Lathe Time in your Area

[kywoodwrkr]

If you have a trade school near you you could ask a student to make some thing for you.
We have Idaho State University here with a VoTech school. It has Machine shop Technology class.
They have a night class for us poor citizens not going to school.

Kentucky residents have the Kentucky Community & Technical College System.
Not all locations have a machinery technology course, Elizabethtown being one which does have one which is active .
Interesting fact in Kentucky is that the state will pay tuition for senior students over age 65.
Take what ever courses you want, as many times as you want. Books not included.
I've been active in program since fall of 2007. Friends refer to it as my adult day care center.
Our location has multiple CNC lathes(one with active tooling), CNC mills and wire/sinker EDMs as well as large slate of manual devices.
MasterCam software is available for use. Mill, lathe and EDM being supported.
Quite often 'outside' projects are taken in with students being given extra credit for the work in resolving the issue.
Anyone in Elizabethtown area feel free to come into ECTC and browse about.

[John Taylor]

My shop rate is $130 per hour but my book keeper said I need to rase it at least 10%. Now if I could charge for all the time I spend talking to customers like a lawyer does I could do OK. When you have $80,000 tied up in tools and still try to make a living at working a shop you got to get something for your time and tooling. The only way I can keep my prices down is to keep my overhead low. Was looking at my supply of chamber reamers and at todays prices it wold cost over $20,000 to replace them. When I first started as a hobby I could take a night class at the local community collage for $10 and use their bluing tanks but that was almost 50 years ago.

[bob208]

yes john that killed me. when I built motors spend 5 hours talking to them then they go some place else to get the job done. I lost 5 hours on 2 jobs one for them and the one I could have been working on.

[Traffer]

The technical schools here used to run nightime machining courses,where a lot of projects were done on lathes mills ,slotters ,and what have you.................unfortunately ,all the machining has been cleared out in favor of floral therapy,art hairstyling ,and ebay shop procedure......yes ,true......the machines are all gone.

Yup...it't interesting they scrapped all the machining tools from our Vocational and Trade schools about 15 years ago. Now they are trying to get stuff to start machining programs up again. Liberals= stupid.

[Papercidal]

At one point in the past I needed a prototype made which needed pretty simple milling and was quoted a pretty high price for setup (which was understandable) so I found a fabrication and machining class at a community college and got to spend enough time with a mill and lathe to make my part and learn a bit about using machine tools and it only cost me about 200$ if I recall

[McFred]

My lathe and mill time cost me about $7,000 for the first hour, and it gets cheaper for every hour I spend on my own machines. It cost even more if you count the house, shop and property where the machines are installed...

For-profit shops have a lot of overhead (salary, rent, taxes, insurance, tooling, electricity, maintenance, etc.). $150-$200 an hour plus setup/material charges sounds about right for my area.

It pays to make friends with tools or to buy your own.

[country gent]

Another aspect of this most people don't want to acknowledge or admit to. When having custom work done you not only paying for the time , machines, and tooling. But also the experience, knowledge, and skill level of the person doing it. This craftsman may have completed a 4-7 year apprenticeship, a few years experience and such. Your paying for what he has accumulated in his head.

When I started in the trade I was amazed at the Old guys in the shop. They didn't appear to be doing much, but at the end of the day they had a pile or work done. I started in my first job shop when I was 15 years old, 2 years of vocational school ( Machine Trades course), retired medically with almost 40 years in the trade as a tool and die maker.

One guy I remember is the farmer who came into that first shop with 8 truck rims. He wanted then cut in half 3" added to the center and welded back together to make a set of rims for the wide "floater" tires for wagons, Quoted him the hours for the job, cut rims in lathe, 2 seam welds in alignment. Roll a 1/8" ring 3" wide( these had to be air tight since at some point tubeless tires might be installed) and balanced. He informed me it was a simple job just cut and weld with the spacer nothing to it. This job would have required a hub made to bolt rim into lathe to cut/split. a means of holding in alignment , each side and the ring/spacer. 2 welds Actually 6 3 inside and outside. then rebalancing them. Rebalancing would have been a hand operation either grinding to remove weld or welding to add. His idea was $25.00-$30.00 a rim. Mine was 8 hours work at shop rate for the 4 rims.

[15meter]

Do a search for "maker space" or "makerspace". There are shops popping up around the country that are membership based co-op type shops. There are several around the Detroit/Ann Arbor/Jackson area. Some are businesses, some are non profit type setups.
There is one in Pentwater, Michigan that is so well equipped, if I lived near by, I'd sell my entire shop of top quality tools (Delta/South Bend/DeWalt) out (800 sq. feet of wood/metal tools) and pay the annual membership.

The one in Ann Arbor has people that will do custom work for a fraction of typical shop rates.

Most run classes on the equipment, once you are signed off you can make your own "stuff".

Country gent there is one in BG, not far from you. I don't know how well it is equipped.

[country gent]

Im in the process of putting in my own shop right now. If nothing else when I get tired I can shut the machine down leave it set up and go take a nap LOL. I may even put a recliner or 2 in the Shop. Spent a lot of time on a stool being comfortable will be nice. Another plus is not having to haul fixtures, tools and parts around.

[15meter]

Im in the process of putting in my own shop right now. If nothing else when I get tired I can shut the machine down leave it set up and go take a nap LOL. I may even put a recliner or 2 in the Shop. Spent a lot of time on a stool being comfortable will be nice. Another plus is not having to haul fixtures, tools and parts around.

The three best tools in my shop are an old milk can with a wood top for a stool, a tall, adjustable chair on wheels that works at the reloading press and a OLD rocking, swivel wood office chair when I need to take a nap.

