Dear Friends,
So I missed this email last week. The short reason why was a wall. A literal wall in fact.
We have decided to bring the building of the database back in house, with Meryle leading the project. Meryle has been my second in command for five years now, and up until now has been the leader in day to day operations. She has a unique knack for building effective systems, which works well with my vision. I build the first thing, and Meryle helps figure out how we will build the next 10,000.
In order to give her the uninterrupted time she will need to learn how to build a database, and then actually build one, she needs a proper office. Up until now, the three admin team (myself, Meryle, and Anna) have shared a large office, with Meryle and Anna sharing a table. This has mostly been out of necessity, but now we need to change.
We have taken an office that was mainly used for leather storage at the far end of the workshop, and are converting that to my office/photo studio. It has good natural light, and is long enough to setup my podcast studio in as well. With me out of the room, we can then divide the admin office in two and give Anna and Meryle each their own office.
I had anticipated that building the wall, drywall, and painting would take about. 3 days. We are going on day 9 of it. Meryle and I spent most of last week cutting lumber, working on changing the way the light fixtures were in the room, hanging drywall, and sanding.
Now every project I do seems to balloon in length, so I should not be surprised that this one did as well. Frankly the worst part of it has been the drywall. Thankfully I have been able to avoid the worst of that since I have had to make bars. Once the drywall was up, I left Meryle to work on the drywall by herself.
She has been sculpting and sanding (lots of sanding) and slowly but surely the wall is starting to look flat.
The wall was intentionally built to provide a sound barrier for her office. Meryle has handed over the day to day operations to Anna, and I don't want Meryle to get caught up in the day to day issues if she can overhear them. Also Anna handles all the incoming phone calls, so I don't want the noise from those calls to bother Meryle.
This means that the wall was way overbuilt using 2x3 studs 16" apart, on one side of the wall, and then another set offset 8" on the other side. So functionally every 8" the wall has a stud that doesn't go all the way over to the other drywall. This gap, combined with Mineral Wool insulation seems to provide a lot of sound dampening. The Mineral Wool was a whole issue unto itself as well. It is very itchy and I ended up getting full body paint suits to go with our respirators for PPE.
Before I could jump into the wall however, I needed to make sure we had enough bars to keep production going. Here is where I can finally share some good news...
I've got it figured out... Sorta
After an enormous amount of testing I finally found a combination where the Medium bars can be made on the old fixture (the first one I made with Skiddy) successfully. In fact, I had one day where I made 56 Medium bars and didn't have a single tool break. One of my taps lasted over 220 holes which is 10 times longer than when I first started. So I'm finally nailing down the recipe for production.
I had stockpiled about 14 days worth of Medium bars before jumping in to helping Meryle with building the wall, and it took all my time last week. This week, armed with my new recipe, I have been working on making Mini Bars on the fixture using the recipe I had figured out on the Medium fixture.
I am happy to report we now have enough Mini bars for the next 10 days or so and the Mini fixture is working (*for the most part).
I'm still seeing my taps break quicker than I would like unfortunately. I think it may have something to do with either the coolant/oil mixture which helps lubricate the tap, or something to do with the chip evacuation below the plate. Those are two variables that are starkly different between the medium fixture an the mini fixture.
One of the keys to success has been using HSS tools for production. Carbide tools are much harder and more wear resistant than HSS tools are, but they are far more brittle and prone to breaking when shocked. For whatever reason, that seems to be happening. I've switched the spot drill HSS and am testing other tools in HSS to see if they work better. HSS (high speed steel) is more prone to wearing, but also is more elastic and can handle whatever issues were killing my carbide tools. The best part is that the HSS tools are significantly cheaper.
The reason I put an asterisk next to the Mini fixture, is that there is some fine tuning in the software that I have been testing over the last few days.
When you take a 4 flute carbide endmill and slot (cut with the full width of the tool), the spin of the tool pulls it in a direction other than the one you are cutting in. This issue has meant that the way I am doing the slots (in three sections) doesn't line up perfectly across the edges.
Functionally, it doesn't really matter, however I want them to line up. Thus I have been making small tweaks to the program to try to compensate for the offset. Each test takes 45 minutes and has multiple variables that need to be tweaked, so its time consuming. I am close to getting it nailed down though.
Once I polish everything up in the program, then I will begin to run it while I work on other things in a different room and see if its able to run predictably enough to work without direct supervision.
This will allow me to turn my attentions elsewhere for the first time in months. I have so many things I want to work on, but one project has captured my attention the most...
My pen design...
There are so many issues I need to overcome with the manufacturing of this idea that I cannot begin to predict when or if this will be available.
What I can say is this. I am very excited for this design. It will be made in house, to the high standards I have set for my brand, with functionality that covers a broad range of refill choices and use cases.
Now I just need to make one...
Realistically, with how long the bars took to get off the ground I have a small sliver of hope that this can be launched before Christmas this year. For that to be true I would need to make remarkable progress in both my machining expertise as well as fine tuning my understanding of this machine.
Thus without a clear path forward, nor a launch on the horizon, I will have to leave you hanging on that idea.
Other things that we need to do involves significant work on our website redesign, including what will be weeks of photography and editing. I have been working with Meryle on wireframes for the new website, as well as some new copy. Hopefully the new version of the website will be even better at providing a clear guiding path to exactly what you want and need.
Progress is slow but it is happening here at the MCC and I have bright hope for the future!
Stay tuned for more letters on Thursdays in the coming weeks and be sure to go subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you like and watch the videos it helps us get promoted more by the algorithm to people who may never have heard of us.
Ever your servant,
Colin Murdy
CEO/Owner
Murdy Creative Co.
Cell: 414-434-9001
MurdyCreative.Co
