Swarfcast

My machinery customers talk about their chips all the time. Spinners, briquetters, getting the oil out so they can sell it. But the scrap yard still doesn’t care what grade it is. It pays them very little for steel scrap and nothing for sludge from grinding operations. Kazuhiko Nishioka, co-founder and CEO of Sun Metalon, came up with a product that gets the last of the oil out of those chips, even the sludge, and turns them into clean pucks a mill will pay real money for. ************* Link

Robby Burton, 30, co-owns AG Drives, a drive shaft company in Green Bay. Blake Schultz, 23, is its director of business development. Robby’s grandfather started the company, and Blake’s dad worked for him. 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 had formal business training. His garage was so full of parts he couldn’t park his car. He had a newborn at home. Some of the machini

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 Spatial 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 support Siemens software, primarily for aerospace, defense, and federal customers. Bob is their advanc

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 with Richtech’s COO, Phil Zheng, at IMTS. He told me why their humanoid robots have eyes that don

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 says it’s where he’s meant to be. It’s where he finds flow. ******** Listen on your favorite podcast

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 Realtime Robotics. Their technology does that kind of motion planning in minutes instead of weeks, and it’s running on the manufacturing lines of major automakers right now. He