Welcome to Igniting American Manufacturing, where brilliant minds from all around the country sit down to discuss the happenings of America’s manufacturing industry and what can be done to keep it growing. On today’s segment, our host Rory Comiskey talks with Guy Beard of Guy Beard Designs.
Rory Francis Comiskey
Hey, everybody, this is Rory Francis, and you’re watching igniting American manufacturing, and today, today, it’s a pleasure. I have someone I consider friend that known for a while. Guy, beard, guy, beard designs. And guy, I’m gonna introduce him here in a second. I’m actually wearing some of his designs here myself. I have numerous pieces. Most people my home do as well. But guy is, you know, we talk about manufacturing, we talk about workforce development, we talk about innovation. Guy touches on a lot of things, and I want to get into him. So we’re going to move fairly quick. You know, guy started as a machinist in his garage. I’m going to talk a little bit about that. And he’s most definitely an artisan, designing beautiful pieces of jewelry, among other things. And the unique thing is, a lot of those pieces that he’s made, he had a fabricate cable and chain and all that he actually designed and hand built all the machines that actually make that so he touches it from different levels. And guy, welcome. I want to shake your hand. Always good to have you here, and my arms a little weighted down with some of your stuff there. So let’s jump right in. So you started as machinist, kind of working in your garage with your dad, right, right?
Guy Beard
My dad always had equipment, and my grandfather had machine equipment, and my uncle had machine equipment, so sort of natural, and he taught me how to use this little lay of the milling machine when I was seventh grade, and I actually built my first steam engine, live steam engine was in the seventh grade, cuts and bolts and all that, and it looked like I made it in the seventh grade, but it actually worked and functioned. And I’ve always had an interest in it. I call moving metal. You know, it’s always been fun to me to take something from one form and change it to another.
Rory Francis Comiskey
Well, I find a lot of folks that work in machinists as machines, whether it’s in metal or in plastic, they kind of, they gravitate towards it, and a lot of it comes naturally. It sounds like you’re, you’re one of those you took to it. So come out, you got out of your garage, at your dad’s garage, and you wound up in the in the dental industry, right, right?
Guy Beard
Yeah. I used to, I love fishing and diving and spear fishing. I grew up on a swim team, and then I became like the boat boy for a group of dentists. And we used to go to Key West every three weeks and spear fish. And then they took me into their their shop, and then taught me the dental lab business. Then I went into dental lab, and which is, at the time, was much more advanced than the jewelry industry, because they had more money to put towards investments and this type of thing. And we basically started making sand dollars, a tick little dental alginate, making sand dollars, and I sold, like, 100 of them in three weeks. So you’re,
Rory Francis Comiskey
you’re in, you’re in a dental lab, and you’re making teeth or crowning bridges, crowning bridges, and you just got a
Guy Beard
took this little sand dollar. I made one for my mom, and I saw like I just started selling unless I’m in the wrong business.
Rory Francis Comiskey
All right. So, so garage making bridges for dentists, sand dollars and now, now you’re in the jewelry business, right, right? Yeah,
Guy Beard
we, we went into the jewelry business. I left the the dental lab business and went to work for a jewelry store, just to get the idea of the stone setting and how that worked. I’ve always been pick up stuff quickly. So we went and I worked there for about half a year. I started a custom jewelry shop, beards, custom jewelry in Jacksonville. And I was, like, 43 years ago, and then we developed from there, and I had a partner. I sold that business, and we went into manufacturing. I like to make things. So you like to buy and sell. So we’ve sort of moved right into manufacturing, and then we go out of the box and look for other techniques and in genres of you know, like we do mem, we do binder, jet printing, we machine, we coin, we stamp, whatever’s the best you
Rory Francis Comiskey
do three 3d printing, additive technology as well. Yeah, we have
Guy Beard
3d printers. We do mesh where we can get more of a organic look to it. But Jimmy, my partner, at the time, long time ago, that says is his specialty, that we’re back together is cat. And so we, we can’t ever all these ideas, these rings and stuff like a CAD machine. And then we take it 3d print it, and then we investment, cast it. And then we we take that and hand finish it, and then set the stone. And embellish it, or however, whatever the customer wants. So we’re very flexible, and that’s what the fun of it is. Is you’re, you know, it’s, it’s more of a passion, it’s excitement, because every day you’re making something different, something new. There’s always something more to create. There’s always something more to learn, a better way to do things. So
Rory Francis Comiskey
you’re part of the process all the way through. I mean, you’re literally an artist, and you’re designing, working, taking customers ideas and designing it. Oh yeah. And then your printing, or your extruding, or you do, I mean, you do everything. You actually anneal some of your products right there. Oh yeah, we
Guy Beard
do. We basically like our cable, our gold cable. We use a heat hardening alloy. So we bring it in as a wire, and we build our own stranding machines, broken stranding machines to make cable. That’s one of the our specialties is we start off making 14 carat, 18 carat and platinum cable for years, and perfected that. And so we do. We use a lot of heat hardening alloys when we need something to have more spring to it, like even like a class bar, sure, we use a heat hardening alloy that we take it, we anneal it, we phase it, and then we can move into a hardening stage. We low heat harden it to give it the most spring ability and longevity in the marketplace.
