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Oct 2026

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Noah Graff, used machine tool dealer and editor of Today’s Machining World, interviews machining company owners, equipment gurus, and experts with insight to help and entertain people working in the machining field. We discuss topics such as how to find quality employees, customer acquisition, negotiation, and the best CNC equipment options for specific jobs.

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October 20, 202648 min

Business School vs. Learning on the Job, with Robby Burton and Blake Schultz-EP 276

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 You Tube 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 lost his job. His grandfather, 75 at the time, was still running AG Drives. Robby asked if they could work on it together. For a while he lived two lives: training as a machinist at another shop during the day, and learning the business from his grandfather at night. Nobody taught him how to run a company. He learned by doing it. The machinist who trained him saw his engineering background as an advantage. Robby already knew the language and had nothing to unlearn. Running a Business With Your Friends Five of AG Drives’ six employees were at the same high school at the same time. Blake went there too, a few years behind them. Robby and his co-owner, Zach, started out in a single bay, with Zach welding behind him while Robby ran a lathe. Today Zach runs assembly and Robby runs the machine shop. When I asked Robby how they divide roles he said that everyone else just does whatever needs doing. I asked Robby whether it’s strange to be the boss of guys from his class. He doesn’t think so. It sounds like they have a lot of fun working together. When their building manager offered them furniture left behind by former tenants, the crew found old family photos in the pile and started hiding them in each other’s lockers. The One With the Degree Blake has a business marketing degree from the University of Minnesota. The first thing he did at AG Drives was build the company’s website, and the phone started ringing almost immediately. Even so, Blake told me he doesn’t think college is necessary to succeed today, except for careers like engineering, law and medicine. What he valued most from college was the network. When he built the AG Drives website, he sent it to former classmates for feedback, and one of his professors invited him back as a guest lecturer. He always wanted to be an entrepreneur but never knew what to invent. “Sometimes you don’t have to invent anything,” he said. “Sometimes you just need to make a drive shaft.” Office or Shop Floor Robby still splits his time between the machines and the office. I asked if he’d ever step off the floor for good. His answer was that whatever he isn’t doing is what he wants to be doing. After weeks in the office, he wants to work with his hands. After weeks of cranking out parts, he’s happy to do CAD work and call customers. Question: What do you do to make your business fun? The post Business School vs. Learning on the Job, with Robby Burton and Blake Schultz-EP 276 appeared first on Today’s Machining World .

October 6, 202648 min

See the Part Before You Cut It, with Greg Walker and Bob Folts–EP 275

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 You Tube 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 great shape. Bob said you scan it and enter the kinematics. If the ball screws have backlash, you program the backlash in. Then the simulation matches what you’ll actually get. “You have to be honest with it,” Bob said. He says he’s in shops all the time explaining why their virtual results don’t match the real world. Usually it’s machine tolerances nobody put into the model. It works on old cam machines too. You model the cams, the throws, and all the parameters, then watch the machine run in the computer. Newer multi-spindles, including many INDEX machines, run Siemens controls that connect directly. Other controls need an edge device added to the machine. Watch It Cut First The workflow starts with the part in CAD. In CAM, the programmer lays out every operation from raw stock to finished part, and the software suggests toolpaths, passes, and speeds and feeds. Then you run the G code through the simulation. On screen, a 3D model of the stock gets cut as the tools change and remove metal. If you programmed something wrong or there’s a collision, it tells you. You fix it and run it again. Bob runs it two or three times before he posts it to the machine. You still mic the part afterward. Bob’s claim is that it’ll be very close, if not perfect. I asked whether I could override the software when I think I know better. You can. Bob admitted that sometimes his override was wrong. The force on the tool pushed the part out of tolerance, and he had to dial it back. “If you really listen to what the CAM system is giving you, you’ll come out with a good part just about every time,” he said. 135 Percent on the Way In Greg brought up a Siemens feature called adaptive control. The machine can come in at 135 percent, then drop to around 75 percent when the tool engages the part. The result is a faster cycle time and longer tool life. The Bigger Payoff Is the Factory Honestly, I wasn’t sure the ROI was there on a single machine. Somebody can always trial-and-error their way to a good part. Greg and Bob see the bigger payoff on a whole line. Bob’s example was an assembly line with people, overhead cranes, and a moving line, all in one simulation. At the show, Greg said they heard from more companies than ever that were expanding, building a new factory, or buying an old one. They wanted help setting it up with Siemens plant simulation. That lines up with our M&A work. More buyers are asking us to find them another factory. Once they buy it, they have to integrate it. Greg also made a point that this isn’t only for big companies. SIS works with startups putting $1 million to $5 million into a new operation and sells them the software at a steep discount. Question: Would you trust a simulation of your machine before cutting the first part? The post See the Part Before You Cut It, with Greg Walker and Bob Folts–EP 275 appeared first on Today’s Machining World .

