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Is an Acme-Gridley the mink coat of machine tools? A well made product that still does a great job, but nobody wants another one. In 2025? No. Not yet. On today’s podcast, Lloyd and I talk about our used machinery business over the last year. We saw one customer drop 20 million for five INDEXs to replace every cam screw machine in their shop. At the same time we sold machines to a multinational automotive supplier who is buying hundreds of Davenport screw machines—many older than me—I’m 45 by the way. ************* Listen on your favorite podcast app using pod.link.     .   View the podcast at the bottom of this post or on our YouTube Channel. Follow us on Social and never miss an update! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/swarfcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swarfcast/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/todays-machining-world Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmwswarfblog ************* Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion! ************* Interview Highlights The Mink Coat Discovery This Thanksgiving, while going through my mother’s closet, my dad found her 40-year-old mink coat in perfect condition. Once worth $10,000, ChatGPT now values it at maybe $250 to a dealer. The discovery sparked an uncomfortable comparison to the cam screw machines in our stock. “Of course, mink means Acmes to me because Acmes helped pay for the mink,” Lloyd reflects. “These are very functional, valuable machines that were running good parts where we bought them and we feel they have value, however… we have to doubt ourselves.” He poses the question that haunts our business: “Let’s say it is 1-5/8” RB-8 Acme. How much money could somebody potentially make on that machine over the course of one year?” He figures $25,000 to $50,000, maybe more with the right job. “We would sell that machine in that price range. Yet we find no buyers. From an economic standpoint, to me that makes no sense.” A Brutal Year The machinery dealing business has been tough this year. While many of our customers’ businesses remained steady, indecision paralyzed buying decisions—particularly around tariffs. “One of the polls I did on LinkedIn asked if indecision because of tariffs caused them to not buy equipment this year.” Fifty percent said that was one reason why they had not bought equipment. And I will never forget this year’s deal from hell. ”We bought a machine in Germany, sold it to a company in the United States, and then BOOM—tariff. We went from an amazing deal to… I’m amazed we didn’t lose money.” I hate tariffs for a lot of reasons. This one was extra personal. The $20 Million Paradox The market presents striking contradictions. One of our customers recently got rid of 30 cam screw machines, selling them for “$2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 a piece,” then spent over $3 million each on INDEX CNC multi-spindles—$20 million total to replace their entire shop floor. “I was shocked,” Lloyd admits. “The question was, are they that much better than a 1” Acme?” I explain the economics: “They make an entirely different kind of part. They make a part that you could make a dollar from where you make 10 cents from an Acme part. Or they’re making $10 on that part, and on the Acme, they were making a quarter.” The new machines can handle medical parts, complex geometries—the kinds of high-margin work that justifies the investment. The Davenport Bet Meanwhile, another customer is betting the opposite way, buying hundreds of Davenports for facilities in Mexico and China. Today’s Davenports have a similar design to their original one from 115 years ago. The company is buying so many they’ve ordered Davenport’s entire production capacity for new machines while simultaneously buying used ones. Good ones, bad ones, anything they can find to rebuild. “There are many uses for small parts as bushings or as inserts or pins,” Lloyd explains. “And if you’re catering to a world market… they’re saying to themselves, we want to tremendously expand our capacity because we believe there is a market there and people have abandoned this market.” The China Question Lloyd sees a broader pattern: “The Chinese appear to be able to make good product, not maybe the quality of product being made in the United States or in Europe, but close to it at a fraction of the price.” He worries about Chinese companies producing chips “90 to 95% as good” as NVIDIA’s but selling for 30% less. “They’re able to make an electric car now in China and sell it in the Chinese market for under $10,000, and they’re selling them now in Germany for as low as $16,000.” “In my mind, we’re in a war with China—an economic war.” Gratitude We end where we began—with gratitude. “I get the privilege of working with you,” Lloyd tells me. And I tell him that I have a gratitude list every day in the morning, and he’s on it. Readers, listeners out there—In an industry facing profound disruption, all I can say is adapt, keep picking up the phone and stay grateful. Even if you’re selling machines that might be the mink coats of manufacturing. Question: What machines did you purchase or get rid of in 2025?

