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Season 3 Finale with Brian of RT Machine
5 Plays1 year ago
Closing out season 3 with our good buddy Brian of RT Machine. We'll talk to you all in a few weeks! Drop us any ideas for Season 4. Thank you everyone for listening the past 3 years.
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Greene Street Joinery is a custom design & build shop located in Monmouth County, New Jersey. We build multigenerational furniture with an eco-friendly and sustainable mindset.
Inspired and guided by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, we believe in the use of traditional craftsmanship and simple, well-proportioned forms; sustainability and ethical practices; and importantly, taking pleasure in our work as craftsmen to create quality pieces of enduring value.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:02
Speaker
The American Craftsman podcast is sponsored by Hayfla. Hayfla offers a wide range of products and solutions for the woodworking and furniture making industries. From hinges and drawer slides to connectors and dowels, sandpaper, wood glue, shop parts and everything in between. Exclusive product lines such as looks, LED lighting and Slido door hardware ensure that every project you create is built to last. Learn more at hayfla.com.
00:00:41
Speaker
The
00:00:48
Speaker
All
Season Finale Kickoff with Brian from RT Machine
00:00:49
Speaker
right. Welcome back to the show. Yeah. Season finale. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by First Walk. That's Chinese food to take out. 77 Broad Street, Keyport, New Jersey. We just had lunch. We got our, uh, our, uh, number one guest here in the guest seat. Yeah, Brian, RT machine here back at it. Welcome back.
00:01:08
Speaker
days...
00:01:12
Speaker
I'm trying to think we've only had a couple people who have been on three times. John Peters. I mean, John must be the only other one. Yeah. Um, how many times was Manny on twice? Yeah. Well, Willie twice. Um, might be it. Yeah. I mean, we've had, we've had a decent amount of guests, but not, not a ton. Um,
00:01:39
Speaker
Oh yeah. You know, you said you got to work on that voice enhancer. So it makes it sound more sexy or something. Like is it Jacqueline? Yeah. Everybody's going to beat that episode. Lots of, lots of compliments on that episode. Yeah. Everybody's imagination was running wild. I'm sure.
Voice Enhancements and Podcast Production
00:01:57
Speaker
Yeah. Well here, I'll give you a sneak. Cause we, we, uh, we talked about this. I like the new studio here. It's great. You got the monitor. What is that? 55 inch?
00:02:07
Speaker
Yeah, these TVs are so cheap now. Stevie was like 200 bucks. Isn't it ridiculous? I mean, it's why not do it for that? I was trying to see if I could show you all the filters that we have on here. Yeah, we had to get to that. But yeah, there's we got a lot of filters. What you're hearing now is not.
00:02:29
Speaker
modulator or whatever. But then when it gets, you know, rendered, that's got to clean my voice up a little bit. I'm very raspy today for some reason. That's good. The, uh,
00:02:41
Speaker
Yeah. Ours is going well. I mean, we're, we're having fun with it.
Brian's Podcast Experience and Listener Feedback
00:02:45
Speaker
Yeah. Our team machine podcast. So you got a dozen in the bank now. Uh, 11. Yeah. Well, yeah, we, yeah, we got one more to do this week yet and, and, uh, go from there. We've, we, it's been pretty fun though. I mean, we've been enjoying it. We've been looking for, we actually just got an email from Jill today. Um,
00:03:03
Speaker
that we had a customer out of Florida that listens to your podcast and started listening to our podcast. Oh wow. And email and I said, Hey, keep up the good work. We like, we like the, the, uh, informative type of, uh, I bet you I know who it is. Let me see. And before I miss speak his name, Kodama design. I'm not sure what up there.
00:03:31
Speaker
Yeah, you know, he's actually he's from New Jersey, I think. And then he moved down to Florida. Let me see. We've talked before. I can't remember his name. I apologize. Top of my head. Go back and messages here.
00:03:46
Speaker
you know, the, the paint booth that we picked up. Yeah. Uh, we were talking to the, to the gentleman that sold it to us and what's his company paradigm paradigm. Yeah. Woodworks, I think. Yeah. And, uh, you know, we were just chatting on the way out and he's like, Oh, you guys do a podcast, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, yeah, we're American craftsmen. Oh, that's you guys. I listened to that.
00:04:16
Speaker
He's like, oh yeah, I just started to listen to that.
Confusion with Similar Podcasts
00:04:19
Speaker
The thing is too, there's that Modern Craftsman, which is a huge, that's a huge podcast. And that's like Nick Schiffer and Tyler, that was his last name, Grace. They're more like home builders. Tyler's in New Jersey, Nick is in Boston.
00:04:39
Speaker
But they do a real big podcast. I think sometimes people get confused. You know, we say American craftsmen, they're like, oh, you're those guys? Like, no, not those guys. Were these guys. Yeah. Were these guys.
00:04:53
Speaker
Yeah, we're always looking for different feedback
Guest Feedback and its Importance
00:04:56
Speaker
and stuff. And it's always tough to get, you know, we try to use you guys as sounding boards and cause you'll tell us, Hey, that fucking suck. That's the thing. I mean, as I said off air, the guests,
00:05:11
Speaker
It sort of flies under the radar how captivating the show is going to be. Yeah. Yeah, it is. You know, it's funny, just different ones. I try to pop around and there's a, I forget the name of it, Sheridan Lumber, I think it's called. And if you ever caught him, he does some nice stuff on species of woods and things like
Joe Strauss's Machinery Story
00:05:31
Speaker
that. It keeps it kind of interesting.
00:05:32
Speaker
Yeah. And it's not just for, um, like, uh, what was Joe? Joe Strauss. Yeah. It's, you know, it's, it's woodworking machinery, but it's, that story is interesting just in and of itself. His story. Yeah. Yeah. That was very enjoyable. And you know, I dealt with, with Joe at my own company for
00:05:54
Speaker
Well, since since the 80s, since Joe took it, we were dealing with Hermans before Joe even took over. So it was very interesting to, you know, hear him come up through and just all these little tidbits like, oh, yeah, the Hermans gang rips or whatever it was, they used to make these machines and then it became what, Yates or something. It's like, I never knew any of this stuff, you know.
Gang Rip Saw Machines in Woodworking
00:06:15
Speaker
Yeah, they were back in the day. Those those gang rips were
00:06:19
Speaker
were really the thing. You saw them all over Pennsylvania. I mean, they were tanks too, just absolute tanks. We, we used one just to rip buildup in particle board. And, uh, because we were, you know, building so many tops, we just hundreds and hundreds of strips a day. And how thick can those, like how many pieces can they rip at once? Uh, I never really stacked with ours because
00:06:47
Speaker
I was, it's so fast, you don't need to stack it. You know what I mean? Oh, so gang rip, it means there's multiple blades, not just one. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So it'll take a piece. That's how wide can you feed it in 12 inches, 24 inches. I think we had a 24. So I was, I was feeding like 25 inch material through it. And it's spitting out what? Eight, three inch pieces. They were inch and three quarter pieces. And yeah, it just,
00:07:12
Speaker
How many guys on the back end to handle? Well, that was half the bottom. The problem with it was, you know, you put two guys on it and the guy in the front end had the easy job. The guy tail end was the guy was scrambling. That was the planer episode. We're listening to the planer episode.
00:07:28
Speaker
Yeah, you know, doing like 60,000 board feet a day. I'm like, what? I can't even. I'm like, that's like years. We don't have that much to come through here in years. Right. If we do like 200 board feet a day, it's like, hey, we we've processed a lot of lumber today. We got it done like five. We could do like 500 with two guys. Yeah. We just set up that we have now.
00:07:51
Speaker
Yeah, you can really move some material on some of the big machines. What we did on that is we had a, I built a cradle and these carts, like four carts I had that went in rotation. And when it came off, all the pieces dropped into the cart and were already stacked.
00:08:09
Speaker
So we had like a little shoot, like a sheet metal shoot that was at the end that just kept it gathered as it came off. And then it went into the cart and it just all was kind of gravity fed. You only had to really worry about it on the first couple, you know, that they went in. Then once they were going, it was, and boy, you want to talk about truckload of dirt, you know, you were
00:08:29
Speaker
As we were just talking dust collectors a little bit earlier, yeah, you were emptying the bags on that at the end of the day. Yeah. That particle board does too.
Brian's Family Business History
00:08:38
Speaker
Oh yeah. I think what I did at one point is I think what I was running inch and three quarter wide and it cut like two strips of four inch wide.
00:08:48
Speaker
because we would make little corner blocks out of those. So those pieces would then go over to an up cut saw. And then that we had an auto feed on the up cut saw and we just cut these blocks. This is all free RT machinery days. These are all free. Yeah. This was a trailing industries days.
00:09:06
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I mean, we might want to just back up just a bit because we know you and everyday listeners of the pod know you, but you're Brian Kraling from RTE Machinery. Yeah. And, you know, for 40 years before that, it was Brian Kraling of Kraling Industries. Yeah. So family business that we did. And
00:09:29
Speaker
we, in the early days, we were primarily kitchen countertops, but, um, high volume of kitchen countertops. So to give you an idea, we were doing, you know, um, like five national home builders. And, uh, you know, we did like 92 home depot stores, like 75 low stores. Then we had all of our distributors and stuff. So we had, you know, we were
00:09:52
Speaker
Cranking it out. 16 trucks on the road every day between delivery and installation trucks. And so I had, I had production lines running.
00:10:02
Speaker
We're about to do 280 square feet of countertops. We're like, Oh man. Yeah. I mean, we did a lot of countertops in a day, you know, to give you an idea, like, like a Ryan homes, you know, between their apartments, condominiums and single family homes. We did about 6,000 homes a year just for them. Jeez. Let alone, you know, K of nanny and toll brothers, where Winchester corporation Rylands.
00:10:28
Speaker
You know, we had a lot of small builders in there as well that, you know, we're still building maybe 20 homes a year, which is, you know, a good size builder actually. And then, you know, then we did specialty items. So we always had our specialty division where we were building custom furniture, one-offs, you know, reception desks, all those types of things. And then, you know, our casework, you know, was in that. And then we also, in the latter years, we were doing a closet systems as well.
00:10:55
Speaker
and the elevated panels. Yeah. And then one of my other big, we, we started in 2001. I started just laying up panels. We had Louis had layup lines. So, you know, we were laying up, you know, a thousand panels a day of, of material. So we would do, um,
00:11:18
Speaker
it's just crazy the numbers i mean we just came up the other day it was like when i work for myself i would do like ten jobs a year yeah it was because you know it was like a you know room full of furniture or cabinetry it would take me you know six weeks let's say to do a job
00:11:40
Speaker
Yeah, it really is all relevant though. I mean, when you look at... My head's spinning just listening to these numbers. Yeah. It's like you have to have the machines to do the volume and you have to have the volume to justify getting the machines. Well, in a lot of the early days and even up until the end, I built a lot of just specialty equipment for our operations. So like we built, if you see just the bevel edge molding,
00:12:05
Speaker
that you can buy from your distributor and stuff. I actually, I was worth bare, used to buy off of us. We made the moldings for everybody. So I had specialty equipment that we made, basically took molder and turned it into my own applications where it was, you know, miter locking the joints and cutting them into the strips all within the molder.
00:12:30
Speaker
and then coming out and going into a gluing process and then you know a two-step planing process where because it's such a small molding you couldn't couldn't just the the way the the piece was it actually came up on a 45 and it was taller than what the actual so that finished molding was basically like 5 16 7
00:12:49
Speaker
But it might've been almost a half inch thick because of the piece that had to be glued on in that miter lock. And so you couldn't just run it through a regular planer. So what I had to do is I had to build a planer.
00:13:05
Speaker
that actually cradled the molding and then it had a series of cutters in it that stepped the process. So it would, in a pendulum fashion, first cutter just nipped, second, third. So you got it to the point where it was a thinner piece of molding. You could actually run it through just now a thickness of planer and finishing to get that mirror finish on the back of it.
00:13:31
Speaker
So, little applications like that. Like we had a machine that we, obviously because we were doing so much backsplash material, we built a machine out of an old edge vander that actually had a table saw basically on either side. Saw blade. It was like a, what we would call is like a single antenna, but it really had a second half to it.
00:13:51
Speaker
The outward motor was adjustable to whatever width you were going to make your back splashes and then we put also in the tail end of the machine before it came off. It was what we called our caulking and belief groove. So it was a 45 cutter that came in and put a nip cut in the bottom of the joint that
00:14:11
Speaker
it would basically relieve the bottom. So when you put your adhesives in it, it was on an angle and pushed the adhesive to the front of the backsplash. So now you're only trying to get like an eighth of an inch of the backsplash tight and you didn't see any sealant lines. It was literally tight fit. So it would come out of there and go directly into an edge banding machine and put the high pressure laminate on.
00:14:35
Speaker
It's, it's why we talked about this amongst ourselves, Jeff and I, about how you guys make these machines. Like you're just talking about it casually and it's, and the idea of creating these machines that do this. I mean, it's a great segue into what RT does as well. Exactly. Yeah. And this, that's a big part. Like in the early days,
00:14:59
Speaker
I was fortunate because I had an electrician that was really good at controls and he would help us work on equipment and everything, but he was good at design work as well. And then I had a really good machinist welder and we would literally sketch.
00:15:14
Speaker
down stuff on a napkin and dream it up. So it was a great way to go because I just had a good team of people in business around me that could envision with me. I've come up with a crazy idea, my dad and I, and here's what we're going to do. And we're working out and we did quite a few. Early on, I built a bevel edge machine. There was still that same molding that was a one pass machine where it could
00:15:42
Speaker
machine inlay the bevel edge molding.
00:15:46
Speaker
and plane everything down within four minutes. And it was a completed piece coming out. But that was a, it was very temperamental machine. And back when we used to do, we used to do a lot of different color insets. You know, people would want, you know, say almond on the top in the face and then, you know, put a wood grain inlay in the middle. It was perfect for that kind of work that we did. And we did a lot of that. So that machine lent itself really well to that. And then once everything really started going to one color, we switched up to this other
00:16:19
Speaker
I barely have the patience to set up the machines just normally. It's like, oh man, I got to set up the shaper to... I got to change the router a bit.
00:16:34
Speaker
I had like the hussy this morning, you know, it's like running the molding on the hussy is the easy part. It's like, send it up as a part that sucks. Yeah. What was the, uh, I think it was the buzzards, the one come or a cartoon with Bugs Bunny, the ones who was like, he kept hitting them on the head. He goes, Oh, I think a whole lot of lumps.
00:16:51
Speaker
That was me. It was good.
Major Contracts and Business Impact
00:16:56
Speaker
We did do a lot of stuff. And then when we got in the elevators, we used to just send it to the elevator company that laid up panels. And then then it got to a point where the main guy from Austria came over and said,
00:17:10
Speaker
to the plant over here. You guys suck, give it to Kraling. I'm paraphrasing here, but he didn't mince words too much either. Yeah, an Austrian accent when he said it. Yeah. I don't know if I had that Austrian accent. Sound like the Terminator. Long story short, because you don't know what you're doing. Just give it to Kraling. They know what they're doing. So we, 2006, we took over
00:17:36
Speaker
all of the operations from, from them all together. And we were shipping all over. We, we shipped the Gettysburg and then it went, then it went, they shipped from there, but they were, you know, they gave you an idea on those. Um, we were doing about 650 panels a week, um, finished, you know, typical elevators, four to six, sometimes eight panels in the elevators. And then you have, you know, a whole hotel with multiples. So depending on, you know, the colors and everything that were picked in there.
00:18:04
Speaker
And then we did them as what they called the 3300, where it was a metal part of the elevator that we actually have a special glue process that was designed just for that application. And we glued the laminate right to the galvanized part of the elevator to save weight.
00:18:25
Speaker
It's mind boggling when you hear these numbers, not just in the fabrication side, but to realize all this work is going into something being built, whether it's a home or an elevator or something like this, all this work going on. Yeah. We, we definitely left a big void in, in the marketplace. You know, obviously we, we sold off the
00:18:48
Speaker
the elevator division and some of the other stuff I just wound down and sold. But yeah, the local guys that were
00:18:58
Speaker
still in town, smaller type of shops. They, they were not prepared. They had no clue what you need. What, how many? Well, we were doing a lot of, we were doing a lot of work for commercial office furniture. One, one big company was Tanner furniture. And so I was competing up against like the steel case and things like that. So
00:19:22
Speaker
Yeah, we were. And, you know, there's bigger companies like that, like Herman Miller and Steelcase and things. And, you know, they're they're building so much, but they couldn't do what we were doing on a smaller scale and custom that needed to go with it. So that's that's the type of work that we did for for those companies.
00:19:41
Speaker
We want some Herman Miller chairs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My brother-in-law is still in that business. So he's, yeah, we, we spoke with him and we had that same, do we need how many moment? It was like, uh, I think we get into this right now.
00:19:59
Speaker
Yeah, Troy's a good guy. He had his own business called Systems Plus and then Tanner Furniture actually bought him out as well. And so he's managing a lot of theirs, but that was, you know, he called me up and, you know, basically on the fly, we figured stuff out and I would get stuff done in a week or two, you know, depending on what they needed, you know, and a lot of one-off things.
Family Business Transitions
00:20:25
Speaker
We did a lot of team holding things like that.
00:20:29
Speaker
Yeah. So he's still struggling to get, to get somebody to fill that. Yeah. That was, that was, I don't even remember it. I just remember like 90. Yeah. How many, how many, how many desktops or something?
00:20:42
Speaker
Yeah, I thought that would be a good one for you guys to hop into. Yeah. I told her, I said, you guys got to call them and see what they'll do. It was, it was really nice. Um, yeah, I mean, that was only what, maybe two, two, three months ago. I mean, like we're better equipped now to be able to handle something like that. It's, you know, it's, you know, it's a process where, you know, trying to build the business into something, you know, bigger than what we are now. And it takes, you got to take small bites and
00:21:11
Speaker
Well, and utilizing, you know, like your layups and stuff going to like Fez Hall and things like that. That's, that's the way to farming out some of this labor. Yeah. Yeah. Until, you know, you're like, wow, we paid Fez like, you know, $175,000 a year. Maybe we should start doing this ourselves.
00:21:28
Speaker
Well, that's, that's always the hard part. It's like, okay, do you, if it's regular work and do you, do you bring that in or do you focus on another aspect of that, you know, doing it? I mean, it's, there's always a balancing act with that.