September 22, 202632 min

Why Make a Robot That Looks Like Us, With Phil Zheng-EP 274

A few years ago, Richtech Robotics would call hospitality groups and offer them robots. They got laughed out of the office. The answer was always the same. We’re a people company. Now they’re building an 8,000 square foot factory in Las Vegas. Three production lines for robots and sensors, all managed by AI. They’d planned it for 2027, but a new FCC rule made them move it up to this year. I talked with Richtech’s COO, Phil Zheng, at IMTS. He told me why their humanoid robots have eyes that don’t do anything. Why Chinese citizens might not love robots as much as they seem to. And why even the people building this stuff are surprised how fast AI and robotics are moving. (Blog continues below video) ************* 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 You Tube 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 Hightlights The Robot Has to Match the Data Standing at the Richtech booth, I asked Phil why the robots look like people. The eyes are the giveaway. He admitted straight out that they aren’t meant to do anything. His answer had three parts, and only one of them was about looks. The first is the work cell. Most jobs on a production floor are done by a person standing at a station using two hands. If you bring in a robot shaped differently, you have to rebuild the station around it. That costs money and time. A robot with two arms drops into what’s already there. The countertops are already built for us. The second reason is the one I hadn’t thought about. It’s the training data. Most robot training today comes from teleoperation, where a person puts on goggles and gloves and drives the robot’s arms directly. That’s where the data comes from. So the robot has to have the same shape as the person generating it. You can’t train a robot to work in a shape no human has, because there’s no human in that shape to show it how. The third reason is the simplest. People like it. They want the head and the eyes. They’ll give the machine a personality, or a name. Robots That Watch Each Other Work The humanoid is the thing people take pictures of, but it isn’t the whole pitch. Richtech’s robots are meant to work as a group. Phil walked me through the table. One robot does assembly and small parts handling, picking and placing, and it comes both mobile and mounted. You don’t want that one hauling things around, so delivery robots move items between stations. Behind them were autonomous pallet jacks for the heavy work. Tying them together is a fleet management tool and an AI layer that runs all of them. Every robot carries sensors and feeds data back. Phil’s argument for why that matters was the sharpest thing he said all interview. Right now a person does a step and hands the work to the next person, and nobody has real visibility into what happened in between. With robots, you can see the moment a screw went into a board and how long it took. The Las Vegas factory is where they prove it out. Sensor assembly on one line, robot assembly on the others, running by the end of this year. We’re a People Company The rejection Phil got in the early days wasn’t subtle. He’d call a large hospitality group that couldn’t fill its openings after the pandemic, offer them robots, and get laughed at. We’re a people company. He says that’s changed. Not because anyone got excited about it, but because people accepted it was going to happen anyway. I asked about China, since the usual story is that they want robots and we don’t. Phil pushed back on that. He’s ethnically Chinese and he was direct about it. He says regular people in China see robots the same way Americans do, as a threat to their jobs. The difference, he believes, isn’t enthusiasm. It’s that the government and the company owners have the power to install them, and nobody gets asked. In the US we argue about it out loud. The part he keeps coming back to is the speed. He says it’s moving faster than any technology of this magnitude ever has, and that it’s designed to only go faster. Question: Would you want a humanoid robot working in your house? The post Why Make a Robot That Looks Like Us, With Phil Zheng-EP 274 appeared first on Today’s Machining World .

