The long, ever faster decline of machining skills in the USA | Hacker News Reader

The long, ever faster decline of machining skills in the USA

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11 pointsbarry-cotter6 comments

> Even worse, when the one shop that will grind the cranks the way we tell them we need them loses their crank grinder to retirement in another year or two, they do not plan to replace him.

Given this reason, it seems like the core cause is that it is niche work of declining relevance.

Is this at least partially the product of a culture of disposable goods? People would rather buy a new TV every few years than fix them. As wasteful as it seems, people seem to choose this option more and more with their purchase habits. Cars get more modular and less repairable every year. One day, if/when cheap replacements are no longer available, we might adapt. Or we might be sorry.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39044586 (“What Happened to the US Machine Tool Industry?”)

https://parallelventures.com/the-decline-of-u-s-precision-ma...

https://www.amazon.com/When-machine-stopped-cautionary-indus...

It is also that goods are in general a lot more reliable.

40 years ago if you got a car to 100,000 miles you called all your friends to brag - the car had rust holes all over, burned oil, and had many other problems. Today cars go 300k miles if you want. Today you don't have to file points, or most of the other things people had to do.

50 years ago a color TV would cost you $1000 - that is not inflation adjusted. It would be scrap in a couple years, but you could have a TV repair person replace the tubes and do some other small adjustments to bring it back to new for much less. Now a TV has transistors (chips) and so is not made to be repaired - but it will last a lot longer and costs a lot less (though some TVs use cheap capacitors that will fail fast and make it scrap unless you know how to replace them - the tubes were made to be replace while capacitors are not).

That just means the dies and molds wear out faster and need replaced. Your TV isn't machined but making it consumes machining services.

"The long, ever faster decline of machinist pay in the USA"

"The long, ever faster decline of management skills in machining"

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