The photo above is a Graff-Pinkert ad in the Serial Number Reference Book For Metalworking Machinery 7th Edition from 1979. Graff-Pinkert & Co. has undergone a lot of changes since my grandfather Leonard Graff and his cousin Aaron Pinkert started the used machine tools business back in 1941. We've been in business almost three quarters of a century, and it's mind boggling how many multispindle screw machines we've sold and then ended up buying back decades later, which we then refurbish and sell to new customers.
I'm thankful for our 8-32 Euroturn (ZPS). Rigid, fast, accurate. A modern beautiful, multi-spindle, almost as beautiful as the Czech women who live where it's built.
I'm thankful for traditional cutting oil. No, not the water soluble stuff which destroys beautiful machine tools.
I'm thankful to live and work in a country which still manufactures many of the best parts in the world at competitive prices.
I'm thankful for all our Wickmans, solid, high precision multi-spindle screw machines, great for quick changeover. Why buy any other machine?
"The Davenport screw machine won World War II," Massimo Bonaldo said to me, as we ate kebabs in a rural village 40 minutes from the center of Hannover, where I was to attend the EMO Machine Tool Show the following day. Massimo is the technical manager of Tajmac-MTM S.p.A., the Italian headquarters of ZPS, one of Europe's top machine tool builders.
I had trekked throughout Germany the previous two weeks, visiting elite manufacturers and machine tools dealers. I had walked through state-of- the-art shops, packed with the latest INDEX MS machines, Hydromats and CNC machining centers. And now I found myself hanging out at midnight with three Italian ZPS technicians in middle-of-nowhere Germany, with one of the company's top engineers giving me a history lesson on the good old noisy American Davenport. The reason the Davenport won World War II for the Allies, Massimo explained, was that the Germans were using European single-spindle machines to bang out ammunition, while the Americans spit out bullets like mad with five-spindle Davenports. Times have changed since the days of American multi-spindle domination. Today Germany is the place to be to see tons of manufacturers full of the best multi-spindle screw machines on the market. That's why Graff-Pinkert sent me there to find machines.
The first shop I visited on my trip was Brehm Präzisionstechnik GmbH & Co. KG, about 100 km southeast of Stuttgart. ...
Graff-Pinkert just got in a Euroturn (ZPS, Mori-Say) 8-32 manufactured in 2001. It's a spindle stopper with feed and speed programable motors, Siemens simatic control, double feed-out, feed-in 4th and 8th position, stock reel and stand, and IEMCA PRA 52 F bundle loader. Please contact us for more information.
“What goes around, comes around.” It’s a dumb cliché, but it’s what I am seeing in the screw machine business today.
The cyclicality of business is playing out as the auto industry in North America pushes toward the magical 16 million units a year mark. Thank god for the F-150, now the “best selling car or truck in America.” Tradesmen are buying, businesses are buying, even Aunt Millie is buying a vehicle today, and most of them are put together in North America with millions of perfectly turned components also made here.
Add a revival in home building and all those unleaded brass fittings needed and it means a lot of spindles turning, after the up and down gutting of the traditional turned parts world over the last 15 years.
My guess is that one third of the shops that ran multi-spindle automatics have gone away since the wholesale outsourcing trend to China began in the late 1990s.
Tim Haendle was pleased with himself when I talked to him Wednesday. He had bought 100 carbide inserts – used of course – for a hundred bucks at a Hoff Online Auctions Internet sale of a screw machine shop in St. Paul, Minnesota. He’ll regrind them for use on one of the 22 National Acmes he runs in his shop, buried in a forest in Mendocino County, 100 miles north of San Francisco.