September 8, 202647 min

The Machinist with Purpose, with Doug Rizzo-EP 273

My guest today, Doug Rizzo, has been working in machine shops for over 55 years, and he’s only 62. Doug worked in his father’s company through good times and terrible, and did applications for Doosan . Now, he’s a plant manager by day and runs his own shop for six or seven hours at night. Doug says he loves all of it, from doing applications, to making fixtures, to cleaning oil off machines. He says it’s where he’s meant to be. It’s where he finds flow. ******** Listen on your favorite podcast app using pod.link. . View the podcast at the bottom of this post or on our You Tube 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 ************* Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion! Machinist Since Age 6 Doug Rizzo’s father owned a machine shop. He started on drill presses and Bridgeports at six. At nine he was running an NC-controlled lathe. Summer vacations, weekends, snow days. He was with his dad in the shop, Madison Sprocket and Gear. They ran Acmes, Brown & Sharpes, Wickmans. Many of those machines came from Graff-Pinkert , long before Doug and I ever spoke. Day job, night job Today Doug owns Franklin Lakes Machine , a contract shop with six CNCs in Englewood, New Jersey, ten minutes outside midtown Manhattan. By day he’s plant manager at Lentron Corporation, which makes components for elevators and escalators. At night he does what he calls a Clark Kent costume change and goes to his own shop to get parts out for next-day delivery. Weekends he’s around the New York metro doing applications and setups for other shops. He’s also helped a lot of guys get their own shops off the ground, applications and quoting and tooling, what his father called training wheels. When people ask if he’s arming his competitors, he says there’s enough pie for everybody to have a slice and you can come back for seconds. For now, the day job pays the salary and the insurance, and his own shop is the gravy. He never has to chase a raise. And if he’s tired, he doesn’t go in. The shop he didn’t get Doug worked for his father for about 30 years. Half a career in one building, and he always assumed he’d take it over. His father had a partner, one of Doug’s uncles. After Doug’s mother died, his father didn’t plan for what came next, and someone else came into the picture who didn’t see the business the way Doug did. The business closed in 2009 after roughly 48 years. Doug had power of attorney, so he took two CNC lathes he’d personally uncrated new and never wrecked, and paid a few dollars for them so his father’s partner wouldn’t be short. Then he put them in storage and went to get educated. For three and a half years he took short assignments on purpose. Six months here, six months there. Swiss machines in a medical shop. Boring mills in Pennsylvania. A packaging machinery builder. He was upfront with every one of them about what he was doing and nobody minded. In 2012 he went to Doosan as an applications engineer, and a number of those same shops became Doosan customers he’d walk in and get running. Where he’s supposed to be When there’s no work at his shop, Doug goes in anyway. He wipes down the machines and the toolboxes and sweeps the floor. He calls the shop solace. The sights, the sounds, the smells don’t change from one shop to the next, so walking into any of them feels like walking home. In his office he keeps a coffee maker, the cam software he’s teaching himself, the rocking chair his mother rocked him in, and a photo collage from his father’s 60th birthday. I asked him why he loves it this much. “I’m supposed to be there.” The post The Machinist with Purpose, with Doug Rizzo-EP 273 appeared first on Today’s Machining World .

