Swarfcast

Robby Burton co-owns AG Drives, a drive shaft company in Green Bay. Blake Schultz is its director of business development. Robby’s grandfather started the company. Blake’s dad worked for Robby’s grandfather. Both families have been in the business for decades. When Robby took over, he was in his mid-twenties and brought in his friends from high school. None of them knew anything about business. Hi...

I was touring a shop once, and the owner told me the engineers can draw up whatever they want. It never comes out like that on the machine. At IMTS, I brought that up with Greg Walker and Bob Folts of Spacial Integrated Systems. They told me it can. As long as you’re honest with the software. Greg is president and co-owner of SIS, a Siemens partner based in Broadlands, Virginia. They sell and supp...

A few years ago, Richtech Robotics would call hospitality groups and offer them robots. They got laughed out of the office. The answer was always the same. We’re a people company. Now they’re building an 8,000 square foot factory in Las Vegas. Three production lines for robots and sensors, all managed by AI. They’d planned it for 2027, but a new FCC rule made them move it up to this year. I talked...

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 sa...

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 Real Time Robotics. Their technology does that kind of motion planning in minut...

Today’s guest on the show is Paul Huber, CEO of COMEX, in Monroe Connecticut. Paul is a machinery dealer specializing in cam Swiss automatics. That’s cam Swiss, not CNC. I’m talking about Bechlers, Stroms and Escomatics , not Citizens. Paul is 84, but proudly says feels like he is 60 as he raises his 17-year-old son. He has been working on screw machines for over 67 years, starting as an apprentic...

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...

We’re on vacation this week.  So we’re publishing one of my favorite Blog/Videos that’s been on my mind lately. I highly recommend you watch the video version of this podcast. Click on the link to go to the video. I won a few big matches on my high school Tennis team, but I was never awesome. I never won the big tournaments. What killed me was that I always had more fun and played better in practi...

Today’s show is the first episode of our new season about Swiss-Type CNC machining. Our guest is Marc Klecka, founder and president of Concentric Corporation , a prominent distributor of Citizen-Cincom CNC Swiss lathes in Cleveland, Ohio. Scroll down to read more and listen to the podcast, or listen with Google Podcasts ,  Apple Podcasts or your favorite app. Main Points Marc talks about his compa...

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...

Born with no intention of becoming a machinist, Greg Knight says he was drafted into “indentured servitude” at age 16 when his father started a Brown & Sharpe machine shop in their garage. Despite his initial distaste for manual labor, fate had other plans for the psychology, philosophy, religion, and sociology major. I ran into Greg at PMTS 2025 in Cleveland last week, working in the Absolute...

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, ev...

On this "Best of Swarfcast" episode, Noah speaks with Rich Gaffney, Vice President of Commercial Operations at Sentry Equipment, a 100-year-old manufacturing company in Wisconsin that has been employee owned since 1986.

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 own boss?” Today Nick and his cousin Joey run JC Metals, going around the country paying cash...

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 stumbling onto this business, he cashed in part of his life savings to buy it. Now at 64, he calls...

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 in life is to pay it forward. He mentors young machinists at his shop. He trains pe...

Have you ever wondered what it takes to manufacture luxury watches that cost tens of thousands of dollars? This is the episode to find out! Last week I reconnected with Josh Shapiro to tell him about a used Willemin 408MT Graff-Pinkert had for sale. He told me that he was extremely excited for his new line of watches coming out that he has been working on for years. He is finally going to be produ...

I met Tim Betts a few weeks ago when he was shopping for a Willemin mill-turn we had for sale. One conversation in and I knew he had to come on Swarfcast. Tim told me he’s in the drugs business, the guns business, and horse racing, and that actually makes him one of the most heavily regulated businessmen in America. Seriously, he’s a compounding pharmacist, he machines precision rifle parts, and h...

Sometimes I feel like I’m a good leader. I think I’ve always believed at least that I could be. The insecure statement comes from my conventional view of leading–taking charge to mobilize other people in our businesses, or as a dad or as a thought leader. But my podcast guest Ryan Avery, gave me a new view of what it means to be a leader. Something more universal and applicable to my whole life. H...

“God, I am so NOT relaxed right now. But I need to just embrace what I read recently — you need the courage to be rubbish. Just relax, stop worrying about everything being perfect, and do it.” I said that to my dad, Lloyd, as we sat down to record our podcast last week–which turned out to be the opposite of rubbish. We spoke our minds. What it means to live in the gain versus the gap, Lloyd’s hone...

On today’s podcast, I’m talking with Mike Payne, owner of Hill Manufacturing and Fabrication in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, to peek inside the mind of a prolific acquirer of manufacturing companies. Before purchasing Hill in 2018, Mike spent 20 years in M&A, orchestrating over 100 deals across nearly every industry. Since then, Mike has acquired four machine shops, and he’s constantly scouting for...

I often ponder—why do some people own and build companies, while most people are destined to spend their careers as employees. In Part II of my interview with Mike Payne, owner of Hill Manufacturing & Fabrication , we explore this question. Mike comes from a family of six generations of teachers, not business managers or entrepreneurs, and he says he was a “mess” in high school without directi...

Today’s AI conversation is about vulnerability—not automation, efficiency, and replacing jobs. Brooks Canavesi, co-founder of Baryons , is taking AI somewhere different. He’s not trying to replace the human. He’s trying to make the human better. I’ve actually been using ChatGPT to supplement my own life coach for a while now, so when I learned what Baryons is building, I had to find out more. The...

Seems like right now every podcast is doing an interview centered around artificial intelligence. But I waited until I found the right story, one that was truly relevant to our audience in the machining world. Today’s guest on the podcast, George Konidaris, is the cofounder of the startup, Realtime Robotics . He is also a professor of Computer Science and the director of the Intelligent Robot Lab...

The most interesting things I’ve ever done — the best conversations, the best podcasts, the best calls — they all required me to be confident enough to move forward, when the results were far from certain. Today I’m going to tell you something I just learned that can get that confidence up when you need it most. I’ve been selling used machine tools for 15 years in my family’s 80-year-old business....