The CWB Association brings you a weekly podcast that connects to welding professionals around the world to share their passion and give you the right tips to stay on top of what’s happening in the welding industry.
Want to know about the thrilling world of welding engineering from an expert? On today's episode, we talk with Mark Norfolk, the President & CEO of Fabrisonic LLC. We journey through Mark's fascinating career - talking about our shared love for the Cleveland Browns, his experiences from a unique welding engineering program, to working at EWI, where he developed new welding techniques for defense-related items. We also discuss Fabrosonic's journey, a testament to the importance of diverse tools and technologies in the welding industry. You can't afford to miss this enlightening discussion about the science behind ultrasonic welding, its practical applications, and the challenges and capabilities of solid-state welding.
Follow Mark:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-norfolk-pe-78a65021
Follow Fabrisonic LLC:
Website: www.fabrisonic.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fabrisonic
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/Fabrisonic-100063676178002/
Thank you to our Podcast Advertisers:
Canada Welding Supply: https://canadaweldingsupply.ca/
WeldReady: https://weld-ready.ca/
There is no better time to be a member! The CWB Association membership is new, improved and focused on you. We offer a FREE membership with a full suite of benefits to build your career, stay informed, and support the Canadian welding industry. https://www.cwbgroup.org/association/become-a-member
The CWB Association brings you a weekly podcast that connects to welding professionals around the world to share their passion and give you the right tips to stay on top of what’s happening in the welding industry.
Want to know about the thrilling world of welding engineering from an expert? On today's episode, we talk with Mark Norfolk, the President & CEO of Fabrisonic LLC. We journey through Mark's fascinating career - talking about our shared love for the Cleveland Browns, his experiences from a unique welding engineering program, to working at EWI, where he developed new welding techniques for defense-related items. We also discuss Fabrosonic's journey, a testament to the importance of diverse tools and technologies in the welding industry. You can't afford to miss this enlightening discussion about the science behind ultrasonic welding, its practical applications, and the challenges and capabilities of solid-state welding.
Follow Mark:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-norfolk-pe-78a65021
Follow Fabrisonic LLC:
Website: www.fabrisonic.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fabrisonic
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/Fabrisonic-100063676178002/
Thank you to our Podcast Advertisers:
Canada Welding Supply: https://canadaweldingsupply.ca/
WeldReady: https://weld-ready.ca/
There is no better time to be a member! The CWB Association membership is new, improved and focused on you. We offer a FREE membership with a full suite of benefits to build your career, stay informed, and support the Canadian welding industry. https://www.cwbgroup.org/association/become-a-member
Alright, I checked, checked, I'm good. So I'm Max Ron. Max Max Ron. Cwb Association welding podcast podcast. Today we have a really cool guest welding podcast. The show is about to begin.
Speaker 1:This episode is sponsored by our friends at Canada Welding Supply. They are a family owned Canadian business with an awesome customer support team that's there, ready to answer any questions you may have. Canada Welding Supplyca offers quick Canada wide shipping, fair prices and a massive selection of welding supplies. They carry all the cool brands such as ESAB, lincoln Electric and Fronius, but also some of the very hard to find niche brands like Furecup, outlaw Leather and, of course, up and smoke welding apparel. Best of all, they offer exclusive discounts only for our CWB Association members. Check out Canada Welding Supplyca today to shop for all your welding needs. Remember that's Canada Welding Supplyca.
Speaker 1:Hello and welcome to another edition of the CWB Association podcast. My name is Max Ron and, as always, I'm out there looking for the best guests I can find for everybody out that watches the show and listens along. Today we have someone who is tied to, or was tied to, one of our affiliates now and that has branched out on his own. We've got Mark Norfolk and he's coming to us here and he's the owner, president and all things incoming of Fabrosonic Mark, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:today. Very well, thanks for having me, good morning.
Speaker 1:Good morning. So where are you? What's your location?
Speaker 2:So we're just north of Columbus Ohio, so kind of Midwest.
Speaker 1:So are you still warm? Is it cold, is it raining? What's the season like right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we have a little bit of snow this weekend. I call it flurry. It's nothing much, but it's supposed to be warm-ish 40s today, so it's not too bad. A little dreary, but other than that.
Speaker 1:That's all right. I know I was watching the Browns game on the weekend. I'm a big Browns fan and I'm sorry. No, no, we're having a great year. We're seven and three, I'm doing, I'm happy. But I did see that the field looked a little frozen and I was like, oh yeah, it's getting, it's getting cold down there in.
Speaker 1:Ohio? Yeah, which is good, because I got about six inches of snow here in Canada already, but so I can pretend it's nicer when I watch TV Somewhere else. Yeah, I love it. So are you a local? Were you born and raised in Ohio? Like where? How did you end up in outside of Columbus?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm born and raised in Columbus. You know my career has taken me other places but always ended to make it back. My wife's from Cleveland, so she's a big Browns fan, which is why I offer my condolences.
Speaker 1:I've seen her suffer over the last 25 years. And then in terms of where, where you kind of had your career right, Did you always work in the Columbus area?
Speaker 2:No, so I'm an Ohio State University welding engineer by training. So you know that's my welding background. After school I spent 10 years with John Deere making tractors and other things. So I was in Iowa, mexico, illinois, a little bit everywhere bouncing around. But after about 10 years of that my wife said hey, I'm moving back to Ohio. You can come or not, but I'm moving back to Ohio. So here we are.
Speaker 1:That's an interesting connection with John Deere because I worked for Brandt Industries here in Canada for almost 10 years and they they own most John Deere up here in Canada. They just over the last decade they've been slowly buying up pieces of it all over the place and I worked with the attachment department where we would figure out how to make all the different attachments fit on basically every other type of vehicle it's not supposed to fit on. Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a lot of fun. My first three years at Deere were all in tests, so I got to drive all over the world testing different pieces of equipment, doing all sorts of things that you shouldn't be doing. I actually I think I might have a world record. I got a fully loaded combine. I got air on all four tires when we were trying to do some experiments, so that may be a world record, I don't know.
Speaker 1:You know it's funny because I used to. I used to bug a lot of my former friends. I live in an agricultural center here in Canada and they're living in Regina, saskatchewan. So we have the headquarters for Brandt here and they hire probably 2000 welders. It's a big shop.
