“Have you ever retired a human by mistake?”
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Out of curiosity, how much precision do you need? Because there’s a hell of a lot of growth in industrial titanium and steel printing going on, especially in medical and aerospace.
0.0002". I have a friend who runs a prototype lab in Ohio doing 3D titanium printing, and one of the world’s leading 3D metal printing companies, EXOne, the people who print Bathsheba Grossman’s Klein bottle openers are about a half a mile from my family’s house.
Somewhat familiar with where the industry is going and capable of for reasons beyond this as well that I am privy to but I can’t say more. I think it may happen someday but it’s not practical to 3D print the kind of things required for forging there’s just simply too much mass needed.
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Ahh. Didnt realize. Gotcha
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Got it, totally agreed given that tight tolerance for the foreseeable future. Very cool.
So does that mean you don’t expect large volume metal printing like Sciaky and Norsk Titanium to have much success either?
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I’d imagine that that’s part of the service in some cases. In addition to any technical capabilities required, having a narrative assembled where some outside experts, acting according to immutable and impersonal laws of how things work, streamline the human resources is so much less awkward than the situation where you just fired a bunch of people.
This is not to say that consultants don’t actually do anything; but there are many cases where one of their important functions is putting the imprimatur of industry-leading excellence on whatever course of action was internally decided upon by the people hiring the consultants. Some customers probably should try hiring consultants with a “and tell us if we are screwing up” mandate more often; but some advice is much more fun to take than other advice.
(edit: to clarify the 'hiring consultants to tell you to do what you want to do" thing: my understanding, from the stories I’ve heard(my father worked as a consultant, so this was a dinnertime topic) you didn’t just browbeat the consultants into telling you what you want to hear: that ruined the seriousness of the enterprise, made it hard for even you to take it seriously; and was both more difficult(if the consultancy was prestigious enough for their eventual report to be as high impact as you would want) and way more expensive than just browbeating employees if all you wanted was fear-induced agreement.
Instead, which consultant or consultancy ended up being hired would depend substantially on the outcome of the internal deliberations: someone who really wants to build a new plant is more likely to seek an operational expert who can paint a glowing picture of how cool and improved that will be; rather than doing an asset valuation that might indicate “even the most optimistic cost estimates suggest that you would be better off doing nothing than doing that”, or someone whose expertise is in slicing up companies and packaging them for sale.
There probably are also some overt con jobs and “Lie to me; but do it with sincerity” requests; that they don’t like to tell stories about as much; but it’s very possible to deliver a hefty dose of rubber stamping via a collaborative process that is not overtly dishonest(and may actually involve considerable rigor, in the relevant area); but, for exactly those reasons, is magnificently effective at eliding what is being omitted while providing impressive work to buttress what is being included.
In that vein, I’m reminded of when we talked about the rise of cost-benefit analysis in history of science class; and how using it without due caution provided a number of examples of how you can make a very impressive case for a policy while missing the accumulation of error from phenomena that you cannot count, or dismiss as negligible, into a cost or benefit(usually a cost involving wetlands or the poors in the cases we were reading about) easily large enough to merit inclusion in the cost-benefit calculation and sometimes large enough to tilt it.)
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Vey true. It also provides the CYA factor for management with a certain type of shareholder. If things go pear-shaped they blame the overpriced consulting firm that hoodwinked them (“who woulda known?”); if they succeed the executives take all the credit and can justify the consulting firm.
Management consultants have their roles, but the big firms like McKinsey have a real racket going on, from how they bill out the wet-behind-the-ears-kiddies to the kinds of “unofficial” services you and I are discussing. In general, I advise people to go with retired and semi-retired individual consultants from their own industry – the grizzled old guys and gals usually deliver more substantive and useful recommendations at a much lower cost.
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I design industrial molds for a living. I’m having trouble making sense here. 3d printing is coming on line as a competitive way of developing patterns, but I’ve never seen any directly useable as molds. It could happen, but we’re not there yet. I could see automating the mechanics of making the various mold components, it’s nothing a decent assistant couldn’t. do. The art comes down to putting the fills, vents, and parting lines in places they work, the customer can abide, and the production department can work with. I don’t see that ballance of political and physical constraints being automated soon.
I’d love doing the design work and handing off the execution to a machine.
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You may think that placing parting lines and vents is a dark and secret art, but you are wrong. I only dabble in 3D printing and design as a hobby, but I’ve seen enough notes and articles to know that a half-decent simulator program can tell you where the best placements will go. But even if you keep someone to do that sort of “final process” work, the grunt work of mold-making was already in the CAD software. the 3D printer just makes it faster and easier to create, or prototype, the molds – including, of course, shapes and vent lines that a regular milling machine & whatnot can’t produce.
