4 ms·

I'm not arguing with your overall conclusion. However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constr

by nvader 1y ago

I'm not arguing with your overall conclusion. However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation. Unless that was your overall point, that capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.

noosphr 1y ago
You don't tinker, explore or innovate live in prod with the root account either. There are general purpose machines that you can make new parts on, and you open a pilot plant if you want to experiment with new manufacturing techniques.
DannyBee 1y ago
"If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation." This is the opposite of brittle. You say this as if those things are desired here. Those things would be a net negative to a well known production process for complex parts. After years, that process has been refined to basically the limits of the machines and the physics involved, to optimize cost vs speed. There is no "tinkering" or "innovation" necessary, and it would be highly detrimental. The experimental part is done until a new machine might provide some benefit (Often this is done by the manufacturer trying to sell them). Then you would test it out on that machine, not fuck up an existing well-running process. Also - not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some things are just done. Even if you could make them slightly better, it's not worth the overall cost over time for everyone. Being "better" is not enough, it has to actually be worth being better. Even things that are worth it, if you want customers to use your new thing, you have to support their old thing, even if that's painful or annoying for you. This is something that lots of ecosystems used to know (fortran is a good example, which is why NETLIB code from the 70's is still in wide use) but some newer ecosystems can't understand.
- nvader 1y ago
  This is fascinating. I really don't know much about the world you're describing, so thank you for sharing your perspective. Don't customer needs change over time? How would one adapt to shifting demand, or new materials becoming available, or old materials going out of supply.
  - simmonmt 1y ago
    It depends on the item. Let's take this screw pitch gage: https://www.starrett.com/details?cat-no=155 https://www.starrett.com/details?cat-no=155 Starrett doesn't really compete on price, as evidenced by the fact that this is a $95 item whereas the cheap alternatives go for closer to $10 on Amazon. So they're probably not making or selling very many of them. But they sell enough to make it worth keeping them in stock, and eventually they'll run out so they'll need to make new parts. Assuming low volume (I say this just in case I've accidentally picked the one weird thing that does sell like hotcakes), they're not going to spend any engineering time evolving that design. The input materials aren't going to stop being made. It is what it is, it does what it does, some people buy it, and so the name of the game becomes how do you make that specific thing they want with the least overhead? You use the same tooling you've used for the last 50 years. When you need a new batch of parts, you pull out that tooling, stamp out a bunch of leaves, and put the tooling away until you need it again. There are many many manufactured items that fall into this category.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      For those not familiar, Starrett has a reputation of quality. If you want the best you buy Starrett and pay the price. Often those Amazon alternatives are good enough, but often they have minor usability issues such that they are not as nice. Sometimes those Amazon alternatives are wrong in ways that matter and they can't be used at all.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 1y ago
        I have a couple of Starrett items only because I lucked out at machine shop auctions and they came in boxes with other stuff that the auction house couldn't be bothered to sort. I'm not a professional, I'm a metalworking hobbyist and the cheap imported electronic tools are more than good enough for me. However, my Starrett Dial Test Indicator is like jewelry, it's so beautifully well made. My cheap Chinese mechanical DTI is probably almost as accurate, but one is obviously far better made than the other.
bob1029 1y ago
> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic Isn't the entire point of a machine shop to be these things? > capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread. You cannot make a profit on a manufacturing line that is not being utilized. Keeping spare tools around and functional just in case is very expensive insurance policy. Semiconductor manufacturing follows these rules as aggressively as possible. The entire line is built based on the speed of the highest cost tools. There are cases where having redundant tooling would definitely prevent some scrap events, but the premium on this options contract is never worth it on average.
roenxi 1y ago
> However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation. The technical term for that is "the real world". Moment of perspective on just how weird the software people are that they don't just accept mucking around as expensive and dangerous.
- WJW 1y ago
  I don't think it's weird, it's just a feature of their/our tools. For software people, experimentation is cheap and easy. Version control means rollbacks are easy and fast. If you do break something, completely rebuilding the application from scratch is something that happens dozens of times per day anyway. When trying a new tool, it arrives with almost no lead time and often at zero cost, so the only price is a few person-hours of work.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  I don't think "mucking around" is the correct perspective there. It's hard to argue that most if not all of the recent innovations in manufacturing concern making chains more modulable, and easier and cheaper to modifywhich you could see as bringing manufacturing closer and closer to software engineering and this is probably to be even more true in the year to come. Large scale automation using mostly wireless technology, easily reconfigurable pick-and-place machine and robot conveyor, cheap additive manufacturing, easy to use and cheap CNC machining with precision which were until recently limited to very expensive models, we are quickly getting to a point where configuring a mostly automated short run is both manageable and cost effective provided you have invested in the tooling and have the engineers able to put it in place efficiently. I think that when people talk about bringing back manufacturing, most think Ford Model T assembly line in 1900 when the norm is quickly becoming a SpaceX-like pacing. That's basically what you are competing against in South East Asia and it sadly has far less need for an uneducated workforce than many expect.
  - helltone 1y ago
    Do you have some references for the pick and place and other reconfiguration things you mentioned. I've been out of this space for a while but last I checked these were still incredibly challenging things to get right.
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
> However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. It is very britlle. The situation described is what happens when there is significant loss of knowledge, little pressure to improve productivity and low products turnover. You start to fear changing things because you doubt you would be able to get back to the previous situation. That's a huge red flag because you are one unexpected incident/failure away from a very difficult situation. That's why someone mentioned process knowledge in another thread. If you have mastery of the process required to setup a manufacturing chain, you are far less afraid of changes and that's indeed key to being efficient and innovative. But the original commenter is also right that volume is key here. If your volumes are so low that short time unavailability or a small amount of failures is life threatening, you simply don't have the breathing room to properly operate.
scott_w 1y ago
> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering For plenty of industries, margins dictate that this is the desired outcome. The goal is to optimise output, not react quickly to changes. There are factories that work to order and can change to adapt to customer needs. These are fewer and further between, and tend to be more expensive as they aren't (by design) able to take advantage of economies of scale.
red-iron-pine 1y ago
> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation. for many machine shops the level of physical risk is > 0, often by a large amount. making widgets for X means handling large quantities of red hot metal; even simple stuff that's easy to get your hands around often shoots tons of oil, gas, and metal shavings in volumes that could hurt or cripple people. if my dev VM gets borked I reboot or revert it, but factories aren't so simple
- lbhdc 1y ago
  I find your perspective to be very software centric, and I expect many people who work in heavy industry to have a very different perspective about this. I was on the implementation end of a considerable amount of industrial automation and technological advancement about 10 years ago. When we were on site the result of making mistakes started at the death of a team member. There were a plethora of things that could kill you horribly, falls, hazardous environment, rotating equipment, etc. Yet we all survived overhauling processes in hundreds of plants. Working in hazardous environments isn't untenable, or even particularly difficult to do safely. In fact we worked at a much faster pace (with fewer mistakes) than corporate world I work in now.