Speaker 1:But I used to always bug them and say, oh, you're working on a combine. Yeah, and what does it combine exactly? They would look at me and think like well, it's just called a combine. I'm like well, why would you call it a verb? You know, I'm sure there's a reason. And then they think about it and be like well, I guess it combines a bunch of other processes that you want to change into one machine. And I used to love just hammering the new guys on that, because a lot of people just think about what a machine is called. They don't think about why. Right, yeah, so what is your background in education? Then You're a welding engineer. No one generally signs up for college to be a welding engineer. Usually it's a path you kind of fall into or find somehow. So how did you? Did you always want to be an engineer in general? Did you have kind of a welding knowledge, maybe before college at all?
Speaker 2:I knew zero about welding coming into this. So I was actually I always wanted to be an engineer, didn't know what type. So I kind of signed up for electrical engineering and, you know, took my first electrical engineering class and decided, well, maybe 48 transforms are not a passion in life. And you know, they had a, you know, an engineering day where all the different disciplines came out and there was a booth for welding. I'm like I gotta check that out. I took a class in the welding program and then I was hooked. Yeah, that was it, just got into it, loved it, loved everything about it. And, like I said, you know, 10 years at John Deere, while I was in college, actually I was designing arc welding cells for John Deere. So John Deere kind of paid for the last two years of my college by just giving me a computer and doing weld cell development remotely.
Speaker 1:So lots of fun times. That's fun. That's fun. I used to have to do weld cell development and it's as long as you got someone that's willing to pay for the bill for your ideas. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. It can be. Now you're lucky that you were at a college that offered weld engineering, because that's not something that's offered in very many places.
Speaker 2:Now, it's a really small program and there's only two or three in North America. So it's yeah, it's a small small group.
Speaker 1:So once you fell into the weld engineering spectrum, it's not like you narrowed yourself down at all, it's almost like you just, all you know, picked the scab off of a whole giant new injury. So like what did you, what did you start thinking about as you started looking at this weld engine, welding engineer, life ahead of you. You know where you could either go into research or design or metallurgy or materials or all these crazy things you could do. Where did you kind of see your place in there?
Speaker 2:So I didn't have like a great plan, I kind of stumbled through it.
Speaker 2:The thing about the welding engineering programs is they typically are fairly broad.
Speaker 2:So you know you're, you know really really shallow in lots of topics that you can kind of pick and choose with topics you know are fun to play in. Certainly, robotics was a lot of fun for me and you know that led to a lot of gas, metal, arc welding kind of development, and then from there you know doing the robotic weld cell design, from there you know developing new procedures for manual welders and then from there into a whole world of test, because of course where do all the machines fail at the weld? So you know kind of just kind of fell into all these different paths. You know, as I went along with no great plan, but again you kind of get that, that that wide berth of information that then lets you fit in kind of anywhere. And actually John Deere for many years was the number one employer of new college grads out of the welding engineering program and because you have that broad base of manufacturing knowledge they can kind of take a welding engineer and putting them, put them in anywhere in the manufacturing space.
Speaker 2:And you know, they know a little bit of metal, a little bit of double E, a little bit of mechanical engineering, have a lot of hands on experience, can talk to someone on the shop floor, so you know the welding guys always did really well at Deere.
Speaker 1:You know I love this connection.
Speaker 1:It's like the six degrees of max, because it was like we used to always poach engineers from John Deere at Brandt before we started buying pieces of John Deere, because because of the exact same things you're just saying.
Speaker 1:You know, we were, we brought up an engineer from Mexico to John Deere Mexico plant and he was wonderful, like he knew a little bit about every single process we had. You know he had that great, like well rounded use, but that that's that even in itself is a very niche type of industry because not too many companies allow engineers to have that freedom of exposure. You know, and that's something I think that actually makes a lot of engineers hate their jobs. You know that they end up being in a company where they're just doing, yeah, they're in a tight little branch of whatever company they're in, and that's what they do morning to night, every day, and they don't really get to be a part of the bigger picture or the bigger design, whatever that is. You know, and and and it's kind of like a nail in a coffin to a lot of people that enter their engineering world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, deere was a great company in that they did move people around a lot, get people into different experiences, getting cross stock. I mean, my, my favorite day of the year every year is, you know, deere always brought in the engineering team to the factory floor at least once a year and actually had them assemble stuff, you know, weld stuff, assemble stuff, build stuff on on the line, and the number one day for design changes was always a day after that. Yeah, like, oh, what did he did this? Oh, yeah, it was me, I can go fix that, you know. So you always got that, that development, that interaction that you know, trying to trying to make people broader in how they think. So it was. It was always a good company for that.
Speaker 1:I get quite a bit of flack on the show for always interviewing so many engineers. I got told I I went to the dark side as a former welder. Yeah, it's like you know I got. It's such an interesting, you know, relationship from the fabricator welder to the engineer. They both obviously need each other, like it's a very clear connection that this is a marriage that needs to occur. It used to happen, it needs to happen. But you know, when the welder says something's not fitting, it's like you know, telling your spouse to calm down it's not going to get you very far Right. So I remember being on the floor and trying to be like look man, this is not going to work. And they're like no, no, no, the computer, it's like the drawings. Good man, it's like, but in reality Holler and Stackup.
Speaker 1:It's not actually going to work. Yeah, and it was a really great, great experience, but for yourself 10 years, almost 10 years, at John Deere. Then where did you go from there?
Speaker 2:Like you know, that sounded like it was right out of college, 10 years with Deere, and then back to Ohio started working for a CWB affiliate, ewi, and in that position totally different world I ended up managing large government research programs. So EWI does research and development in new manufacturing technologies, new welding techniques, and so I was a program manager for a bunch of government projects developing new welding techniques for mostly defense related items. So got to spend time at Electric Boat, you know, working on nuclear subs. Got to do work with the Department of Energy down in Oak Ridge. Got to do work with the Department of Energy out in Colorado on wind turbines. So kind of this is broad base of all kinds of weird stuff. You know. Heavy, heavy knowledge in manufacturing and welding, you know, certainly helped me out. But I got exposed to all kinds of new products and toys I never had seen before. So you know that was. That was an interesting seven, probably seven years, yeah.
