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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.
Speaker 1 (00:00:19):
I absolutely love that music. Welcome to another edition of Chat Nap with the AI Chatter bots, Chuck and Howie. I'd like to take a moment and introduce my partner in crime, Howard. Hello. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2 (00:00:33):
I am not a crook. Hey, that music is great. Speaking of which, who picked that music?
Speaker 1 (00:00:44):
I think it was a joint effort between you and I, but it was give credit to what credit is due. That was on your list that you were responsible for creating. We had about,
Speaker 2 (00:00:55):
That's not where I was headed with IT. Marketing pre-selected about, I dunno, six or seven different, was it marketing that did that? Different clips that we could use?
Speaker 1 (00:01:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:01:04):
And you and I listened to those and we each gave it our vote and I think that's the one we mutually voted on.
Speaker 1 (00:01:10):
That's right. That's right. That would number one I think for both of us. Yes,
Speaker 2 (00:01:13):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (00:01:14):
Yeah. Okay. Now I remember.
Speaker 2 (00:01:15):
Just have good energy.
Speaker 1 (00:01:17):
We got to give credit to marketing folks.
Speaker 2 (00:01:20):
I think we do.
Speaker 1 (00:01:21):
Oh, I hate giving credit to marketing.
Speaker 2 (00:01:25):
You did a nice job. I thought about maybe each season changing it.
Speaker 1 (00:01:29):
You can do that, dude. Once you create your footprint,
Speaker 2 (00:01:32):
That's your image. Right.
Speaker 1 (00:01:34):
I wanted to change naps name 15, 20 years ago, and I was like, I was going to be hung because I wanted to call it the Association for Laboratory Comparisons. I felt the name matched better to what the mission of the organization was, and boy, the board of directors at that time, they were going to pay me for even
Speaker 2 (00:01:55):
Suggesting it would be an acronym of a, you don't want an ache when you talk about proficiency testing. You'd rather have a napped. Did you know that transcat considered renaming the company back in around 2001? The executive staff of the company at that time put out an email to all employees saying, Hey, if you've got some thoughts on what we should name, either stick with our name or we'll rebrand it. And ultimately the decision was we had too much invested in branding of the name recognition.
Speaker 1 (00:02:24):
Yeah. We got a wonderful supporter of NPT. His organization, Morehouse, has been a huge supporter of NEPT for 20 plus years. And anytime that I've needed to answer a question about force, Henry has always been there.
Speaker 2 (00:02:40):
Same here. Yes.
Speaker 1 (00:02:41):
And I think to the community at large, Henry is probably, I dunno how he does it, but through him and his organization, he spends a lot of time and money and resources on training the community at large. Tim and I have a few things in common. We're both, I get to get advice from Henry when I transitioned out of NAPT. Actually, Henry and I had a number of conversations towards what it takes to transition out and to trust other people.
Speaker 2 (00:03:11):
So what advice did Mr. Zu give you for transitioning?
Speaker 1 (00:03:17):
Well, he gave me a good book to read and so I read the book and then we talked about putting in place procedures, policies that others have to follow guidelines that what you did with the company and how you want it to go forward is going to be represented down the road and speak of the devil. There is Mr. Supporter of NAPT with your bright green well in demand.
Speaker 3 (00:03:45):
Look at that
Speaker 1 (00:03:45):
Tire.
Speaker 3 (00:03:46):
That's impressive. Look at this. Look at this. What's NAPT mean? Again, it's the only way we know it. It's when somebody wears the pullover, you forget what the letters stand for and how that works.
Speaker 2 (00:03:59):
Yes, yes, we do. I am
Speaker 3 (00:04:01):
Thrilled
Speaker 2 (00:04:02):
To have you on.
Speaker 3 (00:04:04):
Absolutely glad to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:04:05):
I have such respect for you and everything you've done at Morehouse and for the larger metrology community and the fact that we both share the same initials, hc.
Speaker 3 (00:04:15):
That's right. So we can share our monogram stuff. Fact, unfortunately I don't have much, but
Speaker 4 (00:04:24):
Monograms, I have much that. Nice.
Speaker 3 (00:04:28):
But likewise, we were talking, it's quoted red all, I shouldn't say all. I'd never say all you have stuff floating out, but a lot of published papers that you have Howard and just done great things for so many years and I mean, I think the one is called Why Not K equals three? I think that one was my favorite, the title better than I do.
Speaker 2 (00:04:52):
Yeah, K equals 3.9. Why not?
Speaker 3 (00:04:55):
Yeah, why not? Yeah, yeah. You presented CSI
Speaker 2 (00:04:58):
Because at the time it was all K equals two, so it was just trying to get people to think. Right. And that's actually where that paper stemmed from. We had CFO of the company moved into the CEO position, Charlie Hadid, and he came into my office one time when I was up in Rochester and wrote something on the board about why does calibration matter to customers?
Speaker 4 (00:05:23):
And
Speaker 2 (00:05:24):
He says, I need answers to this and not long drawn out answers, simple answers. So we had a little bit of a conversation and then I started writing papers from that point on. Really that was one of the first ones I wrote equals 3.9 whatnot. And I really wanted it to be less of a scientific approach, which can bore people and lose the audience and more of a conversational approach, which is what I was trying to write in that kind of a prose of writing. But anyway, I'm glad that you liked it. I
Speaker 3 (00:05:55):
Love the work you're doing. A lot of them. I mean, the last one I quoted was the TAR to TUR and rethinking because that one was, I presented at N-C-S-L-I on TAR.
Speaker 2 (00:06:10):
Yeah. Yeah. I love the presentations you're given. You and Dilip do a lot of work together as well, which is fantastic.
Speaker 1 (00:06:16):
There's probably one or two of our listeners that don't know that you have, is it six or seven podcasts that you're part of?
Speaker 3 (00:06:25):
Oh no, I'm not. No, it's two. Just the sign metrology today. And I kind of do our own little one. I wanted to do the one that we have for Morehouse and just fun talking to people just general like Rob Kaki and I talked about bourbon and stuff, so
Speaker 2 (00:06:41):
Oh, that's a great topic.
Speaker 3 (00:06:43):
A little bit different than the metrology. Ryan came on and talked about how sign and some of the different stuff it just was meant for. It's a podcast that's just meant to general chitchat and try to a no bs.
Speaker 2 (00:06:59):
And we try do a little bit of each, right. We have a little bit of metrology and proficiency testing, but then balance it out with just some conversation, a good conversation, which I love to do.
Speaker 3 (00:07:08):
Yeah. You guys back and forth, banner with each other and stuff. Even the title, the AI bots or Yeah, which I don't know. Am I talking to the real people here? I don't.
Speaker 2 (00:07:19):
We bring the artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1 (00:07:25):
We try and save our bantering for when just him and I are on the program. Otherwise the guests would never get a word in edgewise. True. So Henry, we didn't get the opportunity to really introduce you properly. So I'm going to ask you if you can share with us maybe your journey into metrology, how you got started and what led you to become now the CEO of Morehouse industry. If you could share that with our guests
Speaker 3 (00:07:54):
From conception. I mean I can do that.
