Monthly Archives: March 2019

Swarfcast Ep. 34 – Ed Crowley, Master of Insert Tooling

March 29, 2019 Comments Off

By Noah Graff and Rex Magagnotti

On today’s podcast we interviewed Ed Crowley, owner of Crowley Tool Company, a company that specializes in making custom insert form tools and quick change tooling packages for the precision machining industry. Ed explained in detail how his company has developed modular tooling that an operator can change on the fly, which can reduce set up time from days to minutes.

He admits that the marketshare for form tools is shrinking as the cam multi-spindles have lost favor, but he thinks that his products will stay relevant for the foreseeable future.

Question: Are you replacing your form tools with quick change insert tooling?

Listen to the podcast on the player below, or go to swarfcast on your favorite podcast app such as iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts.

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Book Review: Merchants of Truth

March 27, 2019 • 13 Replies

By Jerry Levine

Just as online shopping has transformed U.S. retail sales, the Internet has also remade the newspaper industry, but in a manner less obvious to most people. The old print newspaper business and revenue model has been seriously broken by young upstarts—young both in age and in technology. In Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, Jill Abramson, a former senior editorial executive at both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, has provided an insider account of an industry fighting for its life. She examines four competitors—the traditional New York Times and Washington Post, and two digital upstarts—BuzzFeed and Vice.

The generational gap among readers of the traditional papers and the upstarts is astounding. The median age of subscribers to the Times or Post is over 60 years old. Whereas, people under 35 get most of their news online. The old system relied heavily on an extensive world-wide staff gathering and reporting stories. The new news organizations like BuzzFeed rely heavily on a small staff gathering online information from various sources, mainly Facebook postings, that then is consolidated, edited, and reposted. What is news is no longer determined top-down by an authority like Walter Cronkite or The New York Times. On the Web, the audience establishes its own priority. The readers become the publishers. Or, more sarcastically, the inmates are running the asylum.

Similar to BuzzFeed, Vice built its business on the back of YouTube. To quote Vice’s founders, Shane Smith and Spike Jonze, “The video site was overflowing with amateur uploads and bootlegged clips. To attract a young audience, stories were told from the street level by people with absolutely no training in news.”

The traditional newspaper model was broken both on the content side as well as the business side, and newspapers were very slow to see it coming. New York Times editors clung to the notion that their new website would merely be a superficial resemblance of their existing print paper. But news and opinion sites like the Huffington Post and Drudge Report were already siphoning off its reporting, digital advertising, and audience.

Other websites were destroying the traditional newspapers’ classified ads, which had accounted for millions of dollars of revenue. Craigslist lured away “for sale” ads, and Monster.com or Jobs.com grabbed the “help wanted ads.” Travel and auto ads were hammered by Expedia and Autotrader. Local ad revenue also declined as local department stores and businesses closed, due to online shopping. The Washington Post was especially hard hit because classified ads made up 40% of its revenue. Additionally, local papers supported by The New York Times and The Washington Post have been either gutted or closed, depriving many rural and suburban readers of local information, like high school sports.

As profits declined, both papers began extensive cost cutting. The stock price for The Washington Post fell from about $1000/share to under $400/share. It needed a huge cash infusion to avoid going bankrupt. The Graham family proposed selling to Amazon founder and Chairman, Jeff Bezos, based on his Internet expertise. Bezos had three essential questions: 1) Was the Post still an important institution? 2) Could he be optimistic about its future? And 3) Did he have the technical knowledge to reverse the paper’s downward spiral?

He finally concluded yes to all three. Katherine Graham came back with a $250 million proposal and Bezos accepted. Fortunately for Bezos, shortly after the purchase the paper broke the Snowden/NSA story. This gave a short-term boost in readership, but also answered the first of Bezos’s questions: the paper was still relevant.

The Times was also hemorrhaging money, and needed a White Knight. Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico, came forward with a $200 million loan at 14% interest and the right to buy 16 million shares (about 17% of the company) at $6.36/ share. (As of this writing, NYT stock is selling for about $32/share and are servicing the loan. Slim made quite a good deal.)

In the near term, both The Washington Post and The New York Times seem to have survived the ferocious waters of the digital revolution. Before Trump, but especially after Trump, both papers moved further to the left in both their editorial positions and their news reporting. They are regularly attacked by the President as “failing” purveyors of “fake news,” with minimal impact on their readership. They have revised their websites to include more news updates and videos. They are still relevant, but need to explore additional revenue streams to maintain financial stability. Most important they need to worry about their aging demographic.

Question: Where do you get your news from?

Jerry Levine is a former chemical engineer, political expert, and frequent contributor to the Today’s Machining World website. Check out our interview with Jerry on Swarfcast Episode 18: Jerry Levine on Why Global Warming is Not a Problem.

