November 14, 2024
I woke up today with excitement and the knowledge that will be a long day. Thursday last week I won the vote to become the President of the Murpah Shrine Club for 2025. Every year that I have been a member, I have witnessed planning issues. With that potential I took preventative action and after work today I am having a meeting with all the 2025 Officers and their wives so we can brainstorm on events as well as lock in dates that we know we are for sure doing. Over a month ago, all of the members had been informed of that plan, so they could have time to prepare ideas and think about planning for those suggestions. To get to that meeting I of course needed to go to work first.
I have been waiting for some Aerospace parts to show up. They have been delayed for over a month. Before I receive the material it first must go to a business in Daleville, IN named Element Materials Technology. It is an Aerospace material testing laboratory, where they cut a sample titanium forge section into pieces. Then they will look at the grain structure and strength of the material as part of its testing process to verify that the material is acceptable quality. The finished parts will become various commercial airplane components so there are very strict levels of acceptance before I receive the material.
Today was my lucky day though. I showed up and my supervisor had already placed one of those material items on my worktable, so I knew they had finally shown up. I knew what parts we were going to produce first so I had already gone through the machine and loaded the proper programs and checked all the tooling that will be used in this first batch of parts. The first operation went smoothly. The rough outline of the part was milled and the mounting holes needed for the rest of the operations were drilled correctly. I loaded the part onto the second fixture and started to run that operation and immediately had a failure on the machine side. There is a mechanical arm that swaps tools in and out of a Horizontal CNC Mill. That arm position is controlled by a servo that allows the arm to be in one of three positions. The machine rotated the “tool belt” to the proper position. It grabbed the tool needed, extended that tool (to create clearance), moved to the 2nd location, placed that tool into that staging location holder, then retracted however not to the correct location. It took a few minutes to troubleshoot why the arm was in the incorrect location. However, the smell of burning plastic and warm or hot components is a clear giveaway when looking at electronics. The issue is a burned-up servo. There are two that drive or control a piston. The one that is only used when it is actively changing a tool is the one that is fried. That’s weird because it is used less than the other one. It also popped a fuse that is used to protect the servo from overload. We replaced the fuse with only a few tool changes before it popped. We then switched to a larger fuse, and it only lasted a few tool changes before it popped again. We swapped the servo with a used one, since a new one will take some time to arrive. The used one had the same reaction, a few changes and then it would overload. It appears there is an additional electrical issue as it is sending constant energy to a component that should be resting most of the time the machine is powered on. I am unable to fix that issue, so I must abandon that project for the day. It has taken hours to make all of these troubleshoot and unsuccessful fixes. That is a frustrating aspect of manufacturing. You can have the knowledge and skill to make a part but a component in a machine can fail at some random time and shut down the whole operation.
At this point I decided it was more beneficial to move to a second machine where I was partially through a set up. These parts are a “heat sink” or an item that is used to absorb and then disperse heat generated by electronic or mechanical devices with the purpose to prevent overheating. I wish that servo had a heatsink, it would be an easier fix. Heat sinks typically are made out of aluminum or copper. These are aluminum and go in those very tall parking lot light poles. These heat sinks start off as 3.5” round disks that are 5/8” think. I can run 24 parts at the same time. They are broken up into two panels on a vertical tree that can turn inside the machine. The work done on these parts is so massive that the program exceeds the internal memory and cannot be run on the machine itself. I must connect a laptop to the machine and run the program from that location. The program takes about fourteen hours to run. I want to get somewhere in these parts so I finish the setup and just load one part onto the panel so I can verify all my offsets and the program itself since it had to be modified this morning. It had three tools being used that are listed in different locations on my build information as well as we wanted to add a tool touch off after each tool runs. That means the machine itself will take the drill or mill or whatever tool was just used then touch it off on a probe. The length it takes to touch off has to match the data I put into the CNC memory within .01 of an inch or it will flag the tool as being broken. That can happen sometimes if the collet or holder used is not properly holding the tool and it slides back into the holder or if there is a shaving that gets trapped on the edge of the tool and makes it think the tool is now longer than it should be.
