I find California the most interesting state in America. It is not known as a machining mecca, but it is home to America’s most progressive and largest machine tool builder, Haas Automation of Oxnard, north of Los Angeles. It appears we may not be saying that much longer as Haas prepares to build a gigantic manufacturing complex in Henderson, Nevada, just outside Las Vegas. Gene Haas, the owner of the company bearing his name, has bought a home in Henderson so he will be able to have his eyes and ears to the ground in the 2 million plus square…
Author: Lloyd Graff
The last few days have been fascinating for me as an avid observer of business, politics and sports. Last week two big auctions in the precision machining space took place, Triumph Manufacturing in Tempe, Arizona, and HN Precision in Rochester, New York. My focus was on Triumph, which Noah attended, but I also listened to HN Precision online. A few observations and generalizations: Late-model CNC equipment, even if it is slightly flawed, brings strong prices, but a middle-aged CNC loses value abruptly. At Triumph, the marquee piece, a Nakamura WT250II new in 2016 with no Y-axis, brought $225,000 plus the…
What do you do when you go for a brief vacation to the Bay Area to visit family? Naturally, you study up on the history of Greenland. Greenland is getting some interest these days. Donald Trump, still a real estate developer at heart, recently tossed out the idea that the United States should buy it from Denmark. Of course, the Danes put a kibosh on the deal, which may mean negotiations have begun. A recent scholarly article published by Northwestern University geologists has proven that Erik the Red, the Viking who fled Iceland after a murder and conviction in 985,…
Let’s start with a discussion of two labor strikes that affect my life. The General Motors strike that may be in its final stages is less about money than it is about control. GM and the UAW seemingly agreed on the basic pay issues before the strike even started. What GM President Mary Barra and the GM Board were really concerned about was the ability to make key decisions such as closing a factory or moving work to Mexico without the UAW having veto power. Indication of that is workers at the Spring Hill, Tennessee, plant voting against the settlement…
It seems like it’s the season for a lot of machining businesses to be selling out or auctioned off. I have worked as an advisor on some of these situations as well, so I have had an inside look at buyers and sellers contorting to get a deal done on an operating business. Selling a job shop as a going concern is really tough unless it is a big and growing business, blessed with depth of management and ownership that is clear about what it wants and decisive when an appropriate buyer materializes. Having a limited debt also helps because…
Today, I thought it was time to write something that I actually know something about. Why are some of the big players in the machining business selling out or being auctioned off these days? One of the biggest screw machine sales in years is coming up in November at Triumph Manufacturing in Tempe, Arizona, just outside of Phoenix. Triumph’s owner Chris Mueller went into business in the late 1960s after coming to America from Switzerland as a Tornos employee. Mueller built Triumph into a strong player in long run parts and has been running the company with his daughter in…
By the end of the phone conversation, we were both in tears. My daughter, Sarah, and I were lamenting the collapse of the Chicago Cubs again this year, right after they had blown their fifth game in a row in the last inning. It wasn’t the pain of the loss that caused the tears 2,000 miles apart during our cell phone hug. It was the raw emotion of the moment shared that epitomized thousands of moments of exultation and despair over a team that we both love. This is the time of year Sarah and I talk sermons and baseball.…
As I write this piece, Tuesday’s election in Israel is too close to call. Bibi Netanyahu and Benny Gantz are running neck-and-neck again. This is the second election because Netanyahu could not form a government after the first one in April, though he had a tiny majority of the seats in the 120-seat parliamentary free-for-all. Why does this election mean a lot to me? Israel is my country, almost as much as America is. It was born when I was three, in 1948. Its wars were my wars. Much more than Vietnam, which was my war to fear and despise, Israel’s…
I keep trying to make sense out of the trade war with China. It isn’t easy. I use metaphors to describe the tariffs and the tit-for-tat jabbing of the two major powers. It is a bit like Ultimate Fighting Championship, but it is much more complicated. Donald Trump has an election battle coming up, and a booming economy is his biggest asset going into 2020. China’s Xi has no election, but he has Communist cronies who are not all fawning stooges. Trump has immigration woes that he is trying to turn into a positive politically, but it isn’t working well. …
Of all the weeks in the year this is the one I dread the most. I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder which was triggered by my almost catastrophic heart attack that occurred 11 years ago this week. It is also the week that my mother died suddenly in 1993. I think about the heart attack every day of my life, wondering how I survived, why I survived, and when the final shoe might drop. I don’t try to not think about it, because that only causes me to think about it even more. The strange thing is that it wasn’t…