August 25, 202655 min

This Robot Can Grab a Beer, with George Konidaris-EP 272

Open your fridge and grab a beer without knocking anything else over. It’s usually not hard for a human to do it. But getting a robot to do the same task can take an engineer weeks or months. George Konidaris is a professor of computer science at Brown University, director of the Intelligent Robot Lab, and cofounder of Realtime Robotics. Their technology does that kind of motion planning in minutes instead of weeks, and it’s running on the manufacturing lines of major automakers right now. He was on the show three years ago , when the technology worked in the lab. A lot has changed. The company closed a 45 million dollar Series B and is cash flow positive. (Blog continues below video) ******** Listen on your favorite podcast app using pod.link. . View the podcast at the bottom of this post or on our You Tube 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 ************* Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion! ************* Main Points Grabbing a beer is harder than it looks Real Time came out of research George and his colleagues did on robot motion planning, which is how a robot decides on its own how to move without hitting anything. “There are many ways in which you could reach into your fridge and grab a beer where you would hit the fridge or a beer or knock something over and you don’t do any of those.” You solve that without thinking. For a robot it’s a hard computational problem, and the first paper posing it was written in 1979. What George and his collaborator found was a way to solve it in milliseconds instead of seconds or minutes. The original breakthrough needed a custom processor. It runs in software now. Robots are still stupid, but less so Last time he was on, he told me robots are stupid. I asked if that’s still true. They’re getting smarter and still stupid in surprising ways. Computer vision has genuinely improved. Put a robot in one room and ask it to find the door, then put it in a different room and ask again, and that works now. It used to be brittle. Two and a half years versus five Going from a car design to selling the first hundred thousand units takes an American or European automaker about five years. Chinese automakers do it in two and a half, regularly. The fastest Western car ever was the Tesla Model 3 at roughly three, and George points out that Tesla pre-sold the hundred thousand units and built the factory from scratch. He says the gap has almost nothing to do with robots. “It’s not that they’re using more robots, it’s not that they’re using less people. It’s that the design process of taking the car design and turning it into a factory that produces that car was not efficient.” Western manufacturers work sequentially. Design the car, finish it, then design the factory, then iterate on the work cells. Chinese manufacturers start designing the work cell as soon as the car sketch takes shape and accept that a lot of the work gets thrown out. There are already plenty of robots in traditional American plants. His point is they’re used the same way they were used thirty years ago, because those plants were designed thirty years ago. And established manufacturers aren’t building new plants. Every model means retooling an existing one, which he says is harder than building from nothing. The plan never works the first time This part will sound familiar to anyone who has watched a job go from print to spindle. The work cell gets designed in an office in CAD. Real Time runs the motion planning and tells them what performance to expect. Then it ships to commissioning, where somebody local assembles it with a screwdriver. “Of course it’s not exactly the same as the one in the CAD model. That’s never going to be exactly the same.” The robot moves a little differently than the one in the simulation. You run it and it doesn’t quite work. What changes is what happens next. Instead of bouncing it back to the engineer and waiting weeks, the person standing there adjusts it and reprograms in a few minutes. Will ChatGPT just do this? He gets asked constantly whether an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude will just solve motion planning. His answer is no. That kind of AI learns by studying huge piles of examples and producing something close to what it has seen. Nobody has a pile of examples of robots moving at the absolute edge of what they can do. And close isn’t the standard anyway. “You can’t like mostly not hit stuff. You have to always never hit stuff.” On a line where downtime costs tens of thousands of dollars a minute, a robot that crashes one percent of the time is not one you can install. George’s rule of automation in a factory I asked George what happens to the people in factories as this new technology comes in. He has a rule for it. The more repetitive and predictable a job is, the sooner a robot takes it. That’s why spot welding in a car plant is done by robots but a person still sticks in the cables. It’s why Amazon has machines carry the box to the packing station, but a person packs it, because nobody knows what’s going to be in the next tote. His timeline is slower than most of what you hear. Three to five years before factory design gets partly automated, with no change in what people do versus what robots do. Ten to fifteen years before jobs people do today start moving over. He doesn’t think it’s going to be fast or scary. Slow and incremental, and worth a lot. Serendipity at the MIT Press bookstore, December 8, 2000 For his twenty-first birthday, growing up in Johannesburg, George asked to visit America to look at grad schools. His sister took him. They went to Boston because he wanted to see MIT, and he wandered into the MIT Press bookstore, where his sister told him he could afford to buy one book. He found a book on AI and robotics. He remembers being there on December 8, 2000, because the book’s publication date was December 14. It was an MIT Press book, so the store had it early. He was one of the first few people to buy it. He read it on the flight home and decided he wanted to do a PhD in robotics. Years later he did his postdoc at MIT, and once a week he’d walk into that same bookstore and buy a book, because by then he could buy as many as he wanted. Question: Are you excited about more AI in your shop? The post This Robot Can Grab a Beer, with George Konidaris-EP 272 appeared first on Today’s Machining World .

August 19, 2026Episode 1991 hr 7 min

Best of Swarfcast: A 67-Year Adventure in Swiss Machining Continues, with Paul Huber-EP 199

