Chris Harbaugh with FX3D

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

industrial innovations, Fabtech Orlando, Chris Harbaugh, FX3D company, 3D printed fixtures, precision manufacturing, digital twin, AI generation, modular fixtures, PLA material, laser sintering, print farm, tubing solutions, inspection improvement, high-profile contracts

00:00

Scott. Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott. MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots and let's go all right once again.

00:22

Welcome industrial professionals. Thank you very much for joining industrial talk and your continued support of this wonderful platform that celebrates you. You are the hero in this story. You are bold, brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate. You are solving problems each and every day. That's why you are making the world a better place. That's why we just celebrate you here on industrial talk, we are broadcasting from fab tech here in Orlando, and it is, Oh, it's getting better. It's wrapping up. People are just sort of milling about the place. Some people are packing up. You know, it just is what it is. It's the end of a show. But it was great. And because you weren't here, you weren't here, that means you need to be here next year, and you get to meet incredible people like Chris. He is with a company called FX 3d so let's get cracking with the conversation. He's giving me a couple of things to hand out to Chris and we and we both got the memo to wear white pants. We did. Scott, yeah, and we go to the same barber. Dunk on it looks like I'm looking in the mirror, I know,

01:26

except a slightly better looking version. Oh,

01:29

Shut the front door. That ain't gonna that ain't gonna fly at all. Check this out. Listener, just check this out. Let me just flip. So I got, I got that we're gonna be talking about that. We're gonna be talking about that. And then the best part, you handed out these things right here. They're magnets for holding down the job, the project, right? Holding and, and, of course, me, being a guy, I just think the magnets are cool.

01:54

Can't quit clicking them. Yeah,

01:56

you can't click. Quit clicking. Don't say that three times? No, I can't Absolutely.

02:02

Hey, do you have a good show? Awesome Show. This is our third time to Fabtech,

02:06

third time. So you started in Atlanta, yes,

02:08

exactly, yeah. And then Chicago, yep. And actually, this time actually felt almost like Chicago weather woke up when it's supposed to be

02:19

Florida. Yeah. See fiftys. Yeah, did you take a helicopter to go to the west side? I

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did not. The wife drugged me shopping.

02:29

So you went to an outlet

02:30

mall? Thank you. Yes,

02:35

a common tail, you know the boss, yeah? A common tail, yeah, yeah. But the venues, you know, they're big because they're called concourses. They're not just buildings, they're concourses. So you know that that's going to be the case, all right, before we get into the conversation, a little background would be great. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

02:54

Chris, yeah, Thanks, Scott. So Chris Harbaugh, I am Arkansas, planted there. I've got I'm one of 13 kids. Yes, that's so cool. Eight sisters, four brothers. Christmas is fun. It's Christmas is nuts, because literally, when you would trim the tree to put the presents around, yeah, as time went on, it turned into a stick and a star at the top, and just present that is so cool. But fortunate to have 13 kids was reason that I think my dad started the business Mundo tech, which is an aerospace company that does two bending probably because he had so many kids and really a lot of, I guess, free labor at the time, yeah, yeah, you I know. I know me. So, yeah, so anyway, so out of Northwest Arkansas, Bentonville, Walmart headquarters area, been working for our business for over 40 years. You had a name change then, yeah. Well, you know what actually ethics I came up with about three years ago, yeah, as a necessity for the amount of fixtures that we were starting to need due to some pretty high profile contracts with a very amazing military aircraft that one of the biggest company makes

04:21

So precision was the name of the

04:25

game, precision and cutting down time and de escalation of pricing, because our customer said you're going to drop your prices. So we had to come up with a better, faster way to make parts. And we kind of found out that you can only trim so much off of cycle time, so we kind of focused on indirect labor like inspection, to try to speed things up.

