Swarfcast Ep. 37 – Finding Purpose in Your Work with Brent Robertson

April 24, 2019 • 3 Replies

By Noah and Lloyd Graff

Have you ever asked yourself what your purpose is when you go to work in the morning? Sometimes I wonder if I’m spending enough time making an important impact on the world, or if I’m too wrapped up in the mechanics of making deals on machine tools.

In this week’s podcast we interviewed Brent Robertson of Fathom. Brent is a business philosopher and consultant. His mission is help people discover what their purpose is, beyond just making money. He has found that if he can give people purpose in what they do, it inspires those they work with and their clients as well.

Listen to the podcast below the video.

Question: Is making money purpose enough for you?

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Machining the Fair Way

April 16, 2019 • 6 Replies

Francesco Molinari, the Italian professional golfer who has entered the top tier of pros who are factors in every major tournament, led by two strokes going into the final round of the Masters Sunday.

I have followed Molinari with more than a casual interest of late because he has used a putter made by a 90-person job shop just down the road from Graff-Pinkert in Tinley Park, Illinois. I met the owner, Bob Bettinardi, at IMTS. We were both resting our bones for a few minutes next to the Universal Robots exhibit, and we talked a bit about CNC mills and his putters business, which has evolved from the job shop that was its origin.

Bettinardi had a golf shirt on with Bettindari Golf’s logo. He has built a product with worldwide reach out of a small Haas mill shop. This is the dream of so many independent entrepreneurs in our machining world who long for the margins and stature that come from a world-renowned product.

Bettinardi’s branded putters sell for $300-$400 for a club similar to the stick Molinari used to win the British Open at Carnoustie last year. He also makes an $800 putter with a copper insert.

For a shop running VF-3 Haases with less than 100 employees, Bettinardi is playing in the big leagues with Callaway Golf and Mizuno dominant in the golf club world. It appears Callaway lured Francesco Molinari away from Bettinardi this year though Matt Kuchar, still a prominent pro, and many other up-and-comers are still using the Tinley Park shop’s putter.

Francesco Molinari’s former Bettinardi Putter

A Bettinardi faces a daunting challenge going up against the Callaways of the golf world. They have enormous marketing budgets, and a putter’s design can be easily copied. I do not believe Bettinardi has a patented putter. He has to make a product that pro golfers adore, convince them to stay with it for years, and hope his devotees win big tournaments to popularize his sticks. A company doing maybe $20 million a year in sales can do the golf shows and hit the big retailers, but it is always an uphill battle against the Callaways who have constant exposure in the equipment market and have their name on half the golf bags on the pro tour.

This is why small, closely held family businesses like Bettinardi Golf sell out to the behemoths. I do not know if Bob will sell out or if Callaway, with a market cap of $1.6 billion, will eventually crush him by stealing away all the Molinaris of the golf world when they get hot.

As an independent observer and former mediocre golfer, I hope he keeps milling fantastic, elegant putters in Tinley Park, Illinois, and selling them direct on Amazon for $399 a pop. I’d like to see him buy a dozen more Haas mills and put “Made in USA” on every lovely club he makes.

Maybe today Francesco Molinari will wonder if he could have beaten Tiger Woods at the 2019 Masters if he had had the Bettinardi in his bag.

Questions:

Is there an even playing field in the machining business?

Has Haas helped even the playing field?

Swarfcast Ep. 36 – Ben York on Taking the Art Out of Machining

April 12, 2019 • 1 Reply

By Noah Graff

In today’s podcast I interviewed Ben York, an inventor and consultant for machining companies. I met him at the 2019 Precision Machining Technology Show where his company, Theory 168, was presenting his Perfect Zero Alignment system. The system uses a camera installed in a CNC machine to set work coordinates and align and set tooling (see demonstration video below).

Ben said his mission is to “take the art out of machining.” He wants machining to be easy enough so people can do it even if they don’t know the “tricks of the trade.” In the podcast Ben talks about his process of inventing his new product and starting a company in the machining field.

Listen to the podcast below the video.

Question: Is machining an art form?

