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In our podcast, we dive deep into metrology, calibration, and proficiency testing bringing you real stories, expert insights, and candid conversations from our 85+ years of combined experience. This isn’t just another technical podcast; we’re here to challenge the status quo, discuss industry changes, and tackle big questions like whether calibration labs are failing to train the next generation or if automation has gone too far. Expect lively discussions, industry leaders as guests, and a little fun along the way. As Howard puts it, “Proficiency testing is checking that transition from theory to application. But what happens when techs are just pushing buttons?” And Chuck adds, “We’re not teaching technicians how to measure anymore—we’re teaching them how to press ‘go.’” Whether we’re reflecting on our journeys—like Howard’s path from Air Force electronics to writing calibration procedures for the NFL—or debating metrology’s future, we promise to keep it engaging, informative, and unfiltered.
Chuck (00:15):
Welcome to yet another podcast with chatNAPT with the AI chatterbox, Chuck and Howie, all things metrology. And it is a great day. It's a great evening. I've got my cocktail.
Howard (Howie) Zion (00:29):
It was nicer this morning. It clouded up a little bit, but it's still on the seventies, so don't get me wrong. It's a beautiful day.
Chuck (00:36):
Well,
Howard (Howie) Zion (00:36):
What happened? Where's my sunshine?
Chuck (00:39):
I got my sprinkler going today. First time today,
Howard (Howie) Zion (00:43):
I've got a nice pecan that I got to put on the spit. I need some good weather. I don't want raining,
Chuck (00:50):
But we need rain out here. The entire state is on a fire ban. It's
Howard (Howie) Zion (00:55):
Been a dry spring. Yeah.
Chuck (00:57):
Yeah. We got hardly any rain at all where we're at. So
Howard (Howie) Zion (01:02):
A couple of meteorologists talking like we're meteorologist.
Chuck (01:06):
Go figure. I mentioned I have my cocktail of choice now it's the evening. Do you have your choice of cocktail tonight?
Howard (Howie) Zion (01:15):
Fresh out? I do have my bottled water.
Chuck (01:19):
You are too healthy of a person, my friend. So I'm allowed now to have one cocktail a day. So I've got my rum and coke ready to go. So I'm enjoying that with you. So
Howard (Howie) Zion (01:31):
Unfortunately, I would probably pick either an old fashioned or Kentucky Mule. And for those of you in the audience who don't know a Kentucky Mule, so a Masco Mule is made with vodka, right? So vodka, ginger, beer, lime, and plenty of ice. A Kentucky mule throws out the vodka and puts in bourbon, which is a tasty drink, but of course the ginger beer really makes it. That's a good flavor.
Chuck (01:57):
Before we get into the podcast, I'm curious if you've got your bike put together yet.
Howard (Howie) Zion (02:05):
The bike story. Okay. Lemme tell you, I don't recommend assembling your own bike. Now for those of you who know Janet, she's dealing with some medical issues and she's not able to balance herself on a two wheel bike. So we give that to our daughter and she's been wanting a three wheel bike just for better stability, right? She also prefer to have the not have the brakes up on the handles part of the disabilities. Her right hand not being able to squeeze that. She'd prefer to have the old style when we were kids where you just reversed your pedals to break. But I can't find that. I'm sure there's something out there somewhere, but I couldn't find anything. So I got the kind that had the squeeze Hamo brakes. This one happened to have pads in the front, right? So that type of braking on the tire, but a disc braking system on the back. Never seen that before on a bicycle, right?
Chuck (03:11):
Never either.
Howard (Howie) Zion (03:11):
Yeah. Anyway, so you get it out of the box, you start putting it together and you find out that it's really kind of adolescent bike. It's not an adult bike, it's too small. So we ended up re-gifting it as a Mother's Day gift to her mother, who is very short and loves it. It actually turned out perfect. She loves the color, she loves the size. It works out perfect for her.
