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Tools have their own advantages and disadvantages, and "new" tools are no exception. It would be ridiculous to produce 10,000,000 widgets with a manual lathe.

Tools have their own advantages and disadvantages, and "new" tools are no exception. It would be ridiculous to produce 10,000,000 widgets with a manual lathe. The increase in time and material waste would be multiplied 10m times, so even a very small improvement would have huge impact on the cost. It would likely be similarly ridiculous to produce 5 widgets with a CNC. Sure, maybe doing it manually will take an hour per widget instead of five minutes with the CNC, but modeling, creating toolpaths, testing, and optimizing the resultant gcode would likely take more time that just doing it the "inefficient" manual way. More generally, it seems like it's almost always worthwhile to preserve "the old ways", at least in some form. We don't need our entire workforce of machinists to be able to hop on a manual lathe and knock out parts precisely and efficiently - but if we don't have some that can do that, we're stuck with processes that are extremely inefficient for some jobs. In machining, there will always be a place for someone who specializes in fully manual work. There will always be a place for someone who is an expect in operating and supporting CNC machinery. Now there's also a place for people who are proficient enough in both areas to reliably know which process is appropriate for a given job.

wizofaus 4y ago
"It would likely be similarly ridiculous to produce 5 widgets with a CNC" Are you sure about that? If the part has exceptionally precise requirements but was relatively easy to define the cutting path for (because it made use of existing tools to do so), I would think even a single widget might be more cheaply and accurately produced by CNC than manually. I actually worked on software that generated CNC routing paths for widgets produced in small quantities, and while it's true if the software was written just for any single widget it wouldn't have been economical, it was able to generate a large number of routing paths based on minor tweaks to the inputs. As far as I knew, the effort required to load up various path configurations and produce small numbers of widgets each time wasn't that significant.
bsder 4y ago
> It would likely be similarly ridiculous to produce 5 widgets with a CNC. It is almost always faster to use CNC in all cases unless what you are machining is incredibly simple. Manual machining is likely most used in "unit of one" where the thing is big as large CNC machines are ferociously expensive.
- fourjawchuck 4y ago
  I am a manual machinist. Our shop is more or less that, a job shop that does one-offs or short run work on items that are larger than most cnc machines. However some of the machines have fanuc controls and can thus run programs as well.

wizofaus 4y ago

"It would likely be similarly ridiculous to produce 5 widgets with a CNC" Are you sure about that? If the part has exceptionally precise requirements but was relatively easy to define the cutting path for (because it made use of existing tools to do so), I would think even a single widget might be more cheaply and accurately produced by CNC than manually. I actually worked on software that generated CNC routing paths for widgets produced in small quantities, and while it's true if the software was written just for any single widget it wouldn't have been economical, it was able to generate a large number of routing paths based on minor tweaks to the inputs. As far as I knew, the effort required to load up various path configurations and produce small numbers of widgets each time wasn't that significant.

bsder 4y ago

> It would likely be similarly ridiculous to produce 5 widgets with a CNC. It is almost always faster to use CNC in all cases unless what you are machining is incredibly simple. Manual machining is likely most used in "unit of one" where the thing is big as large CNC machines are ferociously expensive.

fourjawchuck 4y ago
I am a manual machinist. Our shop is more or less that, a job shop that does one-offs or short run work on items that are larger than most cnc machines. However some of the machines have fanuc controls and can thus run programs as well.