Brian is a strong advocate for the Haas control system. The ease of use through decades of evolution makes training people a snap.
Oregonian, Brian Davis wasn’t born with a caliper in his hand. His family did know the value of a good tool, and how to use them. “My dad was a maintenance guy and could fix anything,” tells Syncro Design Brian Davis. “He worked at a school with geothermal heating right over the California border in Oregon. There was nothing he couldn’t fix seemingly with just a file, hammer, and a screwdriver. He taught me how to use everything he had. He was so skilled with limited resources. Something as simple as an arc welder would have been considered a luxury in his line of work.” These days Brian’s tools are far from basic, but that creative approach to problem solving is at the heart of Syncro Design.
Brian Davis
Owner Syncro Design
Brian graduated with a degree in manufacturing from the Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls. His dream, along with all his classmates was to work for Boeing. Aerospace was where it’s at. Nothing was going to keep him from living that dream, except the Boeing recruiters who came to campus and didn’t offer him employment. “I was devastated,” explains Brian. “My friends got job offers and just me and one other guy were left hanging.” Their fortunes soon changed when Northrup paid the school a visit. “Northrup wanted us, just us, and we were flown down to Hawthorn for three days,” continues Brian. “We toured the factory, were put up in a nice hotel, they helped us look for apartments. The whole nine yards. I was going to get my shot at aerospace. It was an incredible job offer. And what did I do? I turned my nose up at it because I was an Oregon boy and LA really freaked me out. The opportunity to go to Northrop was incredible, and I chose to go to Portland.” Consequently, Brian’s first job out of college was working as a manager at a door factory.
Even though it wasn’t aerospace, the move to Portland paid off 6 months later when his neighbor literally popped his head over the fence with a random job offer. “My neighbor’s wife was expecting, his coworker’s wife was expecting, and they needed a person on swing shift,” explains Brian. “I had no idea where he worked, but I said sure anyways. He handed me a piece of paper with the address and company name on it. It was Hewlett Packard. This is back in the day when HP had medical equipment, test/measurement, watches, calculators, all kinds of consumer products. So, my job was night shift test engineer in their printer department. I was surrounded by incredibly intelligent people with the best problem-solving mindset. Company culture was if you needed something, you got it. Prototyping parts in-house was all the rage. I got to know the shop people and they had no problems with me jumping on a machine and knocking out parts for my team, or for other teams that needed parts ASAP. My friends still hassled me for making printers. There they were taking a 200k casting and adding another 800k of value, and here I was learning the science of separating paper. In my youth that bothered me, but you think back and look at how many other technologies have been displaced, and ink jet printers are still around. It’s still viable technology. I was young and there was a big wide world out there, and I wanted to go see what I could do. After six years at HP, I started a consulting business. I met a lot of people, worked with super talented folks. I consulted for companies like Yakima, Microsoft, Amazon, Coherent and held a day job at Xerox. I did everything from engineering to manufacturing design. Anything that came my way. Then I get a call from an old buddy at HP. He would call every so often and ask if I wanted to come back. This time was different. He caught me on the right day, and I said I was willing to come back, but only if he could get me in as a supplier. Well, he did, and I was back at HP as a manufacturing engineer. One day a manager came up and as if I knew anyone looking for work. He knew I had been around and might have some suggestions. The next morning, I had 5 resumes on his desk for people I personally could vouch for. He was impressed, but unsure of his budget. So, they were hired on under me as contract labor, and I found myself with employees for the first time.”
The GenMill 2416 is Syncro’s most recent purchase. It is a very robust machine for its size and is arguably Brian’s most accurate machining center.
