Machine Tool Builders: Bringing Gear Machines Back to Life

Carl Holden:0:01
Welcome to What's Made in the USA, the podcast that celebrates the people, companies, and ideas behind American manufacturing. I'm your host, Carl Holden, and on each episode, we meet the entrepreneurs, engineers, and skilled professionals who are building real products right here in the United States. Today I'm pleased to have Ross Wegron Jones of Machine Tool Builders headquartered in Machesney Park, Illinois. Let's get started. Welcome, Ross.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:0:28
Thanks. Thanks for having me on, Carl.

Carl Holden:0:30
Well, I'd love to jump right in because this is a show about what we make here. And so in the US, I'd like for you to give a top level overview of what you make at Machine Tool Builders.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:0:42
Sure, I like to call it the 30,000 foot view or the elevator speech. Machine Tool Builders was founded by two individuals that had a a service tech engineering background 30 years ago. their approach was to go out into the manufacturing world, so to speak, in the United States, and recontrol machines. or repair machines out in the field existing in customers' plants. Over time, they they acquired a building. they went through a couple three buildings and we now have about 76,000 square feet in McChesney Park whereby we can bring a customer's machine in and recontrol it. But we also continue to recontrol the machines out in the field. In essence, Bringing dinosaurs, as we say it, to the modern age.

Carl Holden:1:43
These are big machines. If I was looking at your site, these aren't things that they're like, I'm just gonna go grab a new one. A lot of companies, it's a generally somewhat already functional machine. Many of what you're doing is taking those back and kind of refreshing, possibly adding some new stuff to the machine, replacing parts.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:2:02
Yes. Yes, that's correct. So these are machine tools, and machine tools differ from like if you go to a brew pub and they have a machine there that puts a a top of a can on so that you can take the beer elsewhere. you need to make the components that go into that device. And so machine tools, there there's like seven categories. I won't go through that. I could point you to A modern Marvel's video that does a really good job explaining it. But where Machine Tool Builders concentrates is in the gear machine tool world. So the machines that we work on and enhance, refine, modify are for production of gears. And that would be a hobbing machine, a shaping machine, or a grinding machine. And along the way, We've developed a portfolio of new machines so such that when someone in the gear manufacturing community gives us a call, we have solutions from one side to the other, be it a new machine, fixing their old one, sending them a a board, you know, a circuit board to keep their old one going, or sending someone out to do the work.

Carl Holden:3:21
So you retool, rebuild current machines, you have a set of your own machines, and am I misunderstanding, you also are a distributor of some other lines of machines?

Ross Wegryn-Jones:3:30
Yeah, more more a distributor or dealer. And what you want when you buy a machine is someone that actually has technicians that know how to apply the machine, install it, repair it, to be a little bit more than just a salesman who says, I know a guy, let me make a quick phone call. So we don't necessarily have our own machine tool product, although Part of what we offer when we recontrol a machine is you have to have software to actually make the machine operate. We developed and and continue to develop our own line of conversationally based software to keep these machines going. That's a major component of the recontrol.

Carl Holden:4:17
Interesting. So what's being made in the USA is the retrofitting of the both the software and the hardware of these machines, and you're helping extend the lifetime and potentially the capabilities of these machines.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:4:33
Right. A lot of times these machines wear out in that the wiring or the servos or the CPU just they burn out. They wear out. a computer, a PC will last a decade in the industrial world, maybe 20 years if you're lucky. Our company will replace that control with a modern equivalent, or maybe a different brand.

And I should mention that a lot of these controls are not made in the United States that do this. Finuok, Siemens, Noom are three major, major ones. but we have the software and the know how to build a kit and apply it to the machine.

Carl Holden:5:08
Yeah.

Carl Holden:5:20
Great. So what is your role, Ross, at MTB and what led you to the j your journey there at that company?

Ross Wegryn-Jones:5:28
thanks for asking. You probably figured it out in about 10 seconds. I'm director of sales and marketing. I have been in the gear business since 2010. but my career started in industrial sales in Michigan essentially 1992. So I've been doing this type of work for a while, a long time. so my role is to seek out Find, introduce new customers, and then make the handoff to the machine tool builders team.

Carl Holden:6:05
Awesome. How long have you been with MTB?

Ross Wegryn-Jones:6:08
I've been with machine tool builders two years coming up this December. However, I've known machine tool builders and actually hired them in one of my first roles in the gear world back in 2010. So we've known each other a while.

