Episode #206B – A Mining Mind

 

Premium fastener provider J. Lanfranco sends mining industry veteran Steve Roebuck on a mission to dig up new business from an international market (11:20). On the Fastener Training Minute, thread educator Carmen Vertullo discusses a classic question involving nylon insert locknuts (22:50). PLUS: The first winner of the “Out of the Rut” IronClad gloves contest! Brian and Eric hone their skills and their platform. Run time: 49:28

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Important Links

• Steve Roebuck on LinkedIn
• Carmen Vertullo on LinkedIn
• Eric Dudas on LinkedIn
• Brian Musker on LinkedIn
• Fully Threaded Radio Email
• J. Lanfranco

 

A Mining Mind

Unearthing The Fastener Future: Tariffs, Trends, And Thanksgiving’s Impact

In our experimental compressed versions of the show, we’re going to drop this one, Episode 206 Part 2, I think we’re calling it, December 3rd, 2024. Haven’t quite got the cadence of these down quite yet, Bri. It’s breaking into the old pattern, but it’s going okay, I’d say.

I hope everyone else thinks so, too.

I’m sure like everything else, it’s mixed. We released the Fastener Distributor Index Survey for November 2024. It’s December. We added a supplemental question in there about the tariffs and what people’s ideas about all that are. You want to talk about split? Controversy galore. I can’t wait to see this report.

We all have our different views on where the tariffs really work and who they really hurt, but I’ll stop there.

I hear you because it bleeds into the political realm. Nobody wants to get mired down in that, especially in the aftermath of making it through November. I get all that, but the tariffs are a real thing affecting the fastener industry. We’re going to have to figure out a way to report on all this, and we will in our Fully Threaded way.

The tariffs are a real thing affecting the fastener industry. Share on X

On top of the weirdness of that supplemental question, which we just had to ask, and thanks, Eric, from Interstate for forcing us to get that one on this time. It was also complicated because being Thanksgiving weekend, probably the slowest day of the year is the day after Thanksgiving. I think it’s as slow as any other day in the holiday calendar. It’s a ghost town out there on FCH.

It was a bit of a ghost town everywhere, except if you are trying to get to a shopping mall, I think.

The fastener industry really does take a little time off for Thanksgiving. Seems to be a pretty important holiday across the board, at least here in North America.

A little like the day after Christmas in other parts of the world, I guess, or the British parts of the world. It’s special Boxing Day, which no one ever really knows what it was, why it’s called that way. It’s when you’re meant to go out doing things, switching the clothes for the size you really can’t fit in.

It’s for all the returns. I always thought that was connected with the hired help, which was a societal thing in Victorian era England when that phrase came into being, I was under the impression it was somehow connected to that, but that’s a blurry piece of trivia in my mind. Anyway, what’s not blurry is this episode of Fully Threaded, which is going to be, again, compressed or, as Brian calls it, streamlined.

We’ve got a conversation with a gentleman named Steve Roebuck. He’s doing work for Fully Threaded longtime partner J. Lanfranco in the mining industry. He’s got a long track record and deep experience there. We’re going to get the flavor of that on this conversation. Bri, I think there’s several details he’s going to lay on this that we could talk about after that are going to resonate with you because he’s certainly a world traveler. He is done work all over the world as a geologist and then later as an executive. He is a very interesting interview.

We’re going to bring you the latest Fastener Training Minute. Some of you have been waiting in great anticipation. Here it is. Carmen Vertullo’s going to share with us his idea about thread engagement and lock nuts. In other words, if you want to know how many threads should be protruding from the end of a lock nut bolt assembly, this episode of the Fastener Training Minute is for you.

A question I ponder frequently, actually.

You think about things like this continuously and somebody’s got to. Carmen’s with you.

Stick around and we will then reveal the first winner of the latest Ironclad Gloves contest that we announced last episode. It’s the Ironclad Tactical Gloves. We called it Out of the Rut. Got a couple of entries. One stuck out to me. This came in over the holiday break and I’ve got to tell you, it is representative of the true feeling, for me, at least, of what the Ironclad contest is all about. We’ll give you details on that as we wind down this episode.

The streamlined episode.

