The Story of Today’s Machining World

I stare at the artistic montage of Today’s Machining World covers that rests against the wall behind my son, Noah. Boxes filled with old issues of Screw Machine World and Today’s Machining World lay behind my chair. We moved Graff-Pinkert’s offices last week, 700 ft. down 166th Street in Oak Forest, Illinois, and those precious copies of my magazines will not be left behind. 

Soon I will take most of them home to stash in my basement, but the move got me thinking about 25+ years of writing about the precision machining industry in various forms and what got me started writing about the industry in the first place.

 In 1969, after getting a Master’s degree in Journalism from University of Michigan, I was stationed at Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, trying to avoid going to Vietnam. I faced a choice about my career. Was I going to be writing for a newspaper or magazine, or joining my father and uncle, Aaron Pinkert, in the used screw machine business that was located on the South Side of Chicago next to a “chop shop?”

I already had seven years of experience working summers, traveling the Midwest searching for Acmes and New Britains. I had two decades of listening to my dad talk about the business at dinner, and I had an impending marriage engagement with Risa. 

As much as I loved the creativity I found in writing, business had an allure. Also, stuck in my head was a memory of my one summer job working for a magazine in downtown Chicago. The job had seemed to be going brilliantly until suddenly I was called into the owner’s office and was told to get out immediately. I was fired.

On my way out, in the hall, one of the other employees came up to me and whispered in my ear, “He fired you because he found out you were Jewish.” I was shocked and bewildered. It was my first personal episode with anti-Semitism, even though my father had told me many stories about his encounters.

When I chose to work with my dad and Aaron, I knew in my gut I would try to write too. My father was passionate about the business, but after having triple heart bypass surgery at 56, travel for him became more difficult. My brother, Jim, joined the business after me and soon took on much of the travel. Uncle Aaron retired. My father died in 1995, which left the company to Jim and me. 

In the ‘80s and ‘90s I started writing about Graff-Pinkert and the screw machine industry in a self-published newsletter called the Graff-Pinkert Times. It whet my appetite for something bigger. We made a lot of money in the 1990s selling screw machines, and at the end of the decade I had the funds to start the publication I had always dreamed of owning. Interestingly, part of the intrigue was the idea of starting an online publication, as it was during the pinnacle of the dot.com boom. But print was still the dominant journalism media of the time, so I dove into the not-so-cheap magazine business.

Getting into the business of a self-published B2B magazine was not an idea that my brother was fond of, but I plunged ahead. I spent a lot of my time and Graff-Pinkert’s money to get it going, deluding myself that it would ultimately pay off for both Jim and I through advertising and thought leadership in the industry.

In 2011, we decided to take the publication all online. This gave Noah the opportunity to work in the machinery business because writing blogs took a lot less time than producing a print magazine 9-12 times per year. It was the very first time that Today’s Machining World actually turned a tiny profit, monetizing with email blast auction ads and banner ads. 

As you can see, I’m still writing. My “Swarf” column from the magazine became “Swarfblog.” Noah’s podcast, Swarfcast, is thriving in its sixth year. Thousands of people open our emails each week. 

I guess you could say that today we are thought leaders in the precision machining industry. But I mainly write because it’s fun.

Question: What side hustles are you passionate about?