Today’s guest on the show is Paul Huber, CEO of COMEX, in Monroe Connecticut. Paul is a machinery dealer specializing in cam Swiss automatics. That’s cam Swiss, not CNC. I’m talking about Bechlers, Stroms and Escomatics , not Citizens. Paul is 84, but proudly says feels like he is 60 as he raises his 17-year-old son. He has been working on screw machines for over 67 years, starting as an apprentice in Switzerland. Early in his career, Paul worked as a technician for European screw machine builders. Later, he ran his own production shop in the US. Then he became a machinery dealer and sold some of the very first CNC Swiss machines. For decades, he has rebuilt and sold cam automatic screw machines, specializing in Swiss-type. Paul learned business skills watching his dad wheel and deal as a dairy farmer in Basil, Switzerland. He managed a Jazz group as a teenager. He is a skilled engineer, an astute entrepreneur, a natural at stumbling on serendipity and hell of a story teller. He also loves to speak his mind, which you will see when we discuss the skills gap problem in the United States. So sit back and enjoy our conversation recounting Paul’s life’s journey. You’re going to learn some screw machining history, you’ll laugh, and I think you will get some inspiration for your own journey. I’ve given you some good highlights from the podcast below, but you really need to listen to get the full story! Listen on your favorite podcast app using pod.link , or: View all of our podcasts on our You Tube Channel. Follow us on Social and never miss an update! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/swarfcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swarfcast/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmwswarfblog ************* Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion! Interview Highlights Paul’s Introduction to Screw Machines Noah Graff: How did your career in machining start? Paul Huber: We were seven kids. My dad insisted that each one of us learn a trade as an apprentice. I was in the music business as a manager. I sometimes made more money than my dad, but he still insisted that I take an apprenticeship. At age 17, I started my apprenticeship. Setup, maintenance and everything else related to Swiss screw machining. I was very lucky because the company which hired me as an apprentice needed somebody in the tool room, so my first six months were actually working in the tool room. Graff: How did you feel about it? Did you like it? Huber: Well, that’s the thing. I took that position only because I had my dad behind me ready to kick me in the behind. So I made the decision. Okay, there’s a job like just any other job I’m going to find. And within six months, I was hooked and it became a real challenge. History of Swiss Machining Huber: I failed French in school. So I said, maybe I should go to work in the French part of Switzerland. At least I’ll learn French. I went to Bechler. Graff: Bechler was not bought yet by Tornos at that time? Which Swiss Brand was the first? Huber: Tornos (was first). Bechler, Peterman, and Tornos, all started in Moutier, Switzerland. (Tornos bought Bechler in the ‘70s and bought Peterman before that.) Tornos never had the intention to continue the business of Peterman or Bechler. Tornos was really specialized for the watchmaking business. They really were looking to build smaller machines and higher precision. Bechler was more for all around. For example, the shaft in your blender. The drive shaft in your blender is made on Swiss. The Skills Gap in the United States Graff: So, what’s next for Paul? Huber: Quite frankly, I wish I could say I want to get into education. But I gave up hope. Mainly because we do not have the material to make skilled people. We have lost the ability to educate our young people in the United States. We are now in a situation where the majority of engineers are either foreign born and American educated or educated around the world–Japan, Europe, and they come here. Can you imagine if the manufacturing industry would be like Gene Haas, spending millions of dollars every year for the education of their future users, on workers, on programmers? Can you imagine if all manufacturing firms in the US did that where we would be today? Graff: Thank you so much, Paul. Huber: I’m very happy you gave me the opportunity to speak my mind. I get on some people’s nerves, but I talk fast! Learn more about COMEX . The post Best of Swarfcast: A 67-Year Adventure in Swiss Machining Continues, with Paul Huber-EP 199 appeared first on Today’s Machining World .