Balancing In-house and Outsourcing
00:21:42
Speaker
What do you actually want to do? Yeah. You know, what's like Steve, our CNC guy up in Connecticut, parts cutter. He's, you know, he's bringing down another job on Friday. We've, this is the second job we're running through him. You know, so we're in, let's say we're in, uh,
00:21:57
Speaker
I think we're in under like six grand for all his work for these two jobs. That's not even a deposit on a CNC machine. So it's like, yeah, for us, it doesn't make sense to do that. You know what I mean? So you have to find, you know, different people that you can use along the way. And then, yeah, when you find that you're ready to make that step, then you're ready. But yeah, floor space is getting rid of all that waste. Yeah. Yeah. It starts compact. You know, that's, that's one of the big things that, uh,
00:22:27
Speaker
you have to balance out everything that goes along with it. So I guess that's what I'm bringing to the plate now with, you know, RT and our whole crew. What's going on over there these days? Oh, we're busy. Busy is good. Busy is good. Yeah. So everybody keeps telling me, it doesn't always feel good. Like I enjoy, like you were talking about, you know, the different processes and stuff we were doing, you know, that's the enjoyable part to me is like jumping into somebody's
00:22:57
Speaker
project and trying to figure out the bugs of it. And let me, let me take some of that headache off your plate. Like the guys over at new doors. Yeah. I was down there this morning. Those guys are fantastic. I almost feel like the ambulance chaser of the machinery.
00:23:12
Speaker
I'm listening to him on the podcast. I gotta go visit those guys. If you're on the podcast, you might, Brian might be knocking on your door. You know, we try and we're like little matchmakers. Anytime we see something, you know, we want to, where are you getting your draw slides? You know? Well, those are the things that make life a lot easier for everybody. And I think like they were saying on their podcast,
00:23:39
Speaker
So much stuff. Well, here's a piece of equipment and by the way, good luck, you know, and the energy out there. So, I mean, I was fortunate today that I left there, met with Chris and Dan and they were very receptive and Chris's mom, which I apologize. I can't remember her first name, but I called them back on the way up and I said, Hey, if you get me some samples, I will
00:24:04
Speaker
start running those parts for you, you know, to, to start working out some bugs and seeing what we can do before we ever, you know, my motto is let's, let's make it work before anything ever goes in or if we, we commit to anything. Yeah. They haven't experienced the type of service that you guys bring to the table yet.
00:24:22
Speaker
No, I'm hoping they do. No, that's a fact. I mean, that's, yeah, that's one of those things. Like, well, he did expresses from, from one of our competitors that I think the F bomb dropped a few times on that one, which I was like, Oh, really? I have heard that before.
00:24:44
Speaker
Anybody who's in the industry at a certain level, they can read between every single one of those lines. So yeah, I mean, that was kind of good to hear in a sense and I'm glad that they're at least giving me a shot to.
00:25:00
Speaker
So tomorrow afternoon on my way back through, I'll pick up about five doors and he's going to give me one that is how they want it to look. So I have one to gauge it off of and I was conversing with Ryan Combs. He's our other salesman, really good in the Sanders, which if you've caught in the other podcasts, he's a Sander guy, man, true and true.
00:25:23
Speaker
And that's what we do. You know, we have such a talented staff that we, you know, we get right away on a project and we start talking with one another and brainstorm, you know, because we have so many projects out there all over the country.
00:25:40
Speaker
you know, that we've worked on or are working on and, you know, the challenges. So we're, we're trying to bring that knowledge right to a customer without, before you're spending money. That, I mean, that's, that's really what I need to get people to understand is that I'm here to, to help and take, you know, my 40 years in the, in the business and, and help me.
Regional Woodworking Practices
00:26:02
Speaker
Yeah. We can vouch for that. Yeah. I mean, it's, I mean, you can hear it on the podcast, you know, you have like a lot of these, um,
00:26:10
Speaker
You know these big, I don't know what you would call it, like these machinery companies. We use styles as an example because that's the only one I can really think of off the top of my head.
00:26:19
Speaker
where they might have like styles. I don't know if they're broken up by state or let's say it's the Northeast and you know, these guys, all their experience is based just here in the Northeast. Whereas you guys on the podcast and listen, they're like, well, you know, last year we were out in Oregon and then we were here and down over there. You guys are all over the country. So you're pulling all this experience from all over, um, you know, which,
00:26:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, in different regions, things are done differently and you pick different things up, you know, wherever you may go. Exactly. I mean, that's.
00:26:54
Speaker
what we're trying to, trying to offer people and, you know, trying to get it out there, you know, obviously with the podcasts and, and, uh, showing up at people's doors and, Hey, let me in. Well, it's always, you know, I was probably the same way with, with, you know, when I was in business and the salespeople, but I could, you know, I'm a nuts and bolts guy. Yeah.
00:27:17
Speaker
So it was hard, you know, for most people to break that barrier just because I was that nuts and bolts guy. And, you know, I was one of them guys, well, I'll fucking just make it. Yeah. That's what we do. You're not the traditional salesman. Well, I guess that's good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you have to have the chops. That's a big thing. Yeah. We had a salesman come in, um, I won't say from who was from an abrasive company.
00:27:47
Speaker
And like, he really didn't know the product at all. Yeah. And it's a pretty basic, I mean, compared to like machines, like there's only, was there half a dozen different types of abrasives? You know what I mean? Like, I mean, I, you know, it's like anything. It could get very in depth, but.
00:28:05
Speaker
even like the basic stuff. He really didn't know. And it's like, you know, yeah, we weren't impressed. And the other thing that happened was he was going on and on for about 20 minutes and then he sort of, you know, stumbled across this thing. It's like, well, this is, this is kind of our best stuff. I'm like, why did we wait 20 minutes?
Salesmanship and Customer Needs
00:28:29
Speaker
He led with the cheap stuff.
00:28:30
Speaker
It's like, this is what we are interested in, if anything. He's trying to sell us aluminum oxide and he's like, oh, you guys use ceramic. And it's like, yeah. He's like, oh yeah, we have that. I'm like, okay. You might want to ask, what are you currently using and why? Well, that was the thing is we showed him what we use and it still never went that way until he was trying to downsell us the whole time. Yeah.
00:28:57
Speaker
And we're like, that's not our style. We want, you know, to be efficient and effective. And, you know, if it costs a little more, that's okay. Right. Yeah. Because sometimes you'll spend that three times over with a piece of garbage, you know, and you're trying to make it work and ending inconsistency of the paper.
00:29:18
Speaker
You know, and I think we covered a little bit of that on, on our sanding. Yeah. Very time appropriate because this was like right around the same time that we're starting to think about, you know, the sandpaper and you know, cause we have these salt boxes coming up and it involves a lot of sanding.
00:29:35
Speaker
Yeah. And that's the, every little thing you can start to shave some time on it and get the longevity out of it. Cause not only do you have to stop and change now you're on that, you know, the distander where, you know, what's the change over on that belt? Yeah.
00:29:51
Speaker
We were like something that I never even really considered was the heat dissipation. Yes. You know, it's like, oh, it's just a little thing that, you know, like the steel drum and the rubber drum that I learned. And then I think Ryan was talking about, you know, what is a silicon carbide is like self, maybe self sharpening isn't the right word, but you know, it sort of fractures off and will become sharp again. Right. Yeah. We actually used a lot of silicone carbide because I had a car shop
00:30:21
Speaker
deal as well. That was my professional hobby, which I think we hit a little bit on the Hot Rods and Edge Banders episode. Now it's pontoon boats, RVs, outboard motors. But I was one of the few guys that could cut glass for chopped vehicles. So guys were sending me stuff all the time. But what we did is I took, because we had laser equipment,
00:30:47
Speaker
I would laser the windshield, an existing windshield, and we made templates. And then what I would do is I made a cradle that basically cupped the whole part of the windshield and we made a male and a female. And then it actually had to incorporate holding the piece that was going to be the drop.
00:31:07
Speaker
And then we put foam on that and then we had a special rubber that we would put on, it was adhesive rubber, it was a roofing product basically. And we'd put that on the edge and then we sandblasted.
00:31:22
Speaker
all the way through the glass. And then the way I made the jig is that you could flip the whole jig with the male and female and start the other side. And then it cradled the drop. And then you had a safety glass, you know, between the, between windshields is the way it's made. And then we used a silicone carbide water to sand the windshield. And the key was you sanded it in the jig. So the,
00:31:47
Speaker
the part of the fixture that held the drop, you pulled that away. We made it that that unscrewed and then you would sand it while it was in the jig. It didn't move it or didn't stress it till you sealed up all those edges and silicone carbide was the only way to do it because it wouldn't all.
00:32:06
Speaker
And like you said, it kind of re-sharpens itself and it was one of the only things that could attack the glass. You know, you couldn't take a regular paper. It just wouldn't, wouldn't just strip a regular paper right off. But yeah, we did that and guys were like, man, that's really expensive. I'm like, well,
00:32:23
Speaker
I'm doing it one time and you get, you get the jig. So when you, so if you were, you know, it costs a thousand bucks plus glass to cut a windshield, you know, and everybody thought that sounds like a bargain because my head is spinning, just trying to picture what the hell was going on. It probably was too cheap, but yeah, we did quite a few of those.
00:32:43
Speaker
You know, cause I was the only guy around that knew how to do it. Holy shit. You know, it was fun. You know, how many windshields did you break before you got it down? Um, surprisingly on my own, I only broke like three till I was like, I cut, I cut the first one. I was like, I don't quite know what happened. The second one was like, Oh, I know what happened. So it was, it was actually supporting. You had to have everything supported evenly.
00:33:08
Speaker
as you were cutting it. Because if the off-fall started to stress, you'd blow a crack in something. So by the third time I had it dialed in and then I could start cutting other people's glass for them. But I always told everybody, hey, it happens. If you got to buy another one, you're going to buy another one. But we do everything we can to... How'd you make the fixtures?
00:33:29
Speaker
on a CNC. So we would, you know, we would laser the back of the glass. I'd just put tape on the glass, laser it, and it took the profile. And then we would just cut them on a CNC and pop them down on the jig. And that's how we did it.
00:33:46
Speaker
I would love to get one of those lasers for doing the rooms.
Laser Technology in Woodworking
00:33:50
Speaker
Oh yeah. Cause mosaic, you could just upload right into mosaic. Yep. Yeah. We, we were kind of cutting edge for that back in like early 2000s when that technology's first started coming on, you know, we, we initially used the digitizing arms.
00:34:08
Speaker
And then, laser products came on and I was like one of the first guys that jumped into laser products as well. And, you know, we had like three of those units, plus, plus the digitizers. We, we pretty much just went all to the laser, hit the tail line, but you know, they were, you can't do it without them.
00:34:29
Speaker
Yeah. Cause you waste a lot of time going to measure a job, especially if you're going to measure like pre-bid or like in the, in the bidding stage. Um, cause all that time could potentially just be thrown out the window. So it's like, if you just go set this thing up, you know, get the room. Yeah. And then that was the way we did a lot of it that way, because even with the 3d units, we would go into rooms that, you know, you had a built in that was four sides, basically floor. And,
00:34:57
Speaker
side walls and ceiling, and we would shoot that whole area. And then we pre-made like all the fillers. If there was like in a commercial job, the floor was so out of whack, which we would actually, my brother-in-law, Troy, we used to shoot stuff for him. They would put these big glass wall systems in. It would be, I don't know, 150, almost 200 foot long in some of these office buildings.
00:35:21
Speaker
we would shoot that for them. And then we would pre-make like all their fillers and tell them how far the floor and everything was out. So Troy could already say, Oh, okay. Um, you know, you guys are going to need, you know, more leveler at this area, the floor, because the floor, the concrete so far out, you know.
00:35:38
Speaker
you're not going to need any levelers at this end, you know, it's out. So yeah, we, we worked together pretty well with a lot of that stuff too. Yeah. I, I worked in an apartment building in Hoboken and it was a new construction. It was all concrete and everything. And I was naive. I'm thinking, Oh, this is going to be all perfect. At least within reason, you thought carpenters were bad. The concrete guys were.
00:36:06
Speaker
Have you seen a concrete guy recently? That was a rude awakening for me. Yeah, you get into some of those really big commercial places and just like, oh my God, this is not going to be fun. And the millwork is matching when it's all said and done. We went to, I think we talked about it. We installed that reception desk, I don't know, maybe two months ago.
00:36:35
Speaker
and looked at some of the work that was done that we bid on and it was it was as crusty as it gets. Oh yeah. Oh I mean you you you don't like to like mock other trades people's work or anything like that. That's not that's not our thing at all. Yeah. It's just these examples were really really horrendous. Yeah we would get into that quite a bit over the years. I you know I would do the same thing. I
00:37:02
Speaker
go into some of these places that I'm like, really, this was what you accepted? You know, and that that's what used to make me so. Right. Because because it was probably let's say they were like 15 percent cheaper than than we were because it couldn't have been that much cheaper. Like we're given rock bottom numbers. I mean, it's like simple stuff that it's very cut and dry time material.
00:37:25
Speaker
So for 15% less, you got like 20% of what you would have gotten. What we would have done would have been 80% better because it would have been right. And it's not like that joke where like, you know, if a tradesman comes in, he's never happy with the guy who's preceded him. It's not that instant at all.
00:37:46
Speaker
Yeah, it's blatant. It's like real like miters just totally undercut and they like shoved pieces inside of it all blown out like they cut it with like a circular saw or something. It was really, really bad. It was horrible.
00:38:08
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. It was sort of like they just picked up some guys who happened to be on the job and had them do it. You know, like, Hey, can you, can you guys, you know, do some of this too? With that broom, come over here and do this. We'll get to this all quick. I was going to say with the laser,
00:38:30
Speaker
We come back from measuring a job and you have this notepad with these, it becomes hieroglyphics from the drive from the job back to the shop. It's like you can't even understand what you wrote anymore. And you have all these dimensions and stuff on there that
00:38:47
Speaker
I think Laser Products now has just a, not for what we were doing, they have a room scanner for that kind of thing now too. So the ones that we had were pinpoint, you had to go along and click all the points or capture everything. But I think they now have a scanning
00:39:08
Speaker
that gives you an overall and it's still good dimensioning, but it's not like you're totally building like a countertop off of it. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing the technology with a lot of it. Yeah. They have now like on your phone, it's called Polycam because the I know like this, whatever this is, iPhone 14 or whatever has LiDAR built into it and you can scan the room and it'll create a 3D, but I don't think the accuracy is there with this.
Importance of Accurate Measurements
00:39:35
Speaker
Yeah. You know, like we want it to get you like an in general.
00:39:38
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. You know, for a takeoff, that's what I was mean. It was, you know, it's good for that type of thing. But when you're really getting down to, okay, this is what we're going to build off of, you know, we got to. I want like it within like a 16th, I'd say is probably because you don't want to have to break out that little, that little saw on the job site.
00:39:57
Speaker
I was laughing at that so bad the other day when you were talking about that. That's the saw that we got to get it out of the van. Well, the thing is, if you don't have it, then what could it have turned into? Oh yeah. You want to be able to fix it. I mean, mistakes and unexpected things is usually what it is. Less a mistake, more an unexpected thing.
00:40:22
Speaker
We got lucky on the last two installs. So this one coming up is probably going to be a nightmare. Yeah. Two in a row. It's going to bite you. That never happens. The last one I left a van running in the street and we just ran inside and the car, excuse me, the carpenter was there. I was like, you have a chop saw set up. He's like, yeah, I'm like, all right, we got to make a couple cuts. We pick it up, we drag it over.
00:40:47
Speaker
It was funny, I was going into Brooklyn on Monday and I'm coming around the block and I'm like hoping there's a parking space in front of their property. What I was listening to you guys with the guys from New Doors and you're talking about I'm one more block around, I'm up one block further than I was like, and it was pouring down rain on Monday. I mean, it was just pouring Monday and I was like, oh my God. And I got lucky.
00:41:12
Speaker
How did I get a place right in front here? Yeah, that was the day we were on that insula too. Rob DiMarco said he was laughing about that. Yeah, so Monday we went, we shot from here, we left here at six, we went up to Newark to Kukin Brothers. It's a lumberyard up there. Yeah. Picked up a piece of baseboard that we had to match on this job. Then we went over to Jersey City to Jim Jamal's, picked up the cushions for the church.
00:41:37
Speaker
went from Jersey City to Red Bank, installed the cushions at the church, went from Red Bank to Ocean to that install, you know, brought the doors that we built for the painters, installed the baseboard. Yeah, it was like one of those days where we just had so many and we came back here and worked for a whole half a day after that. Yeah, that was Monday. Yeah, I think it did by afternoon. It started clearing up.
00:42:02
Speaker
Yeah. And then it started raining again at night. Yeah. Yeah. We, we got pretty good. I was, I went back home on Monday night. Yeah. We had that nice rainy drive up to Newark in the morning with all the airport traffic and it was
00:42:18
Speaker
It was, it was, it was going good. So yeah, we're working on a, so he's a bander up at that place. So upstate. Yeah.
Core Craft Program for Inmates
00:42:28
Speaker
Yeah. That should be a new one. We were just watching a video here on the, uh, so he's a,
00:42:39
Speaker
Avant 6.9. Yeah. Can you talk about that account? Is that okay? Yeah. It's pretty interesting. I don't think a lot of people realize that. Yeah. What they do. Yeah. What they do. Yeah. They have, it's called core craft, which it's part of.
00:42:54
Speaker
you know, New York state and it's for the prison system. And it's basically their, what I would call their industrial arts program in the, in the, uh, and it's entry. Yeah. And that's a maximum security prison. Yes. That is maximum security. And it's funny. Has anybody seen mayor of Kingstown?
