A reflection on starting a fabrication company

So, I guess it's just a little over a year ago that I decided I would devote pretty much every penny I had to start a small R&D and fabrication company called Entertainment Fabrication. It all started when there were products I was using nearly every day that seemed like they were lacking in much needed features. Even out in the field I would hear various other people complain about what we were using. So it seemed like a logical decision, I like building stuff, I see a need, I'm gonna build epic solutions.
But I guess I bit off more than I could chew. I soon found myself wearing more hats than I ever wanted to. As the only person running the show I had to research, design, build, test, get opinions on, market, and foot the bill for everything I wanted to do. I quickly learned how expensive running a shop could be and how steep the learning curve was.
Here's a short list of the main challenges I've faced:

• lack of space - I have had to make do working out of a garage, when I really need around 2000sq. ft.
• convincing people that my product is worth the extra expense - I don't have mass manufacturing capabilities, my stuff costs often over twice as much as what's on the market, I have to add features, quality, and anything else I can think of to make it worth every penny they spend.
• convincing people to switch - people like the brands they have been using for years, they don't want to switch, I have to convince people that I'll be around for a long time and am worth investing in.
• lack of time - Right?? like who doesn't need more, but a part time job, full time working toward a BSME, plus starting up my own stuff, leaves no time for anything else.
• finding work - This is getting sorta obvious I guess, but it can be harder than you think to find buyers. (Even when proposing the best ideas, sometimes nobody cares enough to "fix" it.)

There have been plenty of times I wanted to sell everything and give up, but friends and family would always remind me why I started the company and encourage me to keep going. I am continually having to learn more and more skills in the shop and business side of things, but every month it gets easier and easier.
Earlier this year I resigned from my "day" job and went back to school to finish my engineering degree. That has given me more time for my company, but still mentally taxes me to the extreme every day.
But it does have it's rewards, when you see something you built being enjoyed by people it is pretty cool. When an expert in an industry tells you your product has potential and is better than what is out there, it can encourage you to keep pushing through the tough times. And most of all, I enjoy what I'm doing.
I have finally gotten to the point where I need more help and have started asking people I know to help me sell items, find contracts, and build stuff. It's neat to see friends get excited about the same things I do.
When I hang out with a group of new people and they ask what I do, everyone seems to think it is such a cool job, and maybe it is, I get to build something from nothing, destroy stuff, and play with some big toys here and there. But to me, the awesome is like the bacon in the pot of beans... sometimes it just makes everything else tolerable. Besides, I'm not going to tell people all the bad stuff in my job.
So, yeah, this was random compared with my usual blogs, but I delivered product to a reseller today, for a display so they can try to sell it. And I was thinking back on everything I've been through and thought I'd post a short little something in case it could encourage someone else who is starting up their own company.
-Steven A.

fitting a power feed to a mill.

So, I have a lot of aluminum to machine for a project coming up, and I decided to go ahead and get a power feed (Grizzly H8370), coolant, and DRO on my mill. The power feed came in first, so I'll write about them as they come in. I'm sure there are some professionals that will have issues with what I did... and if you do I'd love to hear your comments, but it works so far, and I wanted to write this in case anyone else is considering putting a power feed on their grizzly mill and talk about some of the issues I ran into.

I have a Grizzly G3358 in the shop, And though I am not a big fan of their stuff; for starting out, learning, and breaking, they work ok, and I do have a few different machines of theirs. In the case of the mill, I had to basically take apart every moving part  and use acetone to strip the grease off. What they coat everything with is very waxy and causes everything to bind. I know they do say to strip it off before using, but they only mention putting a coating on all bare metal to keep it from rusting. I found it elsewhere coating other moving part inside the table and head, so I recommend taking it nearly completely apart and stripping the lead-screws, quill, dovetails, etc.

So the directions have their usual bare minimum of info to get you up and going. It looked like it'd be an easy task so I went to the shop and started after I got off from my day job. But after an hour of frustration I decided to come back the next day. I ended up spending about 5 hours total, but that included doing routing oiling. In addition to the 1/2" wrench and 3 sizes of allen keys they tell you about in the beginning, you will need a drill with a spotting bit, some graphite based lube, the proper tools to remove all of your existing limits, and a small common screwdriver to remove your left hand wheel. Also, in my case, a hammer, 3/16" punch, and metal chisel.

