By Lloyd Graff Have you ever wondered how a movie gets made? This is the inside scoop on that process, right now. Mary Ethridge has written several pieces for Today’s Machining World, including the cover story “Who’s Eating off Mary’s Plate?” about the history of the metal plate in her wrist. She lives in Akron, Ohio, and keeps up with the local scene. So when the Soap Box Derby ran into financial difficulty because the big local sponsor, Levi Strauss, walked away, Mary saw a story worth writing and pitched it to USA Today. USA Today staff reporter Bruce Horovitz…
Author: Noah Graff
By Noah Graff I spoke on a panel about the power of social networking and blogs at the Precision Machined Products Association tech conference on Monday. My specific segment was on how best to use videos to promote your business. The presentation seemed well received by our good sized audience, and at the end we fielded some questions. Someone in charge of marketing at a company attending the conference asked us, “How do I justify to my boss the ROI on having a blog?” We all responded by saying that your ROI from a blog isn’t easily quantifiable, yet that…
Brian Pendarvis of Anaheim says he hasn’t felt the recession. His company, Pendarvis Manufacturing grew despite the softening that battered almost everybody else in the machining game. He attributes his success to marketing his job shop on the Web. Brian says he spends about $50,000 a year maintaining his Web site and spreading the word about his company’s capabilities on Yahoo, Google, ThomasNet.com and McCraes. He pays for Google ad words, but just to promote the company within a 100-mile radius of Orange County. His niche is combining fabricating, welding and machining, a combination we don’t see that often as…
Gordon Styles, British owner of Star Prototype China Limited, a high-quality rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing supplier in China, wrote the following response to the April 19, swarfblog, “Is China the Next Enron?” China as a subject is far more complex than most people realize who do not live here. The term “Middle Class” is unhelpful in China. There are just people. Many have no money; some have money; a few have a lot of money. I say it like that because that is how it is said in Chinese: you qian ren – has money person. It is generally accepted…
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…
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…