The Lone Machinists

This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast , we're back from IMTS and apparently nobody came home with fewer projects. Curt has managed to create a rather serious problem for himself after launching a one-minute presale for his pens. The idea was simple, keep the sales window short so he wouldn't end up with more orders than he could handle. Unfortunately, everyone who got the pens into their carts d...

Jamie is officially running on fumes as the IMTS marathon continues, but there’s still plenty of time for machines, workholding, questionable engineering ideas, and collecting an absolutely unreasonable amount of free stuff. Today’s recap covers small five-axis machines, the X-Horse, ToolDawns, a Wazer demo, and why a Wazer might make sense for some applications but definitely isn’t the answer to...

Day two of IMTS, and Jamie is somehow fitting even more machines, people, questionable decisions, and engineering ideas into an already packed schedule. The day ends with Oktoberfest, late nights, escalator shenanigans, and a trip back to the Airbnb to talk shit until midnight. And starts straight back into IMTS, with Jamie working his way through tooling, workholding, abrasives, automation, and a...

IMTS is officially underway, and Jamie has already discovered that three hours in the machine tool hall gets you through roughly one third of it. In this Monday recap, Jamie and Curt catch up on the first day of the show, the meetup, the endless FOMO, and the sheer number of people, conversations, machines, stickers, and merch flying around. Jamie talks about getting recognized by his voice, final...

This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast, the machines are starting to outproduce the humans, which sounds great right up until you realize somebody still has to finish all those damn parts. Curt is running huge production batches ahead of a pre-sale, discovering just how much his machines can actually produce, and realizing that hand finishing is rapidly becoming the bottleneck. We get into pocket...

This week's episode of the Lone Machinist is basically what happens when the machines start producing faster than the humans can keep up. Curt is drowning in production, running huge batches of parts ahead of a pre-sale and discovering that the real bottleneck isn't machining anymore — it's finishing. We get into hand-finishing pocket clips, blasting, tumbling, abrasive brushes, custom tooling, an...

This week on the Lone Machinist, Curt finally fixes his titanium anodizing problems—and discovers that the secret was apparently replacing the Multi-Etch he’d been using for years. Suddenly the anodizing behaves, the fades work, and he can leave batches running without turning everything into expensive scrap. Meanwhile, Jamie has gone completely off the rails with production. A 4,800-piece alumini...

This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast , Jamie has one hell of a week in the shop. A mold job turns into roughly 40 hours of machining in just three days , including a late-night finish, while the machine burns through an impressive amount of coolant along the way. It also sparks a much-needed conversation about pricing, especially when a retrofit or machine job takes significantly longer than ex...

This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast , Jamie and Curt discover that zero-point workholding really is fucking magical . Jamie has reached the point where swapping between jobs is becoming almost stupidly easy. A tray comes out, another goes in, the machine already knows where everything is, and production can carry on without spending half an hour re-indicating a setup. The Anchor Point system h...

This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast , Jamie discovers an important new limitation in his manufacturing capabilities: This week we're also talking about the reality of running production when customers apparently expect you to know which parts they need urgently without actually telling you which parts are urgent. "I'm not telepathic, motherfuckers." Jamie is trying to impose some sanity on the...

This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast, Jamie celebrates another trip around the sun the only way a machinist knows how—by spending it surrounded by machines, projects, and just enough chaos to keep life interesting. Because apparently birthdays don't stop production schedules. The guys catch up on everything happening in the shop, from ongoing product development and production runs to the const...

This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast , Jamie and Curt discover that making great machining videos is almost as difficult as making great parts. After another week of production, Jamie is finally looking at upgrading the workshop camera setup. The problem? His current action camera has all the image quality of a potato with a lens , which isn't exactly ideal when you're trying to film chips flyi...

This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast , Jamie and Curt dive into one of the less glamorous sides of making products: the internet. Between first-come, first-served launches, Reddit outrage, and the inevitable flood of "you should have made more" messages, they discuss why selling a popular product sometimes means disappointing more people than it pleases. And yes... rage comments still count as...

