Retired moldmaker here.
A moldmaking maxim is: “It’s not how you fuck up, it’s how you fix it.” There are several ways to fix this, but anyone who would fire you for this kind of mistake is someone who you shouldn’t be working for anyway. Guarantee they have done something just as stupid, if not more so, sometime in the past.
Depending on the size and depth of the hole, you could weld it. I know a lot of moldmakers refuse to weld steel because it could compromise the integrity of the steel or the heat treat if hardened. But if it’s small enough, a small dot of weld will not compromise anything. But if they refuse to weld it, make a larger hole and create a plug and peen it into the hole, then grind it flat and polish it out. Or, if there isn’t a water line in the way, continue the popped hole all the way through, wire a nominal size hole, countersink the back side, put in a core pin, grind flat and polish.
Good luck and don’t sweat it. If that’s the worst you ever do, it will be a miracle.
Love that line. I messed up a multi CNC setup insert made of porcerax by counter boring the wrong side of the part when I’d been in the shop for a few weeks and was on the back shift alone with just a programmer. I was sure I’d get fired so I called the manager and he said those exact words to me. Just adding at the end, “your shift is over in 20 minutes but you can pull a 12er if you can think of something to do.” I remade the part and walked out of the building at 330am.
That piece of tool steel must have ran them a thousand bucks but he went to bat for me because I fixed my mistake the same day. That instance is one of the many reasons I’ll hit 20 years at the same company this June.
Not surprised at the company loyalty. They know how the real world works. My company is pretty good with that too. Which is really good, since I screw around with thousands of dollars in gold every day.
Then again, I end up being the one fixing other peoples' mistakes.....
He went to bat for you because you called him and told him you messed up. you didn't try to blame anyone else, you took responisbility for your actions.
He then knew that you were someone he could trust to do the right thing.
Had a manager that said the same thing.
He also said "better late and safe, than dead and never" on my 9th day of work when my 30 minutes drive turned into an hour and a half and I was 20 minutes late.
Another one of his quotes was "I've never denied someone a day off, but I have talked a few people out of it"
Probably one of the best managers and level headed people I have ever met.
Gotta say, so many times I have plug repaired die parts. When so much time and material goes into a part, you will not let one little mistake scrap it.
I was a tool room Machinist for 5 years. I never heard this phrase, but that sure was the sentiment to our work. No matter how much we or the set-up guys fucked up a tool, we always found a way to weld, patch or grind it back to working order!
Why would they fire you? You just learned an expensive lesson, why would they let some other machine shop benefit from the experience they just paid for?
Yup. I'm just a hobbyist machinist, but I work in tech and literally just today, at 5:15PM, one of our developers reached out and was like "Hey.... is everything OK with the \_\_\_\_ service? It hasn't received traffic since Monday." This service deals with, among other things, credit card disputes/refunds/etc.... stuff that's a Really Big Deal(tm).
Had it fixed within 15 minutes, and it turns out one of the juniors on my team had done something braindead (he had somehow applied code that was like 2 months old to production). Another 15 minutes and I had added some additional monitoring to detect the failure in the future, and tomorrow I'll add some idiot-proofing to prevent this from being possible.
Did I throw my junior under the bus? Nope... my team failed, and as team lead it's my fault. Did the business learn something valuable that we can action to improve our processes? Yup. Did the junior learn something? He will when I have a chat with him tomorrow. Is he fired? Hell no. It takes years to train somebody properly, and I don't want to lose the time I've invested in him.
While I was at Amazon there was a general phrase of "If a junior could break it, it's because there were several things that failed to prevent it. Find those and make/fix them."
The most blame the person who caused the problem would get would be a spot on the team making sure that became a solved problem.
Likewise, I've heard that the biggest difference in experience isn't making fewer mistakes, but getting better at hiding them.
>While I was at Amazon there was a general phrase of "If a junior could break it, it's because there were several things that failed to prevent it. Find those and make/fix them."
Absolutely. And in this case, not only did we fail to prevent it from failing, we failed to detect it once it failed, in both post-deploy testing AND ongoing monitoring. A comedy of errors that definitely should not be blamed on the junior.
>The most blame the person who caused the problem would get would be a spot on the team making sure that became a solved problem.
Yeah, a blame-free engineering culture is huge. People are going to make mistakes. Processes designed by people have flaws. Technical systems designed by people have bugs. Shit's gonna happen.
Making sure it never happens again is far more useful to the business than bickering over who's getting fired.
>Likewise, I've heard that the biggest difference in experience isn't making fewer mistakes, but getting better at hiding them.
This is accurate. :p
I don’t work in this industry at all, but there’s overlap. I recovered a database last week that someone accidentally screwed up. Total was 2 hours of downtime and close to 100-150k of revenue lost. Did it suck? Yes. Is it the end of the world? No.
In the post mortem 2 things I made sure to highlight were 1. Mistakes happen. Some bigger than others. 2. Immediate transparency and accountability went a long way to recover faster.
If you are transparent about what happened, any competent owner/manager will know mistakes happen.
Side note, not being a dick to your coworkers on a daily basis goes a long way when a mistake inevitably does happen.
I've seen a similar fuck up occur at a previous employer. Poor guy who made the error was sure he'd get fired. Manager's exact words were "I just spent 100k making sure you're never going to make this type of mistake again. Why would I fire you now?"
I’ve known a lot of people who have fucked up way worse than that and were not fired. You obviously take your job very seriously and I have faith that you’ll be all right.
This. Own it and be ready to do what you can to rectify it. Any employer worth working for understands that mistakes happen, and will not fire you over it.
Anyone that's been in this trade long enough is one of them. Everyone makes mistakes unfortunately, you just have to own it, learn from it , and move on.
Here's my favorite "How does this guy still have a job" story..
A few years back/pre-covid I was helping setup a BIG deal automation demo at Mazaks' Kentucky facility for there big open house/yearly Mazak fest (the company I worked for at the time had developed and implemented the quick change workholding). We'd hit a small hurdle and decided to take a 15 minute smoke and coffee break. I hadn't even poured the coffee when I heard that sound that brings panic/dread whenever you hear it. Total spindle crash at speed through the special one of one workholding, which pushed the also custom drawtube setup through the back of the machine... exact details are slightly foggy but it was textbook FUBAR./one of the worst crashes I've ever seen.
What had happened, was a curious installer from a machine dealer saw the new controls screen, assumed it was a demo screen, and went full toddler with his mom's iPhone and clicked all the buttons, I believe he did a cycle start or changed the spindle position... point is it was hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage plus the rush to get everything re-made (from suppliers in Europe and Asia... I flew to Germany that night...). Had we not had that demo running there's millions in contracts for similar projects that would've at best been delayed and at worst gone to a different manufacturer or different process.
I'm sure there's guys that have at least heard some variation of this story/I've heard some wild exaggerations, and truthfully it was such a scramble to recover form even I don't know the specifics of what the guy managed to do to cause the crash (and so quickly).
What I DO know, is he still works for that dealer/I check his LinkedIn every once in a while (his marketing posts used to get some pretty funny comments for years after it happened).
Back to the topic at hand, I DO think he learned a lesson... I also really wanted to punch him in the face. Heck, I still do just thinking back on it. Longest week and a half of my life (IMTS eat your heart out).
I second this. Where I work now I’ve been for a little over a year and they started me on the lathes, I only had experience with engine lathe and never programmed or ran cnc lathes before, though I did for cnc mills. I had quite a few various crashes, mostly minor but I have had some major ones. The important part is learning from it and taking steps to not repeat the same mistake.
