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Today's Machining World
  • 4.8 (37)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Biweekly

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.

  1. 5d ago

    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 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! 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.

  2. Aug 25

    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 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! ************* 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.

  3. Aug 11

    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 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! 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.

  4. Jul 21

    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 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 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.

  5. Jul 7

    Army, Amazon, Aerospace, with Nir Levy — EP 269

    Nir Levy was nineteen years old when he was already commanding a unit in the Israeli army. He managed hundreds of people and logistics with life or death stakes, at an age when most of us were figuring out laundry. After the Israeli army came Amazon, where Nir eventually ran a full manufacturing facility. There, he learned to live by the company’s obsession with getting it right, every package, every time. Now he’s Vice President of Operations at Final Frontier Manufacturing, a high precision aerospace shop in Colorado. A company that pulled him out of Chicago because they wanted someone who could build a world-class operation from the ground up. ******** 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 Israeli Army Was His First School of Management In Israel, mandatory military service begins at eighteen, with assignments based on testing and advancement based on merit. Within a year and a half, Nir was a commanding officer, first as a frontline mechanic for a Navy SEALs unit, then staffing a maritime border patrol unit on the Gaza coast, then running HR and logistics for a unit of about 500 people in the Red Sea. “At a very impressionable age, you see what a world class operation looks like,” he said. The Amazon Standard: 99.65 Percent On Time After the army, Nir did his undergrad, worked in management consulting, and got an MBA from the University of Chicago. Amazon recruited him during his MBA through their Pathways program, which started him as a manager in a warehousing and fulfillment facility. After a few roles and promotions, he ended up running the manufacturing side, printing and binding books on demand with zero inventory sitting around. “Books are somewhat simple,” he told me, “but they can vary by any means.” Different paper, laminate, covers, cuts. Ninety five percent of orders shipped within four hours of the click. “That’s a world class operation right there,” he said. Across everything Amazon shipped, the standard was 99.65 percent on time or better. He says the principle behind it is customer obsession, treating every package like it has to arrive in time for Christmas, and building every process backward from the moment the customer needs it. The Amazon Playbook Meets Aerospace Final Frontier makes CNC parts for aerospace and defense, including a gear housing that sits on top of a rocket engine (pictured above). Cost runs anywhere from double digits to five figures depending on the part. Manufacturing at Final Frontier isn’t linear the way book printing was. Scheduling has to account for outside processing and raw material lead times on top of the work itself. Nir is applying what Amazon taught him about backlog management, planning weeks out instead of days, to a business with more variables. Near the end of the interview, I asked Nir what he enjoys outside of work. “I like organizing my pantry,” he said. “My pantry is very organized.” Somehow, knowing that, all of it made a little more sense. The post Army, Amazon, Aerospace, with Nir Levy — EP 269 appeared first on Today’s Machining World.

  6. Jun 23

    Your Scrap Tungsten Carbide Is a National Security Question, Nick Stevens and Joey Marks–EP 268

    While his nine-year-old son was fighting stage three cancer, Nick Stevens was driving around buying up scrap tungsten carbide just to keep food on the table. It worked well enough that one day, sitting in the hospital room, his son said to him: “Dad, why don’t you just start your own business and be your [...] The post Your Scrap Tungsten Carbide Is a National Security Question, Nick Stevens and Joey Marks–EP 268 appeared first on Today’s Machining World.

  7. Jun 9

    The Only Classic Car Wiper Business in the World, with Pat Parnell-EP 267

    Pat Parnell went to buy a classic car for his wife. He ended up buying a company too. Rain Gear Wiper Systems, the only hidden wiper system company for classic cars in the world. After 42 years hauling and installing high-end appliances, his body was done with the heavy lifting. Within a few weeks of [...] The post The Only Classic Car Wiper Business in the World, with Pat Parnell-EP 267 appeared first on Today’s Machining World.

  8. May 26

    The Man Who Never Stops Teaching, with Logan McGhan-EP 266

    Today’s podcast is about mentorship, finding it, and paying it back. Logan McGhan is an old friend of mine from the used machinery business who is now a CNC programmer at a semiconductor company in Arizona. Along the way he’s had invaluable mentors in martial arts, machining, and sales, and one of his main purposes [...] The post The Man Who Never Stops Teaching, with Logan McGhan-EP 266 appeared first on Today’s Machining World.

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4.8
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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Today's Machining World
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    261
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Show Website
    Swarfcast

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