Growing a $5m Metal Business 40% in Year 1

Is.

Can I use them interchangeably? I do use them interchangeably. Am I doing it wrong? How do I think about this?

Right. And that tends to be very different. A lot of the tolerances involved are not as tight usually. I'm generalizing here.

Right. But they tend to not be as tight and you tend to have larger structures. There can be smaller fabricated metal parts like brackets or things like that. But generally speaking, it's, it's very different than machining, which is fundamentally taking a hunk of metal and making it into something.

Right. And so you're cutting away metal, you're not shaping it, you're not bending it, you're, you're cutting it away. And within that there can be, you know, fabrication has different, different types. Like there's structural fabrication that's really for buildings.

You know, think of I beams or things like that. There's also people call themselves fabricators, but they're making those little brackets, right. So they've got big laser cutters and they're cutting out small little pieces from that, punching holes in them.

They have brake presses to bend sheet metal. So that world kind of lives on its own. We do some fabrication at Springfield, but it's a compliment to our machining.

It's not the core. So there is crossover sometimes in those things usually because end assemblies for some applications include parts that are fabricated and parts that are machined. Right. But then on the, and then welding is key in fabrication there's, there's a lot of welding. So whenever you hear welding, you can think fabrication on machining.

Machining is so broad. I, I, it's really amazing. There's everything from a guy in his garage with no overhead and a machine who will just knock parts out as they come in to, and there's, there's really no process.

It's just he's really smart and talented at machining and he can, and some of those guys can do amazing things, but it's really a dying breed. And then there's machine shops that are at the other end of the spectrum where they do a lot of high volume stuff or, or things that are pre programmed.

So they have some engineers and, and programmers at the front and then they may have a setup tech or two on the floor, but the machinists who are out there are, you know, they press the button and they babysit the program. Right. They're not, they're a lower technical level and that's where a lot of machining has actually, has actually gone. And, and within that there's production machining,…