by nvader 1y ago

noosphr 1y ago

You don't tinker, explore or innovate live in prod with the root account either. There are general purpose machines that you can make new parts on, and you open a pilot plant if you want to experiment with new manufacturing techniques.

DannyBee 1y ago

"If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation." This is the opposite of brittle. You say this as if those things are desired here. Those things would be a net negative to a well known production process for complex parts. After years, that process has been refined to basically the limits of the machines and the physics involved, to optimize cost vs speed. There is no "tinkering" or "innovation" necessary, and it would be highly detrimental. The experimental part is done until a new machine might provide some benefit (Often this is done by the manufacturer trying to sell them). Then you would test it out on that machine, not fuck up an existing well-running process. Also - not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some things are just done. Even if you could make them slightly better, it's not worth the overall cost over time for everyone. Being "better" is not enough, it has to actually be worth being better. Even things that are worth it, if you want customers to use your new thing, you have to support their old thing, even if that's painful or annoying for you. This is something that lots of ecosystems used to know (fortran is a good example, which is why NETLIB code from the 70's is still in wide use) but some newer ecosystems can't understand.

nvader 1y ago
This is fascinating. I really don't know much about the world you're describing, so thank you for sharing your perspective. Don't customer needs change over time? How would one adapt to shifting demand, or new materials becoming available, or old materials going out of supply.
- simmonmt 1y ago
  It depends on the item. Let's take this screw pitch gage: https://www.starrett.com/details?cat-no=155 https://www.starrett.com/details?cat-no=155 Starrett doesn't really compete on price, as evidenced by the fact that this is a $95 item whereas the cheap alternatives go for closer to $10 on Amazon. So they're probably not making or selling very many of them. But they sell enough to make it worth keeping them in stock, and eventually they'll run out so they'll need to make new parts. Assuming low volume (I say this just in case I've accidentally picked the one weird thing that does sell like hotcakes), they're not going to spend any engineering time evolving that design. The input materials aren't going to stop being made. It is what it is, it does what it does, some people buy it, and so the name of the game becomes how do you make that specific thing they want with the least overhead? You use the same tooling you've used for the last 50 years. When you need a new batch of parts, you pull out that tooling, stamp out a bunch of leaves, and put the tooling away until you need it again. There are many many manufactured items that fall into this category.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    For those not familiar, Starrett has a reputation of quality. If you want the best you buy Starrett and pay the price. Often those Amazon alternatives are good enough, but often they have minor usability issues such that they are not as nice. Sometimes those Amazon alternatives are wrong in ways that matter and they can't be used at all.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 1y ago
      I have a couple of Starrett items only because I lucked out at machine shop auctions and they came in boxes with other stuff that the auction house couldn't be bothered to sort. I'm not a professional, I'm a metalworking hobbyist and the cheap imported electronic tools are more than good enough for me. However, my Starrett Dial Test Indicator is like jewelry, it's so beautifully well made. My cheap Chinese mechanical DTI is probably almost as accurate, but one is obviously far better made than the other.

