Over thirty years inside industrial equipment.

Who runs it

Keith Krupp — engineer and programmer, then the person selling it online.

I came out of Michigan State with a BS in Mechanical Engineering and went straight to Koch Refinery in Corpus Christi in 1991 — five years as a reliability engineer on pumps, electric motors and compressors. Then a year at FMC in Lawrence, Kansas as a maintenance engineer. That is where the equipment stopped being a catalogue photograph: I was the one figuring out why it failed.

At York Repair, from 1997, I was an applications engineer and a computer programmer — the same job, at the same time. That combination never really went away. From there: quality management and compliance for the repair business, then outside sales on automotive accounts.

The part I'm proudest of came next. Inside York Repair I started the electronics repair division from nothing, and founded two businesses to sell into it: RepairZone.com and SurplusZone.com. SurplusZone is long gone. RepairZone.com is still trading today, two decades on, which is a harder test than any campaign metric.

Then six years at ICR Services on e-commerce and marketing, where I launched CNCsalvage.com, MROauction.com and MROrecovery.com. Selling used industrial equipment online is not a category I picked up recently — I've been building the places it happens since 2005.

Since then: a division manager role back at York Repair with P&L responsibility, a contract as e-commerce product owner at Advanced Technology Services leading a replatform with an Agile team, and six corporate websites, two Google Ads accounts and two eBay stores at Northline Industrial.

In 2020 I started Fanuc Express, a Shopify store selling used FANUC equipment. It's still running. Sourcing, listing, pricing and shipping industrial parts is a different discipline from marketing them, and doing both changes how you write a product page.

Signal 47 has been my own practice through most of it, since 2015, and is where the work is now.

Why the auction work fits

An auction catalogue is a few hundred machines described in twelve words each, photographed badly, that a buyer has to understand in about four seconds. I've repaired that equipment, priced it, listed it and written the descriptions. Knowing what a Gleason gear hobber is — and who wants one — is the difference between a flyer that sells and a flyer that looks nice.

Why the software

The brochure work became a generator because doing it by hand was slow and error-prone. That turned out to be the interesting part, and it kept going: two map apps and a news publication, built, hosted and maintained solo. The programmer job in 1997 was not a detour.

How I work

One comprehensive change at a time rather than a run of small guesses. Decisions written down so they don't get relitigated. Deadlines treated as fixed, because in auction work they are — a sale date is a sale date.