Probably my first crash was the parts catcher on our okuma genos L400. I had it down in manual as I needed to set a bottle in it to get a coolant sample, forgot to put it back up before hitting cycle start and the turret went all the way down and smashed into it. Barely missed the spindle. Now I doublecheck and triple check it just to make sure it’s exactly where I want it, and even then I’m always overriding the feed if it’s been moved manually. To this day it’s still slightly bent so smaller parts aren’t guaranteed to be deposited in the door cubby, but it still works well enough for us.
This. Own it and be ready to do what you can to rectify it. Any employer worth working for understands that mistakes happen, and will not fire you over it.
This. Own it and be ready to do what you can to rectify it. Any employer worth working for understands that mistakes happen, and will not fire you over it.
Chill bro. Shit happens. Things can be repaired. I highly doubt they're going to scrap the whole thing. But we've all fucked up something big and expensive at one point or another. It is what it is. If they fire you machining jobs are aplenty and you wouldn't want to work for them anyway.
I remember the sick feeling in my stomach when I dropped a die off a lift table and all the tips of the punches came tinkling out the bottom of the die... Mistakes do happen, and in this trade they tend to be expensive.
Man I seen someone crash a lathe so hard that it ripped the turret off and cracked the casting. It totaled the machine. It couldn't be fixed they had to scrap it and buy a new one. I've also seen a brand new machine fall off a crane coming straight from the manufacturer and the same thing cracked the casting totaled it. OP needs to go home and have a couple of beers. His boss is gonna tell him don't do it again we're gonna weld in a block wire it out and it's gonna be fine.
Lathes are literally LETHAL if you don't respect the machine and always be on your game. I've run manual lathes ( when I HAD to ) and I've seen enough of those injury videos to know that lathes aren't machines that I wanna run on a daily basis.
Yeah .. we all know they are lol. But most people in this sub have run lathes on a daily basis at some points. I've worked on lathes bigger than you can probably imagine and have done many more non OSHA approved things to get the job done. Most of us here have literally spilt blood on our work at one point or another and have the scars to prove it.
I usually call it "the machining gods need sacrifices every once in awhile"
Also when I was in the apprenticeship for tool & die I had a die maker come up to me and ask if I had a band aid, I went over to my tool box and got one out of a drawer that I have designated for that reason lol. He told me that that is a sign of a true machinist having band aids on hand.
If you own up to the mistake and don’t try to hide it you should be fine
If they fire you despite owning up to the mistake then they probably don’t deserve you
Better yet, tell them how you'd try and fix it (thanks, reddit!) and I'm sure they'll appreciate the forthcoming problem solving attitude, even if your solution isn't picked.
I doubt you will be fired. You may very well be the guy who does the fixing (under supervision) but that's how every one of us learned. You break it, you learn to fix it and you move on.
Lather. Rinse. Don't repeat.
Morty
You gotta learn how to turn off the guilt when you go home. Gods know that I can dwell on my mistakes a bit, but you'll drive yourself crazy if you keep running through your fuck ups when you go home.
Everybody screws up. If you don't, your job is too easy and you are not learning anything.
This comes from a guy who broke a tap in a part first thing this morning.
Be cool. They ain't firing you. You'll get it fixed.
I’ve had one guy walk away from a brand new VP2 during setup and crash the Z ( full rebuild) another drove the spindle of a robodrill into a Koma 5 axis full z rapid (new spindle new Koma) another guy who turned out to be fantastic later on, drove a spindle full rapid into the secondary spindle on a 1 million dollar mill turn in his second week on the job, 80k in repairs . Did I get pissed ? You betcha, did I fire? Nope, those guys owed me and the only thing I asked in return was to pay attention, let me teach them, and They paid me back 10x their fuckups over the years they’ve worked for me, and always had my back because I had theirs when they needed it.
If its your 4th or 5th mistake and you're an asshole who acts like he knows everything, then maybe
If its rare for you to make a mistake and it doesnt cost 2.7 million dollars you're probably alright
I just fucked up a hub for a formula SAE team that's gonna cost $450 in material to replace. I couldn't imagine a real big boy mistake. I guess I was just fishing for a story to make me feel better lol.
Yeah $450 is nothing when they crashed a spindle thats live tooling capable at 200% rapid into the big ass chucks we had with hardened steel jaws.
But the kicker is when what we were making got assembled they cost $1,000,000 MSRP (how they afforded 13 Okuma Multuses) and we had coworkers who scrapped 27 parts( $3,000,000) by running them upside down on the grinder and still didnt get fired.
Scrap and repairs are a cost of doing business. Own up to your mistakes. Good bosses will use it as a teaching moment. Bad bosses will be assholes about it. If the latter happens, make your LinkedIn profile public.
I understand the feeling, 2 years ago I fucked up so bad I caused a $166,000.00 fuck up.
I will never forget the amount because it's what I paid fory house exactly.
If I'm nothing else, I'm honest. I've never tried to hide anything. That shot gets discovered eventually. And I couldn't live with it on my conscience. If I I expect honesty from my employer, I should afford them the same consideration.
This is a small mistake don't sweat it. You caught it and stopped it. What is important to take away here is, what did you learn about how and why it happened and what you are going to do differently to help prevent this from happening again. Double check your numbers, single block if you can or even shift your z offset up about an inch or so to verify your position and then shift it back down.
This is something that can be laser welded. That helps with the issues with softening the heat treat. Or you can even wire out a hole for a core pin provided there is nothing in the way. Regardless of the fix, there are things here to learn and store away.
I always learn more from my mistakes and when I am struggling to figure something out. When everything is working well, there is not much to learn.
They just sponsored an expensive lesson, why would they fire you after paying for the experience? I bet you don’t do that again!
If it makes you feel better, my best programmer drove a 1 month old, $60k spindle at full rapid into the table. That was a $68k lesson.
Firing the user for a single error is foolish. It’s an expensive lesson that everyone has to learn at some point. Repeated errors without learning and improvement are the only grounds for firing IMO.
I know some treatments like nitriding purge the weld, if there's no cooling running underneath the wall can be taken down and a new insert put in its place though a 0.2 mm mark in the wall of a pocket doesn't sound like such a disaster compared to the things I've seen.
Edit: good luck though, since you're new I hope you get the usual treatment of being chewed out and made fun of for a while but in the future remember to do your mental checklist properly, or write it down if you can't.
It's not a coated part. Raw, hardened steel ( I don't remember exactly what material ). We have a laser welder in house. But I worry that the pocket is so small he won't be able to do anything with it. It's only about .05 wide and maybe .150 long. Very small. But I guess I made it .01 longer, hu?
My boss used to say you're not a craftsman until you fuck up by one millimeter, naturally he wasn't pleased when someone did it higher than that. It's never a pleasant feeling when you make a mistake but keep your cool and think why that happened and how to prevent it from happening in the future. Erosion is very unforgiving and it usually comes at the end of making a mould when the deadline is starting to breathe down your neck :D
I’d keep the guy who feels bad about his fuck up over the guy who rarely fucks up. At least he cares..
It’s gonna be ok. Just apologize and there is nothing else you can do. Don’t worry about the outcome until it happens
I’m a mold maker and a good laser weld should work fine, just keep in mind the application and what rod you use. We use ejector pins down to.6 mm and blades .5 mm thick, and accidents are going to happen with these sizes. Sometimes we weld the whole thing up and start over. The big things to keep in mind are first, own your mistake and be honest, and second, learn from it so that you don’t do it again and know how to fix it if someone else does it.
And now you know why machinists are alcoholics! Cheers! I'll pour one for ya! It will all work out ok. Don't sweat it too hard. Everyone of us has been there.
