[jmerson]

wjfiles,

It's nice to know there's still someone out there that's working and he's older than me! I'll be 77 in Feb. Planing on retiring in about another 10 years or so. By the way, what's your hobby? I met some chaps from there a couple of years ago and they were Hot Rodders.
Keep up the good work,

Jim

[LouF]

Old enough to know better J/K
I will be 54 the 22nd of this month...

[jepetera]

I'm 20537 days old, it means 56+

[LouF]

I'm 20537 days old, it means 56+

Where the leap year factored into that..

[jepetera]

Where the leap year factored into that..

Do not worry it's absolutely exact.
(TSTD - TSBD)/86400 :cheers:

[Tolyatti]

Мне пятьдесят девять лет.

[Kigiru]

Most of the contributors do not have enough age to qualify as old.
I am 78 and still working (don't get paid much anymore)
wjf

With that much experience if its all around different machines then you probably know more about what's suitable to what tasks than most anyone. If its been with one set of machines, you must have seen a whole progression of technologies, and assuming you keep developing knowledge..?

(Dunno the word for it, I'm twenty five and a rather sad product of my generation I think what I'm hitting now is what everyone meant when they say 'growing up,' and 'you'll know when its happening' and stuff like that that I always used to disregard as unscientific. Blegh, basically just started understanding things again for the first time since I had this one really fantastic math teacher in elementary school who made us do all the stuff that the book said was for calculators in our head. Quite wonderful actually, tho I"m not sure whether its really growing up or just shaking off a self-inflicted form of mental retardation, plus my version of english was so mangled from being asleep and taking in information without understanding for the better part of a decade that even if I did understand it I couldn't put it into words. It all comes out sounding like stories out of the bible lol (like the tower for instance, that could pretty much sum up this entire segue).

anyway assuming that that is what my elders have been saying when they talk about wisdom vs... dunno what the right word is for this, people say intelligence a lot but mebbe accuity? Speed? I, possibly my generation, learned the concept as intelligence but if it is then we are a sadly deficient species in this thing we constantly harp on about compared to pretty much any predator (or other omnivore, or probably herbivore as well) on Earth... dunno if the error is in us insisting that there's nothing of awareness to instinct despite knowing that we can program our own instincts and that animals diverge from what instincts we expect, or if its just me getting stuck in a logic loop, or what.

Either way though, you probably have a wealth of information; lots of our lower resolution machining (and maybe some of the more precise processes? I"m not in the industry (or even the business heh) so I don't have the facts, just info I read on the internet. Either way this is happening while transport costs go up, and it appears to me that the reason it is happening isn't just America's slippage in the economic charts but also the way the economies of scale have affected the machine tool industry? You can build cnc to do a lot of things, especially with certain materials, on the cheap. Essentially just jury rigged assembly line stuff, not truly flexible machines, but if you've got a valuable idea (and humans seem an endless fount of them, for all that we tax our environment we also produce enormous wealth as information, awareness; as near as I can tell the only zero sum situation is one you don't know enough about, but of course I'm rather young and also immature for my age, so no tellin').

What I'm getting around to in a poorly phrased and roundabout rambling way is to ask could you not make a good living in the new low-end machine tool market? If you've got a wide range of machines in your past and are good with the nc, you might be able to come up with a reliable machine and method for forming these mini assembly line components that's affordable enough for you to make a profit and for anyone with the ideas already formed to be able to crack into it on their own with enough hard effort, without completely losing control of their product (I know the cut out the middle man thing is harsh, but the middle men already said pretty vocally that they can't be profitable here anymore, there is only enough room for them in other markets. The time seems more optimal than ever for people to develop their own PERSONAL infrastructure however, at least more so than it has in a long time. I think maybe the distributed (blacksmiths, ferriers, master and apprentice) vs centralized (megacorps, assembly lines stretching around the world to push things to the very limit, financial markets completely controlled by the few most skilled or brazen) industry is probably gonna turn out to be something like weapons vs armor, fluctuating back and forth. The first innovates using cheap technologies, the second using expensive, the first sharpening the old blade while the second forges one anew for every job.

Can't get the words, but a lot of the people, most, working on that right now seem to be fresh college students. They've got a great grasp on the computers, on the higher end programming like that which will be needed to lower the skill slope so that it does not completely discourage the average down on their luck soul, and throughout the life I've gotten the impression from my elders that this sort of stuff (not the straight up numbers, but trying to write human style logic into the software, to give the programming more capability so that others can use THEIR inventive faculties on the products they want to produce not the machine itself) seems off the wall to them, and honestly I get that now more than I did before. The thing is, the kind of knowledge you have? The fundamental, basic understanding of the machinery and the mechanics? Most of my generation doesn't have that. We took the words you guys used to describe all these things you found out, and we put these in the place that you hold all of the actual knowledge that forms the words, and we use that as a sort of shortcut; guess every generation does, never really understood the standing on the shoulders of giants (for my gen, replace shoulders with language/data compression) saying until recently. My gen's primed basically to do things the old way (to invent the new techs) and yours UNDERSTANDS the old ones like we never will.