bob1029 1y ago

> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic Isn't the entire point of a machine shop to be these things? > capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread. You cannot make a profit on a manufacturing line that is not being utilized. Keeping spare tools around and functional just in case is very expensive insurance policy. Semiconductor manufacturing follows these rules as aggressively as possible. The entire line is built based on the speed of the highest cost tools. There are cases where having redundant tooling would definitely prevent some scrap events, but the premium on this options contract is never worth it on average.

roenxi 1y ago

> However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation. The technical term for that is "the real world". Moment of perspective on just how weird the software people are that they don't just accept mucking around as expensive and dangerous.

WJW 1y ago
I don't think it's weird, it's just a feature of their/our tools. For software people, experimentation is cheap and easy. Version control means rollbacks are easy and fast. If you do break something, completely rebuilding the application from scratch is something that happens dozens of times per day anyway. When trying a new tool, it arrives with almost no lead time and often at zero cost, so the only price is a few person-hours of work.
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
I don't think "mucking around" is the correct perspective there. It's hard to argue that most if not all of the recent innovations in manufacturing concern making chains more modulable, and easier and cheaper to modifywhich you could see as bringing manufacturing closer and closer to software engineering and this is probably to be even more true in the year to come. Large scale automation using mostly wireless technology, easily reconfigurable pick-and-place machine and robot conveyor, cheap additive manufacturing, easy to use and cheap CNC machining with precision which were until recently limited to very expensive models, we are quickly getting to a point where configuring a mostly automated short run is both manageable and cost effective provided you have invested in the tooling and have the engineers able to put it in place efficiently. I think that when people talk about bringing back manufacturing, most think Ford Model T assembly line in 1900 when the norm is quickly becoming a SpaceX-like pacing. That's basically what you are competing against in South East Asia and it sadly has far less need for an uneducated workforce than many expect.
- helltone 1y ago
  Do you have some references for the pick and place and other reconfiguration things you mentioned. I've been out of this space for a while but last I checked these were still incredibly challenging things to get right.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago

> However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. It is very britlle. The situation described is what happens when there is significant loss of knowledge, little pressure to improve productivity and low products turnover. You start to fear changing things because you doubt you would be able to get back to the previous situation. That's a huge red flag because you are one unexpected incident/failure away from a very difficult situation. That's why someone mentioned process knowledge in another thread. If you have mastery of the process required to setup a manufacturing chain, you are far less afraid of changes and that's indeed key to being efficient and innovative. But the original commenter is also right that volume is key here. If your volumes are so low that short time unavailability or a small amount of failures is life threatening, you simply don't have the breathing room to properly operate.

scott_w 1y ago

> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering For plenty of industries, margins dictate that this is the desired outcome. The goal is to optimise output, not react quickly to changes. There are factories that work to order and can change to adapt to customer needs. These are fewer and further between, and tend to be more expensive as they aren't (by design) able to take advantage of economies of scale.

red-iron-pine 1y ago

> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation. for many machine shops the level of physical risk is > 0, often by a large amount. making widgets for X means handling large quantities of red hot metal; even simple stuff that's easy to get your hands around often shoots tons of oil, gas, and metal shavings in volumes that could hurt or cripple people. if my dev VM gets borked I reboot or revert it, but factories aren't so simple

lbhdc 1y ago
I find your perspective to be very software centric, and I expect many people who work in heavy industry to have a very different perspective about this. I was on the implementation end of a considerable amount of industrial automation and technological advancement about 10 years ago. When we were on site the result of making mistakes started at the death of a team member. There were a plethora of things that could kill you horribly, falls, hazardous environment, rotating equipment, etc. Yet we all survived overhauling processes in hundreds of plants. Working in hazardous environments isn't untenable, or even particularly difficult to do safely. In fact we worked at a much faster pace (with fewer mistakes) than corporate world I work in now.