I know I’m supposed to celebrate milestone events. I have a lot to celebrate—a wonderful wife for over 40 years, the marriage of my son Ari, surviving my quadruple bypass surgery, and 14 years of Today’s Machining World. I feel enormously grateful for all of these gifts and I count my blessings every day, but celebration is something I have not quite mastered. In an earlier piece, I recounted a story that my father Leonard told me as a kid, but I’ll retell it now. He was just starting out in the used machinery business and was travelling the Midwest…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Tom Brady versus Peyton Manning. I can’t wait. This isn’t just football, this is American history being written. Mills and lathes can wait for another day. New England against Denver is just too juicy, too sexy, too loaded with plots and back stories to pass up. Tom Brady’s football career started in the relative obscurity of Junipero Serra High School in San Mateo, California. He was considered a better baseball player than football and was drafted to play professional baseball out of high school, but Brady and his Dad saw it differently. His father took his home videos of son,…
THERE are now a score or more of ways to print objects out of metal, plastic or both by building them up, layer by layer, into the finished article. But such 3D printing has its limits. One is that no version of the process is good at making the surfaces of its products smooth and accurate enough for them to be used as mechanical components: for example, as the bearings in an engine. If the necessary tolerances are not met, the engine will seize and be no good to anyone. Many engineers therefore think that “additive manufacturing”, as it is…
These are a few of my best guesses for what 2014 may bring. Give me your feedback, and some slack. 1) The trends of the last few years will tend to continue — tepid economic growth, weak employment, rich getting richer and the poor falling further behind. *A few exceptions, however. A powerful hiring tool will gain more traction. Companies will offer to pay off school loans to recruit prime applicants. For programmers, engineers and some other specialists in demand — maybe machinery set-up people — the school loan pay-off will be an important hiring inducement. 2) In 2013, 42%…
Barack Obama is really the stealth Republican President. Had John McCain beaten Obama in 2008, had he not chosen Sarah Palin for VP, today, at the beginning of 2014 he could be so proud of the accomplishment of the “ironic” president Barack Obama, whose adherents generally see him as a failure to date. Obama has succeeded as a Republican disguised as a Democrat. Look at the numbers. The stock market has doubled from 2008, and 2013 was one of the best years ever. Corporate profits have skyrocketed. Labor costs are quiet. Inflation has vanished. Home prices have recovered most of…
The Graff-Pinkert used machinery business, or the “treasure hunting business,” as I sometimes call it, is often fueled by events which some people would characterize as lucky or serendipitous. We often go into a customer’s shop to sell a machine and end up buying a machine instead. A random tip from a customer or dealer we’ve never met before has led us to a source of equipment or information that altered our business dramatically. But you only find treasure when you’re ready to receive it, you have to make your luck. The following are a few big deals from 2013…
Yesterday was an emotional day for me. I gave out end of the year bonus checks to the employees of my used machinery company, Graff-Pinkert, holding impromptu talks with each person after delivering each envelope. I thanked each person for their contribution, asked them how they could improve next year and how I could help them. Paternalistic, very old school. I found myself holding back my tears during some of the sessions. I scurried to an empty shop office to pull myself together — and wept. Some context. As I drove to work yesterday, I was wallowing in a sense…
I’m looking forward to the Rocky redux coming out Christmas day called Grudge Match, starring Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro, both playing aged boxers coming back for one more bout. But just as interesting to me is the sight of the strutting, cocky General Motors, fresh out of bankruptcy, challenging BMW, Ford, Toyota, and even Tesla to a fist fight in the auto arena. Right now GM is everywhere. I’m waiting for even Mike Tyson to start shilling for them. They have their own Italian stallion (mare) in new CEO Mary Barra, who is on every magazine cover but…
By Lloyd Graff My birthday is in a couple days. Just another day. A number. Just a number. A day to celebrate. But it haunts me, too. It’s a day closer to my last one. CELEBRATE, celebrate, celebrate. That’s what “they” say. What do “they” know? Do “they” know how it feels to get to the age that your Mother died? Do “they” know how it feels to suffer from the same health stuff your parents had? I know I’m supposed to wake up in gratitude, that I survived the night and get to live another day. Often I do,…
I normally deal in subtleties — close calls on whether to buy a machine, take a gamble, hire a new person, eat a piece of pie. But occasionally a deal comes along that is so breathtakingly clear you just shake your head and say YES! We are in one of those odd moments. When the handwriting on the wall is so clear even a blind man can read it. The investment incentive, Section 179 of the Federal Tax Code, can bring savings of more than a million dollars in taxes in the right situation, and is most likely ending in…