A few years ago, maybe ten, laser cutting businesses were rare and high tech and it seemed that fabricators were looking for excuses to give jobs to the very few which existed. Mostly as an experiment to find out what the new machines offered to their products. Now they are a little more numerous and the mystique less, well mystifying.
Similarly waterjet cutters are increasingly utilised when ten years ago only government in our technology park could afford to own one for experimental and prototype work. As private firms established their waterjets they complained at having to compete against the government owned machine and so the government body was forced to sell their machine.
If there is any point to this rant could I suggest that maybe 20 years ago when much of the capital machinery in use here was old and worn out business owners were forced to take a very serious look at the future of their enterprises.
With the many new pressures like metrication, standards, closer tolerances being demanded and new responsibilities of collecting indirect taxes for the government in the form of the Goods and Services tax business owners had to decide if they wanted to compete in this new much more competitive environment.
Quite a number of business owners chose to retire while a few made a very significant commitment to new technology machine tools and being prepared to challenge the Asian juggernaut for a share of a shrinking local market.
If you think back ten or twenty years how may machinists would there be who were familiar with computer controlled anything. Okay NC machining was here and there but in the main still relied on punched tape programs.
So is there a question in this diatribe? One that occurs to me is do you all realise how far we have come in such a short time? Our fathers didn't have to cope with such a revolutionary change in the way their trade was performed or the skills they had to acquire. In my opinion many of the people participating in this forum have had to undergo an extreme learning curve with, I suspect, little help from their employers.
It's a very different thing to train new machinists in the new technology but quite another to introduce older employees who for decades performed tasks not much differently than the approach that their grandfathers adopted and while working in their trade had to upgrade their skills so significantly.
Are you coping with the demands of this new manufacturing environment or do you just want to give up and go fishing?