New and improved, perhaps? I don’t know. We’ll smooth all this out. Whatever we do, fortunately, our partners are with us 100%. The title sponsors of Fully Threaded Radio are Star Stainless and the LindFast Solutions Group Family of Companies, Goebel Fasteners and Brighton Best International. Fully Threaded is also sponsored by Buckeye Fasteners, BTM Manufacturing, Eurolink, Fastener Supply Service, Fastener Technology International, INxSQL Software, J. Lanfranco, Solution Industries, 3Q Inc., Volt Industrial Plastics, and Wurth Industry North America. Our email address is FTR@FullyThreaded.com. Let us know what you think, or if you have suggestions or ideas for supplemental questions on the Fastener Distributor Index.

Even comments about the altered, streamlined version of the Fully Threaded. Do you hate it or love it? It’s a good question.

I’ve been getting mostly texts and emails to my personal box on that, but a couple came in through the FTR email box. Also, you know how it is these days. It’s just a multi-channel 24/7 existence, but getting the flavor of the feedback. We’re going to keep rolling. So much is going on here with the FCH Sourcing Network platform that we’re building out and Fully Threaded Radio’s coming up right along with it. 2025 is going to be an interesting year across the board, Bri.

Yeah, I think so, for lots of people, FCH included.

Spinning back quickly to Ironclad before we take a quick break and then talk with Steve Roebuck. I saw this fly across LinkedIn. “Ironclad is proud to announce being selected as a 2024 Global Media Award winner at the Specialty Equipment Market Association Show in Las Vegas for our recently launched Extrication Glove.”

What is that?

I didn’t realize what it was at first either, but let me continue. The voting panel reviewed nearly 3,000 new products featured at this year’s SEMA show with each journalist selecting 10 products that would be most interesting to their readers. The Extrication Glove is a highly abrasion-resistant glove, specifically designed for first responders and high-risk automotive adjacent fields alike.” There’s a short video that was next to this blurb, and it showed this Jaws of Life demonstration with an EMS guy with these ginormous Ironclad, very tough-looking gloves. He’s using this equipment to basically rip a car door off. Almost as rough as a Musky fishing, Bri.

 

Maybe I wouldn’t have been bitten if I were wearing one of those.

No, you certainly wouldn’t have if we had known the Ironclad team when we first started. You used to bleed your way through half of those trips up in the bush. No more, though. Of course, now we’re working so much, we never get a chance to go.

I know. We will.

Such is the price we pay for doing what we do in the world of online fasteners. We all have our story to tell, and Steve Roebuck will be telling us a piece of his.

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Mining For Success: Steve Roebuck’s J. Lanfranco Journey – Part 1

Steve Roebuck, thanks for jumping on the show.

It’s a pleasure to be here.

You’re doing business development work for Jason over there at J. Lanfranco. He has been on the show before. It’s good to meet you and you’ve been with the J. Lanfranco team for a while now. Looking forward to hearing everything that you’re doing, and you’ve got a lot of great stories to tell us, I think, about a particular industry, don’t you?

Absolutely, yeah. I’ve been with J. Lanfranco and Jason for a while, working with them in the business development. I guess I’m the mining guy. Let’s just be clear right off the bat. I’m not a fastener expert, but I immediately recognize the importance of fasteners. The story goes back almost twenty years and I met Jason at that point, so I’ll pick up the story from there.

He’s a great conversationalist and I know that you are too, so there’s no surprise there that the two of you hit it off. J. Lanfranco of course, very much identified with the railroad industry. They’re in energy, military, very well known for their lock nuts and other things, wherever critical bolted joints are concerned. Your focus is mining. What have you been doing specifically to try to grow that with Jason and J. Lanfranco?

It’s a big business and it’s an end of the industry that J. Lanfranco had not put the requisite amount of time into, and there was nobody really within the organization that understood the structure of mining and all the different aspects that is involved in it. If you just look at the aggregates and think that’s mining, you’re missing another completely different field. That’ll be the hard rock if you don’t look at the hard rock and you forgot about the aggregates, you’d be making the same mistake.

The umbrella of mining it is all-inclusive and it’s such an incredibly important part of J. Lanfranco’s future growth. Jason has trusted me to really help develop that end of the business. I’m using 30 years of experience that I’ve got. I’m the mining specialist. My background is geology. I’ve been asked by a few people, he says, “What the heck is a geologist doing in this?” I said, “It’s another tool in the toolkit.” It’s just something I know an awful lot about.

