Release date: 28 August 2020
Episode 32: Ben’s back at the library but the automation isn’t. Ben teaches Stephen about ductility. Stephen brings up tiny sensors. Ben talks about the supply chain, manufacturing extension partnerships (MEPs), and cybersecurity. Stephen brings up a recent ransomware attack on whiskey! Ben puts additive myths to rest.
- https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-08/ptgs-std082620.php
-https://metrology.news/cnc-tool-changes-monitored-with-miniature-inductive-sensors/ - https://www.imts.com/show/newsletter/insider/article-details.cfm?articleid=969&start=16&cat= -https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/08/18/us-liquor-giant-hit-by-ransomware-what-the-rest-of-us-can-do-to-help/ -https://www.instagram.com/p/CEWpREYAvM9/ -https://www.amtnews.org/post/a-new-way-of-thinking-navigating-the-noise-to-ensure-am-design-engineering-success
Subscribe to the Weekly Newsletter www.amtnews.org/subscribe Amateur Machinist Blog swarfysteve.blogspot.com/ Music provided by www.freestockmusic.com
Transcript:
Benjamin Moses: Welcome everybody and welcome to the Tech Trends podcast where we discuss the latest manufacturing technology research and news. Today's episode is sponsored by IMTS. Rebuilding supply chain starts now. IMTS is building a knowledge warehouse to rethink, reengage, and reestablished manufacturing and supply chain. The past few months have unrevealed underlying issues with supply chain and it's time to discuss these problems and how to move forward. Please visit imts.com/supplychain for more information. Steve, how was your week, man?
Stephen LaMarca: It's been a good week so far.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah?
Stephen LaMarca: Do you want to tell the people who we are?
Benjamin Moses: I completely forgot about that.
Stephen LaMarca: It's okay.
Benjamin Moses: I am Benjamin Moses, the director of manufacturing technology.
Stephen LaMarca: I'm Steven LaMarca, the manufacturing technology analyst.
Benjamin Moses: Steve, I feel rusty today. I don't know why.
Stephen LaMarca: I think it's the supply chain papers that we've been working on.
Benjamin Moses: We've pushing the supply chain papers hard. We got a lot of content coming out.
Stephen LaMarca: We've been pushing for them to be complete hard and we've been pushing them to our audience hard too. It's been our primary focus lately. Plus, on top of that, since it's such an authoritative topic, I also feel like ... and I've mentioned this to you before as well, but because a white paper is so formal and I'm not typically a formal person, it is totally thrown off my writing style too. It's like the weekly tech reports.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: But that's neither here nor there.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah. The struggle is real chronic, combine the two. It's tough because I feel supply chain doesn't get the light that it deserves. It's such a complex technology and series of organizations that I feel it's tossed over the fence quite a bit.
Stephen LaMarca: It is. It is. I feel it got a little bit of a 15 minutes of fame because of the pandemic because ... You know?
Benjamin Moses: Yeah. I mean, kind of.
Stephen LaMarca: It was illuminated for a while.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: On how important the supply chain is when nothing was on the shelves at Walmart. Then the hype train came along and was like, "Look at all this stuff being additively produced. All this PPE that we're making that all these manufacturers are pivoting to making PPE now that it's so necessary. Now we've got all this PPE." It's like, "Okay. Supply chain can chill now."
Benjamin Moses: I think that was a-
Stephen LaMarca: I was like, "It's always there."
Benjamin Moses: That's a big takeaway, is additive once again jumped in on the hype and stole it all.
Stephen LaMarca: Totally took it from generative design.
Benjamin Moses: One thing that I have been doing more often now is going to the library, which I'm really excited to get back to.
Stephen LaMarca: Nice.
Benjamin Moses: Emilia and I have been heading back to the library, getting a bunch of books. We've been exploring other sections of the library too. I need to actually start exploring if their manufacturing area is back up. I want to get back into there, but I'm a little sad to see that they have automated receiving area for their books that is shut down for now. I think they run it at night, but what they're doing is they're holding all the books because of the virus for four or five days and then processing the book. I'm bummed I can't use it and it's not being run at the time, but seeing automated equipment idle is sad for me.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah. Well, not just sad, but it's almost offensive to us because automated equipment or any expensive equipment for that matter, just sitting there idle that's wasted dollars. You're not getting your return on the investment.