Speaker 1:So would you feel, in comparison to the Deere work, that you got exposed to more on the design side but perhaps less in the practical application side?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you know, at Deer, you know the welding engineers got involved with stuff. But you know, most days we were welding 10, 18 steel and you know, every once in a while they'd throw in a 10, 20 just to, you know, really get excited, that's. You know, once a year you'd have something that touched wet crop and you'd get to play with 304. So I mean, you know, moving to EWI, then I'm starting to look at Inkenel's Hastalois, 150 KSI steels, things that you know. With a you know a metallurgy background, it's like, oh, this is all stuff I learned about in school but never got to play with. So all of a sudden I'm working in all kinds of different new material systems. So, yeah, less on the design side but a lot more on the you know real deep metallurgy that I never really played with up to that point.
Speaker 1:And in terms of like the follow through. You know this is what people always ask about research companies, universities and stuff like that. They get big projects. They get big research projects. You know, working at EWI do you get to see them through? Like, here's the project. Right from the start, the first call, we want to do this crazy thing. You're like, yay, I'll help you figure out this crazy thing, and then it goes out the door and what happens to it then?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's a mixed bag, just like, I guess, everything else in business. So you know, I worked on a project for an electric boat, designing a new process for putting some stuff together. I'm not going to go into details but that's in production today. I know the engineers there, they're still up and running today. So you know, the team put together this package and it's making, you know, making equipment today for our, for our sailors. Another example I was doing work. This was more on a commercial basis. We were doing a work with a company that makes fire doors and we were doing mig brazing of steel panels together at ridiculous speeds. It was, you know, multiple heads, twin arc, I don't know, like three, four hundred inches a minute, travel speeds.
Speaker 1:I mean we're cranking the doors out. It's hustling.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we, you know, we got this, the system figured out, got everything running and like six months later the company went bankrupt. So it's like oh, I mean, this is a home run from a technical standpoint but the rest of their business just didn't, didn't mess.
Speaker 2:So you know it's a, it's a mixed bag. You see it, you know from all aspects. You know you, you definitely get the technical wins most of the time, yeah, but the but, the business wins, you know, aren't always under your control, but we do get to see, see what happens, just not always the result we're hoping for.
Speaker 1:I wonder what happens to that IP. You know that goes to that company that goes bankrupt. Do they sell it off or do they die with it? You wondering.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you always wonder what's you know, what else could we have copied and pasted that on? And, and you know, made a real big difference, cause, yeah, it was fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, things don't tend to die right Like. Sometimes they'll fall under the radar for a while but then you see them rebirth somewhere else in a different format, and you're like, oh, there's that tech that I saw five years ago that I thought disappeared. You know, people don't usually let advancements just float away, you know.
Speaker 2:I think in 2007,. I was working on a spin arc where you take the, the, the, the nozzle and you kind of spin it a little bit to get you know your metal to flow up for a narrow groove. Wow, do you get the metal to flow up and get a little bit better. You know penetration. I was working on that until 2007 and I think it's changed names by three different companies since then.
Speaker 2:So you know that technology's been around since like 2000. And every four or five years someone comes out with a new, a new version of it, trying to, you know, get deep roots.
Speaker 1:I've always actually thought that was a pretty interesting concept because you know very automatically, you would think of lots of benefits. Yeah, even the, even the vibrations. You know the. The frequency of the vibration would help with, I would think, the settling of the grain. You know like it would. It would, you would think so, and the. The heat should be exactly the same. Really cause contact doesn't get lost.
Speaker 2:Just moving the fluid around.
Speaker 1:Right, basically just using that kinetic energy, that centrifugal energy to push it out, right so?
Speaker 2:yeah, for narrow grooves it produced amazing results. I mean one degree included angles and you get. You know, great, great tie in.
Speaker 1:So what about Bossed of these things? You know like, yeah, it comes up because EWI? For my you know I'm fairly new to EWI and this was actually interesting to me and something that I deal with now at CWB in terms of where I work and what I do with the membership, is that I worked as a welder for 27 years. I worked with some of the biggest companies in Canada and you know, we never really had to reach out for R and D Like it was like.
Speaker 1:It seems like a very specific type of industry that reaches out to a third party that says, look, we're going to drop a couple million dollars or whatever to try to figure out something that's a problem in our company. You know, I would say most companies tackle that themselves internally with staff or hiring or whatever they need to do so. For a company like EWI that deals with these large, you know projects or you know ideas, how does that help the small to medium business welder? You know, is there a connection there? Is there? No, is that just not on the table? Or, you know, can Bobby Joe's welding down the street benefit from an R and D giant like that? You know, yeah, Well.
Speaker 2:So that model I think has evolved a little bit over time. You know you go back to the 90s and the 2000s and EWIs. You know they were cranking out research for you know large oil and gas companies who could fund, you know, these major programs. But I think you know, as the labor market has really constricted, you know the R and D components at many companies, even mid-sized companies, has kind of disappeared. And having that ability to bring on you know 200 experts in a field to solve a specific question, it doesn't have to be a huge program but you know, get you the resources. It's basically outsourcing your R and D department to different experts. So you know I've seen that kind of shift from the huge companies to the more medium-sized companies. Now on the small end it is kind of tough just because of the economics.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you've got a bunch of PhDs, you know, often in the lab doing work, so that's going to cost something and where most of the benefits we've seen are in, you know, kind of government-private partnerships. So there's a program in the state of Ohio, there's a program in the state of New York where you know companies that do these types of manufacturing. R and Ds are funded partially by the state to do work with especially small businesses. Yeah, so a lot of that's coming through some federal programs. But you know overall. You know, just like in racing, you know the technology on your F1 car. Eventually you know those turbos make their way down to the Toyota Supra, you know right. So you know all these things that do get invented. As they're used more and more and become more prevalent, then that kind of you know works its way out slowly, but it is a long process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is something that you know, I've talked about on other shows. It's like I call it the hobby effect, that technology doesn't become a real thing in society until you can do it for a hobby, you know. So like I mean robots. I remember 25 years ago, you know, the first robot I saw was like $10 million and it ran for like an hour a day because it was constantly not working. You know it was like a constant battle to get this thing to do one weld and it'd be like, yeah, it's dialed in, let's do two.
