Stipe Machine/Specialty Motor Cams

[Dodge]

Anybody have any Idea what going on with Stipe's?

Their not answering phones or answering emails.
The website isn't working and their cam information is not on the
"Ford Garage" any more.

I had been in contact with Teressa about a cam I ordered in Jan.
But went radio silent about 3wks. ago.

?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????

[Fullraceflathead]

Definitely not a way to run a business.

[Jim Brierley]

I saw Bill 2 weeks ago in Lincoln, NE. He had just ordered more cam blanks, all seemed normal.

[Dodge]

Oh good. I was just concerned when no response and their info was gone off the Ford Garage.

[JayJay]

There was a letter in the July Secrets of Speed from Bill Stipe that his son, who now runs the company, has had some financing and employee issues and is working to get back into production. I don't know when the letter was written but hopefully they will get back on their feet. Nothing but best wishes to them and to all other small businesses struggling to survive (full disclosure - I've had an order for a set of shocks in for over a year, still hoping to get them).

[Benson]

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Originally Posted by Dodge

Oh good. I was just concerned when no response and their info was gone off the Ford Garage.

About the Question I asked about above quote:
What info is gone from Fordgarage.com?

I looked 6 hours or so ago and found info on Stipe cams, adjustable cam timing gear and other items and shocks.

Just want to know ...


Ok Dodge,

I now see what you are talking about. There are several pages that used to have info about Stipe camshafts on FordGarage.com where 404 errors are happening.

Several items are missing which might be using links to Stipe webpages.

Perhaps these links will be restored after Bill Stipe gets things moved to Kentucky after his equipment is moved from Wisconsin?

[Benson]

Aftermath of Covid 19 is still causing havoc in the supply chain world wide!

I wonder if anybody knows when it might get better.

[BRENT in 10-uh-C]

Originally Posted by Benson

Aftermath of Covid 19 is still causing havoc in the supply chain world wide!

I wonder if anybody knows when it might get better.

I tend to think it will never recover. Finding adequate/enough labor to fill the void to produce the same amount of 'things' like it was pre-Covid probably will never happen again.

I have spoken with many of my customers who tend to be well versed in this, and their general thoughts are the 'maturity' of the pre-Covid workforce that left the void cannot be filled with the aptitude & work-ethic of the new generations. The typical 30 year old and younger employee candidates do not possess the skillset to be trainable. The majority of this age group lack problem solving skills, mechanical aptitude, and brain to hand coordination. IMO, the two major things that created this deficiency stems from my generation never trained them how to work with their hands (mow the grass, use hand tools, use a hammer or a saw, etc.) so they are very naïve in this area. Secondly, this newer generation has used the smart phone and computers to do their critical thinking, and their brain has never been developed to solve problems or think logically in an industrial environment. The length of time along with the costs associated with training these younger employees are just too costly for most companies to absorb.

Therefore, companies that were used to manufacturing something (raw goods, semi-finished goods, or finished goods) had been forced to operate their companies' profit margins on a 'lean level' where they were producing a certain quantity of products and amortizing the entire company's operating costs over all 100% of the products they produced. With the labor shortage after Covid, most of these companies have found themselves operating with a reduced workforce and/or a limited supply chain where they could no longer manufacture the same amount as pre-Covid. Their expenses however, did not drop. So if they are now working with a less-efficient workforce, higher COG pricing, and available supplies of around 50% of before, the only way way they could survive in business was to raise their prices. Now because a hypothetical company can only produce 50% as much product, they had to raise their retail costs by 100% and build their new business-model around a 50% production output. For some companies, they now can only produce about one-forth (25%) of what they were producing pre-Covid, ...and for those businesses, the lack of operating capitol and workforce will likely keep them crippled where they will never survive.

So to answer your question one more time, the likelihood of it ever getting better to a point where it was pre-Covid will never happen. How it affects this hobby is fewer & fewer Model-As are being repaired or restored. Most are just being driven into the ground. The overall prices of level of Model-A are dropping because the quality of the average vehicle is less than what was available a couple of decades ago. Fortunately, the prices of nice Model-As that are mechanically & aesthetically sound are rising, because there just isn't enough of that level of Model-As to go around, ...but that is a whole other topic.