 

We’re going to talk about business development and all that at some point, but I’ve got to dig into this, if you will forgive the pun a little more. I know nothing or very little, let’s say, about the mining industry and mining in general. First of all, have your efforts been concentrated mostly in Canada, or are you doing this in other parts of the world too? How’s that look?

Mining is global, so for J. Lanfranco, what we’re trying to focus on first is North America. It starts in Canada, United States, Mexico, and Continental North America, so to speak. There’s a big industry on both sides of the border, in all three companies. The importance of mining is huge. The opportunity for J. Lanfranco is enormous. My focus is bringing in that on.

When I joined up with the tea, the first order of business was to get to that Vegas show. That was in September 2024. There was a very significant trade show in Las Vegas, and there was 48,000 people in attendance. I mentioned that already. There are 2,200 different companies that were there. I’ve been helping with that one, drilling down, finding the top 200 people that we needed to speak to. They’re from all over the world, but our main focus is going to be in North America.

You had a mining show in Vegas in September?

Absolutely.

Do you know if that was before or after IFE?

It’s called Mine Expo. It was the one that we attended. The next one that we’re going to be attending in early 2025 in February will be SME. That’s going to be in Denver.

You certainly are focused on the mining industry. All right. Tell us where you have been working, though.

I’ve been working throughout, like in Alaska and Nevada. Those are the two places these are the top mining jurisdictions in the world. When you look at the world in terms of where does mining investment want to go, you go where you’re welcome, that’s for sure. Nevada and Alaska are two of the world’s top jurisdictions that you want to be mining. I’ve been mining for gold up in that part of the world.

When you look at the world in terms of where mining investment wants to go, you go where you're welcome, that's for sure. Share on X

In Canada, you’re looking at Quebec and Ontario, very big mining destinations, but again, it’s across all sorts of different industries and commodities. It’s not just gold or it’s not just copper. There are all sorts. There’s coal, there’s aggregates, there’s nickel, cobalt, lithium. There are all sorts of different commodities that you want to be mining.

I’ve been into all different commodities over my 30-year career. I’m just going to take you back for a little bit. I’m going to take you 20 years in reverse here and I’m just going to say I’ve known Jason from J. Lanfranco for almost 20 years now. We met in 2005 when Jason was a one-man show. It was an exciting time for Jason. We met in one of these common offices, and this is where you’ve got a lunchroom. You’ve got a lady at the front desk who can accept your parcels, answer the switchboard, and then you’ve got 20 or 30 of these little 10 by 10 offices. I was in the middle for this area, and I was doing my gold mining, and on my left wall, it was Jason, and on my right wall was another guy.

Jason’s doing lock nuts. This guy on my other wall, he was selling scrap metal, and I’m doing gold mining. It was a whole bunch of young fellas at the time and we’re all just getting going. I had two little kids in the house, so I couldn’t hang around the house too much because it was a lot of chaos of a 3 and a 5-year-old at the time. Jason was doing the same thing. That’s how this started. Jason and I were always saying, “We’ve got to figure out a way of working together.” Life came along and I got swept up in other opportunities.

I ended up having to move. Me and Jason never lost track of each other. Jason was very successful in growing J. Lanfranco into what it is now, a very dominant fastener producer. That’s the important thing. We’re just don’t supply, we produce. Over the last couple of years, we started getting closer and closer and saying, “Let’s figure out how we’re going to do this.”

This was the opportunity. I had a little bit of time in my schedule and I was looking for something a little bit different. That was the opportunity to reengage with Jason, reengage with J. Lanfranco, and seeing it now from that one man show, that little operation working out of his garage, go to his warehouses, 1 in New Jersey, 1 in Hawkesbury, Ontario, and you see the size of them and all the product there, and it’s an incredible success story.

It’s all driven by Jason’s real desire and passion. He is so good at what he does, and he makes it look easy. He is so good with people. What he does is he attracts good people and people want to work for him, and people want to excel with Jason. It’s easy for everybody around the team to do that. Knowing that J. Lanfranco makes such a high-quality product, it’s such a relief. You’re not holding your nose and saying, “It’s a good product.” No, this is a top-quality product. I’ve been around. As a geologist, I’ve been to Africa, the Central African Republic in there, in South America, been to Peru, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Mexico, and again, extensively throughout the United States and of course, Canada.

