That Machinist

I'm sure X will be thrilled to hear that we're going to shut our brand. Yes, we made a mistake in launching a Reindustrialize sweater that was made in Portugal, but we truly did look for 3 months for a factory in the US that would make it at 50 MOQ and couldn't find one. Our plan was to launch it and see if there was enough demand for it to justify a larger MOQ. Also, we thought that in the process of doing this, there was a good chance we'd unsurface a factory that could do it. (Which we did. It seems the only factory in the US that can do this has a website that says they're a fabric company.) Our brand was about a love for technologists and wanting to make them look better. All the nastiness of the past week destroyed that for us. Tech bros are clearly not supportive of anyone else but other tech bros in building start-ups. Instead of a positive, constructive, builder-supportive, "Hey, here's a US factory that can make your next run," we were subject to a slew of abuse. I lost my life savings doing this, which should make everyone happy. (Yes, I'm Croatian.) I need to go get a job now. We have piles of inventory: all the next planned drops of clothes we made to honor tech culture that we're now just going to give away. Doing a thread of the clothes now. DM us your size and address if you want something, but please say something kind. We don't want to contribute any more negativity to the world.

When to replace the coolant fluid of your cnc machine? Next demo is an actual procedure.

Never use fully synthetic coolant. For the love of the machining gods, I’ve seen 4 month old machines that look like a decade of hard service because: synthetic coolant. Don’t know why anyone even bothers selling it. Synthetic has two big drawbacks: 1- It strips lubricant off of everything in the machine. Every seal goes dry, every greased area gets washed out, every mechanism goes crusty. Your tool setter gets rickety, your way wipers crack. 2- it deposits this tacky talc on everything. This eats paint, and generally makes everything in the machine suck to work on. Your workholding needs constant cleaning, your ball screws and linear guides need extra PMs. On those 4 month old machines, we had a complete spindle failure… what happened? They used through spindle coolant, and that tacky film built up in the Deublin rotary union’s carbide:carbide seal. This seal actually seals under pressure, and opens a bit when under no pressure (the fluid acts to keep it cool, so when the spindle runs without coolant, this design keeps it from burning up at 20k RPM). Remaining synthetic coolant dried across these faces, and prevented them from closing fully- every time the TSC was turned on, a tiny dribble of coolant leaked from the union. This worked down the shaft, infiltrated the spindle when the machine was powered down (Brother uses positive pressure on the spindle casting to prevent contamination). Well under 2 oz of this synthetic coolant washed all the Kluber grease from the upper spindle bearing, leading to spindle death with <100 hours of production. Sad! Synthetic coolant is the devil! (And I had to personally deny the warranty claim, and that sucked. We warned them about the evils of synthetic coolant at install, they fully understood the issues and the warranty does not cover damage caused by full synthetic coolant. Even warned them *this* can happen… but their FDA facility documentation and cleaning process was based on this coolant, selected 12+ years ago. They had no choice.)

Manufacturing Twitter Role Call If you want more manufacturing, industrial policy, and reindustrialization on your feed, like I do Let’s build this list I try to only follow people who interact with these related posts but only found like 500 of them...