Posted by tliltocatl 7 hours ago
I earned an MSME without ever learning to actually make things, so once I could afford it I bought a Sherline CNC mill and taught myself to use it. I made many mistakes but got there. I used it just last week to make a wind gauge mounting bracket for a 70 year old sailboat.
I liked that it was made in the USA and (at the time, pre mainstream internet) had a great community to learn from.
I know there are other options still, but Sherline has a fond place in my heart for how easy they made it to get started.
Sherline, for example, specifies spindle nose runout of 0.0005 inch or less and spindle end play around 0.0002 inch or less, using two 20-mm ball bearings with adjustable preload. That’s only about 13 µm runout. A Chinese factory can absolutely manufacture that.
Manufacturers such as SIEG took conventional lathe architecture and mass-produced it.
There is nothing original going on there lots of copying
It's a pure manufacturing cost play to make something precise enough, rigid enough, and light enough[0] while being inexpensive enough for the market segment it's aimed at.
Is it a bummer that a US manufacturer went out of business trying to make money at that play? Yes. Is there anything nefarious going on with IP theft? Absolutely not.
[0] This is being sold to customers who don't hire riggers to move their machines.
And it's the one thing that unites every mainstream politician against Trump - they can't agree on tons of stuff, other than that we definitely should not be using tariffs to defend local manufacturers against Chinese (or any other) imports. I've been assured that those jobs are "not coming back." Well, big surprise - they're also not going to stop disappearing.
China merely followed the American approach towards industrial success.
"Steal to get ahead, but suppress others who steal after you are ahead"
It's certainly destructive to local companies, but that's what tariffs are for. If you think we should be making lathes, then throw tariffs on countries that make them cheaper. If that just moves the pressure to a consumer who still can't afford local lathes, stop handing free money to stockholders and real estate owners and start handing it to people who buy things.
There was a lot of knowledge transferred and training as part of that. For what its worth we previously had trained our North American partners. China could definitely not make our equipment themselves at that point in time. We did retain some key technologies but most of it was moved over.
I don't see how anyone can deny that the Chinese got a lot of the know-how as part of the mass transfer of production to China. 90% of their manufacturing know-how is from the west.
If the point is that Sherline specifically today doesn't have any IP they might care about- sure. It's been copied/reverse engineered/"stolen" a long time ago. I don't know when the Chinese entered the hobbyist machining market but when they did I'm sure copying existing designs wasn't exactly a barrier, or stealing trade secrets, or ignoring patents.
For an extreme example of partisanship on this, see the Youtube channel "Inheritance Machining"
It was bought out by employees in 2017 and it seems like they weren't able to manage it successfully. The two that acquired it were well over 70 when they did so, so I guess this isn't very surprising. From the article it sounds like they spent a lot of money trying to 'modernize' the business, which sounds a lot like they brought in management that was more interested in 'doing management. than making money.
Boy it'd be tragic if these guys felt like they were over their heads, decided to "hire some experts" and ended up with MBAs.
If you are a builder, there is no sane way to bid on contracts with such hugely variable COGS.
And how the HELL do you even attempt to fix the US housing supply if you are tariffing Canadian lumber? You can't.
- Raw lumber costs are about 1% of the price of a house in California.
- Lumber prices were much much higher during the pandemic and are actually not that high right now: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lumber (it's at 9 months low and cheaper than in 2018).
There is a 24-45% tariff on building supplies, steel, aluminum, and cement.
> Raw lumber costs are about 1% of the price of a house in California.
California is fucking weird then, because it's 16% or more other places.
https://www.txrac.com/blog/cost-to-build-a-house-from-scratc...
Lumber framing only makes sense if you want something dirt cheap (and yet, US matchsticks and cardboard houses go for millions of dollars?!) or something that needs to be earthquake resilient and affordable.
It's because of our earthquakes and the severity of our storms. The lumber frame and design of construction flexes and sways when stone and brick would break (tornados are different story). Likewise when they do break, and they absolutely will given some of these forces, it doesn't bankrupt people and companies when trying to recover from those events. Bigger buildings of concrete, stone and brick here are now built very different, sometimes on giant metal plates with actual springs.
Here you go:
https://youtube.com/shorts/jFph1d2WR3s
Btw:
> or something that needs to be earthquake resilient and affordable