EPISODE 14 - MATTHEW KIBLER

Welcome to the Impulse Spotlight where we meet with product development professionals and shine a light on the products they are most proud of.

In this episode we speak with the Engineering Manager at FHE and discuss the Riglock 2.0 a product used in the oilfield industry to improve safety and boost productivity. Our guest is an avid inventor spending his winters in his garage 3D printing functional products and printing parts to make and upgrade 3D printers. Summers on the other hand are enjoyed at the lake with his family.

Matthew Kibler began his engineering career in 1996 working in a laboratory where he developed multi-axis titration dispensing robots. These early innovations in laboratory automation may have inspired the 3D printing technology we see today.

In 2002 Mathew transitioned to the product packaging industry, joining a company where he spent 15 years developing high-speed folder gluers, packers, and flame sealers. His journey from draftsman to CAD Manager, to Lead Design Engineer underscores his expertise and dedication to engineering excellence. In 2017, Matthew brought his wealth of experience to FHE, where he began as the sole Design Engineer. Through his leadership and vision, he built and expanded the Engineering team, becoming the Engineering Manager in 2023.

Today, we'll dive into the design process of the Riglock 2.0, exploring its features and the challenges faced in development. Matthew shares insights into the product development timeline, the impact of technology on this process, and the importance of safety and validation in product design. We'll also discuss trends in product development, strategies for improving development timelines, the importance of having a strong understanding of the tools you use and where that can take you.

Show Notes:

Click here to learn more about FHE.

Podcast Transcript:

Hey, Matthew, welcome to the show.

MK Matthew Kibler 1 :14

Hey, Troy, thanks for having me.

Yeah, yeah. So, I have been started Impulse 25 years ago. We work for another product developed company, saw the writing on the wall that they were not going to be around much longer and you know, started impulse and have been designing products for other companies since. How did you get into product development?

Product developments for me started right out of high school when I was a senior in high school, ended up in the in the technical trade school, got my CAD degree and my first real CAD job, I fell into a great company that I was able to start developing and designing products as a very, very young engineer.

Very cool. And so what is your current role and what kind of products do you develop?

Currently, I am an engineering manager for a company called FHE. We develop products for the oil and gas industry, so primarily pressure control equipment and more recently latching devices. So we developed the original rig lock, which is kind of the clean x of the industry when it comes to latching devices and then we evolved to what we call our frack lock product, which is more of a fracking operation rather than the pressure control and wireline operations. And more recently, we will talk about the product today, which is a rig lock 2 point 0.

Before we get into the rig lock 2.0 for me and other people that do not understand all of that, what kind of what what is the locking device and what is it do?

In the fracking industry, what they do is it is called plug and perf so they will load up a string of detonators and they will pump them down hole, they will plug off the location, and then they will shoot off those detonators, which fractures the formation, and then they will pull that entire gun string out. And our device, what we do is we lock and we unlock at the time of breaking and making the connection so that they can send those guns down hole and do do their perf and then the frack side of the equation comes in and they pump sand and water and chemicals and some things down hole that then expands The formation to get to the oil and gas that we use every day for all of our energies.

Okay. So, like to keep it real simple. Is it like a cap that goes on top of the hole?

It is like a hydraulic or a pneumatic air connection for a very, very large pipe, so 5 " pipe, pneumatic air connection or hydraulic .

Interesting , all right. Yeah, so. I was going to say we do ours with, you know, it is all hydraulically driven, so hydraulically controlled with the first rig lock had cams that locked the stinger in position the current generation has . A wedge like or a dog like gripper system with, you know, backed up by what we call a lock ring that keeps all the stresses into a very, very controlled environment so that when the pressure is on the system . We know we have safe controlled connection at all times and then our automated system , the new automated system goes in and every time you break and make that connection, um, our automated system actually. Does a pressure test for seal integrity automatically and then gives you a graph that tells you how long and what pressure you are at, and then you can share that with whomever you need to to get final approval to make sure that the next process in mind goes smoothly.

And this is the rig lock 2.0.

That is correct.