Swarfcast Ep. 33 – Aneesa Muthana, the Success of a Woman in the Machining Business

March 22, 2019 • 2 Replies

By Noah and Lloyd Graff

On today’s podcast, we interviewed Aneesa Muthana, owner of Pioneer Service Inc., a CNC machine shop that features 26 Star CNC Swiss lathes. Aneesa shared her fond memories of being raised on the floor of a centerless grinding shop, M&M Quality Grinding, founded by her Yemeni immigrant parents. While other girls were playing with Barbie dolls, Aneesa relished learning to use micrometers and cleaning out oil tanks from Cincinnati centerless grinders. At 23 she left M&M, where she had once thought she would stay forever, and bought into Pioneer Service Inc. a Brown & Sharpe shop owned by her uncle.

Aneesa shared her views on a number of topics, including how women are treated in the machining industry, her preference to work with Star CNC Swiss lathes over Samsung and Brown & Sharpe machines, and the significance of the hijab she wears.

Question: Is being a woman in the machining industry an advantage or disadvantage?

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Guilty Parts?

March 20, 2019 • 32 Replies

For many years, I have wavered between being judgmental or agnostic about who I do business with. I felt twinges of discomfort twice this past week.

I had a request for a quote on a Wickman multi-spindle screw machine from a customer who, among many other products, makes accessories for AR-15 semi-automatic weapons. He told me business is robust and they have tripled in size in recent years. He could buy a Wickman multi from someone else (it won’t be as good), but it is in my economic interest to sell him one if he will pay my price and meet my terms.

I felt chills down my spine last Friday when the news hit about the massacre at the mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. As in most terrorist attacks such as Parkland and Tree of Life, the perpetrator used an AR-15 semi-automatic weapon.

Would I be a guilty link in the supply chain if I sold a spare part for a screw machine that could have made a component for an AR-15 that had a remote possibility of being used in a terrorist attack? Is it my obligation to give a sniff test to every email inquiry for a machine or screw or bushing? If the inquiry is from Turkey, do I have to check if they support Erdogan or Assad in Syria?

What about Purdue Pharma, and the fabulously rich and highly philanthropic family that controls it, the Sacklers of Connecticut.

Purdue makes OxyContin, fentanyl, codeine, and a line of ADHD drugs. OxyContin is the most prescribed pain controlling drug in America. It has made the lives of millions and millions of people more tolerable during chemotherapy and after surgery. For most users it is a marvelous drug, but for a significant minority of people who become addicted to it, OxyContin can be an agent of hell.

Purdue Pharma is under constant scrutiny. Its officers have paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, and some have served a small amount of jail time. But the company keeps on making OxyContin, doctors keep prescribing it every day to patients who desperately need its pain reducing power, while the Sacklers get richer and keep giving away millions.

If you run an art museum, a seminary, or a hospital, do you tell the Sackler Foundation you do not want their OxyContin tainted money? Do you tell the doctors not to prescribe it when patients are in bone throbbing pain? If you make parts for the pharma production line that produces OxyContin in Wilson, North Carolina, do you opt out of the supply line and allow an Indian supplier to step in?

I am not a total agnostic on these issues. I am willing to sell a screw or bushing to the company that makes AR-15 accessories, yet I want to know what a Wickman screw machine is supposed to make before I sell one to an inquiring company. Hunting supplies are okay with me, and ammunition for the Army and target shooting is fine. AR-15 bump stocks are not okay for me.

Am I a hypocrite if a sling for an AR-15 is okay, but a bump stock is not. Am I so far down the supply chain that my screw and bushing are inconsequential? In business, we make these kinds of decisions every day.

How do you deal with such questions, or do you just ignore them? If you ran a charity, would you take the Sackler’s OxyContin money to do good works?

Question: Would you produce parts that go in AR-15s?

Swarfcast Ep. 32 – Work Less and Do More, with Ari Meisel

March 15, 2019 • 1 Reply

By Noah Graff

Like many people, I get overwhelmed at work. Sometimes I don’t get the work done I want to do, so I stay at the office an hour or two extra. By the time I get home I feel like I don’t have enough free time for relaxation and other activities.

Scroll down to listen to the podcast with Ari Meisel.

I have been repeatedly listening to a book called The Art of Less Doing, by Ari Meisel, today’s podcast interviewee, which has had a real positive effect on my life. Meisel, who calls himself an “overwhemologist,” has a mission to cure the inefficiencies of folks like me so we can have more success professionally and have a lot more free time. He preaches that the secret to having the time to run a successful business and having free time to relax is to become “replaceable” through automation and outsourcing. He says that if a business cannot be run without you then you don’t own a business, you have the privilege of owning your own job.

In the book and with his coaching firm, Less Doing, Meisel provides resources for people to automate processes and then outsource tasks when necessary by using a virtual assistant. He says the ideal is to automate a task before giving it to another human being to accomplish. Some automation methods can be simple, such as creating automatic bill payments, having supplies automatically queued to be sent at the same time once a month, or having email automatically sorted between junk and important contacts.

