Lexington Discussion

keeping a close eye on the Lexington situation

Monday OS got a report that the harvest knives weren't looking good, but people were happy

Today, the knives are “unacceptable” and Lexington needs this issue resolved

Took the dressing ratio to 8:1 Monday, then 6:1 yesterday

OS making plans once again to send someone out to Lexington, someone from OS possibly at the beginning of next week to get an assessment

Also considering that it would make sense to have sisu go out there as well

Some time before 5 AM is when we would be able to work on the system during the regular work week

Shaun was the one who said there was no problem, and talked to a lot of people on-site

Plant is still saying the knives are unacceptable

The plant does daily visual tests + Scoring

Early this week, the harvest knives were not doing well, but some still passed

More recently, now none of them are passing

OS doesn’t understand why the thursday report last week was “everything is good” but now is “this needs to be fixed”. This isn’t first hand from omnisharp, but according to Shawn, this isnt a guy who make an issue out of something that isn’t an issue

Next steps:

Plant person is going to check if we’re dressing all the way back and then get some additional Judge testing. going to check on 6:1 dressing ratio and that the stones are grinding all the way

Then he will have someone score used knives and test them on the judge

Shawn going out there next week as well

Plant guy did mention that the new knives were scoring well, it was just the used knives

3/26

Situation has gotten worse lol

The plant is not running on Friday

Would there be someone who could go Thursday evening? have access all day Friday and come back Saturday

OS had them running some test, had them try multiple passes to see if that cleaned up the edges. that didn’t yield positive results. Manager told them that someone had to get out there

The problem: OS doesn’t know exactly. Definitely the scores are a problem, but its been mostly sharpness complaints from the floor and the manager

The expectation is NOT to go out there and fix it

OS is going to try and come up with some tests for shawn to run

Primary side is the one with the problem on the harvst machine

Ricardo is saying that the knives on B shift look good, the knives on A shift don’t look good

3/26 4:00 PM Sync

We have an opportunity from Midnight on Thursday night all through Saturday morning to run some tests (Plant opens back up Monday morning)

What We Know:

Install - Inconsistent edges

March 13th - Plant says everything is great, Jason is no longer needed on-site

Shawn’s visit on the 13th - Checked 40 knives, which had very good Judge scores

March 18th - harvest scores start suffering, OS advised plant to go to 8:1 dressing ratio

March 20th - Still some plant concerns with edges, OS advised 6:1 dressing ratio

March 21st - B-shift had good edges, A-shift was still seeing issues with their knives

March 25th - Ran knives all day @ double hone, scores were very poor. OS does not know any specifics on edge issues

March 26th - Noticed B-angle was changed to 0 (we don’t know by who, it wasn’t Skyler OR Spencer)

On-site ergonomics specialist (sharpness tester/runs the judge) says she noticed knives getting better, and not as much material being removed at the heel of the knife

Portions could possibly not be hitting stones

This was right after going to a 6:1 dressing ratio

No operator has contacted product support with issues, everything is being funneled through Shawn

Actions performed

Grant and spencer begin A-angle tuning to the best of their ability (Feb 23)

Grant and Spencer initially think that tuning got them to a good spot, later in the evening “things are terrible”

Skyler - tuned A-angle as best as he could

B angle set to “2” in bring-up

changed pitchback to the same degree (2)

OS wants to run new harvest knives on the processing system

OS wants to take anago scores during various points before the knife gets to EOL

Questions

Where are complaints coming from? the floor? Or just Dana/

What is the nature of these complaints?

how prevalent are the problems?

Are operators sharpening for a shift ahead, or a day ahead? (the answer is both)

Operators will sharpen knives, leave them to be claimed, and when someone else needs a knife, they pull it from that pool of knives

Only USDA reps use wet stones. Plant ops use mouse trap/steeling? yes

Can we get some before and after pictures of knives?

Can we get some anago scores alongside the Judge scores

Can we set up trays of knives with side exclusive picking?

Do they have training material used to teach judge scoring? how consistent IS the scoring?

Can we grab scans from knives going into the processing and harvest machines?

We want to have some force feedback and correction data

Does the grind point look good?