Over the next few years those five people turned into 44, spread between different companies. Brian hired mechanical engineers, support technicians, project managers, even IT people. Having a machine shop wasn’t really on his radar until an outside vendor delivered parts to one of his engineers. “I looked at this box of parts my guy had designed,” tells Brian. “Inside was an invoice for 40k.” At that moment I knew I could offer even more by supplying customers with protype parts. My first machine was a Bed-Mill setup in my garage, and my first customer was HP. Right place at the right time, and I know how fortunate I got. It was like an all you can eat buffet. Every Friday management would pick the jobs they wanted to run in-house and give me the pick of what was left. I offered the same services to other companies I had people entrenched with. All prototype work, one or two, or 20 parts. We got a building, new machines, more machines, bigger buildings and so forth. This was 2012 ish. We’ve balanced things out and currently run 13 CNC machining centers in 6000 sq.ft. with 14 people and a shop dog.”
Brian’s motto has always been, “The best machine is the one you can afford.” He prioritizes financial independence over brand prestige. If that means delivering parts off a Harbor Freight bench mill, then so be it. “When it comes to buying machines, the first thing I look for is what is the best tool at a price we can afford to pay,” explains Brian. “We own all our machines outright, and owing nothing on them has been a big part of how I do things. I don’t want to go into huge debt over ego buying the best named brand out there. My customers don’t care how I manufacture their jobs as long as they are within spec and on time. If I used my dad’s screwdriver and hammer to chisel out a part to match the print, they wouldn’t know or care. When it comes to the decision process, do we need capacity? Okay, let’s duplicate what we’ve got. Do we need capability? Let’s add something that we don’t have. I’ve built this shop around Haas and Fusion 360. Together, they are best bang for our buck out there.” Of Syncro’s machining centers, 7 of them are Haas models, all purchased from Selway Machine Tool. This includes a VF-2, VF-3, VF-5, two UMC-500 5-axis machines, and two UMC-750 5-axis machines. One UMC-500 is equipped with 16 pallets, making it their primary production machine. The shop also has a DMG Mori NHX4000 with six pallets, a Nakamura mill-turn, a Ganesh Swiss turning center, and a GenMill 2416 from Expand Machinery. “I’m not hard on our machines, and they are well maintained,” tells Brian. “Ninety percent of our prototype parts are either aluminum or plastic. I know the capabilities and the limitations of the machines and play to their strengths. For me the Haas has a lot of strength and doesn’t get the respect it deserves, especially when it comes to the controls.”
Brian will never buy a machine without probing, but the Haas he feels has the best interface with the Renishaw Wireless Intuitive Probing System. Clear menu items with pictures to match make setting it up a breeze. For a company like Syncro that does so many setups, an automated probing system is a huge time saver. The operator is able to complete other tasks while the machine is measuring tool heights and setting the work offset.
Brian is a strong advocate for the Haas control system. Every machinist knows the Haas controls, and according to Brian anyone with half a brain can be taught the controls in a very short time. “The Haas control is evolution, not revolution,” touts Brian. “If you’ve ever pressed a button on a CNC machine, chances are it was on a Haas control. The most basic of users are familiar with how it works, and students from every program around the country are trained on them. It is simple to use, yet highly evolved. It seems like it just gets better and better with each new generation. Haas have all this user feedback to draw from and it shows. They don’t just add flashy bits because they can. Each change is well thought out and makes the user experience better. And the training videos. Oh my, the videos on their website, and YouTube are endless opportunities to learn. Everything from basic paths to advanced features, and probing, are all right there for you to gobble up. It isn’t like that for every control. For example, the Mitsubishi control on my GenMill is a nitrous injected, turbocharged monster. It is crazy fast, ridiculously more powerful, cuts smoother, but good luck finding more than a handful of training videos on it. They are getting better, and more are available, but it is tough to compete with the decades of user feedback like Haas has. Is it the best, most powerful control out there? No, but it is easy to use, easy to teach, and does exactly what is needed without unnecessary bells and whistles.”