00:43:13
Speaker
No, but you mentioned it on the podcast. I was like, huh, what is it? Yeah. So watch that. And it's a good series and they actually just renewed it for season three. But, um, yeah, going in there where you're walking right through the center of the yard. Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, they have so much going on. I mean, it, it, um,
00:43:32
Speaker
It's great to see it. And they're staying up with the technology and stuff. And, you know, obviously this project we're working on now is for edge banders. And so like all the furniture and stuff that they use in the state offices, like they make them in the prisons. Yeah. Yeah. They have an upholstery area and there's CNCs in there. And that's actually what stemmed them changing their policy
00:43:57
Speaker
now that if you're bidding on something, you have to be at the bidder's meeting and it's that one day and all the questions and everything are fired there. Now, like yesterday was the day, was the last day you could have formal questions mailed in, you know, or, you know, obviously emailed and go into the bidding process. So, and then they, they kind of set the spec off an older,
00:44:23
Speaker
older machine in there. And then we, you know, obviously we're, we're matching that spec going in, but I think we have a pretty good shot at it. They actually have to go with low bidder in those. Yeah. Bidding for any kind of, you know, government agency is pretty tough.
Bidding for Government Contracts
00:44:41
Speaker
I put together a few in my day and
00:44:44
Speaker
like the spec books and all the, you know, the hoops that you got to jump through. And if you don't do exactly as it's written in there, they just throw your bid up. Yeah. So I think the initial, you know, opening bid
00:45:02
Speaker
packet is 37 pages. You know, so it was like last week I spent, you know, the one morning just burning through the whole thing and I'm like, and it's legalese too. It's not, you know, it's not an easy read. So then I'm, you know, I'm pulling out. Okay.
00:45:19
Speaker
you know, Curtis, he's I'm like, okay, page eight, go to page eight, you know, is where you need to start looking. And then, then we can fan back to everything else. So then like yesterday, we were, I bet you him and I were on the phone back and forth between text messages and phone calls, probably 10, 12 times, you know, yesterday, just trying to get, get dialed in of what's gonna, what's gonna fly for it. And it's a good contract to have, though.
00:45:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean it was good too to see everybody that's involved and you know they went through a director change.
00:45:51
Speaker
as well, just in the last couple of months. Um, but now we have, you know, contact with the people or boots on the ground, which is kind of nice, you know, but you're there with all your competition as well. So that's, you know, I wonder if anybody or how many people have graduated from penitentiary into civilian life and taken up, you know, the trade.
00:46:16
Speaker
Yeah, it'd be interesting. Yeah. You know, cause they have all the machinery, they're, they're doing it. Yeah. I mean, it really, it's amazing what they have in the plants, you know? I mean, in this machine, we were just watching the video here a little bit. It's, it's an impressive piece to know how to run that. Come on.
00:46:33
Speaker
Yeah. And yeah, I mean, all you hear is people talk about they can't find anybody to do these things. You know what I mean? Like, right here. We got some guys got a couple of felonies. He killed three people. So that was a good one. Then we shot over to Albany and actually sold that female, that concept 350, which is the hybrid. That thing's cool. So I'm going to close this garage story real quick.
00:47:03
Speaker
Okay. Yeah, that one's actually a really neat saw. It's getting a little bit everything with the sliding.
Machinery and Equipment Logistics
00:47:10
Speaker
It's the getting away from a sliding table saw, but introductory into a horizontal beam saw and having all the features of mitering. You know, the Arbor goes to 46 degrees, scoring and being able to preset programs and stuff in it as well. So it's,
00:47:31
Speaker
Yeah. Speaking of saws, you know, we had to cut up some stuff on the old slider today and yesterday. And, you know, first it was my turn and I'm cutting out these big, tall, thin doors. And we only have one sheet of this material.
00:47:55
Speaker
You know, you're just praying, you know, that it comes out okay because you just can't trust, you know, there's nothing worse than not being able to trust your machinery. Yeah, that's scary. You know, so I'm like, oh, please God, please. And then, you know, so I made it through unscathed. And then Jeff, I was doing something else and Jeff was over there jumping on, I could hear him like,
00:48:28
Speaker
Nothing locks in. You're dragging the slider around because it doesn't stop. It's just, you know, your parts aren't coming out perfectly square. That's the, that's the thing. You know what I mean? That's my battle with that machine. Yeah. When, when you're, when you're battling that, that's really tough to, yeah, because you're making two doors, you know, that fill up, you know, they're like these follow inset things. So there's no, they were inset doors. Well, they're, they're kind of like following set, you know, they're,
00:48:54
Speaker
Yeah. The appearance is inset. So there's no margin forever. You're cutting them and then you're edge banding them. And you're going back, I only have one sheet of material. So there's only one shot at it. We were talking about our slider. Oh yeah.
00:49:19
Speaker
Yeah, the customer that's going with that concept 350 there. He actually has a 20 plus year old street big, but they have one of the small, I think they were called Titans or something like that. They're only like four horsepower. Yeah. We can't, we can't wait. We can't wait. Oh, it's going to be awesome. Have you been on site for a delivery of one of those compacts? Not yet.
00:49:43
Speaker
Because that'll probably be a new challenge on your rigging skills. Yeah, I had Dave, Dave and Eric sent over some pictures because I was like, can you send some pictures of what this is going to look like? Because the whole frame, it comes as one piece. But there's because this is a demo saw, like I guess they have it set up already.
00:50:02
Speaker
It's already kind of like on the legs or whatever, but it has like lifting point in the middle. So it'll be kind of like a drag it out and then come from the middle and pick it up from above with the forks. Is it coming in a truck or on a trailer? In a truck. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So why don't you come in and pick up the SCMI?
00:50:22
Speaker
You didn't get one? You didn't get a taker on? Did you list it yet? Nobody wants it. You might have to drop the price. Yeah. Everything we put up. No, uh, the dust collector, the slider and the paint booth. No interest at all from nobody. Wow. Yeah. I'm surprised. Are you sure you actually posted them? Yeah, I checked. I mean, I, I went back and look. You know what it is. Craigslist is dead. I'll have to put them on Facebook. Oh, you didn't put them on Facebook. Yeah. Facebook is a way to move stuff today.
00:50:51
Speaker
Yeah. That's we had the best luck. You know, I have a lot of customers. I try and tell them, push them that way. Yeah. You know, see what you can do with it. If not, you know, others. I'll check Craigslist because a lot of times you'll find it's old. It's more old school. So you'll find these dudes who post things on Craigslist and they're not on Facebook. Yeah. So you can find things on Craigslist that you can't find on Facebook, but there's a lot more on Facebook of everything. Yeah. Yeah. I think that the exposure to it is tremendously better.
00:51:20
Speaker
Yeah, you got to go with it. Like when I used to sell, I haven't done it in a while, a bunch of guitar pedals. Yeah. Like there's these forums you can sell on and for the same price, you might get one or two people kicking the tires and it'll go on for weeks and weeks and weeks. Then I'll put the same exact ad up on Reverb, which is like an Etsy owned thing, and they'll sell in a day.
00:51:49
Speaker
Yeah. It's, it's just the eyeballs on it. Yeah. Yeah. Tremendously more. That's that Oneida dust collector that's on Craigslist. I guarantee you if that was on Facebook, it would already be gone. Yeah. It's a, it's got a good price on it. It's a nice dust collector. Yeah. With the rotary airlock on it, that's actually, that's a nice feature in itself.
Podcast Interruptions and Casual Touches
00:52:08
Speaker
Yeah. That's what kind of makes it. I'm getting an Amazon delivery. Thanks man. Kind of nice. Everybody breaking in here. Yeah.
00:52:18
Speaker
Thankfully, Andre doesn't have the code. It sounded like he was trying to come through the door. Yeah. Thank you.
00:52:28
Speaker
Yeah, that would be nice. I think it's it's one hundred and twenty eight inches. With the airlock. That's pretty tall. Yeah, I think we have eleven feet. Yeah, that is one thirty one thirty two. Right. Yeah. One thirty two. So it's just going to make it. Yeah. Now you can always trim that leg a little bit. Cut the sheetrock out. Make it pop up through there. I was talking to a guy. I forget his name. He's a pretty big.
00:52:58
Speaker
What does he mostly make? Okay. Maybe doors, but he had a big, um, it's not a neater man. It's not a bill fab. It's like an air or something.
Optimizing Shop Space
00:53:08
Speaker
He got a new outdoor dust collector and he was getting rid of this and he, and he sent me a picture and that's what he's got the ceilings on. What about what is did like going up through the floor? Oh yeah. Our buddy Matt, he's got, uh,
00:53:24
Speaker
It's like above the bathroom in a shop. There's like a little loft. Like that's where the filter bags are. But then the cans are in the bathroom. You do what you got to do for space. That's exactly. That's our motto, too. We mentioned it, but we were laughing. You know, like the the paint booth was just a bunch of sheet metal and a bucket of bolts. Oh, wow. You know, so it's like.
00:53:55
Speaker
Yeah. Who was it? Somebody's they're like, that wasn't there a couple of days ago. No, no, that'll make it nice. You put that VFD on there. That'll be, yeah. That'll make it nice. Yeah. It's already, I mean, I sprayed, uh, been spraying all week and it's coming real handy. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's so much better than it's 16. Uh, we have 16 times the filter area of our old, you know, old one was one 20 by 20 filter. This is 16, 20 by 20 filters.
00:54:24
Speaker
And you know, that is I think 6,000 CFM and the blower that we had on on the other booth was like 1,200, 1,500, something like that. So it's a big difference. Yeah. Wasn't quite enough. Yeah. You need to move that airflow. That's a key to it. Yeah.
00:54:41
Speaker
Yeah, just, I mean, you can look in there, the amount of overspray that's in there on the floor is minimal. Like you wouldn't be able to see the floor in the old booth. Yeah, everything's dropping down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You get that variable on there too. You'll be able to really dial that in. Yeah. To where it's just nice, plus the wintertime stuff too that you're not.
00:55:02
Speaker
Yeah, be screaming hot in there and cold everywhere else. Yeah. I'm going to go over and stand in front of the paint booth. Well, that was like a Tom shop, you know, so he didn't have any makeup air. So you'd have to crack the front door in the wintertime. Paint booth's in the back of the shop. We're in the front of the shop working. So it's just freezing cold air flying past us all day and going out of the
00:55:22
Speaker
out of the roof. I was thinking of swinging by Tom's shop this week. Yeah. Yeah. Is Lou back to work? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You should go give them some donuts. Yeah. I have a t-shirt. You can bring them. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about tomorrow morning, stopping in there in my way. Yeah. That way down through. And I got a couple to hit and go back over to new doors and pick up samples down there and we'll run them on Friday.
00:55:49
Speaker
Last we were over there, Tom, he's still thinking about a CNC. Yeah. Yeah. You never know. You never know. And he, um, he has a dust collector for the CNC. What was it? I forget. Was it a dust tech? I don't know. He bought a dust collector in used in, uh, preparation for getting a CNC. And then he said he would sell us his Cyclone.
00:56:13
Speaker
Yeah. So you got to sell him a CNC so that we can buy his cycle. Cause he was like, yeah, give me like six, 600 bucks or something. Like, yes, let us know when. Have you talked to him lately? We stopped in. We did. That was, it was the first time since we both left there. Yeah. I think that's right. You guys were talking about it. He was a little surprised to see us. Yeah.
00:56:35
Speaker
There's no hard feelings. No, that's good. Yeah. Life's too short for the kind of stuff.
Client Education and Service Range
00:56:40
Speaker
You know what I mean? There's enough shit to worry about. Exactly. Exactly. There's, um, you know, it's, it's, it was, it's a part of your life, you know, like everything else, you know, for better or worse, there's good and there's bad and everything. You know, we made relationships there. We had, you know, some good times, some bad times.
00:57:04
Speaker
It's all worth it. That's the way it goes. The experience of it all. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't been in there for a little bit, so I figured I'd pop down while I'm over the side. Yeah. Tell them we said hello. Yeah, I will do that. Yeah.
00:57:23
Speaker
hit a couple others on the way over and over to new doors and back to our neck of the woods. Have you tried, um, what's their guy's names out in little, little silver now? Um, when river, when river, have you tried them? Where's he? Uh, Fairhaven, Fairhaven, New Jersey. I don't think I have about 20 minutes South. Yeah. Basically just straight South from here.
00:57:48
Speaker
I understand they do a lot of case goods and things like that, right? You know, high end residential, you know, so very similar to what we do. Yeah. Yeah. The hard thing is just getting people to understand that I'm.
00:58:00
Speaker
here all the time. We're within a couple of hours. And it's hard to educate people because you guys do so much, hard to educate them on everything that you do before you lose their attention span. Because they're like, who are you? I'm trying to work here. Well, I'm always conscious of that too. Trying to get just enough that
00:58:26
Speaker
who we are. I had to turn away the sandpaper guy. Was it yesterday? Yeah. He came to the door. I was in here. I had to send an email or something real quick. He's like, oh, did you get a chance to try out those samples? I said, no. I said, listen, we're going out of town next week and we got like five working days. And like, we've got about 10 days worth of work to finish. Yeah. Yeah. I know those type of days. That's tough. Yeah. I'm always trying to be cautious of people's time. It's valuable and
00:58:52
Speaker
You know, I try to, you know, I'm still the cold Kyle King guy up, but, you know, it's just even, hey, just stop and buy dropman info, you know? Yeah. You know, listen to the podcast. If you're driving, you know, wherever. Yeah, podcasts are great in the car. Yeah. It's perfect. Yeah. I mean, I was so surprised that, you know, we hopped on and Ron, Ron was pretty much sold on it. You know, as soon as we left here, he was like,
00:59:20
Speaker
Jill, buy the equipment.
Role of Podcasts in Modern Media
00:59:22
Speaker
We're on it. I bought those headsets with the, with the mic or the end. So now Ron bought a set last week and now he's like, just order them to tell Dean. Well, Jill told me not to order until you see what's going on.
00:59:38
Speaker
He's got the bug. He caught the bug, right? It's fun. Well, yeah, I mean, it is a lot of fun and, you know, just trying to get, you know, our word across a little bit without being stagnant as well. And, you know, yeah, everything helps. And, you know, social media, I guess this is part of social media podcast, correct? I don't know.
01:00:01
Speaker
I guess it'd probably, it'd be more like traditional media. Yeah. I think you're right. It's just in a different platform. You know, at your social media. It's just, this is how things have gone. And I think it's great. It gives everybody a voice. It's another way to advertise. It sure beats the yellow pages. Yeah. The days of the yellow pages.
01:00:31
Speaker
for years. What we actually did, you know, it's funny because, you know, back when the newspaper in the business section, we did.
01:00:40
Speaker
more like social media posts back then. So we would spotlight jobs. You know, we would do that on a monthly basis. So we would have customers that we were dealing with and we would take photos and, you know, whatever was going on, we would, you know, there was a new grandchild born or something like that. We would do plugs in there. So we did that all the time in the regular newspaper.
01:01:05
Speaker
You know, and it tries to give you a more of a personal touch of what we were all about. Which is important because people want you to be professional, but they also want you to be human. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like I feel like a lot of people try and, you know, they get too big for their britches and they want to act like they're like, you know, I don't know, all business all the time. It's like, that's not reality. No, no, I don't think so.
01:01:29
Speaker
I mean, on my first website, I used to have a picture of all my dogs. Yeah. I call them the crew, the crew, the crew. Yeah. And, uh, I used to get more responses about that than anything. Then all the work, everything, everybody would just read. Yeah. I love the crew.
01:01:52
Speaker
Here's something I wanted to pick your
Cabinet Construction Techniques
01:01:54
Speaker
brain on. So we got the street big coming. And yeah, obviously the big void in the shop is like the construction of the cabinets because obviously we don't have like a pot of rail CNC. We don't have a construction boring machine. We have a line boring machine. But like for a shop this size, what would be like the go to
01:02:21
Speaker
So just to do like smaller construction bore, like we do like the Ritter or the Magi, um, you know, they're few thousand dollar type of machine, you know, where you just kind of leave them set up.
01:02:37
Speaker
That's probably the biggest challenge, you know, over the years is people buy a multi-purpose machine that they're doing construction board and line board and everything in it. And it never gets used because it's just too, too much flipping around. And for most jobs, it doesn't make much sense. You know, whereas you want to be able to just leave something set up to do that.
01:02:59
Speaker
you know, and then you can get ones that just doing it as a horizontal and then you can make it that the head flips as well. But I find that most people would use them more if they have two disc dedicated machines. So, you know, you're obviously, if you're going dowel construction, you're typically like an eight millimeter dowel and
01:03:21
Speaker
you're drilling your side panels and then your tops and bottoms and stretchers and whatnot. So you just leave one machine set up to do it that way. And that's probably going to be the most cost-effective way, doing two machines that just are there stationary for that. That way you can just pop up to the machine, hit that horizontal application or vertical application, and that's it.
01:03:48
Speaker
Yeah, because I've seen ones that are like, you know, they have the line drilling and the construction drilling and just seems like there's like a lot going on. You have to spend a lot of money to get one that worked well. You know what I mean? Well, and in Dow construction.
01:04:03
Speaker
It has to be dead nuts. You don't want to be, you know, you have to have a good fence system on it and you don't want to be moving that. When you get it set up, you don't want to be flipping into another thing or I'm going to switch it from 19 millimeter front setback and all this job, we got to make it to 24. You're just going to set yourself up for failure. And that's,
01:04:26
Speaker
We're trying to get over to somebody. Well, I just want one machine. Well, one machine is not going to, you're going to get frustrated and, you know.
01:04:35
Speaker
for, you know, that's probably gonna be the cheapest way. You buy two machines to do dedicated operations. You know, a lot of times you can find them used, but sometimes you find stuff that's, you know, the racking, if somebody was using it to go from vertical to horizontal and stuff like that, the pins get worn. So that's why I recommend things like that. You just do as a singular. Then you can go into like, you don't have to go full CNC. So like a drill down machine,
01:05:03
Speaker
with a vertical application. So, you know, I think we can get into one in the forties, even though it's not cheap, but what you can do with that is you can do everything in that one machine. So it will actually do the side panel in the vertical and in the horizontal it drills and inserts the dowel.
01:05:24
Speaker
I think that's what Steve just got. Yeah. Yeah. So that's one of the most popular ways because you can just set a few programs in it. Like I had, um, for the one application we did, I had a V tap, uh, it was called a blitz and it was one of the few machines that came with three verticals and, um, three horizontals. And then we would just set different programs in there.
