My used machine tool company, Graff-Pinkert, has sold some used Davenport multi-spindle screw machines to China over the years. It’s impossible to know what type of parts they will make.
Haas Automation stopped selling machines to Russia after the invasion in February, but according to a PBS news show Haas parts are still reaching Putin’s people.
Gene Haas’ Formula 1 racing team’s top sponsor was a major fertilizer producer based in Russia. The son of that company’s owner, Nikita, was the car’s driver.
The Russians no longer put their name on the Haas car and Nikita is out as a driver, but for PBS it is still a story worth 10 minutes on the 6:00 p.m. news.
We want our heroes to be successes. We want our successes to be heroes. We want life to be simple and clear-cut.
It rarely is.
Gene Haas is one of the most incredible business icons of the last 40 years. I compare him to Elon Musk because he has done the virtually impossible. He has made brilliant machine tools, both mills and lathes, at economical prices in Los Angeles of all places. American machine tool builders such as Warner-Swayze, National Acme, and New Britain folded decades ago.
Gene Haas is 70 years old and owns 100% of Haas Automation. He could have sold out and collected billions of bucks, but instead, he challenged Mazak and DMG from 50 miles north of Hollywood. What Gene Haas has done is a business miracle.
Elon Musk gets the accolades in the press, but most people in America have never even heard of Haas. He is no Gates or Jobs. He just keeps building mills and lathes, selling them at reasonable prices to people from New York to Idaho to Alabama who have a dream to cut steel into a usable product on a shoestring.
Gene Haas did go to jail a while back. He got two years for tax evasion, serving 16 months.
Various sources have theorized that he chose to not pay his taxes because he felt he had been wrongly fined for borrowing Hurco’s CNC patents, which were incredibly broad. The other machine tool builders during the same time period had agreed to pay Hurco a licensing fee to use the company’s technology.
And now Haas is getting bad press by the holier than thou Public Broadcasting Service for selling spare parts for his mills and lathes through a Chinese shell company which possibly ended up in a Russian optics plant that provides lenses for weapons used against Ukraine.
Personally, I will not make a judgment about Haas Automation and the Russian connection. Haas has been the biggest benefactor of machine tool education in the United States. He has funded many technical college and 4-year college programs. Haas recently bought a piece of land in Henderson, Nevada, to continue to build beautiful economically viable mills and lathes in America while nobody else is able to.
Life is complicated. War is complicated and nasty.
Business can be too. It always has been. It always will be.
Question: Do you know where the products you make end up?
6 Comments
Lloyd – As a Warner & Swasey alum, I can only say I’m deeply hurt … “Warner-Swayze”. Kidding aside, with reference to your closing comments, this 1975 W&S ad rings so true today and every day.
Titled “If I don’t go, I don’t get”, the ad read:
“If I don’t go, I don’t get”
That’s all you need to know-all there is to know-about business, economics, prosperity, and self-respect – then and now.
A machine tool’s purpose is to cut metal or plastics. What those end products might be can be anyone’s guess. A simple machine tool can produce a component that can be used in a life-saving medical device or a weapon of destruction. Is the bolt-carrier or firing pin used in a military M-16 a patriotic act, where pretty much the same component used in the construction of a civilian AR-15 is a seditious act?
Prior to my existence, our company had produced parts that were used in the Manhattan Project in the
research & production of the atomic bomb. We had no idea that we produced items used in that effort until a few years after WWII. A third of our business was defense related. Some of the part descriptions were generic…’screw’, ‘adapter plate’, ‘housing’, ‘base plug’ etc. Other terms were a bit more descriptive…’firing pin’, ‘projectile’, ‘fuze body’, ‘rocket nozzle’, ‘warhead’, etc. Can anyone really determine if a generic item such as a #10-32 screw is a useful or harmful product?
The machine tool can be making a widget for toys today and tomorrow it can be switched to making a gizmo for weapons. “Parts is Parts”.
Hi Bob,
I thinkthe question is whether spare parts sent to an unknown Chinese entity might have “seemed” suspicious. The Public TV program clearly had a bias against Haas, but they may have been tipped off that the parts were destined for the Russian lens maker who had bought several Haas mills recently. Should Haas Automation have had a “feeling” they would go to Russia? I don’t know. Unlikely it will ever be known.
Hi Lloyd,
Haas situation not nearly as egregious as the Toshiba sale of a 5-axis machining center earmarked for Soviet Union submarine propeller manufacturing. I forget the details, but I think the machine and CNC controller were sold to different entities in Sweden that then forwarded the components to the USSR to be mated within the country. The machine was used to produce silent propellers.
Whenever I see Haas, I am reminded of an ad campaign they ran some years ago when I was relatively new to the manufacturing sector. It consisted of two parts: the first was a headline dripping in innuendo about the different “models” they offered, each pictured with a different very attractive woman in a Haas uniform with blouse barely buttoned. The second, was something about their great service technicians, each with a regular/nice looking man wearing a Haas uniform neatly as one might expect from a professional. Perhaps it was a successful campaign. Those ads ran in all the industry magazines for months and were hard to miss. I found it pathetic. Not that I expect ads to cater to diversity/equality ideals, but just that it was so over-the-top sexist.
Lloyd, thank you for writing on an interesting subject! I have a 2019 Miyano BNA42-S2 CNC Lathe. 1 turret with live tooling, Subspindle. No Y axis. A very nice machine, but not particularly complex or sophisticated by today’s standards. Yet, it has a Transference Detection System (not quite sure of the name or my spelling!). The way it basically works, is that if the machine is sold and moved to another location, a new code number has to be issued by Citizen/Miyano. Otherwise, the machine cannot be run. I am pretty sure that the intention is to prevent the machine from being moved to some unauthorized country. I think that this is “a Japanese thing”, and that not all new machines have it. Possibly it was implemented due to situations such as the Toshiba submarine propeller incident mentioned by another reader.