They're all gone completely, or gone as in moved to where they don't have to suffer ridiculous real estate costs? There are approximately 50 machine shops within a stone's throw of my place out in the middle of nowhere. I haven't been around long enough to truly know if that is more or less than the historical norm, but best I can tell it is a growing sector locally.
replyKinda. 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.
replythat 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.
replyWell 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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