The Machinist

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Erronius

Macho Ma'am
<Gold Donor>
16,456
42,340
Weird thing about where I work: We have a really hard time keeping machinists to run/lead our machine shop

My boss made a comment to me recently that they've been trying to find people that have both machinist experience, as well as CAD experience so that they can handle the drawings side of things.

I'm guessing that anyone that can do both can find work elsewhere that pays more and is less stressful. And if I'm being frank, my company isn't willing to pay prevailing wage for a lot of positions, so this has been an ongoing issue for far too long.

The majority of our staffing issues can be traced back to not hiring enough people overall, existing employees always being overwhelmed with workload, and no one makes what they could be making elsewhere.

So what person with enough experience to run a machine shop, and who can also do CAD, accept a position where the pay isn't top-tier? They don't want to hire someone specifically to do CAD and they don't seem willing to hire another machinist so that the machine shop manager can stay in the office and do CAD and paperwork...that person also needs to help do production, if I understand their workflow correctly (/boggle)



Here's a funny story. We do sales and service for a bunch of industrial products. And one of the factories was selling us parts, as a distributor, with incorrect pricing. So this summer they literally TOLD US what prices were wrong and gave us a date at which the cost was going skyrocket to the correct price.

Seemingly, nobody thought about buying like 50 of a certain pre-machined part beforehand. I'm guessing because they were thinking 'hey we have our own machine shop; we'll just make them later'

So we have existing orders that take that part. But quoted at the old price. If we buy from the product factory at this point, we'd have to eat the new price difference from what we previously quoted. So why not just machine them now? I'm glad you asked.

Turns out (I may have some of this slightly wrong but you'll get the gist of things) this parts mates to a splined shaft, and because we were previously buying the part at a RIDICULOUSLY low (and incorrect) price, they never looked at what it would take to machine it. Then once they went to look at it, they realized that the bore was narrower than a lot of the bores they usually do, and they said that it would be a PITA to do the internal splines. So...they started sending orders for these out to ANOTHER machine shop.

Now, I don't know if that's just going to be their solution going forward or if they're working toward a solution, but I was literally like "WTF is even going on with you guys?"

I don't remember what the ID actually is (3/4"? 1"?) but it would be a similar pattern to this

There's also pieces where it isn't the spline 'b' that is 'squared' but rather it's the portions between those splines (also touching the arrows for the 'd' diameter line) that are squared off

1667667748628.png
 

latheboy

Trakanon Raider
809
1,011
Sounds like they need to have a good think about the way the company is run .. Internal splines are easy, if you have the tooling.
Tooling is expensive if you do every different process though, that's why we have specialist shops.
I do miss working on machines at work.
 
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Kharzette

Watcher of Overs
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I stumbled across this guy's channel and thought of this thread :)

It came up for me because I've been binging on transistor / logic / cpu arch stuff on youtube for some reason, but I watched the entire first vid.

The game Eco has a lot of mechanical powered craft stations. They don't actually make you hook up belts and shafts like the guy in the video has though. Love how he had all that running along the ceiling.

His shaper looks right out of the game :)
 
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Borzak

Bronze Baron of the Realm
24,422
31,638
In college toured a peckerwood mill - small sawmill. It was steam powered and had the belts on the ceiling. They had a flywheel that was probably 10-12 foot in diameter. They would shut down at the end of the day and fire up the next morning and the flywheel would barely still be spinning. Cool stuff.
 
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latheboy

Trakanon Raider
809
1,011
IMG_20230317_212813_705.jpg

Haven't made anything for a while, got excited about streetluges again so knocked one up.
Had a guy help with dimensions, designed in CAD and laser cut and folded at work.. busted out the Tig welder for a few bits and bamm.
Just need a head rest and I can go and scare myself..
 
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