Featured

By Lloyd Graff

DuPage Machine Products President, Dave Knuepfer

Dave, do you consider DuPage Machine Products a job shop?
We’re still a traditional job shop. We run 5,000 and 500,000 pieces, but we’re not always profitable doing that. I have thought about changing the mix, and we’ve gotten more into dedicated and longer runs, but we’re still dealing with shorter runs, and I don’t think we make money on those jobs. I know you want to know about the economics of buying an Index. Why would somebody spend $1.4 million on an Index machine? The way I see it, at least for my survival, it is the only way we can survive as DuPage. We must get into a niche, and that is not doing commercial work.

How do you define commercial work?
I consider commercial work hardware-type parts, home appliance, plumbing; not the techy stuff that you’re grinding and lapping and honing. I think hardware will be gone from this country, certainly in our lifetime. We had several million dollars worth of commercial work in fire suppression systems for restaurants, which we ran for years. It was a couple of nuts with different types of washers on them – Screw Machine 101. The customer came to us 3 or 4 years ago and said, “We’re going to go to China with this thing.” At one time, we shipped 100,000 of these into one of their 15 warehouses throughout the country. We said, “Listen, we will add some value. Rather than ship 100,000 of these for you to assemble, we will assemble, package them in your bag and identify the part number, and when the Denver warehouse needs 15, we will send them 15.” Out of sight, out of mind. That bought us about 2 or 3 more years; it finished last year. $2 million worth of business they could buy delivered here for about $1 million. They would have been foolish not to shift. I don’t think there is any future for that type of work in this country unless you’re interested in just getting along and not making a reasonable rate of return on your investment.

You’ve chosen high-volume, high-precision.
It’s not all high volume to begin with. We hope it matures into that, but it is certainly high-precision. That’s how you afford an Index. We went with the Index for two reasons; one was to get that high-volume, high-precision dedicated part; and the other was to run a family of parts. We run a family of hydraulic cages, and these parts run anywhere from 500 pieces to maybe 7,000 to 10,000 pieces a week per part. Our biggest problem was the big run that ran 10,000 pieces a week. We were running 50,000 pieces and couldn’t get to the next job because we had all this production time, and everything was waiting in the queue before we ran the 50,000 pieces off. With the Index we can run 10,000 pieces or 2,500 pieces, switch over to a similar part where we run the same size stock, and it reduces our inventory. But more importantly, it reduces that queue time, where we couldn’t get to the next job because the machine was tied up with a job and we couldn’t ship for 4 or 6 weeks.

Read full article here

Interview by: Noah Graff

John Ratzenberger

John Ratzenberger is best known for his role as Cliff the mailman on Cheers. Today he hosts Made in America, a documentary-style television show on the Travel Channel in which he travels around the United States visiting American manufacturing companies and meeting factory workers. He also recently started the Nuts, Bolts and Thingamajigs Foundation to encourage and help kids develop the manual skills required to work in the manufacturing industry.

NG: John, tell me about your family background. What did your parents do?
JR: I grew up in a factory town. My mother worked in a factory, my dad drove a truck. I was a carpenter before I became an actor.

NG: Like Harrison Ford?
JR: No, No, everyone says that, but Harrison Ford was a different kind of carpenter. I was a house framer, he was a fine carpenter. I actually did it for a living. I traveled around the country and throughout Europe building houses before I became an actor.

NG: Why did you start the Nuts, Bolts and Thingamajigs Foundation?
JR: Traveling with my show, Made in America, it occurred to me after about 50 factory visits that the biggest problem [our country] is facing is the fact that kids now come out of high school without any manual skills. The average age of a factory worker is 52-years-old. So in six to 10 years, that’s it. And without people who manufacture things, there is no civilization. It’s over.

Read full article here

By Lloyd Graff

August 29, is the second anniversary of the day I almost died. I hesitate to revisit it in this blog because I’ve already written about it extensively in the magazine. But I am of the philosophy that you should never let a good crisis (or the memory of one) go to waste, so I’m going to bring it up once more.