Benjamin Moses: Exactly. Awesome. I've got a couple of really good articles. The first one I want to kick it off with is about aluminum. What do you know about ductility, Steve?
Stephen LaMarca: I feel like I know a lot more about ductility than I'm leading off too right now.
Benjamin Moses: Let me get in the article first then I'll quiz you on ductility.
Stephen LaMarca: Okay.
Benjamin Moses: This paper is from "EurekAlert!" and they cover a lot of material science topics. This research was done in St. Petersburg Polytechnic University. Steve, they're Russian. Careful.
Stephen LaMarca: Yes.
Benjamin Moses: They were conducting research on high-performance wire arc additive, which I'm a really big fan on. Wire arc additive is a larger volumetric flow rates so they're able to produce larger structure faster. In this case, they're putting 2.2 kilograms of material per hour, which I think is fairly high, but it's university research. What they're doing is they're testing out this wire arc additive machine, and they're doing different processing. What they found out when they did some materials testing after they produced a part, was the ductility was three times higher than the specified standard, which is-
Stephen LaMarca: They want that? Is that a good thing?
Benjamin Moses: It was unexpected results. It is a positive, ductility-
Stephen LaMarca: Ductility is good? Higher is better.
Benjamin Moses: It can be better. Let me just read you what ductility means. It's a measure of material's ability to undergo significant plastic deformation before it breaks.
Stephen LaMarca: Got you.
Benjamin Moses: You're basically pushing on and pushing on it. It's basically the toughness of the material under tensile loading. There's a couple of ways to quantify material properties. You got longation values or percent area reductions through tensile testing. In the end, I'm pushing on it and it's deforming, but it hasn't broken yet.
Stephen LaMarca: Got you. To expand upon that a little bit, we see one of the densest materials that we get to talk about on a regular basis, tungsten, or even tungsten carbide.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: Carbide, for example, not ductal at all.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: It's incredibly strong, incredibly heavy, but it doesn't bend or dent. It straight up breaks and shatters.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah, that's right. If you look at the old stress strain curve, so you have your yield strength. Basically you can stress it up to the yield strength and it won't deform. It'll just move back and forth between that shape.
Benjamin Moses: Between yield and ultimate, well, ultimate is where it completely brakes. You have that plastic deformation phase. Some materials are shorter, but they have a really high elastic strength. Something like tungsten or ceramics, they're considered more brittle because of the ductility is so low.
Stephen LaMarca: [inaudible 00:00:06:21].
Benjamin Moses: But they can handle a ton of stress in the beginning, but then it shatters.
Stephen LaMarca: Right.
Benjamin Moses: Right. In this case, they don't mention the yield strength. The yield strength could be really, really poor, but the ductility is better.
Stephen LaMarca: Got you.
Benjamin Moses: That was a really interesting article that by accident ... Actually the way that they found out they had this property and what they're going to do in the next test is, the dependency of material properties to the build rate. Basically how much material are they putting down? What does that effect have on material properties? Maybe they can reduce the ductility or enhance the yield strength or change other material properties by changing the build rate or processing on different parameters within the additive process.
Stephen LaMarca: Got you. Just a quick recap, while you were talking about the article, I went to one of my favorite websites, Wikipedia Simple English, because a lot of people don't know about Wikipedia Simple English.
Benjamin Moses: No.
Stephen LaMarca: If you need to learn something quick and need an entry level on something pretty complex, a lot of people think Wikipedia is where you start. No, no, no, no, because sometimes you'll try going to Wikipedia and searching for limited slip differential and try telling me what a limited slip differential, if you don't know already. Then it's like, that's a little advance. Okay.
Stephen LaMarca: You can't pick that, but Wikipedia Simple English ... Anyway, went to Wikipedia Simple English, typed in ductility. Ductility is when a solid material stretches under tensile strain. If ductile, a material may be stretched into a wire. Malleability is a similar property, is a material's ability to deform under pressure, comprehensive stress. Then it goes down to little example. Gold has high ductility and malleability but lead has a low ductility and high malleability.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: That corrected me on a thought that I had when you were speaking, because one comparison of ductility and malleability in... I'm not going to go into that because I'm a little over my head right now. Anyway. Cool. That's awesome. Speaking of tensile strength.