Speaker 1:You know, and to now, where you get? You know $40,000 co-bots and you could now realistically I think I see it within the next couple of years be able to pick up an eight to $10,000 co-bot for your garage to play with. And I think at that level, once you get to that point, technology is embedded in society. Now it's a thing. It's like the 3D printer. You know it was like this ridiculous thing, but now I can go to Home Depot and buy one for $200. Right, so, like I mean, now this technology is real and like the example, with you know Formula One racing and now you know my lawn, you can buy turbo lawn, one cylinder lawnmowers, crying out, right, yeah.
Speaker 2:Like eventually trickles down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it does eventually trickle down, but it is a long process. You know, thank God technology trickles down better than money, because we know that that doesn't work, that doesn't work at all. But you know, if that, if it could be streamlined, like you said, through granting and products and and I mean I think even the connections that we're seeing now with companies around the world post COVID, where collaboration is kind of back on the table Right. Pre COVID I felt like everyone wanted to be the monolith Right, everyone wanted to develop the next Amazon or the next eBay or everyone wanted to have these monolithics, you know, you know centered companies where they just ruled everything and COVID kind of just leveled that all out and said nah, no, no, no, no, it's not going to work.
Speaker 2:We need to work together.
Speaker 1:We need to work together and we're seeing a lot of affiliations and partnerships and collaborations with companies around the world because it makes sense. You know like hey, I'm a welding manufacturing shop and I need you know these parts machined. I'm not going to build a machine shop now, I'll just find a machine shop down the street to work with and that's, everyone wins right.
Speaker 2:No, Then you build those relationships. And if you need something right away, hey Joe, can you fit me in today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's exactly it. So where I'm leading with all this is you left EWI. So it sounded like you had a really good gig there. What pulled you away from EWI? And then? Where did you go?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so one of the programs I was managing large government programs. One program that I was working on was developing a new solid state room temperature type welding process for thin metal foils. It was actually being developed for some government programs in the armor space and got involved with that technology. We went after a few grants to prove that technology out at a fairly large scale and got those grants and I was managing those grants from contracts, pm, pr management.
Speaker 2:And started on the weekends dabbling with the technology, playing with the machines, running the machines, and the next thing you know, I'm running the machines three or four days a week. I just got sucked into it. So at some point it was about 2011, ewi actually spun that technology out as a for-profit subsidiary. So we spun out this company called Fabersonic to do metal 3D printing at basically room temperature. And so in 2011, the way I phrase it is I made enough people angry at EWI that they said here, go, take this and get out of our hair. And now I'm off doing this full time.
Speaker 1:So Fabersonic was an EWI developed technology that then got spun out into an independent for-profit, still under the umbrella of EWI.
Speaker 2:Still majority owned by EWI, but there are some other investors.
Speaker 1:I see, okay, so your place was kind of. You are also one of those shareholders.
Speaker 2:Kind of sort of not really More president and CEO. Okay, I see.
Speaker 1:And then did it move off grounds, did it move into a new building. Is it that's like now it's own baby growing on its own.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have our own building, our own staff, our own facilities, all off on our own. Certainly, we still talk with EWI, but we're about 25 minutes north in our own facility. Everyone here is a Fabersonic employee. Okay, so what is Fabersonic? Yeah, so people are generally familiar with 3D printing. So in metal 3D printing we're typically going to take some sort of powder or maybe a wire and we melt that in specific locations to build up additively material. We're taking a CAD file, slicing that into layers and then using some sort of fusion source to build up layer by layer.
Speaker 2:Fabersonic kind of turns that on its head Kind of. The first thing is our welding technique is ultrasonic welding. Ultrasonic metal welding is not a new idea. It's been around since the 1960s, mainly used in electronics for wire bonding, they call it. It's very much akin to a friction weld or maybe an explosion weld. So we're taking this solid state, no melting, low temperature process and we're using that to print thin layers of foil. So this is kind of the idea we're taking thin layers of foil and then welding those together into a solid material.
Speaker 2:The nice thing about welding with this particular setup is max temperatures in our welders maybe 100 C, and we hit that for about 100 milliseconds. So from a metallurgy standpoint, the material coming in and the material going out are exactly the same. We haven't changed the grain structure, we haven't changed precipitate size, we haven't changed anything. Another kind of benefit is metal foils are a commodity. So if you look at 3D printing materials even some of the wires, definitely the powders are quite expensive. Metal foils you can buy to an existing spec on the open market. So our number one material is aluminum 6061 and right now we're paying like $6 a pound for that material that's like one of the most common metals on the planet.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And you can buy it from anywhere. So how do we make a three-dimensional shape? That's kind of the key piece. So our incoming feedstock, if you will, is this metal foil. So we use a welder. It's a rolling device. It's about 27 millimeters wide. It rolls over the material and anywhere that it rolls over becomes 100% dense metal. But we're basically making blocks. So if we want to make a pyramid, we make one block, then a smaller block, then a smaller block and a smaller block. But how do we get the exact shape that we're looking for?
Speaker 2:So what we did is we actually combined our metal 3D printer with a CNC mill. So in the additive space this is called a hybrid additive. So we have CNC milling plus additive in the same box. So all of our internal and all of our external shapes, our geometries, all derived from the CNC mill. So all of our internal passageways, if we create internal structure, those all have CNC quality, surface finish and accuracy. The same on the outside. Everything has the same CNC quality, surface finish and accuracy. So, combining those two, we'll weld for a while. Weld layer by layer by layer, come in with the CNC mill, all in the same device, all at the same time, in one datum. We're not moving parts around from machine to machine and mill those geometries into the part as we go, and it's kind of a unique way of doing 3D printing.
Speaker 1:I love this. So right now we're going to take our break. I've written, I've already written down like six questions on that field because it's very interesting to me. In my mind I see some immediate risks which I want to ask, I want to ask about. So we're going to take a quick break here on the CWB Association podcast with Mark Norfolk and we'll be right back after these messages from our sponsors. So make sure you guys stay tuned.
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Speaker 1:And we are back at the CWB Association podcast. My name is Max Seron. Today we have Mark Norfolk here from Fabrasonic. So right before the break you're running us through. We got foils, we put the foils together. It's not electricity, this is a. We're working, because electricity would be mayhem within that much contact surface. They would not bond equally. So you're using it sounds like some pressure ultrasonic heat created through some type of directed device to that area to adhere it to at 100C, which I don't even understand how that necessarily adheres, unless it's just the vibration kind of letting them mesh at a granular level with just enough pressure so that you're not pushing things out of shape. Am I on the right track here?
