After a nice summer break, Shop Talk is back! We’re excited to share with you a slew of exciting guests, starting with Logan Olson. In this season’s first episode, our host, Jonathan Odom, travels to Humboldt County, California to visit Logan Olson’s shop, Olson Manufacturing, where we get a close tour of his lab.

Logan Olson is a renowned designer and the founder of Logan Olson Putters. You might recognize his products in the hands of professional golfers from all over the country. Sit back and explore his shop, learn about the business, and swing golf clubs with us!

If you want to watch the full video, follow the link below. Otherwise, here’s a quick snippet from the episode.

You started tinkering around to try and to make your own putter after high school, so how did that lead you to start a business?

When I began making things I thought, “How can I make something out of wood?” A material like wood is so forgiving- you can make lots of mistakes, and it won’t show. Then I thought, “Okay, how can I go from making something out of wood to making something out of metal?” And [I had] zero metal working background whatsoever. I figured, “It’s the same process but with a different material. No big deal.”

A teacher that I had in high school introduced me to this guy, Bill, who had a small Tormach PC and C in his garage. My teacher told him, “Hey, I got this ex-student that has been taking classes at college. He wants to make a part out of metal.” I showed Bill a CAD file, and he laughed, “You have no idea what you’re trying to make. You have no idea the skills it takes to execute that.”

I spent about a year in his garage learning the fundamentals of manufacturing. He worked on all kinds of things his whole life and his background was in manual machining. My background was simply computer drafting. I took those new skills, applied it to my modeling skill set, and then got hooked on creating programs that actually make stuff. It was so cool to make something usable out of metal.

It completely killed my interest in going to school anymore. I told my parents, “I want to start a job shop where I could make stuff.” Humboldt is a really weird place because we’re detached from a lot of industry and there isn’t much of it here. There’s no resource for a job shop. No ability to take an idea and pay somebody to make it for you. I thought, “How cool would it be to buy a super cheap, old, and used CNC machine and lease a building I can’t afford to run a job shop despite having no business skills? This is so cool, but what did I get myself into?”

I ended up taking on more design work rather than CNC stuff because I was really bad at it and had no experience on quoting jobs. I did design work for local companies, and I am finally making enough money to run a business, but not enough to profit. It sucked! I got all this CNC equipment—why am I not using it? The only thing that I had successfully made was a putter in a garage. So I figured, I got this equipment and tooling. Let me try again with a bit more skill. I started making putters for friends, then friends of friends. And slowly, it engulfed the design side of the business. Until it finally ramped into full production, like a custom putter shop.

Can you show us what you’re doing in Fusion?

Yeah, absolutely. The latest project that I’ve been working on is a mid-mallet shape. This will be made out of stainless steel, and it has a multi material construction. There’s an aluminum sole plate here that is there for mass distribution, mass removal, and also to sort of close the structure. This is a pretty decent example of a very simplified model from the sense of, hey, this is the only thing on the screen.

To go back to the conversation of 3-axis versus 5-axis, one of the towers that I’ve been using a lot is full machine kinematic simulation. This is so critical because it’s hard to watch everything that’s going on sometimes. Especially with full 5-axis cuts, what ends up happening is you have a point control in a motion, and then you have reposition moves that can be very erratic. The reposition moves are something that I try to watch a lot.

The cool thing I can do build out the entire machine and do a full machine simulation of the entire cutting process. Now, it’s not going to tell you things like, “Hey, your stepover is too big, or this cut is going to leave a poor surface finish,” but it gives you a good understanding of what’s going to happen before you walk out there. What’s really great is to be able to watch a simulation spindle crash into a table, versus a real tape spindle crash into a table.

Stay tuned for the next episode of Shop Talk. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, catch up on any episodes you missed, and get your audio-only fix on Spotify.