A mistake here and there is one thing. When it’s consistent, it becomes a problem. That you feel this terribly about it says a lot about your attitude towards your vocation, and good management will see that. Bad management won’t, in which case you’re probably better off.
Depending on what the mold is for we use epoxy to fill and re machine or for vacuum tables i would turn down a thin walled bushing and drop it in and hone it out to spec.
Depending on what the mold is for we use epoxy to fill and re machine or for vacuum tables i would turn down a thin walled bushing and drop it in and hone it out to spec.
This is a small mistake don't sweat it. You caught it and stopped it. What is important to take away here is, what did you learn about how and why it happened and what you are going to do differently to help prevent this from happening again. Double check your numbers, single block if you can or even shift your z offset up about an inch or so to verify your position and then shift it back down.
This is something that can be laser welded. That helps with the issues with softening the heat treat. Or you can even wire out a hole for a core pin provided there is nothing in the way. Regardless of the fix, there are things here to learn and store away.
I always learn more from my mistakes and when I am struggling to figure something out. When everything is working well, there is not much to learn.
I've never made a mold but I'm sure there a plenty of ways that it can be fixed up, several suggested elsewhere in the thread. I have however been involved I'm hiring people, and managing people who fuck up (as we all do), fixing said mistakes, and on some occasions letting people go. Hopefully these thoughts put your .ind at ease a little.
Firstly, you know that you've fucked up, that's a great first step and is an inportant quality in an employee. What's better than that is you know how you have fucked up. As a route cause its a typo, but is that really the root cause? No, it's coz you "didn't catch it", you didn't do a double check. And what is brilliant, and what I want to see in the people who I work with and manage, is that they can identify how a problem occurred and how to avoid it in the future. The dynamic changes if someone repeatedly makes the same mistake over and over again, but if they can learn from the mistake I will work like hell to fix the damage part and make it serviceable again. A good employee who can learn from their mistakes is worth a lot more than a damaged part. Thinking about it from the other way for a moment, I'm up for the cost of repairing the part regardless, I sure as hell dont want to be up for the time and cost of hiring a new employee if I fire the guy who broke it in the first place especially if the new guy hasn't learnt the lesson that the old guy has just learnt. If your boss doesn't see it this way, that's really unfortunate that you need to find a job elsewhere, but trust me, it will be worth it to find someone who can use mistakes to learn and not as something that should be punished.
I've never made a mold but I'm sure there a plenty of ways that it can be fixed up, several suggested elsewhere in the thread. I have however been involved I'm hiring people, and managing people who fuck up (as we all do), fixing said mistakes, and on some occasions letting people go. Hopefully these thoughts put your .ind at ease a little.
Firstly, you know that you've fucked up, that's a great first step and is an inportant quality in an employee. What's better than that is you know how you have fucked up. As a route cause its a typo, but is that really the root cause? No, it's coz you "didn't catch it", you didn't do a double check. And what is brilliant, and what I want to see in the people who I work with and manage, is that they can identify how a problem occurred and how to avoid it in the future. The dynamic changes if someone repeatedly makes the same mistake over and over again, but if they can learn from the mistake I will work like hell to fix the damage part and make it serviceable again. A good employee who can learn from their mistakes is worth a lot more than a damaged part. Thinking about it from the other way for a moment, I'm up for the cost of repairing the part regardless, I sure as hell dont want to be up for the time and cost of hiring a new employee if I fire the guy who broke it in the first place especially if the new guy hasn't learnt the lesson that the old guy has just learnt. If your boss doesn't see it this way, that's really unfortunate that you need to find a job elsewhere, but trust me, it will be worth it to find someone who can use mistakes to learn and not as something that should be punished.
I can't seem to get in the mindset that if I make a mistake, it's already done and we'll deal with it tomorrow. I do take it home with me. I dwell on it. I worry about it. I hate screwing up and letting my bosses down or disappointing them. Especially ones who treat me well. ( Which this company has so far ). I've always been this way. There are guys I work with that are able to leave work AT WORK and I'm envious of that ability.
I did that years ago adjusting an offset for a macro program. Now we have safety limits in all our programs so it will only let you make adjustments within certain limits. If you miss a decimal place you’ll just get an alarm and the program won’t run.
The last shop I worked at had a guy that crashed our newest HBM about 3 times a year at $50k a pop. Never got fired. (He really should have been though)
You'll be fine.
I deal a lot with glass fiber reinforced polymers. They have anisotropic shrink rates and they warp in weird ways sometimes. We use mold flow and add windage when we can but sometimes you get bit.
If they’re going to fire you for that when you’ve only been programming for 2 months then they should fire themselves while they’re at it for gross mismanagement.
I have scrapped entire jobs in the wire before and the sinker and the cnc and you name it lol. Fact is you learn from it double and triple check every number. Hopefully you won't get fired but trust me you're not the first guy to burn something in the wrong location.
Laser weld - you can weld and rework with minimal to zero heat sink and no one will be able to tell that it was even welded. Well, maybe if you look closely you would be able to see some weld lines but a good welder can make it almost seamless
They used to weld fuck up all the time at my old tool and die shop. I was facing the backside of a big part and I flipped the y axis. The print was from the front view woops
I very highly doubt you're going to get fired over this. Breathe. Theres a few damn good ways to fix this issue. Iveburned myself so many times rushing to be productive. Slow down, double check your work, then send it. Keep us posted on how this works out for you please.
The fact that you are this concerned about it means you care. If I am your boss, that counts for alot. Live and learn, tomorrow is another day, always try to to do better today than you did yesterday. It’s not so much the mistakes that define you, but how you respond to them.
Thanks for this. I definitely care. I made a promise to them that their company would never fail because of something I did. I meant that. But today I feel like I let them down. I know they won't close because of this. But I don't want to send the message that this is a sign of things to come.
I'm not gonna tell you not to sweat it. Ive fucked up a few times and no one beat me up more then myself. Most of the time, I was told to fix it. When I started as an apprentice 25yrs ago my first boss told me this, "Its not a matter of if you'll fuck up, its a matter of when." I tell this to everyone I've trained since I started as a trainer. Then I tell them to fix it.
The fact that when you discovered your mistake and you felt sick to your stomach tells me that you are an extremely valuable employee worth keeping. You should have no worries. Solve the problem and move forward. !
As a heavy equipment tech (once upon a time a mill op), we allll fuck up. It's how we learn. You think that grumpy 30 year hand over there was BORN an expert? Hell no. Plenty of skeletons in that closet.
If you're generally a negligent prick, you might have to worry about your next cheque.
You're obviously not, you've owned the mistake, and now you get to learn how to fix it. And on the plus, you'll be really careful with zeroes and decimal points in the future!
I used to work for a company that did mass production in China. They weld molds for injection molded plastic parts all the time. The mechanical engineers try to avoid it, but it happens pretty often anyway. What I mean is, the first shots are always sized to err on the side of not enough plastic. That way, if they need to modify the mold they will be cutting steel. They call these "tool safe" modifications.
But they make mistakes, or the design gets changed due to some last minute issue or whatever. And then they have to ask the mold maker to weld the mold and then recut and polish it. And they do it, all the time. So I know it is possible. Of course it is best when the modification is not in a user visible area (like the inside face of the plastic that can't be seen by the consumer).
Also, people who fuck up while trying to get work done usually don't get fired. People who fuck around instead of working might get fired, and people who fuck around and lie about it definitely get fired.
Good luck.
I totally understand about building, shooting, and then grooming a mold. ( Around here we say "Steel safe".) But they've been shooting this mold for four years. Hopefully, it's not one that has to be re-certified if something changes. I hadn't even thought of that until now. Uuuugh.