Today I’m talking to a guy who believes every company needs to be built to last—not just to flip. Neil Lansing is a turnaround specialist who left private equity to bet his own money on small, underperforming businesses. He’s taken companies from 18 employees to over 400. From $2 million to $40-50 million in revenue. And when everyone else was laying people off in 2008, he told his refrigeration company’s team: “We need more clients.” After transforming mom-and-pop service companies one after another, he found his final stop, Piedmont Machine & Manufacturing. At 67, he’s not looking for the next flip. He’s building something that will outlast him. ************* Listen on your favorite podcast app using pod.link.     .   View the podcast at the bottom of this post or on our YouTube Channel. Follow us on Social and never miss an update! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/swarfcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swarfcast/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/todays-machining-world Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmwswarfblog ************* Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion! ************* Interview Highlights The Journey from Satellites to Shop Floors Neil started as a satellite engineer at Hughes Aircraft, became a CFO of a publicly traded pharmaceutical company, then worked in private equity doing turnarounds and startups. But eventually he walked away from working with other people’s money to bet his own cash on small businesses. It wasn’t an easy mental shift. As he told me: “I remember the first time I did something. I was sitting there and I remember, now I’m not in corporate America, I’m not in these nice New York digs… I’m in some place where it’s like, my God, what did I get myself into?” But then he told himself: “Quit crying, figure it out, make it work.” The Five-Person Rule One of Neil’s key insights is his management structure. Nobody has more than five direct reports. Not supervisors, not managers, not even Neil as owner. This tight span of control is how he grew his refrigeration company from 10-18 people to over 400 in six years while maintaining quality and accountability. “Everyone has to do what we’re supposed to do,” he explains. “If we all do what we’re supposed to do and take the accountability of what we’re supposed to do, then it can work.” Growing When Others Retreat The 2008 financial crisis tested every business owner, but Neil’s response was counterintuitive. While the country was laying off 700,000 people a month, he gathered his top 10 guys and said: “We’ve just got to get more clients.” By Christmas, they were bringing in all new work. Then their existing clients–Target, Publix, Costco – suddenly needed massive expansions. Neil went from laying off 40-50 people to desperately hiring them back plus another 40-50 more. Why Manufacturing, Why Now After several successful turnarounds, Neil decided manufacturing would be his next chapter. He bought Piedmont Machine in Concord, North Carolina, seeing opportunity where others saw decline. The company does Swiss machining for smaller diameter work and can handle parts up to 30 inches in diameter—from roller bearing components for landing gear to automated door systems. He envisions growing his company to 80-100 employees, consolidating into a new 60-75,000 square foot facility, and implementing comprehensive training programs. The Grinder’s Legacy Neil calls himself a “grinder” – someone focused on day-to-day execution rather than just deal-making. His philosophy centers on personal responsibility: “If I don’t do what I’m supposed to do, then I can’t pay these people. And if I can’t pay these people, that means that we did it wrong.” What drives someone to keep grinding at 67? Neil says it’s about legacy, not money. “Everything I’ve done, it still works. It still runs. If I do something and it goes under or it stops being in existence, then I feel like that’s not a good legacy. That means I didn’t do it right.” Neil doesn’t know how to run a machine and doesn’t want to. He knows how to run a business with clear strategy, deep understanding of people, and balls, and he’s still betting big because that’s what real builders do.

Our guest on the podcast today is Shawn Gaskin, owner of Swiss Technologies of New England and Stone Medical in Plainville, Massachusetts. Shawn started Swiss Technologies over 20 years ago, with one L20 Citizen making parts out of sterling silver for Tiffany and Company. Over the years, his company has grown into a diversified shop, doing a significant amount of medical work. If you want to learn about the medical Swiss components business I recommend you check out this interview. Scroll down to read more and listen to the podcast. Or listen on your phone with Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app.     Follow us on Social and never miss an update! Facebook: https://lnkd.in/dB_nzFzt Instagram: https://lnkd.in/dcxjzVyw Twitter: https://lnkd.in/dDyT-c9h Main Points After high school, Shawn worked for a friend of his dad’s who owned a jewelry factory. The company purchased a Citizen L20 Type V Swiss lathe to make parts out of sterling silver for Tiffany and Company, which went into items like key rings, pill boxes and whistles. Shawn characterizes machining sterling silver as across between machining aluminum and titanium. It produces chips like aluminum and the has the abrasiveness of titanium.  The jewelry company rented space for the Citizen in a nearby machine shop, where Shawn was tasked with learning to run it. After several years, Shawn’s boss gave him the opportunity to find more work for the Citizen, giving him a 15% commission on what he brought in. Eventually, Shawn started his own company, borrowing $40,000 from his parents and $80,000 from his former boss, who he then supplied parts for. He built Swiss Technologies starting with the original 1997 Citizen he had learned on.  Eventually, the jewelry job slowed down, so he was forced to find new work. He caught a huge break getting a job running parts that went into ATM machines. In a single purchase order, Swiss Technologies went from doing $450,000 in sales to $2.4 million. Unfortunately 60% of the company’s business came from one customer. In 2015, when the ATM machines got a new design, the work went to China, taking away 35% the company’s revenue. Shawn knew he needed to diversify, so he increased Swiss Technologies’ sales and marketing and obtained ISO 9001 certification, which increased the company’s customer opportunities. In 2018, the company obtained ISO 13485 certification for medical work. Shawn characterizes this big move into medical as an overhauling of the business. Medical Swiss Parts Business Swiss Technologies got its first medical job when a shop nearby had an overflow of work. Shawn says he realized medical work was a good place to be when he went from jobbing machines at $50-$60 per hour to $125-$150 per hour.  Shawn says Medical work is generally categorized as external or internal. External medical work signifies making parts for medical devices such as IV pumps or syringes, while internal medical work refers to implantables, parts that are put into the body, such as bone screws.  He says external medical work is lucrative, but internal medical work is generally more lucrative. Doing internal medical work requires significant investment, such as purchasing liability insurance. As a company doing $3.5 million in revenue with 17 employees, Shawn says he pays around $25,000 per year for insurance, and there are only four or five companies who offer the insurance.  Often medical customers want suppliers to have all of their processes in-house, such as anodizing, passivating, deburring, and laser marking. Swiss Technologies and Shawn’s other company Stone Medical don’t offer all of those services, which adds to the challenge of competing in the medical parts arena. Advice for companies wanting to get into Swiss Machining Shawn says “bigger is not always better” for a Swiss machining company. He thinks a company can be successful with three or four employees and four to six machines. He encourages ambitious people to not be afraid to start with one machine making parts in the garage because there is a lot of work out there for companies who have low overhead.  For companies trying to break into medical work, he recommends trying to get Tier 2 work to begin with. Shawn says if he could go back and time and do things differently at his business he would have trained his people better. When he was making high volume parts for ATM machines, the shop’s machines needed few change-overs, so his people didn’t develop their skills setting up new jobs. He says today he has the best crew the company has ever had. He makes a point of training his people to think independently by giving them time to struggle with problems in shop, even if it means machines are down sometimes. Shawn says he usually gets on the shop floor two and half to three hours a day. He says it’s good to show his employees he is with them in the trenches, to help them solve problems and for him to understand what is going on in the shop. But more than that, he is on the shop floor because of his passion for Swiss machining. He loves the equipment and the processes. He needs to get his hands covered in oil like he did when he started on his first L20, which is still in use today.  Question: What are your favorite type of parts to make?

