In Season 4, Episode 2 of Cliff’s Notes, Tungco CEO Cliff Nance sits down with Evan Nance — his son, and one of Tungco’s newest full-time team members — recorded live at the ITIA conference in Berlin. It’s Evan’s first ITIA. He graduated from Belmont University in Nashville with a finance degree, got his own place, and is now a few months into running operations on Project 74’s zinc reclaim process. The episode is equal parts personal milestone and surprisingly technical — Evan walks through how the zinc reclaim process actually works, step by step, in plain language.
■ Watch Season 4, Episode 2 on YouTube:
The Zinc Reclaim Process — Explained by the Guy Running It
One of the most useful segments in this episode is Evan’s breakdown of the zinc reclaim process at Project 74. In plain terms: tungsten carbide drills go into a vacuum furnace along with zinc in ball form. The furnace heats up, the zinc goes from solid to gas, and in that gas phase it penetrates deep into the tungsten carbide matrix — all the way to the center of the drill.
As the furnace cools, the zinc solidifies back out, but what it leaves behind is a tungsten carbide structure that has been fundamentally changed. The drill that went in rigid and dense now has a chalk-like, almost freeze-dried consistency — hit it on the table and it crumbles. That brittleness is exactly the point: it makes the material dramatically easier to process back into usable tungsten powder. The furnace runs under tight vacuum throughout, because any air leak introduces oxygen, which oxidizes the material and ruins the batch.
Evan describes getting his first successful batch — uncoated drill material — as a meaningful moment. The team is now experimenting with different input materials to expand what the process can handle.
Classroom vs. Real World — and Mike Rowe’s Poster
The episode’s other strong thread is Evan’s reflection on what a finance degree actually prepared him for vs. what working full time at Tungco has taught him in just a few months. His take: the fundamentals from Belmont — cash flows, investment thinking, how businesses run — are genuinely useful, but the real world demands thinking on your feet in ways a textbook never replicates.
Cliff shares a Mike Rowe story from the Defense Industrial Base (DIBx) conference that frames this perfectly. Rowe described a poster from his high school economics class in the 1970s: two images side by side, one of a dirty, sad-looking tradesman holding a wrench, the other of a bright, confident doctor. The caption: ‘Work smarter, not harder.’ Rowe’s point — which landed hard at a defense industry conference focused on rebuilding skilled labor pipelines — is that this narrative, however well-intentioned, quietly devalued the trades for an entire generation. The jobs didn’t go away. The respect for them did. And that needs to change.
Tags
tungsten recycling, zinc reclaim process, Project 74, Tungco, Evan Nance, Cliff Nance, Cliff’s Notes podcast, ITIA Berlin, skilled trades, Mike Rowe, next generation manufacturing, family business, tungsten carbide recycling, vacuum furnace, zinc process tungsten, Belmont University, defense industrial base, DIBx