04:52

Take us through that. Sure I want to know that. Yeah, that's interesting, yeah. So

04:56

in the two bending world arena. Yeah,

05:00

which, if you want to kick the tires of tube benders around here you can they're here bending tubes all

05:07

day, all day. They're tubes everywhere. It's, yeah, there's actually a lot of our people who we bought our two bed near bending equipment from are here, like BLM horn. Great companies. There's a lot of them. So anyways, when we, when we really started going through this process of trying to get all these parts manufactured, we were having to scan every single part for 100% inspection, which took too much time. And so it was okay. We have to probably end up getting fixtures so that we can inspect them on the fly, which would be faster, in our case, than scanning each individual part with the laser. So after we priced out fixtures for 500 we were well over a million dollars, and we didn't have the time, or really the money, to say, let's invest this into a program they're already situated in for a several year contract. So after, after a bit of collaboration, we came up with the idea, let's print a fixture, which is great. Is a really small part, like this big. And so we said, if we can inspect it in this little fixture, that's one less operation.

06:28

So so you're I'm sorry, because I have to jump in so you have this fixture, and then you can inspect it in the fixture by just placing the part in there correct instead of trying to scan. So you create these 3d fixtures to be able to dump in there. And it's a Yep, but Matt, nope. It doesn't

06:47

that's exactly correct. It's a go, no go, Gage. And what we ended up doing is so the small one worked, right? Because we could print it. Problem was we didn't have a printer big enough to make something like four feet long with 12 bends in it. So we ended up taking our well table and said, if we can take this big fixture and break it up into a lot of smaller parts, like turns, bends and angles and apart, and make actually multiple pieces to it, somehow put it together, we could actually achieve the same thing and still print it in house. And that's where we came up with, really, the modular 3d printed fixtures that we're using today in FX 3d how

07:32

are you? How you manufacturing these fixtures?

07:36

Yes. So we have our our own print farm in house. Is this additive? Yes, absolutely. Thanks. A lot of it's gonna be PLA.

07:45

What's PLA? Stand for

07:47

pretty long adjective, okay, yeah, it's, it's, no, it's a poly material. And I really should notice

07:53

off top my head, it is. It's the feed stock that goes into it and prints it out. Yes, got it

07:58

on a spool. Thank you, yeah for saying me, Scott, I don't know. Don't steer me down that road. Yeah, no. So we're gonna use a PLA and for the plastic ones, right? But we're also gonna use laser centering to do metal fixture components in areas where we may have to weld or something. So we, we developed a big print farm, probably 30 printers. And we definitely, yeah, it's, it's, it keeps growing. Matter hackers, it's been a huge help to us, providing all of our printers, all of our PLA material, yeah. And outside of that, we ended up, you know, really, being able to bring these fixtures to a place to where we'd make our own tables. That's like a grid table, yeah, a pegboard, so to speak, which everything's going to get aligned onto. So really, what we're doing is with our print farm, we're, we're literally going from print, farm to table, because we're in Arkansas, so I guess we can say that

09:08

it's like, yeah, what is it farm to table? That's it is print, farm to table that

09:14

that's so cool. So as I look at these, these, these diagrams, do you do any sort of fabrication, like machining, or is it all print farm type of product?

09:26

11:08

So what you're it? Correct me if I'm wrong. So instead of sending the physical component, like a like here, here's a tube, and send it out, get it in, whatever. You send it to the client, you're able to do it from a digital perspective and allow them to see it and experience and then be able to translate that into the real

11:31

world exactly, exactly which could really be, I feel like a very good basis looking forward, you know, we have either customers or allies in different countries to where this may not be practical to ship a fixture over there. Yeah, so right, everything's going over the radio waves with being able to digitally send over the fixtures and let allow our customers also print their own.

11:58

Are you able to use the digital twin technology in such a way that you can run some simulations in the sense of saying, Okay, we want to, we want to bend it and do it this way. But here's another way of being able to do it, and maybe it's more effective this way. Or are you getting to that point where you can play around with it and say, This is the optimal design based off of what we know, and then be able to get the you know? Yes, thumbs up.

