A Bit about CrossWind

A couple of months ago I started to hear of machine shops going out of business and even hearing from some of our vendors that their business was also slowing down.  CrossWind, however, had so much work that our machinists were all working  50+ hours a week and still scrambling to keep up with customer demand.  Our shop is (at the moment) 100% medical device components.  Not that we stay away from other industries, that’s just the niche we’ve found ourselves in.  Unfortunately, we’re not killing ourselves trying to complete all jobs on time like we were in recent history.  Now we’ve found ourselves just trying to get enough work in to avoid laying people off.  We’ve even had calls from one of our biggest material vendors asking if we needed to order anything.  We’re not a very big shop so I know we aren’t one of their largest customers.  For them to be calling us looking for orders, they’ve got to be in a similar boat as we are.  Also, ...

Why is it that, in this day and age, we still have “men’s jobs” and “women’s jobs”?  Why do we fight for equality and then settle for less?  Manufacturing is a growing industry.  Jobs are left unfilled because there just isn’t a large enough pool of skilled workers.  However, there are a large number of jobs that women are in that require similar skills and have a similar environment as welding, machinists, machine operators, inspectors, etc.  These manufacturing industry jobs are often higher paying by about 50% than other jobs in comparative industries.  Industry Week magazine wrote “ female packaging and filling machine operators could boost their earnings by 50% by receiving the training needed to become welders, a job that requires similar arm-hand steadiness, manual dexterity and control precision. The median annual earning for welders is $38,762, compared to $25,851 for packaging and filling machine operators.” Did you know that CrossWind Machinin...

We’ve all seen the rise in food allergies.  We’re all affected one way or another by it.  Maybe you know someone, or your child does, or maybe it is actually you or your child.  Long gone are the days of a PB&J being a staple in school cafeterias.  What if, though, it didn’t have to be?  What if it can be cured?  What if you didn’t have to worry about a child becoming ill or even dying from the smallest trace of nuts?  This would affect my life in a huge way because my 9 year old daughter is deathly allergic to all nuts.  Not only is she extremely allergic, but I have been told by her allergist that she is in the top 1% of this country as far as seriousness of her allergy. One morning, when my daughter was about 9 months old, her brother had a peanut butter sandwich and then gave my daughter a kiss on the cheek as he was taking his empty plate to the kitchen.  The whole left side of her face and neck broke out in a horrible rash....

Have you ever heard of an atherectomy?  An atherectomy is used to treat   narrowing   in   arteries   caused by   peripheral artery disease .  What happens is you get fatty streaks built up in the artery and they clog up.  So, in an angioplasty (which my grandmother had about 20 years ago), a balloon is inflated and passed though the blocked artery and the plaque is pushed into the sides, widening the pathway for better blood flow.  With an atherectomy the plaque is actually removed rather than pushed aside.  There are different methods for this (shown below), but the end result is the same. This is some pretty amazing stuff but how does this relate to CrossWind Machining?  CrossWind machines components for the rotational version of the atherectomy which is where a special burr or drill on the tip of a catheter rotates to shave the plaque into tiny pieces.  Sometimes, sitting here at my desk, I forget how amazing th...