Machines, fixtures, and parts designed by someone who also has to make them.

I am a mechanical design engineer and CAM programmer with twelve years of hands-on work in tooling, machine building, and contract machining. I am a Certified SolidWorks Professional, work daily in Autodesk Inventor, Fusion 360, and AutoCAD, and program three and four axis milling and four axis wire EDM in CAMWorks, Inventor CAM, and Fusion CAM.

Since 2024 I have been Operations Manager at Variable Operations Technologies, an ISO 9001:2015 contract machine shop running Haas mills and lathes and Sodick wire EDM. I model parts and fixtures, release GD&T drawings, and review customer models for manufacturability, setup sequence, and tolerance risk before we quote.

I also build the shop’s engineering tooling: a pipeline that turns customer drawings into DFM reports and pricing, an Inventor API tool that generates shop-floor drawings, and a vision pipeline that triaged a backlog of 220 RFQ drawings.

Before that I spent ten years at Lion Tool and Die as Engineering Manager, leading the design of die-cast trim dies, owning the CAD and drawing standards, and adapting trim tooling for robotic cells. In between I co-founded 616 Flatsticks, a custom CNC golf-club maker, and took its putter line from concept through parametric models, CAM, and production.

Datums follow how a part is fixtured and measured, tolerances follow function, and every callout has to survive quoting, setup, and inspection without a phone call. Design changed how I run a shop too: process planning starts in the model, and the tools I build exist to shorten the distance between a customer drawing and a first good part.