Benjamin Moses: Yes.
Stephen LaMarca: Well, I've got an article here about mini sensors. Let me get the full headline for you. It's from metrology.news.com. One of my favorite websites. CNC tool changes monitored or CNC tool changes monitored with miniature inductive sensors.
Benjamin Moses: Awesome.
Stephen LaMarca: That's what this article is about, but they have a really cool diagram in this article on where they're placing these miniature sensors. It's the part of the spindle that grabs onto the backend of the taper tool holder, the drawbar grabs onto the tool holder right? And they put these little sensors on the drawbar. Well, first off they're small so they can fit in that really compact and tight tolerance area of the machine. The advantage of putting the sensor right there is while it only measures one metric of how hard it's pulling on to the tool holder from that datum alone, you can deduce a few other data points during your cut. It's really wild, but-
Benjamin Moses: It is interesting that you mentioned that. The back of the tool already got your retention knob that the drawbar pulling on every single time.
Stephen LaMarca: Right.
Benjamin Moses: It was using a lot of force it's interesting that it's a replaceable unit are your tapered a tool holder. You can see where, you can see most likely that's not going to reform, but the retention knob gets so little love in the industry that it's surprising that, and it's so important, right? It's holding your cutter. Basically that's the lifeline to the machine. It's a small little piece that at the old factory I worked at, those things were beat to hell. Those were not in any pleasant condition. We would use them for years and years and years. We wouldn't serialize them. We wouldn't know the number of uses they had or life or anything like that.
Stephen LaMarca: Is number of uses or hours in operation typically recorded at a manufacturing facility.
Benjamin Moses: You can correlate that-
Stephen LaMarca: Or something like that.
Benjamin Moses: There's two options like that your ceramic cutters, or your cutters in general, basically you can measure time and cut. They're all rated for a certain amount of time and cut for certain amount of material. That's one way to measure it, but also the retention knob can fatigue, fail, right? You're pushing on this certain number of cycles, everything at some point fails. The question is, what's your-
Stephen LaMarca: If it's a mechanical object-
Benjamin Moses: It's going to fail. Right. The mechanisms for failure in most cases, is fatigue.
Stephen LaMarca: Mechanical device.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah. I've very rarely seen that failed because of a single proof load or a single load because the machines aren't designed that way. Because you're going to lockout or actually I don't think I've ever seen the threads fail on those tapers either. I mean the retention knobs. It's always been in the retention knobs. I think the shape is designed that way they'll fail in the-
Stephen LaMarca: The threads on the retention knob because the retention knob screws into the back of the tool holder.
Benjamin Moses: Correct. Correct.
Stephen LaMarca: And this thread is that mechanical locking connection between the retention knob and the tool holder and the retention knob and the-
Benjamin Moses: The drawbar.
Stephen LaMarca: The drawbar and the spindle. Gotcha.
Benjamin Moses: Yep.
Stephen LaMarca: Well, I can imagine that those saw a lot of wear because even though the pocket NC certainly has not gotten little to any at all action on it lately because we haven't been in the office. I know that they're also not running the AC in the office, which means humid environment and those tool holders for the pocket NC are made out of carbon steel.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: I can imagine how much rust they have, but there's some wear marks on those.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: And as little action as that machine gets, that thing has some wear on it. I can only imagine how much wear is on a full production facilities, retention knobs.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah, definitely. The article that I've got, the next one is about a five tips to boost your company's resilience. Pull this from IMTS section on supply chain. It's really interesting, we mentioned earlier we're doing supply chain. We have a series of supply chain papers that we're researching and writing since the pandemic supply chain has been a big topic we can't get stuff. This across the board, right? All industries have seen this partly because shut down factories the entire life cycle of production has shut down, not just sourcing goods. Some countries have shut down, exporting things like that. The article here covers a series of things that help protect your company or make you more resilient. It covers two sides of resiliency. There's the ability to withstand a negative influences, but also recover from challenging times.
Benjamin Moses: And the two things that I wanted to bring up was the manufacturing partnerships set up by NEST. I think that it's fairly underrated resource every state has an MEP and their task is to help manufacturers with business growth, business improvement, and risk mitigation. Those are the three key pillars. Now, if you look at that carefully it's not talking about technology. It's not talking about the stuff to achieve what the business needs are. It's focusing purely on the business from the manufacturer's needs. It could look at increasing your throughput.