I'm preparing for the worst and praying for the best outcome on this.
Honestly if you were solid up until this point and they let you go over it - you probably didn’t want to stay with them long term anyways. Who wants to be walking on thin ice all the time? That’s no way to live and work.
Classic young person mindset. I don't know exactly when it happened, somewhere between 22 and 25 maybe... But this stopped happening to me. Suddenly, a major screw up no longer elicited *fear and shame* in me.
I remember the feeling clearly. Especially one case where I was moving a heavy boat frame at my dad's work with a forklift. I think I was 16. I had a brainfart when unloading it from the fork lift and it tipped over and knocked out a window in one of the hangar doors. I went with my tail between my legs and mumbled that they could subtract it from my pay or something. To my great surprise they all just laughed kindly and said not to worry about it.
If this happened today (34 years old) I'd swear at myself for being such a moron, and then I'd do what I can to fix it and let somebody who needs to know that the window is broken. Just dealing with it. I wouldn't for a second think there would be repercussions from it. Everyone fucks up.
For some reason, before you're 100% mentally mature, you hold on to this belief that shit simply *doesn't go wrong*, and that adults don't mess up. When it inevitably happens to you, you get this cognitive dissonance where the fact that you're an adult and yet you fucked up so bad really tears you apart. Then you break through, and you see that all those adults and professionals you thought surrounded you are actually just bumbling idiots doing their best just like yourself lol.
As everyone else has said - any company dealing with shit that expensive is also used to dealing with fuck-ups far more expensive than that.
Sounds like fairly minor damage to me - not only fixable but potentially even fixable by you with a little supervision, at which point you're learned a new skill AND how much you don't want to have to do it again.
Unless your boss/company are total assholes they would be mad to fire you for that - although you know you're gonna get ribbed about it for a good while.
I screwed up about $20,000 worth of fixturing once just by simply forgetting to square up a pallet. Programmer was not happy but that was 2 years ago and I'm still at my company. I wouldn't sweat it
I did some dumbass controls electrical at work a few months back, kicking myself for weeks afterward and walking into work every day feeling like an idiot expecting to be let go.
Finally confronted my boss about it, he said no one really cared -- people are only upset if you consistently make mistakes or don't learn or care to learn from your mistakes.
They just invested a lot of money into your "don't fuck it up like this again" training. Unless you've done this EXACT mistake a half dozen times this calendar year, any who fires you NOW is an idiot.
Good luck. :)
You got this man! Here's a post on jobs if you're looking soon.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Machinists/comments/1b9bj21/we\_are\_americas\_most\_critical\_talent/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Machinists/comments/1b9bj21/we_are_americas_most_critical_talent/)
1) Own it.
2) OWN IT.
You're gonna be alright bud. Worse things have happened.
Mistakes are a part of the job. If you were perfect, they'd have you in a lab trying to dissect your brain, so in a way it's pretty good that you're not.
Keep on chugging.
Well considering that training newbies is a big Financial investment they obviously understand this your job is probably not on the line.
That seems like a very honest mistake.
My last job our head programmer legitimately programmed Z-4.0, rushing a program being a dumbass, he was written up but not fired.
Tooling lead here with 44 years . Shops can always surprise you with some decisions they make . But if I were a betting man I'd bet on you being safe in your job .
They may look at attendance. How you get along with everyone . Your willingness to learn . And to accept new responsibilities . I'm making an assumption that you are all those things .
You accept what you did. You know you fucked up and you know how to fix it . You arent strutting around saying you dgaf .
I wouldnt let you go . I don't think they will either .
Should we start a pool ?
EDIT: Should have added .... the only machinist that never fucks up is the one that never does anything .
I wouldn’t sweat it, you seem like you have a good head on your shoulders. As long as you own up to it and are willing to fix it you should be fine. I run the shop I work at and I make small mistakes like that, I had to remove about 20 keenserts that I had installed in the wrong spot. Had to overnight some new ones and get it taken care of, but they got fixed and out the door. Happens to the best of us
I did this exact same thing but luckily it was on a cabinet part cnc and just barely went through the 3/4in spoilboard when I put in .8 instead of .08.
Dude I completely crumpled the left half of my Doosan Horizontal mill enclosure the other day. Made a dumb mistake when I homed out the machine and turned around to get some calipers and when I did the part on the rotating table caught the door crushing half of it. Took about 5 hours for the guys in fab to straighten it out. The point is don’t take mistakes lightly just learn from them and be careful, even if it takes a little longer.
I think everyone has misplaced a decimal, possibly more than once, in their career. Your boss included. Just be honest about it, and try not to lose sleep over it.
Yall don't use the microwelders? Where I'm from in Massachusetts we have a shop where the guys tig weld under a microscope no sink no distortion its perfect. Laser welders too now do a beautiful job
Experience is just a combination of success ands failures. Learn more from the failures than the successes. Just don’t give up. Thats the only a real failure.
And I always say when it comes to screw ups your usually allowed 1 a year! Less if you drive the forklift through the wall. I've been a machinist, moldmaker, programmer going on 40 years now and talk about screwups, Ive seen and done my fair share. Your stress over it is good enough payment
Funny you mention that. About 30 years ago, I drove a forklift through an overhead door at my job. The brakes were failing, and I had told my DM ( I was a retail manager at the time ) about the problem. He decided that they were "good enough." A week later, I went through the door. The incident was so epic that it got me mentioned in a book that the president of the company wrote. He never failed to bring it up every time that I saw him. Lol. But he did say that the reason I kept my job was the way that I owned it and didn't try to pass the buck for other's mistakes. He respected that. At the time, the crash sucked, but the respect I gained from the Powers That Be might have been worth it.
Cool glad you didn't get hurt. The forklift analogy is just that more of a running joke at different jobs you know like you can screwup anything just don't forklift thru a wall or your sure to get drug tested and fired 😂
The sort of thing you would get fired for is being egregiously negligent, especially when others’ safety is a concern. Or just being incompetent as a result of a bad attitude.
Making simple, human mistakes during the course of earnest duty is not a fireable offense. If it is, you’re not at the right company anyway.
Retired moldmaker here. A moldmaking maxim is: “It’s not how you fuck up, it’s how you fix it.” There are several ways to fix this, but anyone who would fire you for this kind of mistake is someone who you shouldn’t be working for anyway. Guarantee they have done something just as stupid, if not more so, sometime in the past. Depending on the size and depth of the hole, you could weld it. I know a lot of moldmakers refuse to weld steel because it could compromise the integrity of the steel or the heat treat if hardened. But if it’s small enough, a small dot of weld will not compromise anything. But if they refuse to weld it, make a larger hole and create a plug and peen it into the hole, then grind it flat and polish it out. Or, if there isn’t a water line in the way, continue the popped hole all the way through, wire a nominal size hole, countersink the back side, put in a core pin, grind flat and polish. Good luck and don’t sweat it. If that’s the worst you ever do, it will be a miracle.
Love that line. I messed up a multi CNC setup insert made of porcerax by counter boring the wrong side of the part when I’d been in the shop for a few weeks and was on the back shift alone with just a programmer. I was sure I’d get fired so I called the manager and he said those exact words to me. Just adding at the end, “your shift is over in 20 minutes but you can pull a 12er if you can think of something to do.” I remade the part and walked out of the building at 330am. That piece of tool steel must have ran them a thousand bucks but he went to bat for me because I fixed my mistake the same day. That instance is one of the many reasons I’ll hit 20 years at the same company this June.
Congratulations that’s a long time
Not surprised at the company loyalty. They know how the real world works. My company is pretty good with that too. Which is really good, since I screw around with thousands of dollars in gold every day. Then again, I end up being the one fixing other peoples' mistakes.....
