PTSD 11 Years Later

August 29, 2019 • 11 Replies

By Lloyd Graff

Of all the weeks in the year this is the one I dread the most.

I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder which was triggered by my almost catastrophic heart attack that occurred 11 years ago this week. It is also the week that my mother died suddenly in 1993.

I think about the heart attack every day of my life, wondering how I survived, why I survived, and when the final shoe might drop. I don’t try to not think about it, because that only causes me to think about it even more.

The strange thing is that it wasn’t all that terrible for me when it happened, because most of the time I was drugged. I had collateral heart circulation developed over 25 years of dedicated running, so even though my most important heart artery was 99% blocked I could still function, if only in a painful and sickly way. I had trouble breathing and thought I had pneumonia. My wife, Risa, and I drove 55 minutes August 29, 2008, to see a friend who was an infectious disease doctor, and I walked into his office at the hospital while Risa parked. He was treating a kid while I waited. I remember him checking me out in the waiting area, putting a stethoscope on my chest, and saying Lloyd, I’m wheeling you to the emergency room myself. I remember somebody yelling, “Can I cut his underwear off?” and then nothing.

Lloyd on a flatbed truck 11 years later

Then the nightmare really started for Risa and my children and many, many people who rushed to the St. Francis Hospital in Evanston to be with her.

Somehow by good fortune that morning a heart surgeon Dr. Muhammed Akbar was available to insert a stent into my blocked artery, known as the “widowmaker.” When asked after the emergency surgery how he did it he simply pointed skyward, Risa recalls. Without the longshot stent insertion I had virtually no chance of survival. Bypass surgery at that point was almost certain to fail. The hope was that I would gain strength over the Labor Day weekend, and they would do a quadruple bypass on Tuesday.

Risa and my children and sister slept in the waiting room for those four nights. I mostly slept and got stronger. I was unaware of what was happening. I wasn’t worried, as best I can remember. They suffered and waited but also had wonderful family togetherness moments.

I strengthened over the long weekend. I was hooked into tubes and had a mask that prohibited me from speaking.

My family regaled me with songs for 45 minutes before the surgery. I am sure it helped them and me, but I can’t remember the singing. The only thing I think I can remember is that the Cubs were on the radio, and I heard the score was 9-6 just before I went into surgery, and they cracked my chest open.

The bypass surgery worked amazingly well. Afterwards, the surgeon said I should be good for 20 years. I’ve held on to that comment desperately for the past 11 years.

Now it’s 4017 days later, and I’m feeling pretty darn good. But the event haunts me – every day. It affects every big decision. I think about it every time I plan a vacation or blow out birthday candles. The memory still lingers of being wheeled into emergency surgery and not exactly being terrified, just being in shock and amazement and almost amused about being asked whether I cared if they cut my underwear off.

Will I ever forget that day, those crazy weird moments? No, unless I lose my memory.

My PTSD is not horrible. I live my life, often with great joy. I am not depressed, most of the time. But I am stuck with that memory tattoo of August 29, 2008. The day I probably should have died, but didn’t.

Question: Do you have post-traumatic stress disorder?

Swarfcast Ep. 51 – Physical Therapist Doug Conroy on Protecting Your Body at Work

August 23, 2019 • 5 Replies

By Noah Graff

On today’s podcast I interview Dr. Doug Conroy of Conroy Orthopedic & Sports Physical Therapy. Doug has been treating injured folks for decades, including me as I rehab my left Achilles tendon. Our interview focuses on the negative effects a workplace environment can have on the human body.

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Doug told me that in the past, workplace health risks were mostly associated with accidents in industrial settings. However, he says that many of today’s experts consider office jobs with constant sitting as possibly more dangerous to workers’ health, going as far as to characterize sitting as “the new smoking.”

Main points of the interview

(2:55) Doug explains his expertise in the field of orthopedic physical therapy.

(5:18) Doug explains that the association of workplace health risks with an industrial setting is changing. Arguably, the largest threat to the health of the working population is prolonged sitting, which he characterizes as “the new smoking.”