Speaker 1 (00:07:57):
Well, I know you guy.
Speaker 3 (00:07:58):
I was the fastest swimmer buddy. I was the fastest swimmer out of the whole. There were millions and I swam the fastest. So I love it now overall,
Speaker 2 (00:08:12):
Congratulations on that race, by the way.
Speaker 3 (00:08:14):
Yeah, it's the best one I ever won. Yeah, metrology has been a fun topic. I guess it's been in the family. I'm fourth generation here, which has its own all the problems dealing with family and everything else. So I graduated from University of Pittsburgh in 99 and came into Morehouse, came in here and basically we didn't have a website, didn't have anything else fresh out of school. I stayed as long as I possibly could. So I graduated with super, I had minors in philosophy, basically got into this company, we have nothing. We had matrix printers to IBM. They weren't even 3 86, I want to say the IBM Ps two old computers and they're doing all this stuff and they're entering all this in. And I knew a little bit of coding and I just remember one of the first things I did is the secretary would type up the search. We had this program that you'd entered this stuff in and I just did this little loop command that would say, do you want to print a second one? She's like, this has saved me so much time.
Speaker 3 (00:09:25):
We have to retype it, retype it in. But yeah, since then I just would learn as much as possible, create website, do other things. It's been a journey with different people along the way. I know my grandfather was here, he was very successful in his time when he was working here, but even I come in and he's dated, this is one of those things that you're the young person in here. He is like, what about this book? Are you talking to Thomas Register? I'm like, yeah, we're talking to Thomas Register. And he goes, well, what about this book? And I go, I have no idea what you're talking about. And he goes, I forget what it was. It was some advertising journal or something or other. And I looked it up and I said, he's like, well, how don't this blah, blah, blah. And I said, well, the company went under in 1996 and here we are.
Speaker 3 (00:10:18):
That was like 2000 at the time. And he's like, yeah, they didn't teach us any of this stuff or whatnot. So yeah, got into it from there and just started going back to the lab and learning as much as I possibly could, learning as much business wise, reading as much as I possibly could. I don't think everything really hit me till 2006 or oh seven when I started taking a lot of external courses. I got really into Eli Golder at, I think that's how you say his name properly, but he wrote the goal, it's Not Luck, several other books. And I just thought his problem solving was it really just genius person. So you start reading these books and you're like, okay, one of 'em would be like the hospital, the doctors and how to book appointments. They're like, well, they have so much success, people cancel their, I mean now we're back in like 2006 or whatever. So people canceled their appointments. And the one company, they just got into a habit of calling people to confirm the appointments. And if people can't come, then they'd have people on the wait list and stuff. And now that's commonplace. They have all
Speaker 4 (00:11:31):
The
Speaker 3 (00:11:31):
Apps and everything. But back then it was just simple solutions to problems and the goal has drum buffett roll and all this other stuff. So really aligned with that, aligned more with lean manufacturing. It just makes sense to do a lot of the lean stuff. Started getting into Six Sigma and then got involved with the A STM committees. And all this time I'm spending numerous hours in the Cal Lab and also grinding teeth, have a family. But as we're growing my time here, per week goes up. So I'm working some week 60, 70, 75 hours, which full circle, I'm a big fan of Scott Galloway. I don't know if you know who he is. I don't think I do.
Speaker 3 (00:12:19):
He wrote a good book. He wrote several things, but Algebra, happiness, which is quite comical because he talks about when you're in your twenties working, learning as much as possible and working 60, 70 even 80 hour weeks. And he goes, by the time you hit 50, you don't want to do that anymore because that crap will kill you. And I'm just laughing because we have one of our friends who's on Patrick, some people might know or not, but I don't want to disclose who he is. But yeah, he worked himself on a bench three days in a row and had a heart attack. So this is around the same time. I'm like, yeah, and I'll tell you what, I'm 50 right now and there's no way I want to pull a 75, 80 hour week on a bench. There's no way. Five years ago, I might've still thought about pulling that and then complained about it probably for weeks afterwards. I wouldn't be recovered. But
Speaker 2 (00:13:17):
Chuck, what have you always told me, starting a business and running a business as a young man's game? Yeah,
Speaker 1 (00:13:24):
Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (00:13:26):
Or the other famous joke is, oh, it's so nice that you run your own business. You work 12 hour days, you get to pick the 12 hours that you want to work.
Speaker 2 (00:13:35):
That's not how you stay in business.
Speaker 3 (00:13:38):
No, that's not how you stay in business. You basically do what's needed when it's needed. I've learned a lot along the way that I wish I would've known earlier. I think we all right. The lessons that we can learn from older people that when you're young you kind of dismiss them.
Speaker 1 (00:13:56):
Well, Henry, I have to share with you, I'm not sure if I ever shared this or not in all of our conversations we've had over the years, but I was actually at your facility before you even came on board. We're going back to probably 1992 when we had to do onsite audits at the time. And one of my trips to nist, I stopped at your lab and we did an audit on you guys so that you would do a lot of our load sales. We had a ton of load sales back in the day, and we had a proving ring that we would send to you as well back when I was with Twin City testing. So I actually performed an audit on you guys 40 years ago now, third, about 35
Speaker 3 (00:14:35):
Years. Oh wow. Yeah, a lot's changed since then. We're a lot has a lot bigger. We've grown a lot, learned a lot. Yeah. We were in a small little back room. The whole lab. You were back there then it's like 15 by 20. We would do everything, which is funny. We had no systems whatsoever and we didn't really need 'em because when you're in that small of a lab and there's two of you working, you basically know when everything's come in and you know when to do it and it's super easy.
Speaker 2 (00:15:04):
I mean, it forces lean right on you. Oh,
Speaker 3 (00:15:07):
Absolutely. It's just, I'm going to pick up and do this and this guy's over here on the one side of the lab. I'm going to go work the other side. What's here that I can just calibrate.
Speaker 1 (00:15:20):
You remember Bob Peterson from nist?
Speaker 3 (00:15:22):
Yep, yep, yep. He
Speaker 1 (00:15:24):
Always said nice things about you guys. Whenever we would go there for our big, because we had a million pounder. He always said nice things about Morehouse.
Speaker 3 (00:15:32):
Yep. Bob was a good, I would say he was a good friend of my grandfather's. I would say the last time I saw Bob was probably 10 years ago, but we go out to lunch and we'd talk about things and he'd ask questions and everything else. Bob's just a great guy. Everybody down at NIST is just fantastic. They're just good people. I used to go down before they had all their security checks. When I came in here, we'd go down to NIST and we'd hang out. There were times that, yeah, now you have to be pre-scheduled and everything else. I go down there and
Speaker 1 (00:16:11):
Spend four hours. You walk right in the building, you could walk right in the door, walk right into the lab, go in the door and say, Hey, Rick, I'm here.