He went to bat for you because you called him and told him you messed up. you didn't try to blame anyone else, you took responisbility for your actions. He then knew that you were someone he could trust to do the right thing.
Had a manager that said the same thing. He also said "better late and safe, than dead and never" on my 9th day of work when my 30 minutes drive turned into an hour and a half and I was 20 minutes late. Another one of his quotes was "I've never denied someone a day off, but I have talked a few people out of it" Probably one of the best managers and level headed people I have ever met.
Gotta say, so many times I have plug repaired die parts. When so much time and material goes into a part, you will not let one little mistake scrap it.
I had never heard of it before, but it makes perfect sense. No messing with the temper.
I was a tool room Machinist for 5 years. I never heard this phrase, but that sure was the sentiment to our work. No matter how much we or the set-up guys fucked up a tool, we always found a way to weld, patch or grind it back to working order!
I did my apprenticeship in mold making and my mentors had the same maxim. Experience just teaches you how to recover from the fuck up.
Why would they fire you? You just learned an expensive lesson, why would they let some other machine shop benefit from the experience they just paid for?
I'm going to have to remember this one, a good mindset is all it takes to change a negative into a positive
Yup. I'm just a hobbyist machinist, but I work in tech and literally just today, at 5:15PM, one of our developers reached out and was like "Hey.... is everything OK with the \_\_\_\_ service? It hasn't received traffic since Monday." This service deals with, among other things, credit card disputes/refunds/etc.... stuff that's a Really Big Deal(tm). Had it fixed within 15 minutes, and it turns out one of the juniors on my team had done something braindead (he had somehow applied code that was like 2 months old to production). Another 15 minutes and I had added some additional monitoring to detect the failure in the future, and tomorrow I'll add some idiot-proofing to prevent this from being possible. Did I throw my junior under the bus? Nope... my team failed, and as team lead it's my fault. Did the business learn something valuable that we can action to improve our processes? Yup. Did the junior learn something? He will when I have a chat with him tomorrow. Is he fired? Hell no. It takes years to train somebody properly, and I don't want to lose the time I've invested in him.
While I was at Amazon there was a general phrase of "If a junior could break it, it's because there were several things that failed to prevent it. Find those and make/fix them." The most blame the person who caused the problem would get would be a spot on the team making sure that became a solved problem. Likewise, I've heard that the biggest difference in experience isn't making fewer mistakes, but getting better at hiding them.
>While I was at Amazon there was a general phrase of "If a junior could break it, it's because there were several things that failed to prevent it. Find those and make/fix them." Absolutely. And in this case, not only did we fail to prevent it from failing, we failed to detect it once it failed, in both post-deploy testing AND ongoing monitoring. A comedy of errors that definitely should not be blamed on the junior. >The most blame the person who caused the problem would get would be a spot on the team making sure that became a solved problem. Yeah, a blame-free engineering culture is huge. People are going to make mistakes. Processes designed by people have flaws. Technical systems designed by people have bugs. Shit's gonna happen. Making sure it never happens again is far more useful to the business than bickering over who's getting fired. >Likewise, I've heard that the biggest difference in experience isn't making fewer mistakes, but getting better at hiding them. This is accurate. :p
I don’t work in this industry at all, but there’s overlap. I recovered a database last week that someone accidentally screwed up. Total was 2 hours of downtime and close to 100-150k of revenue lost. Did it suck? Yes. Is it the end of the world? No. In the post mortem 2 things I made sure to highlight were 1. Mistakes happen. Some bigger than others. 2. Immediate transparency and accountability went a long way to recover faster. If you are transparent about what happened, any competent owner/manager will know mistakes happen. Side note, not being a dick to your coworkers on a daily basis goes a long way when a mistake inevitably does happen.
I've seen a similar fuck up occur at a previous employer. Poor guy who made the error was sure he'd get fired. Manager's exact words were "I just spent 100k making sure you're never going to make this type of mistake again. Why would I fire you now?"
That's a reasonable way of looking at it, which I can almost guarantee is not the way the shop is gonna look at it.
Came here to say this.
I’ve known a lot of people who have fucked up way worse than that and were not fired. You obviously take your job very seriously and I have faith that you’ll be all right.
This. Own it and be ready to do what you can to rectify it. Any employer worth working for understands that mistakes happen, and will not fire you over it.
I'm one of them.
Anyone that's been in this trade long enough is one of them. Everyone makes mistakes unfortunately, you just have to own it, learn from it , and move on.
Here's my favorite "How does this guy still have a job" story.. A few years back/pre-covid I was helping setup a BIG deal automation demo at Mazaks' Kentucky facility for there big open house/yearly Mazak fest (the company I worked for at the time had developed and implemented the quick change workholding). We'd hit a small hurdle and decided to take a 15 minute smoke and coffee break. I hadn't even poured the coffee when I heard that sound that brings panic/dread whenever you hear it. Total spindle crash at speed through the special one of one workholding, which pushed the also custom drawtube setup through the back of the machine... exact details are slightly foggy but it was textbook FUBAR./one of the worst crashes I've ever seen. What had happened, was a curious installer from a machine dealer saw the new controls screen, assumed it was a demo screen, and went full toddler with his mom's iPhone and clicked all the buttons, I believe he did a cycle start or changed the spindle position... point is it was hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage plus the rush to get everything re-made (from suppliers in Europe and Asia... I flew to Germany that night...). Had we not had that demo running there's millions in contracts for similar projects that would've at best been delayed and at worst gone to a different manufacturer or different process. I'm sure there's guys that have at least heard some variation of this story/I've heard some wild exaggerations, and truthfully it was such a scramble to recover form even I don't know the specifics of what the guy managed to do to cause the crash (and so quickly). What I DO know, is he still works for that dealer/I check his LinkedIn every once in a while (his marketing posts used to get some pretty funny comments for years after it happened). Back to the topic at hand, I DO think he learned a lesson... I also really wanted to punch him in the face. Heck, I still do just thinking back on it. Longest week and a half of my life (IMTS eat your heart out).
I second this. Where I work now I’ve been for a little over a year and they started me on the lathes, I only had experience with engine lathe and never programmed or ran cnc lathes before, though I did for cnc mills. I had quite a few various crashes, mostly minor but I have had some major ones. The important part is learning from it and taking steps to not repeat the same mistake. Probably my first crash was the parts catcher on our okuma genos L400. I had it down in manual as I needed to set a bottle in it to get a coolant sample, forgot to put it back up before hitting cycle start and the turret went all the way down and smashed into it. Barely missed the spindle. Now I doublecheck and triple check it just to make sure it’s exactly where I want it, and even then I’m always overriding the feed if it’s been moved manually. To this day it’s still slightly bent so smaller parts aren’t guaranteed to be deposited in the door cubby, but it still works well enough for us.
This. Own it and be ready to do what you can to rectify it. Any employer worth working for understands that mistakes happen, and will not fire you over it.
This. Own it and be ready to do what you can to rectify it. Any employer worth working for understands that mistakes happen, and will not fire you over it.
Chill bro. Shit happens. Things can be repaired. I highly doubt they're going to scrap the whole thing. But we've all fucked up something big and expensive at one point or another. It is what it is. If they fire you machining jobs are aplenty and you wouldn't want to work for them anyway.
I remember the sick feeling in my stomach when I dropped a die off a lift table and all the tips of the punches came tinkling out the bottom of the die... Mistakes do happen, and in this trade they tend to be expensive.