August 11, 202639 min

Why Onshoring Is Really Happening, with Lloyd and Noah Graff-EP 271

The first quarter of 2026 stunk for Graff-Pinkert’s used machinery business. But fortunately, in the last few months, we’ve made some really good deals, selling old Davenport and Acme screw machines, as well as some expensive late model CNC multi-spindles. Today, Lloyd Graff and I give our take on why the year unfolded this way and what we predict the machining industry will look like for the rest of the year. We’re optimistic because it seems like onshoring is real and tariff surprises are no longer a surprise. Listen on your favorite podcast app using pod.link . . View the podcast at the bottom of this post or on our You Tube 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 ************* Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion! It’s Hard to Sell Expensive Machines Noah: We purchased an INDEX MS22-8 CNC Multi-Spindle, manufactured 2019, with a partner at an auction. Brand new, that machine goes for over three million. We were asking less than half of new. And the thing is, even though something is worth that, it’s hard to find someone to actually buy it. Lloyd: Who’s to say it’s worth that? It’s worth it if somebody pays it. Noah: We came very close with one company. We were on the one yard line, a very big corporation, but then it went up the rung, at the very end they said, “Well, the machine we already have has four Y-axis, and this only has two Y-axis.” I think it was an excuse to shoot it down. Lloyd: It may very well have been a political battle within the big company. That’s why it’s difficult to sell expensive machines to big companies. It’s also hard to sell to small companies, because small companies don’t have access to that kind of money. Noah: If you’re going to buy a machine that costs over a million dollars, you have to have a job for it. It’s not something you spec on. People might think, all right, maybe I can pay three hundred grand for a used machine. But to pay a million dollars for a used machine, it just doesn’t compute. Even if it’s half price. Even if it’s a third of the price. Noah: So we got creative, and a little serendipity showed up. I was texting with an old customer to offer a different Index we have for sale. Then he says to me, “Hey, I have an idea for a trade for your 2019 machine.” We ended up trading our INDEX for his Tornos MultiSwiss 8×26 , a 2017 with 8,500 cutting hours, plus cash. He really wanted an Index. His MultiSwiss operator is retiring, and his people wanted another Index. Lloyd: And for all we know, we might end up with a trade on that too. Onshoring Is Real Noah: Like them or don’t like them, tariffs are very influential and they’re happening. Is on-shoring finally real? Lloyd: That’s what we’ve been told by our clients. Onshoring is real, because it’s not so much about price. It’s about fear of what prices might be, and it’s about fear of what the Chinese might do, let’s say, if there was an invasion of Taiwan. Noah: We like to use fear of tariffs as an excuse for why people didn’t buy a lot of equipment from us at the beginning of the year. But it seems like now we’ve broken through to some extent. Lloyd: I think so. To some degree, people are being forced to buy, because they have an avalanche of orders. But I also think there’s a genuine fear by big companies that they cannot have crucial production in China. What I’m hearing from clients is their customers are saying, “We’re not worried about price. We’ll accept price raises. What we want is quality, and we want certainty of delivery.” With China, they may be able to get price, but they cannot get certainty of delivery. And, they cannot get certainty of quality. So while China can still undercut United States manufacturers on price, price is not the only thing that dictates decisions. 50 Bucks an Hour and Gila Monster Saliva Noah: What’s a contrarian prediction you have? Lloyd: Fewer and fewer men are deciding to go to college, because they don’t want to accumulate the debt, and they don’t see the opportunities in the jobs they used to get. (It used to be) “I want to be a programmer, I want to be an accountant, I want to be a lawyer.” Those aren’t necessarily great jobs to go into today, particularly if AI is going to take over so much of the white collar world. But what you do have a need for is people who can run factories and people who can work in factories. So my contrarian view is that more and more people are going to go to vocational school and technical school, and you will see a turnaround in the amount of people available for machining. But you will also see the pay for machining work go up dramatically. You’re going to see people routinely making fifty dollars an hour for machining jobs. Noah: If there’s a bigger supply of people who want to do it, wouldn’t that make wages go down? Lloyd: The demand for quality people will continue to be high, and contract manufacturing people will wake up and decide, if I want to hire somebody, I’m going to have to pay them. Lloyd: What do you think is a surprise that’s coming? Noah: I’m not that original with this one. Stephanie and I have made an investment, and we’re going to invest a little bit more, in GLP-1 stocks. Scott Galloway says that in the next ten years GLP-1 technology is going to be a bigger development in the world than AI. Is that true? I don’t know. But every day these GLP-1s seem to do something new that we didn’t think they could do. Lloyd: Do you know how they developed the first GLP-1 drug? Noah: I do not. Lloyd: It came from testing the venom of a Gila monster. It was originally developed for diabetes. Noah: Serendipity. What We’re Using AI For Lloyd: What did you use AI for today? Noah: I took a database of machines and had Claude build a call list for us. We’re purchasing a Star SR32, so now I have a list of customers all organized and ready to work. What deep dark secrets did you use it for? Lloyd: I used it this morning to check how long a CT scan would take, because my wife was going to have a CT scan ahead of hip replacement surgery. Noah: And what did it say? Lloyd: Five to ten minutes. Noah: And how long did it take? Lloyd: Five to ten minutes. She was greatly relieved before she went, knowing that was likely all it would take. Noah: Anything else you’d like to say to the people of the world? I think I’m ready to drop the mic. Lloyd: Live each day. Savor every moment. Noah: Thank you. Let’s do this again soon. The post Why Onshoring Is Really Happening, with Lloyd and Noah Graff-EP 271 appeared first on Today’s Machining World .

