The collaboration of DMG and MORI SEIKI is moving along rapidly. They now share a magnificent showroom warehouse in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. They are sharing staff, with MORI SEIKI taking the lead on marketing in North America. The companies have taken five percent stakes in one another. MORI SEIKI’s CEO Dr. Mori is on DMG’s board and DMG’s CEO Dr. Kapitza is on MORI SEIKI’s board. The decision on whether to build machines in the U.S. is still a topic of discussion with nothing finalized. ************* If President Obama appoints a Catholic or Jew to the Supreme Court to replace the…
Author: Noah Graff
By Lloyd Graff I just read a nice article in the March Atlantic Monthly by Kayt Sukel, a solo mother (Dad’s in Iraq) who took her three-year-old son Chet, to Petra, Jordan, for a vacation. Her point in the article was that an adventurous vacation, even for a young woman and son in an Arab country is worth the risk. It brought back memories for me of taking my family to Petra in 1999. Nine people squashed into a minivan, crossing into Israel’s’ West Bank at the Allenby Bridge in Jerusalem, meeting our Palestinian driver and Jordanian guide Osama (we…
By Lloyd Graff Jim Chanos is famous for identifying the Enron scam, shorting the company’s stock and making a fortune. He runs a hedge fund named Kynikos Associates, which means cynic in Greek. He specializes in spotting emperors without clothes and is currently betting big that the Empire of China is a naked power. He compares China to Miami and Dubai of recent memory. The common thread is runaway condominium and office construction, huge real estate inflation and a shortage of able buyers. He says that today, all over China, high-rise buildings are rising, fueled by aggressive bank lending to…
By Noah Graff Great news for people with broken legs, but perhaps terrible news for the guys manufacturing titanium and stainless steel bone screws on CNC Swiss. According to an article this week on CNET.com, “This month, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Applied Materials Research (IFAM) in Bremen, Germany, are unveiling a new type of screw that not only biodegrades within two years but actually encourages bone growth into the implant itself so as not to leave gaping holes where the screws used to be. (This has been one goal of fracture putty as well.)” This…
By Noah Graff My boss, one of my favorite free thinkers in the world, asked me the other day whether Toyota is today’s Microsoft of the car industry. It felt like a ludicrous question. I hate Microsoft products (I’m a Mac guy all the way), and I’ve always enjoyed driving Toyotas. Well, at least my parents’ Avalons and my 1997 Lexus ES 300, which has 175,000 miles on it. So what was the thinking behind this analogy? Toyota like Microsoft has become the largest seller of products in its sector in the U.S. market. It appears as though Toyotas have…
By Lloyd Graff Toyota, the icon of lean manufacturing, now has a big fat problem that could devalue the brands which vaulted it to the top selling car company in the world. The sticky gas pedal that has prompted the recall of Toyotas and Lexus going back to 2005 has been traced back to a bad design in a component made by CTS, an Indiana auto parts supplier. Because Toyota was so committed to lean manufacturing, which translated into common components across platforms and models, the company has to callback the RAV4 SUV, Avalon, Corolla, the top of the line…
By Noah Graff One American is doing a full court press to balance the U.S. trade deficit with China. Stephon Marbury, one of the NBA’s all time greatest bums and wastes of talent has gone to play in China. He’s not playing for a thriving cosmopolitan city such as Beijing or Shanghai, he’s playing for the Taiyuan Shanxi Zhongyu Professional Basketball Club, one of the worst teams in the league, in the podunk, coal mining city of Taiyuan. The entire city is covered by a thin layer of coal dust, including Zhongyu’s Binhe Sports Stadium, which holds around 4,500 people.…
Jim Rowe, one of Today’s Machining World’s past “Shop Doc” columnists, recently invented two iPhone Apps to deal with everyday math problems confronting machinists, programmers and engineers. Presently at the iPhone APP store the “Machinist APPrentice 2010” is available for $2.99. It gives you 4 sections to choose from: Milling, Turning, References and Math / Conversions. “The Journeymen,” soon to be released sells for $9.99, and has a much more expanded platform with a variety of Chip Thinning Factors being calculated for Radial Width of Cut, Ballnose Depth of Cut, Torodial Depth of Cut and 45 Degree Lead Angles. Rowe…
By Lloyd Graff Food selling businesses can tell us a lot about best and worst practices in the unending search for elusive success as an entrepreneur. I spent the holidays in the Bay Area (new granddaughter) and indulged my happy obsession of searching markets for the best and freshest produce, breads and cheeses. Farmers’ Markets are reduced in midwinter, but I indulged my passion at a semi-outdoor market open seven days a week called Milk Pail Market, in Mountain View, Cal., home of Google. The store was started 36 years ago by Steve Rasmussen and his father when they bought…
By Noah Graff A recent video from the online Wall Street Journal discusses a survey ranking the “best and worst jobs” of the 2010 economy. On the list, actuary ranked as the best occupation and roustabout ranked the worst. The study, published by a site called Careercast.com, is based on five criteria: work environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands, and level of stress. Feeling good at the end of the day from helping society, and plain old fun were not criteria. So the best job is actuary—the person who interprets statistics to determine probabilities of accidents, sickness, and death, and…