Our guest on today’s podcast is Elliott May, engineer at BME in Port Huron, Michigan. BME builds original custom attachments for cam multi-spindles. They also rebuild Acme-Gridley screw machines. Elliott and I talked about a lot of fascinating things in this interview. How to keep old mechanical beasts relevant, getting young people into machining, and what it’s like to work closely everyday with your dad—who’s also the boss. Scroll down to read more and listen to the podcast. Or listen on your phone with Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Find us on Social: 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 Main Points Custom Attachments Elliott says that customers come to BME when they want to make a part on a cam screw machine but can’t figure out how to make it happen. The company offers an extensive line of proprietary attachments such air operated pickoff assemblies, rotary recess attachments, and synchronized slotting/milling attachments.  Elliott’s father, Brett, started BME 15 years ago. Nine years ago, Elliott started working at the company at age 14. His first job was cutting steel bars with a bandsaw. Later he worked in shipping and receiving, and then graduated to assembling attachments for multi-spindles. After studying engineering for a few years he began working in tandem with his father engineering attachments. Generally they are tasked with tweaking attachments already in their product line to suit the jobs of specific customers. A few times a year, they are called upon to engineer more novel devices, when a customer’s job calls for something special that they haven’t invented yet. Elliott says his father, Brett, is the “idea guy.” Brett analyzes what he wants to accomplish, then Elliott puts the idea down on paper (often CAD). They both are constantly putting their heads together to solve problems. It’s not uncommon for the two to stand at several whiteboards for long periods of time, brainstorming various drawings, trying to work out a solution. Elliott says they have a good chemistry at work, and over the years his role has changed as his knowledge and skills have grown. He admits that when he was younger and less experienced he may have been too overconfident in his ideas and he had to be put in his place. But nowadays, it sounds like he is genuinely challenging his dad in the engineering room. Acme Rebuilding  As a used machinery dealer myself, selling old cam multi-spindles, I grilled Elliott on a lot of the same questions we grapple with at Graff-Pinkert, our family business. I asked him if rebuilding old multi-spindles from the ground up, particularly Acmes, was a good business to be in. Graff-Pinkert still refurbishes some cam multi-spindles such as Wickmans and Davenports, but the work we do is much less comprehensive than that of BME. Also, we stay away from doing a lot of work on Acmes. The parts for Acmes can be very expensive, and the Acme rebuilding process is extremely labor intensive. For a rebuilt Acme, BME charges several hundred thousand dollars. The price depends a lot on what kind of turnkey the customer requires, if any. Elliott says the rebuilding and attachment businesses compliment each other. Often the rebuilt machines come equipped with BME’s proprietary attachments. He says he believes the cam multi-spindle business has a significant future because the machines are often still the best option for high volume jobs, assuming companies have the personnel to run them. Elliott May, Engineer at BME Young People in Machining  I asked Elliott why it’s a struggle to get young people to go into manufacturing and an even greater struggle to get them to run old multi-spindles. He says manufacturing has to shake off its bad reputation from the past, as having a top-down style of management that doesn’t care about the needs of employees. He suggests that if manufacturing employees could count on a clean, pleasant work environment, and felt supported and heard by management, more people would want to go into the field.  Working with His Dad I was very curious to get Elliott’s perspective about working closely with his father, as I also work with my father. I asked him if he felt like he was in a strange position as someone who is not the boss, but also not a normal employee either. It’s a position that I’ve often analyzed for over a decade.  Despite being only 23, Elliott says he has the advantage of having the longest tenure at BME of all its employees. He also says because of his experience and confidence in his ability, he earns the respect of his coworkers. I remarked to him during the interview that he often referred to his dad in the third person as “Brett,” rather than “my dad.” He says it’s a useful way to draw less attention to himself as the boss’s son, even if everybody knows he is. I personally have seldom used this strategy because referring to my dad as “Lloyd” just feels strange. But I admit that I sometimes refer to him as “the boss,” or some other euphemism, when I’m talking about him at work. It was Brett’s idea for me to ask Elliott to be on the podcast. I could genuinely feel his enthusiasm about the idea when he suggested it to me over the phone. I joked to him that it seemed like he was really “kvelling” about his son excelling in the business. He easily inferred the meaning of my Yiddish.  After interviewing both Brett and Elliott, it’s clear to me that both men share a passion for the nuts and bolts, and working together. Question: What’s something important you learned from your father?

