I recently read an interesting book by the guy who runs Sherline, a U.S. manufacturer of small lathes and milling machines. The book is sort of a meandering op

I recently read an interesting book by the guy who runs Sherline, a U.S. manufacturer of small lathes and milling machines. The book is sort of a meandering opus covering basic machining techniques but also talking about the history of the company and how the business was built. A lot of it involves finding ways to use technology and advanced manufacturing methods to keep U.S. manufacture competitive with Asian imports. E.g., the Sherline mill is built on an aluminum extrusion filled with some sort of epoxy/concrete for rigidity. Most Asian lathes are built on castings which are machined to final specifications. The Sherline method is more difficult and requires more capital investment, but requires less labor. Basically in every case he mentions, the way you keep a U.S. based company competitive with Asia is by engineering away all the labor. What you do with 15 people in an Asian factory using 100-year-old methods you do with one guy and millions of dollars worth of state-of-the-art tooling in a U.S. one. And even then it might only buy you a few years of competitiveness, until that machinery can get moved over to Asia and installed, and then they beat you based on the cost of the one guy. Anyway, it's an interesting book if you're interested in that sort of thing but doesn't do much to restore my confidence that we're not engaged in a race to the bottom as a country. (Link to book: http://www.sherline.com/bookplug.htm http://www.sherline.com/bookplug.htm)