Chuck (03:39):
I was going to have you come over and I was going to order one because I had the same problem as you well know where I have balance issues and I was going to order a three wheel bike because I miss biking and short story long. I was going to order one. I can't find one here in Little Rock. Oh really? No,
Howard (Howie) Zion (03:58):
At a bike store,
Chuck (03:59):
They don't carry 'em.
Howard (Howie) Zion (04:00):
Well, we're going to start the search here for it, right? So if I find one, I'll let you know, but we will be buying this fully assembled.
Chuck (04:07):
Yeah, well you'd have to drive your truck down to when you buy one.
Howard (Howie) Zion (04:13):
Well, to bring you one. Yes.
Chuck (04:14):
Yeah, you'd have to bring it down here
Howard (Howie) Zion (04:15):
For me and to do our podcast there with Chris RA and Paul Reese. Right. Have the band out there on the
Chuck (04:21):
Yeah, bring your guitars. Yeah, bring your drums
Howard (Howie) Zion (04:24):
Wine. That'd be fantastic.
Chuck (04:26):
I got a better idea. I'll just borrow my brother's truck. I'll drive up there to your house and then you can put us, yeah, we
Howard (Howie) Zion (04:33):
Can do that.
Chuck (04:33):
You can put us up at your house
Howard (Howie) Zion (04:35):
Then bring all that stuff down.
Chuck (04:37):
Yeah, you've got the mess to clean up. You get to feed us all. Oh yeah. Right. So we're kind of halfway through, maybe a little bit past halfway through of our first season if it's going to exciting season already. Yeah, it really has. And we've had a lot of good hosts already. We've got a lot of good hosts that we're going to have to wrap up the first season. Any thoughts on the first part of the season?
Howard (Howie) Zion (05:00):
Some great guests so far. I think I was talking to you about this earlier. Any new show has to get into its rhythm and I think I'm starting to see us getting into some better rhythms and conversation back and forth and not interrupting each other. That can be hard to do, especially at teams. Anyone who's been on a teams meeting knows the more people you have on, everybody wants to say something and you end up talking over each other and it's hard to not do that. And so using the little raise the hand feature on teams or whatever social media connection you're using is a good way to do that. But we're starting to, I think, get into some of that rhythm that I'm hoping that will solidify. But you know what, from the audience, absolutely love the candidate feedback from you. We've had a lot of good comments, but feel free to let us know if there's other things you'd like to see the podcast to do, other features you might like or guests that you'd like to see on the show. Absolutely welcome. That feedback.
Chuck (05:57):
I know we're getting into the summer season, so we've got the trade shows coming up. You planning to attend all three trade shows or
Howard (Howie) Zion (06:05):
I will be at the Measurement Science Conference and then NCSL for sure.
Chuck (06:11):
Yeah. Well, I'm going to go back to the E two LA event, which has turned into a fairly big accreditation type event. Maybe not so much for metrology, but definitely accreditation related. And
Howard (Howie) Zion (06:27):
Do you have insight for the audience on hoops food that's going to be there?
Chuck (06:32):
Yeah, they got about, it's the only one of the major conferences now for metrology. They're going to have about 650 people.
Howard (Howie) Zion (06:41):
That's huge
Chuck (06:42):
For that. But they have all disciplines. They have chemical people, they have
Howard (Howie) Zion (06:47):
Non-destructive,
Chuck (06:48):
They have chemistry. So it's not just calibration type people, which is mostly N-C-S-L-I units. The testing labs, the calibration labs, these are all kinds of other non-destructive labs and everything. Environmental labs, forensic labs. So they get a much better plethora of people, if you will, that are able to attend this. So it works out better for them, which we need more people to. But accreditation something to do. 25 is for everybody. It's not just calibration labs.
Howard (Howie) Zion (07:21):
Yep, calibration and testing. So that's good because you can have your side meetings with calibration folks, you can meet some new people in other industries and get to know what their needs are and have good conversation. You never know where that's going to go.
Chuck (07:35):
Well, last year staff went to it and they said it was very productive. So the head of A two A owes me a couple of drinks because I'm coming out of retirement to go to it. So they definitely owe me a couple of drinks for that.