Okay. You may have just said this, but just for my benefit, what what were the big changes between the original and and the new one? Like I want to get into a little more detail on on the actual product?

Sure . The original model was designed for pressures in the range of 10,000 PSI working pressure and a test pressure of 1 and a half times that of 15,000 PSI . We did do an upgraded modification to get them to 12,500 PSI which is being used every day in the field, many, many, many units out there being used. 1 of the major differences for this design was we went ahead, made it a full 15 K unit so it can work on not only existing wells and 12 and a half K wells, but even future locations that may require a 15,000 connection. The other major difference is our original rig lock, the locking mechanism pointed up and the female sort of the the receptacle, part of it receiving the stinger was on each of the well heads. So when they do these operations, they have sometimes up to 12 or 20 well heads on location.

And so you would order a package and have, you know, 404 or 5 or 8 or however many you needed of the latching devices and then 1 stinger, the main difference here is now we put the latching device and the stinger in the the on the end of the crane and so we we swing around and we and we latch on with the mail and the latching device and now we just supply multiple adapters that go on top of the wellhead female adapters them and the benefit to that is. You do not have quite as much equipment out on location. You do not have as much weight. You do not have your your H s c when you are getting back and forth on locations, all those things are very are minimized in this case .

Okay. Is it how do I want to ask the question? How does the new product benefit the user? I mean , is it is it improved in that way that the you it is easier on the user?

Uh, yeah, uh, significantly we have effectively automated the process . So in our first generation, we had a control panel with several valves and controls and levers and gauges and you kind of had to be a master mechanic to kind of work the operations a little thing and and then not only is there an operations panel for 1 , but there is an operations panel for 4 of them, and so you do not really you are not sure which 1 to even talk to which **** to grab, which gage to look at. So it got a little intimidating. And with the changeover in the personnel that are on locations , the training that has to go in to teach these people how to use them correctly safely, it can be a challenge. Obviously, they are working every day and and very successful , but what we did was made this version more. Much more user friendly, where honestly, it is a push of a button and everything happens in the system automatically , all of the safety checks are done, all of the pressure tests are automatically controlled, all of the indicators that need to be that need to be triggered, all of those happen in the background, the user does not even have to worry about it, he gets a signal that says , good, you are good to go, you got your pressure test success , you got your latching a success , it is a big green light and on the control unit, which is, you know, very visible from location, everybody knows, hey, we are green, we are good to go and we can go down hole that is all done with 1 push of a button to latch it, 1 push of a button to unlatch it. All that automation happens in the background and our system is literally 111 button push. Way, safer, way faster. Yeah, we are at I think a minute and a half from stab to lock and about 45 s to come off and that is most of that time it is just safety redundancies and just making sure that we are safe to detach or safe to be pressured up on.

So we have helped design literally thousands of products and every 1 of those journeys is a little bit different. So can you kind of walk us through the journey of developing this product what you know, what were the steps involved?

