CNC machinist: Most hated job list

[Dairsie]

For my part most hated parts of wood machining.

1. During apprenticeship stoking the fire and going for messages
2. Being the operator of the old Edge type edge banders that needed the glue pots cleaned every shift
3. The DOS machines going on the blink and not letting you in to change anything
4. The price of spares from Italy
5. The waiting for spares from Italy

A could go on

Dairsie

[AdieR]

Thing is, CNC's in an industrial environment tend to lend themselves to high volume, repetitive type work sometimes doing thousands of components in a single run, and in some cases running totally unmanned having been pre-programmed beforehand and running automatic barfeeders. The advent of automatic probing systems means that their is little need for inspection in some cases as the machine decides for itself if the barstock is the right size to start with, decides if the components produced conform to spec / size etc. To a large extent, it's about competing on price with the likes of the Chinese and other Eastern economies who earn a fraction of the wages of western workers. Even CNC programmers (not just operators) are becoming redundant as drawings are downloaded to machines from CAD files on a laptop.

Speak to someone like a toolmaker who has a far broader engineering knowledge and a better knowledge of machining (and fitting) processes and can find their way round manual and CNC machines, and you might get a different answer; plenty CNC operators I can think of would be puzzled if they had to do a job on a manual machine.