[extrapickles]

You can get electronic probes that measure the stock automatically so you don’t need precision blanks. The probe loads in the tool changer so it can be completely automated. Automatic tool setting makes it so operators don’t need to measure new tooling in tool holders, and tooling wear can be monitored automatically.

I dabble in running a small machine-shop, and we are able to automate a good chunk of what people still do manually. The stock we use is cheap, straight from the mill stuff as we have the machine measure the stock with an electronic probe. The machines also have 20 pallets, so once the stock is loaded, the operator can leave the machine for 20x the cycle time of a part. The pallets don’t even have to be the same product, so we can queue up replacement of inventory with just the quantity that a customer ordered and offer a bunch of made-to-order parts with reasonable turnaround times.

The machines also monitor spindle vibration so they can tell if a tool looses an insert, and the tool-setter is used to check if solid tooling is still intact.

The only manual parts are taking raw materials off the suppliers truck, unloading finished parts (next on automation list), final assembly (working on automation for this), occasionally loading new tools as they wear/break and fulfillment.

[Animats]

The machines also monitor spindle vibration so they can tell if a tool looses an insert, and the tool-setter is used to check if solid tooling is still intact.

That's a key feature. For unattended operation, you must have good fault detection. This tends to be an overpriced extra cost option on machine tools.

There are a lot of things in industrial automation that cost more than they should. Motors with encoders, for example.

[bsder]

> There are a lot of things in industrial automation that cost more than they should. Motors with encoders, for example.

Not really. Motors with encoders aren't really much different in price from the alternatives at industrial sizes.

What you do see is that the transition from hobbyist machines to production machines is quite a significant price change. The jump from, say, a Tormach to a Haas is almost x10 (about $10,000 to $100,000).

This is not a surprise. Those machines are expected to run 24/7 and, if they don't, people are going to get angry and reputations come into play.

This space is optimized for production and if you're not, you're the outlier. Pre-Covid I accidentally tripped a Sunday delivery at the office from one of the machine tool suppliers--scared the hell out of me when someone knocked on my office door at 3:00PM on a Sunday. The delivery guy was just as confused--he had never delivered to such a nice office area. We both had a good chuckle about it all.

(Side anecdote: I had a really nice conversation with the late founder of Tormach many moons ago at a LittleMachineShop open house about servomotors vs steppers. He was quite blunt--the issue wasn't motor cost but customer service cost. His customer service budget would need to go up about $300K per year for about 3 years every time he introduced or changed some major machine feature. So, any change needed to earn $1M over 3 years and then be net positive after that in order to get implemented. Servomotors wouldn't pass that threshold--so unless a competitor forced him to, that upgrade wasn't happening.)

[extrapickles]

Most things I’ve found to be reasonably priced for what they are.

Most products are made with much higher quality materials than you would find in consumer gear. Also the “rated” spec for parts is expected to be understated as the “unreliable” part is one that fails in under 7-10 years of being run at the absolute limit of its spec. If a part fails in 2 years I will completely stop using that vendors products, as having a machine that is worth $1k/hr going down for even a day or two wipes out any savings.

Another factor is the total sales volume of automation products is low, so the engineering costs dominate pretty much everything in that space, even though everything is somewhat optimized to reduce engineering time (the buyers and/or vendors).

[ska]

I don't think actuators are crazy overpriced really. It's true that if you are going to bother packaging them you are probably using decent-to-good quality everything, but that's what you want for non-toy projects anyway. And for toy projects if your budget is really tight no big deal to set up the encoder yourself on this one-off.

[dwohnitmok]

Wow! That really does sound closer to what I thought CNC meant before I stepped into a machine shop.

That's pretty amazing stuff.

[PragmaticPulp]

This rabbit hole goes as deep as your budget allows.

If you're curious, search for Renishaw probes on youtube. They make some of the best mainstream tooling in this space.

[singularity2001]

To turn on the probe, type G65 P9832. The CNC software world needs serious disruption / dev UI updates.

[riskneutral]

Is this a profitable business?

[extrapickles]

If you are careful yes. Doing job shop work (making other peoples parts) is hard to make a good profit as people expect overseas dumping rates.

The real profit comes from making your own products, as then you can force competition to also build their own factory to compete. By having lean production we can have a very large part catalog without having large amounts of inventory for low sales velocity parts.

We have at least a hundred variants that may only sell a dozen or two $100 parts per year, but they only cost us a line in the catalog to maintain the SKU. Since the products are for industrial use, most of our customers like the fact that we have in some cases been making the exact same part for nearly 30 years, which encourages them to design our products into theirs as we never discontinue products, so they don’t have to re-engineer theirs (our products in turn get used in machinery that might have a 10-100 unit/year global market).

[valdiorn]

You've got me super curious. What sort of industries are you catering for when making your own products?

[throwaway0a5e]

Profitable? Yes.

Easy money? No

Fat margins? Hahahahahaha

(I.e. it's like most industries)