Behind the Scenes - 2/28/25

Dear Friends,

For those who are new to our emails, I try to do an email once a week where I go into the details of what is happening behind the scenes of our small business. If you want to catch up on prior messages, check out the blog here or just jump right into the story below.

This week was a bit of a roller coaster on multiple fronts, but the one that became the biggest problem was our swing arm press. This absolutely vital piece of equipment is fundamentally a simple machine. Its a hydraulic press that has a head that swings out of the way to allow us to load up dies and rough cuts of the leather for the precise final cuts. At 27 tons of force, its theoretically capable of many more activities and is slated to be part of how we produce the pen clips (amongst other items). All in all, nearly every product that leaves this place comes in contact with that machine, and on Tuesday it stopped working.

A few years back we had gotten and used a small 8 ton manual press which uses an very long lever and a strong person to apply the force to the die plate. Unfortunately, the plate was too small for most of our items. This means that to cut out larger products requires a very creative punching method and some are impossible altogether. It has been the lone soldier standing in the gap.

The small amount of inventory that we keep on the shelf of various items has been consumed rapidly and the press not working has gone from a big problem to a critical issue. We have to get it working. I did have a very productive conversation with one of the manufacturers engineers. Dusting off my electrical knowledge and multimeter, I set to checking various connections.

The machine is built with safety in mind. A 27 ton hydraulic press would crush every bone in your hand to powder without slowing down if you were unfortunate to get caught with your hand in the machine. Thus, to actuate the machine requires both your hands to press a button on each handle of the machine at the same time. This is of course so that you can't get the head to go down without both hands out of the machine. In addition we have a safe zone around the machine where no one can enter while the machine is on. This perimeter means that only one person can be at the machine at a time.

So the press was running fine, until one time both buttons were pressed and it didn't go down. From then on, the same has been true. So I dove into the machines handles testing continuity to see if the wires had shorted or the buttons were broken. The most likely issue is actually the logic circuit board that receives the signal from the buttons. That I can't fix. But the parts I needed we supposed to be overnighted on Tuesday evening, and as of yesterday they still had not arrived.

These are the hundred little things that happen that make the best laid plans of mice and men go astray.

It's not all bad news though. The new prototype of the leather has been finished and I think we have a winner. I didn't think I could like a leather more than our current stuff, but the new one might just beat it. The surface is smooth and creamy with that heavy body we love but the bleed tests have been excellent. This new stuff should be the best of both worlds and I am throughly impressed with the tanning experts at the tannery. Leather is a wild mesh of art and advanced chemistry, and they nailed it.

Hopefully this new leather finishing system will be able to be implemented soon. There are still some tests we need to run to prove out the material, but if it lives up to its potential, the work on the bags begins. That is a whole new world of excitement that will bring a lot of the customer feedback we have received about them to fruition in a great way.

I guess my real point with this email is that life is full of ups and downs, and if you get too deep into the day to day you can sometimes miss the fact that we have a lot to be grateful for. The press will get fixed, and this opened up my eyes to see how critical it is for us to keep a good stock of spare parts for it on hand. My anxiety about the new leather reformulation was all for nothing. The color, the shine, and the feel of the new one is perfect.

All of this will get entered in my journals, and perhaps someday these little trials will help encourage my children in their difficulties. Perspective can be a powerful thing.

As a little bit of housekeeping. The briefcase designs are now discontinued. I've gotten a lot of feedback on ways we can improve them, and with the new leather on the horizon it's time to take them down. We will be announcing the new ones when they come out, and I hope its no more than two months or less before they are launched. On their respective product pages there will be "notify me" email boxes that you can also subscribe to that will ensure you know as soon as they are out. I will mention now that they will be getting new names as the current names tend to cause confusion (since they are the diagonal dimensions, not the horizontal dimensions). I'm very excited as the new naming convention will be used for all our future bag launches.

Stay tuned for more letters on Fridays in the coming weeks and be sure to go subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you like and watch the videos it helps us get promoted more by the algorithm to people who may never have heard of us.

Ever your servant,

Colin Murdy CEO/Owner

Murdy Creative Co.

Cell: 414-434-9001

MurdyCreative.Co 

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