Setting the Stage for Swiss Machining Success: Shop Tour Video

Midway Swiss Turn has always been a lean shop. It started as a garage shop founded and run by James Rahz before adopting CNC machines alongside the addition of his two sons and daughter-in-law Jayme Rahz (now CEO of the shop). But even as the shop has grown to a standalone shop and the staff has expanded beyond the Rahz family, it considers its work and machine tools carefully to ensure its small staff can perform as much work as possible. These considerations came together to make this shop our 2025 Top Shops Honoree in Shopfloor Practices.

For a closer look at the shop, tour Midway Swiss Turn with Editor-in-Chief Brent Donaldson in the video below or follow along with the transcript.

Transcript:

Brent Donaldson (Editor in Chief, Modern Machine Shop): What do you get when you mix robotic automation, Swiss-type CNC machining and a family-run shop that embraces struggle like a core value?

James Rahz (Founder, Midway Swiss Turn): The reason I started the business, is so I had something to leave to my kids. By the time we needed this fancy machinery, I put my house up for collateral just to buy it.

Brent Donaldson: Inside this building is one of the most forward-looking shops we've seen, and it's no surprise they were a 2025 Modern Machine Shop Top Shops Honoree.

Jayme Rahz (CEO, Midway Swiss Turn): When we bought that first Swiss CNC machine from Mark, it was a high-production job, his house is up for collateral. We get the machine in. We get the material in. I think maybe we run the first release and that business went under.

Donaldson: From lights-out machining and low frequency vibration cutting to digital systems that track everything from quotes to quality, Midway Swiss turn is proving that small doesn't have to mean simple. We visited Wooster, Ohio, to see how this team runs complex parts, lean workflows, and a culture that's as fun as it is fearless. Let's check it out.

Talk about starting the business and the kind of equipment that you had.

James Rahz: I started, I just had the Bridgeport and I had the engine lathe, and the surface grinder. I was doing tool and die work.

Brent Donaldson: Was it a garage?

James Rahz: It was a large — I had 20 feet wide and 60 feet long.

Jayme Rahz: So as you can see for the layout of the shop, we have our main machines with our Swiss screw machines here. We run all Citizens. When we first moved into the shop, we had two machines, and we're up to seven of them now.

We try to set up each machine with its own workstation or workbench that has anything that the operator might need for that job. As we're growing, we've added two new types of technology. We have a five-axis mill, a UMC, and we do have room to put another one over there to create a little cell. And then same thing. This one just got put on the floor, Started production this week. And we have. Yeah. The Miyano. Yeah. So it's a twin-spindle, twin-turret, 51-millimeter CNC machine.

And we have already space right here for the next one, which is planned probably for in the next couple of years, I would say.

James Rahz: It was a building that my brother owned and he let me have half. But he wanted to sell his house, and so I had to get out of there.And I found this place, and I talked people into buying it.

Jayme Rahz: I was just going to say — I was honestly against buying this place at first, because it was so big and so much. I'm like, we don't need anywhere near that space. It seemed like such a huge commitment. Entrepreneurs, business starters, that's what they do for a living: They take these risks.

Brent Donaldson: So let me ask, what types of parts are you typically producing on your Swiss-types?

Jayme Rahz: Well, there is no typical part. We run anything that will fit on that machine. So we have up to 32-millimeter capabilities and we run for oil and gas, DoD, aerospace, fasteners, into the hunting and firearms industries. About the only industry we steer clear of intentionally is automotive, because we don't want to turn into a captive shop.

So more than the industry of parts, what we try to do is have good balance in our customer base, so that we don't become too heavily reliant on any one industry. All industries go through cycles, when one is down, presumably another one will be up.

Now even within our Swiss machines, right now we have seven different models on the floor, seven different configurations. Same thing as when you buy a car, you know? You can buy an F-150, but there's different trim levels and all that. They all do different things.

Brent Donaldson: I wasn't sure if you guys were getting into or could talk about low frequency vibration for finishes and chip control.