Most of us don’t have a knack for pivoting.  We follow the standard curriculum, and we keep going forward when we get in a lane, whether we believe it’s the right direction or not. But for Michael Gimbel, my guest on today’s show, seeing setbacks as serendipity and then pivoting is a natural gift. Michael built a CNC router in his garage by age 12. He dropped out of an elite university after one year to start a company selling 3D printing technology that he invented. When the company failed, he picked up the pieces, shifting to contract manufacturing and engineering consulting. But that business didn’t excite him, so Michael pivoted again to manufacture a spindle gripper he developed for automating his own vertical CNC mills. Today his company, Gimbel Automation, is thriving and his spindle grippers are saving machining companies hundreds of thousands of dollars on automation. And he’s only 26! ************* Listen on your favorite podcast app using pod.link.        View the podcast at the bottom of this post or on our YouTube Channel. Follow us on Social and never miss an update! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/swarfcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swarfcast/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/todays-machining-world Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmwswarfblog ************* Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion! ************* Interview Highlights The Startup Noah: Tell me about your interesting career journey. Michael: I got to college and was totally miserable. I was doing things I’d already studied and aced because they wanted me to. It was such a downgrade from the equipment. The only thing I could fit in my dorm was a little 3D printer. I went from having a full shop to just a couple of crappy pieces of equipment, taking courses I’d already taken. I got burnt out and chose to drop out after a year. To be honest, I felt like I wanted to do my own thing. Hopkins is good for the right person, but it wasn’t me. You have to want to follow everything from A to B to C by the book, believing in the process. I’m the kind of person who wants to try everything, see what I can do, and see where I fail. It’s not a place that curates failure on your own, and that’s what I really needed. Noah: Interesting. So you decided to leave after freshman year? Michael: I completed freshman year, dropped out, and convinced six or seven professors to give me about $70 grand as startup seed money. Then I moved to Los Angeles and raised venture capital. I raised about 1.25 million dollars as a 19-year-old with just a dream, a plan, and a couple of experimental 3D printers. I had invented a new 3D printing process. From there, it was its own wild ride. Noah: Then what happened? Michael: What happened was exactly what you’d expect when you hand a million dollars to a 19-year-old. I tried to run the company, but I didn’t know what I was doing. We made cool tech developments, but I didn’t understand how to manage people or how to get things to the next level. Ultimately, that first company failed. Contract Manufacturing and Engineering Consulting Noah: What came next? Michael: There’s a long, convoluted path to my next stage. The company’s assets traded hands a couple of times. The original investors didn’t want anything to do with it because it was a money pit. Eventually, it came into my hands and I ended up paying off all the debts. I had the idea to run a job shop or contract manufacturer again, to have all these machines in this space for my next chapter. I’d looked for jobs but couldn’t get behind anything, thinking I’d fall into building someone else’s dream. I wanted to build my own thing, even if it was difficult. And it was definitely difficult. I started doing job shop work for startups. I learned quickly that startups are awful customers because most don’t exist in a year or two. We slowly moved into engineering consulting. The startup company was 3D printing, but to do our own R&D, we had machines – a water jet, a Haas CNC machine. I thought, we need to make money now, so we’ll do job shop work. That’s how we started and how I paid off the debts at first. We then moved into engineering consulting and production work, like specialty stuff and art. We were doing all the stuff other shops didn’t want to do because it wasn’t full production quantities and was complicated. We took on customers who didn’t have drawings but needed certain requirements. We grew rapidly, doubling in size every year. We quickly built up to four people. Everything was great. We were mostly in engineering consulting, not only making parts but designing components, putting assemblies together, and testing them. Then COVID hit, turning our whole business upside down. 90% of the revenue disappeared. I had to lay off two people and put one part-time. This was the only time I ever laid people off. We started making face shields for a while and found a way through. It took a year and a half, but the engineering consults came back. People had projects they wanted to accelerate. The year felt like a rocket ship. Right after COVID, we won a big engineering consulting job that added 35% to our revenue overnight. Then it happened again with another customer. We were growing really fast, but you also have the tension of having one huge customer and working around their demands. Before the breakthrough, there was another “Icarus flies too close to the sun” moment. I didn’t really love consulting. It never made me excited to wake up in the morning. We had a four-month R&D project where we lost about $350,000 developing a metal 3D printing system. I was convinced it would be great. We built it, it worked, the machinery was awesome, but when we tried to test it in the market, it failed. I was a bit bored and looking for shiny objects to work on, but the big thing in my head was needing stable, recurring revenue in addition to these big customers. I really wanted a product. I think a lot of job shops have felt that. I’d been working on projects when bored for years. I once built an all-metal operational clock with a swinging arm. We built a shrink fit machine with virtual holders. One of the things we’d built was a spindle gripper to run internal production on our own components. The Spindle Gripper Gimbel Automation CNC Robot Gripper Noah: Explain how the spindle gripper works. Michael: A spindle gripper goes into the automatic tool changer of your machine, loading into the spindle like a tool. This whole sub-assembly goes into your spindle, and when air is turned on, it closes. This allows it, like a robot gripper, to grab a component. Parts are loaded onto the table in a tray on a grid. The gripper comes down, clamps on a part in the grid, lifts up, and drops it off in an automated vise. It does this without an external robot. We invented a new method for machines without through spindle air coolant, which is a huge portion of the market. We soft launched it and sold quite a few. We started with