IMTS 2008 was coming up, but I was feeling so crappy I didn’t care. I had spent two weeks pretending to vacation with my family in Michigan. I drove home with my daughter Sarah and remember feeling so depressed I barely spoke during the hour and a half drive. A week later, my wife Risa and I sullenly drove 55 miles to St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, Illinois. I walked to the doctors office of my friend, Dr. Chris Costas, and waited while he attended to a child with a cold. How stupidly polite I was. When Chris came out and saw me waiting, he put a stethoscope to my chest and immediately announced that I was in congestive heart failure. He then wheeled me to the emergency room himself. I remember very little except being super scared as they cut my clothes off. Risa told me that the doctors were pessimistic about my survival after looking at my arteries. A cardiologist from Pakistan named Mohammed Akbar was available in the hospital, and he volunteered to try to place a stent in my blocked LAD coronary artery. He succeeded, which bought time to do a quadruple bypass surgery after my body could strengthen for three days.

I remember virtually nothing from those three terrible days, but for Risa they were probably the most moving of her life, and I have relived them vicariously through her stories. My children dropped everything and rushed to her side. Friends and family flew and drove in from everywhere. Camp was set up in the waiting room with air mattresses. It was Friday night, so the Jewish Sabbath blessings were said in the Catholic hospital waiting room over candles and brought in pizza. Everybody held on to one another, praying for good news. Several doctor friends arrived to ask questions and translate medical language to the rest of the group. The ICU nurses at first regarded the amassing family members with reservation, but then embraced them. For three days, I had a breathing tube along with a million monitors and tethers, so I tried to sleep as I hoped for a successful surgery after the Labor Day holiday.

16 days later, I left the hospital with Risa and we drove home. Not a day has gone by when I didn’t think about those tumultuous days. After two years, for me every day is gravy.

By Russell Ethridge

My company submitted a proposal for rigging services as part of an engineering firm’s bid to layout and install machinery at a customer’s manufacturing plant. The job will be profitable, and we work frequently with this engineering firm. Since submitting our proposal, I received a call from the manufacturing customer wanting to know if we would work directly with them and split the savings they would realize by cutting out the engineering firm’s markup. If we say yes, we’ll do better on the deal, but at minimum, the engineering firm will lose their margin on our work and may be cut out of the deal entirely. If we say no, neither of us may get the work. No one’s signed anything yet.

You are justifiably concerned about violating the time honored loyalty rule that “you dance with the one that brung ya.” If you agree upfront not to bid directly or not to bid as part of some other engineering firm’s proposal, the ethical dilemma is answered by the agreement because your agreement identifies the scope of your loyalty and was made in the absence of any actual opportunity. Here, however, you must make the decision under the pressure of real temptation.

Read full article here

By Lloyd Graff

Jeff Begg

When you enter a machining firm which cuts millions of pounds of brass bar each year, you expect to find a line of New Britain screw machines or Davenports – bunches of almost identical automatics methodically turning out fittings.

But at Marshall-Excelsior Corporation in Marshall, Michigan, the machinery assortment reflects the eclectic taste of its owner, Jeff Begg. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Warner-Swaseys, New Britains, Davenports, Wickmans, National Acmes; 5-spindle; 6-spindle; 8-spindle; a menagerie of screw machines bite at the brass rod, turning out Jeff’s variegated mixture of niche market non-ferrous fittings.

Begg’s mixture of screw machines cannot be easily type-cast. If it’s a good buy and it cuts brass with efficiency, he’s usually interested. Jeff Begg has built a thriving independent fittings business in southern Michigan amidst the wreckage of automotive-land by following his instincts and his own intense personal scrutiny of the fittings marketplace. Marshall Excelsior reflects the particular style and taste of Jeff Begg, who says, “I guess people say I’m eccentric,” not just because of his collection of screw machines, but because he defies the notion of the blueprint-bound engineer, even though he is an engineer by training.

Read full article here