August 3, 2026Episode 25010 min

Why We Choke Under Pressure — And How to Fix It-EP 250

We’re on vacation this week. So we’re publishing one of my favorite Blog/Videos that’s been on my mind lately. I highly recommend you watch the video version of this podcast. Click on the link to go to the video. I won a few big matches on my high school Tennis team, but I was never awesome. I never won the big tournaments. What killed me was that I always had more fun and played better in practice than in big matches when pressure made my muscles tight. For the last few months, I’ve been fascinated by a discovery a tennis pro made 50 years ago that’s revolutionizing how people perform under pressure. It started when I listened to “ The Coach in Your Head ,” an episode from Michael Lewis’s “Against the Rules” podcast. Check out the video I made breaking down the whole story on my YouTube channel, I Learned It on a Podcast. We all experience this. Job interviews, presentations, equipment demonstrations. We “play tight” when stakes are high, performing worse at the very things we’ve trained for. Tim Gallwey figured out why this happens. In 1974, he published The Inner Game of Tennis , decades before today’s coaching boom. Like me, he was skilled but didn’t perform his best when it mattered most. While teaching tennis at a country club during summer break, he had a profound realization. Instead of giving a student technical instructions for hitting topspin, Gallwey stayed quiet and just tossed balls for 3-4 minutes. Suddenly, the guy was hitting perfect topspin shots. His next lesson, he told a complete beginner to shut her eyes and see herself hitting the ball. She executed perfectly, naturally doing everything he would have taught her. His realization was simple. Performance isn’t about more instruction. It’s about eliminating mental interference. This method became known as mind coaching. It helps people notice when thoughts create tension and worry, then redirects focus to what’s actually useful. Michael Lewis’s daughter Dixie, a competitive softball player, worked with a mind coach who transformed her brutal self-talk from “don’t screw up” to “loose and aggressive.” When she focused on that positive phrase, her muscles could work instead of being locked up by tension. I’ve started trying to apply the “loose and aggressive” mindset in my daily life. I think about it in my morning routines, content creation, and business negotiations. Recently, teaching my 3-year-old to throw a frisbee, instead of explaining technique, I demonstrated it to him a few times and said “just watch and do it.” In minutes he was doing it–of course in his own way with two hands, but he was really doing it, probably better than if I’d verbally instructed him Today mind coaches work with firefighters developing mental routines for emergencies, executives learning to compete rather than just manage. Perhaps this week, try to feel where you are playing tight. Maybe you’ll notice you’re so focused on not failing that you can’t access what you actually know. Or, if you’re coaching other people, you might ask what they noticed instead of listing what they did wrong. The big puzzle I find is to not let yourself get tight about trying to be loose. It just creates more of the same problem. Question: Do you perform well under pressure? What is your secret? The post Why We Choke Under Pressure — And How to Fix It-EP 250 appeared first on Today’s Machining World .

July 31, 2026Episode 10934 min

Best of Swarfcast: Talking Citizen CNC Swiss Lathes with Marc Klecka – EP 109

Today’s show is the first episode of our new season about Swiss-Type CNC machining. Our guest is Marc Klecka, founder and president of Concentric Corporation , a prominent distributor of Citizen-Cincom CNC Swiss lathes in Cleveland, Ohio. Scroll down to read more and listen to the podcast, or listen with Google Podcasts , Apple Podcasts or your favorite app. Main Points Marc talks about his company, Concentric, which has been distributing Citizen Swiss machines for 31 years and Miyano for 10 years (after Citizen acquired the company). (2:20) Marc gives his “5-year-old explanation” of Swiss CNC Machining (sliding headstock machining). He says the original technology of “Swiss style machining” was developed in Switzerland over a hundred years ago for producing high precision watch components. He says what differentiates CNC Swiss machining from conventional CNC turning is that a CNC Swiss machine grips the part with a collet and also supports the part with a guide bushing. This eliminates the vibration that normally occurs when machining bar on a a conventional CNC lathe. (3:00) Marc says a traditional Swiss part has a length to diameter ratio of 3 to 1 or more because that is the point where you start sacrificing the rigidity and accuracy on a conventional CNC lathe. He tells a story about a Citizen customer who produced a 10-foot part out of aluminum tubing. (4:40) Marc talks about the importance of running ground bar stock on Swiss machines, particularly for running lights-out. However, he says that says in the 31-year history of Concentric, he estimates that only 30% of the material run (in Swiss mode) on the machines he has sold has been ground bar stock. He says it is a misconception that Swiss Style CNC machines are only good for running ground stock. (7:25) Marc says that during 2020 Concentric’s business did ok, but the pandemic made it more difficult to sell machines because it was harder to have in person contact with customers. (11:00) Marc says that there are lots of good brands of machine tools on the market, but he sees the support and service of local distributors as something that sets Citizen apart. He says that many years ago Marubeni Citizen made a point of having all of its local distributors become self-sufficient for servicing customers. He says that all the Citizen sales engineers also are applications engineers. He says it is important to have sales people who can get in the trenches with customers to solve their problems. (12:00) Marc talks about Citizen’s proprietary LFV (low frequency vibration) technology, which is featured in many of the latest models. It enables operators to control the geometry of the chip coming off the machine using the machine’s CNC control. He says this capability is significant for manufacturers who want to do lightly attended or unattended machining. (17:20) Marc talks about the significance of the medical sector for Citizen machines. He explains thread whirling for making long bone screws. He discusses a bone screw that was made on a Citizen featuring a laser that performed a cut on that part while still inside the machine (see video). (21:45) Marc talks about diverse markets where he sees Citizens being used. He says during COVID-19 woodworking has become more popular and Citizen machines are making tools used for the art. Also, he says tattoos have become more popular during the pandemic and Citizen machines are making parts that go into the tattoo gun pens. He says demand continues to grow for parts for the electric car markets. (26:00) Noah asks Marc tell him something he learned the week before. Marc jokes hat he learned it probably was not a great thing to break into the Capital building. He also said that he learned about the new LNS chip conveyors that are being put on some of the newest Citizen machines equipped with LFV technology. (31:00) Question: Which Swiss machine do you prefer to use and why? The post Best of Swarfcast: Talking Citizen CNC Swiss Lathes with Marc Klecka – EP 109 appeared first on Today’s Machining World .

