Making Chips Podcast for Manufacturing Leaders

The RFQs are coming in. Your machines have capacity. But the quotes are waiting on the same handful of people who are already busy keeping the shop running. Quoting takes experience, eats up valuable time, and comes with an especially frustrating reality: much of that effort goes into jobs you'll never win. And when a purchase order comes back immediately, your first thought might be, "What did we...

We spend a lot of time asking where the next generation of machinists will come from. Ethan Crane was working in building supplies. A trip to a machine shop for a project turned into a receiving job, and a look around the shop turned into a new ambition: I want to do that. His first classroom was a little Harbor Freight bench lathe a coworker brought in. Ethan spent his lunch breaks making chips,...

What do a freestyle motocross legend, a custom motorcycle painter, and a machine shop owner with 19 spindles have in common? A whole lot more than motorcycles. And at IMTS 2026, Kennametal brought all three together to prove it. Recorded live from the MakingChips studio at IMTS, we sit down with Carey Hart, the motocross icon who made history with a backflip on a dirt bike; Taylor Schultz, a custo...

A new machine can open the door to different work, greater capacity, and your shop's next stage of growth. But buying it is only part of the equation. Who's going to run it? How many hours will it actually produce? And have you considered what automation could make possible? Recorded at IMTS 2026, this episode brings Mark Christopher, Product Sales Manager for Automation at DN Solutions, into the...

We spent this year asking young shop owners how they found machining, and one name came up in almost every single conversation. Titan Gilroy. What better way to close out our Generation CNC and workforce development series than a conversation with the man himself? Most of the conversation lands on the part owners would rather not hear. If your shop is dirty, your walls are beige, and your bathroom...

For every five people aging out of the skilled trades, only two are stepping in behind them. Manufacturers have spent years talking about that gap. Danville, Virginia, decided to build its way out of it. In this episode, Jason Wells takes us inside the Accelerated Training in Defense Manufacturing program, where students with little or no industrial experience are prepared for careers in machining...

Kennametal isn't showing up to IMTS with another wall of cutting tools. They're building a working custom motorcycle shop in the middle of the West Building—and they plan to cut chips, build a bike, and give that bike away before the show ends. Kim Wilson, Global Director of Marketing Communications, and Matt Jacques, Global Brand and Creative Services Manager at Kennametal, join us for a look beh...

Most machine shops start thinking seriously about workforce development when they already need someone. A machinist quits, capacity jumps, the backlog grows, and suddenly finding skilled people becomes an emergency. MSP Manufacturing has taken a very different approach. Johnny Goode joins Paul and Brooke to explain how MSP has spent years building relationships with high schools, apprenticeship pr...

A lot has changed since the last time we pulled up chairs around the Boring Bar. For our fourth edition, eight manufacturing leaders joined us in the MakingChips studio ahead of the IMTS pre-party to talk about where the industry is headed and, after a couple pours, where they think it should  be headed. AI takes over the conversation early. How fast is it really moving into manufacturing? What ha...

Website traffic is falling across the board, and it's tempting to read that as a marketing problem. It usually isn't. AI summaries now answer the generic top of funnel questions people used to click into your site to answer, so the casual browsers never arrive. The visitors who do show up are the ones already deciding whether you're a fit. That changes what a manufacturing website is for. A list o...

Six jobs waiting on a first article means six spindles sitting still. That is the math Mike lives with at Hill, running around 58 jobs a day where nearly every one needs an internal or external first article before parts can ship. When inspection becomes the constraint, good parts pile up behind paperwork, and paperwork does not make chips. This week we sat down with Mehul Shah, co-founder of Grou...

Most shops treat lean like a poster on the break room wall. Andrew Henry runs it like a competitive weapon. He built Henry Holsters into a company that ships around 55,000 orders a year, most of them the same day they come in, without stacks of work in process piling up on every bench. We caught up with Andrew at the Summit on the Summit, and the conversation kept circling back to one idea: The wa...

Every shop owner knows the workforce problem by heart. The trades got denigrated, tech ed programs got gutted, and a whole generation of kids never found out that a manufacturing career was even an option. We have all heard that speech a hundred times. What we rarely hear is a practical, repeatable way to actually fix it. In this GenCNC series episode, we sit down with two people who built one. Da...