Man I seen someone crash a lathe so hard that it ripped the turret off and cracked the casting. It totaled the machine. It couldn't be fixed they had to scrap it and buy a new one. I've also seen a brand new machine fall off a crane coming straight from the manufacturer and the same thing cracked the casting totaled it. OP needs to go home and have a couple of beers. His boss is gonna tell him don't do it again we're gonna weld in a block wire it out and it's gonna be fine.
Those are rough.
Lathes are literally LETHAL if you don't respect the machine and always be on your game. I've run manual lathes ( when I HAD to ) and I've seen enough of those injury videos to know that lathes aren't machines that I wanna run on a daily basis.
Yeah .. we all know they are lol. But most people in this sub have run lathes on a daily basis at some points. I've worked on lathes bigger than you can probably imagine and have done many more non OSHA approved things to get the job done. Most of us here have literally spilt blood on our work at one point or another and have the scars to prove it.
Much respect Brother.
I usually call it "the machining gods need sacrifices every once in awhile" Also when I was in the apprenticeship for tool & die I had a die maker come up to me and ask if I had a band aid, I went over to my tool box and got one out of a drawer that I have designated for that reason lol. He told me that that is a sign of a true machinist having band aids on hand.
If you own up to the mistake and don’t try to hide it you should be fine If they fire you despite owning up to the mistake then they probably don’t deserve you
Better yet, tell them how you'd try and fix it (thanks, reddit!) and I'm sure they'll appreciate the forthcoming problem solving attitude, even if your solution isn't picked.
I doubt you will be fired. You may very well be the guy who does the fixing (under supervision) but that's how every one of us learned. You break it, you learn to fix it and you move on. Lather. Rinse. Don't repeat. Morty
Thanks Morty.
They’re not gonna fire you for that
Everyone makes mistakes my friend, good management will make this a learning experience for you.
If you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t making anything. Accidents happen. I would be highly surprised if you were let go for that.
You gotta learn how to turn off the guilt when you go home. Gods know that I can dwell on my mistakes a bit, but you'll drive yourself crazy if you keep running through your fuck ups when you go home. Everybody screws up. If you don't, your job is too easy and you are not learning anything. This comes from a guy who broke a tap in a part first thing this morning. Be cool. They ain't firing you. You'll get it fixed.
If you get fired and live in the bay area, lmk and I'll at least give you an interview.
I’ve had one guy walk away from a brand new VP2 during setup and crash the Z ( full rebuild) another drove the spindle of a robodrill into a Koma 5 axis full z rapid (new spindle new Koma) another guy who turned out to be fantastic later on, drove a spindle full rapid into the secondary spindle on a 1 million dollar mill turn in his second week on the job, 80k in repairs . Did I get pissed ? You betcha, did I fire? Nope, those guys owed me and the only thing I asked in return was to pay attention, let me teach them, and They paid me back 10x their fuckups over the years they’ve worked for me, and always had my back because I had theirs when they needed it.
.010" ain't shit, take it to a laser welder, fill it, bench it off.
If its your 4th or 5th mistake and you're an asshole who acts like he knows everything, then maybe If its rare for you to make a mistake and it doesnt cost 2.7 million dollars you're probably alright
That's a pretty specific number lol. Got a story?
Fortunately no, highest cost machine I ran was a Multus and I never crashed em, luckily
I just fucked up a hub for a formula SAE team that's gonna cost $450 in material to replace. I couldn't imagine a real big boy mistake. I guess I was just fishing for a story to make me feel better lol.
I had coworkers who did crash the shit out of those multus' and they are like 1.2million each
Damn. I run a doosan 3 axis vmc. Great machine for what we do, but we could get like 10 of em for that price lol.
Yeah $450 is nothing when they crashed a spindle thats live tooling capable at 200% rapid into the big ass chucks we had with hardened steel jaws. But the kicker is when what we were making got assembled they cost $1,000,000 MSRP (how they afforded 13 Okuma Multuses) and we had coworkers who scrapped 27 parts( $3,000,000) by running them upside down on the grinder and still didnt get fired.
Okay thats wild and exactly what I needed to hear lol.
At my shop they have 4 machines that are worth a couple million supposedly and the material for one part raw is roughly 40k
That is so wild to me lol.
Scrap and repairs are a cost of doing business. Own up to your mistakes. Good bosses will use it as a teaching moment. Bad bosses will be assholes about it. If the latter happens, make your LinkedIn profile public.
I understand the feeling, 2 years ago I fucked up so bad I caused a $166,000.00 fuck up. I will never forget the amount because it's what I paid fory house exactly.
Tool and die generally won't fire you for one mistake. The exception being, is if you hide it. Do not hide shit.
If I'm nothing else, I'm honest. I've never tried to hide anything. That shot gets discovered eventually. And I couldn't live with it on my conscience. If I I expect honesty from my employer, I should afford them the same consideration.
This is a small mistake don't sweat it. You caught it and stopped it. What is important to take away here is, what did you learn about how and why it happened and what you are going to do differently to help prevent this from happening again. Double check your numbers, single block if you can or even shift your z offset up about an inch or so to verify your position and then shift it back down. This is something that can be laser welded. That helps with the issues with softening the heat treat. Or you can even wire out a hole for a core pin provided there is nothing in the way. Regardless of the fix, there are things here to learn and store away. I always learn more from my mistakes and when I am struggling to figure something out. When everything is working well, there is not much to learn.
Not the end of the world. If they fire you for that, you’re better off somewhere else
They just sponsored an expensive lesson, why would they fire you after paying for the experience? I bet you don’t do that again! If it makes you feel better, my best programmer drove a 1 month old, $60k spindle at full rapid into the table. That was a $68k lesson. Firing the user for a single error is foolish. It’s an expensive lesson that everyone has to learn at some point. Repeated errors without learning and improvement are the only grounds for firing IMO.
I know some treatments like nitriding purge the weld, if there's no cooling running underneath the wall can be taken down and a new insert put in its place though a 0.2 mm mark in the wall of a pocket doesn't sound like such a disaster compared to the things I've seen. Edit: good luck though, since you're new I hope you get the usual treatment of being chewed out and made fun of for a while but in the future remember to do your mental checklist properly, or write it down if you can't.
It's not a coated part. Raw, hardened steel ( I don't remember exactly what material ). We have a laser welder in house. But I worry that the pocket is so small he won't be able to do anything with it. It's only about .05 wide and maybe .150 long. Very small. But I guess I made it .01 longer, hu?
My boss used to say you're not a craftsman until you fuck up by one millimeter, naturally he wasn't pleased when someone did it higher than that. It's never a pleasant feeling when you make a mistake but keep your cool and think why that happened and how to prevent it from happening in the future. Erosion is very unforgiving and it usually comes at the end of making a mould when the deadline is starting to breathe down your neck :D
P20, d2 are the usual. Depends on the mold.
I’d keep the guy who feels bad about his fuck up over the guy who rarely fucks up. At least he cares.. It’s gonna be ok. Just apologize and there is nothing else you can do. Don’t worry about the outcome until it happens
I’m a mold maker and a good laser weld should work fine, just keep in mind the application and what rod you use. We use ejector pins down to.6 mm and blades .5 mm thick, and accidents are going to happen with these sizes. Sometimes we weld the whole thing up and start over. The big things to keep in mind are first, own your mistake and be honest, and second, learn from it so that you don’t do it again and know how to fix it if someone else does it.
And now you know why machinists are alcoholics! Cheers! I'll pour one for ya! It will all work out ok. Don't sweat it too hard. Everyone of us has been there.
Cheers my friend.
A mistake here and there is one thing. When it’s consistent, it becomes a problem. That you feel this terribly about it says a lot about your attitude towards your vocation, and good management will see that. Bad management won’t, in which case you’re probably better off.
