Hillside Fab
Cast Iron
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2014
- Location
- Missouri
Everyone says dont quit your day job until you have some steady work and savings built up. I've ditched the day job for about a year now, and work is steady enough. Savings.... well that gets converted to tooling at a 1.5:1 (in their favor) ratio seems like.
I've been positioning myself as the guy to call for general machine work when nobody else wants to do your parts, whether it's deadlines, tolerances, larger size, needs engineering, mobile work, or 0.1% machinability index material, or ideally all the above.
I see quite a few rfqs that there just is no way to get done on time without some help. But they arent generic lever yanking / button pushing work, and a lot of the jobs would need at least some CNC work. It's maybe 50 parts at 1-4x each. And most of them are big enough to need a forklift or crane to load in a machine, and have tolerances that you need a decent background in the trade to inspect.
Seems like the older gentlemen who are retired and might consider part time work to get out of the house dont want to mess with anything they cant load by hand, and if cnc comes up, just forget about it - and the young bucks wouldnt be interested in part time, or ideal to trust with a 2000lb block of stainless.
So do I just dive in the deep end, become HR person, hire anyone that seems sober, and pray - or is there a method to getting past this growing pain? and thanks for reading.
I've been positioning myself as the guy to call for general machine work when nobody else wants to do your parts, whether it's deadlines, tolerances, larger size, needs engineering, mobile work, or 0.1% machinability index material, or ideally all the above.
I see quite a few rfqs that there just is no way to get done on time without some help. But they arent generic lever yanking / button pushing work, and a lot of the jobs would need at least some CNC work. It's maybe 50 parts at 1-4x each. And most of them are big enough to need a forklift or crane to load in a machine, and have tolerances that you need a decent background in the trade to inspect.
Seems like the older gentlemen who are retired and might consider part time work to get out of the house dont want to mess with anything they cant load by hand, and if cnc comes up, just forget about it - and the young bucks wouldnt be interested in part time, or ideal to trust with a 2000lb block of stainless.
So do I just dive in the deep end, become HR person, hire anyone that seems sober, and pray - or is there a method to getting past this growing pain? and thanks for reading.