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My first real job after graduation was at a large bank on Wall Street. My first task was to automate trade settlement. This was done manually by a handful of very nice older ladies in the basement. I knew that my task was to automate them out of existence and I felt terrible about it. It was even worse because these ladies were so nice to me. Whenever I came, they would tell me stories about what Wall Street was like in the 60s (think Mad Men, but more money and less creatives). Eventually, I got the task done, and I never saw them again.
The hopeful side of me wants to think that these women were actually looking forward to being made redundant since they would get large pensions. But I don’t really know.
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This, 100 times, this!
Coz often the people doing the automating are just unemployed graduates working in their bedrooms, trying to build something people will pay them for so they can make rent. Or people stuck in jobs they hate, using their spare time to try to start a more fulfilling career. If they stumble on a way of solving a problem using less human workers, then theoretically they get a more positive future for themselves.
The issue is the feedback loop of technological displacement creating the need for people to automate away ever more labor.
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I really don’t know when the advice given to firm looking to be bought became the standard advice handed out.
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I’ve automated myself out of a job, does that count?
It’s pretty much the goal of a IT support person, to get everything to the point where you’re no longer needed most of the time.
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Great work, nice lady. A pleasure to deal with, highly recommend.
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I cast iron in small blast furnaces too- so I get what you’re talking about. It’s quite conceivable and I’ve already seen it done to 3D print patterns rather than the molds.
To people who don’t know, molds are like ice cube trays, but patterns are solid positives, often in many interlocking pieces, that make the core of the molds. It would be much more difficult to make a geometrically and metrologically accurate mold by printing, because the mold takes all the heat mass of the cast material. It has to match up perfectly.
Patterns, however, can be slightly bigger and rough shaped, because its just used as a temporary structure to build a mold around. Thus, its perfectly practible to 3d print them, especially since casting doesnt produce perfect sizes and finishes anyway.
In some cases though there are high precision patterns sculpted from casting wax for jewelry in precious metals, that are basically final size and very fine finish because they are cast in a different method that cannot be done with large items easily, and the wax is burnt out before pouring metal in. Called lost wax casting. I worked as a jewelry polisher for a time for a company that actually 3D printed and machined wax positives for custom jewelry.
Dies, which are what I shall be making soon, are not used for casting but are finished very precisely to size for forging components from Hot Metal into finished dimensions
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No hate buddy, so please don’t take it that way.
But there is a reason that this is still considered skilled labor. When you don’t admit to having cast anything before yourself how can you possibly know what it’s like to physically pour something and know that your vent and gate design works simply because you’ve read some articles on it?
Obviously there are ways to automate some of it like the draft angles of the molds some details can be transcribed to software I’m sure because they have been for the article but much of that is highly dependent on what is being cast and in what form.
I’m not trying to be a prick by saying casting is an art and mold design is an art. I’ve built molds from scratch around something as simple as a rubber ducky and it was remarkably difficult to get a clean pull out of the ducky. Now consider objects that require since you understand from articles what patterns are patterns for things like engine cores that require many many interlocking parts. Imagine now how hard it is to get rid of parting lines and appropriately vent things that have voids at odd angles.
To drive my point home a little bit I once in a pour of about 5000 lb of iron had a 400 lb mold explode at my feet and basically put lava in front of me that I had to jump out of the way for. And the very thing that you appear to be convinced is easy to automate was the reason it exploded. A well made pour trough combined with a knife gate but poured downward too deep. The physical pressure of the iron shooting through that knife gate but building up in the pour spout a couple feet was enough to over pressurize the mold and explode it, nearly burning off my feet to the bone in the process. Fortunately not enough built up that we were able to jump out of the way far enough to get away from the pool of iron.
I’ve learned a lot of stuff from books in life and there are indeed things you can really get a good hand on if you study enough so that’s not what I’m trying to chop down here. But pouring iron at least and other materials react very unpredictably depending on what they are and how they are gated to be filled and no amount of looking at the gate can tell you that even if you’re experienced because the guy that made this was more experienced than me.
The end goal of technology should be full unemployment. The jobs nobody wants to do? Those should ALL be being done by machines, so people can be freed up to only do the jobs they want to do.
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Healthy people like to work. It’s in our blood, like birds building nests, beavers building dams, termites building hills, and suchlike. Lack of work makes normal healthy people neurotic and unhappy. (And then they vote poorly.)
But yeah, we’re just differing in our phrasing - when people really really like doing something, they stop calling it work and start call it “making” or “fun” or something like that…
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