Published: 2024-03-01

Welcome to our first blog! There are so many things to write about to catch up on, but we’ve got to start somewhere. So, here we go.

You might have wondered, ‘what’s the deal with your channel name “Learn It!”?’ Well, it goes all the way back to when I was just a teenager. You see, my dad has owned machine shops for as long as I can remember. When I was 12 he asked if I wanted to start cleaning the shop and earning some money. I thought that would be so cool! So, I cleaned for a very short time (probably just a day or few days) but then my dad needed my helping running a conventional lathe. He was busy doing a bunch of other things in the shop (he was the only one running the show back then) and needed an extra set of hands on the lathe.

At 15 years of age my dad purchased a Mori Seiki SL253. If any of you reading this know  something about Mori Seiki, they make/made some of the best machines in the industry. Now they have teamed up with DMG and are called DMG Mori, but back then, they were just known as Mori Seiki. 

We both had a tonne to learn to run this machine. At the time, we were running mold components, but then 9/11 struck and the industry took a nose-dive and so did our business. My dad decided to start commuting to the big city about 3 hours away because he found a nice job to pay the bills, but he still had this Mori Seiki that needed to run jobs that came our way. So, he asked if I could try my best to run the machine while he was gone during the week. 

I asked him one day, 'how can I learn how to run this machine well?' He thought for a moment, went over to a box with all the machine manuals in it, pulled out the programming manual (half in English, half in Japanese), placed it in front of me and said “learn it!” So, I started reading and learning. 

I tried to learn new code every day whether it was a G-code, M-Code, or some sort of parameter. I loved learning how to run that machine. At that age it was like a gaming system to me, but unlike playing games, I was getting paid!

So, you might be wondering, what happened next? Stay tuned for the next blog.