VIDEO: HOW TO Win at Deburring

JACOB SANCHEZ: You landed that job with your newest customer. You have a part coming into your facility with features you have never seen before, but that's what you love. It's what gets you excited. You got that hardened exotic material on order. Your team is already programming away, wiping down the machine table, making sure everything is ready to get that customer's part machined, cleaned, inspected and out your door.

But are you sure that you're not cutting any corners? Are you positive that you're not skipping any steps in the machining process? Specifically, I'm talking about deburring. You know, that thing that we take for granted? We try to get away from it with outside deburring solutions. Manual, tedious, deburring stations. Need I say more? Well I'm going to anyway. It's time we better understood every piece of the machining puzzle. Specifically, it's time we learn How To Win at Deburring.

I've been in nearly 100 metalworking facilities around the world, and the reason I still get excited, the reason I still get all worked up, is because of places like this. I'm here in Pride Tool, Cincinnati. And who better than to show me around? Mister commander in chief over here, Scott. The woman that keeps it all running, Amy. So I want to dive in a little bit.

I want you, from an owner perspective, what it's like tackling jobs not just for your business, but for your customers. And, Amy, you already know we're talking about deburring today. And I want to hear from you a story, whatever it is, that has to do with deburring good or bad. That's the scene we're setting. Scott, take it away.

SCOTT SCHWARZ: Well, I mean, from our company's perspective, we're trying to solve customer's problems, right? We're trying to get them the best quality product with the best possible service. And so some of the issues that, you know, they're going to face, if they get a part and it's got a bunch of burrs on it because we missed it, went out the door, maybe they cut their hands, it's a problem, it doesn't fit. That's an issue, right? And as far as burrs are concerned, it's often something that we're not thinking about because it's kind of a byproduct of a machining process. So it does present itself to be a challenge of quite a lot.

JACOB SANCHEZ: You got roughing to do. You got ball tracking to do. You’ve got bigger things to do.

SCOTT SCHWARZ:  Yeah, exactly.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Amy what's a story you got for me?

AMY DORNBUSCH: The one that comes to mind that was very impactful was a job that we had planned to ship. We scheduled it, we ran it. Everything went great and smooth. Get it off the machine. Gets to inspection, has a ton of burrs on it. So bad that it actually delayed our shipment by two days. We had somebody deburring by hand for two days.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Two days straight? No way.

That's something that can happen. The thing I love about it is that you guys understand that hey, this happened. We fixed it. Cool. But what are we going to do in the future? I love that. I appreciate everything you do on the ground floor every day.

I think me and Scott, we got to go talk to Sadler. He's from Osborn. He's going to let us really dive into deburring. We're going to get hands on with it. Let's get after it.

Alright brother, it’s time to show machinists why they need to take more pride in what they do. I'm not saying that just for the pun. Sadler. How's it going, brother?

SADLER KLEVE: Good.

JACOB SANCHEZ: A champion of Osborn. You guys take over deburring. Make it happen for companies like this. I see hand tools. I see electric hand tools. But I know the key today is talk about machine deburring.

Hit some of this for me right now, though.

SADLER KLEVE: Absolutely. That's where the biggest opportunity for us to, you know, help machine shops, help manufacturers is, is really replacing the, any handheld process that they're doing. Deburr tools, files, you know, like say air tools, anything like that. If we can replace that and get that inside the machine, that's where the biggest opportunity for improvement is for us.

JACOB SANCHEZ: When you're looking at these factories, these metalworking facilities, trying to help them optimize. What do you see? What are you looking for?

SADLER KLEVE: What we're looking at here, essentially, you know, the hand tools, sometimes deburr stations or, you know, when it comes down to it, it's the quality issues that they may be having. So, you know, trying to improve on that and get rid of any quality issues, get rid of any hard to reach burrs, any hand operations.

That's what we succeed at.

JACOB SANCHEZ: So does that scare you? And I don't mean to pull this out of you, but I heard get rid of hand operations. Get rid of hand operations? People do that. Get rid of people. What are you doing? I don't want this. What does that look like? As a machine owner, you're taking these tools. You're throwing them in the CNC machines to optimize your process.

Does that truly get rid of work for your workers?

SCOTT SCHWARZ: Well, not necessarily, especially because, you know, here at Pride Tool, we really don't have any deburr stations. Most of our deburring is just getting done off of the machine.

JACOB SANCHEZ: I'll play that. So I'm taking this out of my machine.

SCOTT SCHWARZ: So we’d be actually replacing a lot of handwork that the CNC machinist is doing at the machine.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Me having to do this.

SCOTT SCHWARZ: With, you know, some automation in the machine. I think it would be a lot more efficient. And of course, I mean, if we have a situation where we have to take some parts offline and deburr them. We still want efficient solutions. You know, one of the biggest issues is when you’re hand deburring things, sometimes you're destroying parts, sometimes you're not doing a real good job.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Because I’m just digging in there thinking I'm really getting in that burr. And then I do a quick little flip. And now that burr has a deep groove there, it's small here. It's not consistent.