Carl Holden:6:25
It it is very interesting of many of the people that we've interviewed thus far, those that aren't like owners, they they tended to have they're they're in that company because they somehow met said company and and found a culture, found a product that they could really get behind that looks like That's to be your case as well. how many people are employed at Machine Tool Builders and how in this kind of crazy weird labor market are you helping keep those people engaged?

Ross Wegryn-Jones:6:57
Well, we have 14 currently, and around seven to eight of them are on the road on any given day. And a lot of times we've got one or two going because we want to teach the junior ones what the senior ones know. so how we're keeping them engaged is in a lot of cases we have customers in the, you know.

Carl Holden:7:08
Mm.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:7:26
The the United States that have a mechanical repair that's very complicated, say a hobhead rebuild, for example. someone needs to take the hobhead off. When we bring it back to our building, someone needs to rebuild that or refurbish it. And sourcing of components to do that is a difficult thing. So some of the people are dedicated to finding the seals and other componentry. in these heads or these complicated devices. and then of course we've got to go back out in the field and put it all together.

Carl Holden:8:04
Gotcha. So you're solving the problem of a thing breaks down and they just don't have the bandwidth to try to find someone internally in the building that might help. It's not really a thing they keep staffed, so they need someone to come in and it sounds like there's a little bit of investigative and logistics work on helping solve some of these problems.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:8:26
Right. a lot of a lot of situations involve you know, I'll just throw out a number like a you know, a fellows ten-four shaping machine. Once we know the serial number and what control is on it, we typically have people on staff who are familiar with what that control did, how it worked. Also, that machine may have been rebuilt by somebody, a competitor that isn't around. And We have people in our staff, if you can believe this, that understood what was done by that competitor back when it was built. So a lot of times we know more about the machine than the customer does, especially in light of retirements and things like that. so we will then know what the best course of action is. And generally I can give the customer a good idea of what a budgetary estimate would be well ahead of the fact.

A lot of times what my job is is to try and find them a replacement machine or an upgraded machine. But you know, we we have a team where we're looking at solving the customer's problems. So a lot of times what I had hoped to sell as a machine turned out to be a repair that the customer was more amenable to, if that makes sense. For instance, we had we we had a recontrolled machine. program on our floor and as we were taking components off of the old machine, a local customer called and they could not get components from the domestic supplier anymore. They're obsolete. We happen to have them. So rather than having to buy a new grinder, the customer bought the components from us and it worked.

Carl Holden:10:15
Sounds like you'd have to have very specialized knowledge about these things. Where the heck do you find people that understand these machines?

Ross Wegryn-Jones:10:23
Yeah, it the the founder does a good job. yeah, that's that would be Ken Flowers, my boss. the founder does a good job of putting things in place where people get to learn that. so you know, of those 13 people, there's a number of techs, about four or five, that are relatively new, and they tag along with the older techs, or Ken, or our VP of engineering, John Waxler, who is an excellent. controls guy, you know, he can write software and and understands G and code to run these machines, they manage to disseminate that knowledge. I wouldn't say we have a formal program, but we do share a lot of our knowledge.

Carl Holden:11:09
Interesting. because building anything in the US, half of that labor isn't so much the logistics of the parts, but the people that can get it done. And that's really cool that you're working on making sure that an up-and-coming generation that knowledge transfers. Not all companies are good at that and often fail at getting people ready. so that's great. next question would be

Ross Wegryn-Jones:11:28
Right.

Carl Holden:11:38
Who do you sell to and what's a typical transaction look like? Is this a retainer base? Do you bring us in as your repair team and you stay on long term? Is it a fix and leave? Do you have people that just kind of repeat over periods of time? What what does business look like for machine tool builders?

Ross Wegryn-Jones:11:57
Well, machine tool builders, which which is a good name and you know does cover a lot of ground because there's hundreds and hundreds of companies in the United States that use machine tools, of course. but there is a subset of those people that cut gears. So we're when we're knocking on doors, so to speak, it's to companies that make gears or are associated with gear manufacturing.

Gear manufacturing equipment, by the way, is a little bit more complicated than your average turning machine, lathe, or milling machine mill. So we are concentrating on a smaller section of the of the market, so to speak. A typical transaction involves a paid service visit, which might be to actually do the repair on the spot. you know, once we know what it is, we typically have some components we can bring with us that would repair it. It might be simple wiring. So we have an established rate sheet that we send the customer and then we build them for time, material, lodging, mileage, things of that nature. Otherwise, if it's a recontrolled machine or a new machine, those prices go from anywhere from $150,000 to a million dollars. depending on the machine and the complexity of the machine.