Howard (Howie) Zion (07:47):
Alright, so that's back to back with MSC.
Chuck (07:49):
Yep. I'm actually going to come back to that. Then I fly out to John Wayne and then we go and like we said, we give the little bit of responsibility with the 18 award. We've got that all taken care of for this year. Well then after that we got N-C-S-L-I, which should be good. We're going back
Howard (Howie) Zion (08:06):
To Cleveland, Ohio,
Chuck (08:08):
And I am not sitting down with you at a table and drinking wine at Cleveland this year.
Howard (Howie) Zion (08:14):
How are you going to avoid that, Chuck?
Chuck (08:17):
Because I can only have one drink, so we will not be able to have bottle after bottle after bottle.
Howard (Howie) Zion (08:23):
Have you seen the size of a Magnum? That's one dream. You got to define one dream.
Chuck (08:30):
That's kind of how this podcast got started is because people like to sit around and watch you and I go at it where we're really nice to each other on this podcast where
Howard (Howie) Zion (08:41):
You're saying blame it on the wine.
Chuck (08:43):
No, I'm saying that. Well, maybe we should, after we have a couple of bottles, we seem to loosen up a little bit and call each other names and you use language that we probably should use on this podcast. We probably get a bigger audience.
Howard (Howie) Zion (08:56):
This is a family show. Let's keep it legit.
Chuck (08:59):
Yeah. Well I'm drinking my cocktail, so give Cade and then I'll start telling you how I really feel about
Howard (Howie) Zion (09:05):
It. Get out of control.
Chuck (09:07):
So I mean, I had a good time at the NNC Hall last year and hopefully that's a good event as well because how many conversations have we had with guests and between you and I where the attendance at these conferences is getting less and less?
Howard (Howie) Zion (09:24):
I was just going to say, I really hope there's decent attendance. I don't know. I don't have my high expectations, but I would like to see good attendance. And by the way, for new people, this is a great way to get a lot of information overload. There's tons of information here to help you with knowing test equipment, meeting people that you need to know, suppliers, just getting to know others and the industry and sharing best practices. But at this hotel in Cleveland, downtown Hilton, right across the street is the Brown Stadium and right next to that is Glen Research Center, right, nasa. And right next to that is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I mean, there's some cool things downtown Cleveland to do.
Chuck (10:04):
Yeah,
Howard (Howie) Zion (10:05):
So you got that.
Chuck (10:07):
And there's nothing better than actually one-on-one with all the exhibitors. I know people sometimes don't like exhibitors, but there's nothing better than going and talking to the reps and learning the new equipment. The internet has spoiled us. I get that. It's a great tool if it's used properly, but there's a lot of stuff that you're not going to get unless you do as she did a one-on-one. That type of connection, and I've said this a hundred times before, in the last 10 years, the internet has ruined sales. The ability to make a sale has really gone down. It's wrecked these conferences because there's the inability to communicate with one-on-ones shaking hands and
Howard (Howie) Zion (10:45):
Amazon doesn't think so. Conversation.
Chuck (10:47):
Yeah. Well that's Amazon. I hear it. So I dunno. We got to get ready for the conference and hopefully everyone has a second look at it and they can budget it.
Howard (Howie) Zion (10:58):
Speaking of which, so as you know, Kirk and I are putting together a paper on risk that we actually we're going to meet on that here next week to get it finished up. He submitted the abstract already for NCSL, but we want to get that done and of course, get our presentation ready for the presentation at NCSL. And I'm looking forward to that. I think you are as well.
Chuck (11:21):
Well, I really challenge both you and Kirk to really make this paper. I know that you've only got a short timeframe to present the paper, but I've really pressured you guys to write a paper that is so detailed that it can be used by assessors, it can be used by accreditation bodies as a template to provide them guidance in doing audits to risk analysis for Yeah,
Howard (Howie) Zion (11:47):
I mean, again, you don't want to make it so long that people avoid reading it. The goal here is to get people thinking about how risk happens in their daily lives and how to apply that to their metrology operations.
