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I continue to be very interested in 3D printers and CNC Router/Milling machines. Before I got hired by a fire department I worked for 8 years in a family owned lumber remanufacturing plant as a millwright keeping a bunch of 70 year old machinery turning rough wood into finished products such as siding, paneling, flooring, etc... I was trained by some old timers and managed to pick up quite a few skills.

Most people who have worked in a manufacturing job understand that the set-up is a critical and time consuming phase of production. People were always wanting us to run a couple thousand feet of this or that, but we really couldn’t economically do much less than a semi-truck load of anything other than cutting up wood with our rip saw or re-saw. Anything that required changing the set-up on one of our moulders wasn’t usually worth it for smaller quantities. We ran millions of feet of bevel and channel siding. That was our bread and butter.

We did have one small moulder where the heads ran at very high speed and I only had to grind up one knife and then make a counter balance, but that was a specialty machine. Its maximum feed speed was about 30 feet per minute and we could run the bigger machines several times faster. The setup time even on that machine meant that it wasn’t worth doing anything less than at least several thousand lineal feet of lumber at a much higher price per lineal foot.

I love the idea of using machines controlled by computers as a hobby and possibly as some type of niche small business. But when you are looking at up to several hours to make a small object out of expensive plastic filament, I am not seeing this as being much of a threat to traditional manufacturing.