Speaker 2:You're on the right track. So the key piece to understand is metals really like to stick to other metals. In fact, if you look at some of the early Gemini missions in outer space, nasa was launching these aluminum capsules into outer space and right before they launched it, everything got cleaned really, really well. So when they opened and closed the hatches, in pure vacuum they got the hatches started sticking. They actually had to kick some of the hatches open and closed because they were sticking really bad. And NASA started and investigated this and it figured out it was cold welding.
Speaker 2:So what's cold welding? So if we have two metals that are completely clean, the oxide is removed in a vacuum and we press them together, we can get a solid state bond, basically the atoms. You push them close enough together and they start sharing electrons. So why doesn't that happen on Earth? If I take an aluminum plate and aluminum plate, they don't stick.
Speaker 2:The thing is down here on Earth, every single metal surface is covered with an oxide. So kind of the key thing for any solid state joining process friction welding, explosion welding, ultrasonic welding is to get rid of that oxide. And how we do that with ultrasonic welding is we take the two parts and we vibrate them together. The vibration is on the order of microns, 20, 30 microns when we go back and forth, and we do that 20,000 times a second. So we take the two metals and we scrub them back and forth. That grinds away the oxide layer. Apply a little bit of pressure and you kind of collapse the asperities on the surface of the metal and you have metal on pure metal on pure metal. They start sharing electrons and you get a solid state bond.
Speaker 1:Okay, now what are the dangers of oxides creeping in? Like you know, there must be a width maximum for bondable surface area.
Speaker 2:So the limitation is actually on physics. The ultrasonic welding device is acoustically tuned, kind of like a bell to ring at a specific frequency, and about the widest we can go is 27 millimeters due to some physics reasons. But that being said, we're usually doing this in an open environment. So oxygen is everywhere. So as we scrub, just like you said, we include a little bit of oxide into that surface. Now if you look at it under a regular optical microscope you're not going to find it.
Speaker 2:But if you go into a scanning electron microscope you see these little rocks. They look like boulders inside of our bond line and those actually do hurt our performance. So in the X and Y kind of plane, whatever our incoming material property is, we get that in X and Y no matter what. But in the Z direction we lose about 10 to 15% and that's 100% attributable to those oxides getting included. So you know we're always trying to improve our process to lessen the amount of oxides they get in. But you know it is what it is. We do take a little bit of hit in the Z direction and we just understand that and we make sure our design is taking that into account. There's always an allowable limit for everything.
Speaker 1:So, and you know, the metal on metal conversation is something that I think a lot of gear heads learn quickly when they're young with stainless steel components. So you know, I remember being a young guy and I bought my first stainless steel heads for a 69 Chevelle that I had and they were like oh no, sorry, stainless steel exhaust going on to an aluminum head and I used stainless steel bolts Don't ever do that, for all the people that are listening because they weld themselves in and they never come back out. They never come back out because stainless steel has much less oxides, plus it's a much harder, denser material and it's not good with heat either, really, and it really basically welds itself in, not even if you don't even start the motor. You can just screw that bolt in, try to remove it and it's never coming out.
Speaker 1:And I remember my dad was a boiler maker and a metal artist and I remember I screwed that up and he explained it to me. He's like well, stainless is? It just welded itself in there and I was like what, how Like? But you know, now you have this. So with that, what I know about stainless in that situation, does stainless work well in this foil setup. You know as as kind of. I mean the oxides for stainless are kind of a different beast than many other metals. Is that beneficial or detrimental?
Speaker 2:So stainless steel is not really a problem. If you look at most metals, your aluminum, your steels, the stainless is even the nickels, even you know kind of like things like molybdenum, all of those, all of those, the oxides are very brittle compared to the underlying material. So when you take those and scrub them, the oxides although they're quite a bit different material to material, they're all very brittle compared to the underlying metal. Some of the exceptions to that are things like titanium and zirconium. Both of those, the oxides are actually way more ductile than the underlying metal. So we have a lot of problems with the the titanium's and zirconium's, because the oxides are basically soft. But for a majority of the metals out there, you know it's very brittle. We just did it and it breaks right off.
Speaker 1:And what about doing it in a vacuum or in an inert gas base like argon, you know? Would there be benefits to that? I mean, obviously, aside from the expense of trying to create that vacuum, you know, does it help?
Speaker 2:So we've recently done some work, you know, for NASA, welding in a vacuum. You can imagine what their uses may be and yeah, it definitely does help, as you, as you mentioned. The thing that keeps us from doing that is cost. We've looked at, you know, maybe putting a little laser stripe scanner right in front of where the foil goes in and then spraying that with argon or nitrogen or you know whatever shielding gas you're interested in, and it does work. We can, we can knock that oxide away, but the cost benefit just hasn't been there for us. You know, welding in open air with no temperature, you know all your safety stuff goes away. All your you know, plant equipment goes away. It's basically a CNC mill with nothing added to it. So it's yeah, at some point you start going backwards.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, now with the CNC side of it, does it? Do it throughout the process and intervals as needed, like the heads just go back and forth with this. And then, how do you add the layers? Do you have? Does the machine come in and add more layers of a bigger piece, weld where it needs, cut it out, like you know, visualizes through this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's kind of two different methods that we use for presenting material. The first is a coil feeder. So we take strips about an inch wide and we have that on a continuous reel. And so all it does the machine is kicks out a foil, the welder comes down, welds it and it pulls that foil along the length and then when it stops there's a little cutting, a little guillotine that cuts it off. And we keep laying foils layer by layer, side by side, just like kind of like you're mowing your lawn, you do one, then you go a little bit to the side, a little bit to the side and then you go up.
Speaker 2:And that method is great for what I call low volume, high variability. So if the machine is going to make 100 parts and they're all different, that's great. It's very flexible, it can do all kinds of shapes, but it is a little bit slower. If we're going to do higher volumes, we'll have sheets that are kind of pre stamped out and you know, we can lay them in by hand, we can use a robot, we can use a little you know piece of automation to lay that sheet where it needs to be and then the welder comes in, welds back and forth. In either method that X and Y plane is going to be 100% dense.