(11:00 – 16:00) Doug recommends workers change position after 20 to 30 minutes, regardless of their posture. He says that it is generally healthier to be a mechanic who moves around than to work at a desk.

(16:00) Doug explains how many people do not seek medical advice or physical therapy soon enough. As a result, it can take twice as long to reverse the bad habits their bodies have become accustomed to.

(17:00) Doug describes various scenarios where surgery should be performed or abstained from. He cites medical studies which show that many doctors recommend unnecessary surgeries.

(20:10) Doug talks about the use of prescription pain killers during recovery. He says they were overprescribed in the past, but the trend is changing.

(24:10) Doug talks about the improvements in knee, hip, and other joint replacement surgeries. In the past, joint replacements made sense only for older people because of the need to replace them every 10 to 15 years. With new advancements, the components that go into joint replacements are significantly improved so that more young people are receiving replacements.

(30:50) Doug discusses various sports injuries, such as damaged Achilles tendons, ACLs, ulnar collateral ligaments and thumb injuries. He compares the severity of those injuries and examines new developments in treatment.

(35:25) Doug reminds listeners to pay attention to what their bodies are telling them. He also says people need to share more information with doctors and physical therapists, in order to better their chance for recovery.

Question: Would you rather work in the shop or in the office?

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Condo or College?

August 21, 2019 • 14 Replies

For most of my life I have made my good living by buying and selling physical things. My line of credit with my bank is still directly related to the financial institution’s belief in the value of inventory, machines, and cash on hand in relation to money owed to them.

This is the traditional bible of finance. Our statistical yardsticks of wealth, both individually and as a country, are based on measurable, identifiable things. But increasingly I am doubting a lot of these old rubrics which the college Economics texts are based on.

I am not the only one who is questioning the ancient axioms.

About a week ago I heard one of the chief decision makers at BlackRock, one of Wall Street’s largest money managers, announce that he and BlackRock have been wrong in predicting that interest rates and inflation had to go up because unemployment was at a record low and wages were rising. He said the old playbook was wrong, and they were throwing it away.

The chief investment guru of PIMCO, who has had an awful time betting on higher interest rates, took the blame for his terrible year a couple of days ago, but he is staying with the strategy that placed him in the lowest 7% of money managers. He bet on rising mortgage rates.

This is not an idle academic argument. I think it is important for the machining world for several reasons.

The people in our world make stuff for people who want stuff. We use machines and steel and oil. We employ people and use physical space and ship goods to customers.

What if stuff, things, physically measurable items are gradually becoming less important each day?

Mortgage rates are dropping like a stone, currently, as the 10-year U.S. Treasury interest rate hovers around 1.5%. Yet there is no rush by young people to buy homes or condos. Renting is popular today, not buying. One big reason for that is that young people have big college debts they are paying off monthly. They have consciously, or unconsciously, made the deduction that education is more important to them than home ownership. Whether this will prove to be a good or bad economic gamble, long term, is an unknown, but it is affecting the purchase of real estate, and I expect this trend to continue.

I think we are seeing the same choices in vehicles. Young people are investing in day care and gym memberships and restaurants rather than a Harley or a convertible. For city people, Uber, a bicycle, or the subway are limiting car buying. This doesn’t mean that people are poorer today because they do not own a car. They are making different choices.

People are also veering into different spending choices in food and vacations. We are seeing more folks opt for restaurant food or delivered menus. People are spending on travel experiences rather than buying a cabin at a lake in Northern Michigan or Wisconsin.

Warren Buffett recently admitted he made one of his worst mistakes by buying Heinz and its tired old brands. Same with Kraft and Campbell’s. Tired old brands are not selling. Panera and plant-based meat are working.

I’ve been bouncing around in this article, but the theme running through it is that the bankers and investors who have followed the ancient rules are losing. The manufacturers who have done well making parts for home faucets and sedans are beginning to fade. Real value lies in intellectual capital, but it can also evaporate quickly. The numbers that bounce the markets around like yo-yos are obsolete. GDP does not measure air quality, creativity, or life expectancy. Employment does not measure automation improvements. The markets are volatile because people look at conflicting numbers. And the numbers they look at are yesterday’s.