Benjamin Moses: It could be maybe growing your business in new markets, but it's looking at creating a system where it pulls the need to improve your systems internally. That's one underwriter use resource that small medium sized companies can definitely leverage ongoing basis. A lot of MEP has worked with the universities also, it really does create a large ecosystem of working and pulling future generations into manufacturing. The second one is securing information systems and connected machinery. And then recent news, there are a lot of ransomware attacks on the rise and the article talks about a lot of different things. Have you seen any or heard about any ransomware?
Stephen LaMarca: Oh yeah. Speaking of cybersecurity and ransomware Jack Daniels was just hit by a huge ransomware attack.
Benjamin Moses: I like to think Jack Daniels is a manufacturer.
Stephen LaMarca: They are.
Benjamin Moses: They are, yeah. They produce wooden barrels.
Stephen LaMarca: Well, they produce the barrels and they also use a lot of wood to do the charcoal filtration. It's funny. I actually saw a video of when you hear about Jack Daniels or any other whiskey company that does some sort of charcoal filtration. You expect them to receive raw material of this charcoal that goes into their filters.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: Or when it comes to bourbons and other whiskeys like Tennessee Whiskey, you think about a lot of the flavor of American whiskey comes from the oak and specifically the charred oak. That provides some of the filtration itself, by the way, just in case he didn't know. Because they charr the inside of the barrel before they fill it up with the white dog, which is the un-aged whiskey.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: We're getting into a different type of manufacturing right now.
Benjamin Moses: The malicious kind.
Stephen LaMarca: The malicious kind. I saw a video of how Jack Daniels was made and during their charcoal filtration process when they're setting up their charcoal filtration, I thought they were just going to use old barrels, like cut up and burn old barrels to make their charcoal because charcoal just burnt wood.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: You know what they use, they don't use the barrels.
Benjamin Moses: No?
Stephen LaMarca: They use the pallets that the things are shipped in on.
Benjamin Moses: That's funny.
Stephen LaMarca: That can't be the best... But you know what, hey, it works.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: They're the successful whiskey company, not me.
Benjamin Moses: Can't criticize them. They get the job done yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: Tell me about... They were hit with a ransomware attack.
Benjamin Moses: They were. Do you know what ransomware is? In this case they actually had an external group. There's two we'll call them gangs. The article here mentioned that they have two gangs that are a big into ransomware and what they do is they lock down certain systems or certain datasets within a company and to release it or unencrypted them you have to pay them for the key to unencrypted it. You're seeing this off and on a lot of healthcare industries are getting hit, which is kind of sad at the same time the increase of ransomware has gone up quite a bit. This one looks like a targeted attack. Myself, I do not know that Jack Daniels is a part of a multi billion dollar group.
Benjamin Moses: And it looks like they're trying to attack that larger group, trying to siphon money off them. And it has been going on quite a bit and a lot of different penetration points have been brought up. One thing that I do keep an eye on is the Verizon 20, let me read this properly. The Verizon data breach investigations report. It's really good, it's free, definitely recommend you guys check it out or have your I.T. team check it out. What they do is they cover a bunch of different sectors. It's 2000 and some companies that are part of the survey and they categorize the type of breaches that they had with the different sectors that those companies involved with. In summary of all the companies that they've researched, 68% of the breaches were caused by someone outside of the organization. 83% of the breaches are financially motivated as in they want to get money for penetrating the systems.
Stephen LaMarca: I would imagine cash rules.
Benjamin Moses: 42% of the breaches attack are from web based applications and 26% of the malware incidents can be attributed to ransomware. Just from those really interesting summary to get you a good flavor of where potential threat vectors come from into your company, and if you're a small to medium sized company if you lock down your file server for your routers or even your ERP system or simple databases that's just storing our spreadsheets. That's a pretty big problem just trying to access that stuff.
Stephen LaMarca: That's crazy.
Benjamin Moses: A lot of people focusing on the big corporate Lockheed, Boeing. Yeah, those guys get significant impacted by these types of attacks, but if you have a scattered attack across a bunch of different small to medium size companies that really decimates the economy,
Stephen LaMarca: Have they said anything about, or is there any information that you have that is regarding where a lot of these attacks are coming from?