01:05:48
Speaker
for that. So it was a drilling and doweling, but you could, we also did like our hinges for, you know, I had a 35 millimeter set up in that for just doing doors. That's why door programs worked out when you can pendulum between that. The nice thing about that machine too, is you could run wild with a panel on one end. So the fence just had these pop-up pins. So you could be up against the pins on one side and your panel could be eight foot long, you know, and then you could, you could cycle from, say you had a mid
01:06:18
Speaker
like a mid-shelf. Let's call it a foot panel and you wanted to put a fixed shelf in the middle. And then you were, you were lined boring for both sides. You just go up against the one pin, go up against the next pin and it would do, it would come from each side with the same, because what it's called is
01:06:35
Speaker
It's a pendulum operation, but it mirrors automatically. So it already knows what you're doing. You just tell it, I'm in zone one, two, or auto. When you put it in auto, it knows to do the exact same program just in field two. So that's one of the most versatile, if you're getting it into Dow construction and something that you can do multiple things with that machine.
01:07:02
Speaker
Obviously, then you can go into flat beds or point-to-points from different past. I'm a fan of point-to-point machines. I think for custom shops, it's a really, really valuable machine in the shop, and you can still find it. We have a few used ones right now on consignment, great machines. They just
01:07:25
Speaker
We're into some newer technology and there's nothing wrong with the machines because you're doing all the programming within in the machine itself. So it's not like you have to have another office software. You know, that's what's really nice about a lot of the European point of points. You can do everything right on the machine, you know, and it's panoramic. So you can do whatever you want on it.
01:07:52
Speaker
We're going to have to move some machines around if we're going to be doing that. Yeah. Well, then the feedthroughs, the feedthroughs are another nice way, but the feedthroughs now have, or the vertical, you know, have come up in price. You know, when you're starting to look at used and or new, you know, uh, you know, horizontal, it's typically, I think they, most of them have about four tool changers plus, you know, you're drilling operations and everything in it.
01:08:19
Speaker
Um, most of those are, I think started 70 to 90 anymore. So, you know, on that side of things and it's a little limited, you know, whereas the point to point now, when you're doing all these specialty things, you can do all that within the point to point, you know,
01:08:37
Speaker
And then obviously on the flatbeds, like we just had a really nice, that BS, that one actually went to Canada. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. And you were telling us about that a long time ago. Yeah. That one went a few months ago, but that was what was like 60, 60,000 or something. Yeah. That was, that was a screaming deal for that machine because what it had in it. So I'm a fan of a grid table on a flatbed.
01:09:04
Speaker
Um, to have the versatility so that you don't just run only flatbed. Then you're in it. Cause what happens a lot of times guys are like, I don't, I don't really just want to run. That's the base. I want to do some other horizontal work or things like that. And that's where a pod comes into play that allows you to do that horizontal or, or six sided per se. If you're rounding over things, that's what they're doing a new doors.
01:09:29
Speaker
Oh yeah, that's how they're doing the ease in those edges. Yeah. So there's nothing cheap per se, but just with biscuits. Yeah. And what was funny because that customer that just bought that concept 350, they are doing all biscuit with theirs and he has this vertical table set up.
01:09:53
Speaker
that he has the biscuit joiner. It only takes up like a foot off the wall, maybe a little bit more, 16 inches, maybe. And he has his biscuit joiner right on there. And he has all these slats on the wall that he just takes in manually. And then he has a couple of blocks. So his, like his three drawer base,
01:10:14
Speaker
You just put the football machine up on these blocks. And it's already a fixed block and it's already for your rails and your tops and bottoms. It was a great system and he is doing, he's cutting off his street big, he's edge banding and he's putting the biscuits in and then they're going to a screwed assembly.
01:10:34
Speaker
That was like that jig I made for the, uh, the job that you banded with us when we set up the machine. It was like a jig that slid over the cabinet side and then it had all these registration spots for the, for the biscuit joiner. Yeah. Cause you know, still going into a screw. The problem is if, if you're not into a case clamp with the Dow construction, you're still kind of beating stuff together and bar clamping it or screwing it. So it's, it's a tough,
01:11:01
Speaker
thing to do if you don't have a case. No, today you can get case clamps really cheap for you stuff. Yeah. You know, I was, uh, what about like a dedicated shaper with a, just a slot cutting bit and then you run your stuff before edge banding.
01:11:14
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. You could do it that way as well. And then you just use biscuits in the slots. Yeah. Yeah. And just put a, yeah. So you run a continuous slot or just whatever makes blinds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's another way to, I mean, I've been doing a lot, just pocket screws, pocket screws only. And then, you know, pocket screw, sorry, from the interior parts into the sides and then screw through the side into the, you know,
01:11:39
Speaker
I mean, where are these cabinets going? It's not like somebody's going to throw them off the roof. Once they're screwed together and screwed to the wall, we've all seen the garbage home center cabinets that could survive a nuclear blast. Yeah. Yeah. There's so many ways to put them together and finding out
01:12:03
Speaker
You know, it goes back to the kiss system. Yeah. Keep it simple. You know, cause sometimes, you know, you can get so highly automated with something that it really doesn't start making much sense on a small application.
01:12:16
Speaker
I'm looking forward to getting jobs that repeat themselves enough to have jigs. None of this one off stuff. Even the straightforward things we're doing, they're still kind of one offy. Yeah. Yeah. And we could, you know, there's steps that we could take probably to, to, uh,
01:12:41
Speaker
you know, it's like, okay, cabinet sides are always 31 by 23 or whatever, whatever it turns out to be. And then we can have, you know, things set up where.
01:12:52
Speaker
Well, and the nice thing to do is if you base everything off the front side of the, the, uh, all your measurements and all your drillings off the front side. So if something is changing on the, on the depth of the cabinet, it's just the back that's getting chopped off. So everything else follows suit, you know, your, your drawer slide holes. I mean, that's when you get into the cabin programs, what now did they like your drawer slides and all the date, did he drill all that in the CNC when he did it for you?
01:13:18
Speaker
Uh, yes. But I think, uh, what was it? We thought we were using bloom or something. Yeah. For the kitchen, we didn't have the right draw slide, uh, layout on the holes. Well, like, so for this one, we're using the Supra from Hayfla, which is like a, basically like a, like a meta box, undermount, meta box. Uh, yeah. They're just like, so you're not, you're not relying off everything on the side drilling then. Correct.
01:13:46
Speaker
Uh, well, yeah, like these, he's going to drill for those, you know, they're just like white epoxy, but it's like a metal side. Yeah. For a hair. Wow. We just, we're matching. I believe me, we're going to use the F seventies and they're like, no, no, no. They're like, they'll destroy those. I'm like, Oh, okay. They wouldn't let us. Is that right? Yeah. They want those. This is what they want.
01:14:09
Speaker
But we budgeted for like $26 slides and now we bought like $3 slides. Is it the whole drawer box and everything? It's just the side, you know, so there's a rail that mounts the cabinet side and then it's a so you put a melamine bottom and a back. Oh, yeah. And then it has these clips that go on the front. Yeah, we used them years ago. We used a grass system.
01:14:30
Speaker
And it was good for a commercial application. Then we, we, you know, migrated over to just a dovetail drawer. And yeah, I guess they, you know, just slam these things shut. Yeah. I think they're only three quarter extension, maybe two or whatever. It's what they, what they, what they asked for. I said to Steve, I'm like, listen, I just do what I'm told. You know, it's like one of those things you open up and go,
01:14:59
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So he does all like the hinge plate holes and everything. So he won't like line drill the entire side. He'll do like shelf pin holes here and then, you know, inch plates. So, you know, a funny thing is, you know, we.
01:15:16
Speaker
what originally started as what the 32 millimeter system was, it was just basically line boring everything. Right. Which is what we're doing now.
32mm System in Cabinetry
01:15:23
Speaker
And it migrated away from it. And then, you know, and I think the cabinet programs kind of drove that. But then, you know, after many years of building boxes, you know,
01:15:33
Speaker
The 32 millimeter system is not hateful. It actually makes the most sense and it's simple. And like you talked about in some other, most people don't even know. They have no clue. And I'm a big fan of just this old school 32 millimeter system because it worked.
01:15:54
Speaker
You know, we put thousands of cabinets together that way. And, you know, and, you know, stuff migrated to an adjustable shelf. You only had, you know, you do five holes essentially about where it's at.
01:16:07
Speaker
Well, we ran into some situations where, you know, we just did that and everybody, and somebody would say, well, we'd really like to take this down to like two inches off the bottom. I'm like, why? And then I would be like, well, that's, they need it for that. So, you know, yeah, we used to turn our nose up at the full line board cabinet. And now that we have a 23, we drilled the whole damn thing, eight foot cabinet top to bottom, baby. You know,
01:16:35
Speaker
the, for that cab, that was the first time I used that, uh, that pointer thing. Oh yeah. The indexing pin. Yeah. It worked great.
Tools and Efficiency in Cabinetry
01:16:43
Speaker
Yeah. The, you know, one is a little bit bent, I think the one on the left side, but to continue it on, the first time I did, I'm like, well, you know, I'm going to step on this thing. Let's see where the, where the bits go down. And they went right back into the same hall. So I'm like, all right, it works. Yeah. Yeah. We, we did all kinds of different construction, you know, over the years and
01:17:04
Speaker
And I don't know. I mean, when you really start building a lot of boxes, the, the Dow construction was still probably the fastest and less fatiguing for the operator. Cause when you're, you start blowing a lot of screws into boxes. Now, all of a sudden you're, you know, you're talking a lot of wrist action and, and, you know, the downtime and then just the faster itself. So, so how long may stay in the case clamp if you're not using any screws or anything?
01:17:28
Speaker
Uh, it depends on the glue that you're using. We used a pretty facet, uh, Joe want, but even at that, um, it's not really required because when you push that pressure and then we were using a pre drilled pre glued down as well. And if that's, um, you know, your water and everything is shot, right? Yeah. It's not too much of an issue. So that's usually the battle back and forth. It's like,
01:17:54
Speaker
The preglued's nice because you can just shoot, you know, a squirt bottle in the holes, pound that dowel in there, you know, if you're doing it all by hand and then you're just squirting the outside of the thing and then popping it together. But it's probably drying the fastest than other white glues.
01:18:16
Speaker
I like that because in my short experience with the Dow, like if you put too much blue in there like I'm close. It's crazy. I mean, it's got to be just right. You know, he had the pressurized glue thing with the little. Yeah.
01:18:35
Speaker
And it was weird, like there was like a lot of holes, but we only use dials and it's like holes one, three, seven and 12. It was like hard to keep track of it. It was a full on Tom system. Yeah. It was like, it really made sense to him.
01:18:52
Speaker
We did we did the blind data set up for a little bit. That stuff was all coming off the flatbed routers. That's how Steve was doing it before he got the that's how that kitchen that we just did, it was all blood. And it's not it's not a bad construction. You it gives you some wiggle room. Getting the back in was tough on the big cabinets. Yeah, you got a you got a clearance. The first one I got in way too deep.
01:19:17
Speaker
Like I got a third of the way through putting the cabinet together. I'm like, oh, shit. Yeah. So then I'm like with the rabbit plane on the next one is like, yeah, then in the tenant now. Yeah, there's definitely on those. We kind of faded away from it just because it was too slow on the on the routing side. And you get different thicknesses and material. Then it all goes out the window. Exactly.
01:19:44
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. You have, you know, your spoil board. There's too many things. You know, if, if you're not resurfacing your spoil board regular, you know, there's a lot of things to nested base operation that challenges that people don't realize that are involved. So you're actually deep in it. And, uh, you know, there's, there's a lot of guys in the industry that hate it. And other guys that find out when you're like a couple hundred thousand dollars.
Financial Implications of Machinery
01:20:08
Speaker
Well, it's kind of comes back to what we were talking about. Somebody just says, Oh, you, this is what you need. And, and just, okay, you have fun and you figured out and, you know, the guys like it, you know, Chris and Dan were talking about it. That, that hurts. And it, and it, it's definitely, you know, you start losing faith and, you know, yeah. And I'm one, it's funny because Ryan and Cody the other day were like, man, you got to loosen up on your conscience a little bit.
01:20:38
Speaker
I just, the biggest problem I always had was, you know, it was my name was going down the side of the road on my truck. Yeah. You know, it was crannling industries and you know, I, I just, I took too much personally, you know, in everything I did. So I just felt like I was always responsible no matter what, you know, that's the way it's supposed to be. Yeah. You know,
01:21:00
Speaker
It reminds me, when I was an estimator for this company in the city, I always tell everybody that, listen, everything that everybody says in that job is a lie.
01:21:15
Speaker
You know, whether it's a schedule or whatever, everybody just lies. And so, you know, we worked in one big office and I could still hear the boss talking on the phone to somebody or trying to convince him something. And he goes, let me put Rob on the phone. Cause you know, he doesn't lie.
01:21:41
Speaker
because I used to have the hardest time with it. Like the boss would say, tell him, you know, the plumber's going to be there tomorrow. I'm like, but he's not, he's not going to be there tomorrow. Why do I have to do this? You might as well just take your lumps up front.
01:21:57
Speaker
I know you're going to hate this, but it's not going to happen tomorrow. Yeah. I think that's the hardest part with, you know, like construction, like we're just talking about is.
Construction Methods and Practicality
01:22:10
Speaker
What do you want to land on? What really makes sense? What kind of volume are you really doing? And there's all these questions that come up into it. How much do you want to fuddle around with something? You know what I mean? And how much more technology's got to be thrown at it. That's going to be another learning curve and an aggravation and a cost to get to that other side. That's the whole thing with today's
01:22:37
Speaker
Thing is, what can I go to the machine and do very quickly? And I like a broken record on this, you know, and most routers are this way today, too, though you can you can go to the router pretty easily and come up with something and route it. When you're in a higher production zone and you start to have issues. And let's just say a nested base job, let's take that for example. And you got 50 sheets.
01:23:08
Speaker
in that job. And when you hit it to optimize within the program, you may have parts for cabinet one that are in sheet 25. Yeah. And that is probably, now you can manipulate some of that, you know, within it, but a lot of it, you can't get around too easily, you know, on most programs, because the object is to make it
01:23:35
Speaker
screen to machine. So the more that you mess around within the program to make that work, you know, we played around with stuff as well as we would send some stuff to the flatbed and other stuff came off for the same job would come off of the, the, the, the panel cells. And then it just got to be the point where, you know, I,
01:23:56
Speaker
we didn't have an auto offloading system on either of my flat beds. So I was relying on the operators to get everything off, off the machine and sprayed down, you know, ready for the next sheet. And you know, your spoil boards, you know, how much, if you're running all these multiple jobs, you're tearing your spoil board up because it's got all these different sized parts and everything. And then when you're trying to, you're trying to cut
01:24:20
Speaker
um, drawer stretchers and all that type of thing that are four inch part, you know, on a router, it could be a little, yeah. And then you're going to, you're going to lose parts, you know, and now you have to make three or four parts and you got to re index a piece of a sheet back onto the table. And did the operator just grab another full sheet to make it happen? Because
01:24:41
Speaker
He had better vacuum because the whole sheet was down, you know, or did he take the time to just cover the rest of the board with something? You know, we used to keep like a piece of laminate around, you know, to just throw up on the board quick to take up the vacuum to run a small few small parts that needed done. And so that was that was always the challenge there. And now you're going back at that router when they're already in the midst of another job. Panel saw, on the other hand,
01:25:09
Speaker
You could be within a cycle of cutting a big job. Like I could be cutting, you know, a desk job and we're in the midst of a hundred sheets, you know, because we had a rear loading shelling. So, you know, I got, I got two pallets on deck in the back of the rear loader. And someone says, Hey, can you cut me these three parts? I can stop that program and go right to semi-automatic. Cut him them three parts within seconds and continue on my program. And we didn't even miss a beat.
01:25:37
Speaker
So in a higher production atmosphere and, or if you have to look at that, okay, that was higher production, but I'm coming down to you guys are still a high production. If you have to think of it that way, and it's a system that
Streamlined Production Processes
01:25:49
Speaker
you're dealing with. So if you had to do the same thing, it's the same amount of downtime.
01:25:54
Speaker
other than, you know, if you were 50 man shop or two man shop, it's a system. Yeah. Systems are what we're, I think both trying to achieve. Yeah. Yeah. And that is the key. And, you know, you know, Chris and Dan hit on that very well. It is a system and you can't even know you're saying, Oh, I'm, I'm just one guy.
01:26:14
Speaker
Still on a system. You got to have the system because now you can go from one machine, the next machine, the next machine. And now, even though I'm the same guy that just walked between all three machines, or you could put four guys on those four machines, you know, and you have a bigger production atmosphere going. So that's why you have to look at the systems, you know, in place and you got to look at, okay, you got to take a certain amount of thought process out of that. If it takes, if it takes you a day to make a fixture, that's going to, you're going to keep for months.
01:26:42
Speaker
to do those regular jobs. I think it's worth the effort because it's going to save you that much more time. You know, but did it, did you put that jig together and did each job took you an hour longer because you didn't have that jig? Like that little jig you made for the shelf pin, not shelf pin, uh, um, hinge, hinge bore. Oh yeah. Yeah. Pull that out of the drawer today. If they work like a charm.
01:27:09
Speaker
Yeah. Just a little acrylic, you know, with this, uh, whatever it is. 32 millimeter spacing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, set back 37, two holes, three inch holes with a, uh, what the hell you call those, you know, like a self centering bit. Yeah. So you could just put a hinge plate, every quarter on it, pulled out a piece of three quarters scrap, put it up there to set my distance for the door and blue.
01:27:36
Speaker
Yeah, even if it means like, you know, you want to set something up with a biscuit joiner, if it means buying another biscuit joiner, like... Exactly. Spend the 200 bucks buying another biscuit joiner. And then that's just set up for that operation. Yeah. You know, and those are some of the simplest things. A lot of times it doesn't cost a lot of money. No. It's just figuring out, like people come to my home shop and they look at my tool rack and you're like,
01:27:59
Speaker
Man, why do you have 12 routers? Because I don't change bits. Yeah, exactly. Because I already have an eighth inch rounder, a quarter inch rounder, and then I have a couple of free floaters that I can pop a big bit or something in it.
01:28:15
Speaker
You know, that, that's the way you have to look at it. That's cheap to time. And today, where do you, what, what do you go to the, what's the, um, a mechanic right now at, at the dealership, 25 an hour, but 30, you know, Christ, if you're going to the, it's probably almost 200 at the Mercedes. We're dropping the band off next week.