[alexiskai]

Originally Posted by BRENT in 10-uh-C

I tend to think it will never recover. Finding adequate/enough labor to fill the void to produce the same amount of 'things' like it was pre-Covid probably will never happen again.

I have spoken with many of my customers who tend to be well versed in this, and their general thoughts are the 'maturity' of the pre-Covid workforce that left the void cannot be filled with the aptitude & work-ethic of the new generations. The typical 30 year old and younger employee candidates do not possess the skillset to be trainable. The majority of this age group lack problem solving skills, mechanical aptitude, and brain to hand coordination. IMO, the two major things that created this deficiency stems from my generation never trained them how to work with their hands (mow the grass, use hand tools, use a hammer or a saw, etc.) so they are very naïve in this area. Secondly, this newer generation has used the smart phone and computers to do their critical thinking, and their brain has never been developed to solve problems or think logically in an industrial environment. The length of time along with the costs associated with training these younger employees are just too costly for most companies to absorb.

Therefore, companies that were used to manufacturing something (raw goods, semi-finished goods, or finished goods) had been forced to operate their companies' profit margins on a 'lean level' where they were producing a certain quantity of products and amortizing the entire company's operating costs over all 100% of the products they produced. With the labor shortage after Covid, most of these companies have found themselves operating with a reduced workforce and/or a limited supply chain where they could no longer manufacture the same amount as pre-Covid. Their expenses however, did not drop. So if they are now working with a less-efficient workforce, higher COG pricing, and available supplies of around 50% of before, the only way way they could survive in business was to raise their prices. Now because a hypothetical company can only produce 50% as much product, they had to raise their retail costs by 100% and build their new business-model around a 50% production output. For some companies, they now can only produce about one-forth (25%) of what they were producing pre-Covid, ...and for those businesses, the lack of operating capitol and workforce will likely keep them crippled where they will never survive.

So to answer your question one more time, the likelihood of it ever getting better to a point where it was pre-Covid will never happen. How it affects this hobby is fewer & fewer Model-As are being repaired or restored. Most are just being driven into the ground. The overall prices of level of Model-A are dropping because the quality of the average vehicle is less than what was available a couple of decades ago. Fortunately, the prices of nice Model-As that are mechanically & aesthetically sound are rising, because there just isn't enough of that level of Model-As to go around, ...but that is a whole other topic.

In general I agree with your thesis that, because the COVID crisis led to a string of retirements and the premature death of pillars of this community, we're unlikely to recover from it in certain key areas. I also agree that the pipeline into the automotive fabrication and restoration profession is very thin due to lack of interest in the field and vocational training.

However, I think it's best to be cautious about attributing hiring problems to innate generational deficiencies. The complaint that young people these days lack work ethic and appropriate skills is as old as history itself. The problem of training new employees and building a profitable model is present in every industry, and in every industry there are some firms that figure out how to do it and some that struggle. We should be cautious about generalizing from the struggles of some firms to the death of an industry.

[JayJay]

I’m not sure that this issue is strictly Covid related. Ever since WWII we’ve been a society focused on getting more and more formal education (the GI Bill leading the way) and less and less focused on hands-on work. Yes, there are people whose talents are better on the intellectual side than on the practical side. But really, how many English Literature or Communications majors do we as a society need? Maybe they would have been better suited to a technical training. We’ve so focused on “clean” occupations that we’ve made it somehow undesirable to work in the trades. We as a society set ourselves up for sending manufacturing outside our borders by making that sort of work less desirable. I’ve spoken to several small manufacturers in the recent past and they almost all note the lack of trainable young people to fill their workforces as one of their chief concerns. Covid just brought this to a head, but I don’t think it’s the cause.

[Y-Blockhead]

Originally Posted by alexiskai

I also agree that the pipeline into the automotive fabrication and restoration profession is very thin due to lack of interest in the field and vocational training.