Benjamin Moses: It does get into a little bit. Some of it is internal to the U.S. some of it is external to the U.S. There's always the debate if they're government actors, or if there are small gangs, or if they're small groups, right. It's kind of hard to trace and hard to pinpoint who the exact perpetrator is, but it does get into whether or not their employee based or outside the employee base, or if they're kind of revenge attacks, things like that
Stephen LaMarca: You've been on point with your explanations and descriptions, because I've been following along using simple English.
Benjamin Moses: Oh, I have a magic simple English.
Stephen LaMarca: And yeah to go back to what is ransomware? The first sentence is a type of malware. You've got to look up malware, which most of us know, but short from malicious software, and it's a kind of software that can be installed on a computer without the approval of the computers owner. Like a virus or spyware something like that. Specifically this is the scary thing, restricts access to the computer system that it infects or the data that it stores often using encryption techniques and demands a ransom be paid to the creators of the malware. That's really scary.
Benjamin Moses: That's a tough thing to say. It's tough because if you go through the breach report, you see how the entry points into the companies sometimes it's phishing scams. Sometimes they're targeted attacks on people's social media that they can get in through. To be honest, a lot of the threats are still basic emails to executives, requesting information or links through executives. There still is the occasional USB drive in the machine or USB drive on the floor that brings in the malware, but all this talk about doom and gloom there are some benefits. The article from IMTS talks about ways to improve your resiliency specifically around information security.
Benjamin Moses: This has a really good article about small business information security the fundamentals, and this has a really good framework for cybersecurity also. It looks at kind of the full spectrum from identifying to prevention and you can kind of walk through and do some self assessment to see where you're weak at and where you want to improve and things like that. And I definitely recommend educating, being aware of potential threats and the industry. And not so much about individual articles, but kind of overall industry. There's always the individual thread, right? I've got tons of data stored here at home from my movies, pictures, all the pilot class we're doing. One of my servers went down not the data thread, just the equipment failed. I lost some data, but most of that was already backed up online on to a third party site that I was able to recover. Just keep in mind that it's all about the overall prevention plan or a risk mitigation plan for data breaches.
Stephen LaMarca: Sure. That's great that they have a self assessment for that kind of during the times of Coronavirus. If you Google COVID-19 the first thing that pops up is a self assessment to determine whether or not you... It can't tell if you have it, but it can tell you whether or not you should go get tested.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: I think self-assessments are underrated.
Benjamin Moses: Agreed.
Stephen LaMarca: They seem a little silly because anybody could lie on this.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: To get the answer that they want to hear, but there's also times where you can get an answer you don't want to hear. That you deduced yourself without doing a proper self-assessment. I think Mayo clinic and Web MD are guilty of these. They should have self-assessment for literally anything. Because I mean, you go on Google, Dr. Google and type in, "Oh, I have a chest pain. Right in the center of my chest." And Mayo clinic and Web MD will be the first two responses and you click on their links and they're like, "Go to a doctor now you're going to die." And it's like, okay, slow your roll.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: What am I going to die from? And can I take a self assessment on it?
Benjamin Moses: Yeah. Can I just take some tums?
Stephen LaMarca: I think websites like those should really push self-assessments more often. I think hopefully this pandemic really pushes it with that, but now we're getting into healthcare. I [inaudible 00:24:42] getting back to manufacturing and speaking of social media, you did mention it earlier.
Benjamin Moses: Yep.
Stephen LaMarca: One of the pages that I follow or the accounts that I follow on Instagram. Tom Ford-
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: Ultra premium, luxury lifestyle company. Fancy designer company imported-
Benjamin Moses: Tell me a couple of things, I don't know anything about Tom Ford.
Stephen LaMarca: Tom Ford does... They do high end fragrances. They do really good fancy shoes, suits. Think of Gucci or Louis Vuitton, that's like Tom Ford, but Tom Ford's a little bit more collected. Where you look at something that's made by Gucci, they have those dumb G's everywhere. Louis Vuitton has the dumb LV's everywhere. It's stupid grid pattern. The other luxury brand Burberry, which I think is so basic and disgusting has that vomit colored tartan everywhere, that brown plaid. It's like, how did they become famous on that? It is disgusting looking, but I digress. Tom Ford is like that, but they don't have a look that they go for it. They just have a good style. Tom Fords a great collected brand that if you had to wear just one of those brands, Tom Ford is the safest to wear. Because you won't look like an utter tool.