This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast , Jamie and Curt are joined by Al Whatmough , whose career has taken him from apprentice machinist to educator, software leader, and one of the driving forces behind modern CAM. It's a conversation that's less about software and more about how great ideas actually happen . Al shares the journey from teaching machining and CAD classes to helping grow Autodesk...

This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast, Jamie discovers that running a machine shop while fighting off a brutal cough is a lot like running production with a worn-out end mill—you'll get there eventually, but it's going to make some unpleasant noises along the way. Curt spends most of the episode wondering whether he's going to catch the illness through the internet, while Jamie repeatedly reache...

This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast , Jamie is fighting on two fronts: a mystery illness that's trying to end the episode early, and a CNC controller that's decided now is the perfect time to develop an attitude. Somehow, despite the coughing, month-end admin, and machine diagnostics, the show goes on. The guys dive into the latest shop updates, including another batch of Barnacles , fresh ano...

This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast , Jamie returns from the chaos of moving an entire machine shop, only to discover that the universe rewards hard work with paperwork, broken internet, and even more work. The new shop is running, production is back online, and somehow an employee is shipping orders while Jamie isn't even there — a concept so foreign it feels suspicious. Meanwhile, Curt celeb...

This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast , Jamie and Curt discover that modern machining is really just thousands of lines of code standing between you and catastrophic stupidity. After a mysterious edge case causes a surprise Z-crash, Jamie finds himself debugging macros, reading error logs, and remotely killing machines at three in the morning because apparently sleep is optional. Meanwhile, the...

This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast , Jamie drags Ben from Black Fox Machining into an emergency guest appearance after recent developments sent the machining community into full rumor mode. Running on almost no sleep and questionable amounts of enthusiasm, the guys dive into everything from home-built CNC machines to the strange reality of becoming accidental role models. Ben shares how a bur...

This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast, Jamie finally gets the keys to the new workshop and immediately discovers that moving a machine shop involves approximately 4,000 decisions, 7,000 trips to hardware stores, and at least one full-scale CAD model of the building. Floor plans are taped out, paint is being thrown around, machines are getting shuffled, and somehow there's still time to argue abo...

This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast, Jamie accidentally speedruns manufacturing because he misread an order and panic-machined a batch of anchor point bodies before realizing they were the wrong version. Meanwhile, Kurt discovers that machining titanium from round bar is somehow less efficient and more efficient at the same time, which feels spiritually correct for machining. We also dive deep...

This week on the The Lone Machinist Podcast, Jamie fights anodizing for three straight days, accidentally makes the wrong color parts, redesigns a bandsaw out of pure spite, and discovers that South African customs agents apparently moonlight as package demolition experts. Meanwhile, Curt declares war on bubble mailers after the packaging industry collectively decided quality control was optional....

Ever wondered how a conversation about burgers turns into industrial automation, toaster engineering, and titanium butt plugs? This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast: Jamie survives a wedding weekend, immediately goes back to abusing the LK with horrifying amounts of tool steel, and starts planning how to automate 400,000 fence clamps without losing his sanity. Curt discovers the joy of dual-wiel...

Ever wondered what happens when two machinists get slightly too much caffeine and absolutely no supervision? This week on the Lone Machinist Podcast: One of us falls headfirst into an ERP system that started as “just a quick tool”… and is now basically a full-blown operating system  The other accidentally becomes a sticker manufacturer and nearly buys a $2000 mistake off Marketplace There’s a...

In this episode of The Lone Machinist, Jamie and Curt are joined by Trevor from Titan Ring Designs, and things get deep… like “question your entire life path while holding a mic” deep. What starts as a simple chat about machining quickly turns into a full-blown masterclass on creativity, risk-taking, and why making tiny, ridiculously intricate titanium parts might actually be the most logical life...