Chuck (12:01):
Yeah. Speaking of that, real quickly, have you seen, we talked about training and stuff. Have you seen what Henry is doing with Morehouse? Have you seen his education series that he has?
Howard (Howie) Zion (12:15):
I have not.
Chuck (12:17):
You should sign up for it. It's very remarkable. And everyone knows who he is from Morehouse. I mean, he's really believes in training. He's kind of filling that gap that we probably should have talked about earlier in our conversation about technicians being trained. He's got an excellent series on.
Howard (Howie) Zion (12:37):
Now is he developing this in conjunction with side calibration or is this on his own?
Chuck (12:41):
No, this is all by himself.
Howard (Howie) Zion (12:43):
Okay.
Chuck (12:43):
He's training people all about force measurements. I mean detailed force measurements. What is excitation? Vol streaming? What is four to 20? Everything. He's just doing a fabulous job.
Howard (Howie) Zion (12:54):
Nice.
Chuck (12:55):
And what I think needs to happen is people like you and people like Kirk need to start doing that as well. And if we need to, we can use NAPT as your front to fund that particular type of project. But more people like Henry need to provide that type of education because we're missing that lead in to the people that are in these C labs throughout the entire country, probably even the world that need this mechanism to provide additional in-depth reading.
Howard (Howie) Zion (13:26):
Yeah. We did talk earlier about the lack of the pool of resources for experienced technicians, the need to develop training for them, and especially on the job training, mentoring that apprenticeship type of approach to get people from where they are, where their knowledge base is and their experience or lack thereof to productive calibration technicians that can think for themselves and be able to provide the work that we need to have done for our clients.
Chuck (13:55):
What we did, for example, in the customer portal, which people log, it's a free tool that our customers can have access to. Anyone can have access to it, but we have this free risk analysis tool and it's really a global approach tool that you helped design. And it's a fairly decent tool, but it's a global approach from a company standpoint. And it's a great tool and we recommend that people start with that as an approach to doing proficiency testing. But once again, it's one of the many improvements that NAPT has made to provide training to these people when they don't have other mechanisms internally. And how many other sites out there are offering free uncertainty training, for example. We don't have that because there's tons of it out there already that we can download free uncertainty stuff. But my point is, there's lots of free stuff out there that these technicians, either they don't know what's available or they just haven't done due diligence to go and find it, what I'm saying, do a search on it, or maybe their employer's not letting them do it or maybe they don't want to do it. I don't have that answer, but it's amazing. Howard, I could bore you for hours on how we still get a lot of conversations with technicians who clearly, I don't want to sound negative, but they need more training.
Howard (Howie) Zion (15:23):
Well, this is something I've observed in my 60 years on the planet, and that is just simply that any profession, not just calibration sales, whatever you're doing in life, you're either engaged in the process because you're driven and motivated to learn about it
Chuck (15:42):
And
Howard (Howie) Zion (15:42):
Succeed or you're not. And I see people who are just trying to get by and collect a paycheck. Maybe they're not sending out to just collect a paycheck, but they're just not really engaging in the process. And that's what you have to have first. So you can develop all these great training tools ad nauseum available on the internet for free, whatever else, but it's like you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink. They've got to be thirsty for
Chuck (16:13):
It.
Howard (Howie) Zion (16:13):
They've got to take advantage of it. Maintaining it and delivering good training, that's something you can retain. That's the first step. Second step is you got to have motivated people who want to learn.
Chuck (16:29):
The problem that we have, and I fight with other NAT staff on this as well, is the misconception that you have for something. Sometimes they say that things are free, you get what you pay for, and nothing could be further from the truth. Let's take for example, our good friend Chris Gretchen, and he put together a application, a workbook many years ago called Uncertainty Calculator. It's a great tool that hundreds and hundreds of people have used and it's free. People are still using that to this day.
Howard (Howie) Zion (17:01):
We used it for quite a few years, and I think we still are in some cases.