Yeah, the steps are really you know, you got to have a vision for what you are looking for. The I just introduced a couple of my teammates. Nick Snoke is the president of FHE and Steve Hutchinson , our product development specialist . So the 3 of us get together, we sort of scheme up what is the next thing we are going to we are going to work on and then we develop the vision for what that product needs to be how it needs to interact with the field, what you know, maybe what the customers are giving us feedback on over the years for other products and we just take all of that information and then we come up with a strategy for, you know, what the latching mechanism is going to look like, whether it is going to be, you know, on the well heads or if it is going to be hung, if it is going to be standing up. How how we want to interact with it, how the field personnel need to interact with it, what pressure rating it is going to be at, and so we set that sort of scope in our minds and then I typically go back and start a mechanical design of some of some sort of trying to optimize and think about service ability so our service departments can get through and service. These quickly tear down, recertify, rebuild and have all that as efficient as possible. So a lot of a lot of the process for this design was really thinking about and designing for service ability and and obviously with function and stress analysis and safety always forefront in our in our design cycles . M then manufacturability . So so after we go through the the design cycle of service ability, do several design reviews on, hey, what do you think of this? What do you think of that, Steve's fundamental in giving feedback from a field perspective and the user's perspective, which is always fantastic feedback and then also How it is going to interact with the the environment . So oftentimes we get back units that are just greasy and gross and they have to be serviced and and and so in this design cycle, we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can prevent that grease in grass into the mechanism and into the workings of the system . And so we designed this to be contained rather than sort of exposed to the elements , that feedback was fantastic , also the seals that we use, we evolved those seals from field, you know, trials that we have done for the past several years and then the controls. So Steve's are controls expert and we work very closely together on how the interaction for on the sensors and what sensors we should use, how many sensors we need, you know, we have got we have got bore pressure sensors , we have got position sensors and we have got some redundant switches in there and all that has to be coordinated and then the programming for the HM. We work closely together on all of that. And and he is got a team that works on those as well and then we sort of parallel the designs. So so the control systems kind of being in parallel with the mechanical design. And then get to a prototype phase, build a prototype, test it, we did a little roadshow this year, kind of getting some get in the buzz a little bit down in Texas and we were able to show it off to our customers and while we were doing this, it is it was kind of a pre prototype testing phase . We are able to see how it was working. If there was any things that we wanted to change, which we did, we changed a few things, several things actually change them for reliability, changed them for function. It was it was good. It was actually really a good field trial even though we did not put any pressure on the system at all.

Okay, I was going to ask about your prototyping process , is that like do you do 3D printed stuff early to test mechanisms and then do you get into like actual metal prototypes that you can field test or, you know, what does that process look like?

Yeah, a little both so hobbyist, 3 printer myself , I have got a few of them in my house, got a few of them at the office. So, yeah, when I come come up with an idea that I like and I think, all right, I think this is going to work. I will go ahead and print a hand, you know, a sample either scaled or full size and kind of articulate it, maybe put it on my desk, look at it for a couple days and kind of just feel it out, see if I really like it, pass it around the office. In the in the development team and, you know, poke holes in it, like I give these guys things to poke holes in so that by the time we do go to metal, we are generally I would not say 1 and done, but we are. Very, very close to a functional device by the time we go to metal, you know, I have been doing this for almost 30 years to design and mechanical pieces of equipment that have been built by fabricators

I have got a pretty good feel for getting things done the first time and well, arguably my tolerance is sometimes a little suspect . I do get some pushback . I tend to I tend to be fairly aggressive in tolerance for the prototype and then start back and back in numbers down as we work through and see if there is anything that maybe is not not moving as intended or maybe has a little too much resistance . Sometimes it does not go together and you kind of massage it a little bit. So so generally by the time. Machine shop

prints are done. It is pretty the designs pretty well done. I do not do a full prototype, 3D printed prototype, functional prototype. And I have never done that. Do a lot of FA. So before we ever put anything to metal, we are very validated and verified that the FAS are accurate , that there is no stresses that we are concerned about, go through all the metallurgy and make sure that we are happy. With the selections of metals and and, you know, for cost purposes because you can always go exotic, but you do not want to you want to go with the most common components that are out there, so. We try to stick with, you know, the most common oil and gas industry known materials so that we do not have to go exotic.

Sure , sure. So, but it sounds like you you will do 1 final metal prototype before you go into full production.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We will do 1 . We will do 1 metal prototype, like I said, we will function test, it will cycle test it, we will to beat it up, test it my you know, I like to just say, all right, go break it and then tell me what broke and then we will go fix it. That is kind of a good way to I actually do not like being involved in that because . I do not want to see how they broke it. I just want to know what broke and then kind of fix it from there if we have to.

Are most of the parts machined or cast or both?

Yeah, almost everything is machine , so forged, forged bodies and then turned my designs are generally a lath product that then has some mail work on it.

Okay. So your prototype is literally just like the production version, it is just not on a production.