So here's a poor picture of the unit, but I thought the sticker was funny and didn't think to take a pic of the whole thing...

Installation was pretty straight forward and according to the directions, minus not having a spotting bit handy everything was going smoothly. To the left you can see the left hand wheel removed, I needed the small common screwdriver for this.

I mounted the motor and noticed that the gears were not lining up very well. There are slots so you can slide the motor (white housing with the little gear) in and out, but it was hitting the side of my table. So, after double checking that I was doing everything right. I figured my options were to machine one or the other down about .25"

  So, I had to take the power feed back off, remove the gear from the lead screw. And remove the little black part that locks them together. This is where I had to use the hammer and punch, as there is a pin going through the black thing and the lead screw. When you are putting this all back together, also check it 180 degrees when you are lining up the holes. Mine appeared to be not centered and after jamming the whole thing trying the wrong way, realized what was going on...

 Next, I had to remove the bearing plate, it has 2 allen screws in it and then is just held on by the paint (what I used the chisel for). The power feed will cover all this so I wasn't concerned about chipping the finish here. Notice though that there are pens that align it all, so you are trying to pry it out, not down... cause if you bend you lead screw getting this off, you will be in a heap of issues later on. I ran my table all the way to the right before doing any banging on it to help prevent any damage to the machine.

If you've actually been following this, you will have to get creative at this point, now that your table is half taken apart, you need to take off about .3" of material, I'm not sure how deep I ended up going, I just kept cutting till I was about .125" from the ball oiler.
I have never actually machined cast iron before, so I wasn't sure what the best bit would be, I used a cheep 4 flute 1/2" end mill, 1180rpm, started with side cutting in .02" passes cause it was chattering a lot if I tried to cut more at a time... prolly since the table was half taken apart.

 Here's the finished part, I cleaned it up really well (after this picture was taken) to make sure there were no pieces of metal to wear on anything. Note that you will want to re-oil this part really well (via the ball oiler) once it's installed.

 Got it put on, looks pretty sweet I think.

 And finally I got the power feed re-mounted. I wish it could have been ordered in green to match the mill... Below you can see how the gears now match up much better. Now for a few more comments to wrap up:
1. There aren't any directions as to what the speed's relate to, it is 0-9, the website says 4-200 rpm, I guess we could then use some math to roughly figure out ipm feed rate from this assuming it's a fairly linear speed increase.
2. The drive gear that you fit onto the lead screw only has one set screw. Due to the gears slightly loose fit on the lead screw shaft, when you tighten the set screw it pushes it slightly off center. So, when using it in manual, the hand wheels are now stiff on one side and smooth after 180 degrees as the gear teeth push closer and further from the motors gear.

3. The limit switch as about 1/4" of travel before it clicks and shuts the motor down, which then travels about .2" more before coming to a complete stop. It seems cheap... plus the t-slot stops I am supposed to use do not fit in this mill. They are plastic and barely to large to fit in the slot well. I am assuming that they are not supposed to be moved once set? I don't know, I will be modifying it so that it sits lower or to the side and I can still use my standard limits for projects I'm doing by hand... I also have an idea for making an optical trigger that kicks the "transmission" straight to neutral so it will be quicker, easier to set, and more useful for what I'm doing...
4. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with the cord for the limits? It's just hanging there in the front getting caught on everything...


Well, That's about all I got. Hope this helps some of y'all, if you have any questions, or need help on yours, leave me a comment and I'll respond as soon as I can. I'll be posting more as I modify the rest of the toys onto the mill...

'till next time,
-Steven

Midas Pro2 review

So, I finally had the opportunity to run a show on the newish Midas Pro2. I had been hoping to get this chance ever since it came out. The Pro2 has a very compact size for handling 56 channels. I won’t go into a lot of the basics since those are really easy to look up on their website, but I'll talk about my experience... Due to its size, the typical console stand that was sent was way too big for it, luckily I had a demo of the Mini Console Rokker from Entertainment Fabrication and it lowered it down a bit so I could see the screen better, and didn’t stick out into the aisle as much...

