computer numerical control

That gentleman who just left, he does a lot of 3D printing, some of these 3D masks and things he printed, and he's a wealth of information in that area.

I specialize in CNC work.

There's people that come in, they wanted to redo their dashboard on a boat, and they're How do you do that? How do you measure out parts? How do you- What does CNC stand for? So CNC stands for Computer Numerically Controlled.

Okay.

And it's how does a computer control the movement of a tool? And the reality is a laser machine uses CNC.

It just moves the laser head around.

The router table moves a router around.

These 3D printers move the print head around.

I'm good.

I, uh, we were just talking a minute ago, my, my video on the five-axis CNC machine just posted this morning at 7:00 AM, and, uh, Dave, you did yours a couple weeks ago.

You were ahead of the curve.

And I heard Laura's doing one.

And, uh, I, I was just saying to you guys, it's really refreshing to see how the p- comments are all positive.

No one's saying, you know, sell out, or no one's saying, you know, that's not real making or any of that stuff.

So this, this CNC technology is really taking hold versus seven, eight years ago if any one of us did anything computer controlled, you get some negativity there.

But, uh, I'm really having a lot of fun with this machine and, uh, I've, I've made several things that I didn't even film.

My dad, Paul, started the company in 1991 with my uncle, my uncle.

uncle through marriage actually paul was really good friends with with dave in high school dave married paul's sister so dave is my uncle now and they've been friends since middle school started the company just those two in a garage basically in 91 just doing some handrails so that's what mostly what we did in the 90s and then about 05 we got into the all-electric cnc benders Right.

Probably out in front on that.

And we've kind of let the market take us and dictate where we go from there on the tube bending side.

Are you doing multi-stack tooling, or are you doing the single or both?

Yeah, so a lot of multi-stack.

Probably out of our 15 or so benders we have powered up, we have 13 CNC benders, a couple of older hydraulic machines that we run, mostly our pipe elbows and things.

We have a stock product line.

Your hosts are Alex Adams of Type A Furniture, [object clatters] and Alex Duffy of Duffy Woodcraft.

Whatcha Makin' is proudly sponsored by Next Wave CNC.

Ooh, what you makin' in the shop today? Yeah.

Got a couple Alexes to show you the way.

Yep.

Yep.

So that was annoying, and then on top of that, I broke four CNC bits this week, which is the most I've broken in a single week ever.

Um, but I-

You have to have automation.

So CNC machines existed then, but they were not robust, okay? You could, you could not produce the million parts a year with the technology with CNC, uh, computer numerically controlled machine tools at that time.

So you, what, what my, where my dad worked is you, you actually design the machine specifically for that part.

So a, two years before the car ever is in the showroom, the big three says, "Okay, h- we've designed this.

But what, uh...

How did this, uh...

You were gonna s- you were gonna talk about how that microscopy work translated to the, like, CNC inspection-

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, that does not help.

And so, slowly I'm getting machine after machine between a lathe and a mill and then a CNC mill and then hopefully a CNC lathe and then a CNC plasma cutter and then starting to take up space and then a bender and then a bandsaw and then, you know, you run out of room real fast, right? And then the other problem is that my wife is also the same way where she likes equipment and likes to play with said equipment and then needs to buy more equipment because it's cool and you can expand and try new fun things and make fun stuff.

And so that's double trouble for both of us because it's already in a limited square footage space.

And then so we've been expanding from shed to shed to shed.

If you look at the curriculum, it was built by Stanford.

They're inviting industry leaders, entrepreneurs, technicians, and engineers who's not on the list CNC machinists and tool and die and welders and CNC programmers and the people who are actually going to fill these $1.9 million jobs.

It's kind of like a hospital training a bunch of administrators to focus on billing and regulations and site development and stuff, but not training the surgeons and the nurses.

So I think it's useful.

So American manufacturing really is small manufacturing.

And, you know, AI can be trained.

We use it in my business to quote faster to, you know, do things faster, programming faster, before you'd have to handwrite G-code programming for a CNC machine.

Well, now you can train your AI to do that.