Carl Holden:13:28
Yeah, have I have some clients that have I don't know if they're machines that you work on, but these like really big box complicated stuff happening inside and it is obviously something they've purchased and they talk a lot about CapEx and and the investment in it and never really thought about well these those things are gonna break. You can't go take that down to the oil express guys and they know anything. You need hyper specialized people like yourselves. as far as moving forward with machine tool builders, are you planning on adding more to what you do or any like what is your gr is growth just simply finding more companies to service? what's what's your goals over the next decade?

Ross Wegryn-Jones:14:14
It it really is finding more companies to service. I think one of the biggest challenges is to keep engaged with the customer that we already have, of course, and let them know what new developments have come up. you know, we can't always count on the older equipment being retrofitted or recontrolled. you know, we do have some new offerings and It is a somewhat crowded market. there's a little volatility in the US right now. I think that we're in the midst of a of an automation renaissance. You see nuts lots of headlight headlines about automating. And and a lot of those conversations have been about machine tending. So loading and unloading the machine, which a lot of people don't that's kind of boring. A lot of people don't like to do that. so Yeah, the biggest challenge is not doing too much that dilutes your efforts to the simple fact that we know who our customers are and new people come through them all the time and we need to keep them engaged and keep them updated on what it is that we do. One of the dangers is Machine Tool Builders has been doing this for 30 years. And oftentimes I ask the people that I meet that and we all know each other, I say, Tell me what you think it is that Machine Tool Builders does. And a lot of times I'm surprised by the answer. They had me pigeonholed as just doing the recontrols and retrofits, if they remember that at all. They don't know about the new product we have.

Carl Holden:15:57
Yeah, I because of the nature of my work, I'm always looking at what people are looking online. Do people call you machine tool rebuilders? Do you get do people say that? 'Cause that's like search traffic around that and I'm like, I'm wondering if they're looking those guys up, but they're putting re in front of builders.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:16:13
Well that that's a key word. That's a key word in a in a pay-per-click or search engine optimization approach. the the the trouble starts when someone in you know any anywhere in the United States has a vertical milling machine that's out of warranty. And it that's a pretty simple, straightforward machine, and it might be a different brand. We don't Necessarily know much about that or how to fix it. We certainly can't get into the software. you know, that's generally proprietary, different builders have their different protocols. So we're not able to help them. On the other hand, if it's a mill that's within one of our existing customers that also produces gears.

Absolutely. We'll help them. I hope that distinction is clear. So yeah, we do have the danger of, you know, picking up a keyword that covers a lot of ground. And, you know, I I do get the occasional company in Pennsylvania that has a whole bunch of five axis milling machines and they're getting old and they want us to redo them along with the automation. We're just not built.

Carl Holden:17:13
Yeah.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:17:37
To handle that. There are other companies that do that type of work. And as a salesperson, I'm happy to refer them to those people.

Carl Holden:17:48
I always find it interesting to try to figure out what people would be looking online, but the fact that you're so hyper specialized and things, there isn't some just like like for injury attorney lawyers, you look up personal injury attorney to get help if you're in a car wreck. And there isn't a there isn't a term for y'all and and for many cases people may not know that there is t these types of companies. So you're more of a education side too, I'm understanding of letting people know that there are experts like yourselves that can help refurbish or even bring in new equipment.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:18:20
Yeah the Yeah, the the gear the gear world i is rather interesting. I I was introduced to it back in I think it was like eight, seven or eight, and then, you know, jumped in headlong in twenty ten. And a and a big part of the community is the American Gear Manufacturers Association, which is now the Motion and Power Manufacturers Alliance because they've joined with the American Bearing Manufacturers Association.

They're really good at networking. It's a great community. if you wanted to talk to me about bevel gears, which is a subset, well, there's parallel axis gears, which we're really good at, round donut gears where they come together like this. Bevel gears are 50% of the gear business. That's where the gears come at angles like so. So that you know, like like 90 degrees. There's a different group of people within the gear business that know that. So we only go so far. We only know so much on the bevel gear side, but I know a guy who knows a guy. There's a lot of that in the gear community. I I didn't see that type of thing with the typical machining community, you know, which is A much larger pie, as it were.