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Machining Show Business

April 9, 2019 • 4 Replies

I attended PMTS, the exhibition put on by the Precision Products Association last week, not really to sell screw machines, but to learn and connect. Accomplishing this goal gave me a satisfaction and closure that I’ve never felt before at a show. Here’s the crux of what I learned.

This was the happiest crowd I’ve ever seen at an event of this type. The endless mope of the last recession finally has drifted away. Nobody mentioned losing work to China which was a theme for so long. The prevailing vibe was that big companies are finding China a scary place to make large bets. Costs are converging with America finally, and production mistakes and logistical headaches make China a wash as far as costs go. The Trump tariffs cut both ways as far as competitiveness is concerned, but they do emphasize the uncertainties of depending on a competitor for crucial production. “I’ll make it in China,” used to be an automatic response by large corporations to a production requirement. Today it isn’t. This does not mean a torrent of work is coming back, but it is more than a trickle. The major point is that the gutting of American manufacturing has ended, and the mood of suppliers has changed to positive.

Another nonissue for PMTS participants was the worker shortage. In three days of connecting with participants I never heard it mentioned. My sense is that owners and companies are adjusting to the employee scarcity. Interest in robots is keen for the dumb jobs that used to require thoughtless loading and unloading. Robotics programming and training is a hot category. Recycling 5- to 10-year-old refugee robots is getting to be an important business category.

Lloyd, Noah, and Rex at the PMTS 2019 Graff-Pinkert Booth

Lloyd, Noah, & Rex at the PMTS 2019 Graff-Pinkert Booth

The large number of young people attending makes me think they are starting to get intrigued by interesting factory work and becoming disenchanted with piling up debt in four-year collegiate programs. I also saw more women who have moved into shop floor work and supervision. It is still a piddling percentage, but growing.

I found it odd that the machine tool behemoths like Mazak, DMG-MORI, Okuma, and Doosan chose not to display. They seemingly blow millions of bucks on IMTS and then claim poverty for off-year shows like PMTS. This leaves the field open for specialty builders to make a big pitch for capex budgets.

Davenport made a splash with their CNC multi-spindle. Many old Davenport folk gasped at the $345,000 price tag, but compared to European 20mm multis the price looked provocative. They sold two the first day.

All of the Swiss CNC folks showed except Tornos. The field is crowded, with Citizen, Star, and Tsugami hogging most of the market. Citizen folk were beaming as they were coming off their best year ever, their fiscal year having ended just a few days before in March.

Reflecting the boom in Swiss sales, Kevin Meehan of Edge was ebullient about his past year, selling record numbers of FMB and Taiwanese bar loaders and hiring the staff needed to get them out the door and install them.

Yet this was not a crowd of people jumping for joy and putting up new factories. The folks I talked to were pleased but not complacent. Nobody wanted to talk politics, which was not the case during the later Obama years. OSHA was never mentioned. People wanted to buy stuff, update, improve, but not add square footage. They wanted to buy shops to get customers and employees, not bricks and roofing. It was a Midwestern crowd, an increase over previous years in Columbus, Ohio. I think that was not an indictment of Columbus, but a reflection of happier times and greater convenience.

Hopefully the 2021 PMTS will show similar trends and even greater optimism.

Question: Do you still go to trade shows? Why?

Swarfcast Ep. 35 – Graeme Sinclair on Precision Machining in Australia

April 5, 2019 • 5 Replies

By Noah and Lloyd Graff

In today’s podcast we interviewed Graeme Sinclair, owner of Parish Engineering, a prominent precision machining shop in Australia. Graeme has been in the machining business for 60 years, since he served his apprenticeship at age 14.

In the interview Graeme discussed the challenges faced by machine shops in Australia verses the rest of the world, his eclectic taste in CNC machines, and his passion for the game of squash. Sinclair explained that one reason he has many different types of equipment is that automotive companies have shut down their operations in Australia, meaning a lot of high volume work has disappeared.

Question: Would you like to move to Australia?

Listen to the podcast on the player below.