I’ve seen a lot of things. I’ve worked in lots of operations. I’m not just exclusively a mineral exploration geologist. I’ve also been a production geologist. I’ve also been a production engineer. I was in charge of a very significant mine, a company called BHP Bulletin. I think most people have heard that name before. We had a diamond mine up in the Northwest Territories of Canada. The first four years that I was working there, I was working on the production geology side, and then I moved into the production engineering side.

It was just an amazing experience to see these large-scale operations. We were moving 250,000 tons a day of material. It was a huge operation. With this scale of operation, you actually start to see every level of it. You can see the process plant, the open pit, the trucks, the shovels, the dozers, all the rolling stock, all the iron as it’s called. I really wish I could have been helping J. Lanfranco at that time because I had direct access to everybody in the maintenance department. That experience taught me the ecosystem and who’s important in any one of these businesses.

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We’ll continue this conversation with Steve Robuck as he thumbnails the perils of the mining industry in his work for J. Lanfranco right after the Fastener Training Minute. Be right back.

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Fastener Fundamentals: The Ultimate Guide To Lock Nuts And Thread Engagement

This is Carmen Vertullo with your Fastener Training Minute, coming to you from Carver Labs in beautiful El Cajon, California and the Fastener Training Institute. This episode’s topic comes from actually an OEM who sent me an email with a photograph of it. That photograph was a large grade eight bolt in an assembly, probably about a one-inch grade eight bolt with a nylon insert lock nut. Actually, it was not a nylon insert lock nut, it was an all-metal lock nut. He’s asking me to comment on the installation.

It turned out that looking at the photograph, the end of the bolt was barely sticking out the end of the nut. My commentary, obviously, had to do with the number of threads that we need exposed past the nut when we’re using a lock nut. I commented on that, and it gave me pause to think about that, because even though I have often commented, probably even during the Fastener Training Minute on number of threads we need past the nut or thread engagement even, I really have not ever drilled down on that when it comes to lock nuts.

The question is, how many threads do we want to go past the end of the lock nut when we’re using a lock nut? The answer is, it depends. The lock nuts we’re talking about here are prevailing torque lock nuts. Those are the ones that you spin them down and they stop, and then you have to add additional torque to get them to go to their seating place. Obviously, we need some threads past the end of the nut. What does that depend on? It depends on the locking feature mainly, and what’s going on on the end of the bolt.

For most hex cap screws, I would say for all hex cap screws, and I’m aware of in socket products, even though we typically aren’t putting nuts on socket products, though we may, the end of the externally threaded fastener is chamfered. We have 1 to 2, maybe as many as 3 threads that are not fully formed. That has to do with the thread pitch, the diameter, and so on. I’m not going to dive into that right here.

How much of the nut is consumed by the locking element in the nut? With a nylon insert lock nut, we know that’s beyond the threads of the nut, but with an all-metal lock nut, it’s within the threads of the nut. A center lock nut, for example, the locking feature is in the middle of the nut. The general rule is, and I haven’t seen this written anywhere, I might have to invent this general rule, is all other things being equal, spin the nut down until it stops and you have resistance, and you need at least 3 to 5 more turns to ensure that the locking feature of the nut is fully engaged into fully formed threads.

Here are a couple of interesting things that could affect that. One thing is, if we’re talking about small machine screws, for example, you don’t have a point or chamfered threads on those typically. You probably can get away with fewer threads sticking out the end of the nut. If you’re using, for example, A307 hex bolts, which also typically, though not always, do not have that chamfer on the end or that point, it’s not required. It doesn’t mean it’s not there, it’s not required. You also have a little bit more forgiveness because you have fully formed threads all the way up to the end of the bolt.

I think it would be worthwhile to do an analysis on this because coarser fine threads, diameter, all that matters. The bottom line is the most important thing is that we have all of the locking feature of the fastener fully engaged in fully formed threads on the bolt. Once again, I think that comes out to about 3 to 5 threads, probably at least 3 threads exposed past the end of the lock nut to be sure.

 

I hope you learned something about the proper use of lock nuts, all-metal and nylon insert lock nuts we were talking about. It doesn’t matter if metric, I think the rules apply. If anyone is interested in helping me out, I think we’re going to talk about this in depth on our next Fastener Experts Mentoring Program. I think it’s worth a magazine article for one of the mentees to write. This has been Carmen Vertullo with the Fastener Training Minute. Thanks for reading.