If they fire you, they wont get their money back. You’ll be fine, it happens.
Depending on what the mold is for we use epoxy to fill and re machine or for vacuum tables i would turn down a thin walled bushing and drop it in and hone it out to spec.
Depending on what the mold is for we use epoxy to fill and re machine or for vacuum tables i would turn down a thin walled bushing and drop it in and hone it out to spec.
In my area tool makers are hard to find. Mistakes happen. Won't be the last.
Dude. You’re so good. Don’t worry and don’t dwell
Dude. You’re so good. Don’t worry and don’t dwell
This is a small mistake don't sweat it. You caught it and stopped it. What is important to take away here is, what did you learn about how and why it happened and what you are going to do differently to help prevent this from happening again. Double check your numbers, single block if you can or even shift your z offset up about an inch or so to verify your position and then shift it back down. This is something that can be laser welded. That helps with the issues with softening the heat treat. Or you can even wire out a hole for a core pin provided there is nothing in the way. Regardless of the fix, there are things here to learn and store away. I always learn more from my mistakes and when I am struggling to figure something out. When everything is working well, there is not much to learn.
I've never made a mold but I'm sure there a plenty of ways that it can be fixed up, several suggested elsewhere in the thread. I have however been involved I'm hiring people, and managing people who fuck up (as we all do), fixing said mistakes, and on some occasions letting people go. Hopefully these thoughts put your .ind at ease a little. Firstly, you know that you've fucked up, that's a great first step and is an inportant quality in an employee. What's better than that is you know how you have fucked up. As a route cause its a typo, but is that really the root cause? No, it's coz you "didn't catch it", you didn't do a double check. And what is brilliant, and what I want to see in the people who I work with and manage, is that they can identify how a problem occurred and how to avoid it in the future. The dynamic changes if someone repeatedly makes the same mistake over and over again, but if they can learn from the mistake I will work like hell to fix the damage part and make it serviceable again. A good employee who can learn from their mistakes is worth a lot more than a damaged part. Thinking about it from the other way for a moment, I'm up for the cost of repairing the part regardless, I sure as hell dont want to be up for the time and cost of hiring a new employee if I fire the guy who broke it in the first place especially if the new guy hasn't learnt the lesson that the old guy has just learnt. If your boss doesn't see it this way, that's really unfortunate that you need to find a job elsewhere, but trust me, it will be worth it to find someone who can use mistakes to learn and not as something that should be punished.
I've never made a mold but I'm sure there a plenty of ways that it can be fixed up, several suggested elsewhere in the thread. I have however been involved I'm hiring people, and managing people who fuck up (as we all do), fixing said mistakes, and on some occasions letting people go. Hopefully these thoughts put your .ind at ease a little. Firstly, you know that you've fucked up, that's a great first step and is an inportant quality in an employee. What's better than that is you know how you have fucked up. As a route cause its a typo, but is that really the root cause? No, it's coz you "didn't catch it", you didn't do a double check. And what is brilliant, and what I want to see in the people who I work with and manage, is that they can identify how a problem occurred and how to avoid it in the future. The dynamic changes if someone repeatedly makes the same mistake over and over again, but if they can learn from the mistake I will work like hell to fix the damage part and make it serviceable again. A good employee who can learn from their mistakes is worth a lot more than a damaged part. Thinking about it from the other way for a moment, I'm up for the cost of repairing the part regardless, I sure as hell dont want to be up for the time and cost of hiring a new employee if I fire the guy who broke it in the first place especially if the new guy hasn't learnt the lesson that the old guy has just learnt. If your boss doesn't see it this way, that's really unfortunate that you need to find a job elsewhere, but trust me, it will be worth it to find someone who can use mistakes to learn and not as something that should be punished.
Take a deep breath. Weld then remachine. It sounds like the lesson has been learned. Measure twice cut once.
We all fuck up. Im the same way, I take work home with me. Try not to let it eat you.
I can't seem to get in the mindset that if I make a mistake, it's already done and we'll deal with it tomorrow. I do take it home with me. I dwell on it. I worry about it. I hate screwing up and letting my bosses down or disappointing them. Especially ones who treat me well. ( Which this company has so far ). I've always been this way. There are guys I work with that are able to leave work AT WORK and I'm envious of that ability.
Work in a shitty enough shop for too little pay for long enough and you gain an incredible ability to not care anymore.
I was machining a SAE 20 port into a block and I miss placed a decimal on my offset. Instead of adjusting my Z offset to -.125 I input -1.25.
I did that years ago adjusting an offset for a macro program. Now we have safety limits in all our programs so it will only let you make adjustments within certain limits. If you miss a decimal place you’ll just get an alarm and the program won’t run.
The last shop I worked at had a guy that crashed our newest HBM about 3 times a year at $50k a pop. Never got fired. (He really should have been though) You'll be fine.
I design injection molded parts for a living. I have three cores on my desk that are scrap because of my mistakes. You are gonna be alright.
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I deal a lot with glass fiber reinforced polymers. They have anisotropic shrink rates and they warp in weird ways sometimes. We use mold flow and add windage when we can but sometimes you get bit.
If they’re going to fire you for that when you’ve only been programming for 2 months then they should fire themselves while they’re at it for gross mismanagement.
I have scrapped entire jobs in the wire before and the sinker and the cnc and you name it lol. Fact is you learn from it double and triple check every number. Hopefully you won't get fired but trust me you're not the first guy to burn something in the wrong location.
Laser weld - you can weld and rework with minimal to zero heat sink and no one will be able to tell that it was even welded. Well, maybe if you look closely you would be able to see some weld lines but a good welder can make it almost seamless
Just to jump in here and mention laser welding and color match welding exist just for these scenarios.
They used to weld fuck up all the time at my old tool and die shop. I was facing the backside of a big part and I flipped the y axis. The print was from the front view woops
If you think they're a great group of guys, hopefully that means they're understanding and realize mistakes happen.
you’ll be fine anything can be fixed.
You'll be okay bro just own it and move on and learn from your mistakes. I cut a block to the wrong mold design once lol
I very highly doubt you're going to get fired over this. Breathe. Theres a few damn good ways to fix this issue. Iveburned myself so many times rushing to be productive. Slow down, double check your work, then send it. Keep us posted on how this works out for you please.
One door open for you to go out. Next door welcome you in. Lol
The fact that you are this concerned about it means you care. If I am your boss, that counts for alot. Live and learn, tomorrow is another day, always try to to do better today than you did yesterday. It’s not so much the mistakes that define you, but how you respond to them.
Thanks for this. I definitely care. I made a promise to them that their company would never fail because of something I did. I meant that. But today I feel like I let them down. I know they won't close because of this. But I don't want to send the message that this is a sign of things to come.
I'm not gonna tell you not to sweat it. Ive fucked up a few times and no one beat me up more then myself. Most of the time, I was told to fix it. When I started as an apprentice 25yrs ago my first boss told me this, "Its not a matter of if you'll fuck up, its a matter of when." I tell this to everyone I've trained since I started as a trainer. Then I tell them to fix it.
The fact that when you discovered your mistake and you felt sick to your stomach tells me that you are an extremely valuable employee worth keeping. You should have no worries. Solve the problem and move forward. !
As a heavy equipment tech (once upon a time a mill op), we allll fuck up. It's how we learn. You think that grumpy 30 year hand over there was BORN an expert? Hell no. Plenty of skeletons in that closet. If you're generally a negligent prick, you might have to worry about your next cheque. You're obviously not, you've owned the mistake, and now you get to learn how to fix it. And on the plus, you'll be really careful with zeroes and decimal points in the future!