Yeah. Yeah, the our prototypes are in the field running to date today brand. We are over 240 cycles as of this meeting this call and still going strong. So the from a manufacturing standpoint, do you is everything done in house? Is it just is it outsourced somewhere in the States or I have got a. Yeah. So, what f we do almost everything in the United States . We source from many machine shops locally and then we have got some regional machine shops in Texas and then in the Midwest. So they will manufacture all of our all of our hardware , deliver it and then we assemble test and validate in house, but we we do not have any machine in house machine shop capabilities at this time, we do a fabrication department. So our fabrication department makes the control units and the control skids and the the equipment that all the equipment that goes with with the controls, but the structural equipment gets manufactured outside or machined outside and then assembled here.

Interesting , what is the timeline look like for developing something like that?

That is a tricky question from, I am going to say. From the time we have a prime path to the time we get a prototype is roughly 6 months . Um, now to get to prime path can be a very large variable and and I say that people may not know what that means , prime path is an accepted direction that everybody agrees, yes, this is this is the direction we want to head. As a developer, I am going to go through 3 or 4 or 5 different design iterations that maybe are not and I do not get AI do not want to buy off, I do not get acceptance for. Maybe they are just so crazy and so far out there that they do not need to be built and they do not need to be brought to the world. Other times we will take a design to a certain point and and and then take a step back and look at it and ask ourselves .

Some of the some of the fundamental questions of, you know, is it sealed properly, is it is it going to shed water properly? Is it going to keep out dirt? Is it you know, and so when so those type of questions can significantly alter a design even though you have put maybe a month worth of design time into it. But usually, once we get to prime path, it is a fairly quick, I say fairly quick 6 months to a prototype where all the all the finalized designs, all of the fall of the drawings and then the machining time, which is, you know, a brand new 1 is anywhere from. 4 to 10 weeks, just depending on how complicated the part is and then you got to get the machine shop spool up. And so there is there is a lot of things that go into that 6 months , but that is that is a for me so far that is been a pretty common timeline.

And then after that 6 months , you will start testing.

Yeah, yeah, testing validating then there is usually a short design cycle for revisions . This time we did a moderately complicated redesign and it was it was just the way that the that the hydraulic cylinders were designed, I made it easier to install and more more efficient and more compact overall. And that is usually only about 4 weeks and then and then we are back to a build cycle and that is where we are at today. So we are putting together our first production runs now and we are getting ready to show them off next week and then we have got several build cycles in queue and we are going to have a lot a lot of product here in a short amount of time.

With all the products that impulse has helped design, there is always some kind of big challenge that comes up. What was the biggest challenge you and your team faced in developing this?

On this product. It was probably the most successful build I have ever had, but there is always challenges , there were some interface challenges we have. What we call a stabbing guide so as your device is hanging from a crane and they and they are going to stab onto the device, the original 1 was a little too shallow and a little it did not quite solve the problem the way I had intended it to. And so in our testing and in our roadshow that we did, we observed that we needed to change how that interfaced with both the the female adapter and then the latching mechanism itself. So those 2 elements changed significantly. And honestly, that was the biggest challenge we had in this design was just making sure that that Interface was really effective. I spent an extra, I think 3 weeks just designing that interface and how the 2 making sure that that they can not get bound up or making sure they can not get hung up and spent quite a bit of time on that 1 part just to make that interface right.

Interesting , if you could go back in time and change 1 thing about developing this product, what would it be?

It took I think I think as engineers we are optimists , right? We always think we can do something in 2 weeks and it never takes 2 weeks.

Sure . Yeah. Yeah.

I can I tell you every time I get that done a couple weeks, no problem. And so something always pushes but the timeline, you know, I would like to I would like to start rolling out products a little faster and so as a as a design engineer and as somebody who is looking in get towards the future and start queuing up these designs and get them rolling out in a more timely manner. And and a little bit more systematically . But I think I think if I could I could shorten the timeline, I always in the timeline.

Yeah, yeah. So shifting gears a little bit, just kind of as we start to wrap up, what are some of the I like this question just because everybody comes at it from a different perspective. So what are some of the trends that you see emerging in product development?

That is a great question.