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Hoops Heaven

April 2, 2019 • 2 Replies

I have just completed an indolent weekend of imbibing sports on TV: NCAA basketball winnowing 16 terrific college teams down to the Final Four and the Chicago Cubs opening the season with the Texas Rangers. Just for the added whipped cream I watched the Miami Pro Tennis Tournament that Roger Federer won, the 101st significant tournament victory of his career.

I thought about business a bit, responded to emails, ruminated about blog topics, changed my travel plans to the Precision Machining Technology Show in Cleveland this week, and did a rigorous work out, but mostly I relished some superb basketball and suffered through deplorable relief pitching by the Cubs. At least I could share my pain with my son-in-law, Scott, via text to ameliorate some of the
agony. And it’s only April. Six months more of baseball trauma.

I have not followed college basketball much this year, and I don’t bet on sporting events, but I studied up a bit before the Tournament and listened to Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith enough to quickly pick up the 2019 narrative.

Duke did finally lose by one point to Michigan State on Sunday, 69-68. Tom Izzo of MSU has a group of solid college players, none of whom may make it in the NBA. They are led by Cassius Winston, a shrewd, savvy guard who makes big plays but does not stun you with any single facet of his game.

The Final Four this year will be made up of Michigan State, Auburn, Texas Tech, and Virginia. None of these four teams have a Top Ten prospect, except possibly Jarrett Culver of Texas Tech, who is probably a 15-20 pick if he forgoes his final two years of eligibility.

Auburn’s top player, Chuma Okeke, tore his ACL in the Elite Eight game victory over number one seed, North Carolina, yet Auburn, a five seed, still beat a Kentucky team of High School All Americans to reach the Final Four.

The only top seed to reach the Final Four is Virginia, who should have lost, but with two seconds left on the clock and losing by three points made a one-in-a- hundred play against Purdue. Purdue had deliberately fouled so Virginia would not get a chance at a three-point field goal to tie the game. The free throw shooter got only two shots. Everybody knew that if he made the first free throw he would attempt to miss the second, hoping for a rebound off the rim that a Virginia player could catch and then shoot successfully to tie the game. I have seen this attempted many times, but I have never seen it work. But on Saturday a blond African kid, yes, from Guinea, Mamadi Diakite, plucked the rebound and hit the tying shot with the ball in the air when the buzzer went off. Virginia then went on to win in overtime over the Boilermakers.

I have been watching the NCAA college tournament since 1965 when I went to Portland, Oregon, with the Michigan team and saw Bill Bradley score 56 points in a runner-up game and then Gail Goodrich score 43 to propel UCLA over the Wolverines for the title.

I know the bad stuff about college basketball. The players are exploited by the coaches and the NCAA who make billions of dollars off the TV contract. Some players rarely go to class like Derrick Rose at Memphis, but Rose and his coach, John Calipari, knew what they were doing. Memphis won the NCAA that year, but scandal took it away from them. Rose got his $50 million NBA contract
despite hobbling knee injuries, and Calipari nailed perhaps the second-best coaching job in college basketball, after Duke, with Kentucky.

I know college basketball and football are a mockery of amateurism. Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour give under-the-table money to coaches and players. I still love to watch it.

It is such a different game than when I watched it in the 1960s, when Adolph Rupp of Kentucky put only white
boys on the court. African American players dominate the sport, but there are players from all over the world in the NCAA tournament. Gonzaga, a little Jesuit school in Spokane, was a top seed this year, and their best player, Rui Hachimura, was from Japan.

The Finals will be played this coming weekend. If you were a betting person you could have gotten 70-1 odds on Auburn two weeks ago. None of the Final Four are clear favorites. And that is a wonderful thing. I’ll be watching. Will you?

Question: Do you care whether college basketball mocks the amateur ideal?

Swarfcast Ep. 34 – Ed Crowley, Master of Insert Tooling

March 29, 2019 Comments Off

By Noah Graff and Rex Magagnotti

On today’s podcast we interviewed Ed Crowley, owner of Crowley Tool Company, a company that specializes in making custom insert form tools and quick change tooling packages for the precision machining industry. Ed explained in detail how his company has developed modular tooling that an operator can change on the fly, which can reduce set up time from days to minutes.

