20 Minute Blog

More day job discussion, in under 20 minutes… as you know my company works a lot with the industrial market, but not exclusively. I’m now working with a company that sells metal for precious metals IRA account. This is a substantial difference from the usual clients — largely because I can basically understand what they do without having to spend an hour researching the industry online.

Of course I’m still researching the precious metals IRA online, because I need to know more than the very basics. Just a little more, mind you.

What is a Precious Metals IRA

A precious metals IRA is an IRA account that you can store actual physical precious metals in. The idea is that you actual buy gold bars or gold coins and those physical gold bars can be a part of your IRA investment account. These are still legitimate government (US government) recognized IRA accounts.

Of course since the precious metals IRA are government recognized, that means they also have to follow some government rules specific to precious metals IRA accounts, in addition to standard IRA stuff. Here are the key rules:

• There are regulations on the kind of gold and silver that you can store in your precious metals IRA. These have to be of a certain purity (varies by metal) and they cannot be collectible gold or silver coins. The collectible coins have a collectors’ value that does not transfer to a precious metals IRA and the end result is that you simply can’t use collectible gold or silver coins at all.
• The gold and silver in your precious metals IRA cannot be under your mattress! You have to store the physical precious metals in a recognized depository that meets certain security and insurance requirements, etc.
• You can buy gold bullion or silver bullion from wherever you want to, but you cannot by from a precious metals dealer or broker that you’re related to in any way. The assumption is that the two of you could somehow be cheating stuff or giving each other deals.

That’s the big stuff. Most IRA investment places offer precious metals IRAs and they have all the forms and know all the details. The big thing is that you don’t want to use only precious metals in your IRA, instead you use it as a way of diversifying your portfolio with something that has historically been a pretty safe investment. Of course over the last few years both gold and silver have been crazy — mostly going up, but also having a lot larger fluctuations than they historically have.

Even when I think I finally understand something within the industrial market, I find that I don’t really understand what I think I do. In this case it’s CNC stone machine.

Now, I know what CNC machining is, and I know what a CNC machine is. It’s a machine that is controlled by a computer with a spindle that cuts out metal. You can make just about any kind of metal part you can imagine with CNC machining, from knobs to pistons to blocks to actual 3D metal sculptures of faces and whatever else you can imagine. CNC machining is kind of cool.

So now at work I’m working with a company that manufactures CNC stone machines — the actual machines that do the CNC machining. I had to pause for a moment and figure out why a CNC machine would be made of stone, which at first didn’t make much sense. Then I realized that it’s probably not the whole machine made of stone, but instead just the surface that holds the metal — after all, you need something big and thick and heavy and what better than stone?

Well… that was a pretty idiotic guess.

CNC stone machines are normal, regular CNC machines — made out of metal — that are used for machining stone. So you use the machine to make stone sculptures, or cut out marble bannisters, or even tombstones. Yup, there’s no guy with a chisel there — it is in fact a machine shop using CNC machining on the stone to cut everything out just so, to very precise measurements that are entered into the CAD software. Then the computer does all the cutting with a spinning spindle chopping into the stone.

Of course the stone CNC machining is a little bit different — after all stone is much more likely to break off in chunks than metal is, so it requires different spindles and different speeds and different pathways programmed in through the CAD software. But overall… it’s still just the normal CNC machining that you’re used to.

Now I kinda want a wee personal-sized CNC machine (and the knowledge of how to work the CAD software) so that I can machine out my own little sculptures. Like Darth Vadar head of metal, or out of ebony. And fake tombstones. And who the heck knows what else. A metal tape dispenser, or anything else that is improbably to be made out of solid metal or solid stone. The fun is endless!

Okay, I decided I was going to write about whatever it was that I was working on at work today, and that means I have to talk about truck door seals. I’m going to try to blow through this in five minutes today. Hold on a sec, getting my timer application on my phone running….

And going.

Truck door seals are a form of security seal that is used to secure the back door of semi trucks. The truck door seals actually serve two separate purposes. They do effectively lock the door; however, the big thing with security seals that separates them from a lock or a padlock is that there is no way to open a security seal. Thus you put the truck door seal on once the truck is loaded up and then the only way to get it open again is to actually cut the seal off — this typically requires bolt cutters, at least in the case of metal truck door seals.

The other feature of truck door seals is that they have a serial number printed on them, and obviously no two truck door seals have the same security number. What this means in practice is that the truck door seal is “tamper evident” — this way it’s not possible for anyone to have done anything that you don’t know about.

Here’s an example:

Lets say you load up your truck only you use some kind of padlock instead of a truck door seal. Someone could break in by picking the lock, they could steal something, or change something, or copy sensitive documents, etc. Then they could replace the lock and you’d never know that they did anything (especially in the case of copying sensitive documents). Similarly, even if the intruder had to cut off the padlock, they could just replace it with an identical padlock. Not so the security seal — even if you replace the truck door seal with an identical truck door seal, it would perforce have a different serial number, so it would be obvious that someone did something.