Benjamin Moses: Sure. So they make premium wearables-
Stephen LaMarca: [inaudible 00:26:13], otherwise but you won't look like a tool.
Benjamin Moses: So they make premium wearables that you like.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah. I mean, I follow them just to follow style trends and whatnot. You wouldn't tell that by just looking at me. I do, I try to follow them.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: But anyway, on one of their recent Instagram posts. They posted today, this picture of some model wearing some long dress and some fancy, probably Tom Ford sunglasses. Sharb happens to wear Tom Ford sunglasses by the way, I picked them out for him.
Benjamin Moses: Our old co-worker Sharb [inaudible 00:26:49].
Stephen LaMarca: He's back in India now. Anyway, Tom Ford posts this picture of their model wearing a long dress and their fancy sunglasses, but it is in front of this massive Dusan sign.
Benjamin Moses: Okay.
Stephen LaMarca: I can only imagine the few Dusan employees that are probably on Instagram while they should be working are like, "Dude, look Tom Ford didn't tag us, but our brand is on Tom Ford." One of the biggest designer brands in the industry has recognized us maybe unintentionally, but it's cool that is Dusan the Tom Ford of manufacturing?
Benjamin Moses: That's an interesting.
Stephen LaMarca: It's silly.
Benjamin Moses: Cross industry social media posts. That's really funny.
Stephen LaMarca: I thought it was wild seeing that. They have to be super excited to see that.
Benjamin Moses: There is a trend in manufacturing that I do like to see. Call it the visual appearance of machine tools and manufactured equipment. Where they try to make it say more rounded, more, not quite like star Trek, like in the future where everything's kind of white and clean looking. I do like the kind of steps towards that where it's not just a big gray square it's fine if it's white or any other color it's, I just, it's a big block of metal hanging around.
Stephen LaMarca: Well, designers get often lost in a form over function and in the manufacturing industry where it's literally about how you're making something function takes precedence to form. I think it's really cool when companies find a way to make something that is supposed to be purely functional-
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: Beautiful. Form labs, they have really clean looking machines. There's a lot of companies that try to go for that Apple look.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah, yeah. There's quite a few companies, yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: I hate Apple, whatever. Apple, another example of a designer brand. They don't make tools. They don't make anything useful. It's a designer brand.
Benjamin Moses: It's a designer brand. I agree.
Stephen LaMarca: Bite me.
Benjamin Moses: You're going to get some Apple hate mail.
Stephen LaMarca: I'm going to get so much hate mail.
Benjamin Moses: Mail all your Apples to Steven at AMTnews.org.
Stephen LaMarca: If you had a complaint, go to the Apple store and buy an iPhone 11 or make sure it's the pro one, whatever the most expensive iPhone is. Write your complaint on the back, carve it in there with a knife and then mail it to 79, oh, one Jones branch drive claim Virginia two, two, one, oh, two.
Benjamin Moses: Are you done Steve? When you talk about functional reform, the next article it's from our own website, AMT news, and they talk about navigating the noise to ensure aim design engineering success. It's an interesting article. They cover a couple of myths related to additive manufacturing. We mentioned the hype that additive stole away from supply chain and logistics again. There's just tremendous amount of energy around additive and rightfully so. I mean, there still a lot of value to be harnessed when we get into full production and interesting designs, but let's take a step back and look at some of the pros and cons of additive. It was three different myths here. One is additive manufacturing is for every company, every product, that's not correct. That is a myth that can easily be dispelled. It's not for every single product.
Benjamin Moses: It's not for every single company. If you're a company built on welding pipes. Additive may not be in your technology growth. If you're a company making small valves, additive may not be in your technology path. The question is, is this in your technology path? And did you assess it? It's not a yes, no decision and it gets into a couple of other key elements. One is material costs are how you control your expenses that's definitely not true. In the article they talk about the project cost is around 5% from material. Understanding the full cost of an additively grown part that includes for raw material to growing the part to post-processing, which is probably where a significant part... For example, if you're a growing the part on a titanium bed, if you're growing a titanium part. You've got a big thick titanium slab that you got to cut it from.