Jayme Rahz: We’re very early adopters and yeah that was, we get better finishes, better tolerances.

Tyler Beal (General Manager, Midway Swiss Turn): Low frequency vibration in itself lends a very good hand to chip control, like Jayme had said. But it's likeif you think of 3/16 from titanium, that you can't — like when you're trying to get a really good finish on something like 32 RA and under, LFV isn't always the greatest, but when you're taking those giant hog cuts, that's where it'll help, because a lot of times your strings will ball up. LFV will minimize that completely.

Brent Donaldson: You had the Bridgeport, were you working for somebody else? And ultimately, my question is what motivated you to start Midway rather than work for somebody else?

James Rahz: The reason I started the business is so I had something to leave to my kids. That's the reason I did it and then by the time we needed this fancy machinery, I put my house up for collateral just to buy it.

Brent Donaldson: Wow. For your first —

James Rahz: Yeah. And the second machine too. Yeah. And then we ran into some tough times and Jayme figured out a way to pull us through that one.

Brent Donaldson: Really? Are we talking about 2008, like the Great Recession era?

Jamye Rahz: Yeah. By and large, we have generally two machinists out here to run all nine machines.

Brent Donaldson: Really?

Jamye Rahz: Really.

Brent Donaldson: Two?

Jayme Rahz: Two. A majority of the day there's two. If there's troubleshooting to do with one of them or there's something exceptional, we might have a third. With a third, one of the owners would come outand do some troubleshooting.

Tyler Beal: I'd say 12 to 14 hours a day is what we try to target. And that's on our on our lathes, our mill will run 24/7 because of the robot.

Jayme Rahz: Yeah. If we fill up that table on certain jobs, it can run 36 hours.

Brent Donaldson: My first question about this is pretty general. It’s just, what made the five-axis with robotic automation a priority investment for you guys?

Jayme Rahz: So that goes back actually a long way. We've done Swiss work for 25 years now. One thing our customers have consistently asked us to do is mill work. And because we were generally only had two people here doing the machining, mills never were going to work for us because they really needed a lot of labor. You needed somebody to stand there, hand-load parts and take them out. We just were not set up to have that amount of labor. So we were very resistant to it.

As automation and robotics came out and really, once the price started to come down and make it accessible even to small companies, that's when we really started thinking about doing some precision mill work again. For me and for our company, the thing that had to be part of it was the robotic arm, because I couldn't hire a whole other machinist just to stand here and flip a part.

Brent Donaldson: And your robot here, this looks like — it's just a five-axis Fanuc?

Tyler Beal: Yeah. So we actually purchased this machine fully integrated. So it came with learning curves like any new machine will. But with the five-axis mill and the robot, we're able to condense all that into the robot, put the part in, it may do a flip, it may do a secondary operation all within the same work holding — which we design ourselves—and then it'll bring out a part at the end.

Jayme Rahz: When we bought that first Swiss CNC machine from Mark, it was a high-production job. It was kind of one of the biggest things we'd ever really looked at quoting. It needed this specialized equipment. It was incredibly expensive at the time, you know, especially with where we were at. And, Marc's like, “Now this is going to be great. This is going to be good.” You know, his house is up for collateral.

We got the machine in. We get the material in. I think maybe we were on the first release and that business went under that we were making the parts for. The work went away. So now we're left with a giant machine payment, this brand-new piece of equipment and no work for it because we had intended for that to run full-time on that one job.

Oh, yeah, it's heart stopping. This is where we go back to having those relationships with everybody that we work with. Marc Klecka at Concentric. He pulled through for us because we didn't even know how to market it at that point. That was never our goal. It was just to run this one job. So, I hit the road with you, doing sales, and Marc Klecka from Concentric was steadily feeding us.

These are customers that he would go see that needed Swiss machines, but didn't have enough work to warrant buying one. So he could facilitate the relationship for us. And he kept that work flowing in for us until we could get our feet under us and do the sales. And so I had to learn how machines operated really fast.

