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by eloisius
1774 days ago
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Thanks for your take on it, I really don't want to be the anti-tech curmudgeon so I'm sincerely happy to read a different perspective. Especially your last paragraph makes me feel better. Maybe it's because CNC technology has come a long way since 15 years ago, or more likely because the staircase company I worked for were just cheapskates willing to strip mine their company's reputation. I feel like I had to recalibrate the damn thing hourly. The vacuum that held the stringers in place was not strong enough, so they would break loose and end up jamming the routing bit constantly. Having PTSD thinking about it. |
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But yes vacuum clamping is still annoying. There are of course strategies like onion skinning, leaving tabs. On nesting machines I often cover the table with laminate if I'm running small parts and need to prevent vacuum loss through the spoil board.
Most people that I talk to that brought CNC into a shop haven't seem to have laid anyone off but instead seem to be able to retrain people and grow sales because of the new capacity it brought.
Although if there are people who are actually button pushers and legitimately bring nothing else to the table I think their time is limited. I wish I could find the video but last year our CNC vendor sent me a video of a concept manufacturing cell using an autonomous guided vehicle. It blew my mind. There was no operators or conveyors just robots cutting a whole lot of different sized parts of of different material at the same time. The parts got stacked on a pallets which the AGV drove around to the different operations. They were even showing off handling non rectangular parts with no problem.
Probably not that expensive either I was thinking maybe $2 million based on the prices of machines I knew and... wildly guessing at the price of the robotics. Expensive but imagine 15 more years?