Swarfcast Today's Machining World

Working in the machining industry I hear the term “lean manufacturing” mentioned a lot. But what does the word “lean” really mean in this context? And how do you implement it in your company?  To help me clarify these questions, I interviewed Matthew Rassi, founder of Twenty Helping Hands. He’s a lean manufacturing consultant who [...]

In honor of this weekend’s PMPA National Technical Conference, we’re resharing a podcast we did last year with 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 [...]

I’m dealing with a customer right now who seems interested in some CNC machines Graff-Pinkert has for sale. They told me they needed this type of machine ASAP! And these machines are RARE! They even said they had a big job for the machines already and they are on the “verge of pulling the trigger [...]

On this week’s classic episode of Swarfcast, we’re talking about preventing fires inside of machinery. Our guest is Mike Campo, Midwest Regional Sales Manager with Firetrace International, makers of fire suppression systems and solutions. Fire suppression systems keep businesses, people and equipment safe by automatically detecting and suppressing fires in high-risk equipment, like CNC machines, [...]

Our guest on today’s show, Howard Sheldon, grew up working in his family’s third generation precision turning company. He planned to eventually take over the business from his father, but unfortunately succession didn’t happen the way he had hoped. Howard left his family company in his mid-30s, and 10 years ago started his own Swiss [...]

It seems that today’s younger generations of workers, such as millennials, want to understand why they are instructed to do their jobs in a certain way more than their predecessors. Many of today’s employees are not content to just follow orders and take home a check. They want to feel invested in their work, they [...]