Carl Holden:19:54
It's just that's one of the things I enjoy about doing this is you never really think there's this whole micro industry around just the gears inside machines, and somebody has to make those, and somebody has to make the machines that make those, and there have to be people who help the people that make the machines to do those things. There's so many layers.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:20:11
Right. Right. And the the association is is really good also. they're proactive where they identify emerging markets because they have people who, you know, in the gear community, there's some people who are good at different types of finishing for gears, or there's people who are much more adept at plastic gears than steel gears. So it you know, you can go on and on and on. But one of the emerging technologies that's come around is the gearboxes that are required in humanoid robots. So there are a couple of different designs that one has for the motion of the hands of a robot. And there are very, very small fine pitch gears involved in those. Somebody's got to get them from somewhere.

And so it's kind of a growth market, but I I think that the US is relatively new to it. And there aren't that many machine builders, if any, that are US based that make a machine to address those fine-pitch gears that are needed. There are some companies that make tooling, work holding, you know, the actual tool itself that does the cutting, but the machine tool companies they're Very, very few. that is such a such a a niche market. As you could imagine, if you have a watch, the Swiss are exceptional at it. They've been doing it forever.

Carl Holden:21:55
Right. That's true. That's true. we've touched a little bit on it before we actually started here today, but and you've touched a little on it. What are some major hindrances or challenges currently to the business and how is machine tool builders tackling those?

Ross Wegryn-Jones:22:13
Yeah, it's it's interesting. I've been to a lot of networking opportunities and I subscribe to a lot of webinars and so forth. So we're we're all subject to the same headwinds and some of us are are less and some of us are more vocal about it than others. the it's a perilous event event right now. the tariff structure changed. last week Thursday at 4 30 in the afternoon. I mean that's that's kind of how it came about. So we're we're subject to I think Switzerland right now, if we import things from Switzerland, 39%. anywhere else it's 10, but it might be 15. but we We have machine builders that we work with from Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Switzerland, Czech Republic, and I the Japan as well. So there's there's a lot of energy and effort required on our part to look to what the harmonized tariff schedule code is, what tariff applies, when it changes, if it's going to change, and These are significant amounts of money where we have to incorporate that within our terms and conditions, within our quotes, in such a way as to pass muster, and you know, have an honest conversation with a customer. A lot of my peers do things a little differently. but at the end of the day, many of us basically wait for the machine to hit the dock and then we look at the bill when it shows up. That's no way to run a show.

Carl Holden:23:56
I mean

Carl Holden:24:11
It isn't. Yeah, the 10% may not sound a lot when it's like a $20 thing from Amazon and now it's $22. It's a lot different when it's a million dollar machine and you're talking about a hundred thousand dollar difference. Now it sounds like you've got some projects too, though, that you're working with. obviously there is a push to make more things in the United States.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:24:25
Right, right.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:24:38
absolutely. Absolutely. So well, we are I I think yeah okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna just talk about my own personal experience, not my opinion. So so we we totally 100% try and source as much domestically as we can because

Carl Holden:24:40
So how is that going?

Ross Wegryn-Jones:25:03
In the Rockford, Illinois area, this is one of the last bastions of machine tool building in the United States. you know, some of the original cradles were Springfield, Vermont, Precision Valley, Cincinnati, Ohio. many would argue with me that Detroit, Michigan was a cradle of machine tool building. And I will totally generalize and say, yeah, for automotive manufacturing, sure. but Rockford, Illinois.

Good grief. They were making machines back in the day that were for the the textile industry. so Rockford, Illinois remains a an area that makes enclosures. There's companies there that make enclosures for the machines, ball screws, guide rails, all sorts of componentry that we use. So we try to do it as much locally as we can. simply from being able to track it, know where it came from, know how it works. But the controls that we use, which is a major cost component of redoing these machines, are often available only from overseas. Now we have the benefit of FNUC USA and Siemens USA, and Noom is in Schiller Park, Illinois, nearby, but each of those cunt companies are headquartered in Japan.

Germany and I believe Numa's French, respectively. At the end of the day, that's that's where the money goes. There isn't a US based controls maker for what we do of any consequence. In fact, there there really wasn't.

Carl Holden:26:49
It's all kind of originated over there and grew from over there.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:26:53
Yeah, you know, if you look back in the nineteen eighties, you know, there were a lot of American machine tool builders, and I speak of like LeBlande, who is the inventor of the engine wave, one of the major machine tools, turning machine. you know, they did adopt CNC controls in the 70s and 80s. There are many more people way more qualified to talk about this than me. but they weren't necessarily the quickest adopters, and Japan In order to get into the market, really covered the market with less expensive machine tools that were computer controlled. And the US was a little behind in adopting that, or at least US based machine tool builders were. And things changed. US companies adopted in order to be able to keep up with the world.

