My shop has been growing as of late. The oldest employee has been there for about 8 years. Hired one guy full time about a year ago. One part time guy 6 months ago and another part time guy a week ago. These guys are all fairly smart and making a little better than average wage for the area and their skill sets.
This Friday I went out of town and bought a used machine. Saturday morning I find about 50 scrapped parts and a damaged fixture (my most complicated fixture) that I should probably replace instead of welding. Today I change the inserts on an expensive face mill and one of the screws has been over tightened with the head stripped.
There are various ways I can idiot proof all this stuff but my fear is if I do that they will never learn anything. Plus I already babysit them enough and don’t get to work on the things I should.
We have tool presetters, all of the fixtures are marked with workcordinates, program numbers and sometimes even a Z offset that will get super close to tollerance. Basically all they have to do is throw in a fixture, probe it and then select the proper program. Many of the production jobs have spec sheets. I don’t want to get in to probing routines to ensure every part is loaded correctly. I would by some torque screwdrivers for the face mills (if they make them?) The damaged fixture was from them not updating a tool offset even tho we have tool setters.
I know stuff happens and I try not to get mad. I feel like I could have given them all the day off and been basically in the same spot. They made more good parts than bad and overall the day was probably a net positive money wise. But they also screwed up more stuff than they get paid and I now have more things to do and not nearly enough time. So the question remains how do you train operators to bring them to the next level.
I apologize as this topic has probably been brought up before but today’s environment is likely different than previous post from years ago.
This Friday I went out of town and bought a used machine. Saturday morning I find about 50 scrapped parts and a damaged fixture (my most complicated fixture) that I should probably replace instead of welding. Today I change the inserts on an expensive face mill and one of the screws has been over tightened with the head stripped.
There are various ways I can idiot proof all this stuff but my fear is if I do that they will never learn anything. Plus I already babysit them enough and don’t get to work on the things I should.
We have tool presetters, all of the fixtures are marked with workcordinates, program numbers and sometimes even a Z offset that will get super close to tollerance. Basically all they have to do is throw in a fixture, probe it and then select the proper program. Many of the production jobs have spec sheets. I don’t want to get in to probing routines to ensure every part is loaded correctly. I would by some torque screwdrivers for the face mills (if they make them?) The damaged fixture was from them not updating a tool offset even tho we have tool setters.
I know stuff happens and I try not to get mad. I feel like I could have given them all the day off and been basically in the same spot. They made more good parts than bad and overall the day was probably a net positive money wise. But they also screwed up more stuff than they get paid and I now have more things to do and not nearly enough time. So the question remains how do you train operators to bring them to the next level.
I apologize as this topic has probably been brought up before but today’s environment is likely different than previous post from years ago.