Speaker 2:When we weld two foils side by side, we actually overlap one a little bit, say I don't know a fow or two, and what that does is it allows that welder as it's vibrating and actually runs that down and we get a bond to those, those two side edges. How long that's dead access there. Yeah, exactly. So either way it's the same. And then either way we use the CNC. In some of our machines the welding device is actually another tool in the tool changer. So to the CNC, it's just another. You know it's tool number weld, you know it's tool number eight.
Speaker 2:In our larger systems usually the head is on kind of a second secondary Z axis we call W, but it just depends on the machine and what we're trying to accomplish. But we do have machines that build all the way from 200 millimeters by 200 millimeters, all the way up to two meters by two meters, build envelopes. So you know, really for us the CNC is a motion system and we can buy any motion system size we want and kind of put this, this welding device, into the mix.
Speaker 1:And what about issues with high low within the material? You know, like no matter how precise a role of consumables you're ordering of this foil. There's going to be variations in thickness or even grain structure within that. Is that affected by? Does the machine get affected by that or does it kind of level it all out through the vibration?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the vibrations are pretty interesting. Under a high power ultrasonic field metal actually flows fairly easily. There's an ultrasonic effect called the Boschinger effect, but it allows metal to flow pretty easily. So if we, if we weld a sixth thou, let's say a copper foil, we take a sixth style copper foil and we weld that down. Once we're done with that weld, we'll actually measure about 5.8 thou. So we are thinning the material a little bit. So you know, as long as the variation is only intense, it's no problem. We're pushing down on that with some force. And if we see, you know, as we build up we get to layer 200, we see that, you know, the build starting to get a little bit of a out of distortion. We have a CNC mill there, deck it and keep going. Yeah, same thing if we, if we have a mistake, a bad weld, the power goes out. Whatever mill that layer off, start over again. So it's a great process for making mistakes, because you make it and you go, oh okay, mill it off, do it again.
Speaker 1:Well, and it sounds like the materials you're using to build with aren't extremely expensive either, so there's not a lot of heartache with like oh no, we're just peeled off $18,000 of material or something you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for the most part. Historically we've been in aluminum and coppers. We have done some expensive materials. We've done a lot of tantalum recently for some radiation shielding and that stuff. You do cry a little bit when you mess up. That one hurts a little bit.
Speaker 1:What about dissimilar steels? You know, because you know, obviously full weld, like liquid pool welding, standard welding, is not very friendly to dissimilar metals. They want to migrate away from each other as much as they will, you know, initially bond down the road. They don't want to stay bonded. Now do you have those issues with this type of welding, saying copper to aluminum or copper to steel or something like that?
Speaker 2:So the beauty of solid-state welding is we don't have to worry about most of the metallurgical consequences you would have if you melt it and re-solidify it. So let me see this is layers of titanium and aluminum. This is actually an armor product for a satellite so it stops space debris. But you can see we have, you know, good welds between those two materials. Here's another part. This is a copper face of an aluminum heat exchanger for a satellite. So this is a radiator for a satellite and you can see we've got, you know, mixed metals there.
Speaker 2:So really our process really doesn't care about mixing metals. Layer one can be aluminum, layer two can be titanium, layer four can be molybdenum and you can kind of stack that, which is really an advantage for making some of these complex parts. Where you have the concern is if you have a part that maybe goes up to really high temperature in operation. So when you get up to those high temperatures metal A can diffuse into metal B and then cause you some of those metallurgical consequences. So we always have to talk to customers. You know how are you going to use this, what's the use, environment. But if you're leaving it, you know, terrestrial normal use, the mixed metals we can pretty much combine anything.
Speaker 1:Now you know, aside from these really advanced you know purposes that I see with this, what would be some of the you know around the house, or you know, when we talk about it at the beginning of the show that trickle down. You know where do you see this technology trickling down into maybe our everyday uses?
Speaker 2:So our number one use by volume is actually in electric vehicles. We have a customer that made 24 million parts last year and they're on target for about 30 million parts this year. And if you, you know, think about an electric vehicle, there's all kinds of areas where you might want to take aluminum, copper and nickel foils and combine those for battery type things. So you know, high volume stuff is out there. You can drive a car today that has our technique in it. We just can't tell you whose car it is, but they're out there.
Speaker 1:What does it rhyme with? No, I'm not saying.
Speaker 2:But you know, when you get to you know more kind of everyday uses. We actually do a lot of kind of awards and signage and I'd say almost decorative stuff, Because we can mix metals together. You know, layer one can be gold, layer two can be silver, layer four can be copper, and then you can mill into those different layers to get very interesting, expose those colors. Yeah, I mean we do do a lot of work for artists and jewelers and honestly, the jewelers money spends just as well as the automotive, just as well as the aerospace money.
Speaker 1:Well, even your background, with the little fabric sonic piece that you were holding up to us, you can see the copper exposed through the aluminum top right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we do make kind of awards and stuff. That's mostly local kind of folks who've known us and seen us, but we do get that type of thing. Another interesting aspect is with our technology. Because we're not getting hot at any point, we can stop and drop in an electronics package, a sensor, a device. And what we've done for a lot of customers as well as some of our own internal folks, is we've made little coffee mug heaters so we can embed a heater into the base of a metal part as well as a thermal couple so that we can turn that on and off with temperature and it's all buried inside of this little plate that you sit on your desk. So there's lots of kind of interesting applications with embedding things to get functionality out of hardware that you just couldn't get with traditional types of manufacturing.
Speaker 1:What about non-ferrous or non-metal layering? Could you do a plastic and then copper pathways through that with another plastic on top and create basically integrated circuits Like, is that a thing?
Speaker 2:So that's a fantastic question. So our welders are set up for welding metal. So ultrasonic metal welding likes scrubbing. Ultrasonic polymer welding likes knocking into each other kind of this kind of motion. So we haven't done a lot of polymer work. So I don't think we have a good chance of mixing polymers and metals where we do play sometimes as mixing ceramics with metals, because your crystal's still, yeah, Again, we can't directly weld with our process to a ceramic.
Speaker 2:Typically, what we do is we use another process, like a vapor deposition, to lay a thin layer of metal on the ceramic and then we can print on top of that. So yeah, the polymers aren't? We just don't have a good solution for jumping polymer to metal, at least with our technique.
Speaker 1:That's not mixing those polymers with the graphites and stuff to kind of create like a semi-metallic state or something, exactly something that we can get a little bit of metal to metal contact.
Speaker 2:Write that down, that might be your trick there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll put you on the patent.