a couple big customers who liked what we were doing. We’ve exponentially grown the automation business from there, adding air vises, a conveyor loading system, and modules. Lately, we’ve focused on delivering total automation solutions. Noah: You came up with this because you were short on people? Michael: When I invented it, there were four of us, but I was the only one who could run a CNC machine. For production orders, I had to either turn them away or do them myself. It was built out of necessity – I needed a way to run parts. We used it for years before turning it into a product, which is now our primary business. Noah: It’s a gripper that hooks onto the spindle. How is it automation? The part still has to get in the machine. Don’t you need a robot, person, or loading system? Michael: We put at least one piece of automated work holding, like an air vise, onto the table, and have a fully adjustable part tray grid. You need room for a vise and a tray, and one of these grippers goes in the spindle. You set the vise, and using our program generator or automated templates, you upload your program. It’s as easy to program a run of 20 as it is for your setup guy to run one part. When you hit go, the generated program moves the table so the tray of parts is perfectly under the gripper. The gripper comes down, clamps a part, lifts up, centers over the vise, deposits the part, and the machining cycle runs. For a simple one-operation pallet system, we put that part back and move to the next one. The machine keeps going until the tray is empty. We’ve taken it further with a system using a second vise for the second operation and an integrated flip station for a third operation in the same cycle. Questions: When did you pivot in your business or life? What would you like to pivot to? Transcript was generated with the assistance of claud.ai.

Is an Acme-Gridley the mink coat of machine tools? A well made product that still does a great job, but nobody wants another one. In 2025? No. Not yet. On today’s podcast, Lloyd and I talk about our used machinery business over the last year. We saw one customer drop 20 million for five INDEXs to replace every cam screw machine in their shop. At the same time we sold machines to a multinational automotive supplier who is buying hundreds of Davenport screw machines—many older than me—I’m 45 by the way. ************* Listen on your favorite podcast app using pod.link.     .   View the podcast at the bottom of this post or on our YouTube Channel. Follow us on Social and never miss an update! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/swarfcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swarfcast/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/todays-machining-world Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmwswarfblog ************* Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion! ************* Interview Highlights The Mink Coat Discovery This Thanksgiving, while going through my mother’s closet, my dad found her 40-year-old mink coat in perfect condition. Once worth $10,000, ChatGPT now values it at maybe $250 to a dealer. The discovery sparked an uncomfortable comparison to the cam screw machines in our stock. “Of course, mink means Acmes to me because Acmes helped pay for the mink,” Lloyd reflects. “These are very functional, valuable machines that were running good parts where we bought them and we feel they have value, however… we have to doubt ourselves.” He poses the question that haunts our business: “Let’s say it is 1-5/8” RB-8 Acme. How much money could somebody potentially make on that machine over the course of one year?” He figures $25,000 to $50,000, maybe more with the right job. “We would sell that machine in that price range. Yet we find no buyers. From an economic standpoint, to me that makes no sense.” A Brutal Year The machinery dealing business has been tough this year. While many of our customers’ businesses remained steady, indecision paralyzed buying decisions—particularly around tariffs. “One of the polls I did on LinkedIn asked if indecision because of tariffs caused them to not buy equipment this year.” Fifty percent said that was one reason why they had not bought equipment. And I will never forget this year’s deal from hell. ”We bought a machine in Germany, sold it to a company in the United States, and then BOOM—tariff. We went from an amazing deal to… I’m amazed we didn’t lose money.” I hate tariffs for a lot of reasons. This one was extra personal. The $20 Million Paradox The market presents striking contradictions. One of our customers recently got rid of 30 cam screw machines, selling them for “$2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 a piece,” then spent over $3 million each on INDEX CNC multi-spindles—$20 million total to replace their entire shop floor. “I was shocked,” Lloyd admits. “The question was, are they that much better than a 1” Acme?” I explain the economics: “They make an entirely different kind of part. They make a part that you could make a dollar from where you make 10 cents from an Acme part. Or they’re making $10 on that part, and on the Acme, they were making a quarter.” The new machines can handle medical parts, complex geometries—the kinds of high-margin work that justifies the investment. The Davenport Bet Meanwhile, another customer is betting the opposite way, buying hundreds of Davenports for facilities in Mexico and China. Today’s Davenports have a similar design to their original one from 115 years ago. The company is buying so many they’ve ordered Davenport’s entire production capacity for new machines while simultaneously buying used ones. Good ones, bad ones, anything they can find to rebuild. “There are many uses for small parts as bushings or as inserts or pins,” Lloyd explains. “And if you’re catering to a world market… they’re saying to themselves, we want to tremendously expand our capacity because we believe there is a market there and people have abandoned this market.” The China Question Lloyd sees a broader pattern: “The Chinese appear to be able to make good product, not maybe the quality of product being made in the United States or in Europe, but close to it at a fraction of the price.” He worries about Chinese companies producing chips “90 to 95% as good” as NVIDIA’s but selling for 30% less. “They’re able to make an electric car now in China and sell it in the Chinese market for under $10,000, and they’re selling them now in Germany for as low as $16,000.” “In my mind, we’re in a war with China—an economic war.” Gratitude We end where we began—with gratitude. “I get the privilege of working with you,” Lloyd tells me. And I tell him that I have a gratitude list every day in the morning, and he’s on it. Readers, listeners out there—In an industry facing profound disruption, all I can say is adapt, keep picking up the phone and stay grateful. Even if you’re selling machines that might be the mink coats of manufacturing. Question: What machines did you purchase or get rid of in 2025?