Chuck (17:05):
And so NEPT offers the same thing. We offer a free PT planning tool, free risk analysis tool. It's free to anyone that wants it. But the misconception that just because something is free means it's no good. It's definitely wrong in this case. And that makes me, I don't know, I wouldn't say angry, but maybe we should charge for it and then people would use it. I dunno,
Howard (Howie) Zion (17:28):
Even if you charged a minimal fee, I think it tends to change the perspective on it
Chuck (17:35):
Because
Howard (Howie) Zion (17:35):
I do think that people take for granted things that are free.
Chuck (17:38):
Yeah, absolutely. So maybe we'll convince the management at NEPT, which we're no longer part of. What we do is sit on the board and advise these people to charge for it. Yeah. Well, we'll bring it up at a board meeting as an action item.
Howard (Howie) Zion (17:54):
Sounds good.
Chuck (17:55):
But anyways, it's a problem. And I get the point how I really do where these organizations, they don't want to pay for stuff, but they don't want free stuff either. But so when you give 'em stuff for free, they don't want it. But at the same time, when you charge it, they don't want to pay for it. And I get you got to make money. If you don't make money, you can't be in business.
Howard (Howie) Zion (18:16):
That is true. You absolutely have to watch your margins especially, and it's different if you're privately held versus publicly traded, right?
Chuck (18:24):
Yeah.
Howard (Howie) Zion (18:25):
Publicly trade. The company absolutely has to answer the shareholders board of directors, but a privately held company, a lot of times, and I've seen this like Janet did medical billing for years, she did it for optometrists. And what I started seeing is, my gosh, if you ran your business differently, if you had a different business model, you could get a group of omes together or doctors or whatever, dentists, and you could make a killing of this, right? You could market it differently and better to sell those services and you could grow the business. But most of those single owner locations, they're making enough money to have a comfortable lifestyle and pay the employees something. They don't pay 'em great, but they're
Chuck (19:11):
Satisfied.
Howard (Howie) Zion (19:12):
They're content and they don't want to grow.
Chuck (19:16):
Speaking of medical, you know that I had four surgeries in the last 14 months. Too
Howard (Howie) Zion (19:21):
Many. Yes.
Chuck (19:22):
And unfortunately, I am not sure I told you this so yet. I think I did. I've got to have surgery on my shoulder. Now.
Howard (Howie) Zion (19:29):
You didn't tell me that.
Chuck (19:31):
Yeah.
Howard (Howie) Zion (19:31):
Why are you holding that on me?
Chuck (19:32):
Well, I fell down a couple of times during my,
Howard (Howie) Zion (19:36):
I think my
Chuck (19:37):
Problems that I had last year and I wrecked my shoulder pretty bad. And the only way it's going to fully recover is they're going to go in there and do the quote unquote what you want to call the rebuild.
Howard (Howie) Zion (19:50):
Orthopedic surgeries are getting more commonplace. I'm not going to say they're easy not. And certainly some orthopedic surgeries are more difficult to recover from than others, especially knees and your shoulders. Now, Janice's brother just went through that surgery we're talking about two weeks ago, and he's in a lot of pain right now. Oh, is he? That's to be expected, right? That's to be expected. But that type surgery, the recovery time is fairly long and it's inconvenience on top of the pain. But you've got pain now,
Chuck (20:26):
But it's manageable pain as well. Okay. I can't imagine having my right shoulder. Totally not be able to use it for six to eight weeks.
Howard (Howie) Zion (20:36):
You know what? Most of the surgeries get you up in therapy right away. They don't want blood clots. They want movement. So being ambulatory, being able get movement in there and exercise is pretty key. You probably remember that I've had both my hips replaced years
Chuck (20:55):
Ago. Yep, you told me that.
Howard (Howie) Zion (20:57):
Yeah. And so a little bit of a story there, if you don't mind. We've been transcript has been doing business with this orthopedics company for over 20 years now. I set that up 20 years ago with a gentleman who by the way, just reached out to me today this morning.
Chuck (21:14):
No kidding.