It seems there is a confluence there, that instead of just abandoning the old tech and stepping onto something new, soming up with some insane invention like cold weld metal powder that can be printed then made up whole or any of these other things the 3d printer community thinks they're gonna bring about, we might end up wealthier in the end if this set of generations, we instead each turned our innovation upon the same tech and see where the old methods, milling and hammering and forging and laser cutting, see where they can go, and the knowledge you have in you is just as essential (and so just as valuable if you can figure out the angle, its beyond me for sure; best I could guess would be to approach one of these spiffy university grads working on one of the different home fabrication projects and see if you can spot any gaps in their understanding of the processes you know that are causing them to try unnecessarily to create something new and inexpensive and inefficient... I really don't know why we are like that, but it seems to be a recurring story that the new generation has to come along and invent wholly anew, throwing aside most of the knowledge of the old so they can bolster their own egos and act like they are some champions of knowledge, we even redefine words so that the old way (be it the past generation or a hundred ago) seems less valid, or perhaps we just do not notice this happening (seriously, these dang religious texts, when you remove the assumption that god carries a pocket watch (especially switching days to decisions/clock cycles for the christian creation story, which is the one I know best) and is bound by the notion of discrete time, they start sounding a whole heck of a lot like all the physics we've been writing over the past couple centuries, and they feel like they have the right sort of shape to slide nicely into the great big whopping gaps in the understanding of gravity, awareness, and quantum mechanical probability.

Some say we hit our peak at fortyish or fifty when quickness and wisdom come into balance, but honestly I guess what I'm tryin' to get at is that it appears to me (as much as I can figure anything) that that applies mostly to the old (ancient, timeless) tradition of throwing out the words of our forefathers and inventing a new language to re-say the same thing instead of trying to understand them more fully. Or, shorter, you'd probably be more likely to have a cheap efficient machining solution just pop into your head for any given type of item than the people working on making industrial/machine infrastructure fresh out of college and full of energy and zeal would of solving the same problem with weeks or months of careful study, simulation, and calculation. Our society is kinda geared to shaft elders who wish to continue to contribute (unless they're sitting on a pool full of gold like scrooge mcduck of course) and innovate... been thinking a lot about it and I'm starting to form some theories but all of this stuff is really way above my head and all I can manage is to hold outlines, ghosts of the essential ideas and see where they fit together, then try and work through the math (I think math to me means something like confluence or congruence (?) would to you, or I suppose its the 'equation' definition of math) and see if I can simplify it enough to get a toe-hold.

Good luck, though, I hope you find some way out of your conundrum. When people talk about how we burn up and waste our environment, they tend to forget that one of the biggest chunks of that (taking it from the perspective of size equaling significance, total contained information, or perhaps ability to effect changes in your awareness) environment is six billion other impossible human beings, not a one of them lacking in the ability to innovate, to invent, assuming they can find a subject which both holds their interest and that of enough others to be profitable. Least I hope so, because I wasted all of my formative youth in a silly pursuit to rewire my brain until it looked like my mental image of a super scientist or genius, under the false impression that man had no hope of competing with machines, unaware that practically every successful advance in that area was simply a new application of some concept already demonstrated in nature, and that the greatest capabilities of man were no closer to being replicated than they were at the dawn of awareness, that at most they will probably come up as more beautiful if slightly randomized reflections, not competition but instead force multipliers.

Or in short, I saw a program not long ago where they had reassembled some automaton created by a clock maker at the dawn of the industrial age. It had more range of motion, more unique behavior, it appeared more ALIVE than the most convincing silicon skinned and chipped japanese bot I've ever browsed past on internet videos, this after surviving an inferno and building collapse and being shipped as disassembled and scorched random brass gears and cogs and wheels. Now watchmaking is supposedly becoming a lost art when these fellows would be more welcome in the field of BEAM robotics (or KISS robotics in more traditional terms, heh, its basically about copying nature and using the simplest stuff possible, avoiding the use of unnecessarily expensive general-purpose microchips; I couldn't imagine what the current leaders of that field working together with a couple old skilled watchmakers could come up with... I just have the feeling that it would make the robots in our movies that now seem impossible look instead look like poorly designed junk, just as ridiculous as the robot in the movie robocop, meant for military suppression but with its vulnerable grill on the front because the designers were trying to make it sell better using the tactics of psuedo 'sports car' manufacturers, just throwing a an intimidating skin over cheap malfunction prone hardware.

[handlewanker]

Wow, long post....must be a novelist in the making.
Ian.

[Tolyatti]

Today is my last chance to click the 50-59 button... When I was 18 in 1970, I asked myself if I could possibly be listening to the same loud music when I turned 40 as I was at 18. The answer is still "yes".

[Vegabond]

I am 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+ 1

[ChipMagnet]

Does it count if my 20th birthday was 2 days ago?

[Orion13]

41


Orion13

[holbieone]

I'm keen to know the age spread of people across this forum...

well , every one here is five years older from when you ask the question


Here's to another five :cheers:

[FannBlade]

Funny thing my youngest daughter (19) ask me today if I was in a mid-life crisis...I told her that was 15 years ago when I was 40 and hope I don't live to be 110...I will be really broke!

[MattMachinist]

52, been machining since I was 12 in my fathers shop. Got a job when I turned 18 Starting programming on teletype machine and paper tape in 79'. I have been thru it all. Been programmer, leadman, foreman,supervisor, machine shop manager, consultant.
I can run any machine CNC or Manual. Its been what I have always wanted to do and its been mostly fun...lol

[BAMCNC.COM]

27

[legendboy]

just 34 here, just quit my job of 10yrs and started my own biz. Primarily i do mechanical hvac drawings for oil sands projects.
However I am skilled in deciphering the sdrl/sddr thru specifications and data sheets/drawings.

my machine shop isnt even going yet lol

[TAREQ]

I will be 42 at 6th of march 2013

Human become complete at the age of 40

[MetalZilla]

53 Going on 23

[nancymya7]

Hey. . I am only 22 years old. . Still young