Meisel also believes in the merits of a virtual assistant. This was something I had not really considered before and felt a little embarrassed to try, but several months ago Graff-Pinkert hired a man in Albania to work for $10 per hour. He looks online for new contacts to add to our database and he advertises our machines on the Web. In addition to speaking Albanian he speaks English, Swedish, and Turkish, which may come in handy for Turkish customers in the near future. This has freed me up to talk to customers and focus on more complicated tasks. I admit that he sometimes does a more complete job than I would on certain tasks because my attention would have been diverted. Meisel says that the brain is not designed to multi-task, so this result makes sense.

In addition to automation and outsourcing advice, Meisel prescribes a scientific approach to working efficiently based on brain research. He says it is important to find one’s personal peak time to work, which can vary significantly among people. Mine seems to be from about 9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. He also believes that setting time limits makes a huge impact on productivity. Studies show that people often make work take the exact amount of time they are allotted, which is why many people, such as myself, work the most efficiently right before a deadline. Data also shows that the brain often works better in sprints, so rather than trudge through a to-do list, only stopping when one task is finished, it is best to work in 25 minute increments, taking five minute breaks in-between.

The idea of working less hours and becoming replaceable can be difficult for people to swallow because doing more work makes us feel valuable in our workplaces and society, but Meisel teaches that once you learn to do less, you can accomplish so much more.

Questions:

What tasks do you wish you could do more efficiently?

Are you replaceable at work?

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A Shop Doc Question

March 12, 2019 • 9 Replies

Dear Lloyd – I read all of the issues of Today’s Machining World and really enjoy the insight and information. I’m a 62 year old journeyman tool and die maker who morphed into a scientific instrument maker, designer, manager over the last forty years.

In my current position, I am running a CNC department for a 100 year old family business. I’m helping the fourth generation to go another 100 years. The company started as a tool and die shop, moved into manufacturing (almost a captive shop for Western Electric Hawthorne Works), stamping, forming, laser, waterjet, and is now working in CNC machining. We do mostly small lot aerospace work. Right now, I am saddled with a problem I have never encountered.

Question: We need to put a #2 Philips feature on a custom screw on about 300 screws. I don’t think that cold heading is an option due to the material and tolerances. Other than sinker EDM, I don’t know how to make the feature. Do you have any ideas? Any thoughts would be appreciated.

We want to bring back the Shop Doc feature as a frequent part of Swarfblog. Please write us if you have a thorny job you could use help with. lloydgrafftmw@yahoo.com

Swarfcast Ep. 31 – Ken Mandile, Employees Are Buying His Business

March 8, 2019 • 2 Replies

By Noah and Lloyd Graff

On today’s podcast we interviewed Ken Mandile, founder of Swissturn, a successful CNC Swiss machine shop in Oxford, Massachusetts. Ken’s children are not interested in taking over Swissturn when he eventually retires, so five years ago Ken began restructuring his company into an employee stock ownership plan or ESOP, in which he will gradually transfer ownership and management to his employees.

Scroll down to listen to the podcast.

Before going the ESOP route Ken turned down two lucrative buyout offers from private equity firms. Ken reported that after the first year of restructuring as an ESOP, the value of the company increased by 51%.

Question: Would you want to work at an employee-owned business?

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Plumbing Brass is Sweet

March 6, 2019 • 7 Replies

In the machining world, plumbing products are a sweet spot again because even though new home sales are drifting, the rehab/refurb market is thriving. Faucets are fun again. Hot tubs are hot. India is big in plumbing brass, but a lot of its product goes to Asia, Africa, and South America. If you want quality at an affordable price, you buy American.

For me, this brings up many memories of Price Pfister. They used to make a million faucets in Los Angeles and had a name for quality in California. That was until they shut down all of the American production of brass goods and moved production to Mexico and China.

Pfister is now part of Spectrum Brands, based in Madison, Wisconsin, which owns Rayovac batteries, plus several pet care companies including Dingo and Lazy Pet, and makes insect repellent. Last year, Spectrum merged with another holding company called Harbinger, out of Rochester, New York. The Price Pfister that Izzy Familian ran successfully for so many years in LA is now a little piece of the Home Depot and Walmart supply chain.

Price Pfister’s real estate in LA would be worth a fortune today. The New Britain screw machines they ran hard have fanned out over the country or were scrapped. Could Price Pfister have survived in the US? Maybe if they’d moved to Nevada and invested in their people and equipment, but holding companies have no interest in people or continuity. Manufacturing is fungible. If Mexico isn’t working, move it to Shanghai. If Shanghai is a problem, Chennai in India is welcoming. Personally I think with commitment to quality and innovation, Price Pfister could have made it in America.

Question: Could Price Pfister have made it in America?