Balancing

Today we shipped about another dozen packages, and got some work done on the current commission on the floor. Working on projects like that at the end of the day is risky, and that definitely showed up today! I had to redo the piece I got done, but it did help me work out a few kinks in my process. On pieces like this, all the kinks ae in the first side, and the rest will follow quickly!

Carbide hole cutters make even the smallest drill press a power house.

Using the machining vise, clamped to the table, definitely helped reduce runout and kept a more accurate hole. I also switched my pilot drill to have a tighter tolerance with this guy.

Today was a quintessential picture of my days recently and led to an alteration on the back end of our shop policy. The morning was spent doing finish work, wire wheeling and waxing, then quickly forging a couple sets of hooks during lunch time and packing them up, before a dash to the post office. Needless to say, lunch was late haha! Afterwards I worked on the bell tower commission until the evening. And I realized I keep running into the same issue, where the product turnaround time I have been operating under (5-7 business days on a 6-day work week) don’t allow for A: Serious, fully awake and committed times for commissions, and B: making larger batches of items.

My commissions tend to be squeezed in where they can, and batches of staple items like hooks and skewers aren’t able to be large enough to be as efficient as they should be. Therefore, I came to the conclusion that, until my backlog of commissions is clear at least, I need to extend my lead time on orders. I kept it pretty conservative, switching to 5-10 business days. Anyhow, as I get more work I definitely need to be more disciplined with my time, and I think this change will help me spend more productive, dedicated time on each part of my job. I love the variety, and I love being so busy! But it definitely requires me to step up my game to stay on track as the business grows.