Honolulu Builders Embracing Automated Layout with Dusty Robotics

What a great and educational experience @ concept sliding solutions last week. We had 4 very talented boys from Malet Lambert School carrying out work experience. They arrived looking slightly shy and no doubt apprehensive to start the weeks long work experience but soon settled into working life. Concept didn’t hold back! They started out at the Carcass & Cut edge plant on Bergen way, We had the boys working on Beam Saws, Edge banders, 5 Axis CNC machines, Drilling machines, the 5-piece shaker door production line & Quality control. They also all visited our state of the art Aluminium sliding door plant across town helping our team down there to produce the products which are supplied and delivered nationwide. Then on Friday before goodbye to Concept they had a tour of our marketing suite On Gothenburg way, whilst helping themselves yet again to more Hot chocolate & Fizzy Drinks. As one of the fastest growing companies in the area which is trying to lead the way in manufacturing capabilities it was really good to see how these Boys in year 10 adapted to work life. It certainly gives us confidence as a business to keep investing in youth through work experience and apprenticeships to bring these kids on further in their young careers. #Workexperience #Learning #Marketingsuite #Showroom #VR #Bespokefurniture #Bedroomsolutions #Tradeschoice #Tradecounter #Greatservice #Construction #Madetomeasure #Housebuilders #Leisuresuppliers #EGGER #Henkel #Bedrooms #Kitchens #Bootroom #Mediawalls #Lifetimewarrenty #Innovation #Manufacturing #InteriorDesign #Consumables #Fivepiecedoors #SlidingDoors #UKManufacturing #BusinessGrowth #DesignExcellence

Indiana high schoolers are designing rockets, manufacturing C8 Corvette parts, and running cattle businesses—for credit and pay. Center Grove juniors Adam Harmon and Raj Jain interned with Speedway Composites after designing rockets in aerospace engineering class. They help build C8 Corvette parts. They're not alone. Indiana's 2024 diploma seals now require career-experience hours, technical certificates, and CTE courses for the top-tier diplomas. Schools are scaling programs to meet the demand. South Bend's Bend Manufacturing runs a makerspace that fills local machining orders. Indian Creek High School operates Creek Cattle Company—a student-run beef operation that supplies the cafeteria and teaches business skills. Center Grove sees roughly half its 3,000 students in Project Lead The Way pathways, often leading to college degrees through Ivy Tech partnerships. PLTW President David Dimmett notes the curricula focus on transferable skills: problem-solving, design, teamwork. Coalitions like Ascend Indiana and the Indiana Chamber of Commerce are sponsoring internships and hiring graduates with technical experience. The state's diploma reforms are gaining national attention. Early, paid work-based learning doesn't just prepare students for jobs. It gives them real responsibilities and real income before they graduate. 𝐒𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞: https://lnkd.in/gNeVJv8C

A customer came to me needing that part stamped. They thought it was a four-slide job. Having designed both four-slide and progressive tooling, I could see the problem immediately: the 90-degree bend sat so close to the full radius that the center form would be dangerously weak. The tolerances were tight. The material — stainless steel — is unforgiving. This needed a progressive die, and it needed two cams. Not the obvious answer. Not the cheap one either. To solve it, I turned to Bill. Bill had done his apprenticeship at Tinnerman Products just after World War II. Tinnerman was legendary in the trade — the kind of shop that didn't just make diemakers, it made exceptional diemakers. Bill understood this, and he had a philosophy about it: he never stayed anywhere more than three years. He wanted to see how everyone did it. Over thirty years he worked at shops all over, absorbing techniques, approaches, instincts — things that don't appear in any textbook. He worked at our company three times. I was only there for one of those stints — my family had owned the business since my father bought it in 1962, carrying it forward from its founding in 1946, and my brother and I took it over in 1990. By the time Bill and I worked together, I was on my way to designing progressive dies. But sitting across the bench from Bill, I was still learning. "That is how the trade works. People learning from each other. Knowledge passed hand to hand, bench to bench, generation to generation." To become a journeyman diemaker, you serve an apprenticeship of roughly 10,000 hours. There is simply that much to learn. The best die designers are almost always diemakers first — people who have felt the metal, understood the tolerances in their hands before they ever drew a blueprint. I went to college, but I also learned the craft, slowly, from people like Bill, who learned from people whose names I'll never know. That chain is breaking. US manufacturing employment peaked in 1979. In 1980, there were roughly 176,000 diemakers in this country. Today there are about 50,000. The apprenticeship pipeline that produced Bill — and through Bill, produced some of what I know — has been quietly draining for decades. Could AI design dies someday? Maybe. I wouldn't rule it out entirely. But I'd put that a very long way off. What AI cannot yet replicate is the accumulated intuition of someone who has spent 10,000 hours making something with their hands — who looks at a stainless steel blank and knows, before the math confirms it, that the cam needs to come from the other side. That knowledge lives in people. It gets passed down or it disappears. Bill got it from Tinnerman. I got some of it from Bill. The question worth asking — the one that keeps me thinking — is: who gets it next? #manufacturing #skilledtrades #diemaking #americanmanufacturing #craftsmanship

