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What happened to the US machine tool industry?

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Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#61

Post by dukeyukey »

MajimasEyepatch wrote: post #19
grow2grow wrote: post #2

Right, it seems the U.S. economy is trying to say, "making elementary machine tools is beneath us." The important bit is at the end: the U.S. is still a top buyer of machine tools (made elsewhere). Is the same thing to happen with software? When it becomes worth the time of the U.S. economy to produce basic machine tools again, they'll get to create new machine tools factories using all the latest technology: so it i…

> Is the same thing to happen with software? Offshoring in software development has been around for a very long time. Most large US companies have a mix of onshore and offshore devs. The more mundane the software, and the tighter the financial macro-environment, the more the ratio shifts toward offshoring. This is the way the offshoring cycle has worked for a long time. However, unlike hardware, software is about inf…

> I have seen firsthand that non-US teams building software for US consumers often don't quite understand the reasoning behind the requirements and may lack polish around basic things like English

Something I'm curious about, have you seen this happen with countries culturally close to the US? Like teams based in Canada, Ireland, or the UK?

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#62

Post by cityofdelusion »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #42

> Constant pressure to hit quarterly performance targets meant that machine quality often suffered. In some cases, machines would be shipped out the door unfinished so the delivery could be booked, and assembly would be completed by service technicians at the customer’s location. In his history of the American machine tool industry, Albert Albrecht states that “the actions of these larger corporations and conglomerat…

The metric system wasn’t a factor, it was all economics as laid out in the article. Tooling both foreign and domestic was/is a mixture of imperial and metric to meet certain markets. The major force behind machining, automotive, did their conversions to metric back in the 1970s. The U.S. was seriously lacking in computerized machining and had plenty of time to shift to metric based machines, but the MBAs had already determined long before that they preferred overseas manufacturing at a fraction of the cost.

Machining today is heavy metric, even in the U.S. and there is still no economic way to make it all work, much like with steel production and other manufacturing concerns.

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#63

Post by dale_glass »

KevinMS wrote: post #57
cantrevealname wrote: post #9

> Consider a company that manufactures its product on lathes. Assume that it has ten lathes that can just meet production requirements. Assume also that each lathe wears out in ten years and that the company has its investment plans so well organized that one lathe is replaced every year. Now consider what will happen if there is a 10 percent increase in demand for the product. The plant will need eleven lathes to me…

Do lathes actually wear out? Machine tools are built like tanks and could probably last until the end of time, you just need to replace the bearings and motors occasionally.

Yes, it's a machine with many moving parts. There's bearings, gears, ball screws, lead screw, belts, etc. There's also multiple precision ground surfaces that wear unevenly because some parts of the surface get far more use than others.

The bed tends to accumulate damage over time, as try as you might, you'll eventually drop something heavy on it.

A lot of it is very much fixable, but I suppose that eventually one decides it's too much to bother, especially if something is damaged is badly enough, or the lathe is old enough and it doesn't make much business sense to fix it.

If you abuse a machine badly enough you can get something bent to the point it's not really worth fixing.

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#64

Post by michaelt »

grow2grow wrote: post #2

Right, it seems the U.S. economy is trying to say, "making elementary machine tools is beneath us." The important bit is at the end: the U.S. is still a top buyer of machine tools (made elsewhere). Is the same thing to happen with software? When it becomes worth the time of the U.S. economy to produce basic machine tools again, they'll get to create new machine tools factories using all the latest technology: so it i…

> Is the same thing to happen with software?

I have a theory that one of the major challenges facing manufacturing in the US is actually the opposite.

A manufacturing company in the US is competing for smart, numerate STEM graduates with the likes of Google who offer graduates $180,000 with zero experience (or so I'm told)

But they're also competing with manufacturers in the far east, where $40,000 is a great salary, for someone with several years of experience.

Difficult to win both competitions.

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#65

Post by Kon-Peki »

KevinMS wrote: post #57
cantrevealname wrote: post #9

> Consider a company that manufactures its product on lathes. Assume that it has ten lathes that can just meet production requirements. Assume also that each lathe wears out in ten years and that the company has its investment plans so well organized that one lathe is replaced every year. Now consider what will happen if there is a 10 percent increase in demand for the product. The plant will need eleven lathes to me…

Do lathes actually wear out? Machine tools are built like tanks and could probably last until the end of time, you just need to replace the bearings and motors occasionally.

There's an entire refurbishment industry keeping them going.

I know that this article said that you could order machine tools from Japan in the 1980s and get them in a few weeks. But that's not the case anymore.

People buy some press or lathe or whatever out of a liquidation warehouse in Michigan for ~$50k and then pay a refurbisher $1,000,000 to get it to whatever specs they need. That's more expensive than buying a brand-new machine from Germany/Italy/Japan, but you get it installed in your facility so much faster that the extra cash is worth it.

And because they last forever with proper care and maintenance, nobody cares if the "new" tool is 70 years old.

Note that this behavior can easily distort the stats on demand for new machine tools ;)

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#66

Post by rsync »

grow2grow wrote: post #2

Right, it seems the U.S. economy is trying to say, "making elementary machine tools is beneath us." The important bit is at the end: the U.S. is still a top buyer of machine tools (made elsewhere). Is the same thing to happen with software? When it becomes worth the time of the U.S. economy to produce basic machine tools again, they'll get to create new machine tools factories using all the latest technology: so it i…

"Right, it seems the U.S. economy is trying to say, "making elementary machine tools is beneath us.""

Hopefully policy makers and the citizenry will resist following what, as you say, the US economy is trying to say.

You see ...

You can stop making elementary machine tools.

You will never stop making (people who can only make elementary machine tools).

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#67

Post by lasermike026 »

cpursley wrote: post #46
jillesvangurp wrote: post #42

> Constant pressure to hit quarterly performance targets meant that machine quality often suffered. In some cases, machines would be shipped out the door unfinished so the delivery could be booked, and assembly would be completed by service technicians at the customer’s location. In his history of the American machine tool industry, Albert Albrecht states that “the actions of these larger corporations and conglomerat…

MBA thinking ruins everything it touches. Boeing is another example. It's all about short-term profits over long term sustainability.

Fire all the MBAs.

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#68

Post by bawana »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #42

> Constant pressure to hit quarterly performance targets meant that machine quality often suffered. In some cases, machines would be shipped out the door unfinished so the delivery could be booked, and assembly would be completed by service technicians at the customer’s location. In his history of the American machine tool industry, Albert Albrecht states that “the actions of these larger corporations and conglomerat…

Wait till you see what the MBAs have cooked up for health care. You'll die in the Emergency Room waiting room. Even concierge medicine wont save you.

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#69

Post by advisedwang »

psychlops wrote: post #21

> A strong dollar made imports even cheaper by comparison I think that summarizes the article. It has been cheaper to import, so we do. The strong dollar policy supports some industries at the expense of others.

Also that right after a drop in domestic machine tools demand due to recession American industry collapsed overall.

It should be no surprise few machine tools are made when there's less domestic industry overall.

Re: What happened to the US machine tool industry?

#70

Post by ThaDood »

So from what I can tell, a lot of boils down to the same reasons most of America/US manufacturing declined. Globilzation, greed and other factors.

This article really hits home for me. I grew up in Cincinnati and it was a tool making powerhouse back in the day. Cincinnati Tool, now Milacron and many others were made here in town. We still have a few nice tool makers in Ohio - Kett and Wright but its sad to read about how much this industry powered the nation and a lot of its innovation.

Going to our museum center, hell even our Airport has a bunch of exhibits that take about all of the tool making and industry we used to have. Makes me sad really.

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