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Global Mining Frontiers: Steve Roebuck’s Executive Insights & Wild Tales – Part 2

I’m just listening to you, and I can tell right off the bat, these are highly complex operations and there are a lot of levels to it. As a geologist, as you were, traveling on these assignments, what would your piece of it be initially?

I always referred myself as an industrial tourist. Depending on the role I was taking, either as maybe a vice president of exploration, and maybe in some of my later years after that as an even higher executive than that, I was really trying to determine the viability and the investment thesis behind any one of these assets that we would visit. That was really my role is to see which one of these things.

Is it viable? Do you want to work in this country? That’s number one. Is money going to follow you into a country like this? There are countries that you want to work in, and, believe me, there are countries that you don’t want to work in. If you remember maybe early on, I said to you, “You go where you’re welcome.” This is true in the mining business. I said Alaska, Nevada and parts of Canada, you’re welcome. People want to see business. Do people want your business there? New Atlanta Labrador is another great destination, so is Saskatchewan.

My role has always been more on the technical and the financial and more of the executive side of things, but that took time. I started off at the bottom on the very first rung in the ladder, and I was cutting drill corps and working my way up from that point on. I was being the geologist and logging the drill corps and then starting to assemble and having various other teams working below me, and then starting to put that whole thing together and then going out and actually seeking the money from the investment community to go in and do major exploration programs and then subsequently buy projects. It’s an interesting field.

I’m just thinking about all of the hairy situations you could get yourself into in certain parts of the world, with the risk of these industries being nationalized. Obviously, an entry-level geologist isn’t going to be concerned with that, but as you become more executive-level, of course, you have to consider all that, don’t you? If you were involved in that part of it, you were really getting into some heavy-duty geopolitics as a part of all this, weren’t you? How did you study up for all that? Did you just learn through hard knocks or did you get nationalized out of existence a couple of times?

There’s no school that teaches you this stuff. This is the where you go out and you learn the hard way. Typically, you go with somebody and they may be able to hold your hand a little, maybe be able to speak the native language. I’m fortunate to be able to speak a little bit French, but certainly, a lot of the destinations that I’ve been to there was neither French nor English, nor Spanish being spoken.

There's no school that teaches you this stuff. This is where you go out and you learn the hard way. Share on X

There’s always that but I’m taking a look right now, and I don’t mean to pick on any country in particular, but recently, a country called Mali in West Africa has made a very bad habit of detaining executives from a number of different mining companies, an Australian company called Resolute, a North American company called Barrick Gold. That’s a nasty side of the business where you get put the clink and if your company doesn’t respond well and get you out of that or negotiate a new deal because the junta that is now in power doesn’t like the that previous deal, it’s a tough game.

Some of the fastener executives who are reading this are thinking, “Now ransomware doesn’t really seem so bad.”

I wouldn’t want that either but there’s all sorts of things that can trip you up along the way.

I got a buddy who’s an attorney, he’s actually head counsel for Prospero, which is an island economic development zone off of Honduras. Right now, they’re getting jacked around the whole globalization movement. They don’t really have too much tolerance for freedom and economic prosperity it seems so they’re trying to legislate them out of business and that’s really a harsh thing because you really have no recourse. When everything changes, you just have to gather up what you can in the aftermath and look for somewhere else to operate.

That’s the fortunate thing with J. Lanfranco and the fasteners. There’s lots of different places to work and lots of different countries and companies to be working with, and we’re always looking for the same thing. We’re always looking for the exact same thing. We want to be treated fairly. We’ve got a good product. We want to work with people who want to work with us. That’s the key thing here, as in any business. It goes back to where you’re welcome and who’s going to treat you well. That’s why our initial focus is going to be in North America. We’re going to be focusing in on Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

That sounds like a good strategy for the moment. Let me ask you this, what is J. Lanfranco’s main commodity that you’ll be selling into the mining industry? Obviously, lock nuts are your flagship. Anything else in that bundle that you’re looking to move?