01:28:36
Speaker
Does anybody make like a pneumatic actuated like biscuit cutter like a like, you know, how castle has like that tall pocket hole machine that I don't know of him like we have that little Delta Which like actually yeah Yeah, that Delta is they still make that Delta or no. No, we have it though, but the pedal sucks. Yes Can you just replace the pedal on it?
01:29:01
Speaker
Yeah, I'd like to maybe go to like a, cause it's just a wire. It's just drive by wire. So I'd like to maybe make like an arm kind of thing to do it that way. Yeah. It's totally mechanical. Like an old fashioned bicycle break. Yeah.
01:29:14
Speaker
Now I got to look to see what biscuit joiners. I think like one of those castle machines would be great for us. I don't know if anybody, maybe Ritter makes one where it's a table, kind of like the Porter cable we have, but you just hit a pedal and it comes and drills the pocket hole. Yeah. And then they have the inserters too. Like, you know, that's a big time saver. You know, you're always dicking around, trying to put the cabinet together. You're trying to get the screw in there. The screws are over on this side of the table. I'm putting it and then you're looking for the screws.
Automation in Woodworking
01:29:42
Speaker
Yeah. It's, you know,
01:29:44
Speaker
Yeah, we had multiple of the castle machines. We used to beat the hell out of them. We actually put an automation system on one of ours way back. It was a timer wheel. It was so simple. It just was on a little arm and it would drop down and it was the diameter of the spacing of the holes we did for our backsplashes. And it had a stop, a roller stop.
01:30:12
Speaker
All you did was monkey ran it through the machine. It actually, the way we had it set up, you didn't even have to push the pedal.
01:30:22
Speaker
He went down and I was on a timer every time he just pushed it. And it just had a pneumatic clamp that came down automatically. Yeah, it had in their castles bigger machine. It had already had the pneumatic on it. We just added this stupid little wheel arm with like a roller on it and it triggered
01:30:44
Speaker
the foot pedal. So every time it came around, it just triggered the foot pedal. So basically I could send anybody to, hey, go down there and drill a thousand of those boards, because we would pre-drill them. So everything came off the panel saws, pre-cut like a little bit oversized, like an eighth inch over.
01:31:04
Speaker
Then it would go through the pocket hole drilling machine. And then it would go into optimization in the backsplash department. And then it would optimize out on the 121 inch sheet. That's what they were. And then we laid everything up in full strips.
01:31:19
Speaker
And then it got chopped out at the tail end after it was already through. It already went through the sizing machine and through the bander. And then it got knocked down to small parts. Then you only had to handle small parts for whatever end capping had to happen.
01:31:37
Speaker
So yeah, we do stupid little stuff like that. We, we, we automated a lot of dumb stuff and I don't, I really wasn't dumb, but it was, you know. Yeah. I love it. It seems insignificant, but when you look at it in the big picture, it's, you know, how many, how many hundreds of hours, thousands of hours were saved or, you know what I mean? You know, before the pocket hole machines, we, we built
01:31:59
Speaker
It had a, it cradled the back of the back of the countertop and it was a big air drill. And we had two finger presses on it. You had an airline run to it. You put it right up against the back of the countertop.
01:32:14
Speaker
and hit the stop, hit the other button and it auto drilled the hole and you just slid it down the top and we pre-drilled. That's when we used to put the screws in from up underneath. So it was already drilled. So we built that machine. Then we built another machine that was all aluminum as well. They're lightweight.
01:32:33
Speaker
And then the other one held the actual backsplash and the countertop all in one. So it was like a grip at the top and the bottom and held the backsplash onto the countertop while you screwed everything. And then you just, you just, and it had just one, it had one little trigger thing on it. You just slid it right down the top and then just as you went down and when you draw it up underneath and then
01:32:58
Speaker
Those were, those were specific that we had a little bit of money in those, but we, you know, we built them for the operation. We were mountain, you know, you need to give you an idea. We were like finished countertops was like 7,500 lineal feet a week. Yeah. I mean, it was like, you know, like post form alone was like a thousand to 1200 finished lineal feet a day between, you know, balls mounted miters assembled and.
01:33:21
Speaker
We built these miter assembly machines that you flip the post-form countertop upside down within the miter machine and it had air clamps that came down and we had a special grip system that was serrated on the bottom and it grabbed and pulled the countertop together so you could put all the miter bolts in it and we already glued it in and we did everything upside down.
01:33:44
Speaker
So while it was in the press, we'd put the scab on the back and glue that on one right away, staple it on, flip it over, do any final adjustment out, wipe all the glue off, screw the backsplash together. But in those days...
Innovations in Countertop Production
01:33:58
Speaker
For the L-shaped counters? For the L-shaped counters, yeah. And we built that. I sold a number of those machines. So we used to build that machine and sold it to other countertop companies around the country.
01:34:07
Speaker
Yeah it was but we were that I could do with a crew of three guys within that what we called the miter assembly area you know they'd be mounting the bowls cardboard and everything up you know we did like 50 L's in an hour like just
01:34:24
Speaker
Just that's insane. Talking about like two hours, you know, just like do it like we're do it here just to assemble the miter two hours for two guys. Yeah, I mean, you know, two guys work in the miter machine and then two guys as and they as fast as you could go, man, you'd be like.
01:34:43
Speaker
just making it happen. Yeah. It was, we had a lot of, a lot of high production stuff and, and trying to do it in a, in a high quality fashion. That was the name of the game, you know, keep the quality there. And yeah. And that's what we had. You know, that was our motto. We had pride in quality was a part of our deal all the time. We had that all over the, all over the plant, you know, reminder. Yeah. It's a, it's a good mindset. Um,
01:35:11
Speaker
I've been reading stuff about like reinforcing positive, um,
01:35:19
Speaker
Not your behavior. There's a name for it now. This guy, he's... You have to embrace the suck. Yeah. That's a Goggins. But he went into this classroom. He was a scientist of sorts. That part was legitimate. And he goes into a classroom of like, let's say fifth graders, and he gives like a sort of like an IQ test.
01:35:45
Speaker
And he said, I can disseminate the results of these tests to pick out who, which students are going to be real blossom into like geniuses, so to speak.
01:36:00
Speaker
I can do this. So he gives this test and tells the teacher, these seven students, these are real comers. They're going to be geniuses. They're going to do great things in life. So the end of the school year, all those seven kids all really excel. And the scientist comes back and admits that he just picked those kids at random.
01:36:30
Speaker
No kidding. Yeah. That's a real thing. So it has to do with, you know, like teacher, you know, living up to expectations, the teacher treating the kids differently. It's all these things. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. It's all your outlook and what you're trying to do. I love a challenge.
Balancing Artistry and Business
01:36:51
Speaker
to me. And I think that's just comes from my like in adrenaline junkie type of, you know, speed and wanting to achieve stuff. And, you know, I still come back to it today. My dad always used to say, why build it if it's not going to look different than the regular. So, you know, every time I'm building something, it's like, well, how can I make this look
01:37:13
Speaker
like really like something, but in the same sense, can I do this in a production type of atmosphere? And in a lot of my projects, it's more like, how hard can I make this on myself sometimes? Sometimes we're in that boat. Yeah. We go, what the hell just happened? A little less so these days. We're trying to get away from it.
01:37:40
Speaker
Right. That's the thing where our mindset is, you know, we're actively involved in the pursuit of trying to, you know, run a business in a sense, as opposed to an art studio, while still maintaining the same kind of
01:37:58
Speaker
Integrity. Exactly. Yeah. You know, on all fronts. Yeah. Which the systems come in even more if you're trying to do, be like, we want to do a volume, I guess you could put it. We want to do volume with very high quality. So the systems are even more important because there's much less room for error. Exactly. Because now it starts to become repetitive no matter what the project, even though the project might be a little bit different.
01:38:26
Speaker
the assembly technique. That's what I really would love to see, you know, everything set up. We're making a box. This is how we make a box. Yeah. So you might want to look, you know, if you look at some of your most difficult projects you made in over in the past, and then you look at that same project and say, how could I do that same project to come the same outcome faster? Yeah. Well, we've been lucky that we've had so many of those projects that were like,
01:38:55
Speaker
that ended up being really difficult. And every time it's like, okay, what are we going to do different now? We learned that we can't do this, you know, or that this took longer than it should have. So now what are we going to do? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And not go broke. Yeah. I've come close. Tomorrow. I don't know.
01:39:18
Speaker
I don't think it matters at what level you are. There's always that. There's always that risk. Yeah. Yeah. It's just no matter what it is, like, you know, our shop, it's a big hungry animal, man. Yeah. You got, you got to keep, you know, a hundred families fed. And that's amazing, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, I look back at, you know, we, we were like a $10 million company, you know, which moving a lot of our product that we did was, you know,
01:39:44
Speaker
Pretty substantial. Obviously, in the other years, we didn't do some of the other volumes and things like that. And then I scaled back. We hovered pretty good in the high 40s from the big recession years, which was a very comfortable, and to be honest, we were more profitable.
01:40:04
Speaker
Yeah, you reach that sweet spot.
Finding a Market Niche
01:40:07
Speaker
Yeah. And, um, you know, some of the competition went away that was doing stupid stuff. You always have some of the, you know, if you're in a competitive marketplace with things that you're, you're always up against those kinds of guys that are going to give it away, you know, but, uh, yeah.
01:40:24
Speaker
Yeah, it was just, it was time. We had a couple older sisters that, you know, we're retiring and you know, my dad wanted to totally get out and I looked at, do I want to buy everybody or do I want to go help other people? And then take this on, take on all this stress for myself.
01:40:40
Speaker
Yeah. And that was always, uh, it was never taken lightly, you know, and the decision took quite a bit to figure out what do I do? I want to run this whole thing. Yeah. That's a big move. Oh, it's huge, you know, and that's, you know, my, that's all I've ever done. So, um, this is a perfect, uh, place for me to land, you know, in the same, same type of business and trying to help people out. And yeah, you bring a lot to RT. Yeah. Well, I'm hoping that
01:41:10
Speaker
Well, you just picked up some new territory. You must be doing something right. Give it to Brian, he'll do it. Stop skipping a jump. Western Ohio, Brian's got it. Well, you can't be afraid to stop in, talk to people, and you can't get tears in your eyes when the door slams in your face. Although I haven't had anybody do that.
01:41:35
Speaker
while you're out there, there's a customer in Detroit. Yeah. Yeah. We actually have, it's a great team.
Positive Work Environment
01:41:45
Speaker
You know, I, I enjoy it, you know, quite a bit, you know, and I'm, I'm always one to, I want it done right now. You know, so we really enjoyed our visit out there. It seemed like a nice family atmosphere. Yeah. Cool.
01:41:58
Speaker
Yeah. Now listening to the podcast, you know, you start to feel like, you know, the people a little bit more. Yeah. I think that's, that's good too. That's why I like last week's, I think you, you caught, you know, most of it this morning from last week and just a little more laid back in bullshit session. And, you know, what happened with Eric with the ladder? Cause you guys touched on it. So they were out there getting one ready for auction.
01:42:22
Speaker
and it was an air handler and was up on the roof and they at the last minute realized they didn't get this stuff.
01:42:30
Speaker
Eric goes up on the roof and it just happened to kick out. But we make jokes. I say, well, Carson kicked the ladder out for Carson. Carson's the youngest son of IRS auctions to Keith. And, you know, he's learning the ropes and everything now. And I, I give him what we were in, you know, doing my plant and stuff. And I would, I would give those guys him and his little cousin. They didn't know how to take me. So like, I'm like, you know, running around and I had, you know, I had, we had, we were talking, they were talking about cleaning equipment.
Importance of Equipment Presentation
01:42:59
Speaker
Yeah.
01:43:00
Speaker
Well, I had my stuff like spit polished, like all my stuff was like dialed in. And then the one guy Todd from the IRS, he's taking pictures and they're jumping over to things that I don't have cleaned yet. And I'm like, what, what the fuck are you guys doing? I got six machines here that are like clean, polished, you know, covered up. And then, you know, so then I'm teasing these guys, you know, and I'm like, you know, of course me, I'm like kind of animated too. I'm like, what?
01:43:26
Speaker
And I don't really mean it. I'm just messing with them. Plus you want them to look good. You're selling them. Yeah. And I got guys I'm spending money cleaning this stuff up real nice. And then I was joking with them like, hey, there's some shit buried in some sawdust over there. Why don't you go fucking take some pictures of that stuff? And then Carson finally, that's why I tease Carson now. He's a great kid. He's learning the ropes pretty good.
01:43:56
Speaker
His little, his little cousin, he just smiles all the time, stares back. And I think once they got to know me, it was like, he's not really a bad guy. He just likes to. So the ladder came out and, and what he got real hurt or Oh yeah. He busted his foot up and he had, um, I don't know if he had one surgery or two surgeries, um, on his heel and, and his ankle, uh, going into his leg there. So yeah, he, he doesn't, he doesn't really run anymore. Pretty tall ladder.
01:44:26
Speaker
like 12, 15 feet somewhere like that, and landed right on his heel. That's funny high enough. Yeah, you think about it, what's this like 10-ish here, 12, you go down and right on it. Oh yeah, I mean, OSHA is what, like three feet? It's like guard rail, three feet. I mean, you can die falling three feet. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty crazy, so.
Safety Awareness in Operations
01:44:48
Speaker
Yeah, that one was not good. Was the roof slick or something like that? No, I think he was actually on the ladder. So I don't know if he was climbing onto or off when it went. Yeah. I always hated getting back onto the ladder from the roof was the worst. Yeah.
01:45:06
Speaker
So I just make jokes that Carson kicked the ladder.
Auction Experiences and Competition
01:45:10
Speaker
That was a good episode. You know, Ron had a couple of good moments with, you know, going to the auction and the guy's like, what are you here for? He's like, I'm here for this. I forget what it was. Press or something. He's like, fuck.
01:45:21
Speaker
Or it's like, you know, whoever's got the highest, you know, whoever's going to, uh, has the highest number already set gets it. Like, all right, on three, say your number. Yeah. Yeah. He's, he's definitely has the, uh, the background in it. I mean, it's, they go way back with, with the best in the industry for sure. And you know, it's, it's pretty neat, you know, and just all the guys, even the younger guys,
01:45:48
Speaker
the amount of knowledge that they've built in such a short amount of time, you know, is impressive. You know, just, just guys are really thinking outside the box. Like Josh had just called me, you know, before we got on the podcast here, he's just, you
Technician Skills and Machinery Issues
01:46:03
Speaker
know, checking in. He knows it's my customer and
01:46:06
Speaker
you know, making sure, Hey, I got it running good. And you know, I'm going to stay here for production, you know, and make sure nothing else has a hiccup. And yeah, he was great with the bander, you know? Yeah. Yeah. You guys are something else. You could tell he just knows, you know, exactly. I don't know how many say he says he's done, but he just knows what to do, you know? Well, and he knows what it's supposed to look like. Yeah. You know, and it's not just, okay, that's good enough.
01:46:29
Speaker
And he was like, you know, he was kind of keeping us all online. He's like, all right, come on. He's like, he wanted to see a little more gone on. Yeah, he's a really good tech. I'm just methodical. You know, even if a machine, he's never been on it. He can man. He can just take a few minutes and go through and understand. And once he
01:46:52
Speaker
sees a couple of things, he's like, okay, I know what it's supposed to do, you know, and, you know, just, just attacks it and, you know, he, and he's really good at just looking at other things that are potential problems. Like he fixed the oiling system and stuff that was sporadic on that same machine, you know, it was never even brought up.
01:47:09
Speaker
And he started really going through everything and saying, okay, yeah, I'm here. Let's get it dialed in, which is really good. Yeah, that same customer, we're actually buying another one that's in auction right now for that customer. So we do that quite a bit.
01:47:27
Speaker
People hunt down machines and will either bid for them and this particular one, that's still a heavy part of their business. So they have two of these top masters in play and one another one for backup and production. And they're also looking at another point to point. They had just put in a brand X point to point about a year ago and not happy with it.
01:47:54
Speaker
They're happy for the most part. There's some issues with the machine that's not getting ironed out, which that just drives me insane why it's not fixed.
Industry Advocacy and Customer Satisfaction
01:48:04
Speaker
I can see if there's a part issue, you can't get it or something like that, but it's not that. So you're a little fish in a big pond and they don't have time for a little fish. Yeah, exactly. And you don't have an advocate going out there. My main job is to
01:48:21
Speaker
make sure everybody's happy and it's working. People are happy when it's working. People are not happy when it's not working. There's always stuff that goes wrong, but if the ball is just dropped and nobody or you just got to put your hands up, okay, it's beyond its abilities. Yeah. When things are going wrong in the shop, we're losing sleep.
01:48:48
Speaker
If you're involved in, in our shop, like you should be losing a little bit sleep too. It's like, yeah, we all, we should all be on the same team, you know? Cause it's like, we all need to go to bat for each other. Um, yeah, because you don't get paid. I don't get paid. You know, you're not getting paid. If you're not producing six jobs and you, you only producing three jobs for the week, it's starting to affect what, you know,
01:49:11
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. The money that buy another piece of equipment that you're, have your sites on down the road or trying to figure out. Yeah. And you know, yeah, it only takes a couple of jobs going sideways to tank a business. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. You can be, you can say spending, uh, you can go broke spending money for sure to get things dialed in.
01:49:33
Speaker
So yeah, we're actually looking he's looking at a used point-to-point and we're just gonna do a drilling operation actually with with that I'm sure we're gonna do a few more things with it, but they do these desktops and
01:49:47
Speaker
They can pendulum between them. So they literally had, I can't believe what they were doing. They had just a template laying his template on and hand drilling. Like, so yeah, there could be a little cock eye. Yeah. So they had like the legs or something.
01:50:03
Speaker
Yep. And then, you know, they're not either not deep enough. And this is a pretty temperamental. It's a hard, it's a desktop. It's hard. It's like a resin. Drill bits get all clogged up with shit. Yeah. And then, you know, if it's not drilled to the right depth, now guys are snapping screws off in it because it's that large of material.
01:50:24
Speaker
You know, there's an hour. Yeah. It's like where that top is done because it's at a critical point and or you got to drill a hole over to the side, which isn't cool. Yeah. Just put the screw in an angle. Yeah. Or just glue the screw top back on. I've done that.
01:50:43
Speaker
I don't have a plenty of brass screws. So yeah, we're actually test running one at the shop for them and going to run it through their applications, see if that's going to work for them. But that's, that's the other thing, you know, with the USB so equipment, you know, it's, we don't know anything about this particular one.