He admits that the marketshare for form tools is shrinking as the cam multi-spindles have lost favor, but he thinks that his products will stay relevant for the foreseeable future.

Question: Are you replacing your form tools with quick change insert tooling?

Listen to the podcast on the player below, or go to swarfcast on your favorite podcast app such as iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts.

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Book Review: Merchants of Truth

March 27, 2019 • 13 Replies

By Jerry Levine

Just as online shopping has transformed U.S. retail sales, the Internet has also remade the newspaper industry, but in a manner less obvious to most people. The old print newspaper business and revenue model has been seriously broken by young upstarts—young both in age and in technology. In Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, Jill Abramson, a former senior editorial executive at both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, has provided an insider account of an industry fighting for its life. She examines four competitors—the traditional New York Times and Washington Post, and two digital upstarts—BuzzFeed and Vice.

The generational gap among readers of the traditional papers and the upstarts is astounding. The median age of subscribers to the Times or Post is over 60 years old. Whereas, people under 35 get most of their news online. The old system relied heavily on an extensive world-wide staff gathering and reporting stories. The new news organizations like BuzzFeed rely heavily on a small staff gathering online information from various sources, mainly Facebook postings, that then is consolidated, edited, and reposted. What is news is no longer determined top-down by an authority like Walter Cronkite or The New York Times. On the Web, the audience establishes its own priority. The readers become the publishers. Or, more sarcastically, the inmates are running the asylum.

Similar to BuzzFeed, Vice built its business on the back of YouTube. To quote Vice’s founders, Shane Smith and Spike Jonze, “The video site was overflowing with amateur uploads and bootlegged clips. To attract a young audience, stories were told from the street level by people with absolutely no training in news.”

The traditional newspaper model was broken both on the content side as well as the business side, and newspapers were very slow to see it coming. New York Times editors clung to the notion that their new website would merely be a superficial resemblance of their existing print paper. But news and opinion sites like the Huffington Post and Drudge Report were already siphoning off its reporting, digital advertising, and audience.

Other websites were destroying the traditional newspapers’ classified ads, which had accounted for millions of dollars of revenue. Craigslist lured away “for sale” ads, and Monster.com or Jobs.com grabbed the “help wanted ads.” Travel and auto ads were hammered by Expedia and Autotrader. Local ad revenue also declined as local department stores and businesses closed, due to online shopping. The Washington Post was especially hard hit because classified ads made up 40% of its revenue. Additionally, local papers supported by The New York Times and The Washington Post have been either gutted or closed, depriving many rural and suburban readers of local information, like high school sports.

As profits declined, both papers began extensive cost cutting. The stock price for The Washington Post fell from about $1000/share to under $400/share. It needed a huge cash infusion to avoid going bankrupt. The Graham family proposed selling to Amazon founder and Chairman, Jeff Bezos, based on his Internet expertise. Bezos had three essential questions: 1) Was the Post still an important institution? 2) Could he be optimistic about its future? And 3) Did he have the technical knowledge to reverse the paper’s downward spiral?

He finally concluded yes to all three. Katherine Graham came back with a $250 million proposal and Bezos accepted. Fortunately for Bezos, shortly after the purchase the paper broke the Snowden/NSA story. This gave a short-term boost in readership, but also answered the first of Bezos’s questions: the paper was still relevant.

The Times was also hemorrhaging money, and needed a White Knight. Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico, came forward with a $200 million loan at 14% interest and the right to buy 16 million shares (about 17% of the company) at $6.36/ share. (As of this writing, NYT stock is selling for about $32/share and are servicing the loan. Slim made quite a good deal.)

In the near term, both The Washington Post and The New York Times seem to have survived the ferocious waters of the digital revolution. Before Trump, but especially after Trump, both papers moved further to the left in both their editorial positions and their news reporting. They are regularly attacked by the President as “failing” purveyors of “fake news,” with minimal impact on their readership. They have revised their websites to include more news updates and videos. They are still relevant, but need to explore additional revenue streams to maintain financial stability. Most important they need to worry about their aging demographic.