You nailed it right there. It’s definitely the fasteners. It’s the ease that they go on, the ease that they come off, the fact that they’re good on corrosion, shock, vibration, all the standard stuff that we’re extremely good at. We have a full range of metric, full range of imperial from the size of your fingernail all the way up to the size of your fist. Whatever you need, J. Lanfranco has got the parts for you. That’s the main business, and that’s going to be the focus. It’s about educating people. It’s getting in front of people. Maybe in the rail business, J. Lanfranco is an established name. Everyone understands the quality product that they have, but really in the mining, this is virgin ground for us.

It’s an opportunity to really grow the business. We’ll be tackling that. The next big show for J. Lanfranco is the SME, and that’s the late February 2025 in Denver, Colorado. Good thing we’re used to cold climates. We’ll be putting our park is on and heading out to Denver and enjoying 3 or 4 days in the end of February there. That’s our next big show, and that’s going to be our focus, getting in touch with the people who are going to be attending that. Maybe some of the people that are reading this, you want to reach out to us. We’ll be reaching out to you, that’s for sure. There’ll be a knock on your door and it’ll be me or Jason or Lisa.

I have no doubt about that. Steve, it’s really a pleasure to speak with you and I look forward to meeting you in person. I’ll tell you, before we cut this off, let’s make a mental note to reconvene and do an extended conversation that will record and put on a future episode, because I would really like to, again, forgive the pun in advance, dig into this whole mining topic a little more and hear more about your ventures because I could tell you’ve got a lot of them.

I could tell you about Guatemala. I have never seen as many handguns in my life or pistol-grip pump-action shotguns. Every single guy had one. Yeah, there are lots of crazy tales from my experience. I look forward to sharing them.

Sounds excellent. Okay, Steve Roebuck. The website for J. Lanfranco, if you want to read up on more of their endeavors and their various industries they are involved in, because it’s much more than mining and railroad, as you gathered from Steve’s comments, JLanfranco.com. Great friends and supporters of the show. Good to talk to you, Steve. Thanks for being here.

Absolutely. I look forward to speaking again soon.

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Echoes Of The Mine: Brian’s Chilean Open-Pit Adventure

Bri, as you are listening to Steve recount that portion of the conversation there where he was recounting his travels abroad and the potentially treacherous situations that the mining industry finds itself in, did that remind you of any particular travel stories of your own?

Yes. Actually, I went to see what’s probably what was then the biggest open-pit mine in the world and it was up in the Atacama Desert in Chile. It was just an enormous hole, a big copper mine. I believe it had four years of was it the Marxist president Allende in Chile. We arrived there just, I don’t know, five months after the military coup, Pinochet took over.

This is like mi-‘70s?

Yeah, this is 1975, actually. The coup was like the end of ‘74. I don’t know, say August ‘74 and we arrived in January ‘75.

What were you doing there? You weren’t working for a fastener company.

No, I was not. We were just a group of New Zealanders traveling around the world like everyone does after they get out of university. We had a friend who was a Chilean, and that had been nationalized by the Allende government. It was having its problems because they put communists in charge of everything, but they didn’t give them any training so no one knew how to run a gigantic open-cast mine.

It sounds par for the course.

Pinochet was trying to decouple the state’s ownership back to private ownership to get it working again because it was a big source of revenue. Similar thing, as in we were in Bolivia a few months later, they had the same problem. We drove past miles of these things that are now known as lithium mines. They didn’t know what it was then. It’s interesting. You certainly have to worry about the government of the place where your mind is.

You certainly have to worry about the government of the place where your mind is. Share on X

Steve Roebuck is working with J. Lanfranco these days and he’s very aware of all that. Focusing on North America, it sounds like, but I guess that’s no guarantee of anything these days, is it?

No.

The way things are going.

It couldn’t be as bad as Bolivia or whatever.

Yes, I certainly hope so. Anyway, it was good to speak with him. As I threatened during the conversation, we’re going to have him back when we do a non-expanded conversation. I have it in my mind to do more of these where we really draw these things out in I’ll call it a Rogan-esque way. For what we’re doing right now, it wouldn’t have been a good fit. We’ll do that. He’s on the list. I appreciate it. Thank you, Steve Roebuck, with J. Lanfranco, for coming on with us. Also, Carmen Vertullo. He brought us the Fastener Training Minute.