12:26

No, that's great. Great question. Scott. We actually had some people last month. They had some headers for a car, right? And they've been making these out of all these little pie shaped pieces. And that's all they had to work with us, is, listen, send me your part. We'll scan it. We'll optimize it, yeah, so you can make maybe one bend instead of 20 little pie shaped cuts. So we're actually able to take that model and optimize it for our customer and then give them that whole digital twin for them, as well as create them a digital fixture at the same time.

13:01

Yeah, see, that's that's ideal. And I would imagine quality goes through the roof, like you don't have to worry about, hey, that thing wasn't bent properly, or whatever might be, its quality is there is huge. That's right, you

13:14

can't blame chip on the shop floor anymore for making it wrong, because we're going to put a fixture in front of every person that's out there on the shop floor so they're checking their own inspection. In fact, our our throughput time, once we introduced it into the tubing side of our business, we were able to literally cut down our time 25% throughput just because of we didn't have to backtrack our rejections went down because you're catching your pump at the very beginning of the process instead of waiting till final inspection. So it's been a it's been a huge help. So

13:51

that allows you to be more competitive in the market with your your

13:57

high end client. Yes, yes.

14:00

Who is saying you need to reduce your price and improve your quality? Exactly? It's always a fun conversation. You like that conversation? It sounds like, yeah, yeah.

14:09

I feel like it's coming again, so I got to figure a better mousetrap now.

14:14

But you But speaking of that, what? What do you see that is sort of on the horizon from a technology perspective of how you're going to sort of do that,

14:25

you know. So we've AI, yes, AI, is it? It actually is. So where we are working on auto generation of our fixtures, so that instead of being able to have to have our engineers craft each one specifically we're working on being able to create something will get us 80% there, right? It's never gonna be 100% AI is great, right? The journey's gonna just be long. It'll get better and better. But. Know, we really want to get this to where we're reducing the amount of time there are engineers. Engineers are doing specifically help, let AI help auto generate more of our fixture, and then have us finish off the final parts of this to where we're scanning and validating the fixture would be the most of the work. Wow. Fun stuff.

15:26

Wow. This is, this has been a great conversation. It went by fast.

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It has split. So

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if somebody, I mean, how does somebody get a hold of you? Like, what's the best way to do that? I tell

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you what, LinkedIn is always a very big, easy bus. You know, we love that. Ethics.com. Baby.

15:48

I like that. Check this out. Again. They're magnets. They're magnets. You are fantastic. I like that. Chris, thanks guys. I'm all giddy.

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All right, we're gonna have all the contact information for Chris out on industrial talk, so reach out if anything he can. Are you an open book? It's like, hey, if I called you and I said, Hey, want to know a little bit more

16:08

you great. That's why I put my number on there. Yeah, there you

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go. See right there. It's everybody wants everybody to be successful. Why not? All right, we are broadcasting from Fabtech. It is in Orlando, Florida. It is the size of a small state. That's what this place is, and it has solutions everywhere. And you get to meet people like Chris, who's who's passionate about your success. All right, we're gonna wrap it up on the inside. Stay tuned. We will be right back.

16:37

You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network. Ah, yeah,

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that was Fabtech, a must attend event. It is. It's the, I don't know it's, it's an amazing show where you can kick the tires of all of the fabulous solutions and the innovations that are taking place. That's Fabtech. It's an annual event in manufacturing. Yes, you need to put that on your calendar in a big way. You get to meet people like Chris, Chris Harbaugh, the organization or the company, is fx, 3d and right here. Check it out. Check it out in the camera. I still have the magnets. It's it's more of a fidget than anything. I'll just sit there and click them together. Fantastic solution. Reach out to them. You got all the contact information for Chris. Out on industrial talk. We're building a platform industrial talk this year. Make it happen. Connect with me. You have a podcast. Connect with me. You have technology. Connect with me. All right. Be bold, be brave, dare greatly. Hang out with Chris. Change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned. You.