why we build!

friends, i am now turning 62, and while surfing the net last few days, i have been looking for a K&T eB, and have found only a very few pictures if any. wouldnt Parsons be dismayed? My Uncle george dtarted me on an atlas lathe when i was seven, a bridgport mill when i was nine, then i watched Jimmy stewart in the lone egle playing Lindburgh, and have been hooked on harleys, airplanes, and all engines and machine work since! America, no longer has the tool box mentality! AND THIS! will be the downfall of our country gentlemen! i am talking about education standards, the lack of, impossible equality of outcome, and a so called service based economy that is doomed to failure! all through our history, we found answers to impossible questions! we grow food for the entire world! we build and have built so many astounding things that make our very existence, a Godsend! Now, the people who say they know better, have dumbed out children down, and made them lazy, and moronic! What i am trying to say my friends, not enough people know WHAT WE DO!, and HOW! we do it! and how they benefit from our labors, not mention our hobbies! And the things that come from our work, minds, and problem solving! I am no pr guy, but whilke looking for that eB, i realized that even though we need cnc, and all the speed we can get to make parts, equal sign, MONEY! we are not teaching enough young people our trade and work, to keep this country ahead of everyone else! YES, manual is slow, but deliberate! YES old NC is slow, but also for teaching confidence and precision. i have had students come to my business, that can not add, subtract, mulitply or divide, with out a darned calculater, this is madness! i hope some here can articulate better than i ,my frustration with the loss of forsight and the challenge of hard work, that brings satisfaction from a jobe WELL DONE! and brings more young guys to this realization, and girls too! i have been teaching men and women for many years this trade, but i see not enough, and it worries me that they are being stifled! oh well, just trying to see if antone else feels that the sensation of hope and wonder, of what can be accomplished, when some one tell you IT CANT BE DONE! WE DO IT! john r thellin 2 trinity texas! thanks for letting me say whats on my mind!

I agree with you.

As things get easier people "try" less.
So many people that show up here interviewing for CnC positions, dont
really understand math.

But then again we dont pay very well either.

If they don't really understand math maybe they won't figure out how lousy your shop pays....

I do agree Yes, we have a problem. Where to start? anyone? It isn't enough to complain and explain. We must assert ourselves if necessary do it ourselves, because no one in politics, education, and the service economy will do it for us. I have seen community collages and High Schools remove trade curriculum. I have seen "apprentices" that I would not have signed off on, yet they could BS their way into a "journeyman" title and non tradesman managers would sign off on it. I have heard "They finished their course work for the certificate" never mind that they couldn't figure out Trigonometry or algebra. Let alone run a machine with out screwing something up.

I graduated from the local community college in 95 with a degree in "Machine Processes".

When I started, there were 27 guys in my class. After Christmas break, we were down to 12. Of those guys, I think no more than 5 of us finished the course.

Shortly thereafter, the college discontinued the course. With that enrollment, do you blame them?

My first job out of college paid less than $8/hr. I took me until 2000 until I found a job paying more than $20/hr and by that time, I had a wife and a child. And we all know what the housing market was like in 2000.

So I've never really been able to "make a living" in this trade. I've done OK. But it's always a struggle.

Why would anyone sign up for this when they can get into computers or banking or something like that and make 5 times more money?

And then, when I get 10 years in to a decent job, the company decides I'm too expensive and ships my job to Mexico.

So again, who would sign up for something like this? You're going to get guys from the bottom of the barrel. If I were starting out today, I'd go be a pharmacist and knock down 100k out of school.

We must be teaching too many our trade,supply and demand.We need higher wages/
shop rates but the supply of cheap shops and guys is holding us back.I never encourage young people to go into any manual trade.Was good but now technology has changed all that.Calculators are a tool.Who cares if you can do your times tables in your head,sheese,
why not memorize log tables and trig tables while we are at it.Thinking ,conceptualizing,
networking those are some of the tools needed now.

What is not taken into consderation is that we make parts for larger companies who have externalized the cost of a machine shop. Those companies think our prices are to high and have moved on to foriegn shores. All that is left is service, manufacturing will not return until it is too expensive everywhere else in the world, as long as there are under developed countries with lots of poor people corporations will seek out cheap labor. One saving grace could be 200 dollar a barrel oil, it will bring manufacturing back since offshoring it will cost too much to transport it back. But even then we are only 350 million people and china is billions, so if they buy the crap themselves they wont need to ship it back for us to buy. Once you skip a generation the knowledge is lost and must be recreated not just learned, we are in the sunset of an empire.