Speaker 3 (00:16:18):
That's right. And I remember one time the conspiracy theorist about the trade towers. They're online saying, we took down the trade towers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And NIST was testing all of this in their backyard. So I'm walking up at NIST in the Force Lab, all of the, they brought, not all of it, but they brought a bunch of the twin towers there for testing. And I'm like, I'm just going to go walk around here and check these out. It was really cool and it scared the crap out of me. So I'm walking around the NIST grounds, checking out the two hours and four deer jump out at me because there's deer everywhere down there, and I guess I didn't see 'em behind the big I-beams and everything, but the guys had a laugh. I said, yeah, I saw the deer here. And they had a laugh at me with that.
Speaker 3 (00:17:03):
I said, yeah, and what about this conspiracy theory about the towers that they're just laughing. They had the big machine out there, Erie as can be picture. So the one plane hit the tower and they had this big picture of the hole in the tower and we're looking at it and they blew it up and there's a person standing in the hole. And that thing was so eerie to me because you know what? They were probably on one of the top floors. The fire had burned out, most of the fire burned out and they had made their way down and we're probably no other way to get down the steps. For people listening, we do like, what does this guy do? We do force and torque measurement. We've done force measurement company came into existence in 1920. We worked with the National Bureau of Standards around 1925 to develop the proving ring, which at that point was the greatest instrument for measuring force in the world.
Speaker 3 (00:18:02):
Now since then, it's been a hundred years and that's why we say the force and calibration though lots of stuff. I mean, boilers were blowing up, other things were happening. The strength of materials determines a lot, and they didn't have a good way to determine the strength of materials. So working with the people at the scientists at NIST along the way to develop and refine the proving ring actually was not an initial success. And I think not till the 1940s or so that we were selling more proving rings, and then through the forties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, started selling a lot and then load cells started becoming dominant. And the nineties, yeah,
Speaker 2 (00:18:42):
My training when I went out to the advanced physical dimensional training in Denver for the Air Force was proving rings or force.
Speaker 3 (00:18:51):
Yep. Now it'll be load sales. I mean, some people do use proving rings. We laugh about it here. It's like I wanted to hit the a hundred years and get an order for 'em, and we did get an order this year, but if I'm advising people, no kidding. Oh yeah, yep. There's still people. They're the ultimate standard. As far as things go, I would not recommend. I mean, I'm here, we make 'em. You'd have to really convince me that you're worried about solar flares, you're worried about the grid being knocked out. You have a horrible power. There's a lot of things that we would have a discussion about. They're very good check standards. Now, people that have used 'em, I think they're mostly a legacy product. And you get some countries that just extend a recount date, I don't advise doing this. They will stay in calibration for years if they're maintained.
Speaker 1 (00:19:45):
One of my questions on my notepad was I was going to ask you is how many proving rings do you think are still being utilized in the industry?
Speaker 3 (00:19:53):
When I started here at Morehouse, I'd say about 50% of our workloads still came back and was booming rings, and now I would say it's about five, 6% of our workload comes back.
Speaker 1 (00:20:04):
That's still quite a lot though then.
Speaker 2 (00:20:06):
Yeah, it's quite, we acquired some equipment at an auction about eight or nine years ago. All the load cell presses, there were like three or four that we had half million pound. Remember Henry, we talked about that one and we had all the proving rings and load cells that went with it. So we still have all those proving rings
Speaker 1 (00:20:23):
Just
Speaker 2 (00:20:24):
Inherited from the auction sale.
Speaker 1 (00:20:26):
Well, the proving ring is not an easy instrument to use. That's the other thing compared to a load cell
Speaker 3 (00:20:32):
And our techs, if you calibrate load cells all day, you get so bored, and if you calibrate proving rings all day, it's a challenge. But by the end of the day, you just don't want to be looking at dials and little lining up little lines all day. So there's a nice mix on it that five percent's actually Nice. A lot of our techs and me included, if I was in the lab all day, I'd want to grapple on every other day and do a cow. It breaks up the monotony of doing the same type of thing, and it does require some skill. That being said, yes, stand in there to do a two hour, two and a half hour calibration. Like I said, that's why I'd want to do one every other day.
Speaker 1 (00:21:16):
Well, it's no doubt that Morehouse is the leader for providing commercial load cell calibrations, especially for AA load cells and that type of thing. And the thing that really impresses me more than anything else, Henry, is the amount of time that you spend, not probably just personally, but Morehouse itself on educating the community for force measurements. I mean, you've gone above and beyond, so can you share with Howard and I exactly what drives you to teach the world as much as you do? I mean, and you don't charge for
Speaker 3 (00:21:49):
It. Yeah, I'd love to share. I'd like to say there's some later in life I put it all together. I read a book called They Ask You Answer, and it was just a phenomenal read. I recommend anybody read that. I went to N-C-S-L-I in 2010, missed the whole heyday. I wish I would've been there in 2005, six. And when Howard Zion, obviously you were there and Howard Castro was there and they were the Z five 40.3 standard was being written. And then the subsequent handbook it was written, that stuff just fascinates me what people were doing at that time.
Speaker 1 (00:22:27):
There are a lot of people that were involved with that writing that document. A lot of people,
Speaker 3 (00:22:32):
And a lot of people say they would write it differently today. So that's a whole, I think almost everybody says they got some of it wrong, but for as much as they got,
Speaker 2 (00:22:42):
But that's why we have revisions, right?
Speaker 3 (00:22:43):
Yeah, that is. But as much as they got, so I missed that. I went in 2010 and a gentleman, Dave Nebel was like, oh, you bought this. You should teach a class. I'm like, I've never taught a class. He's like, it's easy. You got a break, you give up, just do a four hour one, you get two breaks, you do this. You're really only teaching three hours if that. He's like, you can talk to people and do all that. I'm like, ah, yeah, I guess I'll do it. So I did it and just from that interaction, I was scared beyond belief, right? I took this notebook, I'm doing all this research, giving people printed slides, absolutely everything. So presented 2011 at this time and after I presented, I got a bunch of questions. They scared me to death. I was like, oh yeah, the first time you present someone asks, oh, do you have this? And it's like something you didn't think of. But luckily I had USBs and everything else and I was able to sort it.
Speaker 2 (00:23:53):
Yeah, you got an audience full of real world problems and they want 'em solved.
Speaker 3 (00:23:57):
Yeah, they want 'em solved. And sometimes you're just not going to have answers. I mean, you're there with people that are much smarter than you at times. So anyway, yeah, onto that. Just after that it started, yeah, kept presenting more topics and got into it, made a fair share of mistakes along the way, of course, but you can't be afraid to fail. The saying is, fail fast, fail cheap, fail often. So all of those things along the way doing it, but in general, educating and doing this and starting to write this, I was typing the same email so many times with customers and I said, I'm just going to start writing this down. At least we'll have documentation. I would say I was pretty stupid at first because it was probably a good year of writing emails. Well, if this doesn't work, you have to count for the five Rs list, the five Rs, reference, standard uncertainty, reference, stability, resolution, repeatability, reproducibility, and don't forget environmental factors. Let's get that in here too. And I type these long ass emails out over and over again. I'm like, you know what? I should just start writing blogs and papers and learn. And that became a bit of research project and weekends I was doing Excel spreadsheets and trying to figure this stuff out. You learn by doing it. I think I've learned more along the way by making mistakes. I wish I could correct a few papers. There's one I had that the probability of something like about a four to one TUR.
