By Lloyd Graff The current Fortune Magazine’s cover story is about Zipcar, the car sharing rent-by-the- hour company that is changing the way people look at car ownership in urban areas. Zipcar has outflanked Hertz and Enterprise in this fast growing segment of the rental business, though the biggies are now pushing to catch up. The Zipcar approach is 10 years old with 325,000 members who pay $50 per year for the privilege of being a Zipster. Cars are available at unattended parking lots in big cities. People rent them to go to the store, move residence, visit friends, go for an interview etc.…
Author: Noah Graff
By Lloyd Graff This is the story of a cold saw that tells us how the used machinery business sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. Two partners bought a deal with a small assortment of machine tools in Arizona. They chose to auction the equipment off in the worst possible market, the spring of 2009. The most valuable piece in the sale was a Kaltenbach KMR100AP cold saw, new in 2004. The partners in the auction had figured the circular cold saw would bring $30,000 at sale, but for an assortment of reasons including ineffective advertising, an out-of-the-way location and abysmal market…
By Noah Graff In the next issue of Today’s Machining World I interview Demetrios Leontaris, otherwise known as the iPod Doctor. He has a business driving all over New York City in his Aztec, fixing broken iPods, PDAs, laptops and smart phones belonging to everyone from Wall Street guys to construction workers to teenagers. On average, to fix an iPod he charges between $59 and $100 and change—a heck of a lot less then the price of a new one. What I found so refreshing about the way Demetrios’ runs his business is that he hates to say “no” to…
Doreen Koop is a gutsy young woman with a kitchen dream. She is an industrial engineer, recently laid off from United Launch Alliance of Decatur, Alabama, where they make parts for Delta and Atlas rockets. Doreen decided to go into the manufacturing business in her hometown, Pulaski, Tennessee, so she could do work for her old company. She needs ISO certification before United will buy from her. She decided to build a product she knew, a high-end spatula aimed at cast-iron cooking devotees. Her father had made such a utensil for the family decades ago, and she decided to improve…
By Lloyd Graff Richard De Leon is looking for more than a few good men. He took an ad costing several hundred dollars under the “Careers” category in the Saturday Wall Street Journal, searching for lemon and orange pickers to work from September 17 to Jan. 31, 2010, near Yuma Arizona. I called Mr. De Leon at his firm, Servicios Agricolas Mex Inc to see how many refugees from Wall Street had applied for the $7.95 per hour seasonal job. He was affable and informative. I asked him why he advertised in the Journal and he said it has a…
By Lloyd Graff Les Paul, the famed guitarist, died last Thursday at 94. He played his instrument in a jazz club until just before his death even though he had the use of only two fingers in his left hand because of arthritis. Paul’s right arm had been badly crushed in a car accident in 1948. One doctor suggested amputation, but Paul insisted that they fix it at a right angle so he could play his guitar. He developed the first solid-body, electric guitar for Gibson. The company did not see a future for the instrument until 1952, after rival…
Last month I wrote an article about the death of Automatic Machining, in which I ended the piece with a reference to the magazine being a CAM operated Davenport in a CNC world. Bob Brinkman, owner of Davenport, took umbrage at my comment. I am taking a moment to answer him. Bob, I love you and I love your product. My father made a lot of money running Davenports in World War II with the assistance of your father, Earl. But sadly, today, the world of machining tends to look at your and my beloved Davenport automatic as a noisy…
Mike Jackson, head of the publicly traded dealer group, AutoNation Inc., says the automotive economy has turned the corner. He sees a 13 million car year as early as 2011 or 2012. Ford is making money. GM may have an IPO as early as next year. Inventories of cars have been halved in the last few months. The green lights are illuminating the highways. Yet business in my world, the machining world, still stinks. What do you do if you are making decisions now that could affect your business for the next three years? From experience I know that the…
There’s been a breakthrough in the production of tiny gears used in medical instruments and electronic mechanisms. July 23, the NewScientist printed an article about a new technology which enables gears and cogs to make themselves. The components are formed from discs that buckle into shape after a change in temperature, and the team behind the study says the technique can produce complicated bevels or curves that are difficult to produce with traditional methods. For a decade, engineers have been experimenting with materials that spontaneously bend into shape. A thin metal film deposited on top of a heat-expanded polymer such…
Recently Lloyd Graff interviewed Chris Kaiser, president of Big Kaiser Precision Tooling Inc. They discussed Big Kaiser’s hiring philosophy and also talked about the features of two of the company’s products: the Chip-fan and the Fullcut Mill. Question: Would you be willing to hire an employee with impeccable talent but zero people skills?