What do Marv Albert, Michael Vick, Eliot Spitzer and A-Rod have in common? They are all disgraced public figures who are or have been recreated as guys we’d love to meet for a beer at Applebee’s. Marv is doing the NBA semis on TNT after the forgotten shame of cross-dressing and acting rather badly with his erstwhile girlfriend. He was banished for a year and basketball suffered. Marv is the master of calling a game. The heir to the great Marty Glickman, Marv has surpassed the glib Glickman and has no peer in sports broadcasting. Michael Vick is out of…
Author: Noah Graff
By Lloyd Graff Auction prices today are very hard to figure. I talked at length with Dennis Hoff of Hoff-Hilk Auctioneers about his May 26 sale at Bystrom Precision, a small CNC shop in Minneapolis. The magnet pieces in the 150 lot sale were three L-20 Citizens, Type VII new in 2000 with Iemca Genius barloaders.Hoff says he told the client the sale price for each of those machines would be in the $30,000 to $40,000 range. The day after a long Memorial Day holiday is a lousy day to do an auction because people are just getting their plants…
Paul Huber of Comex comments on the recent Bosch auction in which 75 Escomatics were sold by Asset Sales Corporation. Paul came to the U.S. as a Tornos service engineer and is now the wise man of the Swiss screw machine industry.
I had a chance to talk to Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board on Sunday. In my opinion, Stephens is one of the most astute observers of the Middle East political morass who I have read. He is a young guy but he has spent several years in Jerusalem and knows Israeli-Arab relations as an insider. Benjamin Netanyahu, former and current head of Israel, met President Barack Obama on Monday, and the big topic was what to do about Iran’s atomic weapon program. Stephens feels that the U.S. must stop Iran now because it will have a…
Derrick Perkins of Liberty Research in Gonic, New Hampshire, has a creative approach to customer acquisition. He targets a long running job which he feels he can refine and then virtually own once he cracks the code. His approach is to design and build his own equipment to elegantly and efficiently run the component in play. Perkins and his team of designers and toolmakers essentially invent the machine to make the part. He would rather build a special machine than buy existing technology in many cases because he is always looking for the “unfair” advantage versus his competition. He…
At the 2009 Precision Machining Technology Show, Noah Graff interviewed David Holscott, consultant to the Precision Machined Product Association Education Foundation.Holscott said he was pleased with the PMTS show’s student attendance, which he projected to be about 225. However, he remains concerned that people still do not sufficiently emphasize to students the importance of post high school education nor do they recognize the potential for vocational schools to lead to fulfilling careers. Question: Do you fear that in five years the U.S. manufacturing sector will not have a sufficient skilled labor force?
At last week’s PMTS show Lloyd interviewed Wes Skinner, head of ManthBrownell Corporation, of Kirkville, New York. They discussed the ups and downs of the brass market, now dominated by Chase Brass and Mueller Brass in North America. Until recently brass has never sold for more than the price of copper. In the following video Skinner comments on the difficulty in dealing with this brass bar duopoly.
By Lloyd Graff With the machining community so riddled with woe at the moment, the guns and ammo boomlet is manna from heaven. It’s a great time to be in the gun business. The buzz on the Web is that Barack Obama is going to push for a ban on assault riffles, something households need more than refrigerators. Evidently, Obama’s campaign reference, that “bitter” small-town Americans “cling to guns or religion,” has fueled a tremendous surge in gun and ammo sales. People are buying AR-15s, the civilian version of the M-16 military rifle, like 42” HD televisions. At $1000…
Today’s brutal economy is forcing people to do things they would have thought to be preposterous a year and half ago. In Japan, as unemployment grows to levels not seen since World War II, unemployed factory and office workers are going to the countryside to try to be farmers. Recently, I traveled to Japan and witnessed a place with high-tech, amenities I couldn’t imagine beforehand. Restaurants have computers to order from, taxies have doors that open automatically, public toilet seats are heated and ultra fast trains dominate transportation. People used to this world are attempting to learn to farm, in…
By Lloyd Graff The General Motors train is lumbering toward bankruptcy. Does it give you any comfort that Elmer Fudd in pinstripes, otherwise known as Fritz Henderson, is now running the show at GM? Henderson is another GM lifer who has been a successful bureaucrat politician at General Motors—not exactly a guy who looks like the next Lee Iacocca or Steve Jobs. What a mess the company has become. Alfred Sloan must be laughing or crying in his grave as he watches jokes like Rick Wagoner and Elmer Fudd, excuse me, Fritz Henderson, fumble toward bankruptcy. I felt like retching…