July 21, 202644 min

Can Work Make You Happy? Ask the Russian in Brazil, with Tatiana Koval-EP 270

My guest today teaches happiness for a living. Which is ironic, because she grew up in a country where smiling at a stranger means something is wrong with you. Tatiana Koval spent 15 years as an HR consultant in Russia. When the war in Ukraine started, saying you were against it could put you in jail. Within days, she left the country with her husband and two sons to emigrate to Brazil. This is a conversation about happiness at work, life in Russia, and moving to Brazil, a place where strangers smile, hug, and say good morning in the elevator. ******** Listen on your favorite podcast app using pod.link . . View the podcast at the bottom of this post or on our You Tube 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 ************* Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion! ************* Interview Highlights Losing Everything to Stay Human Russia’s war with Ukraine started February 24, 2022. On March 1, Tatiana and her family were gone. A new law had made it a crime to speak against the war. Most of her clients had government connections, so she lost them. Colleagues cut ties because being associated with her had become dangerous for their businesses. They chose Brazil because of a Facebook post saying Russians could move there and get citizenship. Money matters, she says, “but to stay human for me was much more important.” The Slavic Face In Russia it’s not the norm to smile. If you want respect, you wear a serious face. Tatiana calls it the “Slavic face.” Russians grow up expecting crisis, always ready for something bad to happen. She calls that mindset the opposite of happiness. Looking back at her school and university years, she realizes she fought depression, but she never saw a psychologist. The stigma was too strong. Tatiana holds three university diplomas: mathematics, economics, and communication. None in psychology. Then about 15 years ago she joined a US-based online conference where people were talking about happiness at work. Nobody had ever told her that work could be a path to happiness. She calls it her “wow moment.” She dove into positive psychology, taking courses on Coursera and reading Martin Seligman and Tal Ben-Shahar. What hooked her was Seligman’s famous question: if everything is okay with our lives, could we make them better? Bom Dia in the Elevator In her building in Brazil, neighbors say bom dia in the elevator every day. People smile, hug, and complain plenty too. Community runs deep, in church, in family, at work. In Moscow she lived in the same building for over 15 years and knew two or three of her neighbors. But she pushes back on the idea that everything in Brazil is better. Social trust, she says, is about the same as Russia. She couldn’t go out after dark in her old Russian neighborhood, and she wouldn’t recommend it in most Brazilian cities either. How She Learned to Love Cleaning the House Tatiana uses a method from positive psychology called job crafting: redefining how you see a task. She hated cleaning her house. So she turned it into her hour for podcasts, dancing, and exercise. Now she refuses to let anyone else do it. Understanding Your Why Work becomes a path to happiness when you find the meaning in it. In Tatiana’s projects, one of the most common results is that people finally understand what the company is doing, why, and for whom. In her own business, the goal is not just to make money but to understand what the other person needs and find the true solution. If a solution isn’t right for a client, she says no and points them to someone else. Happiness Is a Skill Tatiana says the tools of positive psychology helped her recover from emigration faster. She had stress, losses, and plenty of negative emotions. But her recovery came much quicker than it would have without the science of happiness. During that period she asked herself every day if she was happy. The answer was yes, because the decision to leave was built on her values. Listen to Tatiana’s podcast, Happy at Work — Coding Happiness into the AI Workplace The post Can Work Make You Happy? Ask the Russian in Brazil, with Tatiana Koval-EP 270 appeared first on Today’s Machining World .

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