The Machinist

Weird thing about where I work: We have a really hard time keeping machinists to run/lead our machine shop

My boss made a comment to me recently that they've been trying to find people that have both machinist experience, as well as CAD experience so that they can handle the drawings side of things.

I'm guessing that anyone that can do both can find work elsewhere that pays more and is less stressful. And if I'm being frank, my company isn't willing to pay prevailing wage for a lot of positions, so this has been an ongoing issue for far too long.

The majority of our staffing issues can be traced back to not hiring enough people overall, existing employees always being overwhelmed with workload, and no one makes what they could be making elsewhere.

So what person with enough experience to run a machine shop, and who can also do CAD, accept a position where the pay isn't top-tier? They don't want to hire someone specifically to do CAD and they don't seem willing to hire another machinist so that the machine shop manager can stay in the office and do CAD and paperwork...that person also needs to help do production, if I understand their workflow correctly (/boggle)



Here's a funny story. We do sales and service for a bunch of industrial products. And one of the factories was selling us parts, as a distributor, with incorrect pricing. So this summer they literally TOLD US what prices were wrong and gave us a date at which the cost was going skyrocket to the correct price.

Seemingly, nobody thought about buying like 50 of a certain pre-machined part beforehand. I'm guessing because they were thinking 'hey we have our own machine shop; we'll just make them later'

So we have existing orders that take that part. But quoted at the old price. If we buy from the product factory at this point, we'd have to eat the new price difference from what we previously quoted. So why not just machine them now? I'm glad you asked.

Turns out (I may have some of this slightly wrong but you'll get the gist of things) this parts mates to a splined shaft, and because we were previously buying the part at a RIDICULOUSLY low (and incorrect) price, they never looked at what it would take to machine it. Then once they went to look at it, they realized that the bore was narrower than a lot of the bores they usually do, and they said that it would be a PITA to do the internal splines. So...they started sending orders for these out to ANOTHER machine shop.

Now, I don't know if that's just going to be their solution going forward or if they're working toward a solution, but I was literally like "WTF is even going on with you guys?"

I don't remember what the ID actually is (3/4"? 1"?) but it would be a similar pattern to this

There's also pieces where it isn't the spline 'b' that is 'squared' but rather it's the portions between those splines (also touching the arrows for the 'd' diameter line) that are squared off