Equipment Testing for Clients
01:51:02
Speaker
And, and so we're going to set it up and run and, you know, run through spaces and
01:51:08
Speaker
That's what's cool about what you guys do. I mean, I've told a couple of people who are like, you know, that I know that they're looking for something. I'm like, they'll look for it for you. Like these guys have access to more. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure you guys have more access, but just the knowledge of where to look, when to look, what to look for. Yeah. And then how to fix it if it needs it. Yeah.
01:51:30
Speaker
Yeah. And we, we've had enough experience with a lot of products that are like, okay, yeah, that's going to be a lot to re do a whole control center on. You might want to just steer clear. You know what I mean? So it's, it's a balancing act, you know? And like I said, we have, we have customers do that.
01:51:47
Speaker
they have the same machines and they're looking for it as parts machines for their existing applications. Or it might be a good running machine that they might put that one in and pull the other one out and use the other one as a parts machine. You just never know, there's a lid for every pod, really.
01:52:03
Speaker
Yeah. You know, I forget which episode you guys, it might've been a planer episode. I think you guys were saying like somebody had a straight up plane or they're going to put in a new one, then take that one out, recondition that one. Yeah. And then run two or whatever, you know? Yeah. We're working with a customer right now that's got four locations and they're trying to get their game plan for, for the year. And it's funny because our main Marine Johnson, one of our gang rep and
01:52:31
Speaker
They were actually dealing direct with them and the customer now is asking for us to be involved in the whole project because of installation, the service, we're right here. And regardless of Marine Johnson, we'd be doing that for anything, but when it's a direct project and the customer wants us involved, we weren't involved to begin with. Just smooth out the whole process.
01:52:58
Speaker
Yeah. And actually Josh was at their facility already. So that just like concreted the relationship. Yeah. You know, our customer there, he was like, you know what, uh, you guys offer, you guys are spot on. So, so that was good that, uh, and he blends well. So he's, you know, he knows his stuff and we went through and fixed a bunch of stuff on one of their planers and
01:53:24
Speaker
Yeah, Nate was on a big one. I think on that same planer episode when just showing the customers how to grind and sharpen and stuff like that. He was talking about running that diamond plate. I'm like, holy shit. Yeah, it's pretty in depth. Yeah, Nate's really, really good. I mean, there's a guy that's
01:53:44
Speaker
only been on the job for six years. And, uh, really, really pretty amazing what he can do now. It's hard to keep track of everybody on the podcast. Yeah. Yeah. We'll have to have to put pneumocletures on or something for everybody.
Podcast Listening Habits
01:54:01
Speaker
Everybody needs to introduce themselves again. Yeah.
01:54:05
Speaker
Yeah, we really as what they do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Most of the time it's just us sales guys and what's Dean do is he a salesman? No, he he primarily he's like Eric's right hand man. So he does all the in between. He brand new machines are coming in.
01:54:25
Speaker
have any brand new or used. He's adding it right away to the inventory, doing stuff with photographs and powering up things and just a whole slew of items. He's a good runner between it all. He's learning the business and he's been there and he's done rigging. He worked on the service side of things, so he's done service work and
01:54:47
Speaker
And he's a wrench in itself. He lives on a farm, obviously. So he's got that transam. You know, you got to know what you're doing. It was so funny because I was just saying to him, like, you never see those transams anymore. And there's a firebird. Firebird. Yeah, there was like, holy shit. He's like, yeah, that's mine. I was like, oh, shit.
01:55:07
Speaker
Yeah. He's, he's good. He's a really good kid. And in the podcast, he, he just took it and ran with it. Yeah. Yeah. So he's, he's doing a good job. Yeah. It's, it's sounding really good. Yeah. I like, I like his voice here. I tell him all the time. I said, Dean, you sound fantastic here. Just do this. Like, you know, you guys got that commercial in the middle now. You like the self promo. Yeah. We're, we're stealing material ideas. Yeah. Product spotlight.
01:55:35
Speaker
We're our own sponsor. And we got a, we get a shout out at the end of the episode, which is, did you hear it again? Oh, you're on the tail end all the time now. Yeah. We're loving it. I mean, it's, uh, you know, now that the Florida guys are trying to, you know, it takes just time, you know, and people to, you know, make the time to, to listen and see them, what you can get out of it. And you know, and I, to be honest with you, I didn't really listen to podcasts before coming on yours. Yeah.
01:56:02
Speaker
You know, and then, you know, I knew about a lot of stuff, but I never really just logged on because most of the time I didn't have the time, you know, what I was doing before. Now, you know, I got so much windshield time in my hands that, you know, it's tough, like in the shop, you know, like I listened today to your guys new episode.
01:56:20
Speaker
But there's parts that I missed because I'm trying to do something. When you're driving, obviously you're paying attention to the road, but you can listen and digest what's going on. I start putting together a cabinet and then my mind's thinking about the cabinet and then I missed two minutes of what was said.
01:56:39
Speaker
Yeah, we're enjoying it. It's actually a lot of fun. I don't know what we're going to do this week. Yeah. I just wanted to say that like cross promotion is really great and cool for everything.
Cross-Promotion Benefits
01:56:51
Speaker
You know, we always like to talk about the people that were, you know, colleagues and, you know, doing business with like CT Woodwork and
01:57:00
Speaker
Bob DeMarco and Viz and Bliss. There's plenty of work out there for everybody. And it's just a great way to spread the community out. Oh, absolutely. Spread those arms out. It's like Joe from Hermans was saying, you know, he's like,
01:57:16
Speaker
We never you know, they were like right up the road from you guys literally 15 minutes up Yeah, he's like, you know, we never competed and then it was funny when he said he was like on like the town council or whatever Yeah, he's like I didn't know that he's like there's no reason
01:57:37
Speaker
I was like, wow, that was good. Well, I think, I think, you know, it's funny. We both remember that. Well, when it went, you know, when Ron, when I purchased that building, everybody was like, holy fuck, you know, yeah. You know what I mean? It was Ron had really come out of the gates hard, you know, from, uh, that was only probably about seven years in. Once he built, bought that building and
01:58:00
Speaker
you know, a whole different animal. It's funny because he really relocated. I mean, he was in Chambersburg. Which is like further west, right? Yeah. He lives in Carlisle. So he's pretty much south and a little bit west. And then
01:58:16
Speaker
You know, his his shop was only maybe a half hour from from his house there. And he's been he's been driving an hour and a half for for all these years. Yeah. Where's your place? I'm trying to get where we drove. We were driving and we saw
01:58:32
Speaker
You mean my house? Yeah, we saw three. We saw three. Not Three Mile Island. Is that what it's called? Yeah, Three Mile Island. Yeah, we could see it in the we're like, oh, shit. So when you're coming, like I come across the turnpike. So I go New Jersey turnpike, 95 New Jersey turnpike, and then get right on 76.
01:58:52
Speaker
which is the PA Turnpike. And then I'm at the Harrisburg East exit. So I'm only, you know, like three miles off of the Harrisburg East exit. So Harrisburg International Airport is actually in Middletown.
Geographic Business Details
01:59:05
Speaker
So you're a little further west from RT. I'm almost directly south. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Harrisburg is, I'm in the vicinity. So I'm like really 20 minutes from Harrisburg. You know, you don't think about some of those. It's all like right there when you're, you're scooting around. Does Ron drive a BMW SUV?
01:59:27
Speaker
No, he drives a 300 S Chrysler. Okay. That's his car choice. We're talking about driving fast. Oh, he and when we do the podcast, we were doing the podcast and we were leaving and there was a one. It was like an M six or something. Yeah. M six X six BMW with Pennsylvania plates. I'm like, I wonder if that's Ron.
01:59:48
Speaker
Yeah. He's, he's the black 300 S it's pretty bad as Hemi in it. Oh yeah. I think fucking rolls. He loves them 300s. This one, this one, they, it handles and everything. Well, he just put another set of tires on him. We're like, Mr. Hot Rod in and out of traffic. He's like, you know,
02:00:04
Speaker
Yeah, because I had the RAM with that motor and that thing moved. Yeah, in the car, it's insane. Yeah, it might as well be a charger. Yeah, I mean, it's got big caliper brakes and everything I make already that it's pretty impressive for just, you know, they still make those. Yeah, that's a brand new one. Yeah. Oh, he winds the miles up to I I'm pushing twenty seven thousand miles on my Jeep since February. Oh, yeah. I put some miles on.
02:00:33
Speaker
Flash. I think we just ticked over like 11,000. We've had the man for two years. Yeah, it's it. I put the miles on. That's.
02:00:45
Speaker
No doubt about it. That's a credit to you. In the territories. Now I got Virginia and West Virginia. So everybody out there in Virginia, West Virginia. Yeah. All you listeners. Yeah. I'll be, I'll be in your territory. I haven't made it back out to Morgantown. I was going to say that's your alma
Sports Rivalry Anecdotes
02:01:01
Speaker
mater. Who's that? You're alma mater. I didn't graduate, but I was there for a couple of years. I had, I had a girlfriend that went there. They were going party school when I was a freshman.
02:01:11
Speaker
Yeah, back in the 80s, it was brutal. It was brutal down there. It was crazy. Good college. Yeah, a lot of fun. Great football team. We were supposed to go to the national championship when I was a freshman.
02:01:28
Speaker
We lost a pit in the backyard brawl 2007 or whatever it was. How did that ever like pit in West Virginia? I don't understand how that ever became the big rival game. I don't know. Because back then, one of my buddies, he had a Mustang GT and he had
02:01:45
Speaker
Pitt GT was his license plate. Well, we were playing in West Virginia and they took and rolled his whole license plate up like a piece of bologna and he come out. He was so mad. They had, they rode on it and stuff with like, you know, the, the, not the chalk, but the white marker things and rode all over it and stuff. You suck. Yeah. Eat shit. Eat shit, Pitt was the money.
02:02:10
Speaker
the backyard brawl. I think it's just the proximity because just like a hour, Pittsburgh's like an hour north of Morganton. I guess they still play, but everybody, all the college teams are in different divisions. Yeah, the pretty alignment now is crazy. Yeah. Because it's all about TV. TV revenue. Yeah.
02:02:29
Speaker
We were in the Big East. And then the Big East, you know, the Big East used to be like East Coast teams. And now they're like, yeah, like, you know, I don't know who's actually in it. They're like, Alabama's in the Big East. I'm like, this doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I think it's like SMU was in the ACC or something like that. And that was all those Mid-Atlantic teams. Yeah. Like Maryland, whatever.
02:02:51
Speaker
I don't have it straight because it's all pretty recent, but yeah, conference realignment. Yeah. Um, yeah, I don't follow any of it. I'm like, I'll catch college games here and there, you know, but when we're at a party or what have you, but that's what I always say. It's like, if you invite me over to watch football and there's snacks, I'll come over. I'm not going to sit at home and watch what kind of food are we having? Yeah. Oh, speaking of food, guess what this weekend is?
02:03:16
Speaker
I'm doing my pepperoni sauce. I saw your post about that. I ordered 20 pounds of pepperoni and our little butcher that's down in Elizabethtown, which is just down the street from us. It's more of a Pennsylvania Dutch
02:03:32
Speaker
So the pepperoni is not heavily smoked. You know how a lot, so I get it in the sandwich size, but then I have them cut it at eighth inch thick. And then I cube it. So there's pepperoni mixed through the whole thing. I used to do it, it's just the slices. And then once I started learning and we were, then we started canning it. So you're going through that whole other process. Now pepperoni, you know, it was like,
02:03:57
Speaker
too hard, you know, from it and it was too thin. So I switched to doing that and then I was up at the, our Strights Orchard. So everything is fresh right from the... I saw the tomatoes and peppers. Oh yeah, it's... Were those full-size shopping carts or were those like mini shopping carts? They're minis, but for effect it looked like... Yeah, I was like, wow.
02:04:20
Speaker
Yeah. The one girl, uh, friends of ours, she just dropped off another roasting pan and, uh, I got to rummage up a few more because this batch, you know, I can control it out of the roasting pans much better, you know, cause I do this layer. That's how my recipe works is I know it by the layers, you know, of the type of peppers and everything. There's five peppers in it. Oh, wow. Yeah. There's no onion and everybody's like, is there garlic? I'm like, no, for mono tomatoes, a couple of little regular tomatoes and, uh,
02:04:48
Speaker
And I do a grinding process with those and then all the peppers are done in a bigger. And then the other key to is all the seeds go in. So, yeah, by the weekend, I'll drop some off for you next week. You have to bring it up to maker camp. Yeah. Oh, that's right. Yeah. We didn't even talk about that. We got that coming up two weeks. Yeah. That is right. Two weeks from tomorrow. Wow. Yeah. We'll be up Thursday. Oh, wow. Yeah. What is today? 20th.
02:05:15
Speaker
Uh, yeah. It's Derek's birthday today. Oh yeah. 33. Oh wow. You're younger than me. Yeah. He's getting up there. I just talked to them this morning. They were, they were at the Ren plan. He's got like 15 guys at the Ren factory. He hasn't been on the podcast yet, right? He was on
02:05:35
Speaker
I think we did the Sanders. Derek was on. What's funny is... He was on a Sander episode? Yeah. And I didn't realize it until I actually listened to the episode. He sounds a lot like me. And I was like, wow, I never thought that before that he was...
02:05:53
Speaker
That happens. It is weird hearing yourself talk also. Yeah. Cause you know, you never, you hear it resonating in your own head, but yeah. Then when you hear it, it's different recorded. Yeah. And I was like, holy cow. That kind of sounds like me talking over there.
02:06:09
Speaker
Yeah, he, he's a 33 today and they're plugging away. So I think they're going up to the cabin this week and they're up and they have a place up in Potter County. So trying to get some more riding in before they close the, all the trails, like there's all eight TVs and yeah. Cause hunting season kicking in pretty hard. So once that you can only go on like some of the main roads and stuff, you can't go on the, any of the state forest and stuff like that. That's for, for like rifle in Pennsylvania.
02:06:38
Speaker
No. Archery comes in. I think that opens usually like last week in August in New Jersey. Yeah. We're last last weekend of September. Yeah. And then shotguns first week of December. We actually now have some, some honey Sunday hunting now different, different things. It's limited. Yeah. I want to say in New Jersey, it was like you could hunt on Sunday with a crossbow or something weird, but we just got crossbow hunting, like, uh,
02:07:07
Speaker
got to be in the last like 10 years, maybe. Yeah. We're about the same. It was like handicap only. And then they went over to make sure that everybody was getting handicapped things. I had buddies. I'm like, how did you get a thing? He goes, my shoulder hurts. I'm like, you got to be kidding me. It's like window tint and medical marijuana. Oh yeah. I got a doctor. I got glaucoma. Yeah.
02:07:33
Speaker
I remember bow hunting season when I was a kid in Arizona, but it was like compound bows. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's what, uh, that's what I still shoot. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't, I didn't cross over yet. I never shot a deer with a, with a bow. Tried. You know, I started pretty much all my at 10.
02:07:51
Speaker
All my buck are in bow. Yeah. And I got a couple in rifle. Just don't know. No bucking. We don't have any rifle in New Jersey, but yeah, my dad is a big bow hunter. Not so much anymore as he's gotten older, but he was always, you know,
02:08:09
Speaker
It's a more, I'll say like skillful kind of thing and more, I don't know what's the word I'm looking for. You're more connected with nature kind of, I feel like with the bow, you know, the deer has to be 30, 40 yards. You must have to be close to the scent, everything. It's very, it's much more nuanced than, you know, rifle, 200 yards.
02:08:37
Speaker
Shotgun, 100 yards, maybe, if you're good, but. Yeah, we had going to, we were talking a little bit about Illinois. I had to learn to shoot like 60 yards. So I had to change my whole bow setup, all the arrows, everything we had to dial in. So we spent, we spent like a whole season, like pre-season just dialing in my setup to go to Illinois. And
02:09:02
Speaker
much faster, like the Arrow setup, much more kinetic energy. You always shot 125 green thunderheads. Yeah. That was what we always shot. I got to pull mine out to see what I, I'm not changing it. The setup really works well and it knocks them down. I blew shoulders and stuff out with the setup I got going on now.
02:09:24
Speaker
A couple of my buddies are like, you know, why are you shooting? You know, you get the know-it-alls and stuff. Do you don't want to shoot this? And then the first deer I shot in Illinois, I went through two shoulders, you know, both sides and freaking dropped this thing. And they were like, wow, that kind of works. Expandable or just regular broad? Now I used to shoot some expandables, but then when I started going to that, you know, we were shooting at that 50 and 60 yard range.
02:09:46
Speaker
uh, because of the distance out there, that's what had to dial my, my setup in for my accuracy. And then the, the kinetic energy just was like dumb luck. Yeah. You know, we didn't know until you shoot your first deer until you blow some bone out or something like that. You don't know what it's going to do, but yeah, I used to shoot expandables, but then, you know, if you broke your rubber bands, you know, on the front or something stupid happened, you know, um, and once I got this set up, I'm not changing it works pretty well, uh, release her fingers.
02:10:16
Speaker
I switched to release. I was fingers for the longest time. I think my dad, I don't even know if he's still bow hunting, probably not, but I don't think he ever shot a release.
02:10:26
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for, that was like taboo, you know, back in the early days with release, that was like cheating and you know, you're not any good, that kind of stuff. It's like those long putters. Yeah. And it does. The accuracy is one of the guys that worked for me and he actually still runs the elevator division, Todd.
02:10:53
Speaker
he was like world champion Hoyt shooter. Wow. Yeah. He's good fingers. The bows have gotten crazy. Yeah. You know, when I first started, it was just like there was an actual rest, a little rubber rest. And then I got the whisker biscuit and he got the true glow sites. It's like I had just this, actually, you might know what it's called, the pendulum site. Was it a
02:11:14
Speaker
Keller pendulum site. Yeah. So when you're in the tree, you know, you're usually shooting down and the site actually is a pendulum and it would swing to account for the, yeah, that was cool. Yeah. It was funny. Once we changed a lot of my setup, string wise, you know, and speed and we're using these ultra slims, um, carbons and everything kind of changed. Like all my grouping came together.
