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by fragmede 13 days ago
Kinda. What's the lead time on my high precision metal part that needs to be cut on a 6-axis lathe? Or a metal 3d print? Neither of those machines are cheap, so not only is lead time astronomical, profit on them is also pretty great for the machine shop, which implies there's room for more machine shops. There's a lot of red tape for the orders I see, (CMMI etc) so maybe AI will help machine shops get that and be competitive.
1 comments
convolvatron 13 days ago
that last point doesn't really follow. yes, you can do you ok if you have the kind of expertise to actually make that high end part and the position in the market to get the kind of work, but I think you overstate the margins and its certainly not the 'are you going to drop people or just increase your volume' argument that gp was making.
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fragmede 13 days ago
Well yeah, I'm not gp. My point is that, sure, machine shop count has gone down, but machine shop capacity, with conditions, currently has a 16 week lead time and high prices. If the argument is "there is enough machine shop output that everyone is going to get fired after the robots come" I'm saying there's a long way to go. And the same argument for writing software applies to machine shops. There's more to programming than writing code itself. There's room to grow upwards and meet the customer more where they're at so the machine shop isn't an extension of a robot that does cut x at point y and bends at z, but with the design process of the part before it gets to that.
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convolvatron 13 days ago
fair enough, I don't participate really in the high end market, so I don't have any real insight. does seem like something of a market failure. the two things that stand out to me though is the very high capital cost that probably adds friction to investment, but probably more the people skills. there are tens of thousands of banger low precision machinists like me out of work, but outside of Europe where do the high-precision machinists actually come from? particularly one that shade over into material science and would be effective design partners. are those mechanical engineers that just specialized?
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