Robby Burton, 30, co-owns AG Drives, a drive shaft company in Green Bay. Blake Schultz, 23, is its director of business development. Robby’s grandfather started the company, and Blake’s dad worked for him. Both families have been in the business for decades. When Robby took over, he was in his mid-twenties and brought in his friends from high school. None of them had formal business training. His garage was so full of parts he couldn’t park his car. He had a newborn at home. Some of the machining happened on a lathe in a friend’s backyard. Now they have their own shop. This past year the business grew more than 300 percent. ************* Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion! ************* Listen on your favorite podcast app using pod.link.     . View the podcast at the bottom of this post or on our YouTube Channel. Follow us on Social and never miss an update! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/swarfcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swarfcast/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/todays-machining-world Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmwswarfblog ************* Interview Highlights Learning on the Job Robby’s path ran through engineering. He earned a two-year degree in mechanical design and spent five years as a drafter, designing rolls for the paper industry. When a big project fell apart during COVID, he…

In a lifetime, how many opportunities have you missed to listen to a potential friend, or at least a possible interesting acquaintance, because you stopped at “how you doing today?” This thought became real to me recently while listening to a marvelous book, Theo of Golden, by Allen Levi. It is Levi’s first novel. He described it as an “experiment,” but friends who read pieces of it implored him to try to get it published. The story is about Theo. We don’t know his last name until the end. He flies alone on a private jet to a university town named Golden, ostensibly attracted by 115 portraits drawn in pencil by an unknown artist, displayed in a local coffee shop. Theo buys all of the art pieces anonymously. One by one he writes handwritten letters to the particular subjects of the portraits and invites them to meet him near a prominent fountain in the center of town to receive their portrait as a gift. Over the course of the book, we learn about many of the people as Theo graciously meets them and thoughtfully brings out their “stories.” Invariably they want to know why this kind old man with a…

I was touring a shop once, and the owner told me the engineers can draw up whatever they want. It never comes out like that on the machine. At IMTS, I brought that up with Greg Walker and Bob Folts of Spatial Integrated Systems. They told me it can. As long as you’re honest with the software. Greg is president and co-owner of SIS, a Siemens partner based in Broadlands, Virginia. They sell and support Siemens software, primarily for aerospace, defense, and federal customers. Bob is their advanced manufacturing expert for federal work. He has over 50 years in tooling and defense manufacturing, and he started out cutting cams on Brown & Sharpe screw machines. ************* Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion! ************* Listen on your favorite podcast app using pod.link.     . View the podcast at the bottom of this post or on our YouTube Channel. Follow us on Social and never miss an update! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/swarfcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swarfcast/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/todays-machining-world Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmwswarfblog ************* Highlights Your Machine, Not the Perfect One Everything starts with a digital twin. That’s a digital version of your machine, part, or process that behaves like the real thing. I asked what happens when the machine isn’t in…