SCOTT SCHWARZ: And that's a problem.

JACOB SANCHEZ: And at the end of the day, even something like this is a step up from a file or a deburr whip, but it's still... Not what we need.

SCOTT SCHWARZ: Not consistent.

JACOB SANCHEZ: So fellas, I'm ready to get away from here. I want to go in front of that CNC machine. Let's go actually make this happen for a machinist.

SCOTT SCHWARZ: Sounds good.

JACOB SANCHEZ: So I know we're down a man. That Scott is a busy guy, but that doesn't mean that me and Sadler aren't going to get some work done today. I thought I messed up earlier when I was talking about the cycle time, and I was like, yeah, you add in deburring to reduce your cycle time. And I was like, oh no, you're literally adding another cycle. It's going to go up.

He was like, Jacob, I love that as an owner, as a business owner, I'm looking at the process time, the cycle time, raw stock to done customer part in their facility. So adding deburring cycles actually optimizes me and it reduces my cycle time. With that in my mind dude, can you tell me a little bit about like, if I wanted to add more deburring, if I wanted to make sure I can get as much deburring as I can in my machine?

SADLER KLEVE: Yeah, just because you're adding, you know, brush deburring cycle time doesn't necessarily mean it's going to take you longer to complete jobs, complete parts. You know, if you're, you know, getting the part out of the machine, burr free, no sharp edges. You know, that's a win. And they can ship those parts a lot quicker than if someone has to manually deburr every single part that comes out of the machine.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Yep. And as we saw earlier, if that person that’s manually deburring has one little slip, eight hours, four hours, I don't care if it's 30 minutes of scrap done. That part's gone. Yep. So give me some examples real quick. I have some 1018 with a hole that I did. There's a burr that's inside the hole. I have burrs outside of my part. How could I use some of these things to solve those problems?

SADLER KLEVE: If you have a burr that's rolled into a hole, you're definitely going to, you know, want to have some type of filament and that's going to be able to reach inside the hole, you know, have the flexibility to reach in and pop the burr out. And then, you know, if it's rolled over an edge, kind of the same thing, you know, that's where the filaments have an advantage of where they can reach over the edge and clean up the edge as well as knock off the burr.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Something like this.

SADLER KLEVE: Yep. Absolutely.

JACOB SANCHEZ: So I don't know about you, man, but I love seeing these, but I'm kind of done talking about them. I want to see them run. I'm bringing in a machinist to get this machine, Aaron!

AARON BREEHNE: Hey, how's it going?

JACOB SANCHEZ: How's it going, brother? So I want you to get this up and running for us. We've been talking about deburring all day. You're the machinist of the day, and I got some questions for you. But let's see this run first.

So from a machinist programmer perspective, what was this like? Getting this program, getting it up and running? I don't know about you, but maybe some shops think anything is daunting when they have to program anything in their machine. How easy was it or what was it like?

AARON BREEHNE: It's super simple. We've already programmed the part. We're basically just duplicating the tool paths that we've already written, just with a brush. You just go back over the same surface with a brush, knocks all the burrs off.

JACOB SANCHEZ: Do you agree? That's something that you'll see in like job shops, small, medium size around America. They just get scared because they hear the word program?

SADLER KLEVE: Yeah, absolutely. If they think that it's going to be a big process and they're going to tie up somebody writing program for the machine when really, like you said, you can just duplicate the tool path that you already have made and, you know, you're just running with the brush instead. And, you know, he has all the control.

And like I said, I dropped off these parts, I think on Monday. And, here we are two days later. And he's been practicing with it, I think so.

JACOB SANCHEZ: All right. I got a question. Give me your honest opinion on deburring as a whole. You're a programmer. You're a machinist. You got more important things to do. Just give it to me straight. What does deburring mean to you in the whole machining process?

AARON BREEHNE: Well, obviously the deburring has got to be done at some point. We can do it in the machine and keep it out of the operator's hands because humans are prone to error. They can slip, they can go at it with a file. Sometimes they hit a burr that's not even there.

JACOB SANCHEZ: I love that you understand that, man. Thanks for all the work you do inside the machine to keep work outside of here. Thanks for everything Osborn does to supply shops with solutions like this. I appreciate it all. At the end of the day, everybody, we just have to understand small, medium sized metalworking manufacturers around America, you have your challenges, you're trying to find solutions.

At the end of the day, you just want to get parts done quicker, better, faster to your customers. Quality is of the highest importance to you and your business, so you can't ignore this stuff. You need to make sure that you're optimizing everything you can inside of your machine. Deburring, sawing, I don't care. All of it needs to be taken to the highest level, and you need to make sure you learn How To Win at Deburring.

Narrator: For more metalworking tips and industry best practices, stay tuned for the next How To episode and subscribe to the MSC Industrial Supply YouTube channel, a source of original manufacturing content Built To Make You Better.