Speaker 3 (00:25:48):
So I wrote this paper about four to one TUR and how it doesn't take in the location of the measurement and everything in my myopic vision was based on us. And all we basically do is bench measurements. Someone sends us something in, we're looking at one probability curve and saying if it's in or out, we're not looking at historical data. We look at that, but we don't do that to make whether it's pass or fail. We do work for the nuclear industry and everybody else. And generally when I was talking to our customers, they all want pretty strict guard banding if they know what even guard banding is, most of them that know and care about risk are in general want pretty much you're subtracting the majority of the uncertainty from your tolerance in any case. So I wrote this and my myopic view was from just without the other curve. So yeah, I've since corrected it, but that was one that I think I took a bit of a brutal licking on in the community. I've recovered. I'm not afraid to fail. I could be wrong today.
Speaker 2 (00:26:56):
No, you shouldn't be. I try to teach all of our employees that are, I used to anyway, but not so much involved as much now, but with our employees in my part of the organization, I'd like to tell them, you're not on an island, you're not expected to do this all on your own. You've got to do your workload. But when you have questions, that's why we're all here. You have supporting groups of people at different levels in the organization, different departments. We're here to work together to serve the same customers. And that's right, we should be having those conversations and not feel embarrassed or ashamed to ask the questions
Speaker 3 (00:27:31):
Or to
Speaker 2 (00:27:31):
Fail
Speaker 3 (00:27:32):
In spending a good, probably close to 20 years back in the lab and about over 15 years full time, I got to play. I was here 60, 70 plus a week if I wanted to. My wife doesn't love this piece, but if I wanted to go see what would happen and use a different adapter or do something else, it's like, yeah, I'll just go home like 20, 30 minutes later. And I would do that all the time. And then I'd start learning about that and then I'd go with the engineering team and start saying, well, what's going on with this? Why is pretty consistent and reproducible, repeatable and reproducible when I do this? And shouldn't the customer know about it? And then you start to have discussions with the customer when their stuff would fail, it'd be like, well, you didn't send your top locks in or you didn't do this. So all this spurned articles, and then you get back to they ask you answer and you start talking about, well, if we can educate, it's going to be a lot less work on our end. Selfishly, I don't have to retype emails with five R's and an E and all this other stuff, but how cool is it to be able to share all this so other people don't make the same mistakes? So it's not
Speaker 2 (00:28:50):
Only that. Yeah,
Speaker 3 (00:28:51):
You
Speaker 2 (00:28:51):
Said selfishly and that's correct. You get benefit from doing that. You do.
Speaker 3 (00:28:55):
Yeah,
Speaker 2 (00:28:55):
You do. But customers love the attention, the detail, the conversation, the communication
Speaker 2 (00:29:02):
That they don't get otherwise sometimes. And so I'm all for that as well. I support that very much. I love having conversations with our customers in my part of the organization to transcat where all of the embedded labs we're setting those up, creating those, developing those for manufacturing companies. And so we're working right there side by side with their engineers, their production people, their quality people, and we are able to shortcut and get answers for them that normally would happen over emails or meetings or paperwork that just takes forever to drag on. Having those conversations are appreciated by the end users of the equipment
Speaker 3 (00:29:38):
If they ever happen too. That's the other piece. If you're not having those discussions, we've had people we're engineering the one we had that we sold four 25,000 pound load cells, so maximum. And when our engineer went out to see what was going to happen, they called after the fact. They were generating like 600,000 pounds of force. So the first application they killed
Speaker 4 (00:30:03):
Right
Speaker 3 (00:30:03):
There. And that happens not as much, but we've had that where people just say, no, you're wrong. This is what I want. And you kind of back off. You say, okay, if this is, we had some of these applications with someone was using two load cells for a torsion thing and they kept overloading the load cell. It's like, do you put two in? Well, you just want to sell me two load cells. No, this is sound and here's why. And then you explain it and now they haven't overloaded any. So our profit has gone, our sales have gone down. Now I love when you can sell a solution and it just works for somebody and it continues to work for somebody. So there is a piece of that that you put it out there, people read it, you establish some expertise in the field. There's a lot of good things that come with writing and documenting everything that you're doing and you can point to it.
Speaker 2 (00:31:00):
That's what builds your brand and keeps it strong.
Speaker 3 (00:31:03):
It does.
Speaker 2 (00:31:04):
You make yourself reliable
Speaker 3 (00:31:06):
And then other people can look at it and then eventually your team starts learning this stuff too because they don't know a new tech day, one doesn't know a new salesperson day one doesn't know people are asking these questions. There's a lot of handholding that goes on in organizations on what people want. And there's a lot with experience. We're talking about AI now. AI doesn't have the experience. Yes, you're probably going to replace entry level people that are out of college because it can do the same thing. But I mean technicians know that this piece of equipment that you see, maybe once in a blue moon, they know how to do that piece of equipment, which no one else knows how to do it. We take all these notes, we're meticulous with note taking and all of this stuff. But I walked through our lab today and I saw pieces of equipment. I was like, why are we doing this?
Speaker 3 (00:32:04):
But people do it. And they had this huge power block with more pin connector and a USB to it and I'm like, man, this thing's hardy. It weighs like 15 pounds that they could replace it with this little USB, we call it a Hattie, a high accuracy digital indicator that weighs like few ounces, but they're going to ship this 15 pound thing. And it was like the case was already broken up and people just don't know. So in that respect, it's like alright, they may have an application but they don't know the other stuff on the education side. Super passionate about that because I do think that if people know they will make an informed decision and you can save a lot of money, which is an interesting topic for the three of us to talk about is when you start looking at risk analysis and someone buys something and their test uncertainty, we'll just say their measurement capability index test uncertainty ratios are two to one on the device and they've bought this and they're making all these measurements. My general assumption that I'm talking to people is they generally aren't looking at how many they're falsely rejecting. And most people will look at p FFA to death, the probability of false accept, but
Speaker 2 (00:33:24):
More worried about impact to the consumer than they are to themselves, right to the
Speaker 3 (00:33:28):
Manufacturer. That could be major fines, that could be planes falling out of the sky. That could be lots of bad things. Typically on the PFR side though, it's like, okay, so I'm falsely rejecting good actual good product. How much of this, and on the purchasing side, someone's saying, well, this device cost me 10,000 engineering saying it's good enough, but if I would've spent 20,000 and bought 85, 88 or something like that, if I would've spent this, maybe I'm not rejecting $30,000 in good product a month and they don't think about it. So if we just think about this on the small scale, I'm thinking if you extrapolate this out, there's probably billions upon billions of dollars that are just going out the window. And I saw it when I was in the Six Sigma courses. I saw it all the time. All of us were sitting there and they're like, well, my owner just we're making money so we don't care.
Speaker 3 (00:34:34):
Our teacher, the person that taught me would always say, I always offer customers. I said, you don't have to pay me a set. I will work for you and the year one savings after you implement things, we'll split it. We'll just split it in half. And he said no one would ever take him up on it. I'm like, they're still going to make 50% potential more of whatever amount, well, not more, but whatever amount it is, if they saved a hundred grand a year, they'd owe him 50 grand, but they'd still be in the plus 50,000, but no one would say yes to it.
Speaker 2 (00:35:09):
That happens more than, well you probably know, but it happens a lot. And I have a couple of anecdotes to that. One was when back in 2005, I went down to Houston, Louisiana area and drove and met customers out there, petrochemical industries, and I met with one of our customers and the goal was instead of sending a salesperson out to talk with them about is there other business we can get or other equipment that you need supported, which tends to turn people off, they wanted to send more of a technical person out there. So I went out there just to have a chat with these customers and one of the customers petroleum company said, we've been using you guys for, I think at that time, four years prior to that, we didn't calibrate any of our equipment. And I'm like, really? Why would you not calibrate your equipment?
Speaker 2 (00:36:01):
Aren't you worried about having incorrect readings? And this is as I'm just starting into some of these papers I'm writing. So that also helped me to get some perspective from the customer's point of view. He says, look, we take crude oil and we'll make whatever the next line product in line is. Maybe it's diesel, very easy to make it. If we mess that up, we turn it into gasoline, turn it into kerosene, turn it into whatever we're making money no matter what. I don't care. I don't care whether the measurements are right or wrong. He says, now from a safety perspective, that's why we care. We don't want to be blowing things up. We don't want to have accidents killing people, millions of dollars in lawsuits. So we started calibrating and so we got into the conversation about what else we could be doing with them, but that gave me some insight to say there are some processes where in manufacturing you just don't care about the answer, right? It's not important because they're making money.
Speaker 3 (00:37:01):
They don't think it's important because they said, oh, we'll turn it into this. Yeah,
Speaker 2 (00:37:05):
We're making money.
Speaker 3 (00:37:07):
They had a path to still, but what is the caveat to that? And this is what? What's the highest margin item on this list? And if you could do more of that, the company makes a lot more money than if you have to turn that crude into this.
Speaker 2 (00:37:26):
So they're not necessarily thinking about optimizing, they're thinking about, I'm just making money
Speaker 1 (00:37:31):
On almost every podcast. We touch on the education and training of the new technicians that are out there. And I think it's not even debatable now that in our conversations at NAPT and probably at the other vendors as well, whenever they talk about training technicians to force measurements, they point 'em to your company because of all the downloadable spreadsheets, the papers, your program you have, is it an eight part series that you can sign up for to teach you how to do measurements? Everything from
Speaker 3 (00:38:04):
On that one we have, so the latest thing that we came up with was have a 400 some page book on forced measurement
Speaker 4 (00:38:13):
That
Speaker 3 (00:38:13):
Is not highly digestible for somebody new at all.
Speaker 3 (00:38:17):
What we have is we have an email series that breaks it down to 40 plus weeks, Tuesday through Thursday, 10 minutes a day. I tried to design 'em some days and now this is where uncertainty comes into play. I personally try to make it 10 minutes. That does not mean that some are not seven minutes and some are not 15 minutes a day. So the pretty widespread on that one depending on what the topic was. In general, it's designed so it takes somebody about 10 minutes a day. We know there's not a hundred percent retention with anything, but they can go through it if they have the book, hopefully they're on the bench, they're learning all this other stuff and I think it's a real easy way to get good at something.
Speaker 1 (00:39:03):
Well, I was going to point out that my son, who is in our industry as well, took you a course and he and I are now able to have conversations about force measurements.
Speaker 3 (00:39:14):
Oh, that's great.
Speaker 1 (00:39:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:39:15):
That's a fantastic outcome. That's what you're hoping for. Exactly. Not somebody a seasoned meteorologist. That's not going to happen. I mean if people want that shortcut, good luck. I don't know how you get there. Maybe Howard,
Speaker 2 (00:39:28):
Just like with you, it starts with being motivated and engaged in the process and then that just drives you to learn more and pull more information in from wherever you can get it.
Speaker 1 (00:39:37):
My point is that there's a lot of people in the community who now go towards what you've done. Henry with training the world, training them, metrology community on force and torque measurements. It's not debatable and I think it's fantastic. You're one of the few people that have actually put their resources to training other people and we need more of that.
Speaker 3 (00:40:01):
I love it. I absolutely love it. Love having other people. I love training other people. The only thing I hate, and I say negative things too, my bias is once you start working with a quality manager and you go through the whole process with them, the uncertainties, you work on budgets and everything else, and then they leave the company and they're replace with somebody else that me go do it straight again. Start all over. Yes, that's the one. That's all the time at Everett. But that's also why you have all the documents too. Because if you can, honestly at this point, you want to have people that want to learn and and I talk a lot of the time and if people just ask you for the answers, that's not learning. So more than happy to help all day long. If people dig in, they start and they come up with, they're nothing better than getting a great question in your inbox.
Speaker 2 (00:41:01):
A really great question. So that 40 week course, that 10 minutes a day on average while they're working on the bench, that to me is the perfect coupling of learning to retain because you're feeding a little bit of information at a time. They're applying it, they see how it works, then they form questions in their mind naturally. Now they need to know, and that's when learning takes place. So you're kind of building that situation to occur
Speaker 3 (00:41:31):
And hopefully where they work 'em play a little bit like they can say, oh hey, we have these four adapters over here. I wonder what happens if I just take a minute and put this other one in to see what happens in our machine to see. So
Speaker 2 (00:41:47):
Your natural curiosity, all those years that you spent extra time going back in the lab and checking things out and talking with the engineers, set you up to be able to answer questions for other people like we are doing today with you. So myself, Mike sublet and you will need to get together at some point to talk through this dynamometer fixture that our customer is trying to make work and you're intrigued with it, which I love and we're going to have a good discussion around that when we get into
Speaker 3 (00:42:14):
It. So that's another good topic on the training that Chuck said sometimes, and this is an example where a customer wants use a compressive force to calibrate a dynamometer and pull intention and sometimes your solution seems so simple but gets so intricate with all the time and effort that it takes to do the testing to make sure you don't have friction loss, to make sure everything's aligned, that there might be a better solution with that's already commercially available.
Speaker 2 (00:42:50):
You spent all of five minutes looking at this and said, well, stability is a question. And that's exactly what the problem is. You look at the data from this fixture with a number of different load cells, it's all over the map. There's so much variability in it.
Speaker 3 (00:43:01):
One of our customers wanted us to do two cows in the same setup. So they made this cage and it would take me two hours just to align everything every time. If you were doing this all day long and then you get numbers and you're like, ah, I can't believe that you go in and retorque it and do all this stuff, eventually you multiply that by how many times you're going to do that a day with customers. And customers generally people get used to, they get numb to things. Talking about training and everything else is another piece of it. I love when we have new technicians. I love when we have new people, it's fresh eyes and I tell them, I said, you're going to be ruined in probably 90 days, right? Some not. And I'm really blatant and they always look at me funny when I say that
Speaker 2 (00:43:50):
Information overload.
Speaker 3 (00:43:52):
Well, you're going to become accustomed to the way things are done
Speaker 3 (00:43:56):
That if you become more numb to it, day one, this one customer, we had had three load cells on one meter and it would take 15 minutes to set up this meter till you keyed in all the things. It was a one channel meter, so you had to put in all your span points. It would only retain the last one. And you're changing three load cells. So if it took me 15 minutes to enter one in whatever came in the door, the first one you cow now it was an extra half an hour of setup time for us. Now if that technician's out in the field using that multiple times a day, you just start multiplying that even if it's only half an hour a day, that's huge. That's two and a half hours a week. And then people wonder, Hey, why are my techs so busy and I can't schedule this because you're just doing things and people forget or they don't think about it. They just think, I've just done it this way for the five, 10 years I've been here. And that's what you get a little numb to. Our team still ask a lot of questions or they come in with questions on the standard and that one gets me a lot when they do some of that and I'm like, this is something the committee needs to improve, but my jadedness will say something like, it'll be 10 years till it comes out because anything that goes through committee is just takes forever.
Speaker 2 (00:45:18):
It can take a long time.
Speaker 3 (00:45:20):
It can,
Speaker 2 (00:45:21):
And
Speaker 3 (00:45:21):
You've got to go through all the negatives you've got to get. Pete convinced people on board. The last one I took to committee, everybody agreed it was an issue, but no one had a solution and they didn't like the one I proposed, so they just dropped it. But that to me was it doesn't solve anything ludicrous. We all know. I said, well, let's put in, at the very least, let's put in it was zero reduction methods and NIST has a different zero deduction method than NPL in United Kingdom,
Speaker 3 (00:45:54):
Which is different than other people. So it's like if we just put in examples of these methods, now the math is in there and at least people can. Worst case scenario is if you want to duplicate our cert, you go through three of the methods that are in the standard and eventually you'll come out. But better than that, we just publish it all online. I like to share as much as possible. So we put our own math book for any equation that we use, almost any. We didn't put the quadratic in there, but almost any equation that we use on a cert is you can go download online histories is SEB non-linearity. We even put in code snippets that if they want to just drop it into Excel, they can do it.
Speaker 1 (00:46:35):
What's your vision for Morehouse for the future? Where do you want to take Morehouse? What are your plans for mission wise, vision wise, and obviously your continuing education plans?
Speaker 3 (00:46:47):
Oh yeah. So those are all great questions. So to simplify, great people, great leadership, great measurements. That all comes down to you hire the right people, you have the right team, make sure that leadership is there, align with core values. So in general, our goal is to stay in business. I mean, that's a silly goal. We do have growth things and all the other stuff, but in general, the game of business is just stay in business, don't become obsolete. So with anybody out there, it's obsolescence sucks. So if you get stuck in doing the same old thing right now we're on the AI cusp. We're looking at that. That was going to
Speaker 2 (00:47:38):
Be my question. How do you see AI changing operations for you?
Speaker 3 (00:47:43):
Yeah, okay, so I will just share this directly. This may change. It may change by the time the podcast is released tomorrow, but no, so I really think that there's going to be, and this is just my opinion, I think there's going to be ai, we're not going to avoid it. It's out there, cats out of the bag and everything else. I think there's going to be different levels where you can have an AI solution or you can have an AI solution that has human interaction and review to it.
Speaker 3 (00:48:15):
I've told our machinists that I think they're probably the last group of machinists. I just don't see people saying, I want to learn, go learn to machine things. I don't see this. In fact, manufacturers is retracted a little bit recently in the United States. I don't see this manufacturing boom per se coming back. So my pure vision is to retain as many people as possible, expand, and if we can find steel labor, I think there's a huge value in the ability to machine and work on metal and parts and everything else. I think AI will be cool and keep machines from crashing. I think it will get you 90% of the code to make a product that you could probably just model and then load into the machine. I think that that extra 10% is going to require people with skill and namely the machinists and the engineers that are going to know for a while.
Speaker 3 (00:49:18):
And I'm hoping at least for the remainder 10, 15 year gap that our expertise is going to be to add the human component on top of the artificial intelligence. I don't think we're going to have a robot put the load cell in the machine. I have not seen, I don't know how clean the purchase orders are for your customers, Howard, but I'm assuming they're not very clean. Where you have, and when I say clean, I mean very detailed of this is what I want done. This is how I want it calibrated. I want use these for force. I want to use these fixtures. I want this guard band method. I want you to fail. If the PFA is greater than two and a half using this method that they know all of the risk profiles,
Speaker 2 (00:50:03):
Most customers don't even think about half of those things.
Speaker 3 (00:50:07):
So running that through, if you have all that running it through artificial intelligence, you could probably set up some systems in the future to do that. Otherwise, I think the human interaction is going to stay with us for at least the next decade in this business or once. So
Speaker 2 (00:50:27):
That's
Speaker 3 (00:50:27):
Where I, yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:50:28):
You mentioned about machinists and things like that and difficulty in finding resources for that. I imagine that you've historically been using subtractive manufacturing to create, to actually make the load cells. Have you done any additive manufacturing in your processes? Is that something you can
Speaker 3 (00:50:48):
Looking? I truly believe that if you look at what NTA is doing and some of the other people are doing, you can almost get, it's super expensive now with 3D printing and some of the stuff, I think it is coming, I don't know when it's coming. There's some other things that are coming as well. But load cells are the argument with the engineering team over this is always, it's going to be cheaper, at least short term next five years. They're saying, I don't know what the gap is. I'll know more next month because my good friend's going to the MIT conference on a lot of his stuff. So great question on this. They are saying is if you have designs, so much has to happen, oven curing, ga, all this other stuff, the machining processes. If you have good designs and you're making some, it's going to be a lot cheaper overall economical to still spin up the machine. That will change eventually because you'll buy the raw materials and powders and you'll have these 3D prints that can almost make everything and then you won't have all this waste. We cut so much raw material, just the amount we do buy forgings and all the other stuff and stock. But overall, it's just a lot of machining. Especially when you're drilling some of these load cells, load pins, not as much, but oh yeah, you take a big chunk of steel and you whittle it down. Yeah,
Speaker 4 (00:52:23):
Pretty
Speaker 3 (00:52:24):
Much lack of a better word. And then you do some gauging, then you put it in the ovens and you do all the other stuff. Then you temperature comp, then you do your testing. And then our engineer, the one, the one guy's funny. If you smell something burning, sometimes someone didn't engage it right, and he thinks it's a bit easier to just burn 'em off. Sometimes you'll just scrape 'em off. It just depends on what was done. But the burning 'em off is funny because it's that, of course, our goal is to help more people. I think the more people that become customers of ours, Chuck and Howard for force measurements, I think the more that are going to make better measurements and have some recovery on lower PFR and of course lower pfas and all that stuff. The goal is create the safer world. However we get there. If it's through education, if it's through helping people with things, that's good. You only have so much limited resources and the other pieces, you have a return on energy. So you want those customers that want to do more of the right thing. You want them that the quality people that are going to fight with their boss that says, we've done it this way for 20 years, you're wrong. And the quality guys, yeah, no, you're wrong.
Speaker 1 (00:53:44):
And here's why. We'd love to take advantage and embarrass you. Do you have any mentors that you've had growing up that you would look to in the metrology community outside the metrology community? Any mentors that helped you become who you are?
Speaker 3 (00:53:58):
I'm still, according to Lord Shawl there, I'm still a Paddle one apprentice. So I would say, yeah, I took a class with Dilip in 2010 uncertainty, a measurement down in Letic, Maryland. And this guy comes in and he's speaking a little funny at the time and everything else, and I'm talking to him, who is this guy? And at the end of the two days, I just thought he was just one of the best classes I ever had. And for whatever reason, DI and I became friends. We've been friends for a while. We talk to each other every week. And I would say he's one of the best mentors. He mentored some other friends and everything else.
Speaker 2 (00:54:43):
I got a question, now I'm looking at the artwork in the background there.
Speaker 3 (00:54:45):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:54:46):
And the one that's the Deadweight press, it looks like with
Speaker 3 (00:54:50):
Yellow. Yeah, yellow background. My wife did that.
Speaker 2 (00:54:52):
Is she really?
Speaker 3 (00:54:53):
Yeah, she did that as an original.
Speaker 2 (00:54:55):
I like it. Very well done. And the other one, what's the one behind you with the
Speaker 3 (00:55:00):
Looks like that's a book. I did an ebook. We had someone on Fiverr do that one for the first version of the ebook. That was like 200 or 180 pages, I think the version one. Now we're going to release the next version that's free for people. That's 400 some pages of everything source. Then I might turn around and write a torque one, but I'm pretty exhausted after 400 plus pages on the tours. That's
Speaker 1 (00:55:27):
A lot. Is that your decision book?
Speaker 3 (00:55:30):
No, no. The decision rule book Dilip, Greg Sanker. I did that one. We just wanted to be free too. Chuck's read that. Howard, I don't know if you've seen it, but look, I was struggling with decision rules. So the thought process on that one was, and so was Greg, and we had Scott Mims come out and Dilip and just said, look, we want to make this easier for people. I think we made a hard topic, probably a medium topic. I'd like to go through it again and give a lot more examples of do this if you don't know. And like I said, I'm learning more
Speaker 2 (00:56:05):
Know you make decision rules for dummies level, but you've already made an improvement there. If you've made it easier,
Speaker 3 (00:56:12):
It's tough. Decision Rules for dummies is tough. I mean, method five and method six is for dummies, right? Two choices until you know what you're doing, pick one,
Speaker 3 (00:56:22):
Right? I mean that would be, it's a start. It's a stake in the ground. It's a start. Yeah, because otherwise, man, there's a lot of stuff. And then you get into Howard Castro's stuff and they were going in N-C-S-L-I what? RRP 18. That's just goes, you've lost the majority of people when you start doing, you make it too difficult. Howard great, I don't want to say anything. His stuff is awesome. His risk guard, I still use his risk guard free download software. I have it on my desktop, on all my computers. And that was done in 2006 or something
Speaker 2 (00:56:57):
Around that time, six or seven. I went to the Philly area and I was a guest speaker at the JJ conference for all the metrology people that they brought in from all their divisions. And they wanted training on a couple of topics. One of them being, how do I figure out my cow cycle changes? How do I evaluate equipment and figure out what the cow should change to? Well, that gets into a lot of detail, right? Oh yeah. So I started with RP one and I said, okay, there's six methods here. Here's what they are without getting into the math of Special Methods six and getting into the differential equations or, anyway, all I,
Speaker 3 (00:57:37):
Yeah, the RP A three and all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:57:39):
Yes. And all I did was just describe what the methods were and unfortunately it was right after lunch, so they were falling asleep. They were bored. They were just like, oh my gosh, I can't take any more of this. And I wasn't even getting into the math of it. Right. So yeah, those things can be very complicated and you can lose your audience pretty quick
Speaker 3 (00:58:00):
And a lot of people don't know what they're doing, so therefore they just end up not doing anything like the Rush song. You can choose not to decide, but you still made a choice.
Speaker 2 (00:58:10):
I love that. And I have rush tickets, by the way.
Speaker 3 (00:58:13):
Oh, did you? Yeah, the drummer's going to be, it's going to be good.
Speaker 2 (00:58:17):
It will be. So I figure if Annika Niles is good enough for them, she's good enough for me. Of course, I'm a drummer and I miss Neil Pi. He was my mentor for being a percussionist, but he's been gone for 10 years. 10 years now. Been gone a long time.
Speaker 3 (00:58:35):
And from
Speaker 2 (00:58:36):
People I love that they're going to get back on the road and I've got tickets for Fort Worth and for la.
Speaker 3 (00:58:41):
Oh, that's awesome. What's funny about Rush with me is that first album Neil was not even on who was working Man In the Mood. I love that album. It's still freaking an awesome album. Even though Neil Absolutely. I mean they got better with Neil. The songs got more intricate and stuff, but man,
Speaker 2 (00:59:01):
Well, I mean he's writing a lot of their lyrics.
Speaker 3 (00:59:04):
Yeah, I mean Fly by night,
Speaker 2 (00:59:06):
Speaking of which, a lot of our guests are musicians as well. Do you play any music instruments?
Speaker 3 (00:59:11):
I played guitar for a little bit. I don't really play much anymore. I wasn't, I was more, I want to recreate and learn how to play songs and I didn't learn the theory, so that was stupid on my part. I should get back to it. I have three guitars. I'd sit there and learn to tap Thunderstruck and learn to play cathedral and it's like, okay, that's the one trick pony. I'm going to freaking hammer with Thunderstruck and then Cathedral, you just do the same thing. Hammer and volume up down with the pedal. So yeah,
Speaker 2 (00:59:48):
So it's hard for that to use that to make your living, which is why you've done the same thing I've done. You went into engineering metrology, you got into more detailed things that society needs more of. Not that music isn't important. It is very important to me and to a lot of people. I love music. It's the same inquisitive thought process that you follow to get into where you are today that you'll follow to get back to music and master it at some point you have more time,
Speaker 3 (01:00:15):
Get back to it. I freaking, I am so into vinyl and collecting and the old records and all that. I am so into this right now. I wish I wasn't because it was, people used to give me their vinyl records.
Speaker 4 (01:00:30):
So
Speaker 3 (01:00:30):
I had a mass of I'm into it and they would just give me boxes of vinyl. I don't want this. Now you go to the record store and you want, it's 10, 20, $30 for Yeah, they get the albums. I was plucking Dollar. I'd go back and look at some of the stuff like an Aerosmith album was $3 and all this. So I'm amass so much and I've just gone through and displayed it all at my home and then I'm like right now, so what? People may not know. So then you have part of a band's collection and I'm like, I got to finish it off. Think now I got to go buy freaking Obscured by Clouds. The one album that I don't love, I got to go do this rush. I haven't bought all their albums. I'm giving up on that one's lot. I have the early one, don't years of it. That's a lot. What's that?
Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
58 years of albums from Rush. So
Speaker 3 (01:01:22):
That's a lot a of sets. I have a lot of their CDs and that's the trade off. If you have the CDs, do you still buy the vinyl? And then I'm like, well, I love this album. So I just bought, yes, fragile. I ordered that one the other day. Like Damnit, I don't have, yes. And that's probably one of their best, if not their best. I like finding the obscure stuff. I like listening to full albums, not songs.
Speaker 4 (01:01:47):
So
Speaker 3 (01:01:47):
You go listen to somebody's Eagles, you go listen to Desperado or Rush, you listen to In the Mood or Fly by Night or whatever, and you find these tracks that you've heard the hits so many times you find the obscure track and you're like, holy crap. A lot of these albums stuff they tried, tried to tell stories. Yes. Quadrophenia by the Who. Everybody knows Tommy but Quad, it's freaking Love Brain Over Me is the last song. It's phenomenal.
Speaker 2 (01:02:14):
Oh, that's awesome. So I assume then you have a good turntable, a good Hi-Fi stereo system, Moran or something like that. Fair.
Speaker 3 (01:02:22):
I have Fair Audio Tech. I'm in the $400 turntable range with $150 needle. I'm fine with it. I can't tell the difference. Chuck wants to push on. But what's the funniest thing about turntables I think is somebody, there's a great, you have to look it up. Somebody took a hundred dollars, 1978 turntable and a record and they took a high fidelity and a $750,000 setup and they standardized the, they put 'em both to 96 Hertz file and then they standardized the volume levels and 57% of the people said the a hundred dollars 1978 turntable sounded
Speaker 4 (01:03:06):
Better.
Speaker 3 (01:03:07):
So I think there's things you can do isolating, well, good speaker wire and stuff. I'm in my set of about a thousand dollars and I'm more than happy with it. Would I like a better one? Yeah, but I'm not going to buy it. I don't need it. Yeah, understood.
Speaker 1 (01:03:22):
Well, Howard, honestly, I think just about every single guest we had has a musical connection. I'm not kidding.
Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
They have. And I see that friend, which is why I asked that question now. Yeah,
Speaker 1 (01:03:31):
I can't think of one of our guests that didn't have a medical, not a medical musical connection. Okay, last question for the day. For you Henry, do you have any favorite place that you visited or a favorite place you'd like to visit?
Speaker 3 (01:03:45):
Oh, that's a good question. I don't know off the top of my head. I like Doned in Florida a lot just because walkable, there's like eight, nine breweries if you go downtown, lots of restaurants. My wife and I typically like walkability. If we are going to go on vacation, I don't want to be bothered with cars or anything else. Just like, we'll go on hikes. Turks and Caicos we went to, they're super, super nice. Stayed there, walked the beach and look at the phone and see this is only a mile away, we'll just walk to it. Hopefully they have walking paths and stuff. But I got eaten alive by mosquitoes they like my blood type at. So yeah, there's cool places. NCSL, I thought San Antonio was cool, the Riverwalk down there. But we keep going back to Dunedin but haven't been all around so I can't say
Speaker 1 (01:04:41):
Nothing internationally, nothing besides the Turks, just the
Speaker 3 (01:04:44):
International Dominican Republic is cool down there. I don't know how it is right now. Been over to Europe and stuff. I have not been to Germany. I want to go to Germany eventually. So I heard the greatest NMI story over Germany that they're in. Everybody's in a room and somebody knocked on the door and they started cursing him and said, why are you disturbing us? We're in this very important meeting with everybody and under no condition were you told to disturb us. And the joke was the guy said the vending machine was out of beer and they stopped the meeting and got on it right away. So yeah, I don't know if that's true or not.
Speaker 2 (01:05:31):
National emergency,
Speaker 3 (01:05:31):
Someone told me that. But then NIST and PTB are funny. You pit 'em against you go to the shows when they used to attend. It's like NIST is the stepchild in the ptbs eyes and stuff. But
Speaker 2 (01:05:47):
I hear PTB and I think a past blue ribbon for
Speaker 3 (01:05:50):
Whatever reason. I like PBR. But yeah, PTB is great. Those guys. What's cool is that all the NMI people are just fantastic. NP Ls great. Anybody we come in contact with usually are very helpful. Ptbs been super helpful with Torque. But it was funny, we were looking to get something calibrated, a large torque instrument. PTB was down NMI, Japan was down, C OM was down and our engineer wrote me back. It's like something about why is everyone's torque machine down? I guess we should, this is a good opportunity for us to build one. Like, okay, there you go.
Speaker 1 (01:06:28):
What you guys do. You guys have the best national Torque standard in America.
Speaker 3 (01:06:32):
Yeah, but it was built by NPL. We'll build our own. We're building our own on things. Yeah. Yeah. Torque is just for listeners out there, there's a lot of error with torque setups and stuff and I don't think anybody's doing a phenomenal job right now.
Speaker 1 (01:06:54):
We could have a long, long, we're going to have to have another podcast about torque. I think so. And all the mistakes that are made in torque measurements,
Speaker 3 (01:07:01):
The chubby checker measurements.
Speaker 1 (01:07:04):
I think we mentioned that you've been a supporter of NAPT when I say not only just you, but Morehouse for 20 plus years. You guys have supported NEPT. Anytime I've had a question, you're the answer. You're the guy I go to. So I personally want to thank you and Morehouse for your 20 plus years of supporting us.
Speaker 2 (01:07:24):
So you do in Kansas City. The conference for NCSL is in Kansas City next year and we'll be celebrating 30th anniversary for NAPT. We'd be glad to have you there. Can
Speaker 3 (01:07:36):
You believe it, Henry? I'll be there. I'm looking forward for anybody that wants to go to N-C-S-L-I next year. There's the Hallmark Greeting Card Museum, which we can organize a trip to, which I have to see. I don't want to see it, but I have to see it.
Speaker 2 (01:07:53):
Yeah, Kenton is the home of a number of companies. Hallmark, of course. Russell Starr, candies. There's a number of things here to see that museum, jazz museum, yep.
Speaker 1 (01:08:02):
We're going to have a big party, Henry, and we want you to come to our big party because it's not too often, I know you are a hundred years, but Napt is 30 going to be 30 years next year. And for me, that's a major milestone to spend 30 years with the company. It's just for me personally. Unbelievable time. So please come and bring your staff and help us celebrate. I'll be there. So with that being said, I hear the music, I hear the fat lady singing that she's in the background. Any last words, Howard?
Speaker 2 (01:08:38):
No, the last words belong to you.
Speaker 1 (01:08:40):
Okay, well I'd like to say if you want to improve your proficiency, your technical competency, then you need to sign up for laboratory comparison today. With
Speaker 3 (01:08:51):
That, I'll add to that because you can do everything right, but the proof is making sure that end EN ratio is below one when it's all said and done.
Speaker 2 (01:09:02):
There you go. Thank you. Perfect.
Speaker 1 (01:09:04):
Thank you. So with that being said, we'll see you on the next podcast and thanks for listening and we'll talk to you guys soon.