Carl Holden:27:42
I think

Carl Holden:27:47
Well, I think you're doing a great job of creating that American component on your end of support rather than having to go overseas to potentially have someone visit. I mean, even just a plane flight of a company from out of the country to come repair versus being in Illinois and being able to come to people here. I think that's a way it's made in America. the that effort is is being done there. And so we're really happy that you're able to be a component of you know, a gear in that larger machine, right? So

Ross Wegryn-Jones:28:19
Right, you know, and at the end of the day, you know, we're kind of a local boy that will work on your machine wherever you acquired it from, whether it was us or not, and you know, it's paid work and we are really proud of and very conscious of the fact that the machine that's in Rockford, Illinois, or Corona, California, or Portland, Maine, we get it back up and running because that machine is supporting. the families and the associates and the employees in that building and keeping things made in the United States. Of course, we're all for that. And when we try and sell a new machine and we don't win and it's from somewhere else, we're okay with that too. We know that eventually they may call us to fix it.

Carl Holden:29:09
Great. Great. Well, thanks so much for sharing everything you have today about machine tool builders. We'd like to close out with a couple of personal things just to get to know you, Ross, better. What's a place, a favorite place you like in the United States to visit?

Ross Wegryn-Jones:29:24
I would I would have to say Chicago, Illinois.

Carl Holden:29:27
Okay.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:29:29
you know, I have a I have a couple of top top cities I like to visit. I like cities, I like the energy that they have. so yeah, there's Chicago, Illinois, there's Toronto, Ontario, Indianapolis, Indiana, and you know, you can't forget about Cleveland, Ohio. So

Carl Holden:29:48
Yeah, I've been to Cleveland. I like Cleveland. And I've been to Chicago. I did a Toastmasters competition in Chicago and my wife and I had a lot of fun going and eating good food and all that kind of stuff. So what's a childhood memory or younger memory, adult memory, younger adult memory of the United States that you hold dear?

Ross Wegryn-Jones:30:01
Excellent.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:30:13
Sure. I remember in nineteen seventy-four, my dad accepted a job with Buck Chuck Company in Kalamazoo, Michigan. And eventually the sport that they found me, well, the sport that fit is soccer. So my dad on one Saturday morning loaded all of the kids in a conversion van. I think other people showed up, and we went out to Buck Chuck.

There was someone operating a lathe on the floor at Buckchuck. None of us had safety glasses, none of us had hearing protection. 1978. And I watched as a spark went overhead, and it was a chip from the lathe that landed on the floor. And it it like turned from a spark into a piece of metal. And the operator said, Go ahead, kid, pick it up. And I did. Burned my hand. Everybody laughed.

That was my introduction to manufacturing. And I just thought it was the coolest thing. so you know, my dad and I did work together starting in 2001 for a couple of years, but but generally speaking, I've made my own path in the machine tool world, but I always remember making things and and that and understanding how it was made. There there's a lot to you know, a piece of gum.

Carl Holden:31:15
Yeah.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:31:41
or a cup or a boat trailer, it's gotta come from somewhere. Somebody has to make that.

Carl Holden:31:51
Well, that's a great tie-in to the next question I have for you. that if all the young people that are up and coming into the workforce could hear you, what would you say to them?

Ross Wegryn-Jones:32:05
I would say the fundamentals are there's thing-oriented and people-oriented people in the world, if you want to split it that way. And working with your hands, the shop classes that we had, be it wood shop or metal shop, when I was in high school, middle school, working with your hands, whether you're a people-oriented person or a thing-oriented person.

Is a good skill set to have. And maybe that knowledge can work whether you go through college or a technical college or a technical career. but that understanding can form all sorts of things public policy, social policy, and Well, I lost my train of thought. That's you know, it it it's a good thing to fall back on. Yep. It it may even help you when you're stranded alongside the I-75 on a Wednesday night and your car breaks. It may help you with that.

Carl Holden:33:22
Yeah, I used to do a lot of stuff with my dad and things. I don't do it as much anymore. I'm marketing working on a computer. I have very uncalused, nice cuticles. So marketing work will do that to you, but being able to make things and under at least understand things and increase your knowledge about the world in general, is just critically important.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:33:32
Yeah. Ditto. Ditto. Yeah. I got it.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:33:45
Sure. Yep, definitely.

Carl Holden:33:48
Ross, thank you so much for sharing today about machine tool builders. We wish you the best of luck in y'all's journey to continue to grow and to support this effort to make more in the USA. Thanks so much for coming today.

Ross Wegryn-Jones:34:01
All right, Carl, thanks for having me.