My name is Scott Mulkerin
I own and operate SDM Fabricating.
I'm a pistolsmith by trade and...
and manufacture a line of...
...accessories for Smith and Wesson revolvers and 1911 automatics.
I have been pistolsmithing since nineteen eighty five...
I got a Tormach in 2007
So the Tormach...
...came quite a bit later.
I had been reading on the internet and found that there were a few different machines
are out there that were affordable
for a small business like that.
The more research I did the closer i got to Tormach and it...
...probably took a year to make the decision to do it
but I'm so glad I did.
It's done so much for my business.
When I went to trade school,
I took a field trip to B, F. Goodrich in Akron and sought a demonstration of a CNC...
...machine, so it was probably...
nineteen seventy-four
and it was pretty
amazing
science-fiction stuff then but they were doing it.
It was all tape controlled and had to be...
punch tapes.
Pretty rudimentary stuff but...
really amazing so i've known about it since,
now my teens.
And you know, I never...
...considered it would be something one would own in their basement and at home.
It was...
...pretty far out stuff back in the seventies.
A lot of the...
...types of...
...machining operations I did are very labor intensive and repetitive.
There were some...
cuts on the top of the slide that I like to call miniature scallops.
It's a small concave cut.
The ones in that photo...
were very small stair step staggered over at the top of the slide.
The slide was held on a rotary fourth axis. The cuts were done along the radius.
The slide top.
And there were twenty one hundred cuts on the top of that.
And to have
If I had to do that on the manual milling machine, indexing every one of those...
cuts with an X, Y and Z move,
it would not have come out perfect
just programming and telling the machine to do it
...that's the beauty of CNC that's something that would....
...drive a man mad if he had to do it more than once, manually indexing all those moves.
That's like the perfect application for CNC.
Since I've had the machine and figured out all the cool stuff it can do...
...I've kind of shifted my focus...
...on what i do so i've been doing a lot of prototype and design work,
and a lot of one off things with the machine, so actually,
...owning the machine has...
...totally changed my business outlook.
I've developed an accessory for my machine that I thought would be pretty handy...
my lever operated draw-bar which is a mechanically operated quick...
release draw-bar system. Tormach's...
draw-bar system had to be integrated into Mach,
and run off of air,
where mine could not be which is the main reason I did it because I didn't want...
...to hear the compressor run.
So mine's totally manually operated.
When I look at something I go, "wow, that's really clever how they do that".
And anybody looks at it says, "well that's going to make my life easier"
I just wonder how they did it.
And if I get a new toy, whether it'd be electronic, mechanical, whatever, I sit...
down
and read the instructions cover to cover,
Before I play with it.
I want to know all the wonderful thing it can do for me.
My Dad was always...
...into something. He liked to build model steam engines. He had a shop in the basement.
So I've been around machines my whole life.
I've been very mechanically inclined my whole life.
The big difference between me and my brothers was we all took things apart but I had the knack...
...to put them back together again without extra parts...
...and let them work.
I bought a motorcycle,
and it was not working. I got it from a family friend for thirty five dollars.
An old Honda 305 Super Hawk.
And I took it all apart and put it all back together, did a complete rebuild on it.
It took a couple years, I used my paper route money.
I got that running and...
uh... get my license suspended driving without a license before I was old enough to..
...have a license because of it.
Not always a good thing.
I was one of a team of ten...
...who presented G.W. Bush
...with a commemorative pistol...
The presentation was made at.
trGeorge W. Bush's office in Dallas,
with myself, I believe there were ten of us
representatives of the American Pistol Smith Guild who made the presentation.
What I do is fun.
And I enjoy it. I get up, I...
...make stuff...
I'm creative. It's a good creative outlet for me for me.
I do that for twelve thirteen fourteen hours a day and...
...then I watch TV for an hour, go to bed and I get up and I get to do it all over again.
I'm self-employed. I only have to work half days...twelve hours.
Ok, what's your website?
sdmfabricating dot com.
And that's the best way for people to get a hold of you?
I don't want anyone to get a hold of me...