That’s it. Our rundown of people to thank is pretty short on this one, although I should say thanks to Ironclad because right after I rattle off this list of our partners for this episode, we’re going to announce the first winner of the Out of the Rut Ironclad Gloves contest, which is our latest way basically to keep talking about Ironclad and equip the fastener industry or as many of you as we can with really nice pair of these tactical gloves, which I’ve been wearing all fall.

I really like them. Having said that, the title sponsors of Fully Threaded Radio are Brighton Best International, Tested, Tried, True. Brighton Best. Goebel Fasteners, quality the first time. Go Goebel. Star Stainless, right off the shelf. It’s Star. Fully Threaded is also sponsored by Buckeye Fasteners, BTM Manufacturing, Eurolink Fastener Supply Service, Fastener Technology International, INxSQL Software, J. Lanfranco, Solution Industries, 3Q Inc., Volt Industrial Plastics and Wurth Industry North America.

You know the email address, folks. It’s FTR@FullyThreaded.com. If you have photos to send, trying to score a pair of these Ironclads or have something to tell us what you think of the show, FCH, anything in particular related to fasteners, here it is. FTR@FullyThreaded.com. You can also catch us on LinkedIn. One other thing, Brian, before we slide over to this Ironclad.

You’re really working on the suspense thing here, aren’t you? I can tell.

Trying to round out my skills as a host, I guess, due to various people making various suggestions. I don’t know how well I’m managing all of it, but I’m trying. The upcoming Link Magazine will have a short article that I dropped in there, touching on a recent revelation about AI, how it actually has a practical application or this is an example of it. I was also using it as a way to introduce people to some of the thinking behind the forthcoming new FCH Sourcing Network platform code-named Luigi.

After Eric’s father’s nickname, incidentally.

Yeah, there’s a piece of deep trivia that I didn’t talk about, but that’s true. Anyway, so there’s some foreshadowing. Our next episode of Fully Threaded Radio is going to be, I think, a pretty good one from the standpoint of we’re going to try to go back to our roots of generating just a little controversy. We’re going to talk about this tariff question on the Fastener Distributor Index.

Those results are pouring in right now. We’re about ready to send it all off to the Baird guys for analysis. Next episode, McNulty will be talking with Tim Roberto Jr. with Star, but we’ll get some commentary. I don’t know, I haven’t quite thought that one through, but it should be good. Now, without further delay or suspense as we try to improve our show craft, the first winner of the Out of the Rut Ironclad Gloves contest is from Winona, Minnesota. Sam Aldinger.

You saw the photo, Bri. Before I explain that, many of you might remember Sam Aldinger from Fastenal and he was with Fastenal for many years. He announced that he was leaving the company to focus on other pursuits. He’s doing some homesteading, actually, Bri. I know he’s trying his hand at chicken ranching and he’s doing a bunch of other things, but it’s quite interesting.

Meanwhile, he is keeping his hand in the fastener industry, doing some private consulting and he’s a sharp guy. He sent us a photo over the Thanksgiving break that really struck a chord to me. It’s a picture of his father-in-law, who’s a little immobile. He’s getting up there in years and he’s been a lifelong outdoorsman, lifelong hunter. He couldn’t get out this season, but Sam took him out onto the back porch.

Of course, where they’re situated up there in Winona, it’s quite majestic. Their back door is a big agriculture, wildlife setting. We’ll put this up on LinkedIn, of course, to share it with you, everybody. It was his father-in-law, Tom, looking out, hoping to see some wildlife. We won’t necessarily say what the true motivations here in the interest of the more sensitive readers of the show, but you get the idea. Anyway, it was good enough for us to send Sam that first pair of Ironclad Tacticals. Great photo, Sam. Thanks for sending it. Very much in keeping with what we were hoping to receive. Okay, that’s going to do it for this episode of the show. Do you feel good about it?

Yeah, I do. It’ll work.

We’re going to get to work compiling this FDI as well as doing a whole bunch of other stuff. You’re putting together another one of these giant data projects right now. We got a huge list of to-dos. It’ll be good to get this episode out and I know all of you are working hard to wind down 2024. You’ve got a few more weeks to make it a great finish. Hope you do it.

Hope we all do, actually.

I hope to see you guys at some of the association holiday events and of course, on the next episode. For now, I’ll just say get out there, sell some screws. We’ll talk to you very soon.

Until next time, folks.