Question: Is college a better investment than a house?

Swarfcast Ep. 50 – Robots, Vaporizers and Transfer Machines

August 16, 2019 • 1 Reply

By Lloyd and Noah Graff

For the fiftieth episode of Swarfcast we are playing clips from some of our favorite past podcasts.

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Highlights include:

(3:06) From episode 1, Lloyd talks about his decision to go into the family machinery business. He also talks about his working relationship with his father and his father’s cousin Aaron Pinkert.

(7:37) From episode 15, George Breiwa, founder of DynoVap, talks about his proprietary vaporizer that does not rely on an external electrical source. He discusses manufacturing his product using CNC Swiss screw machines.

(11:10) From episode 10, John Griner, owner of Griner Engineering, discusses his company’s drug testing policy.

(13:50) From episode 18, Jerry Levine, former executive at Amoco, gives his take on global warming, saying the earth’s environment is not in an age of crisis as many scientists believe.

(17:00) From episode 5, Esben Østergaard, founder of Universal Robot, discusses the role of collaborative robots in the future of manufacturing. He says that in today’s economy there is a need for robots that are easy to redeploy for constantly changing short runs.

(20:25) From episode 37, Brent Robertson of Fathom gives Lloyd and Noah insight on how they can find purpose running their machine tool business and media business.

(23:53) From episode 47, business writer, Bo Burlingham discusses the keys for business owners to successfully exit their businesses.

(26:47) From Episode 43, Bruno Schmitter, owner of Hydromat USA, discusses his upbringing in Switzerland and the early days of selling Hydromat rotary transfer machines in the United States.

Question: Who would you like to hear interviewed in a future Swarfcast?

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Swarfcast Ep. 49 – Sebastien Schmitt of Staubli on Robotics in Diverse Fields

August 9, 2019 Comments Off

By Lloyd and Noah Graff

On today’s podcast we interview Sebastien Schmitt, North American Robotics Division Manager of Stäubli, a prominent robot producer from Switzerland. Sebastien explains how Stäubli focuses on building robots to help produce smaller automative components for car interiors and parts under the hood rather than assembling large car bodies like some of its competitors.

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Sebastien also discusses Stäubli’s TX2 Robot, a model which can be used in a collaborative or a standard industrial mode, plus the importance of working with robot integrators who are specialized in their specific fields in order to get the most out of robots.

Highlights from the podcast include:

(2:44) Sebastien Schmitt discusses the history of Stäubli since the company’s inception in 1892 in Switzerland as a producer of textile machines. Later Stäubli got into the connector business, and in 1980s it entered the robotics field.

(6:10) Sebastien discusses the specialty areas for Stäubli robots. He says that 50 percent of industrial robots are utilized by the automotive sector. Stäubli focuses on the production of smaller automotive components such as car interiors and parts under the hood. Other robotics companies produce a lot of larger robots for welding and assembling car bodies.

(7:37) Sebastien discusses Stäubli’s significance in automating industries such as pharmaceuticals, life sciences and medical devices.

(13:00-18:30) Sebastien discusses the trend of collaborative robots. Stäubli’s TX2 model is capable of being used as a collaborative robot as well as standard industrial type. He discusses how robots can only truly be collaborative if they are properly integrated. Telling the robot what to do is not complicated. The complicated part is integrating the robot to execute a productive application.

(18:30) Sebastien explaines Stäubli’s philosophy of partnering with integrators who are specialists in the field of an application rather than using an in-house integration department.

(23:25) Sebastien discusses statistics which show that when countries bring in a lot of robotics into their infrastructure their unemployment rate actually decreases.

(25:55) Sebastien discusses how he got into robotics. He talks about his upbringing in northeast France, an area once known for mining. He was influenced by his father, a mechanic who was the first in his family who didn’t go into mining.

