Travis:

 I'm here at the team at Kingpin. Can you explain what you do with the machines here and the products you use?

Justin:

Yeah, definitely. We make a lot of products for the industry to hold tools and tool caddies, templates and jigs. And so the laser allows us to create something like this, which is one of our newer items, which is our solder tray that not only holds the components in, but allows the solder to come out. This is easily transportable to the car while working on it. 

And then when it's hot I don’t have to worry about burning the car. So in the past, we could have taken our hand routers and made jigs and templates and hand routed this, but that's a, you know, manpower nightmare. So when we got into the lasers, when we got our hobby style, which is the desktop version, that allowed us to cut, you know, our time way down from the manpower. And we were able to get, for example, on the sheet, we were able to get four kits of just the bottom two trays here.

But then we realized in production that we wanted to speed that process quite a bit up and that's when we went over to the Muse Titan to get a much more powerful desktop machine for production. We can get a yield a lot more in a shorter time frame and we can actually do 16 kits on a single cut without loading the machine.

And that cuts down manhours as well. And that's the 16 of the bottom ones there. And then when it's all done, we take the top plate over to brand it with our Kingpin fab products at the Galvo. We start hitting out there to get the logo put on there for branding.

Travis:

Awesome. You wanna walk us through the process here on the machine?.

Justin:

Yeah let’s take it out. We'll show you how it's done.

Josh:

All right. Now we're going to hit play. We're going to start this job cutting. So we'll click the play button and the system itself will autofocus. So the machine will move over and autofocus on the material so you get the proper setting as far as your thickness of your materials and the distance it is to be away and we’re going to close our lid.

We're running the base piece, which is white. It's essentially 30 pieces that are square like this with the four holes punched in the corner. There’ll be 15 of these, and then the other section of it has two circles cut in the corner and two outlines cut in the corner for the solder wheel to actually sit in. So that way the solder wheel stays locked into place when it's dropped into the caddy.

Travis:

Oh, that's the second layer on top of this.

Josh:

Yeah, that’ll be the second layer that goes on top. So out of that now we were able to get 30 pieces out of one sheet, in comparison to the four pieces we got out of the other machine, at a time. It cuts down on time. On the other machine it takes roughly about 6 minutes to cut four pieces. So we get 12 in about 18 minutes; where [with] this machine, we did all three of these in roughly 18 minutes.

Travis:

That’s not bad at all

Josh:

So it's, this layer goes here. And then our bottom layer is this layer that goes right here. And essentially that gives us basically a stop point. If you were to push the cap all the way down it seats into the base and then if we turn it slightly sideways, you can see the soldering iron actually drops all the way down to the base, sits down in that little cubby. That helps to keep it balanced and stable.

Josh:

So what we do [for our logo] is we use the [Fiber] Galvo. So we have with the base, we have a couple of other jigs, but this is essentially our little jig setup that we use.

Travis:

How long does it typically take to do just like one logo?

Josh:

The full size logo takes about 45 seconds, I think.

Travis:

So you can crank through that pretty quickly, right?

Josh:

Correct. If we do this, the time is about 45 seconds. And if we do the bright one, it takes about 60 seconds or so. It's still, it's just, it's about a minute, give or take.

Travis:

Take. All right. Tell me your favorite aspect of the Titan.

Justin:

I actually got a couple of them. My favorite, favorite feature of the Titan is the perimeter run. It's really neat when we're putting full sheets in here, easy fast alignment for a mass production. But what makes it really neat, say we're doing a one-off or test fitting something and I want to put a smaller one in. I can go ahead and I can do a perimeter. I can quickly identify where that's going to go, and I can adjust it right on the fly just like this. And I can quickly maximize where that cut is going to be on [the material]. It makes production much, much faster, including the one-off parts. 

The other cool features I love about this, since it's a 110v platform on the power and it doesn't have to have a huge circuit for that. I have everything in my shop on wheels because I like to move things around when I get bored and change up the way things look, and have things more organized and features and functions with that. So we have this on a cart that's wheeled, and being a 110v, I can actually plug it in anywhere. 

The other great feature I love about it is I can tilt this up at a small 45 degree angle with my partner and we can cruise right on into the classroom so when we're actually physically doing our classes, we can have this machine inside when we're talking about the machine so the students can learn to cut and we don't have to be out in the production area. We can actually have the classroom and we can easily bring it back in here. I don't have to enlarge a doorway or get a construction crew out or anything like that to make it happen.

Travis:

Yeah it fits through a standard 32” size door

Justin:

Just tilt it on its side a little bit. Those are the greatest features of this machine.

Travis:

Excellent.