For Brian the Haas control really shines when paired with the optional Renishaw Wireless Intuitive Probing System. “I will never buy another manchine without probing,” details Brian. “All my machines have it, but it works the best on the Haas. Everything you need is built right into the controller. On other controls I might have to use an app, cut and paste, or manually enter data, but on the Haas, it is all tied directly in. I get faster and simpler setups; it reduces operator errors and increases productivity by automating the probing tasks. For a shop like our that does so many setups these are huge advantages. To start with I can set my work offset in a matter of seconds by just answering a few basic input questions. Everything is picture oriented. Start by pulling up the probe in the spindle and select what you want to probe. Is it a rectangle, do you want to probe a pocket, a board, a circle, match it to the onscreen graphic to get started. Add in basic dimensional info, jog the probe close to the raw material and away we go. You’ve now probed this part to within two ten thousandths of an inch. It knows where the center of that part is. Wow, that was easy. You put the probe away. Now you start putting tools in the machine. You go to a different section in the probing menu. Hey, there are more pictures. Here’s pictures of tools. Tool one is an end mill. Great. Tool 2 a drill, tool 3 a tap. You go into the program routine, you push a button, it grabs tool one, it comes over to the side of the table, it comes down, it touches the tool probe. It now knows the length of the tool. Then it does the second one, and the third one, and goes through however many you got in there. While it’s doing that, I’m cleaning the chips out, I’m cutting my stock, the machine is running itself and is basically helping me with the setup. As a prototype manufacturer we are in a constant state of setting up machines. Every time we successfully run a part the probing add on has paid for itself.”
Syncro Design find Fusion 360 is easy to teach, and is a great for their 5 axis prototype jobs. Fusion 360 provides a ton of value for its price point.
Fusion 360 also plays a vital role in Syncro Design’s efficiency. “Fusion 360 is kind of like the Haas of CAD CAM,” explains Brian. “Fusion is easy to learn. They teach it at most trade schools and there are a ton of videos online. It’s like Fusion gets you a driver’s license, you gain some experience and figure out how to drive the race car later. In Fusion we can flip back and forth between design and manufacturing. It converts 3 axis programming to fit the 5 axis machines with the press of a button and a Z reorientation. It provides a ton of value for its price point. It doesn’t do everything, and we don’t get as much control, but they provide us enough for what we do. If you give me four hours to chop down a tree, I’m the type of person that spends three of those hours sharpening his axe. So, when it comes to running parts, we are front loaded. I would rather spend the time programming than tying up a machine with setup after setup after setup. When most people think of 5 axis machining, they think impellers and helix. We have four 5 axis machines, but our customer’s parts are not ultra-high complexity like blades and impellers. So typically, we are not utilizing the UMC’s simultaneous 5 axis machining capabilities. Most of the parts we run on the 5 axis machines could be done in multiple operations on any of our 3 axis machines. Instead, we machine all six sides in only two ops. Five sides on the first op, and then a quick pass on a 3 axis to finish off the bottom. Most of the time it is literally 3 axis machining, rotate it 90 degrees, machine, rotate, and so on. Fusion is perfect for doing this. Even my weakest programmer knows how to program a 3-axis part in Fusion. By running on 5 axis machines, we are more efficient, generally faster, and our accuracy is vastly improved by touching it less. And all of this is easily done in Fusion 360 for a fraction of the cost of other name brand software.”
Admittedly Syncro Design is a little light in their turning department, but that could change soon with a new machine. “We are maxed out on space right now in this building, details Brian. “I’m considering building another since we have the room. But in the meantime, I’m leaning towards replacing one of the mills with a mill turn, or maybe a multi spindle lathe with Y. Don’t know yet. Depends on the budget. We will probably be looking at the GenTurns first. I’ve been really impresses with the GenMill’s capability and the support from Expand Machinery. The 2416 is a beast of a small machine if that makes sense. It is way heavier than its Haas counterpart the VF2. Arguably it is the most accurate machine in our quiver right now. I expect their lathes to have similar characteristics. We will see how things play out, but the business just keeps growing, and it is all by word of mouth. It says a lot about us that we don’t advertise and yet the phone keeps ringing. All these years, and all these contacts just keep feeding the machines, and I like that, it tells me we do a good job for our customers. A happy customer is the best kind to have.
Syncro’s parts range in size and complexity but 90% of them are made from plastic or Aluminum. They are a prototype specialist, but still have production runs in the 1000s of parts.