We have good tools for product development. I see the need for great tools, and I believe there are champions for great tools out there. I used I do not know product dropping is going to be useful here, but so as a as a developer, you know, solid works has been in the industry for years and I have used it for more than 20 years . And then in 2018I started using on shape and it is a tool that has helped me as a designer and a design engineer and and a CAD manager manage the product lifecycle of the product data PDM seamlessly . I do not have to I do not have to worry about PDM anymore . So those type of tools and they are integrating with arena solutions for the P L M service and QT, the quality product line that they offer there, I think if we can get a little more integration from CAD idea through purchasing and into the manufacturing shops and have a much different, more linear communications path through all of those. I have asked for it for for years , honestly. Being able to have the machine shop, generate the cam profiles and get the parts manufactured faster without having to jump through all these extra hoops of translating and things and and it is coming. Oftentimes , your machine shops now have the CAD tools at their hands their fingertips. So they are bringing them directly in. They are bringing them from the cat tool into the cam software. But I think trending. I know there are several companies that are trying to make that transition from idea to product a lot more efficient and I think 3D printing is helping that, um, especially from a prototyping phase , but even some some metal 3D printing that I am seeing. So there is several companies out there developing high quality. Laser deposition, 3D printing for metals , there is also the several other metal type metal Type 3D printers out there that are coming along. And so the trend to me is get it from from from this idea to in your hands , touchy touching it faster and and there is lots and lots of people developing tools to get there.

Sure , yeah. Yeah, that is interesting. I know you love on shape , but it will be interesting to see what they continue to add to that, that product or the ancillary services that they are going to add on to it.

For sure, for sure, yeah, uns shapes a small piece of that that that vision, but what they have done to allow multi people to be designing at the same time having the system in the cloud where you can access it from your cell phone or your tablet. Or I have seen people use a refrigerator displays and actually log in to their on shape account on a refrigerator, so it is it is that functional.

Yeah, it is awesome . Yeah, and you were talking about, you know, getting things more streamlined . I was just working on a design and it is got, I do not know, 50 or 60 parts in it and I had to export everything in step or sl or both and, you know, I am like been doing this for 30 some years . And here we are still exporting every part individually and then pulling it back into another software. It will be nice someday when we do not have to do that.

Yes, sir. There is a company called End Topology that I have been working with recently and they have got a different way of of designing geometry with implicit models and some of their implicits are now able to be brought into the EOS environment . And so that to me is an really fan as fascinating trend. For model transitions and going straight from idea to part, it is pretty cool.

Yeah, yeah, interesting. So reflecting on all the challenges , successes and and things you have encountered developing products, what words of wisdom would you want to share with those looking to make a significant impact in the product development world?

Yeah, if you are passionate about what you do, just do it. I tell you I try to mentor people and and and coach some of the younger ounger people around me. Grab your goals. You know, find your goals, grab them strategically, make them as effective as possible and enjoy the ride. And you will have success . I was lucky enough to get involved in CAD . I was not even I was not you know, I am not I am not trained in any specific discipline other than the tool. And so I have learned everything I have learned and done everything I have done because I know a good tool and and, you know, find your passion , follow it and and enjoy the ride.

That is good, works awesome , this has been great. Is there anything else you want to mention with regards to the product you have talked about or just product development in general?

A good question. Product development in general is an exciting field for me, software hardware , all these all these tools that we have today, I think there is a new shift in the tools that is coming that I think is going to be exciting times for for new designers and I think we still have to have the human overview and make sure that we are validating. I think there is a potential for a lot of products to be developed that are are unsafe and F being a safety company that is really what we stand on is safety. We want to make the best products in the market and we want to make the locations safer. So we just got to make sure that when we are allowing the tool to do some of the development, we want to make sure that we are validating that before we just send it in harm's way.

Sure . So excuse me, before we end, where can we find out more about the the new product coming out?

Yeah. Our website is built by fhm.com and our our web developers done a great job go there and look at all of our products, safety products and P C equipment, things that we have done over the years and go check us out.

I’ll make sure that gets in the show up. I really appreciate you. I appreciate you doing this, Matthew.

My pleasure . Thanks for having me.