3/27/24

Scores

Overall 7.76

Min: 7.31

Max: 8.23

New information from Shawn

Shawn scored mixed of new and freshly sharpened on primary and secondary with both “ignore tip” checked and unchecked

OS knives are scored on the anago after they’ve been ran on the judge

(Negligible dulling occurs on the judge)

Secondary Side (Ignore tip is not checked)

Overall: 7.91

Min: 7.6

Max: 8.11

Secondary Side (Ignore tip is checked)

Overall: 8.15

Min: 7.71

Max: 8.48

Primary Side (Ignore tip is not checked)

Overall:

Min:

Max:

Primary Side (Ignore tip is checked)

Overall: 8.08

Min: 7.71

Max: 8.3

Shawn took a 6” processing knife and ran it on the harvest machine, it looked

There are some burrs, its a hit or miss (1 out of 3 knives had them, and they weren’t always on the same place along the knives)

Shawn says they’re not incredibly bad.

A high percent of knives have gone through the hollow grinder because they’ve been in circulation before

How many knives running on the harvest machine predate the transition?

about 50%, maybe a slight majority are new

Shawn looked at incoming knives on a previous trip, and it didn’t look out of the ordinary

Dressings looking good

Clean smooth edge front to back. Fully dressed

Alex’s Feedback 4/3/24

The plant’s main concern is variability in scores, not necessarily that the scores or the profile issues

Alex looked into the scanner last night, but ultimately wasn’t confident that this would provide long term benefits, and reverted the changes he made

Adam’s opinion: Ricardo is appreciative of the efforts. They are supportive and want our fixes to work,

If we can get 10 knives per side, instead of 5 knives per side, and collect that over 2 weeks, that would be a great start on the data. This would not explicitly give us a solution, but its a good place to start

Adam not sure if 2 weeks is reasonable

The processing system at Lexington has been stellar with the exception of Monday where there was some issues. It was a one time anomaly

If we only have a week or so to get this solved, the nuclear option may be the only choice we have

Shawn to speak with Riccardo to better understand where the plant is

Adam + Craig updates 4/3/24

Alex is continuing to see variability on the Harvest machine

At the moment scores are looking good, but nothing has changed

Alex and Shawn are still seeing burrs on the machine

The plant has a clean out coming up in 2 weeks

Ideally, an Eng/Technician can gather data that we want to gather

This would require over the weekend collection

Only need 2-3 days on a machine to collect this data

Plant clean out Thursday the 18th

If Omni is to replace a machine, that would be when they want to do it

Update 4/4/24

John Rocha is available to go to Lexington, however, he is not one of their highest performers, so Omni would appreciate it if we send someone with him, potentially Jake if he’s still available?

Could Jason Dearden go out? It would be a weekend trip but I imagine he would take some days off in the week, and I myself would have to get approval from Rachael

Russ however, can veto this if he wants

“We are treating this as a manufacturing issue, we will not pay for any of this time or effort until we know what this is. It is up to SISU to figure this out. This is not being paid for by OS until its not shown to be a MF issue”

The problem from OS: When we don’t call this a MFG issue, where SISU is liable, SISU doesn’t have incentive to resolve issues in a timely and efficient manner

OS feels they are not getting the support they need.

Post-Lexington

outside of the dressing bit is worn out

Not evident why they’re worn out early. Could be new dressing bit lot was bad. Because of this, we should keep on eye on the bits that have just been sent out on the field

A angle tuning would get un-calibrated because

bad design on the motor mount bolts (as seen on the dressing motor picture)

The bolts are loose which may make the dressing stage wobbly and loose

2 things found:

Loose bolts on the dressing motor

Config file incorrect (

Primary honer shaft was stalling out whenever we were homing the dressing stage. Doing a stone replacement would abort after force feedback was registered

Theory is that the loose screws were causing the shaft to get stuck

touch off distance in the config file was possibly messed with

We don’t have anyone on-site anymore to keep an eye on the new dressing bits to see if they’re wearing out

2nd Post Lexington

2 primary problems:

1. Dressing of the stones. Alex Avila observed loud sounds coming from the dressing process, and john observed the sound on-site.

Dressing stage was coming out too far out towards the operator to do a touch off

This was a config file issue, the variable controlling this was off

Spencer: “I have that value as 0.5 as long as we have had the machine. I even see the config from 12.15 when I believe we brought that back from BTX after the damages and it was set to 0.5 then for both honers. I can't seem to find the config from the first bringup but I can see if skyler had if sent to me somewhere I am not seeing it”

John rotated dressing bits, did the separation stage shaft alignment, made sure both sides could dress appropriately

⁠

Austin: “The dressing mounting block either needs blue loc-tight or lock washers on the bolts, either or”

#42-49 have the coupler on the motors that allow us to hot swap txm and lexium motors.

rolling back to previous design vs how to mitigate the issue (i.e putting loc-tite on

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