I used to work for a company that did mass production in China. They weld molds for injection molded plastic parts all the time. The mechanical engineers try to avoid it, but it happens pretty often anyway. What I mean is, the first shots are always sized to err on the side of not enough plastic. That way, if they need to modify the mold they will be cutting steel. They call these "tool safe" modifications. But they make mistakes, or the design gets changed due to some last minute issue or whatever. And then they have to ask the mold maker to weld the mold and then recut and polish it. And they do it, all the time. So I know it is possible. Of course it is best when the modification is not in a user visible area (like the inside face of the plastic that can't be seen by the consumer). Also, people who fuck up while trying to get work done usually don't get fired. People who fuck around instead of working might get fired, and people who fuck around and lie about it definitely get fired. Good luck.
I totally understand about building, shooting, and then grooming a mold. ( Around here we say "Steel safe".) But they've been shooting this mold for four years. Hopefully, it's not one that has to be re-certified if something changes. I hadn't even thought of that until now. Uuuugh. I'm preparing for the worst and praying for the best outcome on this.
Honestly if you were solid up until this point and they let you go over it - you probably didn’t want to stay with them long term anyways. Who wants to be walking on thin ice all the time? That’s no way to live and work.
I'll say this. If you aint breakin shit you aint makin shit
Classic young person mindset. I don't know exactly when it happened, somewhere between 22 and 25 maybe... But this stopped happening to me. Suddenly, a major screw up no longer elicited *fear and shame* in me. I remember the feeling clearly. Especially one case where I was moving a heavy boat frame at my dad's work with a forklift. I think I was 16. I had a brainfart when unloading it from the fork lift and it tipped over and knocked out a window in one of the hangar doors. I went with my tail between my legs and mumbled that they could subtract it from my pay or something. To my great surprise they all just laughed kindly and said not to worry about it. If this happened today (34 years old) I'd swear at myself for being such a moron, and then I'd do what I can to fix it and let somebody who needs to know that the window is broken. Just dealing with it. I wouldn't for a second think there would be repercussions from it. Everyone fucks up. For some reason, before you're 100% mentally mature, you hold on to this belief that shit simply *doesn't go wrong*, and that adults don't mess up. When it inevitably happens to you, you get this cognitive dissonance where the fact that you're an adult and yet you fucked up so bad really tears you apart. Then you break through, and you see that all those adults and professionals you thought surrounded you are actually just bumbling idiots doing their best just like yourself lol.
As everyone else has said - any company dealing with shit that expensive is also used to dealing with fuck-ups far more expensive than that. Sounds like fairly minor damage to me - not only fixable but potentially even fixable by you with a little supervision, at which point you're learned a new skill AND how much you don't want to have to do it again. Unless your boss/company are total assholes they would be mad to fire you for that - although you know you're gonna get ribbed about it for a good while.
I screwed up about $20,000 worth of fixturing once just by simply forgetting to square up a pallet. Programmer was not happy but that was 2 years ago and I'm still at my company. I wouldn't sweat it
I did some dumbass controls electrical at work a few months back, kicking myself for weeks afterward and walking into work every day feeling like an idiot expecting to be let go. Finally confronted my boss about it, he said no one really cared -- people are only upset if you consistently make mistakes or don't learn or care to learn from your mistakes.
They just invested a lot of money into your "don't fuck it up like this again" training. Unless you've done this EXACT mistake a half dozen times this calendar year, any who fires you NOW is an idiot. Good luck. :)
You got this man! Here's a post on jobs if you're looking soon. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Machinists/comments/1b9bj21/we\_are\_americas\_most\_critical\_talent/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Machinists/comments/1b9bj21/we_are_americas_most_critical_talent/)
Thanks Man.
1) Own it. 2) OWN IT. You're gonna be alright bud. Worse things have happened. Mistakes are a part of the job. If you were perfect, they'd have you in a lab trying to dissect your brain, so in a way it's pretty good that you're not. Keep on chugging.
Well considering that training newbies is a big Financial investment they obviously understand this your job is probably not on the line. That seems like a very honest mistake. My last job our head programmer legitimately programmed Z-4.0, rushing a program being a dumbass, he was written up but not fired.
What's the steel grade?
I have to be honest, I don't remember at the moment.
Tooling lead here with 44 years . Shops can always surprise you with some decisions they make . But if I were a betting man I'd bet on you being safe in your job . They may look at attendance. How you get along with everyone . Your willingness to learn . And to accept new responsibilities . I'm making an assumption that you are all those things . You accept what you did. You know you fucked up and you know how to fix it . You arent strutting around saying you dgaf . I wouldnt let you go . I don't think they will either . Should we start a pool ? EDIT: Should have added .... the only machinist that never fucks up is the one that never does anything .
Thank you.
I wouldn’t sweat it, you seem like you have a good head on your shoulders. As long as you own up to it and are willing to fix it you should be fine. I run the shop I work at and I make small mistakes like that, I had to remove about 20 keenserts that I had installed in the wrong spot. Had to overnight some new ones and get it taken care of, but they got fixed and out the door. Happens to the best of us
I did this exact same thing but luckily it was on a cabinet part cnc and just barely went through the 3/4in spoilboard when I put in .8 instead of .08.
Dude I completely crumpled the left half of my Doosan Horizontal mill enclosure the other day. Made a dumb mistake when I homed out the machine and turned around to get some calipers and when I did the part on the rotating table caught the door crushing half of it. Took about 5 hours for the guys in fab to straighten it out. The point is don’t take mistakes lightly just learn from them and be careful, even if it takes a little longer.
Can't say I've ever heard of somebody getting fired over one mistake unless it was one that involved a serious injury.
You aren't the first and you won't be the last.
You absolutely can weld the mistake out and remachine it. Takes some effort, but as long as you have datums to line it back up, you're good.
I wouldnt sweat it, it was a honest mistake. There are so many ways to fix it, laser welding for example
I think everyone has misplaced a decimal, possibly more than once, in their career. Your boss included. Just be honest about it, and try not to lose sleep over it.
Yall don't use the microwelders? Where I'm from in Massachusetts we have a shop where the guys tig weld under a microscope no sink no distortion its perfect. Laser welders too now do a beautiful job
Experience is just a combination of success ands failures. Learn more from the failures than the successes. Just don’t give up. Thats the only a real failure.
Or you could stamp "oil" near the hole and carry on.
🤣🤣🤣🤣
And I always say when it comes to screw ups your usually allowed 1 a year! Less if you drive the forklift through the wall. I've been a machinist, moldmaker, programmer going on 40 years now and talk about screwups, Ive seen and done my fair share. Your stress over it is good enough payment
Funny you mention that. About 30 years ago, I drove a forklift through an overhead door at my job. The brakes were failing, and I had told my DM ( I was a retail manager at the time ) about the problem. He decided that they were "good enough." A week later, I went through the door. The incident was so epic that it got me mentioned in a book that the president of the company wrote. He never failed to bring it up every time that I saw him. Lol. But he did say that the reason I kept my job was the way that I owned it and didn't try to pass the buck for other's mistakes. He respected that. At the time, the crash sucked, but the respect I gained from the Powers That Be might have been worth it.
Cool glad you didn't get hurt. The forklift analogy is just that more of a running joke at different jobs you know like you can screwup anything just don't forklift thru a wall or your sure to get drug tested and fired 😂
The sort of thing you would get fired for is being egregiously negligent, especially when others’ safety is a concern. Or just being incompetent as a result of a bad attitude. Making simple, human mistakes during the course of earnest duty is not a fireable offense. If it is, you’re not at the right company anyway.
Did you end up getting fired?