Speaker 1:So when I think about this process, it's all like it makes perfect sense. I love it. What about waste? One of the things that comes up with any type of additive manufacturing. Now, there's been a lot of investment into additive manufacturing but at the end of the day, the additive, the AM created part, is generally not a finished to size part. There's always like some machining or refinishing that needs to happen around it. Is there a lot of waste in this? Like you talked about pre-stamping, or just creating where you need to and milling as you go? Compared to other processes, is there a high level of waste or low? How does that stack up?
Speaker 2:So we would say that it's a much lower amount of waste because we're just printing near net shape. So we may print two, three millimeters wider than we need to, just so we have a nice face to mill. But other than that we're just printing the material where we need it to be. So if we're milling a millimeter off of everything to clean it up, there's not a ton of waste to be had. Since all of our processing is happening in one machine at one time, at one go, there really isn't much post-processing. The only thing that we may do is if somebody wants a Heela coil or something like that, that's gonna be hand inserted afterward, but the hole is gonna be drilled, tapped in place as we're building, so there's not a lot of finishing to be done. Once they come out of the machine, from a overall ecological standpoint, things like powders for some additive processes.
Speaker 2:Making powders is a very, very energy intensive process For us. We are taking metal foil, so at some point it was melted and put into a sheet, but that's being done at a very large scale as efficiently as possible. When we bring that in we don't melt it. So we're not putting that much energy in in the grand scheme of things, because everything stays at solid state, nothing really melts. The amount of energy we put in for unit volume is almost a tenth of what you would do with a fusion-based process, so we feel we're fairly ecologically sound, trying to use the minimum amount of energy in order to get the bond that we need. And again, the feedstocks tend to be a little more, a little less energy intensive, although they are metal products.
Speaker 1:Well, at the end of the day, metal's metal. There's a process there and I find it interesting in the world. I'm getting old now I'm coming up on 50, and I look at the waves of highs and lows of materials throughout my life, even when it was steel and glass are bad, stainless is important, and now stainless is too expensive and glass and metals are good again. Wood is bad, now wood is good, and that's all based on technology. A lot of people don't understand. That's like well, paper bags used to be the death of everything and now they're back. It's like well, the technology and forestry is also changed. We produced paper way differently than we did 50 years ago. So there's things like that. But with this process you still haven't gotten into, or maybe you haven't quite got to the level. Where can someone come in and say I'm a business owner, I want to buy one of your machines to set up and I can rifle these off in my own shop. Are you at that point?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we are. So we have what we call catalog machines, kind of a small, medium and large that anyone can come in and buy. We do have those out in shops around the world. In fact we have one in Europe, one in Australia.
Speaker 2:The kind of a key piece of knowledge you need is, if you know CNC milling pretty well, you're off to a really good start. You have to understand how a CNC runs. That's where most of it is. On top of that you have to know a little bit about solid state welding, which with all machines we pretty much put in training, and we'll come out and train you on all the basics. And then, with our customers, typically we're fairly tight in that they will contact hey, we're going to weld Inkenel to steel today. You have any advice? And we'll feed back to them. Hey, these are our notes on feeds and speeds. So just like you have a machinist handbook for milling, we have a handbook for welding. If you want to put Inkenel on to steel, you use feeds and speeds. If you want to put steel on to Inkenel, it's a different feeds and speeds. But yeah, we share those with our customers if we have them. So that kind of trying to make it as easy as possible for them to go out and make some money with them.
Speaker 1:One of the other questions I had was after you're done building a part, it's machined and ready to go. It looks pretty. Is there any annealing or stress relieving or anything like that that has to happen to the finished product before it goes out the door, or is it ready for service at that point?
Speaker 2:So it's a little bit dependent on the customer and I'll kind of explain why that is so. Earlier on we talked about oxides, getting oxides included, and we do take a debit in the Z direction. So for many I'd say most customer, that's fine. So a vast majority of the parts that we make there they are put into use directly off the machine. Now when you get into some high consequence industries like nuclear, satellites, aerospace, anything 3D printed has to go through a specialized heat treatment called hipping. That's kind of derived from some of these powder based processes, but a lot of the large OEMs just have a flat out If it was made with additive manufacturing it has to be hipped. So in those cases some of those parts are being hipped. From my perspective as metallurgists it's a waste of time, but there's some thou shouts out there and so we check the box when we have to.
Speaker 1:Well, there's some industry standards that I'm sure get made to the lowest common denominator, which you're not in that denominator, but still it's out there, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're underneath that umbrella.
Speaker 1:Now you have an interesting point of view. You came up in industry, you worked, you kind of did the hands on the tools type of job, which I love when engineers do that. I find that that's very useful in an engineer's career. Then you kind of went into like the think tank. You got thrown into the think tank and you came out the other end kind of an entrepreneur, which is a very interesting pathway Now for yourself. Looking at the industry as a whole, how do you feel about some of the issues that we're seeing in the industry with the lack of tradespeople or some of the skills gaps that are being happening across our countries, canada and the US? How do you?
Speaker 2:see that? Yeah, I see it as a travesty. We at Fabrosonic we are working with our local area career center trying to bring kids in and show them, hey, welding can be cool. Welding has high technology. Welding takes a lot of science, trying to pull people in and show them how rewarding and how much fun some of these very hands-on careers can be. But yeah, it's, I think, mostly driven by a lot of parents who still see our industry as a lot of smoke and dirt. They just haven't been in a high-tech manufacturing shop where we're controlling the environment. We want to have a controlled environment for our process and for our people. Yeah, it's something that we definitely battle. Every time we can we're bringing students in, like I say, from career centers. We've had high school interns where we brought them in trying to get people excited about hands-on work, running machines. We've had high schoolers run print and parts for us we have. Yeah, it's a continual battle and we're trying to do what we can.
Speaker 1:Do you see the future of Fabrosonic in the development arena for putting materials together and creating the next technologies? Or is it going to become kind of like a Miller welding or a Lincoln, where you're kind of pushing machines out for productivity and for manufacturing?
Speaker 2:So the technology is really new. We've been around 10 years but it's still really new. There's not a lot of people that even have heard of us, much less experts on the subject. So I think, for the next 10 years at least, we're always going to have to have some component inside of process development where somebody brings in hey, I want to put A to B to C and we help them with that process development. So I don't think we're ever going to lose that core development piece. Now, that being said, getting machines out there is certainly financially a great thing, and we also do production in-house. Last year we made about 30,000 parts in-house using our own equipment and I like that mix of selling customers and product is great. It makes good money. Doing production in-house allows you to learn what are all the things that are keeping your customers from having success. So you run into the problems.