IMTS is 1.2 million square feet spread across six days, and the average visitor only spends about 2.7 of them on the floor. That math is exactly why walking in without a plan means seeing a fraction of what you came for. In this episode we sit down with Bonnie Gurney and Michelle Edmondson from AMT, the team that builds IMTS, to talk through how to actually get value out of the biggest manufacturi...

Most machine shop owners spend twenty years learning the lesson Stone figured out before he turned 21: get great at one thing, and say no to almost everything else. He bought his first CNC at 15 to make knife handles, started taking billable work at 19, and now runs a precision shop in North Phoenix that goes after the tight-tolerance medical work a lot of shops won't touch. This one is part of ou...

Most shop owners have stood in front of a shiny new machine and felt the pull. Buy it, and the work will come. Tim Drinkwater of Accurate Machine Products has lived both sides of that bet, the one that nearly buried him and the one that showed up as a free machining center. This conversation sits right where two of our current series meet: Gen CNC, where we talk to founders who started young, and...

AI is going to be everywhere at IMTS this September, and if you walk the floor without a filter, it'll make your head spin. So we brought in someone whose whole job is helping manufacturers tell the real thing from the marketing fluff. Ryan Kelly, VP of Technology at AMT, joins us to break the noise into something usable. He walks through a simple way to sort every AI claim you'll see into three l...

Getting laid off twice early in your career could make you crave stability. It did the opposite for Brian Balthasar. After two rounds of corporate layoffs, he decided that starting his own machine shop was the safer bet. This is another one of our Gen CNC conversations. Brian founded Balthasar Industries in 2022, and he just bought his first building in North Tonawanda, New York. We walk through t...

Most machine shops judge a good day by spindle time. If the machines are cutting, we're making money. If they're sitting still, something must be wrong. But what if keeping capacity open for the right customer is actually part of the product? That question kicks off our conversation with strategist Kaihan Krippendorff, who we met at MFG 2026 in Fort Lauderdale. Kaihan's big idea is that value is m...

Everybody in manufacturing knows the skills gap is real. Far fewer people are doing anything about it. That tension runs through this entire conversation, and it's why we're glad to have Kyra Tillman back on the show as part of our workforce development series. Kyra runs BTM Industries, a small job shop in Woodstock, Illinois, and she's a driving force behind the Manufacturing Pathways Consortium,...

Keith and Patrick Lee didn't start their machine shop with a giant facility, a full team, or a fleet of high-end equipment. They started with a Tormach in a one-car garage, a willingness to learn, and the belief that if they kept showing up, solving problems, and doing what they said they would do, they could build something real. In this episode of MakingChips, Keith and Patrick share the story b...

Some shop owners are born into machining. Others stumble into it through YouTube, side jobs, and a little bit of "sure, I think we can fit that D11 dozer cylinder on the mill." Leighton Hill's story has a little bit of all of it. In this episode of MakingChips, we continue our Gen CNC series with Leighton Hill of Hillco, a young shop owner from the Kansas City area who grew up around manual machin...

In manufacturing, everyone talks about the skills gap. Fewer people talk about the relationships, systems, and long-term commitment it takes to solve it. In this episode of MakingChips, we continue our GenCNC series by exploring a powerful partnership between Northridge High School and JD Machine, a collaboration that is creating a steady pipeline of young manufacturing talent and proving that wor...

Recorded live from the Toolpath Machining Summit at Mammoth Mountain, this episode of MakingChips explores what happens when software thinking collides with modern manufacturing. We sat down with SendCutSend founder Jim Belosic and CNC leader Phil Linscheid for a conversation about speed, automation, growth, and the changing realities of manufacturing in America. What started as frustration sourci...

What happens when a young woman with zero machining experience gets handed the keys to two CNC mills and told, "Figure it out"? For Melissa Ramos, it became the start of a journey that's equal parts grit, creativity, community, and stubborn determination. In this episode of MakingChips, we sit down with the founder of M95 Machining to unpack how she went from crashing machines, crying in shop bath...