Last week, I heard a story about an old customer of Graff-Pinkert who lost three key machinists because a shop down the street was paying more. It led me to make a post on Linkedin, asking if machinists and setup people were paid enough to attract young people to the machining field. On the whole, commenters vented that they were not compensated what they felt they deserved working in the machining industry.  The post has 53 comments so far (I’m usually lucky to get one). The big question is, are manufacturing jobs in the United States, machining jobs in particular, attractive enough to fill the labor shortage that everyone continues to cry about? I thought back to one of my favorite podcast interviews, in which I spoke to Adam Wiltsie of Vanamatic, a 3-generation screw machine shop in Delphos, Ohio. In the interview, Adam told me that Vanamatic does not have a talent shortage and enjoys incredible employee retention, in part due to innovative recruitment strategies and flexible schedules.  I don’t know what the company pays its employees, but Adam told me that when business came roaring back after the Covid-19 dive in 2020, Vanamatic raised wages $5 for all employees. I spoke with Adam yesterday and he said that employee retention is even better than it was two years ago. Even if you’ve memorized this story already, I recommend you check out the original blog and listen to the podcast. They’re good even a second time around! Listen with the player at the bottom of the page or at your favorite podcast app.                                                                                                  View the podcast our YouTube Channel. Follow us on Social and never miss an update! Facebook: https://lnkd.in/dB_nzFzt Instagram: https://lnkd.in/dcxjzVyw Twitter: https://lnkd.in/dDyT-c9h Original Blog After Graff-Pinkert sold a second used Lico CNC lathe to Vanamatic, a 3-generation screw machine shop in Delphos, Ohio, I had a great conversation with Adam Wiltsie, the company’s Director of Operations. At that moment, I was quite envious of Adam—I was sitting at my desk in my office, while he was outside on a beautiful July Friday afternoon, waiting in line his local ice cream institution Dairy Hut. Adam gets out of the office on Friday afternoons. He gets to tailor his work schedule, and contrary to what one might assume, this is not just a perk for members of the company’s leadership team. Vanamatic allows a flexible work schedule for all its 103 employees. Adam says this is a key reason why the company has not been suffering from a shortage of skilled people, that so many other manufacturing companies often complain about. In fact, 103 employees is a record number for the company, which happens to be located in a town of 6,000 people. Vanamatic was founded in 1953 by Adam’s grandfather in Delphos, Ohio. Today, the company is run by a leadership team made up of Adam, his brothers Scott and Jared, Steve Schroeder and Dave Ricker. The company makes parts for a variety of sectors including automotive, aerospace, fluid power, agriculture, construction, fittings, and refrigeration. The majority of its machines are 8-Spindle VNA Conomatics— 1-5/8” and 2-5/8” capacity. For those unfamiliar with Conomatics, or “Cones” as they’re often called, think of an ACME-GRIDLEY but heavier and a larger tool zone. Adam says the company loves the machines because “they can push feed rates like no other.” Cones aren’t built anymore so Vanamatic has its own rebuilding program for the machines. The company also has CNC turning centers, a few other brands of multi-spindles, and 10 Lico CNC lathes—picture a sexy, beefed up 11-axis CNC Brown & Sharpe.  Adam is 42 years old, with three kids. He says having kids influenced his management style because it made him realize that every person works differently. Vanamatic’s management philosophy takes into account that all of the company’s employees have different requirements to bring out their peak performance and make them happy. Treating every individual employee uniquely bucks the traditional collective style of management in manufacturing companies, which Vanamatic had employed for the majority of the company’s life. Adam Wiltsie, Director of Operations of Vanamatic A while back, Adam and his brother Scott, head of Human Resources, implemented a management strategy called Start, Stop, Improve. Every year, they sit with each individual employee and ask them what they would start, stop or improve on a company level, a department level and an individual level. In the process, they learned that many people at the company desired a better work-life balance. They realized that by implementing flexible hours they could improve the lives of employees who prefer to be with their families at different times of day. Flexible hours could also accommodate employees who have hobbies or outside projects they want to pursue. For most of Vanamatic’s existence, the company had a standard work week for every employee, of four 10-hour days and one 8-hour day. Fifteen years ago, the collective model was thrown out. Currently, all shop employees, aside from primary production operators, have the choice to work between 35 to 50 hours per week. Primary production operators can work 45 to 60 hours per week. Employees have the right to work within those ranges at their discretion without approval from supervisors. Every two weeks, the company takes a look at what work needs to be done and maps out a plan. Shop workers manage schedules amongst themselves to get the necessary work completed. In the past, some of Vanamatic’s customers came to the company and demanded it implement a policy making its people work a minimum of 56 to 60 hours per week, but it refused to change its policy. Adam says loyal, happy, skilled employees are the essential element to keep the company successful, so it can’t afford to alienate or lose them. They take precedence over an annoyed customer. Vanamatic’s management philosophy was a lifesaver in May of 2020, when its business fell 50%. The company gave its employees the choice to work 0 to 50 hours per week. It even laid off employees if they volunteered to be and then helped them sign up for unemployment benefits. When work came roaring back later in 2020, Vanamatic needed to get all of its people back fast. Instead of complaining about unfair competition against government assistance money, the company raised wages $5 above what workers were previously earning. Employees came back and felt valued. Now they are fueling Vanamatic to set a record pace for the company in 2021. Question: Are machining jobs in the United States attractive enough to fill the labor shortage that everyone continues to cry about?