When my son entered high school some years back, I was shocked that they no longer offered the "Shops", auto, machine, electrical, wood, even drafting and design. Everyone I knew that made a career in automotive mechanics of some sort began their training in high school "shop".

[BRENT in 10-uh-C]

Originally Posted by alexiskai

In general I agree with your thesis that, because the COVID crisis led to a string of retirements and the premature death of pillars of this community, we're unlikely to recover from it in certain key areas. I also agree that the pipeline into the automotive fabrication and restoration profession is very thin due to lack of interest in the field and vocational training.

However, I think it's best to be cautious about attributing hiring problems to innate generational deficiencies. The complaint that young people these days lack work ethic and appropriate skills is as old as history itself. The problem of training new employees and building a profitable model is present in every industry, and in every industry there are some firms that figure out how to do it and some that struggle. We should be cautious about generalizing from the struggles of some firms to the death of an industry.

Originally Posted by JayJay

I’m not sure that this issue is strictly Covid related. Ever since WWII we’ve been a society focused on getting more and more formal education (the GI Bill leading the way) and less and less focused on hands-on work. Yes, there are people whose talents are better on the intellectual side than on the practical side. But really, how many English Literature or Communications majors do we as a society need? Maybe they would have been better suited to a technical training. We’ve so focused on “clean” occupations that we’ve made it somehow undesirable to work in the trades. We as a society set ourselves up for sending manufacturing outside our borders by making that sort of work less desirable. I’ve spoken to several small manufacturers in the recent past and they almost all note the lack of trainable young people to fill their workforces as one of their chief concerns. Covid just brought this to a head, but I don’t think it’s the cause.

The difference, I believe, when you/we speak of some industries figure it out whole others struggle is likely determined today by the amount of automation that is involved to succeed in that industry. From what I understand, companies that can reposition their business-model to use automation are the ones that rise to the top in this day and time.

For example, a machine shop that now can use CNC automation technology to do the actual work while using an employee with low skills (one that installs and removes the widget only) is the company that continues to make money. On the other hand, the Shop that must use a workforce that needs to problem solve, and use their brain-to-hand coordination to operate a machine typically struggles to find a capable operator. Older generations tend to be able to rely on their past problem solving skills and/or hand coordination abilities to successfully operate a machine. Like it or not, the typical younger generation generally just does not possess those skills because they have never been exposed to it.



Again, the younger generation often gets upset when it is mentioned that their abilities & skillset are inferior to the previous generation's skillsets however it is true from what I have physically experienced. Case in point, we hired an entry bodyshop tech that graduated from a local college with an Industrial Arts Associates degree. The poor lad knew the basic foundations (-book knowledge) however he lacked practical experience in many of the most basic skills needed to do the craft he went to school for. A main one was using a hammer. He is not alone. Many that are entering the workforce have never used a hammer, -or even the simplest of tools such as a screw driver or pliers. Workers from a generation or two ago learned those basic skills from an early age beside dad in the driveway. So in reality, those kids from that era have a 12-15 year head start on these Gen Z kids graduating into the workforce today. How many companies can afford to train a new hire for 10 years before they can do a task without supervision just to do the basics?? That is why the Z Generation is being labeled as untrainable. When prior to Covid we still had a capable workforce in force that could do their job and still train a new employee, then the costs of that training could be amortized over the volume of widgets or services a company was producing. Covid caused the supply chains to be interrupted and as a result, the on-the-job trainers were no longer around to train the Gen Z workforce. Prior to Covid, we had no warning to ramp-up training for this timeframe, -and Covid changed the way we knew to run our businesses.

[alexiskai]

Originally Posted by Y-Blockhead

When my son entered high school some years back, I was shocked that they no longer offered the "Shops", auto, machine, electrical, wood, even drafting and design. Everyone I knew that made a career in automotive mechanics of some sort began their training in high school "shop".