Thus: tamper evident.

Of course, not all truck door seals are giant metal things that require bolt cutters to remove. There are also plastic truck door seals. They serve the same purpose — they lock the truck door down and have a serial number to provide evidence of tampering — but they are much easier to cut off. A plastic truck door seal provides less security against break-ins, but makes like a lot easier on the receiving end since you don’t need the giant whopping bolt cutters to remove them. And there’s some logic to the theory that if someone is going to cut off the truck door seals, they can just as easily bring bolt cutters with them as a tool to cut the plastic truck door seal.

The other advantage of the plastic truck door seals is that they cost less — much less in fact. This becomes a big deal for shipping companies, because truck door seals with serial numbers are becoming required for more and more shipping. Any kind of international shipping has to have them, and more domestic shipping companies are requiring them — after all, everyone who is shipping something thinks that their stuff is vitally important. And for some of them, it is.

Damn — went over. Just under 7 minutes for this truck door seal write-up. Ah well, still not bad.

I learned something new today about internet terminology and industrial technology as it relates to EtherNet IP. Happily I learned this while doing some research rather than saying something terribly foolish in front of a client. At my day job I’m working with a company that makes protocol gateways — basically stuff that translates one protocol into another.

The concept is that you might have your computer that speaks french and your giant machine making bottles that speaks Chinese. The protocol gateway translates one language into the other so your equipment can talk to each other.

They work with a whole bunch of protocols, most of which I had never heard of, and among them is EtherNet IP. This was the one that I thought I knew what it was. After all, we’re all familiar with ethernet cords that plug our computers into the vastness of the internet. And I happen to know that IP stands for Internet Protocol. Since this client works in protocols it was a short but clever leap to realize that EtherNet IP was the Ethernet Internet Protocol.

This is entirely untrue, alas.

As it turns out Ethernet is one thing, and the IP protocol is another thing. EtherNet IP is yet a third thing, which stands for Ethernet Industrial Protocol. The idea of EtherNet/IP is that it’s a protocol designed specifically for industrial applications that is built on the Ethernet physical layer.

EtherNet IP is an application layer that uses TCP packets to send information. It is better than standard Internet Protocol for industrial applications because normal IP has all kinds of little pauses and gaps in data transmission. You and I don’t notice them because a pause of a half second is no biggie when you’re loading a web page. But when you have that bottle making equipment stomping around doing something every second, a half-second gap in the transmission of instruction to the equipment can cause a big problem that might require the entire operation to be shut down while things are resynched.

So EtherNet/IP is very different from ethernet (though related) and IP (unrelated). Good to know.

An interesting thing about working with all these different industrial companies at work is that in addition to learning a bit about the industries, I’ve found that I’m beginning to pick up vaguely related side knowledge that is now transferring from one client to another. Today’s case in point is stainless steel. I work with several companies that do manufacturing in stainless steel, including stainless steel metal stamping and another completely unrelated company that does stainless steel forging and still other companies that do machining or die casting in stainless steel.

As I’m working with one client and I have to write some copy about stainless steel metal stamping, I suddenly realized that I was able to ramble on for some time about the various characteristics and benefits of stainless steel because of what I learned working with a stainless steel forging company.

I know, for example — and without looking anything up here, just off the top of my head — that stainless steel is corrosion resistant and is resistant to stress cracks and deformation. This make stainless steel ideal for applications that are exposed to the elements or where a longer lifespan is desirable. Stainless steel forgings in particular will last pretty much forever, and are increasingly popular for many heavy duty applications.

Stainless steel also is pretty — it shines up nicely and believe it or not this is also a significant benefit in many manufacturing processes. In particular stainless steel stamping is often used because the metal can be polished or burnished without the need for application of additional layers or solvents to shine it up. For parts that are going to be seen, the appearance of the metal stamping (or forging) can be an important selling point.

And finally, I know that stainless steel is expensive — far, far more expensive than other steels. In both stainless steel forging and stainless steel metal stamping applications the main reasons stainless steel isn’t used like 80% of the time is due to cost. When compared to your dead average steel — low carbon steel — stainless steel can cost up to five times as much. And that’s a big price to pay even if your part will be stronger, prettier, and last longer. The result is that low carbon steel is often preferred for metal stamping and in fact is the default material for deep drawn metal stampings, and low carbon steel or alloy steels are more often used for giant open die forgings rather than the most costly stainless steel forgings.

I figure at the rate I’m going within a few years I’ll finally have a new client walk in the door and be able to hold discourse intelligently on anything they do. Even if I’m not familiar with their exact industry, odds are I know enough about industrial processes and materials that I can talk about what they do in one form or another.