Dear Friends,
It's been another long week of broken taps. Frankly I thought I had really found a groove that worked for tapping, but apparently not. I promise this email will not be entirely about the bars, its been too much of that.
In brief, I've broken about $200 in tools trying to get the holes tapped properly. I can't seem to lock down why I'm having the trouble, but at the moment I think I have found a workable solution. The issue was persistent no matter what I tried. I would spot drill the hole, drill the hole, and then go to tap it. Each time the tap would seize up in the hole and snap, not making it more than a tiny way into the hole.
Eventually I decided that I would hand tap the bars, but have the machine drill the holes and cut the bars. During that process I realized something. I was using a drill to hand chamfer the back of the holes. Once I had done that, it was much easier to tap. Essentially this was cheating as it made the actual hole shorter in length. The good news was that I could have the machine manage to do something similar.
I ended up getting a new spot drill that was pointier... That's not the official term, but I can't think of a better way to express the difference. It had a sharper angle to the cutter which makes the cone it creates deeper for the same external size. I also reviewed the math for the drill and realized that I could go up a drill size without having too much of an issue for the thread height. What that means is that when the tap enters the hole, its removing less material from the walls and is creating shorter ridges which has less friction.
Apparently this is actually a standard practice for stainless steel, but no one had mentioned that to me...
I also got something called form taps. Unlike plug taps, form taps work by literally pushing the material into shape rather than cutting it. It forms the threads around it, which generates a lot of heat and creates very strong threads.
The form taps didn't work. In fact they snapped virtually instantly, worse than the plug taps, which I didn't think was possible. However, the combination of the other factors, the wider hole, with a shorter length of actually tapped material has combined to make for tapping that is reliably working.
Praise be to God... (speaking of which, this Sunday is Easter so I want to wish you all a happy Easter. He is Risen Indeed, Alleluia)
This saga is no where near done, but at least I have bars being made, even if its not ideal.
In other news at the workshop, we have decided we are actually going to be working on building our database in house. I have mentioned this in the past I'm pretty sure, but for all the new people here is a quick recap.
A few years back, shortly after I hired Meryle, she began work on a system to track our inventory that had been sold, when it was sold. This was mainly because during Christmas rushes, we would be multiple days behind at times, and we wouldn't know that we had run out of a raw material until we went to make a product and the things we needed were gone. By that point it could take several more days to get the raw material in shop, and we might miss deadlines and give our customers a bad experience.
This system started as a simple Google sheet table. It took the orders that came in, cross referenced them with the recipe of raw materials, and deducted those raw materials from the "current" inventory. That way we knew when we had sold out of raw materials when the sale happened, rather than when we went to go make the item.
Well this spreadsheet grew larger and larger as we added more materials, products, and interconnected sheets over time. Meryle built into it an incredible forecasting model that proved critical in our success during Covid. It accurately predicted how much of a drop off we would likely see and allowed us to order only the raw materials we absolutely needed to keep our costs down.
For several years now it has been inadequate for our needs. Frankly we are doing magnitudes more business now, which alone would make the calculations nearly impossible to keep up with. The system has been limped along, with rough patches and heavy limitations.
We like to do things in house whenever possible. I feel its actually one of our core strengths. Doing things in house allows for us to grow in our skills with an applied focus for learning. It saves us money, and allows for more granular control of everything. So as it became more obvious that we needed a new database, I began to research the various options that we could use and make in house.
First I looked at off the shelf MRP systems that integrate with Shopify. There were some great options, but each one was missing one critical aspect or another of what we were after. I then reviewed the various types of online and offline database building tools. To make a long story short, I decided to build it on Five.co software.
For several months I have been working with the Five development team to dialog about our use case and get their advice. I cannot recommend them enough. They have been incredibly excited for our project and have done excellent work adding new tools to their software specifically to help us.
With everything going on, I thought maybe we should bring on an outside developer after all. We talked with a programmer and she was great to discuss the project with, but when it came to getting it rolling, she just didn't have the bandwidth. So Meryle and I decided we are back to doing it in house.
The money we borrowed to do the project would cover an additional employee to cover the production Meryle would normally do for 6 months. That gives her plenty of time to learn about the program (which is designed to be easy to use) and implement our solution (which has already been mostly diagrammed). By the time the project is set to finish, we will be at Christmas and will be able to keep the person on anyway. With the new work we are doing with our international launches (which I will try to talk about more next week) I have no doubt we will have the work to keep the new person on full time for the long run.
So this week has had a renewed effort for Meryle to pass off most of her day to day tasks to Anna who will be making most of the operational decisions, and we have been renovating the workshop to create a new office for Meryle with walls and a door. This should help keep out the riff raff while she works.
It's also had the nice side effect of getting me my own office as well. I will send some photos along in a later email perhaps.
Next week I will start writing this email earlier and I will tell you all about the great success we have been having with our international launches, the grant money we are getting to supercharge that, and some of the new tools we are building into the database to accelerate the company for the future.
Happy Easter everyone. Go read up on it if you haven't here:
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