Benjamin Moses: You're going to wire EDM it right away. You have the cost of slicing the part. Then you've got to post-process it. Machine all your other support structure. There's a lot of post-processing that's required and that's not fully considered when someone is looking to get an additive. It's kind of a retrospective thought process. The last one that I mentioned, last myth is, if you buy they will come. If I buy an additive machine, I'm going to get additive business, which that's not true at all. The additive market is tough. There's a lot of engineering science related to it. I think that's one of the things that the article talks about is the theoretical information required to produce a good part.
Benjamin Moses: There's still a lot of engineering science behind it that a lot of companies don't have yet and just to buy a machine then start growing apart, that doesn't mean you'll get a business right away. I thought that was a very good message to be portrayed in the industry to talk about a little bit more. Additive is super beneficial. The question is, is it right for your business? And is it right for your product growth? You have two angles to look at as a manufacturer and as a designer. Do I want this part to be grown? And is that the correct path for it?
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah.
Benjamin Moses: That was very interesting. The question is those are three myths, but how do you move forward? And it talks about two pathways to look at this going forward. One is understanding your intellectual property. Do you have engineering resources that you have fully vested into a specific process and they've grown that way or do you have a broader set of skills and engineering they can bring in new technologies. And of course be wherever the bias, right? When you look at a metal industrial additive machine, you're looking for a million dollars right off the bat. Can you recoup that in your timeframe to take a loan for a million dollars or how do you positively leverage this new machine for your business or does it become a liability later on? I thought it was a really good article and it really gives a good perspective on understanding additive before you jump head first into it.
Stephen LaMarca: Exactly. That's a good point. You know what, I actually think you can... The additive industry, because it's such a new technology and it's a millennial technology, if you would. I think that industry could probably step back and hire some boomer salesman if you would. Because what I'm trying to say is a lot of old school machine tool or cutting tool companies even, they kind of frown upon just the Amazon approach of just go online, buy a bunch of stuff and return the stuff that didn't work and continue buying this stuff that does work. Instead they want to send a salesman to you who can bring you that kit of stuff, but also they don't want to sell you a product. They want to sell you a solution.
Benjamin Moses: Correct, correct.
Stephen LaMarca: And when I used to hear that all the time in this industry. My mind went to okay, boomer, whatever, just let me buy a bunch of stuff online and not talk to anybody and give me what I want to let me figure it out. I feel now I'm eating my words because I feel the additive industry could probably use some old school sales man like that and be, we're trying to sell solutions dude.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: Additive, isn't good for everything.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah also I think the other way around too with the new organization, I think having someone reach out and figure out what type of machine is good for the organization to the path that you're looking at too right?
Stephen LaMarca: Right.
Benjamin Moses: Get someone that's a little more experienced. Someone that's willing to pick up a phone and call people, not myself. I don't want to call anyone. I just want to click buy. Someone that's willing to spend time and talk to people I think that's the most beneficial part kind of the thought process here Steve, is that you need to discuss it more before you buy that million dollar machine.
Stephen LaMarca: Maybe you don't even need to buy the machine. You just need as a service, you know?
Benjamin Moses: Yeah. That's a good point because-
Stephen LaMarca: In the process of you getting additive as a service, you may need to talk to a design engineer that you currently don't have employed at your business.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah. Yep. Awesome Steve, anything else?
Stephen LaMarca: No man.
Benjamin Moses: No, you're good?
Stephen LaMarca: This was heavy.
Benjamin Moses: This was heavy. Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: This is way heavier than we anticipated.
Benjamin Moses: We talked a lot of different things, stuff from Tom Ford to ransomware, to pros and cons of additive.
Stephen LaMarca: If you don't understand anything, we heavily advised that you go to Wiki Simple English to look all of this.
Benjamin Moses: I'll bookmark that later. This episode is sponsored by IMTS. Please check out imts.com/supply chain for more information about rebuilding supply chain. See where can they find more info about us?
Stephen LaMarca: amtnews.org/subscribe, get it.
Benjamin Moses: Awesome. Bye everybody.
Stephen LaMarca: Have a good one.
Benjamin Moses: Yep.
Stephen LaMarca:Bye