Howard (Howie) Zion (21:15):
Surprising. Yeah. He and I keep in touch ever so often, not as much as we used to. He's still with the company 25 years he's been with the, now he'll be 25 in October with Transcat. But in any case, we built a really great relationship. So he's comfortable reaching out to me and saying, Hey, I've got, in this case a metrology problem for one of our products. Can you help me? So we got on the phone and he shared his drawings with me and everything that he's trying to do, this has to do with the way they insert the femoral stem for hip replacement, total hip replacement. And I'll share some pictures with you. Now, I want to warn the audience, if you're squeamish, you might want to stop here. I'm not going to show anything overly shocking, but there are some pictorials of bones and things like that that I'm actually going to show a surgery, just a piece of it that's going to show what the damage is. So just a forewarning to those in the audience.
Chuck (22:17):
What about beef? What farm score ish?
Howard (Howie) Zion (22:19):
I don't care. All right, so here's what happened to me. Here we are October of 2004, and I start at this customer site, the orthopedic site, and be getting our operation up and running to run their cow program for them. And six months into this, I'm getting everyone hired. We're on board, we've got a great team out there, and I'm at a point where I go to stand up from a seated position and I had this major pain in the front of my hip and it's like what in the world was going on there? And it just kept getting worse and worse. So here I am traveling every week out here to get this stuff going. And so I take some time to go back to Rochester's where we lived at the time, and I see an orthopedic specialist and he says, oh, you've got vascular necrosis of the hip.
(23:13)
And I said, what? Well, how did this happen? Well, lemme explain what that is. And that's what this petro is. So the head of your hip bone, the femur has a blood supply that feeds it. Right now your femur is creating the, it's the largest contributor of your red blood cells, but it also has to be fed at fresh blood supply to keep the bone healthy and growing. And so when this dies off for whatever reason, it could be due to severe impact. A lot of football players have this type of injury. Bo Jackson's one of those example. Or it could be overuse of steroids that can cause problems with your vascular system or overuse of alcohol. I didn't drink at the time, I didn't drink at all. So it was none of those. They don't know why this happened. But my left hip for some reason lost its blood supply to the fever head.
(24:08)
And the first thing that goes is your cartilage here on the outside. If that's all that happens, that can lead to osteoarthritis. But then if you get necrosis of the subc chondral bone, that's where you start getting into pain. And I had a lot of pain. So after they tried to do a bone decompression that didn't work, it was too late. We got into looking at hip replacement. Alright, so all of this to say the hip replacement due to avascular necrosis, let me go to what happened. You have the surgeon has to dislocate your hip and they do an incision on the side of your hip and pull it out so they can get to this fever head. They cut that off and then they have to put a femoral stem, the metal insert down into that fever. This is the process that this gentleman's asking me about.
(25:03)
Alright, so jump to these pictures. Here's my hips. Back in 2005, you probably, if you're not used to looking at x-rays, not seeing what's happening here. So I'll zoom in on the left side. Looks like a pretty round, very normal hip, nice round surface on the left hip. Can you see that? It's not fully round here. You see this deterioration here from the cartilage and the necrosis of the chondral bone. That's the pain I was feeling. So they needed to replace that. Alright, in that process I happened to, and the surgeon didn't know until they got in there, but I happened to have very thinner than normal femur walls. So they cut the bone off, they're getting rid of to drive this femoral stem. It has a centered finish on it so that when it's in there, your bone will grow into it and hold it in place.
(26:06)
So it's intended not to come out while he's driving it in there. And my bone is starting to radiate fracture because of the thin walls. So he's now having to pull it back out, which is a lot of work. So this surgery is known as one of the blood surgeries there is. And one of the most difficult for a surgeon when they're driving that in, they're using a mallet to hammer it down in. And now they've got to figure out also do you get the angle right and the position and rotation, right? Otherwise you're going to walk funny and you have problems with your spine. So in any case, he gets it out of there. He puts a cable branded cable around the outside of my femur to secure it and then drives it back down in. Right now, that's the old mallet method. They now make these things called an impactor switch to that spray. Okay? So I'll show you the video of what an impactor does, okay? So you can see what that's doing, right? Instead of using a hammer to pound that in there, you've got this effectively a pulse impact hammer, but it's designed specifically for this application to drive the ral stem into the
Chuck (27:12):
Fma.
