What's a Machinist?

Yeah, I know you don't know. Unless you are one.

We learn everything the hard way. Company-sponsored apprenticeships are limited to the needs of that company. Then after you’ve trained, a potato chip plant advertises for “potato chip machinists” because most people have no idea what a machinist even does.

A machinist adapts, becomes an engineer with no degree, generates CAD drawings and CAM programming and creates prototypes that work, unlike damnable “printed” products; build or create every component that goes into the first units of just about everything. We know how to make things even without a damned computer, hand-cranked milling machines and lathes and surface and cylindrical grinders and tool and cutter grinders. I’ve never met a machinist who couldn’t weld.

Back in the day, machinists were proud of their trade, coming to work wearing a shirt and tie. Now pride in the trades is mostly found in China.

Unfortunately I can no longer recommend a trade to anyone until people reawaken in this country. Not if you wish to feed your family.

I was lucky. I nailed a research support position at a big university, after my own shop closed because everyone’s plants were sold to Japan or China or put on flatcars to Mexico. That position became mine because generally, “college graduates” can’t run machine tools.

The Machinists Handbook is an encyclopedia of centuries of knowledge; expanded by the internet, there was nothing I couldn’t find, answer or do. My income outstripped that of three local machinists. I interfaced with faculty, staff and students daily, and together my team and I put equipment on fault lines, mountainsides, ocean floors and in outer space. It was a ball.

When I retired, they closed the shop.

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