High school shop classes were discontinued for a number of reasons:

1. Doing a thing and teaching it are different skills, and there were fewer and fewer teachers wanting to specialize in shop.
2. These classes are useless if you're not training on the same kind of equipment you'll be using at the job, and that equipment gets more complex and expensive every decade. Schools weren't seeing the cost-benefit equation working out.
3. Vocational training shifted to community colleges as high schools decided they needed students to spend more time on pure academics in order to meet test standards.
4. Educational reformers targeted shop classes for elimination because school administrators were disproportionately assigning marginalized students to them, and it was thought that this was perpetuating generational poverty. Shop classes, and the students in them, have been stigmatized going back to the '60s and beyond.
5. Educators increasingly came to think of high school's role as preparing students for college. College was where students would specialize in preparation for a career; high school was supposed to be as generalized as possible.

In my part of the country, there is a thriving ecosystem of vocational training, including automotive and machining – but it's entirely at the community college level and it's done explicitly under the sponsorship of local industry. That's just not something a high school could do nowadays.

[Dan McEachern]

Actually some high schools ARE doing it.
https://www.petaluma360.com/article/...vel-with-nasa/

[JayJay]

Originally Posted by alexiskai

High school shop classes were discontinued for a number of reasons:

1. Doing a thing and teaching it are different skills, and there were fewer and fewer teachers wanting to specialize in shop.
2. These classes are useless if you're not training on the same kind of equipment you'll be using at the job, and that equipment gets more complex and expensive every decade. Schools weren't seeing the cost-benefit equation working out.
3. Vocational training shifted to community colleges as high schools decided they needed students to spend more time on pure academics in order to meet test standards.
4. Educational reformers targeted shop classes for elimination because school administrators were disproportionately assigning marginalized students to them, and it was thought that this was perpetuating generational poverty. Shop classes, and the students in them, have been stigmatized going back to the '60s and beyond.
5. Educators increasingly came to think of high school's role as preparing students for college. College was where students would specialize in preparation for a career; high school was supposed to be as generalized as possible.

In my part of the country, there is a thriving ecosystem of vocational training, including automotive and machining – but it's entirely at the community college level and it's done explicitly under the sponsorship of local industry. That's just not something a high school could do nowadays.

My point exactly. We've become a society that increasingly passes the buck for basic education farther down the line. When I graduated high school (very early '70s) in a quite upper middle class community, there was still a somewhat viable path for those kids who wanted to stop at high school and get out into the workforce. Subsequently, when my kids graduated high school in a similar community 35 years later, if you weren't going on to a four year college you were a "loser".

I taught at the State University level for a couple of years in the mid-80s. I was shocked at how ill-prepared some students were for college education - unable to do basic math or string a coherent thought together and form a paragraph of complete, grammatically correct sentences. High school used to be a credible stopping point for some kids. Nowadays the "the ticket to success is education" has morphed into "if you don't go to college you are doomed to failure" has taken over. And with that, or perhaps as the cause of it, kids graduating high school are unprepared to make it in the real world. Nowadays a significant portion of freshmen in college have to attend remedial education classes for the stuff that they should have learned in high school.

When I was in high school I got sufficiently ahead in "hard" subjects through summer school and doubling down early that I pretty well coasted through my senior year. I had two periods of auto shop, one of which I was the student teacher. And here I am 50+ years later, still working on old cars.

Even at the community college level, vocational ed is in a sorry state. Here in the SF Bay Area, that even as recently as 30 years ago was a hotbed of manufacturing for the electronics industry (it ain't now, for sure), there are perhaps a half dozen or so community colleges. I went looking to take a welding class. I found only one of those community colleges offering basic welding. I inquired at several and got "yeah, we used to teach that but we don't any more". It's a vicious circle - you don't train, you won't have the talent and then you won't be able to train the next generation.

Brent, I get your points, and that's an excellent analysis. You certainly have a more direct exposure to the lack of trainable talent than I do.

[Hitman]

Originally Posted by JayJay

My point exactly. We've become a society that increasingly passes the buck for basic education farther down the line. When I graduated high school (very early '70s) in a quite upper middle class community, there was still a somewhat viable path for those kids who wanted to stop at high school and get out into the workforce. Subsequently, when my kids graduated high school in a similar community 35 years later, if you weren't going on to a four year college you were a "loser".