02:11:39
Speaker
My pins, I have a bad right eye, so I can't see red well. Red like looks like a big blur. So I had to take my red pins out. So I have like alternating like light yellow, green, yellow, green, you know, for my pins. But I don't really need much on the bottom side. Like my 20 yard pin can do anything. Like between zero and 30, you know, until you start going, you know, further away.
02:12:09
Speaker
I'm looking forward to getting back into it. I just got my license back after all these years and the group, it all started with Brian and I just talking about duck hunting. And I was really into duck hunting with training the dogs and everything and had just so much fun with that. That was more fun than anything, is working with the dogs. And even if we didn't get anything, the dogs would be like, hey, what are you guys doing?
02:12:34
Speaker
We're all ready to do something here. You know, the gun's gone off, but nothing's dropping. The dogs are mocking you. Yeah. It's like, yeah, I could just see that if they could talk when you come back in the house, you know, the wife asked, how'd you do? I went into so good and you know, the dog talking and he's a fucking idiot. You train me how to do this thing and you didn't let me do it. Yeah. Cause you at least throw something for us. You know, it's like,
02:13:01
Speaker
We had a lot of fun with it though. We had a full boat blind. Work dogs want to work. Oh my God. And they just love it. Yeah, they do. Like I had electronic collars. My dogs knew that we were going to have fun. And most of it I used for tone. So there was different tones that we were out in the field, you know, and the wind's blowing at me and they're out there. They couldn't hear me a lot of times, you know, like just a whistle because I can whistle pretty good. So
02:13:28
Speaker
I would whistle and everybody responds to this whistle and the tone on it sounded like the whistle. So anytime I was training and I did a whistle, I always hit tone. So they knew that was to come. So they could be, I didn't even have to do nothing. I could be like out in the dogs are walking out in the yard a little bit and I just hit the button hit tone and they come right over and they're both healed. Both of them would heal at each other. Brody would be to my right and Gracie would be to my left.
02:13:53
Speaker
And it was pretty funny. Everybody goes, what did you just do? I'm like, yeah. And that was the cool part. When people watched them work, you know, just in a training session. And, uh, but it was every night, you know, doing something and then we would play, you know, then we would do a little more training and then we would play and they knew no different. It was all playing to them. You know,
02:14:16
Speaker
It was only probably early on. The biggest thing with the collars are, which I hate that a lot of people use, the dog doesn't know what it's supposed to do and people are using it to correct what they don't know what they're supposed to do. And that's always irritating to me.
02:14:34
Speaker
The dog has to really understand until he's like knows he already knows what he's doing. And then when he's like full on defiant, that's when you bring that in. But, but yeah, once, once you get them to that point, you never really have to use it. It's all tone. Tone was the big thing. Tone was the correction.
02:14:53
Speaker
come back to dad, you know, and that's, that's what we're going to do. Yeah. We had rabbit dogs that would run, you know, until they were exhausted and they lay in the briars, you know, you'd have to go find them and bring them out, you know, cause they would just run until, you know, cause the rabbit holes up and they just going around and around, but they love it, you know?
02:15:13
Speaker
I have friends, HVAC guys, and Matin checks, and Nick, he runs the Beagles, and he loves it. And it's really neat to see when they get to howling. And there's all that anticipation. You're waiting for the rabbit to run out. It's fun. We have a Beagle club right down the road for me, a couple of miles out of town. And it's pretty neat to watch all them.
02:15:37
Speaker
And it man, noisy. You got all the back of them going. Yeah. They're freaking hard. They're a noisy breed. Especially if they start barking a deer, which is like the first thing you try and train the vehicle is don't bark a deer. Yeah. Do you guys know what four H is? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. When I was a kid in Arizona, I was in four H and was in obedience competitions with my dog. Oh yeah. Yeah. It was a lot of fun. That's, I didn't know they did that with four H.
02:16:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. You know, it's one of those things you run into some kid at school. He does is like, oh, that's sounds like fun. Yeah. Yeah. So you used to do the thing the dogs would heal and circle around like sort of like like the Westminster. You know, you're not running. You know, your your dogs are to follow you around and stuff like that.
02:16:26
Speaker
sit and stay calm, you know, and they try and get the dogs to move. And they used to do the forage fair. You know, when you, when you can work all together as a, it's great stuff for a kid. Oh yeah. Yeah. We would, we would go down or we have a sportsman club called Palmira, um, right down a couple of about 20 minutes from us that we were members of. And we, I forget how many acres we have down there.
02:16:51
Speaker
We might have 150 now and the quiddie, that's like a big famous natural trout stream that runs right through the property. And with one end of the property, we used to go down and simulate hunts. So we would have, I had launchers, electric launchers that I could run off of their collars. And we would go to roots as farm market and buy pigeons. I had a pigeon coop out in the backyard.
02:17:20
Speaker
And then we would take a whole travel case of pigeons. And we would, Derek and I would go out through the field and we would set, you know, set these launchers up. We had like, we had four of them so we could at least get a four bird hunt going on. And then we would go out and they're on it, you know, on the noses and then I could control the release. Oh, so the point. And then you, you release this. Yeah. Well, they'd be on something. So like with Mimer Labs, so,
02:17:48
Speaker
Instead of the pointers, you're doing a little bit different training with them. Flushing them. Yeah. Where the labs are like, they're on it and it's just going to flush. Yeah. So on that, I would pre flush. One time Brody, he grabbed the bird out of the air. He was like, he had such like his reflexes were just incredible. And I was like, holy shit. He just freaking got that old pigeon right out of the air.
02:18:16
Speaker
And, uh, yeah, we had a lot of fun, but that's how we did it, you know, and they, they, from the, from eight weeks old, you know, I, I got with a trainer that was at, um, the sportsman show at the farm show building years ago.
02:18:29
Speaker
And he just gave me a number of different things. And one of the most important things that he taught me was, um, submission of the dog when they're puppies. So always, you know, as you're playing with them at that eight weeks and on is putting them on their back and holding them down with, you know, on their chest and their arms until they submit. Yeah, I've heard about that. And you have to do that.
02:18:54
Speaker
all the way up through. And especially as your breed gets bigger, like I have Neapolitan Mastiff now, which is, you know, a big dog. So it gets more important that, you know, my, my labs were big dogs. Like Brody at his peak was 130 pounds. Oh, that is big. Yeah. He was a tank and like Gracie, she was probably one 12 ish, you know, so they were both big Labradors.
02:19:18
Speaker
And you have to do that, even though what it does is it settles them down from aggression. And it also tells them who's boss all the time. So I still did it as they were older, you know, all the way through. And it's how it would be in nature. That's right. They do a pack of dogs or wolves or whatever. There would be, you know, this top dog. That was one of the most important things I think I learned from that trainer, you know, and just that constant reinforcement.
02:19:48
Speaker
of, you know, praise, you know, that everything had to be. I always did. Like if you get them food smart, that's not really the best way to do it. It's all about the praise and them having fun and getting cuddles and that kind of stuff. That's how I did it. And I think it was one of the most I actually trained my neighbor's dog.
02:20:06
Speaker
because it was so out of control for them. And it was so funny. So I trained their dog for him, but they wouldn't do anything that I trained them. Like I'd work with them. I'm like, okay, you have to do this every day, you know? And the dog, his name was PETA. And that dog would get out and I'd go whistle. I'd do my whistle, PETA. And she'd right over to me and like heal right beside
Training Dogs and Family Dynamics
02:20:28
Speaker
me. And Jim, the neighbor, he'd be like, man, fucking dog. I'm like, Jim, you gotta do stuff. You gotta train the person. Yeah. It's the problem.
02:20:35
Speaker
Well, it's like we talked about with John. It's like raising kids, you know, you have to find that balance between discipline and like affection. You know what I mean? Yeah. That's the alarm. Oh, yeah. You know, you want to.
02:20:52
Speaker
discipline your kids and teach them right from wrong, but you don't want to go too far in either direction. It's the same thing with dogs. People feel bad disciplining their dog, but that's how you teach your dog how to be a good dog.
02:21:07
Speaker
Yeah. And it's consistency. It's a system. Yeah. We came back full circle to the system. Yeah. Yeah. Cause the dog is a member of the family. And, and so he's got to know his role in the family and the boundaries and all these other things. Like my, my Neo, he's, his name's Enzo. Okay.
02:21:27
Speaker
Like the Ferrari. Like the Ferrari. And it's so funny because I'll still do that with him on his back. And like I get, I get up in his face and stuff with him too. And he, he grumbles at me like, you know, and he's like, and most of the time it's because I'm just petting his, his chest, you know, and he just, he likes that. And it's so funny. I'm like, you're not going to bite me.
02:21:50
Speaker
He looks like a big gargoyle though. He's like, people, he comes like running and you're like, he's kind of scary. Yeah. Yeah. They're, they're crazy. Their hands are like, like the, they're huge. And like his hands, like he has fingers, like my, I have two lab, uh,
02:22:12
Speaker
create Pyrenees mixes. And they're like little hoops. You know, for him, he's like, hey dad, let me give you a high five. And he like hooks you. Like he's like, he can literally grab your arm and like pull you right in. He's like, he's a pretty crazy nut. Smart. Oh my God, smart.
02:22:31
Speaker
the personality between, you know, my labs were always fantastic. I love the labs and stuff. And he just has such a more people like personality. It's funny how that happens, you know, the, where they, the dogs and in our lives, they sort of, you know, some of it's us, you know, in viewing these
02:22:54
Speaker
characteristics, but I believe that they certainly have some of these things. I've already videoed him talking to Sherry. He's like at the chair, like literally talking to her and she's like, what do you want? And then he's like, gets the old hook going on there. It's dinner time. It's, you know, it's snack time. It's like throw my ball time. That's what he's, that's my wife's text me this picture. It's the dog.
02:23:22
Speaker
We have a two-story house. He likes to go upstairs. He rests on those cast iron radiators. He rests on that with his nose at the upstairs window surveying the street.
02:23:40
Speaker
Hey, dad, there's someone here. It's funny, too, how the different breeds have their own set of personality. You know what I mean? Like our little we have a big dog and a little he's not huge. He's pretty big. And this is a good size and a little dog. And she's like a Dachshund Chihuahua.
02:24:01
Speaker
Maltese mix, like a whole bunch of things. And I now I'm getting fed all these videos on Instagram because I guess I watched them for too long. All these Dachshund videos and she's got like this Dachshund personality and it'll be this video. It's like, you know, oh, you know, when you're a Dachshund owner or whatever and it shows them like doing all these things. I'm like, holy shit. I'm like, she does these exact, these exact things. They're tenacious, right? Yeah. And then like, you know, like the pit bulls, like Nick,
02:24:29
Speaker
They get this like shifty eye kind of like they did something wrong. It's like spot on some of these things.
02:24:38
Speaker
Yeah, I don't, I don't know if we'd have three dogs again. We had at one point we had five dogs and that was too much. Yeah. And then we had four for quite a while. And then, uh, we're down to, down to three there are 10 and nine. So it's, yeah, ours, a bunch of ours aged out and we have one. Yeah. Ruth is getting old 11 or 12.
02:25:02
Speaker
But he's he seems great ever since Kaya came. I think he's gotten a little rejuvenated. Yeah, she'll be too.
02:25:10
Speaker
When my wife took him to the vet after getting her, she was a puppy when we got her. She was like, whatever, a couple months old. They're like, you know, he lost a little bit of weight. I think we should do some blood work. She's like, no, we have a puppy at home. Yeah. It is amazing when they have younger blood running around, stay active. She kicks his ass and she's like 12 pounds and he's like probably like 65 pounds. And she just, he's got a great nature to him. He's a good dog.
02:25:39
Speaker
Yeah, Sherry does a lot of walking with our dogs because we're in this little burrow and it's a nice area to walk and stuff like that. She has problems with this one neighbor down the way.
Neighborhood Conflicts and Police Interactions
02:25:51
Speaker
He's like the problem child in the neighborhood.
02:25:55
Speaker
He makes the neighbors pick up the leaves that blow into his yard. Like he's like, Oh, he's, he drives. I don't have a maple tree. Who's maple leaves? Yeah. And he drives the police and the police department is literally caddy corner from him in the burrow. And he, the, one of the cops, I came home one of the days I was working from the house and, and I come home and, and, uh, there's a Middletown burrow cop card in the thing. So I call this thing and,
02:26:25
Speaker
No answer. And then I get a call back and hey, who called and you know, and he kind of cocked an attitude right away. And I was like, this ain't going to go well because I ain't dealing with any attitude here. It's like, I didn't do anything wrong. Yeah. So this guy, he, he gets in scuffles with my wife all the time. She doesn't, she walks him on the sidewalk. Well, the one day she, you know, he's walking, don't get, get your dog out of here.
02:26:48
Speaker
I'm on the sidewalk or she'll go, hey, good morning, Joe. So she feeds on it. Like she'll be real super nice. You're not welcome here. This was the last trip. That's what he said. Yeah. Oh, he's out there.
02:26:59
Speaker
Oh man. Is he old man? He's probably 60 mid sixties, maybe today standards. He's got a, he's got a friend that lives there as well. And, um, just he's out of control. So I, we've been having problems with this guy for like,
02:27:19
Speaker
three years now. It's just, it's insane. So I talked to, there's a lot of other ladies that walk their dogs and guys and I'm like, Hey, you ever walked down on email street? And they're like, yeah, that asshole. So the cop calls me back and I'm like, I said, and he's like, yeah, blah, blah, blah. I said, that fucking guy said, I, this is exactly how I talked to him. I was so fricking pissed.
02:27:42
Speaker
And I was like, yeah, he said, I was like, look, my wife walks a dog on a sidewalk. It's a public sidewalk. All we're asking you to do is walk on the other side of the sidewalk, on the other side of the street. I'm like, fuck that. And fuck that guy. I was like, there's no, we all pay for the sidewalk. Yeah. And I said, this guy is a menace to the neighborhood and you know it. I said, every neighbor he hates, every neighbor around them is calling the cops on everybody.
02:28:06
Speaker
You know, and some of the women, he is like brutal. So purposely the next day I took the dogs for a walk. And I go walking down through there and I'm going slow. Did you take Enzo? I took Enzo, yeah. I took Enzo first. Oh no, my leash broke. Of this giant dog. Magically, he never comes out of the house. But as soon as Sherry walks, he's out of the house. And I told the cop that too. I was like, you know, he never comes out then yells at me.
02:28:34
Speaker
You got to do like a little rascals, like wear like a house dress and wig, some slippers. Yeah, it is. And only just picks on. And so it was funny, the cop, he was like, sir, just can't. I said, I'm not cooperating with somebody that's like such an asshole like this. And he's got the whole neighborhood in an uproar. You know what I mean? It's just like.
02:28:58
Speaker
Now, the problem is here, and it's funny because I'm good friends with the neighbor, the mayor of the town, and he calls over the weekend and he goes, hey, I got some boards. Can I run them down, you know, and run them through the planer and stuff? I was like, yeah, come over. And I said, oh, by the way, if you hear it, because the mayor's in charge of the police department. Okay. You know, so, and I said, if you hear, you know, crannling up the street, you know, it was an asshole. I said, here's exactly what I said.
02:29:21
Speaker
He said, oh no, not that guy again. He's like, just, you know, the whole town, he's always at, you know, some town meeting or something like that. Oh, that's the best to know those nosy neighbor. So it's too funny. It's like, guys, I know like most, all the police officers, you know, in, in the borough and, and, uh, and the mayor I'm friends with.
02:29:41
Speaker
It's funny because man, I wish I had one of these Oliver planers. That's what I, I wanted the just the 15 inch or yeah, 15 inch at home. It's kind of nice. I keep just enough stuff at the house. You know, I got like a mini max slider and
02:29:58
Speaker
older one, like green, green ones. Yeah. Way, way, way back. And like 12 inch joiner and stuff like that. And I actually have an Oliver Lee. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're heavy. Yeah. And I got other, you know, multiple drill presses, that kind of stuff. Bansal, you know, thousand routers. Yeah.
02:30:20
Speaker
Yeah, it was funny. I was just talking to my dad the other night and he was like, do you really need all that other stuff? I said, it's there. It's not hurting any. Coming from the guy who's got the tools in the bathroom, right? Yeah. I just said, did you get the new table saw yet? He goes, I don't know this, this new band saw. Actually, I got to contest this little, the Recons.
02:30:43
Speaker
It's a nice bandsaw. Yeah. They've got a pretty good reputation for like a home gamer kind of bandsaw. He's like, I can actually rip a lot of stuff with this thing that, you know, I didn't think I would be able to do. And I was impressed. I ran it through its paces. I was like, for a tabletop unit, it's, it's got some balls to it and it's the accuracy. It doesn't get a blade. The selection. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,
02:31:08
Speaker
Yeah. He's whittling away. He's starting some fiberglass and he goes, I can, I think I'm going to just put the cardboard up here on the balcony so I can paint. I'm like, man, you're pushing the limits. Apple doesn't fall far from the drill. Yeah. He's, but he, you know, for 88 years old, he's, uh, that's, that's up there. Yeah. Good for him. Oh yeah. And he's, it's a great show. I'll show you a video here then of, of his shopping.
02:31:33
Speaker
And when we get off, he's he's pretty good. I forgot all about we stopped in at Sherman. Oh, yes. And so their shop, there's a it's like a molding lumber supply kind of place down in Manasquan. We were looking for a piece of baseboard and we we we went to Jager Lumber and then we stopped in over there.
02:31:54
Speaker
And they have a little shop where they do custom runs. They have like a little winding or not little, they have a winding Mulder and he had some big old bands. So I said like lightning on it or something. Not something I had ever heard of a big, uh, Whitney planer, a couple of shapers and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of little, um,
02:32:15
Speaker
lumber yards, especially out in the sticks that do a lot of, you know, actually our little one right down the street from my house, Middletown lumber, they have a nice little planing set up and, and molders and they do different custom. They, they specialize in a lot of exotics. Um, that's kind of like their forte and their stuff's like,
02:32:33
Speaker
really dead nuts, you know? Stuff that you don't have to do a lot of machining to. That's why we started, you know, going towards, not towards, that's why we get all our lumber off. Yeah. It's, you know, easier to control it that way. Yeah. It's just, you know, the best S4S is still going to move. So it's like, if we can control, we can have the movement happen here, it's better. Yeah.