Speaker 2:You run into the little gotcha that you don't know about and are able to continually improve the machines based on that. And then the research component helps keep everyone excited, keeps everyone on the shop floor interested in this new thing that we've never done before. That is going to help us in the long run. So I like that mix of having research all the time, having production all the time and then selling product at the back end. Now we move up and down that spectrum a little bit. We do every year but I think we always have to have those three key pieces inside our own walls.
Speaker 1:And with the attachment of EWI, are they still feeding work to you, as opposed to you having to go out and look for work?
Speaker 2:No, no, we have our own sales staff. Okay, we've been autonomous in kind of the sales aspect most of our existence. We do rely on or use EWI for services like materials testing. We always go to them for metallurgical mounts, sem work. We always go back to home base, but other than that we're pretty autonomous.
Speaker 1:And then what about with the CWB? Now, with this affiliation with the CWB and I've talked to many people within EWI and around EWI Some know so much about the CWB, some it was never even on the radar. It's like what is that? So do you see a connection with Fabrosonic and the CWB group in Canada, maybe just as a place of business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think one of the huge benefits of the coming together of EWI and CWB is that they're both kind of targeted at a little bit different audience, and getting that cross ability to access those other audiences, I think, is great for not only the companies but also the end consumers, and that they get access to a lot of things that just really weren't on their radar before. From a Fabrosonic standpoint, it's the same thing working with you to get out to a broader audience, working with other CWB engineers to hey, if you have this problem, here's another solution that you may not have been aware of before. Anytime you get into these spaces of highly technical, highly engineered components, there's never one technology that solves everything. You got to get every tool in your toolbox and being aware of what tools are out there really allows people to serve their customers better because they have access to things that maybe they weren't aware of in the past.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, and with Fabrosonic's success, do you see much expansion in the future too? Is this multiple shops around the world type of thing? What are Mark's world domination plans?
Speaker 2:Yes, we recently moved into a larger building for us. We have about 35,000 square feet, which is maybe a little bigger than we need right now, but we wanted room to expand both the manufacturing of products, making parts on a production standpoint, but as well as building machines. We have enough space for maybe the next five to six years. Hopefully after that things will continue to grow and we'll move into another part of the existing building we're in right now where there's room to expand sideways. I don't think there's ever going to be a need for multiple sites. We ship machines all over the world right now. The thing that we need to expand is maybe our network of support people. Again, the machines are based off of CNC mills, so, partnering with organizations that already do maintenance and repair of CNC mills, they'll understand our equipment very, very quickly. It's not like we need to develop a new skill set. We just need to find folks who have that skill set Right.
Speaker 1:Awesome, buddy. Well, this has been a lot of great information and I learned lots. Today, as with most of these interviews, I wish I had one of your toys to play with in my garage, but I don't know if I'm off 240, so probably not.
Speaker 2:Now. It's been a lot of fun talking with you. I appreciate the time.
Speaker 1:You bet. So what's on the game plan for Mark now? Do you? Where do you want to be in 10 years or when you grow up? Do you see yourself just riding this? Is there going to be a baby fabric sonic offshoot that takes your interests? What do you see for yourself?
Speaker 2:Wow, that's a great question. How I mentioned, I've fallen into everything I've done. I've been at the right place at the right time. Fabriconic I started on this technology in 2007, so I'm going on 16 years now with this technology. It's my baby. If someone says ultrasonic additive is no good, that really gets under my skin. I'm probably going to end up here for a while longer. I've been working with this technique for a long time and I really want to see it grow and explode.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Well, to close it out, how do people find out more about your company? How do people know where you are? Let everybody know the pathways to get to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the easiest way is to go to the web, fabrasoniccom If you want to see videos of the technology in action on YouTube. If you put in Fabrasonic, we have a bunch of videos of different parts, different machines running to show how it works. Yeah, go to the website. You can also email us at info at fabrasoniccom. We're fairly easy to get a hold of.
Speaker 1:Awesome. If someone's interested out there and they reach out to you, I'm sure that they're going to have a really good time trying to figure it out. I would love to see someone just be like oh my God, I could do this to that. Maybe they can help us right? That would be really cool.
Speaker 2:There are a lot of good problems out there. Like I say, knowing what tool during the toolbox see if you have an option.
Speaker 1:And what's some of the last things you'd like to get out there? Anybody you want to say thank you to, anybody you want to say hi to?
Speaker 2:Any shout outs, yeah let's see Our biggest customer who's doing automotive. I can't say your name, but Mark and Joe love to see you guys out there. And to all of our friends at EWI. As I mentioned, I came out of EWI. I have a lot of great friends there, so I always like to give them a shout out Well, I'm going to be down visiting EWI in Buffalo though in December.
Speaker 1:So I don't know if you know many of the people in the Buffalo, but I'm excited to go there. I missed the first round of tours because I was sick, but I'm going down there to do some visits and I can't wait to get down to Columbus to see that shop. But I'm waiting to see when the Browns are playing nearby so maybe I can time that really well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you're ever in Columbus, let us know. Like I say, we're only 15, 20 minutes away, so we'd love to have you out. Yeah, I would love to see the shop.
Speaker 1:I would love to get a tour. Yeah, awesome. Well, thanks, mark, it's been super wonderful. Like he said, check them out at Fabrosoniccom. They're online. Lots of really cool stuff. If you're interested in the technology, check out the videos on YouTube. And, of course, with the release of our podcast, we're going to put all the links up and share them out there for all our memberships and all the people that follow along. So thanks again, mark, for taking time to be on the show. Thanks, max. All right, everyone, keep downloading and sharing and we'll catch you at the next show. Take care of yourself. We hope you enjoy the show.
Speaker 3:You've been listening to the CWB Association Milding podcast with Max Seren. If you enjoyed what you heard today, rate our podcast and visit us at CWBassociationorg to learn more. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or suggestions on what you'd like to learn about in the future. Produced by the CWB Group and presented by Max Seren, this podcast serves to educate and connect the Welding community. Please subscribe and thank you for listening.