It’s been a busy couple of months here at Subtract.
Both our internal team and our network of vendor shops are growing, and with that growth our manufacturing capacity has never been greater. We can take on a wider variety of work, and more of it, while continuing to focus on the same things we always have: quality parts, good communication, and predictable lead times.
If you have something you need quoted, you can send it our way at www.subtractmanufacturing.com.
Outside of manufacturing, we have a few other things going on. CertTrace, our material certification tracking application, is officially in open beta. AJ is recovering from some historic flooding in central Indiana. And we’ve added another person to the Subtract team.
But first:
IMTS
We’ll be at the International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago from September 14–19.
If you’ve never been to IMTS, it’s worth going. It’s one of the best opportunities to see what is happening across the manufacturing industry, look at an unreasonable number of machines, and meet the people behind them.
Subtract, along with the Taps and Patience Podcast, will be hosting a meetup on Tuesday, September 15 at 2:00 PM Central at the Tormach booth.
Come introduce yourself and hang out with us. And if you’re an antisocial introvert like AJ, bring an interesting part with you. Interesting parts make excellent conversation starters.
You can watch the full announcement here.
We’re also planning to debut an entirely new Subtract website for IMTS. It isn’t live yet, but we’re very excited about it. Keep an eye out.
CertTrace Open Beta
Our CTO and resident tech wizard, Jacob Muñoz, has been hard at work building CertTrace, a material certification tracking application designed for machine shops.
CertTrace makes it easy to connect material certifications to the physical material sitting on your shelves, and then track that material back to the jobs where it was used. It is intentionally lightweight, runs entirely offline, and started as a tool we wanted for our own internal use.
Right now, CertTrace is still in a limited, invite-only beta. We’ve been slowly rolling it out to people in the Subtract Discord so we can get real-world feedback, find the rough edges, and make improvements before opening it up more broadly.
We expect to move into an open beta fairly soon.
If you’re interested in getting early access, the best place to start is by joining the Subtract community and going through our normal vendor signup process. As we expand the beta, that’s where we’ll be pulling the next group of testers from.
We’re excited about where CertTrace is headed. What started as a small internal tool has the potential to solve a pretty common headache for machine shops, and we’re looking forward to getting it into more hands.
The Great Flood of 2026
A couple of weeks ago, AJ got hit pretty hard by the flooding that came through central Indiana.
His property temporarily became a swamp, and his shop ended up with roughly four inches of standing water inside. Not ideal.
Fortunately, everyone is safe and healthy, and the house was untouched.
The shop was not quite as lucky.
AJ has, naturally, decided to use the damage as justification for completely remodeling the shop office. Whether four inches of floodwater was strictly necessary to begin that project is still up for debate.
You can see the whole story in his video here.
A New Team Member
If you’re in our Discord server or you’ve emailed us recently, you may have noticed a new name showing up: Jacob Stout.
That’s me.
I originally started by helping AJ around his shop, but as both of our schedules got busier, it became obvious that I could be more useful helping with Subtract directly.
I joined the team in June, and since then I’ve been doing a little bit of everything: video editing, customer communication, quoting, and, apparently, writing newsletters.
It has been a lot of fun getting involved as Subtract grows, and I’m looking forward to meeting some of you at IMTS.
If you want to hear more about who I am and how I ended up here, I was on AJ’s podcast, Taps and Patience, last week. You can listen to that episode here.
There is a lot happening around here, and there is still a lot of work ahead of us. We’re growing the team, growing the shop network, building better systems, and doing our best to make Subtract more useful to both the people buying parts and the people making them.
Thanks, as always, for following along and for giving us the opportunity to earn your business.
Hopefully we’ll see some of you at IMTS.
-The Subtract Crew