Howard (Howie) Zion (27:13):
And that's a great thing, but they need to know what the energy output of this pulse is. That's the question. How do you deal with that? So they're currently using what's called a split Hopkins and pressure bar. Now this is something I'd never heard of before. Been in metrology for 42 years, always learning something every day that I hadn't heard before. And it's effectively here, I'll show the picture here. It's two bars where you attach a string gauge to the end of it, here's the sample material, and you're driving this with an Aragon into the sample material which drives into the transmitter bar. So you have an incident bar, transmitter bar, and you're measuring that strain on there and converting it to JUULs for the amount of force. So that's the concept of what they're trying to use. Now
Chuck (28:03):
Andre trying to determine how much PSI per juul, then they increase the psi,
Howard (Howie) Zion (28:07):
How much force effectively in pounds of force or in JUULs that's being delivered. And not just once, but as that thing is impacting, you saw how it works. They're trying to figure out what does that curvature over time, what does that histogram look like? So I'm going to work with him on this. But in any case, these are things that are applications of metrology that go right back to the products that we use every day in our lives. And it's very important. I won't go into the word of the details of that, but that is my connection with personal life versus business life and how those tie together.
Chuck (28:43):
I don't want to have the surgery. Now you told me that.
Howard (Howie) Zion (28:47):
Look,
Chuck (28:48):
Why do I want to have someone pound on me?
Howard (Howie) Zion (28:50):
I had left hip done 19 years ago, nine months later I had the right hip done because same thing happened. It you saw how healthy it was and nine months later it was in the same condition. So for whatever reason, it's not like we had a family trait of this, a genetic thing, but for whatever reason I lost those blood supplies and I had to have hip replacements. And these are four bar titanium. So you've got the, from rural stem, you've got the ball cap on top of it. This is called your acetabulum up in your hip socket. So they have a piece that fits into that and they can either screw it in or the center finish will hold it in and then the ball on top of that. So what they do is if these wear out and they need to be replaced, they're only replacing the ball on that in their acetabulum and not the parts that are connected to the bone. So it's brilliant design, but minus four part titanium with chromium finished. Some have a plastic of fitting on it. So
Chuck (29:42):
You're one of those guys that can't go to the airport.
Howard (Howie) Zion (29:45):
Oh, it triggers it every time. So I don't even sign up for TSA because they don't have the millimeter wave scanners for TSA. They still use the x-ray machines, which will trigger every time.
Chuck (29:55):
Yeah.
Howard (Howie) Zion (29:56):
Yeah. I can't tell you manage of
Chuck (29:58):
That. Unbelievable.
Howard (Howie) Zion (29:59):
But great surgeon, great products. Knock on wood. I've never had a problem with these. They've been fantastic.
Chuck (30:07):
Howard, I've asked you for advice on three things today and you've been negative on all three things. You're welcome. I asked you for what kind of cocktail you were drinking and you water?
Howard (Howie) Zion (30:17):
Yes. You all.
Chuck (30:17):
Yeah. I asked you if you could come help me build my bike and you were negative on that and now I tell you I've got medical problems and you basically said, no, I'm not
Howard (Howie) Zion (30:27):
Medical. I sound about it.
Chuck (30:29):
So I am a little bit leery to bring up another topic with you today.
Howard (Howie) Zion (30:33):
What did engineers say to the question? Is it glass half empty or half full and engineers say it's not the right size glass.
Chuck (30:45):
Well, I like that. Well, so back to the metrology again. I'm going to have to really think about getting the surgery because you really educated me more so, I mean more so than the doctor had. I can tell you that much. You're welcome.