Today I’m talking to a guy who believes every company needs to be built to last—not just to flip. Neil Lansing is a turnaround specialist who left private equity to bet his own money on small, underperforming businesses. He’s taken companies from 18 employees to over 400. From $2 million to $40-50 million in revenue. And when everyone else was laying people off in 2008, he told his refrigeration company’s team: “We need more clients.” After transforming mom-and-pop service companies one after another, he found his final stop, Piedmont Machine & Manufacturing. At 67, he’s not looking for the next flip. He’s building something that will outlast him. ************* Listen on your favorite podcast app using pod.link.     .   View the podcast at the bottom of this post or on our YouTube Channel. Follow us on Social and never miss an update! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/swarfcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swarfcast/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/todays-machining-world Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmwswarfblog ************* Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion! ************* Interview Highlights The Journey from Satellites to Shop Floors Neil started as a satellite engineer at Hughes Aircraft, became a CFO of a publicly traded pharmaceutical company, then worked in private equity doing turnarounds and startups. But eventually he walked away from working with other people’s money to bet his own cash on small businesses. It wasn’t an easy mental shift. As he told me: “I remember the first time I did something. I was sitting there and I remember, now I’m not in corporate America, I’m not in these nice New York digs… I’m in some place where it’s like, my God, what did I get myself into?” But then he told himself: “Quit crying, figure it out, make it work.” The Five-Person Rule One of Neil’s key insights is his management structure. Nobody has more than five direct reports. Not supervisors, not managers, not even Neil as owner. This tight span of control is how he grew his refrigeration company from 10-18 people to over 400 in six years while maintaining quality and accountability. “Everyone has to do what we’re supposed to do,” he explains. “If we all do what we’re supposed to do and take the accountability of what we’re supposed to do, then it can work.” Growing When Others Retreat The 2008 financial crisis tested every business owner, but Neil’s response was counterintuitive. While the country was laying off 700,000 people a month, he gathered his top 10 guys and said: “We’ve just got to get more clients.” By Christmas, they were bringing in all new work. Then their existing clients–Target, Publix, Costco – suddenly needed massive expansions. Neil went from laying off 40-50 people to desperately hiring them back plus another 40-50 more. Why Manufacturing, Why Now After several successful turnarounds, Neil decided manufacturing would be his next chapter. He bought Piedmont Machine in Concord, North Carolina, seeing opportunity where others saw decline. The company does Swiss machining for smaller diameter work and can handle parts up to 30 inches in diameter—from roller bearing components for landing gear to automated door systems. He envisions growing his company to 80-100 employees, consolidating into a new 60-75,000 square foot facility, and implementing comprehensive training programs. The Grinder’s Legacy Neil calls himself a “grinder” – someone focused on day-to-day execution rather than just deal-making. His philosophy centers on personal responsibility: “If I don’t do what I’m supposed to do, then I can’t pay these people. And if I can’t pay these people, that means that we did it wrong.” What drives someone to keep grinding at 67? Neil says it’s about legacy, not money. “Everything I’ve done, it still works. It still runs. If I do something and it goes under or it stops being in existence, then I feel like that’s not a good legacy. That means I didn’t do it right.” Neil doesn’t know how to run a machine and doesn’t want to. He knows how to run a business with clear strategy, deep understanding of people, and balls, and he’s still betting big because that’s what real builders do.

