Hi, I'm Luke. Today on of darts, I'm going to run you through the top 10 lean warehouse improvements
we've made in 2020. For those of you tuning in to my channel for the first time, I run an e-commerce
business, and it's essentially a nerf mod hobby shop: We sell all the parts, tools, supplies,
and accessories to modify your foam blaster arsenal. Most of our manufacturing is 3D printing
and small tool use, but we're expanding to a variety of other tasks. We currently run 97 3D
printers -- they are all Prusa i3 Mk 3s or Prusa minis, and we just moved into a new warehouse
about two months ago. For those of my viewers who are more familiar with my nerf content,
lean manufacturing is a type of manufacturing where you are looking at efficiency waste and
hassle that's involved in producing an item. I was turned on to lean manufacturing by Paul Acres
who is now, to me, sort of the godfather of lean manufacturing. The principles come, I think,
originally from Japan. I read a great book called the Toyota way, and here in a warehouse where
we are running 3D printers, it is primarily a function of wasted motion, that is moving around
the warehouse too much, or moving something out of station too many times, or time itself where
we've got a process that's taking way too long. So without talking too much more up here in the
studio, let's get down to the workshop floor, and I'll show you the top 10 warehouse improvements
of 2020. Let's get going. All right, number one is a heat gun with a foot pedal.
So we used to have this style that would sit on the bench, and it was constantly falling off,
it was constantly moving around. I tried mounting it, but it wasn't really that convenient.
And then it was also lower-powered, so the longevity didn't last as long. Now we bought
a more commercial heat gun that is table-mounted, and it has a nice foot pedal so that you can
be sitting here prepping apart, and then when you're ready you can just hit the
heat gun. And this kind of thing seems really obvious, but it wasn't until
someone pointed it out to me that it made sense to make this improvement.
Number two this is a really simple one, but a bolt cutter is mounted to a table mount vise and
it was really simple to do, but it made it a lot easier. Instead of constantly having to pick up
the actual cutters, and grab your spring, and then sort of balance using both, this way you can get
your cut really easily, make your cut, and you're good to go. Additionally, when we're not using it
we put the glove over it with the glasses on top, that way it encourages you to use the right
protection when you are actually using the tool. Number three: So here in our print farm, where we
run about 100 printers, we are constantly cleaning the beds with rubbing alcohol and a spray bottle.
so the first improvement was basically to stop dumping alcohol and rubbing it. We used a spray
bottle, but then you were constantly looking for the spray bottles. So a simple improvement was
to design a little 3D-printed hook that went into our shelving, and a space for the towel,
and a space for the bottle. And you'll notice that there's one on every single column,
so that no matter where you're standing -- even if you're in the middle of a shelf, you
can reach right over here, clean your bed, put it back, and you're done. Frequently, before I would
be here needing to clean, I'd have to walk 20 feet over here, find the bottle, come back,
and then initially we were just using the bare bottles which you would squirt on,
and you'd end up wasting a lot more of the rubbing alcohol when really all you need is a single
spray. So this has worked out really simply, and it was just a very easy print to design. I think
it took me all of 25 minutes to design this, and two prints, and we were ready to go. Number four
is a custom pin jig using an arbor press. An arbor press is just a simple press that uses a gear to
make a linear action. Our Little Rocket product, which is a little mini blaster, requires this
12-millimeter pin to be inserted, and initially, we were doing this just with vise grips,
but what I decided to do was build a tool to make this much more repeatable and a lot easier to do.
So inside this tool, there's a little magnet that will actually grab the part itself.
You line up your two parts and put them into the device. You clamp once to put it in, move it over,
all the way through, you've completely installed this. That used to take about 5-10 times as long,
and now it's much much easier. In the same tool, we also made a tool to do the top trigger, which
also has a connector like that. And then, let's say you made a mistake and needed to remove it
on the back end, we've actually added a pin removal pin. So essentially, this pin can push
this pin back out so that you can grab it with the pliers and pull it out if you needed to swap it.
But these little improvements make a huge difference in the amount of time it takes
us to build these kinds of products. Number five is this great card cloner.
We are constantly updating files here, and it's a pretty labor-intensive process. If you're sitting
there manually dragging files over and over, this card cloner lets you make one master copy,
and then anybody can simply copy five cards at a time. While the actual copying speed
isn't any faster than say doing it on your computer, assuming you have a fast reader,
it does save the actual time sitting there swapping them, because they go from red to green
and you are good to go. Number six is very similar to number five it's a USB hub. This is a 16-port
high-speed hub and this allows us to transfer to a whole bunch of cards at the same time.
The individual card speeds of the SD cards and the USB drives are only around 100 megabytes a second,
and so you're not getting anywhere near the max of your USB. But when you put a whole
bunch at the same time, you can batch these tasks out, and it saves quite a bit of time.
