Welcome, Garage Shop Fabricators and friends! We’re excited to be exhibiting at the 70th-annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, and I’d like to begin by thanking the readers who pick up FFJournal every month. We also would like to welcome those who have never heard of FFJournal, the magazine for metal fabricating and forming technologies.

Imagine you’re standing among hundreds of thousands of people, all motorcycle enthusiasts. It’s a summer day in South Dakota, and the sun glints off of the chrome on the bikes. The roar of engines rises above the collective voice of the crowd, and the smell of exhaust is in the air.

A couple of months ago, an associate forwarded me something that caught my eye. It was an article from strategy+business magazine headlined, "The case for backshoring: Which manufacturing operations should return to the United States?"

If you think about it, much of what you see and touch on a daily basis comes from fabricated and formed metal--it’s everywhere. In the pages of FFJournal, as well as on FFJournal.net and FFJournal TV, we spotlight the machines and minds behind some of today’s forming and fabricating innovations. Writing about things like the Orion space exploration vehicle, the Trans Alaska Pipeline, NASCAR race cars and the USS New York, featured on this month’s cover, brings it all to life.

How many of you build components, assemblies or products hoping a customer will buy them? To put in another way, if you build them, will customers come? Not necessarily—as automotive OEMs have learned.

Here at FFJournal, we always strive to bring our readers a unique style and perspective when it comes to reporting on metalforming and fabricating. In the past four years, we’ve sat down with several celebrities, including Jay Leno and Paul Teutul of Orange County Choppers. World-renowned metal sculptor Albert Paley has appeared in our pages, along with the U.S. military, NASA, Grupo Modelo (the world’s sixth-largest brewery), Chicago’s Millennium Park and NASCAR.

For those of you who appreciate the style of a classic car, being in Automobile Metal Shaping Co.’s Kimball, Mich., shop is like being a kid in a candy store. The moment I stepped foot on-site, I was surrounded by some of the most impressive cars ever built.

"A man admired for his achievements and noble qualities" or "One that shows great courage" is how Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines a hero. For too long, our culture has turned to professional athletes and celebrities to fill its need for heroes.

When gas hit $4 per gallon last summer, it effectively stopped the sale of high-profit SUVs and trucks for the auto industry. In turn, it might have also led to the events that helped put Chrysler and General Motors in Chapter 11.

Back in the 1970s, it wasn’t unusual for domestic cars to develop problems within the first couple of years after purchase. Because of these problems, many complaints were generated, and new ways to address them became a major focus of the domestic car companies.

Would a 30-cm sandwich taste as good as a foot-long? Would a 36.576-m touchdown pass make a crowd go wild like a 40-yarder? Could a 1.8-liter fountain pop quench a thirst like a 64-oz. Big Gulp?

The recent freeze in credit has started to thaw, giving consumers low interest rates and cheap leases on new cars. But for car dealers who need money for their floor-plan inventory, it’s still frozen, causing some of them to fail, reports Automotive News.

Since the 1990s, the domestic automakers have consistently reduced their worldwide supplier base so they could more efficiently purchase parts. They’ve also demanded that suppliers become more efficient by using lean methods to lower part prices.

Change is a constant with manufacturers in good times and in bad. But there’s one kind of change for which I’ve never seen the downside: implementing lean manufacturing.

Over the holiday season, I was in the market for a new piece of furniture and while inundated by the thousands of different online options, I stumbled upon a small acrylic fabrication shop’s Web site that seemingly had exactly what I’d been searching for.

Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If Einstein were alive today and was asked what he thought of the proposed Big Three bailout, insanity might come to mind. Ask Charles Darwin, and I think you get the picture.

When it came to transforming the transit bus I purchased into an ice cream truck, getting steel to cover up the windows was a shock. I heard steel was selling for about 30 cents a pound at that time.

As we all know, the stock market fell to unnerving lows on Monday. It was the third-biggest decline since World War II. To say the least, spirits have been equally low these days across the board--even on the manufacturing floor.

During the summer of 2007, I was looking around for a diesel chassis for an off-road 4x4 motor home I was thinking about building. Reviewing what was available on eBay, I stumbled across an ice cream truck that was up for bid. After talking to the owner about the business, I realized it could be lucrative for both of my boys for the summer.