Rory Francis Comiskey
Well, so you and I use manufacturing terminology. And for the, for the late layperson, basically you’re you’re twisting wire, and then you’re heating it and cooling it so it gives it that spring and that ability and kind of so it actually where wears better, and that’s what that more life out. This is a layman’s terms. So for the, for those having manufacturing, so all that stuff’s in house, correct? Now, you actually have, you know, you twist wire, and you can stranding machine, you call it. Now, what I think is kind of unique, and I’ve seen this, we’re going to actually do a second segment. We’re actually going to show, go in and show some of the wire being twisted inside. But the unique thing is, those machines, they were in store bought, they were designed by you and actually fabricated. So you decided you wanted to make a chain. You wanted what it looked like, and then you actually built, had the fourth floor to engineer and build the equipment to actually do that. Am I correct?
Guy Beard
Oh, that’s we I was looking for cable because I’ve always been a fan of the like America’s Cup racing, and so I’ve always looked at the cable we could get stainless steel. And I went to my friends had a big import business and go find me cable over in Italy. And they was not there. So we got interested in it. And I went to, couldn’t find machines to cable small amounts of material. So I went to Roger Schoener, that was with co founder of Southwire in Carrollton, Georgia, and he helped me develop a basics stranding machine. It was like, it was like getting a computer with no instructions. And so we took it and had to figure out how to make the configurations, the twist per inch, and has decks on it. So you can make a core out of a certain geometry, and then you add on a second layer, and we put gear boxes on it to change the ratios. But we developed that equipment, and then we developed the little ropers that we take the strand and we put on a roper, and it has a core, and then six wires around it, and they twist and make a cable. If
Rory Francis Comiskey
I’m staring you I’m trying to follow, you know, and it’s kind of, I’m there, I’m there, you know, for a lay person, you know, they might get it, they might not get it and maybe, well, hopefully my audience is brighter than I am. But here’s what I want to ask you now, all this is in your head. You didn’t go to college as an engineer. You’re not an engineer, right? No, so you acquire this skills. Just tell me organically, yeah,
Guy Beard
it was like that, like that tiny room. Can I constantly, never ending improvement is, I’m always looking for for something different. I pick things up quickly. And I can call people and talk to them, and like Roger schoner, he goes, I’m not sure. I want to help you build this machine. You know, I got nothing, you know, I didn’t. And at end of the day, he goes, I’ll help you, you know, because we had a we and then we bonded. But I’ll pick things up quickly, and we go outside the box, you know, and I’m in, you know, we do, you know, we study things. We understand metallurgy. We talk to the top guys in the country, and if we don’t know
Rory Francis Comiskey
the answer, there’s always someone you can call and ask an intelligent question, they’ll give you the answer so, you know, and not gonna say, in a lot of ways, you are an innovator. Would you say, you know, sounds like there’s a lot of curiosity on your part on how to make things and how things get together and and sort things out? Fair statement,
Guy Beard
oh, yeah, no. That’s, that’s, that’s, and that. That’s where we’ve really been. Part of what we do is we go look for something different. We take things, products, techniques from other industries, and pull them back into the jewelry industry. We had two patents on memory shaped titanium cable in the jewelry industry for years, and I found it I was walking through a wire facility, and I looked over in his desk, and there’s a spool black cable. I said, What’s that? And then he goes, memory, shave metal. And so we we got our first spool of it cost like $5,000 we didn’t really understand it. And and I undid the end, and it just blew up in our hand because it has so much, it wasn’t treated. And I think the Tomas, I hope that was fun, he said wise, it was 5000 bucks. So, you know, we’ve learned by mistakes. You know, we we in we’re not afraid to go do things and then turn out not the way we want them, and we improve on that until we get it where we need it. Well, manufacturing
Rory Francis Comiskey
is always moving forward, and it’s moving forward at faster pace. It takes that curiosity, that innovation, to keep it moving, though, you know that desire Mother Mother curiosity is a mother invention, right? No, yeah.
Guy Beard
Well, that’s what that’s, you know, that’s one of the gifts I have, is I can look at something, I can look around this room. So we can make that, we can do this. And what we really do is we look for what I call an I am I am a sailor, I am a fisherman, I am a machinist, I’m a and these people all have passions, okay? And so we look for that passion, and we come up with something that sort of reflects that passion that they can wear, and it’s somewhat of a an extension of their personality, you know, say, I’m wearing this. Oh, what’s that? Oh, well, you know, I’m a sailor, I’m a fisherman, I’m a you know, and other people that have that same passion will notice that piece and and it brings people together. And that’s what the fun thing about making jewelry is, it’s a reflection of your personality, what you like to do and, and that’s what I like. I like to look at every piece that I’m making. I’m saying, Look, I’m somebody’s gonna wear this piece, and I want it to be as pretty and finished as well as possible because of extension of my passion into their passion.
Rory Francis Comiskey
Yeah, well, you use the word passion a lot, and it is obvious you’re very passionate. So unfortunately, so we are going to go into the shop and we’re going to look at some of the actual equipment on another segment. We’ll walk through it, because it’s really, really neat stuff. And, you know, to me, the thing probably that struck me the most is, you know, the foresight in the vision to know what you wanted to create and how to get there, you know, and that whole process. We’re going to talk about that as we walk through the footage. It was, you do a lot in a small footprint. You know, your machines aren’t super large, you you know, I’m very, very impressed with the scale and what you’re able to accomplish. So we’re going to do that. It’s all we have time for today. This is Rory Francis guy. Thank you so much for being here. We’re going to have you back. We’re going to do that insight in shop stuff, manufacturing is cool, folks, and here’s living proof of it, guy, thank you, and we’ll see you next time. This is Rory Francis signing out. You.
