garyhlucas
Stainless
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2013
- Location
- New Jersey
I’ve been at this job for 1-1/2 years and I don’t think I can take much more. A few months back I got permission to bid on a Fadal 3015 and won the bid. We paid for it and the vendor packed it up for shipping and while waiting for it I gave him a list of tooling needed to make it efficient for the maintenance and replacement part work we need to do. At the last moment he orders me to cancel the machine and get a refund!
I told him how bummed I was going back to saws and files to make parts. He then accused me of being distracted by ‘shiny things’ and said I spent more in the bid than he authorized. After managing projects from $250K to $2M in my past jobs a limit of $100 without written permission is just insulting.
Now I am rebuilding a brand new drilling machine from China purchased without controls because the previous smaller machine has been a disaster with bad controls. That machine has not made it through a single day without a problem that takes all my time to fix. Last crash knocked all 5 spindles out of alignment. The new bigger machine has 16 spindles!
He started conplaining the new machine was taking to long and I told him the other chinese machines were wating my time. He got upset that I was concerned about MY time being wasted! Then he said he was calling my bluff and I was to just work on the new machine and I had to have it done by July 6th and running. I did the mechanical design in SolidWorks on an office PC that complains about resources constantly. I made a number of parts on my homebuilt CNC to get them quickly. I am doing the electrical design. I am doing the wiring of the 3 servos and 8 VFDs, and assembly with two unskilled helpers I am training at the same time. I am doing the PLC programming and precision alignment of 16 spindles and the 16 clamps that hold the pipes for drilling.
This machine replaces two 20 and 30 year old manually operated machines. I figured out how to automate it such that we eliminate so much labor it pays for the entire machine in less than a year. Now he wants it to be strictly manual without ever seeing if the simple automation actually works!
What happens July 7th? I have heard rumors of other guys like me that could pull this off, but I have never met one.
No way I finish by
I told him how bummed I was going back to saws and files to make parts. He then accused me of being distracted by ‘shiny things’ and said I spent more in the bid than he authorized. After managing projects from $250K to $2M in my past jobs a limit of $100 without written permission is just insulting.
Now I am rebuilding a brand new drilling machine from China purchased without controls because the previous smaller machine has been a disaster with bad controls. That machine has not made it through a single day without a problem that takes all my time to fix. Last crash knocked all 5 spindles out of alignment. The new bigger machine has 16 spindles!
He started conplaining the new machine was taking to long and I told him the other chinese machines were wating my time. He got upset that I was concerned about MY time being wasted! Then he said he was calling my bluff and I was to just work on the new machine and I had to have it done by July 6th and running. I did the mechanical design in SolidWorks on an office PC that complains about resources constantly. I made a number of parts on my homebuilt CNC to get them quickly. I am doing the electrical design. I am doing the wiring of the 3 servos and 8 VFDs, and assembly with two unskilled helpers I am training at the same time. I am doing the PLC programming and precision alignment of 16 spindles and the 16 clamps that hold the pipes for drilling.
This machine replaces two 20 and 30 year old manually operated machines. I figured out how to automate it such that we eliminate so much labor it pays for the entire machine in less than a year. Now he wants it to be strictly manual without ever seeing if the simple automation actually works!
What happens July 7th? I have heard rumors of other guys like me that could pull this off, but I have never met one.
No way I finish by