02:33:02
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Keith actually called was about two weeks ago, left a message. He's such a nice guy. He's like, Oh, I heard the podcast when you guys were RT. I just want to thank you guys for all the nice things you said. We called him back and talked for about 15 minutes or so. Oh, cool. Such a nice guy. Yeah. Yeah. They're really good people up there.
02:33:23
Speaker
That's awesome that you were able to link up with all that. Yeah. He brought us 300 board feet of maple. Yeah. Yeah. What a week after we were out there. Yeah. Yeah. Nice stuff. So it's all over the jobs. We've been, we've been doing this wood. Oh, good. And great price. I mean, fantastic.
02:33:42
Speaker
Yeah, they're they're tough to beat. Yeah, I was surprised because, I mean, you know, going from like buying from like a local place and then going to O'Shea, it's like, how much better could it get? And, you know, yeah, they're great people down there as well. Yeah, that's that's funny that that Keith followed, you know, he's the president of the company. Yeah. So and then Mike, our salesman, is an ex O'Shea employee. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Actually, our salesman at O'Shea, his name is Mike, too. Yeah. Yeah, it got a little confusing there.
02:34:13
Speaker
one more part of the family. That's it. We're like that. We like, we all go to the same dentist now. It's funny. You talk about dentists. I have to get back in. I missed, you know, being on the road all the time. I missed like four appointments, you know, and I'm like calling the day before and I'm like, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to be there. You know,
02:34:34
Speaker
There's I always had that we always have an install or something because they booked me six months out. So I just went and you know, so they were like, all right, we're going to book you for six months. It's like March twenty twenty four. I'm like, all right. I'm like, I'm sure I'm going to be canceling.
Health Reflections and Humor
02:34:47
Speaker
That's what I do. She goes, does that sound good? I'm like, it's like eight months from now. You know, that's what they say. I'm going next Tuesday unless there's like a wedding or a vacation. It's like, what? How could I possibly know if this is going to be?
02:35:01
Speaker
Well, mine was taken over. They had, um, he retired and it was through COVID. He was going to stay on longer. And then she lamb, it's now called lamb. And she took her, she's really cool. Um, it was funny. I had, I had a tooth that they had to do an extraction on. And this was, I think like two years ago, maybe. And she never did my old dentist. She wanted to make sure which tooth it was. So she got this little dental hammer.
02:35:29
Speaker
I've never even seen a dental hammer. She cracked that thing. And I was like, I about went through the roof. I almost grabbed the whole. And I was like, what the fuck are you doing? She was like, well, I had to make sure I didn't think he'd jump like that. I'm like, give me the goddamn hammer. So now it's like, I tease her all the time. She's like, how are you today? I'm like, good. If you put that, keep that hammer away from me. I have one right now that has a crack in it.
02:35:58
Speaker
and I have to get in to get it filled. And this is, in the last six weeks, I've canceled these appointments and they got rid of Friday. That was like my go-to, like I would always pull like that Friday afternoon appointment or something. And I could always make that. It was like, I can definitely be there by three on Friday.
02:36:20
Speaker
Yeah. Cause we do late nights on Thursdays, I think. Yeah. We try and get like the five o'clock appointments. So I got, I'm going Tuesday at five. Yeah. And that's what it is. Tuesday's. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, so I try and set up my appointment and it's like four months in advance and I'm like, and it's like, oh, there's no.
02:36:38
Speaker
how could there not be a five o'clock for everybody books for six months and yeah i was trying to get like my regular doctor i'm i'm the seven o'clock appointment the first one and it's funny because the one days because i don't have any like seven o'clock i'm like i
02:36:55
Speaker
That's my slot. Yeah, that's my slot. You have to. It should say Brian Craling in there. That's my slot because I've already been there. Then people are supposed to be there at seven. They show up at seven thirty. And that just pisses me off for first thing in the morning. I'm like, I love that. I call a place. It was when I had the thing in my eye. I got a piece of laminate in my eye.
02:37:13
Speaker
So my dentist or my eye doctor doesn't open till like one o'clock on Thursdays or something. So I call the answering service, whatever. So then we're going to an install. I'm calling every place, you know, the second that they open. So one place opens 730, whatever I call it, 731.
02:37:30
Speaker
I'm just getting here. I'm trying to get set up. I'm like, no, you're supposed to be open at 730. Computers are fired up to get the thing. I'm like, Oh my God. No, it's funny. The dentist like, cause so they, everybody knows us, you know, cause they do both our whole families and they know we're coming straight. I'm coming straight from work. I'm going to be dirty.
02:37:53
Speaker
It's like, no, we'll get you in. We'll get you out. You know, cause they try and coerce you into taking like a three o'clock appointment or something. It's like, you know, that's the, my whole day is done after that. There's no way you're getting me home. Yeah. That's, that's the tough ones. Usually end up with the three 15. Well, I don't think that's that hard to don't think, I don't think my dentist actually planned on retiring as soon as he,
02:38:22
Speaker
he wanted to. I mean, he, he, he wanted to, and then he got a taste of it too, like COVID. And then he was like, you know, this is pretty nice. That like happened to a lot of people. That's why, you know, the workforce is hurting so bad because
02:38:38
Speaker
people who were a couple of years from retirement were like, I'm just gonna retire now. People who were five, three, five years out. Yeah. And he was, he was 70. So, you know, great shape. I didn't even think he was that old. I thought he was like late fifties or something. You know, I was like, man, you're retiring early. Cause what are you talking about? I'm 70 years old.
02:38:56
Speaker
You've been coming here since you were 21. I'm like, I'm starting to do the math. I'm like, okay, I'll give you, I'll give you that. That's right. We mentioned this the other day, like the nineties, somebody my age, it sounds like, you know, it just happens. It's like, Oh no, that was 30 some odd years ago.
02:39:13
Speaker
I'm starting to feel that now, like my knee, my knee has been bothering me. I heard it back in high school and it was always like, oh yeah, I hurt my knee like 10 years ago. And now I'm like, wait a minute. I'm like, that was like 20 years ago. I'm like, oh shit. Like I'm getting old. It goes so fast. Like it seemed like forever getting to like 40. And then once 40 hit, it was just like, wow.
02:39:37
Speaker
gone. Then 50 gone. 50s just slide by. Yeah, that's going on 55. I'm going to be 35 next year.
02:39:49
Speaker
So what do you guys, what are we taking up to makers camp?
Makers Camp Preparation
02:39:54
Speaker
I think I'm just going to freelance everything. I'm going to load the colors. Pepperoni sauce. Pepperoni sauce. So we're doing the picture frames. And so now we're going to do this trivia thing. So we're going to have like woodworking trivia. I got Julia, our admin, she's coming up with like 250 questions and a way that I can just like hit a button and it'll just like spit out a random question.
02:40:17
Speaker
Can we get cliff notes before going to bring this thing up and like probably a microphone or two maybe and have like a little set up so I can have like sound effects and I reached out to all kinds of companies like over the weekend I got.
02:40:32
Speaker
Tool nuts, send in some stuff. Sustainer is sending some stuff. I just heard from Shaper Origin is going to send some stuff. Ridge Carbide is sending some stuff. Exvasson, who makes tape. Starbond, we got the stuff from Hayflow. We got a whole pile of crap over there. Tools today. So we're going to have all these little prizes and stuff. So, you know, we could
02:40:55
Speaker
call people out of the crowd. Hey, you, uh, what year did Norm Abrams star? You know, it was the first year of the new Yankee workshop on 1989. Okay. Yeah. There's a, uh, a tape measure from Hayfla. Cool. Yeah. That's going to be fun. Yeah. That'll be great. Yeah. No, we got to do, this'll be, uh, something to write down. If we're going to integrate the road, we got to make sure we have the right connection to go from the road to the PA. I think it has an XLR out, doesn't it?
02:41:25
Speaker
That's what I don't know. All right. I probably have something like that in the, in the bag at home, but I'll, I'll double check. So it's gotta go quarter inch to XLR.
02:41:44
Speaker
No, that would be fun to actually record some stuff up there, too. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're going to probably shoot a YouTube video with John, maybe. Yeah. For today's craftsman channel. Oh, nice. Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. Oh, it's going to be a way. You're going to have the time. You're going up Thursday or Friday? It doesn't start until Friday, but now it's funny because what's the next girl that called me? She called me the other week. Oh, did they actually? I meant to ask you guys.
02:42:12
Speaker
I was supposed to call you a while ago, but I'm just getting around to it. So good news is we got a cancellation. I said, let me guess, Robin. I said, Robin, Jeff, or let me stay there. She goes, oh, you know, I'm like, yeah, I know everybody. I figured Austin just yeah, I was like, we'll just figure it out the day of, you know, yeah, that's good that he.
02:42:35
Speaker
Yeah. Then I was getting a little scared once I was listening to Corey and Rob talk about the, uh, the welding house. I was like, man, did I dodge a bullet in his truck? It's not only that it's that this, the location is so much better. Yeah. Yeah. You're right there on top of it. Yeah. Cause at night when you're hanging out, that's, you know, it's like the difference between like, uh, living on campus or having a commute. Yeah. Yeah.
02:43:05
Speaker
It's not the same effect. Yeah, we pulled up the map when. And Corey and Robert here will show you black or. A lot of biker events up there. Yeah, it's a big one going on this week or next. No, it must be this week. Yeah, it was. I was disappointed I missed the.
02:43:26
Speaker
the early part of the timber frame. I would have went up for that. Yeah. I haven't made it to any of those like off season kind of things. So yeah, you come in here, this is like the dining hall and there's like a bar down here and this is like a outdoor, like I think they do like concerts and stuff or whatever, you know, whatever.
02:43:43
Speaker
musical performances but this is where maker camp is in this big field this is our two rooms right here oh sweet one two we literally we pulled the van in right here we drive right onto the grass
02:43:59
Speaker
Cause the woodworking tent will be like right here. So, you know, we want to like load in and load out every night. So we just drive the van over there and load in. Yeah. This is like a little bathroom building and this is the pavilion. So a lot of stuff happens under there.
02:44:14
Speaker
But they used to do that maker burn where they they build this. They call that giant dinosaur. They're not doing that. They're going to do fireworks instead. So there's going to be tents like in this middle area this year, whereas this used to be all open. It was just tents like along the perimeter. Yeah. So there's going to be even more tents this year. The welding tents over here. Yeah, the motor home is not going to make it for this year. Maybe maybe next season. Yeah, a lot of people go up and like camp in tents or in RVs.
02:44:45
Speaker
They usually complain about the conditions. Yeah. That's not because it's not a lot of avid campers, you know, sort of like people who are like used to sleeping on the ground. Yeah. They signed up late. So there were no rooms left and they had no choice. You know, I guess we're camping. The best was was John DeResta.
02:45:06
Speaker
So, you know, Jimmy Dresta, he's like he was he's like the the godfather of this whole maker kind of thing. He he that's like a AK-47 guitar that he built.
02:45:24
Speaker
He. Okay. Yeah. I've watched some of his videos on some of this. Yeah. He's a big like YouTube guy. Uh, but his brother John is an actor. He was in like Miss Congeniality with Sandra Bullock, a couple of movies. He's got a standup routine as well. Oh yeah. Yeah. He's a standup comedian. He's a riot. He was like a transit cop in the eighties. So he's got all these. Yeah. He's real. Like, uh, you know, um,
02:45:51
Speaker
Jokes that that we wouldn't tell in public Yeah So he shows up last year and his his girlfriend is there and she's camping and So he's camping with her and he's you know, he lives in Hollywood in LA or whatever. He's not used to the weather Like I almost fucking died last real anime. It was it was funny
02:46:19
Speaker
Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Should be good. It's like a perfect time of the year too for the weather. Yeah. Yes. We've been lucky. Yeah. Last year on like Saturday, it was cold. Yeah. We had this wind coming up through the, oh yeah, this little thing right here. We were up in this tent. We were getting, getting killed. It looks like campers around to far left over here. Yeah. Yeah. Like lining all right here and over here.
02:46:47
Speaker
Oh, is that, is it part of their campground? Yeah. Yeah. So it starts like here. Okay. Yeah, it's pretty big.
Woodworking Community and Club Events
02:46:58
Speaker
Nice. Yeah.
02:47:01
Speaker
Yeah. It's great too, because you really, I mean, we, we don't take breaks really, you know, but even on the weekend, we're not here. Jeff's here sometimes, but you're, you're still kind of engaged in the running the business. Yes. Um, it, it kind of.
02:47:21
Speaker
It's one time a year we really engage in woodworking and stuff like that, but without worrying about. And you're having fun. Yeah. And now we'll have Julie this year. So yeah, it could just be like all calls and emails go to Julie.
02:47:37
Speaker
Yeah, because last year, you know, we've got clients like, hey, what? Yeah, you're constantly. I mean, you know what communication the way it is. You're never offline. You're always on. And, you know, if I see the text, I'm not going to be like, I'm not working.
02:47:53
Speaker
I have to answer like, you know, just the way it is. Yeah. Not above, you know, you asked me a question. I'm not going to say I can't answer that. I'm not working. I have one, one buddy at the river that he's a state cop and he's an undercover cop. Okay. And he looks the whole part. He's like drug undercover.
02:48:18
Speaker
And he's the commodore of our boat club. And my wife is the manager of the boat club. So, I mean, it's a pretty big business actually, our boat club down there. Different times she'll be calling her. She goes, Cherry, I'm pretty fucked up right now. I don't think I can answer that question too much. I'm on the island and I'm pretty deep. So, it's funny.
02:48:43
Speaker
Yeah, it should be a great time. I'm looking for. I was thinking I might take some of my big, my slick chisel. Yeah, I'm going to bring my timber framing chisels. Yeah. So this is where the thing is going. That's where you started to build. It's going over here. But primarily what they have, they have the timber frame
02:49:03
Speaker
already pretty much done, correct? Yeah, for the most part. Like all the joints have been not maybe not all of them, but most of the joints have been fit, but they're not pegged or anything. So it's all still apart. OK. And then was it last year or two years ago, they built where the hell is that thing? So right here? Yeah. Yeah. They built this pavilion. This is a timber frame pavilion. And then that was two years ago. And then last year they built this bridge. Oh.
02:49:31
Speaker
And we built last year a swinging, like a porch swing. Yeah. Solid's a peelie that hangs in this pavilion here. Yeah. Yeah. I really enjoy the timber frame stuff. Wish I got more opportunity to work on it. The guys that run it are called Chip and, uh,
02:49:52
Speaker
Dietrich, something Dietrich, Justin Dietrich. I think he's in, I wouldn't say he's in Illinois. Um, yeah, when I was messing around with my own stuff, I ended up buying a chain mortiser. Oh yeah. That makes for an easy work. Yeah. Yeah. That'll take out a lot of material. Oh yeah. You just, it's like a, it's just like a pendulum action on it. So you can just, you can plunge with it and then just,
02:50:19
Speaker
open up does like the little domino kind of action on it. Yeah. I hope he has to make one. Yeah. I'm trying to think what mine's like a weird Denzo or something. I can't remember. I think they had one when they were doing the, the timber in or whatever they call it recently. They're pricey little suckers. Yeah. Oh yeah. But that's like the, you ever seen the, I think Mafell makes it. It's like a, um,
02:50:48
Speaker
a porta band, but it's made for timber framing. So it has like a, uh, a, uh, like a flatten or something. Yeah. That you actually sit on top of the work and you can cut like a, yeah, it's cool. Yeah, that's pretty nice. Yeah. Yeah. That's one thing I do enjoy on the wood side is working with the timbers. I don't have any projects I can do that on.
02:51:12
Speaker
We made some pegs for him last year. That was the extent of, they're like, we need like as many pegs as you can make out of these pieces of wood that we have. Should we wrap it up? Yeah. We've been, we've been going for what? Almost three hours. My wife's looking for me. Supper's ready. That's what she said. Supper's ready. Ding, ding, ding, ding. The triangle was going off. Oh man.
02:51:38
Speaker
Well, thanks for coming out. I appreciate it. Thanks for lunch. We had the, what was our sponsor there today? The first walk. Best Chinese food to take out. All right. Not best Chinese food takeout. Best Chinese food to take out. To take out. No MSG, $1 delivery fee. We delivery. We delivery. I like it. At least they roll with it. Yeah. No MSG though. Come on. MSG tastes good.
02:52:06
Speaker
They call the flavor out of it. Yeah. Where are they on main street? Uh, key port broad street. Oh wow. Yeah. So they come down a little bit. Yeah. Well, they put the flyer in the box and they got some results. Oh, we missed out. We could have got an order of sesame chicken and a court of chicken with broccoli for 2099. Yeah. It was fun. How many hours we were in this for a bit today, two hours and 52 minutes.
02:52:32
Speaker
Almost three hours. I didn't break the, it doesn't even seem it. No, no. Then when I go home, my wife's like, so let's talk. It's like crickets. I didn't want to talk before. I just talked for three hours. So this is the season finale of season three. We're going to take a couple of weeks off. Yeah. Definitely at least the next two weeks. Cause we got hayfla next week and maker camp the following week. And then we'll be back for season four.
02:52:58
Speaker
Yeah. Well, we'll brainstorm on what we're going to do for season four and our time off. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in the meantime, then tune into RT machine. There you go. Yeah. Tell everybody where they can find you guys. RT machine.com. Yeah. Or Brian at RT machine.com. There you go. And yeah, the podcast is on, I guess all everything now it's on Spotify, Apple podcast. Yeah, we have it on all of them. Yeah. All that. And it comes out Wednesday at what time? 5am. Okay.
02:53:25
Speaker
Yeah. And it's R T the letters R and T. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. I think we're in episode 12. Yeah.
Podcast Conclusion and Listener Interaction
02:53:34
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And they're good. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, listen to this next one coming out and then go back and check out the earlier episodes. Yeah. Yeah. And if you want to questions about the podcast or anything, or you'd like to add it's
02:53:47
Speaker
podcast at RT machine.com. Yeah. That email gets right to Dana and he figures out what, uh, so we're getting a little bit of feedback. Dean machine. RT machine.com. Have any machinery questions, wants, or needs contact RT machinery. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. All right. We'll talk to you in a couple of weeks. Everybody take care. Yep. Take care.
02:54:13
Speaker
As always, Robin and I, thank you for tuning in and we'll see you next week. If you want to help support the podcast, you can leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Again, we appreciate your support. Thanks for tuning in.
02:54:42
Speaker
has been a change.