Howard (Howie) Zion (31:04):
Look, they haven't invited me in on the surgeries yet, but these orthopedic companies do have a cadaver room where they have surgeons come in and practice the surgery on cadavers. Sure. Why would hope? I mean that's the best way to do it. So they've got anatomical figurines that they can do that on, but there's nothing like doing it on an actual person cadaver first. Learn out all the intricacies of that before you actually jump into this. Now they have a new system that they're selling called the Vela system, and it's a fluoroscope type of design with digital marking on the patient so they can determine the size of the hip replacement, different sizes based on your anatomy. And so they determine the size of the hip with this tool. They also determined positioning once it's in there to make sure it gets in the right position.
Chuck (31:56):
Yeah, sure.
Howard (Howie) Zion (31:57):
When I had the left hip replaced, it ended up a half inch higher than my right hip. And so I had to wear a lift in my shoe to not have a problem with my spine so that when I walked or stood, and then once they did the other hip, it evened up. But same thing with this. So they improved the tools over the years to make it better and make sure that there's more precision too, the surgery.
Chuck (32:23):
Okay, so let's get back to metrology because again, I'm not going to have it done. I am not done. So getting into our next one more
Howard (Howie) Zion (32:34):
Thing. I was up walking the next day after surgery because they don't want blood clots forming or anything like that. They want you up and exercising that appendage.
Chuck (32:47):
How'd you feel the next day?
Howard (Howie) Zion (32:49):
The pain was, even with the wound pain was less than the pain I had prior to surgery. So for me it was an improvement.
Chuck (32:58):
So you're saying I should think about the surgery.
Howard (Howie) Zion (32:59):
I think you should think about it and then make sure you're doing everything they tell you for occupational therapy, physical therapy afterwards, doing all those exercises to get yourself back in shape.
Chuck (33:09):
Yeah, well I'm a little bit leery on surgeries as you can imagine.
Howard (Howie) Zion (33:14):
Quite a few.
Chuck (33:16):
Okay, so we're going now into the second plus half of our pod season for season one. We've got that's
Howard (Howie) Zion (33:25):
Some great guests coming up.
Chuck (33:26):
Oh my god, I dunno how we're going to do it. I don't know how. There's a couple other podcasts out there that have a guest like every week. I don't know how they do it, which by the way, I'm excited that we're getting more metrology podcasts out there because now we're getting options for more people to learn about metrology versus having a limited supply of opportunity for people that want to get metrology related. And I think our podcast offers a little bit different type of venue towards intr, maybe more ad hot tech stuff,
Howard (Howie) Zion (34:00):
Just trying to get it out there and get a broader audience. I would love for this to get in the hands of high school and college guidance counsels for the things that make are interesting to them to help students understand this field career field exists.
Chuck (34:18):
And
Howard (Howie) Zion (34:18):
It's a really good career field with a lot of interesting things.
Chuck (34:22):
Any closing thoughts for today? Anything else that you want to chat about before we call it a day?
Howard (Howie) Zion (34:27):
On one of these, we talked about adding some metrology tools to the NAPT website and that was something the board of directors is working on and we haven't really moved that ball forward, but perhaps I could share some of those on just one of our episodes between you and I just to show some of those tools. What's possible. It's more of that type of thing. What's possible, most of what I've developed has been in Excel, either for just descriptive purposes or for graphical purposes to help get a concept across.
Chuck (35:03):
Well, I think that's a great idea. Are they free? Are we going to charge for 'em?
Howard (Howie) Zion (35:05):
They're free.
Chuck (35:07):
So with that being said, words of wisdom, actions speak louder than words.
Howard (Howie) Zion (35:14):
I like that.
Chuck (35:15):
And if you're not solving the problem, you are the problem. So with that, all that, thanks for listening to chatNAPT with AI chat box. Howard and Chuck, thank you for joining us and remember to take advantage of our sponsor, NAPT. We want to thank them. And if you're not doing proficiency testing with NAPT, you need to do it somehow because that is the only way that you prove that you're technically competent is by participation in a known proficiency test. Take care and we'll talk to you guys soon.