The rest of the shift allowed me to get through all of the milling and center drilling and drilling on the parts, so I will just have to tap or put threads for screws, into the parts tomorrow in order to be done with this first set up part. If the grooves and threads and other details are matching the blueprints, I will then go ahead and load a full batch of parts onto the fixture tomorrow and then be able to run the full fixture of parts. So after a nine hour shift I was able to only get through about an hour and a half of machine one part and then not quite through the heat sink set up part. It feels like a failed production day but we will up and running on the heat sinks tomorrow and as soon as the servo and electric issue is fixed I will be able to run the aerospace parts as well.
After work I drove home and took a shower. I was ready to go to meet my Shriner Officers but had to wait on my wife. She has a headlight out on her vehicle and didn’t want to drive in the dark when we were done with the meeting. In the waiting process I received a call. It was from an Officer at my Masonic Lodge. He asked if I was ready to take over the Bible Dedication for Master Masons. I have not been practicing much lately but I have done enough to say I will do that for our guys. I will need to do some heavy focusing on that in the coming days as I will have to perform that duty in just over two weeks. By the end of that conversation, my wife arrived home and was ready to leave.
Once we got to the meeting, we had some time to wait so I brought out my notes and items I had to suggest. One member was out of town but he sent me his list of ideas. Another members wife said that when she or her husband has a random idea she will add it to a note, so she printed that off and presented it. Another officer works for the postal office so he was on speaker phone for most of the meeting but was able to show up in person once his route was completed. We had to table bylaw changes until the first of the year, but our plan is to have those modifications presented at the February meeting and then voted on at the March meeting. I found out that our most recent approved by laws are from 2021 but were never properly submitted to the Murat Temple in Indianapolis, so we are still under our 2016 by laws. I am focused on cleaning up all the wording and amendments and then we will take the correct steps to have it filed.
A few of our members were going to go to Ohio last weekend for a “Water Buffalo Degree”, which is based on the Fraternity that is in the Flintstones cartoon. We found out that one of the top members is less than an hour drive from us and offered to allow us to host one of the events and then also have the option to do our own version in the future. That would allow us to raise money for our direct causes and keep the money local, so we have slotted a date for that. We have multiple members who are “Hillbilly Shriners”, so we are doing one or two of the stated monthly meetings as well as hosting a “Hillbilly Ball”. The proceeds from those meetings and the dance will go to Shriners Hospital Transportation Fund. We have signed up to the do the “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” in order to help raise money for the Muncie Mission. We will be going to local businesses and friends in order to raise money to sponsor us for our committed donation to that organization. We are doing our annual Fish Fry. The club usually does one in the fall but my group has decided to move it to the spring in order to get it to fall inside of Lint. All together there were fifteen events or dates that we were able to agree upon. Another ten appear to be settled. We just have to find the specific date to do those events. Over the last decade I have seen one officer a year seem to quit over being burned out. I have been very clear with my group that I am looking for ways to make that not happen with us. I have a handful of dates in the next calendar year that are blocked from being rented. On those days we are doing group fun activities. That includes a raffle in Fort Wayne that Shriners can attend. It is an all day affair and as a Shriner we can buy a $20 ticket and it gains us access to partake in the event all day long. We have always had that day booked by a random rental so a few members go and have a blast and the rest of us get to hear about what we missed out on. I want that to be a nice fun day for everyone. We are trying to incorporate a trip to the Chicago Shriner Children’s Hospital and then watch a Chicago Cubs game. Things like that can help give us the focus on why we are all volunteering our time and working so hard to raise money while also giving us time to spend together that isn’t working an event. I got our group to do the BSU Alumni Homecoming Parade this year. I was blown away by how many members and their wives informed me that the parade experience was the most fun they have had in years. I believe we have not participated in a parade in around fifteen years. I am now working on leads to add the “Shriner Carts” that a lot of people associate with us. We will be doing a few parades this next year since the feedback was so overwhelming. It also helps gain our organization more public exposure. I was surprised when I spoke with a Muncie Police Officer who said he did not know we even had Shriners in Muncie. That lets me know we have failed in our community outreach, so I am very focused on that as one of my top goals for 2025.
After the meeting was over It was to late for my wife to entertain cooking, so we stopped at a fastfood a window and went home at ate our dinner. After that we got ready for bed and prepared ourselves for tomorrows challenges.