(29:43) Sebastien gives his preference for the film Short Circuit over The Terminator.

Question: What task do you wish you could give to a robot?

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Machining a Pancreas

August 7, 2019 • 6 Replies

By Lloyd Graff

A couple days ago, Futurism newsletter ran a piece about Liam Zebedee, a software engineer in Brooklyn who struggles with diabetes while trying to live the semblance of a normal life.

He built his own “artificial pancreas” because he was frustrated with the daily hassle of dealing with hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and pharmacies. He started with a good piece of hardware, an insulin pump. He then developed his own software and purchased the necessary hardware for $979. He pays $225 per month for off-the-shelf glucose sensors plus his monthly cost for a supply of insulin.

“I know that it’s pretty insane to run your basic metabolism on untyped JavaScript code,” Zebedee writes. “But if you were in my shoes, you’d realize it was safer than going to the hospital, intentionally or not.”

The homemade “artificial pancreas” shows the hand of ingenuity that builds businesses out of ideas. In a small way our machinery business has been grappling with a mechanical challenge which most of the “smart people” we consulted told us would likely end in failure.

We do not tackle a lot of setups on screw machines these days because if folks want us to do it, it usually means that they cannot do it themselves and don’t know anybody who can. We took on this one for several good reasons that seemed to trump the obvious impediments. It was a big opportunity to sell machines, but failure would be very expensive.

The job was to thread both sides of a 4-1/2” long, ¾”-diameter pipe. The customer made a couple million of them a year, but their process either on CNC lathes or screw machines and threading machines was laborious and even dangerous.

On the face of it, at least to me, who did know enough to understand why they had done it the old-school laborious way for 50 years, it was quite doable on a Wickman. Thread chasing on one end, die head threading on the other, a piece of cake.

What I did not know was that steel pipe, 4-1/2” long, presents nasty problems for threading. Pipe is not uniform in surface quality, wall thickness, and machinability. There are significant differences in the products of each manufacturer. It is not perfectly straight, it will wobble—more the longer you attempt to machine. Cutting tools usually are not durable enough to compensate for the roughness and wobble of pipe.

Wickman has a husky and generally quite useful thread chasing attachment for the end of the pipe closest to the spindle. Unfortunately, it was really not expected to cut steel pipe to connect a hot water heater. It normally rests on an aluminum base on top of the cross slide, but to our own dismay, we consistently got unacceptable chatter using the attachment. After tearing our hair out in frustration, Javier, our engineer, mentioned that at his previous job they had occasionally used a steel base when chasing difficult stainless steel components. Luck had it that we had a scruffy old steel base on our parts shelf. To our shock the chasing worked.

We ran into similar issues trying to do die head threading on the other end. The cutting tools broke, the die heads fell apart, chatter was a constant companion. We put a Logan air threading attachment on to replace the mechanical one. Better, but still not good enough. Then we slowed down the clutch by changing gears. Still no good. Finally, we put it on the slowest possible threading speed, and we got a good thread, but the cutters had a maddeningly short life. It required a different coating to finally make it work.

Through all of the experimenting we labored with four different varieties of seamless pipe. Only one worked reasonably well. We asked our customer for more pipe. They could not seem to provide it for us. “Purchasing” and “Politics” continually got in the way of providing us more raw material to perfect the process. We offered to buy it ourselves, pick it up ourselves at another plant, do anything to move the process, but the pipe did not come. Finally ten 10-foot lengths arrived. Not enough for a full run off, but enough for samples and a good tryout of the process.

“We did it.” At least we think so for now. Not a homemade, artificial pancreas, but a satisfying, improvised solution to the problem for Graff-Pinkert.

Question: Tell us about an “impossible” job that you solved.

Swarfcast Ep. 48 – Jonathan Ladouceur on 3D Printing Houses

August 2, 2019 • 1 Reply

By Noah Graff and Rex Magagnotti

Our guest on today’s Swarfcast is Jonathan Ladouceur, head of engineering at Twente Additive Manufacturing, a company specializing in architectural 3D printing. We met Jonathan last week when his company bought an ABB IRB 6700 track mounted robot from Graff-Pinkert.