Our guest on today’s podcast is Joe Bennett, Vice President of Sales at Seaway Bolt and Specials, a privately held cold heading company in Columbia Station, Ohio, founded in 1957. In the cold heading process, coiled steel is cut into slugs, which are then hit multiple times, ultimately pounding them into a desired shape. The cold heading process is capable of producing several hundred pieces per minute. Some cold-headed products are net shaped blanks that are shipped to machining companies who then finish the parts. Scroll down to read more and listen to the podcast. Or listen on your phone with Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app.   Main Points Seaway has historically focused on cold heading one product family, taper threaded pipe plugs ranging from 1/16” to 2” diameter. The pipe plugs are used in a wide variety of industries such as automotive, oil and gas, and agriculture, going into products like transmissions, pumps, compressors, and engines. Joe describes a threaded pipe plug as an inside out nut. It looks like a nut, but its threads are on the outside. They are produced by cold heading a blank followed by thread rolling. Seaway produces 100 million pipe plugs a year, exporting 30% of its production. A few years ago, the company decided it needed to make a new part family if it wanted to keep growing. Its team decided the logical course would be to cold head female tubular fittings to match its male pipe plugs.   To cold head its pipe plugs, Seaway uses machines called nut formers. To make the new tubular parts the company purchased three machines called parts formers, which have the capability to make more highly engineered parts than nut formers. Joe says the new machines stand two stories high, have the footprint of three conference rooms and weigh 400,000 pounds each. <span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span> The used machines cost several million dollars to purchase and will take millions more to rebuild. Joe says National produced around 18 of the type of 1.5” cold heading machines Seaway purchased. GM was their original owner, buying them new in the 1970s.  Prior to working at Seaway, Joe worked in sales for 10 years at a large cold headed parts distributor in the Columbus, Ohio, area. Six years ago, he took a job at Seaway because he preferred to work for a privately held, smaller company with around 70 employees, where he felt he could make a significant impact.  Joe beams about Seaway’s philosophy of running the company with a “first class” management style. He and the company’s owner, Ray Gurnick, offered to cover a roundtrip plane fare for me to come to the company and interview them in person. I unfortunately had to take a raincheck. Seaway pays 100 percent of higher eduction costs for its employees. The company has three holiday parties a year and regularly brings in food trucks to celebrate company achievements. It offers profit-sharing and gives regular bonuses. Its shop bathroom has been redone in marble.  Seaway uses open book management, showing its employees the company’s financials on a quarterly basis. The purpose of open book management is to keep employees invested in the company’s success and guide them how do their jobs in the best way to maximize productivity. Also, including employees in the management process makes them feel valued, which can boost performance and satisfaction. Every Friday, production at Seaway stops for the last half hour of the day so employees can clean the shop–cold heading shops happen to be notoriously filthy. Afterward, the quality department takes photos around the shop and reports to the various departments how well they cleaned up. Joe says that when visitors come to Seaway they are wowed by the shop’s cleanliness, but more importantly, the cleanliness creates a pleasant working environment for Seaway’s people. Though Seaway is ambitiously expanding its product lines, the company does not aspire to be like its larger competitors. Joe says the company’s strategy is to do all the little things better than its competition. This will attract the best talent to work there, which in the end will lead to success. Question: If you could buy any new equipment for your shop, what would you buy?

The last six months I’ve been using AI to help me with everything from business negotiations to dealing with my kid’s pneumonia. It’s become a daily part of how I operate—at work and at home. The big difference between it and just googling is that you have a conversation with it. Check out the video I made for my YouTube Channel, I Learned It on a Podcast! What the Heck is AI Anyway? If you’ve used ChatGPT or heard about it, you might still be wondering what it actually does. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick calls it “the world’s fanciest autocomplete.” Instead of just finishing one sentence, it can write full emails, answer complicated questions, or help you think through equipment problems. Here’s the key difference: when you ask Google a question, you get a list of links. When you ask AI a question, you get a response—and then you can respond back. You’re having a conversation. But you have to watch out—it can be completely wrong while sounding confident. I asked about health effects of eating eggs daily and got different answers depending on how I phrased it. It even sited a made up source! You have to stay sharp. It Figures Stuff Out The biggest shift is I’ve stopped Googling much. Instead of sorting through search results, I just ask AI and we work through problems together. I’ve used it for oil stains on my pants—describing exactly how it happened, what cleaning supplies I have, when I can get to a washing machine. For business negotiations—discussing customer situations, to figuring out what to make for dinner, we discuss a game plan together. When I was lost at Frankfurt airport, I snapped a photo of German signs and uploaded it. ChatGPT told me exactly where to go like having a local guide. The power isn’t in the first answer. It’s in the back-and-forth. AI asks follow-up questions I hadn’t thought of, suggests approaches I wouldn’t have considered. We figure things out together. How You Get Good at Using AI Don’t ask for one idea—ask for 200. Don’t ask for one way to write an email—ask for 30 variations and pick the best one. This creates serendipity—lucky breaks that take projects in directions you didn’t expect. Recently, working with Claude on a video script, we went back and forth on different ways to explain AI’s value. Through that conversation, we landed on the perfect line: “It helps you figure shit out.” I might have gotten there alone, but it would have taken a while. Together pretty quickly we found something that captured exactly what AI does in daily life. My Creative Conflict I’ll be honest. I sometimes feel conflicted using AI when I write. Sometimes it feels like having having a parent helping me with my homework who does too much. When Claude helps me write something polished that sounds like me, part of me thinks: “Did I actually write this?” But here’s what I’ve realized: AI doesn’t replace the hard thinking. It removes friction. The ideas and judgment are still mine. It’s just easier now to get more ideas into the world. I think of it like jazz—sometimes it’s a trio with me, Claude, and ChatGPT all riffing together. My Challenge to You Spend 10 hours using AI for everything you ethically can in your business. Ask about pricing strategies, equipment decisions, customer communication challenges. But remember. It’s predicting patterns, not searching databases. When something doesn’t seem right, trust your instincts and double check. Most importantly, don’t just ask one question and move on. Have the conversation. Ask for 50 ideas instead of 5. Push back when you disagree. You’ll quickly discover what AI is surprisingly good at, and what it’s not ready for. More importantly, you’ll see how it changes the way you figure things out when you’re stuck. Question: What’s your experience been with AI tools? Let me know in the comments. For the original podcast that inspired my blog and video go to this link: Using AI to Think Better, Create More, and Live Smarter