping to fill these two spots.

[00:17:19]We have another one next week, and then we have three for assemblies. The interview process and the and the hiring process is uh taking a bit longer. We bring them in, we interview them, we select them. Um, they take two weeks to get here. Uh, then they go through training. the ramp up of people has has kind of been another big uh bottleneck, but good in the sense that it allowed me to find all of these little issues and uncover things like the fact that we didn't have SOPs, we didn't have work instructions, we didn't have first article inspections, we didn't have standard work, we didn't have a signoff task to say, "Yeah, this person's trained. We can move them. We can uh bring them that way." So, those are all coming in place this week. That is my update for the beginning of week seven.

[00:18:02]That's all I got. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments.