We are looking for one CNC turning settup person for 1st shift, one CNC turning operator for second shift, two third shift CNC turning operators.  We would like CNC turning operators to have some CNC turning experience, and we can train cooperative applicants from there.   CNC settup people need to be skilled settup machinists.

We are also looking for 2nd shift CNC mill operators, and two third shift CNC mill operators.  On the mill side, if you are good with hand tools we can train on the job.  People who can work on a car can run a CNC milling machine capably with training.  

We have ~90th percentile of CNC manufacturing industry pay for this area (the operator job on the website pay rates don't reflect shift premiums for 2nd and 3rd), and ~90th percentile benefits after 60 day probation, (health, dental, 401K, vision, life insurance, 4 paid holidays, two weeks vacation, up to 5 personal days).  Our work is probably 65 to 70th percentile challenging- no heavy parts to lift, no un-obtainable tolerances to hold, we have clean air mistaway units on every machine, (2 exchangers working 24 hours a day), air conditioning to keep the temperature from being hostile, we have no old machines in poor repair.

Drop a resume at this link for Griffin Armament Employment opportunities.

We would appreciate any referrals of any machine operators for first, second, and third shift on CNC turning or milling machines.  We're 30 minutes from Hartland, Delafield, wales, Ft Atkinson, Juneau, and 20 minutes from Lake mills or Oconomowoc, or 10 minutes from Johnson Creek.

Is that Bodycoat New Berlin?  There are very few nitriders in the USA from what I understand maybe like 10?.  We tried Bodycoat New Berlin once, and they did more industrial parts- they had issues turning the metal red in areas.  The guys doing it for firearms industry typically do shot peening and polishing operations that are a little more cosmetic in nature.  We're using a Texas company right now.  We do 17-4 Stainless- that's a special treatment- so it's a minority operation in a facility that happens once every week or two typically.

I want to say we crossed paths at some point.  Your forum name sounds familiar.

We don't have a storefront currently and until we do, we would prefer Google not bring random people to the door. That's a distraction and we can't bring them into a highly controlled firearms manufacturing environment.  I don't think Google even has our current location information.



Gordon Ramsay does cooking.  Street bums and Michelangelo have historically painted somewhere in the world. CNC can get quite complicated and the best way to do it is with as much art and skill as possible.

If you're talking Operation or Machinist, it starts with good mechanical aptitude, work ethic, and ability to use hand tools about half as adeptly as a professional mechanic.  If you have that, you can learn to be a great operator on the job in 2 or so years.  If a job is actually going to take a strong effort in training you, you'll probably make more like $17 an hour in intense learning environments for a few months, while the focus is 80% education.  The jobs that will give you $20 are going to want more work, and will teach you less doing it.  We have both types of positions available here.  And that's really cool, to get paid to learn things people pay tech schools to not quite learn as well. I went to tech school for machining and in the manual portion, during finals I worked 55 hours a week and paid the school to do that, and at one point I got massively dehydrated and blacked out and woke up on the floor because the shop there wasn't air conditioned like our shop.

Add a 3-4 years, strong attention to detail, good problem solving, good reflex response time, and the ability to remember processes and information you learn, and you can learn to be a great machinist.  

Add a pretty high level of intelligence and very strong drive to learn on your own time, and you could eventually be a high level programmer.  

Everyone starts somewhere.  Today, a lot of people get ahead of themselves and ask for the ceiling without climbing the ladder, and that just sets a person up for failure and disappointment.

One of our guys here that we trained pretty extensively was from Texas, and we taught him to run multiaxis lathes and mills, and he had a family problem and had to go home to Texas, and he got a job working for Larue, and Larue trained him on Mastercam, and then he got a job with Ghost Gunner, and every move was a pay and responsibility uplift for him.  It didn't work out for us, or for Larue, but it worked out pretty well for him.  

Basically high school educated Griffin Assembly to career level pay in 2 years, without paying for any education along the way.

I agree, its been a short stressful time. Only millions of dollars and my whole life’s work depended on my overcoming it.  Failure wasn’t a good option.  Ive delt with a lot of high stress stuff in my life to prepare me for it.  A lot of the guys I combat deployed with to Samarra in 2004 got out of the Army when they returned. At least one fit guy in my squad got on full disability and never worked again.   I stayed in 6 more years went back to Iraq for another year, also had 6 deployments doing high threat security for the state department afterward.  

I did have the benefit of technical school taking tool and die in 2006, so I learned manual machining and Solidworks and manual programming mills and lathes.  I was probably the second highest graded guy in my class.  That gave me a foundation for Mastercam training in 2016.  I also had meetings with all the tool sales guys from tungaloy, sandvik, iscar etc for several weeks solid, (maybe a month) in a conference room full of blueprints for various type parts, and selected tooling for an entire production line and began programming it part by part. I had a lot of weeks over 70 hours, and some weeks over 80 turning it around.  The shop has a shower and locker room and a gym and at over 80 your sleeping several days of the week at work. It is comparatively smooth now and Im working 53 average.  We’re a competitive company and there are always things to do.

I agree I would just as gladly hire an enthusiastic guy with work ethic and aptitude, with no cnc experience.  One of my better multi-axis lathe operators is the mill dept lead (a settup person) now, and prior to 2016 he was a short term assembly guy who we hired when he was a detailer at a car dealership.  One of the mill guys worked on print lines with quad graphics.  One of our night lathe operators used to operate a plastic molding machine.

Waukesha county technical college.  I thought at the time I would learn it to make silencers that we were subcontracting.  I did buy small cnc machines, but they were not industry quality.   I did make a few aluminum products on them, but quickly sold them and started using subcontractors after that, until 2016.  

Our first generation of industry machines were hurco and new yamaseiki machines.  They were junk we ran hard to earn Doosans to replace them all within I think two years. The doosans are pretty competitive once you optimize fanuc look ahead, m-code timers, and get tool load monitoring software running right.  

We have one mazak mill we’re trying to sell to get the floor cutting machines all on one brand.  

Mazaks are ok, but you have stupid quirks to deal with like batteries dieing without warning, near impossible re-teach of home position, and tech support that can seemingly solve zero problems due to their poor understanding of their hodge podge of machine tools.  They will talk to a customer all week but get the customer no-where, so it seems their function is to waste customer time and force them to call in paid application support for things as mundane as battery maintenance. Comparatively, fanuc warns battery low, and tells you which battery and we can swap and restart without loss of position. Other type stuff is easier too.

The fanucs have a memory card formatting tool for up to 2gb. Program handling, where the mazak smart control is 512kb with no card formatting tool.  The Mitsubishi is a higher performance fanuc copy control that handles parameters in a less logical fashion so you can’t dive in and fix anything without being brought up on mazak/Mitsubishi controls.

Our hurco was 5 axis.  The Hurco 5 axis stuff just has problems.  Problems with chip handling, problems with coolant getting into the encoders, coolant getting into the trunions, and pneumatic braking is weak and the seals need to be rebuilt occasionally.  The three axis hurco stuff is still built in Taiwan, but it has less inherent flaws. Cnc machines from doosan are going to run a lot, and will only break down rarely.  Thats what you need to make money in manufacturing.

Needing employees doesn’t have to be a time to sell.  The positive is it can help a company grow.  The negative is it can keep a company from growing if people aren’t able to be found.

This covid stuff put a lot of people at home on the couch collecting government checks.  People embraced communism and working became unnecessary for a lot of people who were ok to lose money to go on extended vacation.  Wisconsin doesn’t have ideal population density for staffing to begin with.  It is also hard to know what a comprehensive hr strategy is. We have indeed, billboards, and some radio ads currently.