In 24 days, 20 h and 14 m after his innovation. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐦𝐚𝐲 𝐛𝐞 𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐲. Crativ1.com/contact-us In 1942, World War II shipbuilding was failing. German U-boats sank American vessels faster than the Navy could replace them. The traditional system required 240 days to finish a single hull. Henry Kaiser walked into this deficit. He had never built a ship in his life. “𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐬” 𝐬𝐚𝐢𝐝 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭 𝐟𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫. It required master fitters. Seven years of apprenticeship. Custom blueprints. Millions of hand-driven steel rivets. Kaiser looked at the plans. He decided rivets were too slow. He proposed welding the steel instead. He wanted to build the ships in separate pieces across the yard, then drop them into place with heavy cranes. Records from the Maritime Commission show a grim calculus that year. In a single month, German torpedoes destroyed over 100 Allied vessels. The traditional American manufacturing base, relying on custom craftsmen, could not close the gap. To win a war of attrition, the supply chain required someone who did not respect the traditions of the sea. The old shipwrights mocked Kaiser's idea. A ship was a single, organic structure. You couldn't bolt it together like a car. His early attempts proved them right. One of his welded tankers split completely in half while sitting quietly at the dock. The steel fractured in the cold water. The old guard nodded. Kaiser didn't stop. He adjusted the welds. He reinforced the joints. He stopped hiring master craftsmen. He hired farmers, waitresses, and retail clerks. He didn't teach them how to build a Liberty ship. He taught them how to weld one specific seam, over and over. They built the deckhouses upside down on the dirt. It was faster to weld pointing down than reaching up. When a house was finished, a crane flipped it over and lowered it onto the hull. The build times dropped. Two hundred days became one hundred. One hundred became forty. By late 1942, the Richmond yards operated twenty-four hours a day. They told him a ship took eight months. He stopped building ships, and started assembling them. On Sunday, November 8, his crew laid the keel for a vessel called the Robert E. Peary. By Tuesday, the bulkheads were in. By Wednesday, the hull was painted. On Thursday, the ship slid into the water. Four days, fifteen hours, and twenty-nine minutes after they started. His yards produced over 1,400 vessels before the war ended. They outpaced the U-boats. The Richmond facilities closed shortly after 1945. The heavy cranes were dismantled. The slipways were paved over, replaced by concrete and quiet harbor trails. Today, a small visitor center sits near the water. Every commercial vessel crossing the ocean today is built in modular welded blocks, using the exact method the experts promised would fail. Henry Kaiser: the man who put the sea on an assembly line.

Today the team are undertaking Day 1 of a two-day pump screed application course as part of a FeRFA-led apprenticeship and specialist resin flooring training programme. The practical training is focused on pumped polyurethane screed systems, including mixing, flow control, application techniques, thickness tolerances, substrate preparation and finishing standards. Today’s material focus includes the application of heavy-duty polyurethane screeds such as ResDev Pumadur HF, a FeRFA Type 8 system recognised as one of the most durable resin flooring solutions available for demanding industrial environments. Investing in accredited training is essential to maintaining high installation standards, improving technical knowledge and ensuring our team remain up to date with modern resin flooring systems and best practices. Continuous improvement. Continuous investment. Continuous standards. #FeRFA #ResinFlooring #PolyurethaneScreed #PumpScreed #IndustrialFlooring #ConstructionTraining #SurfacePreparation #CommercialFlooring #FloorRestoreLimited #ContinuousImprovement