Question: Where do you get your news from?

Jerry Levine is a former chemical engineer, political expert, and frequent contributor to the Today’s Machining World website. Check out our interview with Jerry on Swarfcast Episode 18: Jerry Levine on Why Global Warming is Not a Problem.

Swarfcast Ep. 33 – Aneesa Muthana, the Success of a Woman in the Machining Business

March 22, 2019 • 2 Replies

By Noah and Lloyd Graff

On today’s podcast, we interviewed Aneesa Muthana, owner of Pioneer Service Inc., a CNC machine shop that features 26 Star CNC Swiss lathes. Aneesa shared her fond memories of being raised on the floor of a centerless grinding shop, M&M Quality Grinding, founded by her Yemeni immigrant parents. While other girls were playing with Barbie dolls, Aneesa relished learning to use micrometers and cleaning out oil tanks from Cincinnati centerless grinders. At 23 she left M&M, where she had once thought she would stay forever, and bought into Pioneer Service Inc. a Brown & Sharpe shop owned by her uncle.

Aneesa shared her views on a number of topics, including how women are treated in the machining industry, her preference to work with Star CNC Swiss lathes over Samsung and Brown & Sharpe machines, and the significance of the hijab she wears.

Question: Is being a woman in the machining industry an advantage or disadvantage?

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Guilty Parts?

March 20, 2019 • 32 Replies

For many years, I have wavered between being judgmental or agnostic about who I do business with. I felt twinges of discomfort twice this past week.

I had a request for a quote on a Wickman multi-spindle screw machine from a customer who, among many other products, makes accessories for AR-15 semi-automatic weapons. He told me business is robust and they have tripled in size in recent years. He could buy a Wickman multi from someone else (it won’t be as good), but it is in my economic interest to sell him one if he will pay my price and meet my terms.

I felt chills down my spine last Friday when the news hit about the massacre at the mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. As in most terrorist attacks such as Parkland and Tree of Life, the perpetrator used an AR-15 semi-automatic weapon.

Would I be a guilty link in the supply chain if I sold a spare part for a screw machine that could have made a component for an AR-15 that had a remote possibility of being used in a terrorist attack? Is it my obligation to give a sniff test to every email inquiry for a machine or screw or bushing? If the inquiry is from Turkey, do I have to check if they support Erdogan or Assad in Syria?

What about Purdue Pharma, and the fabulously rich and highly philanthropic family that controls it, the Sacklers of Connecticut.

Purdue makes OxyContin, fentanyl, codeine, and a line of ADHD drugs. OxyContin is the most prescribed pain controlling drug in America. It has made the lives of millions and millions of people more tolerable during chemotherapy and after surgery. For most users it is a marvelous drug, but for a significant minority of people who become addicted to it, OxyContin can be an agent of hell.

Purdue Pharma is under constant scrutiny. Its officers have paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, and some have served a small amount of jail time. But the company keeps on making OxyContin, doctors keep prescribing it every day to patients who desperately need its pain reducing power, while the Sacklers get richer and keep giving away millions.

If you run an art museum, a seminary, or a hospital, do you tell the Sackler Foundation you do not want their OxyContin tainted money? Do you tell the doctors not to prescribe it when patients are in bone throbbing pain? If you make parts for the pharma production line that produces OxyContin in Wilson, North Carolina, do you opt out of the supply line and allow an Indian supplier to step in?

I am not a total agnostic on these issues. I am willing to sell a screw or bushing to the company that makes AR-15 accessories, yet I want to know what a Wickman screw machine is supposed to make before I sell one to an inquiring company. Hunting supplies are okay with me, and ammunition for the Army and target shooting is fine. AR-15 bump stocks are not okay for me.

Am I a hypocrite if a sling for an AR-15 is okay, but a bump stock is not. Am I so far down the supply chain that my screw and bushing are inconsequential? In business, we make these kinds of decisions every day.

How do you deal with such questions, or do you just ignore them? If you ran a charity, would you take the Sackler’s OxyContin money to do good works?

Question: Would you produce parts that go in AR-15s?

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