I received these pained notes in November and December from Paul Merandi, a machinery dealer in Hauppauge, Long Island. Paul is a thoughtful and sincere guy. I found his postings provocative and affecting. – Lloyd Graff A comment posted in response to the blog “Gun – No Gun” 10/26/2012 I was raised with guns but do not presently own any. My wife and I chose not to have any in the house with the kids around. For a very long time we would not even let a water pistol into our kids’ hands. That changed with my son, who seemed…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Sometimes you read something so brilliant, so incisive, so right on, you want to jump for joy and call your friends. This came in yesterday from the publication Industry Today. (See if you can make it to the end) –Lloyd Graff “2013: A New Manufacturing Era” (from Industry Today) “It has been a long tradition: In December and January, publications—no matter what subjects they cover—like to engage in the game of New Year predictions. That’s why we were excited when IDC presented us with its Top 10 manufacturing industry predictions for 2013, which we—in turn—present to you. We’re not…
The Toronto Blue Jays, also-rans for more than a decade, are now the most interesting team in Major League Baseball. They clearly made the decision to go all out to win the pennant this year while competing in the same division as the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox and Tampa Bay Rays, teams which have been in the elite for many years. With the acquisition of R.A. Dickey, the National League Cy Young winner of 2012, Toronto has six proven starters, which makes them an immediate contender. But this is not really a baseball blog today. The intriguing question…
I am just turned 24 years old in September of 2012. I program, setup and run 3X HAAS ST 10 Live Tool C-Axis Lathes, (with no Y=axis). The turret is huge, the tool holders are huge, and the space is very limited, but it does not stop me.
Thirteen years ago I visited Hell for two hours and then boarded a bus to a local hotel. My wife Risa and her friend Judy were taking a winter holiday in Poland, immersing themselves in the Jewish history and culture of our Eastern European ancestors. To fully understand their life it was crucial to see how it virtually ended in the Nazi gas chambers of World War II. Poland, to its credit, has maintained its Concentration Camps as permanent shrines to its appalling past. I had chosen not to do the trip, but I was doing some business in Europe…
Let’s rethink the infamous “skills gap” that is almost as common in conversation in our machining clan as “the fiscal cliff.” Maybe the skills gap is partly a “pay gap.” Perhaps manufacturers who pay McDonald’s wages get McDonald’s employees with comparable turnover. McDonald’s pays $14 an hour for a shift manager. They can get almost unlimited applicants for that job. Job shops think they can hire skilled workers for $14 and keep them, but they can’t. A shift manager at McDonald’s has a title with more cache and has more potential for advancement than most trainee CNC operators at Mac’s…
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…
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…