Forty-five years on the floor.
I moved to Houston in 1981 because the steel industry tanked in Northwest Indiana and I was an unemployed heavy-equipment operator. The oil field was booming, so I packed it in and headed south. I landed in the machine shop of a tubular-products manufacturer running a band saw, cutting raw material for the die shop.
A few weeks in, they trusted me on mills and lathes — all manual. Then they bought a Mazak M1 retrofitted with a Fanuc 6T control, and nobody wanted to touch it. Except me. I worked every minute I could on that machine, often for free, until I owned it. That was the beginning.
From there I couldn't be stopped. Five years at a Houston shop with twelve CNC lathes — Mori, Hess, McDonnell Douglas tape controls — gave me serious depth. When the Houston bottom dropped out in 1986 I hightailed it back to Indiana and landed in a Chicago gear shop: CNC lathes, CNC mills, hobbing, shaping, broaching. Another huge exposure. In 2000 I moved into aerospace as a CNC programmer, which I'd been doing on my own programs for years anyway.
I've programmed mills, lathes, and multi-axis machines, set up cells, maintained AS9100 compliance, and trained more machinists and programmers than I can count. Every tool that makes it onto this site exists because I needed it — or remember needing it — to support a real job or fill a real need.
If it doesn't work on the shop floor, it doesn't ship.
I've always been fascinated with code — Visual Basic, C++, Python — and I started building tools for myself on the side. Eventually those tools were good enough that other machinists kept asking for them. CNC Guy is what I want for the industry: useful, affordable software built by someone who's actually run the machines. It starts with CNCGuy Edit. I hope you find it useful — feedback is always welcome.