Last week I talked about educating students on the trades and why it matters. Earlier this week at the iBuild Showcase, I got to see another side of that in real time. These events matter more than we probably give them credit for. Not just because they are big or well put together, but because they create a chance to turn something abstract into something real. For a lot of students, the trades still sit in that category of “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t really know what that means.” You can explain it all day, but there is a limit to how far words will take you. It is like trying to explain what it feels like to stand on a finished structure without ever stepping foot on one. You can talk through the process, the materials, the precision it takes to get there. But until someone actually sees it up close or experiences a piece of it themselves, it is hard for it to fully land. That is what stood out at iBuild. Students were not just walking through. They were putting on safety gear, getting out on a beam walk, screwing down deck plating, watching live CAD work take shape, and seeing 3D scanning in action. It stopped being something they had to imagine and became something they could experience. That is when the conversation shifts. It turns into questions about how to get into it, what it takes to do the job right, and where they might fit. I spent time walking through what it really looks like to become a fabricator or steel worker, not at a high level, but in a way that actually connects. The skills, the discipline, and the pride that comes with doing it the right way. Moments like that are where perception starts to change. Not because of one event, but because someone finally had the chance to see it for themselves instead of just hearing about it. If we want more people to understand the value of the trades, we have to keep creating opportunities like this. Not just telling the story, but giving people a chance to experience it. #SkilledTrades #WorkforceDevelopment #ConstructionCareers #Manufacturing #Leadership

"No nails" sounds like aesthetic gimmick. It isn't. Traditional Japanese joinery uses purely geometric interlocking — two pieces carved to lock into each other, no adhesive, no metal. Kyoto temples are disassembled for renovation every 200–300 years and reassembled with the same pieces. Nails would have corroded long ago; geometric joints don't. The technique doesn't transfer to serial production — it requires sub-1mm precision and 10 years of apprenticeship. For work built to last centuries, there is no better method. Read more: https://lnkd.in/ds2Hz2PP #Joinery #TraditionalCraftsmanship #JapaneseWoodworking #Durability #WoodIndustry

This week, we’re celebrating Brasfield & Gorrie Spirit Week, and our Advanced Field Engineer class joined in while working through a strong week of technical training. 🎉👷♂️📐 The class focused on structural steel, including shop drawing review and practical tips and tricks for layout and as-built work on these types of structures. We also conducted an in-depth experiment with control networks, using different types of targets to see the impact they have on the results. It was a great way to connect theory, equipment, and field application. 🏗️📏 To tie it all into Spirit Week, I challenged the class to come up with a CAD design for the occasion. What they didn’t know was that once we picked a winning design, they’d be responsible for laying it out in the yard themselves. Out of four submissions, I combined elements from each one into a final design, and I hope you like how it turned out. 💻✅ Brasfield & Gorrie, LLC We were also glad to have Ryan McCord’s Apprenticeship class join us for the video. A great week of learning, teamwork, and a little creativity mixed in with the technical work. 🎥👏 #BrasfieldAndGorrie #SpiritWeek #AdvancedFieldEngineer #FieldTraining #StructuralSteel #CAD #SurveyControl #ConstructionTechnology #FieldEngineering #TeamBG #Apprenticeship #ProfessionalDevelopment

Happy National Skilled Trades Day! 🛠️ 🧰 Chances are, you have heard a thing or two about AI and all the incredible things it can do. Here is one job AI will never replace: injection mold toolmaker. Stelray is more than just a molder. For over three decades, we have operated a full-service tool room staffed with master moldmakers and seasoned technicians. Where other molders are content to rely on partnerships, Stelray prides itself on rigorous maintenance protocols and on-demand mold repair--things simply not possible without a robust team of skilled tradespeople. We make a big deal out of promising the service you deserve. We can only do that because of the highly skilled professionals who deliver extraordinary results for our customers day in and day out. A big thanks to Emmett O'Brien Technical High School Technical High School and the Connecticut Technical Education and Career System who make this all possible! Through their academic awards and on-the-job apprenticeships, meaningful careers in manufacturing are accessible to everyone. #SkilledTrades #Plastics #NationalSkilledTradesDay #MadeInUSA #CTLeads

Rhian and Ceri from our team visited Maes y Haul Primary School today to talk to Year 6 pupils about the opportunities in civil engineering. The pupils learned how the different roles at Horizon play a part in delivering the projects that make everyday life safer and more accessible for local communities. From building footpaths and zebra crossings, to improving school car parks, and installing playgrounds to give children safe spaces to play - they had some great questions about how these projects come together and why they matter. 👷 Rhian and Ceri covered topics around apprenticeships, sustainability and why we need health and safety rules on site. The pupils also got to try out hard hats, gloves and hi vis and learned why PPE is so important. 🚧 👷♀️ Engaging with young people and showing them how civil engineering shapes the places they use every day is something we’re passionate about. A huge thank you to the staff and pupils at Maes y Haul for welcoming us so warmly. #HorizonCivilWales #CivilEngineering #SouthWales #CommunityProjects #EngineeringInAction #FutureEngineers #SaferCommunities