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Shownotes
Buying a fighter jet is the cheap part.
Mike sits down with Jim Becker (linkedin.com/in/jim-becker-48449790), President and CEO of Perfect Point EDM, to talk about the biggest line in any defense program: keeping the fleet flying.
Perfect Point builds the E-Drill, which uses electro discharge machining (EDM) to pull aircraft fasteners. Founded in 2005, it turned a lab curiosity into a fielded tool that removes a rivet in about 30 seconds instead of 10 minutes, with no debris and almost no rework.
Jim's take is blunt. The aircraft modernized, the maintenance tooling did not, and the industry keeps papering over it by leaning on a shrinking pool of skilled mechanics.
Topics include:
• Operations and maintenance as the biggest cost in a program
• Electro discharge machining applied to fastener removal
• Cutting a 10 minute rivet job down to 30 seconds
• Eliminating foreign object debris and rework on titanium airframes
• Why maintenance tooling never modernized
• Winning over risk-averse engineers with the material science case
• The shrinking pool of skilled aircraft mechanics
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• Perfect Point EDM homepageppedm.com
• Perfect Point EDM LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/perfect-point-edm
• Jim LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/jim-becker-48449790
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Chapters
intro
the MRO space
the founding story
from the Marine Corps to Boeing
framing the rivet problem
tooling stuck in the 60s
titanium and steel fasteners
no FOD, no mess
the three step process
four to five times faster
killing the rework
problems everybody just accepts
the miracle-worker culture
the aging workforce
winning over the engineers
the launch that fell flat
SBIRs and the valley of death
fall in love with the problem
conventional wisdom that's wrong
making do with less
go talk to the mechanics
the stance he'll defend
where to learn more
outro
