Mastercam

Every machine means more employees, and it's going to be tough, yeah.

So at IMTS, you also had partnered with Mastercam and somebody else on the Freedom Tower that you built there.

That's right.

Kind of a scaled-down version, and I think you showed that off at Manufacturing Day event.

So they bought it.

They sent my, the owner's son at the time and my supervisor out to, I think it was Chicago and to learn how to program the machine, learn Mastercam, or not Mastercam, sorry, Esprit.

We learned Esprit, or they did, went to classes for that.

And then we got the machine in, but it didn't get hooked up for, I think it was like six months before it came online.

I came back in for another walkthrough with Rachel and Derek that time and went through and he showed me a little bit of stuff.

He said, I've actually been learning this.

If you know Mastercam, you can probably pick it up pretty quick.

I said, listen, I have never done Fifth Access, which is what we have here is Fifth Access CNC routers.

So I guess we couldn't get your attention.

But then I think we had some post about us going into Mastercam as well.

That got your attention and then reached out to us.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so I want to know, you know, how are you guys handling ITAR? You know, are you working on CMMC, which is about to become a big problem for us? And I also want to know, these are the things that customers are going to want to know because I'm a customer, right? And so I want to know about ITAR.

I want to know about CMMC.

And I want to know, are you using my Mastercam programs to train the model?

Yeah, great question.

Do you have any, um, like really thorough simulation and sort of like digital prove-out, uh, before you actually start cutting metal?

Yeah, so on Mastercam, there's a verify-

Okay

... that we, we look at, but you know, that's only part of it.

Mm-hmm.

So.

And sounds like you guys use Mastercam.

Yes.

And that was, you know, 2011, 2012, somewhere around there.

It was using Mastercam.

Well, it may be digging a little too deep into a topic that I really am just touching on the edges of here, but I would see that you could speed that process up by taking rougher cuts, ultimately ending up with the same result but a worse surface finish.

So, you know, how, how, how did they weigh up surface finish versus machining time?

Yeah.

Um, Mastercam, I don't know if you've ever, uh, had any experience with that one, but that was what they used to do all the CNC programming at Navistar.

Mm-hmm.

And it's, it's pretty common with machine shops and stuff.

Then they were like, "We can't use...

We can't import the models." It was a different format, and they couldn't get it to, to work.

And then they went to Mastercam, and they're like, "Well, you gotta pay the, pay the maintenance agreement." And they're like, "Okay."

[laughs]