Even at the community college level, vocational ed is in a sorry state. Here in the SF Bay Area, that even as recently as 30 years ago was a hotbed of manufacturing for the electronics industry (it ain't now, for sure), there are perhaps a half dozen or so community colleges. I went looking to take a welding class. I found only one of those community colleges offering basic welding. I inquired at several and got "yeah, we used to teach that but we don't any more". It's a vicious circle - you don't train, you won't have the talent and then you won't be able to train the next generation.

I disagree. Community colleges and technical training at high school levels is where it's at. Gone are the days when high schools have "shop" classes. How many high schools are in any given region? Probably 50 or more for large metro areas. How many community colleges are in that same region? Probably four or five campuses. How many universities? One.

Workforce and job development are highly technical fields these days. The old manual lathes and mills you had in your high schools in the 70's, 80's etc our now home hobbyist equipment. It's all about automation, robotics and other high tech focus areas. CNC machining has made your high school shop Bridgeport a dinosaur. Can each high school really afford to own and operate a high tech CNC machine? No. That's why technical high schools and community colleges have stepped in to take that lead. They're better funded and can quickly adapt to changing workforce needs. Do you think the newest Ford factory needs someone that knows basic welding? Nope, that's all done by robots now. So you're search for a basic welding class is going to yield poor results as you found, that's not the skill an 18 year old needs. And if they do, their local union training center will provide it through their programs.

[Oldgearz]

Back to the original question, the info on Stipe cams, IM330, etc. has been removed. Info says 'page not found". I've tried in the last week or so to find specific info on the Stipe cams....to no avail. The Stipe website doesn't work and no info seems to be available. Hope they can get it together.

[mcgarrett]

Wow, I thought this post was about Stipe camshafts!

[western77]

Bill has moved all his machines and tooling to Kentucky were he now lives. His plan is to start up production as soon as possible.

[BRENT in 10-uh-C]

Originally Posted by Hitman

I disagree. Community colleges and technical training at high school levels is where it's at. Gone are the days when high schools have "shop" classes. How many high schools are in any given region? Probably 50 or more for large metro areas. How many community colleges are in that same region? Probably four or five campuses. How many universities? One.

Workforce and job development are highly technical fields these days. The old manual lathes and mills you had in your high schools in the 70's, 80's etc our now home hobbyist equipment. It's all about automation, robotics and other high tech focus areas. CNC machining has made your high school shop Bridgeport a dinosaur. Can each high school really afford to own and operate a high tech CNC machine? No. That's why technical high schools and community colleges have stepped in to take that lead. They're better funded and can quickly adapt to changing workforce needs. Do you think the newest Ford factory needs someone that knows basic welding? Nope, that's all done by robots now. So you're search for a basic welding class is going to yield poor results as you found, that's not the skill an 18 year old needs. And if they do, their local union training center will provide it through their programs.

Lots & lots of misinformation in this based on my first-hand knowledge. My son begins this Fall as an instructor for a local state community college where he & I have been advisors for. Most people do not realize that most colleges receive the vast part of their funding from grants. They really do not have the funding to quickly change as suggested. Changing of a curriculum requires funding from grants, and then generally requires a year or two for a curriculum to be implemented. All totaled, it can be 3-5 years for change to be implemented.

Several other misconceptions from above in the high school level. More often than not, because the high school vocational class and the college-level classes were not at capacity, the two were merged. This stems from the counselors and the parents pushing college participation for the students (-and not vocational trades). One other issue is the pass/fail ratio. The classes on both levels must be presented to the students where they academically pass. The instructor and the schools funding is largely based on this. Most students today are much better at academics than they are at lab work. Again, they lack brain-to-hand coordination and problem solving skills. So if 75% of the grade comes from a lab project, what I have seen and heard from the instructors is the kids fail. Way more than meets the eye on why the local High School curriculums were dropped.

Originally Posted by mcgarrett

Wow, I thought this post was about Stipe camshafts!

It was, ...and the proper answer too the original question was made several times above. Now we are free to discuss other things. New socially accepted rules allow things to be discussed anywhere and everywhere!!