I don't think the lose of some technologies is going to force the US
in to its demise.Not knowing how to manually turn the cranks on machines designed 200 years ago is not a bad thing.Except for us old guys.I wonder what Tesla
might have accomplished if he had today's computers and cnc equipment
to help ?.How many guys on this forum are cranking out amazing stuff with no idea
of manual machining. The first thing to do is chuck the tv nightly news.It is sending out a distorted image of your country.Ours does to.

I suppose the most encouraging thing I can say is that I believe that the rose blooms late in the machining trade afa $$. I still make more than most of my non machinist friends but I do get a bit dirtier doing it. It didn't really start to pay well till i was about 35. but I love this work....

jpete said:

I graduated from the local community college in 95 with a degree in "Machine Processes".

When I started, there were 27 guys in my class. After Christmas break, we were down to 12. Of those guys, I think no more than 5 of us finished the course.

Shortly thereafter, the college discontinued the course. With that enrollment, do you blame them?

My first job out of college paid less than $8/hr. I took me until 2000 until I found a job paying more than $20/hr and by that time, I had a wife and a child. And we all know what the housing market was like in 2000.

So I've never really been able to "make a living" in this trade. I've done OK. But it's always a struggle.

Why would anyone sign up for this when they can get into computers or banking or something like that and make 5 times more money?

And then, when I get 10 years in to a decent job, the company decides I'm too expensive and ships my job to Mexico.

So again, who would sign up for something like this? You're going to get guys from the bottom of the barrel. If I were starting out today, I'd go be a pharmacist and knock down 100k out of school.

Click to expand...

Sad but true.

gentlemen i reply

to all, the first thing you all have to remember is this, you are no longer competeing in a local market! The internet has now made all of us GLOBAL! to kieth, calculaters, are great, but, when the battery goes dead on the night shift, you have to figure the sizes manually! As for wages, the market will only pay so much for each product, it is better to say no politely, than to do a job for nothing! every man in the shop today has to produce, period! i charge 75.00 dollars an hour, for manual and cnc. i pay my man at the shop, twenty dolars and hour, no benefits. i have been open now for three years, and still have not taken a check for me or my partners. i live on a small stipend for retirement, everthing goes back into the company to keep expanding. one more thing, i tell my employee THANK YOU, EVERY DAY HE WORKS FOR ME! i have been to pta meetings, school board meetings, and many other places in regards to teaching better math and sskills to ouryonger people. there are many young people who still love to build things. the operative word here is love! I fyou don t love what you do for a living, then you are just going to be miserable, and that is not good for morale in the shop. Yes i too want more money and more work, but the bottom line here is PROFIT! i do everything form oil filed to medical to the motorcycle products that i produce, i even fix pots and pans for the elderly, and made parts for old tractors, bulldozers, pile drivers, you name it! repiar pays good money too, and people have thanked me many times for keeping their old equipment running. America is not dead yet gentlemen, she just needs more of us to stand up for her, and loudly!

I think the arithmetic/calculator debate is similar to the manual/cnc debate. The principles of one underlies the other, but understanding the principles is sufficient, without spending wads of time becoming overly proficient in learning to do things the hard way.

Having said that, I'm not dead certain that one really gets a gut understanding of the principles without doing quite a bit of practice doing stuff the hard way for a while.

What is really necessary is a sufficient understanding of the basics so that you can go further and take advanced mathematics and algebra, and understand how to set up and manipulate equations, and logic.

I don't trust myself to add up a bank deposit correctly without checking it with a machine, but I can still set up equations and solve them with the help of a machine, and that skill is more important than spending hours honing my times tables up to 1000

kpotter said:

What is not taken into consderation is that we make parts for larger companies who have externalized the cost of a machine shop. Those companies think our prices are to high and have moved on to foriegn shores. All that is left is service, manufacturing will not return until it is too expensive everywhere else in the world, as long as there are under developed countries with lots of poor people corporations will seek out cheap labor. One saving grace could be 200 dollar a barrel oil, it will bring manufacturing back since offshoring it will cost too much to transport it back. But even then we are only 350 million people and china is billions, so if they buy the crap themselves they wont need to ship it back for us to buy. Once you skip a generation the knowledge is lost and must be recreated not just learned, we are in the sunset of an empire.

Click to expand...

Ponder the results of the Chinese, finally, after more than ten years of earnestly trying, being successful at detaching the USD, from the value of those barrels.

Nothing else, and I mean nothing, makes our funny money worth more than paper, other than it's association with oil prices.