Peter Bowman owns a small job shop near Green Bay, Wisconsin. He wrote me an email Monday asking for advice on how to sell the assortment of manual machine tools his father has accumulated in his small shop where Peter initially learned about the business. Please read Mr. Bowman’s letter below and reply with suggestions. I will write my own reply on the blog in the comments following the letter. Hello Lloyd, My 75-year-old father just shut down his machine shop and asked me to sell off everything. The place is a museum of 1940-1965 manual machine tools and I…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Sears is a dwarf of the consumer superpower it used to be when it was the place you first thought of to do your shopping for a washing machine or a screwdriver. Now it’s becoming synonymous with screwing its suppliers. ABC World News with Dianne Sawyer recently did a story about Sears hijacking the intellectual property of a brilliant tinkerer, Dan Brown. Brown built his little American company, LoggerHead Tools, on his elegant product called the Bionic Wrench, which grabs a nut on six sides so it won’t slip, as so often happens with your not-so-trusty crescent wrench. Brown works…
I have spent a lifetime playing the cyclical market for screw machines. And I still screw up. By focusing on the BIG PICTURE – unemployment, Europe’s recession, the fiscal cliff, the 2012 election, oil prices – I’ve missed one of the most significant swings in the domestic economy. Housing. Sometimes you miss the newspaper on your doorstep. Housing in a lot of American markets is rebounding strong. Builders cannot find enough lots in locations where transportation is good, schools work and people feel safe to walk around. The place to make money in real estate is Phoenix. It’s also the…
The art of business is shrewd anticipation. This is particularly true in a speculative business like betting on the future values of secondhand machine tools, but almost every person who lives, works or invests in the American capitalist economy is forced to place some kind of bet, even if they push their worldly belongings down the street on wheels. My question today is: WHEN should I place my bet? Playing poker, I’ve always wondered why people make big bets early in a hand as they gaze at only partial information visible to them. The bluff has a residual value in…
I voted for Mitt Romney yesterday, knowing he would lose badly because he ran a horrible campaign. As I lamented to my sons before the election that Romney was going to be slaughtered in an election President Obama virtually dropped in his lap with his inept leadership, they both commented, “How can you vote for somebody who runs such a stupid campaign?” Unfortunately, I did not have a good answer, except that my vote was a protest against Obama’s weak leadership. I have given quite a bit of thought to how Romney could have won the election against Obama, a…
The aftermath of Super-storm Sandy makes me ask the question whether a generator should become standard equipment in homes and businesses. My wife has a big family in New Jersey and New York. Many of them have sought refuge this week at a close by lake home they own jointly that has a built-in generator. At Graff-Pinkert we lose power several times a year. It has become more than an inconvenience. Our phone and Internet service are tied to the electric grid. I’m starting to think we should buy a generator for the office, and possibly at least a portion…
I am one of the dwindling number of Americans who have never owned a gun – or a rifle, semi-automatic, shotgun, or RPG. I did practice using a rifle (M-16) with targets shaped like people in Basic Training, but the idea of firing at a real living person terrifies me. Tramping into the woods to hunt and kill deer or ducks doesn’t excite me either, though I can imagine that the camaraderie of friends dressed up in orange and camo, packing rifles on a camping trip in the woods could be exhilarating. I just have no fascination with guns. I…
Do we now have two National Anthems? The “Star Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America”? At Yankee Stadium they play the Banner before the games and the Irving Berlin masterpiece in the seventh inning (and not just during playoff games). Frankly, I think “God Bless America” is definitely more inspiring, more melodic, and much easier to sing and remember. I do love the creativity that various artists have shown on national television, starting with the remarkable Jose Feliciano rendition of the awkward Star Spangled Banner. The song is just plain old and lacking meaning today – “Rockets red glare?” Please……
A little more than two weeks to go before the 2012 American election. It seems like business is stuck in the mud–slinging. I’m going to make the contrarian case that this is precisely the time for people to take action, because almost everybody is so scared about the outcome of the election. If the President is re-elected, many people I talk to think it will be a bad thing for small business and manufacturing. But if you listened to his arguments, Obama is gung ho for small business and manufacturing, and the remarkable thing is that this segment of the…
One of the more interesting areas developing in manufacturing today is the three-dimensional printing of parts. The process is in vogue for the rapid prototyping gang. It merited a front cover story in The Economist’s April 2012 issue and was a hot area at IMTS. Recently, somebody printed a guitar of playable quality. Another party copied most of a gun, which made some law enforcement folks shiver. With the availability of guns legally and illegally, plastic guns are probably the least of our worries. Publicly held firms like Stratasys have been bid up to stratospheric levels, partly because sales have…