Now I know some of you are probably wondering why aren't you using a print farm software.
We are really hoping for Prusa's software to come out and help solve this problem of dealing
with all of the files for nearly 100 printers, constantly updating, and constantly trying to keep
everything as organized as possible. So eventually we will implement some sort of software, but
right now the software and hardware solutions out there just haven't quite made sense. Number seven
is faster cards. Most 3D printers come with pretty much bargain basement, as far as I'm concerned,
garbage cards. These two cards that came with are Prusas, no offense to Prusa, but they're just not
very good quality. Filling this up with files currently would take about half an hour. So it's
an incredibly slow card on top of actually causing some issues because I don't think these are very
good memory sticks. The same thing goes with the SD cards. They're just very, very slow. If you
wanted to transfer the five or six gigabytes worth of files we've got, it would take you at least a
half hour-45 minutes. And that's pretty much unacceptable if you're going to sit around and
update your cards frequently. Instead, we replace them with genuine SanDisk products. And most of
the cards we buy are at least 16 gigs because that's about all we need. And ultimately they're
100 megabytes a second, which is probably about a 20x improvement from these base cards. It made
a huge difference in just transferring to cards quicker. [Number eight]: This is one of our many
hardware bundling sites, and here we're bundling hardware kits that go for Little Rocket. And one
of the problems with hardware kits is that it's really easy, when you're bundling a lot of these,
to make mistakes. And so we've done two things: First, they're all color-coded based on which kit
they are [for]. They have the quantity clearly labeled, so we've got strong visual controls.
Next, we've got examples of the final product here, labeled in those colors. And finally, we've
got a system that tells you exactly the weight of the hardware, so that when you're building these
kits, you can grab them, weigh them, check them against the weight they're supposed to be. And the
scale is accurate enough that even if the lightest weight item (like the spring) is missing, you'll
know based on the actual weight of the parts. This saves a ton of time in just sitting here counting
and verifying that you have all of the parts, because the worst thing we want to do is have a
parts kit go out to a customer and then they realize that they're missing one little screw,
or one o-ring, or something that's absolutely key in getting the blaster created. Number
nine is probably one of my favorite that I'm the most proud of. This is another arbor press, and
this is a station to install the magnets for our Perses lids. They feature a little ring and a lid
that both need to have opposite-facing magnets. And we want them to be the same each time.
What I've built here is an auto-feeding hopper that reloads the magnet each time
and presses it in place. This jig lets you very easily add the glue into onto your magnet hole,
press it in place, and you're done. When you want to do the other side you get to simply
switch over to the other product. Same thing again: we're just we get to add glue.
The magnet auto-loads. We put it in place, we install our magnet, and we move on. And
this makes doing these parts really easy, very repeatable, and saves a lot of time ultimately.
And number 10: We just installed this bubble wrap holder that allows this to no longer take
up bench space. What was happening before is we would have a roll of bubble wrap,
and it would be bouncing around, kind of moving onto the shelf, onto the table maybe, onto the
floor. And you'd always have to sort of mess with it, and then it would take up space. Now,
you can simply pull off what you need, pack it up, and continue on. Or if you're going
to wrap something up, you can pull it down and wrap it as you dispense it to yourself.
This way it takes up no floor space, and it's easy to access all the time.
I've got one more bonus one for you that is something we just added: We recently got the
entire team these pouches. It seems like a simple thing, but when you're constantly looking for
pens, markers, a knife, a sharpie, tape, and your gloves, it saves a lot of time just having those
things on you all the time. And I got kind of sick of having all of this stuff shoved in my pockets.
I would be digging in and out of my pockets, never able to find anything. This one's just made that
really easy to access. I've got a spot for my phone, my pens. I keep the exact same tools on
here all the time, they're always available. I keep a spare roll of tape. And this is sort of
my everyday warehouse carry, and of course, I keep basic tools, like pliers and a box opener
along with my favorite knife. But this has really been a super helpful thing for at least me,
and I believe the rest of the team as well, just not having to search for those tools. Now, this is
different than when you're at an actual station; we have designated tools for each station. This is
more stuff that you might use in miscellaneous categories all around the warehouse. I hope
you enjoyed this top 10 video, for my regular viewers I know this is sort of a new style, so
I would really really like to hear from you in the comments. If you enjoy seeing this, it's also more
of a behind-the-scenes look which I think some people have thought would be interesting to see.
So let me know in the comments, do hit that like and subscribe button if you think we've earned it.
Obviously, as everybody's always saying, it helps us out so much on the channel.
I will keep doing this constantly, because we've got a lot more improvements I've already made,
and others that weren't in this video. But these were some of the most pertinent and
interesting for the warehouse as it stands right now. Until next time, I'm out of darts.