On powering up, it did send a small DC pop through my PA, worth muting your system if it can easily be done, but nothing that would make me power everything off first if my amps were already on. The console didn't come zero'd out, and all the defaults that I could find had been written over except for one that was warning that it would make the console not accept future upgrades. So for the next hour, I erased channel names, copied a flat channel across all the channels, unassigned VCA's, re-did the pop groups, and tried to figure out patching.
I am going to start with the screen since it is where you will spend most of your time. It's nice and large and has a mirror output on the back via DVI. Since the screen wasn't touch, they were able to make all the information smaller and fit a lot more per page than you would expect from perhaps an M7CL or similar. Of course that being said there were several functions that would have been much nicer as a touch instead of having to use their very stiff and small trackball. My wrist was hurting by the time I got through soundcheck.
One thing I liked about how the information was displayed on the screen was that the right 1/4 almost always displayed an expanded view of the selected channel or parameter you were on (unless you pulled up a system function like patching or naming), the left hand side gave a decent overview of channel activity for the 8 channel's faders below the screen, but lacked in one main area - there was no overview of the eq's.
Moving on to the right of the display, is the section of knobs and switches for eq, gain, gate, etc. for your selected channel. I found it a little lacking in that I really dislike having to use arrows to page through the different filters in a parametric eq. it seems much slower, and I am constantly having to double check what filter am I on. The only real confusing thing here though, is the gain knob has a swap button, that changes it's function from stagebox gain -> trim gain (digital trim) ->  delay. this was confusing at first since the system tech told me the trim gain was the analogue preamp, and stagebox gain was digital, and I was trying to figure out why all my levels were so low... 
To the right of that is a bank of mutes, meters, and stuff for all the 16 auxs and 8 matrixes. For Midas to have dedicated nearly twice as much space to this as to the previous section they must believe it's really important, but I couldn't really find a use for it since I could pull all that info to the faders.
So there are 16 input faders, and then 8 VCA/ output master faders. These last 8 do not have any meters on them though, which was really odd since you can expand the inputs to all 24 faders (one of my favorite features), but if you are using them for outputs, you have the meters in the bank above to reference, so it's not too bad.
More on the fader sections, there are only 6 characters on the scribble strips, I would rather have had more, it seems unnecessary in this computer driven age to have to abbreviate so much, or at least it would be nice to be able to have a long name on the screen.
The back-light for the displays can be colored to your choice, which makes it really nice to be able to quickly find money mics and such. But since those were built into the select buttons for each channel, selecting became a bit clunky to me.Since you can have either 16 or 24 channels viewable at a time, this is where many manufacturers get awkward solutions in my opinion. Midas has an interesting solution in that there are scroll buttons to the right or left. Imagine that every input and output is on a giant loop of channels and you are scrolling by 8 one way or another. the only issue I had with it was that sometimes I'd get a bit lost as to where I was (because I had a few bank that ended up with similar names) and a "home" button would have been nice.
Now I really like the POP groups, it's a really convenient way to view a small group of channels especially if they are on several different layers. But the only thing I didn't like was that, since there were no custom layers, I couldn't re-order the channels within a pop group. I think it should be fairly easy to implement within the setup dialogue.
Finally I would like to mention sonic quality. Everything seemed to have to be way over eq'd to make it sound right compared with every other console I've used in that room. Even something like an sm58 I had to dial about 8 db out of 220ish where I would normally only cut 2 or 3 db out. I know everybody says they are legendary preamps, and they have a nice warm quality to them. but I did not find it useful for the show I was doing.(think early rock and roll) I would carry around outboard FX if I was using this console. The delay was ok once I got used to it, but the reverb left a lot lacking. I have Waves presets I made over a decade ago that sound better. As you increased the reverb time (max 8 sec) past about 1.5 sec. it starts getting a "tremolo" sound to it. I tried all the different presets for hall, plate, room... but they were all the same. 
I have no Idea about the remote aps, My computers OS is too old to run the mac version, and I don't have an iPad. 
Now of course these are just my opinions, and what I was able to do in the 1 day I had it. Feel free to comment below if you find out I'm wrong on something that can't be done, or if you like something that I didn't, I'd love to hear how it worked for you.
'Till next time
-Steven A.