For us to have low labor on the floor. It's important that the office side supports that as much as possible. So that would be us doing the work upfront to make sure that by the time it hits the floor, it's all been thought out.

The basic setup, regardless of the job, is going to be loading a program into the machine. And that will have been developed and written by our office side. It's going to be setting up our automatic bar feeders with the right channels and everything for the size of material stock that we're going to put in there. All of our material comes in, is received in, and is labeled and barcoded, and set in our material storage in the back there. So it has the job number, the part number, everything on it, so that there's no question about what matches what job. All of our jobs have a job traveler that goes with it, that also says “this is the material that you should be looking for, this is how many pieces there should be,” so they can collect all of that stuff.

Brent Donaldson: And what are you using? What is the platform you're using to convey all the information that's created?

Jayme Rahz: Sure. Yeah. So we have a couple of different platforms. We use an ERP system that houses all of that information and that is JobBoss2. It's their cloud-based version. Also in the office, there's specialized programming software developed by Citizen. And so we use that mostly to program all of our Swiss machines. But we also use Hexagon Esprit and we will have the ability to use some Mastercam as well.

Tyler Beal: From the quoting standpoint, we use Paperless Parts. As far as an ECI, it has the estimating sort of a module on it. But what we found with Paperless Parts is it gives us the ability to not be as rigid. It gives us the ability to communicate back and forth with each other on different thought processes. Because, I mean, inevitably we're quoting, I don't know, on average 15-20 different quotes a week. It can go up and down from there. But it's really hard going back and thinking through your thought process on something that happened three months ago.

Jayme Rahz: So, a lot of the automation that helps out on the shop floor actually helps in the office, too, with everything. And then it flows out here.

The last piece of software that we have that we use is this device here, you'll see on top of our machines. And that's called Harmoni. So this is really going to be a lot of machine monitoring, data collection. And in addition to that, it's going to house and collect all of our quality checks and data as well.

Brent Donaldson: Let's talk a little bit about what Harmoni is doing for even one specific job that you're running here. So, I mean, a lot of it is, how is the machine running? What's the downtime? What's the spindle time like? How long does it sit? And just practical stuff. Like how many parts has it run? And it allows me to have that in my office, at my desk.

Tyler Beal: This tells you not only how the machine is running, it gives you, like, job-specific data that tracks back to our job routing through ECI. So it's all integrated together. But it also gives you program rev tracking. So those tweaks that you're making as you're dialing the job in, it will capture that. You send it off to Harmoni and it revs it. So you can go back and say, all right, the job ran great two months ago. What did we change? It also has a feature, it has a camera and a microphone here. You can actually get on Harmoni's dashboard and actually talk to people through it.

Jayme Rahz: So each time we would have one of those things happen, whether it's a full industry recession or just the individual industries, as they go through it, it would teach us a lot about how to organize our work, the types of customers to go after.

Brent Donaldson: I'm not sure if you're familiar with Modern Machine Shop, and we have a program called Top Shops. We have hundreds of shops across the country that take this survey. And then, when the survey closes, I and some of my colleagues go through all the data — and it's a lot of data — and we select the four top shops in the entire country for those categories. And you guys are one of them.

And, interestingly, two of the shops this year are run by females. And I think that's fantastic. Is there anything to say about leading a shop? I mean, traditionally this industry is very male-dominated.

Jayme Rahz: It is. Yeah. I mean — and again, even before here I worked in manufacturing. I guess I'm just used to it. My belief on that in general is simply, you know, I have a job to do, and I do it, and I don't really consider whether I'm male or female or who I'm working with.

Brent Donaldson: Was that something that you considered? Or did that change your opinions on anything?

James Rahz: No, I was I was happy that she did come in. Because I don't like to do this paperwork. I’m a machinist.

Brent Donaldson: Hey everybody, Brent Donaldson with Modern Machine Shop here. And if you just watched that video and you're thinking, boy, I'd like my shop to be featured in The View From My Shop series, then just send us an email at shopvideo@mmsonline.com and tell us what sets your shop apart.