Rather than 3D printing with plastic or metal, Twente 3D prints with concrete, creating huge structures. Jonathan told us that in the next few months Twente will be embarking on a project to produce the frame of a house in 40 hours of machine run time over a six week period.

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Main points from the interview:

(3:35) Jonathan talks about the emergence of 3D printing with concrete.

(5:20) Jonathan talks about the origins of 3D printing. He characterized the very first versions of 3D printing as “2.5D printing,” as compared to the processes his company is currently using, printing with concrete.

(9:45) Jonathan discusses Twente’s upcoming project to build a code compliant house frame using 3D printing in British Columbia, Canada. This would be the first of its kind in the country.

(16:07) Jonathan discusses the way 3D printing houses may change the building industry. He says, “One of the biggest benefits to 3D printing is the complexity not costing extra.”

(20:35) Jonathan discusses the material composition of the concrete Twente is using for 3D printing. The concrete’s composition and a precise control of temperature enables it to harden 30 seconds after it is released from the nozzle.

(23:15) Jonathan talks about the design software, Rhino, with an add-on called Grass Hopper that does parametric design. The software also enables the user to map out where the nozzle needs to run.

(27:30) Jonathan discusses his predictions for who will be using 3D printing to produce houses in the near future. He says that it will be important in areas where transport is difficult. The shipping costs to ship traditional building components to remote areas can be astronomical. To build a house with 3D printing all one would need to transport to the location is a robot and some chemical additives if materials can be sourced at a local quarry.

Question: Have any of your clients switched a product from machining to 3D printing?

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Trade Wars

July 31, 2019 • 11 Replies

By Lloyd Graff

Today is the last day of the Major League Baseball trading season. I am a nutty baseball fan, Chicago Cubs variety, who follows such folly with a fanatic’s intensity.

Maybe it’s the machinery dealer in me, but I love the trading. Every team is looking for that player who with change of scenery turns into a butterfly from a caterpillar. Other times non-contending teams will trade a star at the end of his contract for a potential star at the beginning of his career. The classic case of this was in 2016 when the Cubs traded their best young minor league player, Gleyber Torres, for the services of Aroldis Chapman, the hardest throwing relief pitcher in the game who was at the tail end of his contract. Chapman, who could throw 105 mph, helped the Cubs win the World Series in 2016. Gleyber Torres was an All-Star this year for the Yankees. Chapman left the Cubs after 2016 and re-signed with the Yankees.

These “deadline deals” can be transformative for a team. The Cubs made a great deal with the Texas Rangers in 2012 trading Ryan Dempster, a once great relief pitcher, and a decent catcher, Geovany Soto, for pitcher Kyle Hendricks, then a minor league pitcher out of Dartmouth who had a fastball that could not break the proverbial “pane of glass.” In a little less than a year Hendricks had become one of the best pitchers in the game, and Dempster had retired.

As I was preparing to write this piece I had a heretical thought for a baseball fan. Does the act of trading a player make him a kind of high-priced slave? The player usually has no say on where he might be sent. He has to uproot himself and maybe his family on a moment’s notice. He immediately has to acquaint himself with an entirely new group of teammates, some of whom may be hostile because he threatens their position.

The NBA players are pushing back on the notion of easily trading players. Star players like LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard, and Anthony Davis can almost call their own landing places and influence whom they would like to play with. In football the Le’Veon Bell holdout at Pittsburgh is a precedent for important players to command more leverage in their employment, though the NFL seems to be very hardline in resistance.

I don’t know exactly how things will play out, but the players are destined to get a say.

Question: What are the best or worst sports trades in history for you?

Swarfcast Ep. 47 – Bo Burlingham on Successfully Exiting a Business

July 26, 2019 • 3 Replies

By Lloyd Graff

Bo Burlingham has spent much of his career writing about the lives of entrepreneurs. I recently interviewed him at his home in the rustic hills of Oakland, California.

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We talked about the need to plan for a strong and successful conclusion to a business career, as described in his recent book, Finish Big. Bo discussed seven factors that characterized owners who had happy exits:

(10:55) You must know who you are, what you want and why.

(11:44) You have to build a sellable business—a business that you could sell when you wanted, to whom you wanted, for an amount you considered fair.

(11:20) You have to give yourself enough time. Most people don’t start thinking about exiting early enough. You need to find a successor, and it takes a long to time to get that right.

(13:15) You have to get the right advice from others who have exited their own businesses in the past.

(13:50) You have to become very clear in your own mind about what you want to have happen to the people in the company for you to feel at peace afterwards.

(14:20) You must do as much do diligence on the buyer as the buyer is going to do on you. You want to find out why they really want to own the company. Otherwise you are in for some bad surprises.

(14:44) You have to figure out what you are going to to do after the exit, who you are going to serve. Bo found that many people after they leave their company don’t know who they are anymore. They no longer know what their purpose is in life.

Question: What will you do after you are finished with your current work?

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At the Track Every Day

July 24, 2019 • 8 Replies

By Lloyd Graff

Trading in used machinery is sophisticated gambling. Some people find it strange that I am utterly indifferent about sports gambling. It has no allure for me. I once lost $25 playing 21 at a casino in Vegas and felt stupid – not for losing, but just for walking into the smoke-filled room. Yeah, it was a long time ago.

And now, after such a long, long time in the screw machine trading and refurbishing business, we have the exhilarating and scary opportunity to reinvent a new business by finding a new cohort of machines to gamble on. I’m finding it exciting, even enthralling at times, and pretty damn scary, too.

A very smart guy once told me that “if you don’t feel ‘it’ in the pit of your stomach, you aren’t bidding enough to get a deal.” He was right, but that doesn’t mean fear guarantees your success. It only guarantees doubt and restless sleep.

In our machinery business, we are confronted with the wrenching reality that our traditional customers are not very interested in buying what we’ve always sold. It’s a bit like a car dealer specializing in sedans and convertibles in a pickup truck and SUV world. Not much action. The obvious path is to switch to pickups and SUVs, but the downside is that almost everybody else has done the same thing. For a used machinery dealer, the analog is to jump into the used Haas lathe and vertical machining center market. But that is awfully boring and terribly competitive. There is an auction every Tuesday and Thursday with Haases in it. The only sleepers are in sofa beds.

Our strategy has been to go to Outer Mongolia searching for bargains and hauling them back to civilization. My son Noah likes to travel to Outer and Inner Mongolia so he wants to try this approach.

I also want to search for the guavas and jackfruit in the produce department, the exotics that only the people with weird tastes dare to inhabit? This is a long jaunt from the Acmes and New Britains of my youth that we once sold by the truckload.

Our real niche seems to be in the European descendants of the Acmes and New Britains, the CNC multi-spindles like Index and Schutte that are so darn complicated and daunting that they confuse even people who have grown up with their simpler, now often discarded, cousins.

When you place bets on machinery you don’t know like family, you are going to lose some of the time. Try to tell your banker, “Well, I bought that washer, that robot, that Hydromat thing, to experiment.” They may get the intellectual gambit, but they get rather annoyed about losses. They think you are always supposed to win in business. This is when resilience and being part of a team that understands the value of defeat as an educational tool, one that realizes that business is a continuum, are so vital. To succeed in the long game of business you have to build in defeat cushions. If you are going to gamble you are going to lose. If losing is “unacceptable,” which seems to be the position of football coaches like Urban Meyer and Jim Harbaugh, you are going to end up desperately needing a shrink or a sabbatical.

I hate losing or being wrong, but I also love the action of being in business and trying really hard to win every day, knowing that setbacks are inevitable, and dealing with change is maddening.

I think about the option of leaving the game. Noah often asks me, “Dad, was it always this hard?”

Honestly, I can’t even remember, Noah. Let’s just get it on.

Question: Do you view business as gambling?

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