[country gent]

In the tool room at work we had stools. only chairs were at the desks where the computers were. there was an technique to using them on the mills and lathes. You didn't sit on them completely more just leaned supported yourself on the edge. But it saved a lot of energy and strain.

[Traffer]

Another aspect of this most people don't want to acknowledge or admit to. When having custom work done you not only paying for the time , machines, and tooling. But also the experience, knowledge, and skill level of the person doing it. This craftsman may have completed a 4-7 year apprenticeship, a few years experience and such. Your paying for what he has accumulated in his head.

When I started in the trade I was amazed at the Old guys in the shop. They didn't appear to be doing much, but at the end of the day they had a pile or work done. I started in my first job shop when I was 15 years old, 2 years of vocational school ( Machine Trades course), retired medically with almost 40 years in the trade as a tool and die maker.

One guy I remember is the farmer who came into that first shop with 8 truck rims. He wanted then cut in half 3" added to the center and welded back together to make a set of rims for the wide "floater" tires for wagons, Quoted him the hours for the job, cut rims in lathe, 2 seam welds in alignment. Roll a 1/8" ring 3" wide( these had to be air tight since at some point tubeless tires might be installed) and balanced. He informed me it was a simple job just cut and weld with the spacer nothing to it. This job would have required a hub made to bolt rim into lathe to cut/split. a means of holding in alignment , each side and the ring/spacer. 2 welds Actually 6 3 inside and outside. then rebalancing them. Rebalancing would have been a hand operation either grinding to remove weld or welding to add. His idea was $25.00-$30.00 a rim. Mine was 8 hours work at shop rate for the 4 rims.

It it the people who do not understand the concept of precision that think a machine shop is some kind of hack shop. We used to do that kind of stuff at a regular mechanic shop, calling it pro-fab. When we would try to explain the process and give them a price most of them would still go away angry, thinking we were ripping them off.

[country gent]

We had engineers who would draw up a new tool or part, dimension it to a 4 place decimal 9(.0000) one was even known for a 5 pace decimals on his drawings. Then wonder why the quote to make them was so high. Look at a legend on a drawing and you see the tolerances. usually .0 +- .010, .00 +- .005, .000 +- .001, .0000 +- .0005, .00000 +- .00005 Fractional +- 1/64 unless specified. Holding overall length of +- .001 on a 4 ft shaft that doesn't matter really drives up the cost.
That's why I recommend having a dimensioned drawing with you and the required tolerances for the part. Also the needed material cold roll is much cheaper than tool steels and easier to work with. Some tools steels triple the cost of materials over leaded cold rolled. Just handing the guy a part leaves a lot of unanswered questions for him.We used to joke that adding a zero behind the decimal point added a zero to the cost. .0 = $10.00, .00 = $100.00

[EDG]

People outside the precision machining business have no concept of the time and skill involved to produce parts to order. They do not realize they are competing with other customers that value getting the job right the first time and pay well for it.

First of all the machinist has to be paid say $30/hr or more.
Add in shop overhead, profit, raw material and the total comes to about 3.5 to 5 times what you pay the operator to run a conventional machine. A cheap CNC might run $150/hr. A large 5 axis mill may run $500/ hr or more.
Don't like the cost? Go to a shop that is not busy. They are guaranteed to be crummy. That is why they are not busy. No one wants the crummy shops working on their stuff.

Still don't like the cost? Too bad because there are lots of high tech companies that need parts and prototypes that pay for good work. I know I have been in those shops all over the country. A very good one is in Yreka, Ca. There is no airport, the company is in a small backward town with few hotels and places to eat. His company does world class work on semi-conductor process chambers and work comes to him from all over the USA. I had to fly across the country several times to baby sit hot projects through his shop. We paid $3600 for a product that should have cost $800 in regular production. He was only one that could do a good job and turn the work around in a month.
Why was he in such an out of way place? He liked living near Mt Shasta in the northern California climate. He could have lived anywhere and business would have came to him.

There is another guy from Fremont, CA that moved his business to Singapore to be more cost competitive because they pay their workers about 25% to 30% of what they make in the US.
He had 3 very large German 5 axis mills that cost $1.5 million each plus about another 100 or so smaller CNC mills and about 40 CNC lathes. The part we had made there was a process chamber the size of a pool table for manufacture of semiconductors. The blanks were $20K slabs of Alcoa 6061-T6 plate that we had flown from the USA to Singapore. I spent weeks down there advising them on how to set up and machine the parts. When the process was finally perfected they charged $18,000 per part just for the machining.
When there is work out there like that for good machine shops they are not going to want your gun stuff at any cost. Many of those companies could make firearms better than the gun manufacturer.

[Hdskip]

What EDG said and more.

[deltaenterprizes]

I have a small shop and charge $30/hr and people think that is high!

[john.k]

The other catch is the rough drawing with salient points marked with a felt pen.......just a rough old thing ,says the customer.......then a day later they are back whinging that a shaft doesnt fit,a keyway is too loose,or some other complaint...........then you get the supposed accurate drawing that actually has conflicting dimensions,and the part ends up 1/16" thick in some critical load bearing area.....or even better ,falls in half on the machine........................

[Bent Ramrod]

As long as we’re exploring the grim reality of making oddball onesie-twosie parts, we might consider showing some mercy to the poor Local Hobbyist and forbear loading him down with projects that do not interest him in hopes of getting them done cheap.

As soon as friends and acquaintances heard that I was making parts for the wrecks I fix up as a hobby, they figured that as long as I was sweating it out in the shop anyway, I might as well make myself useful and do their stuff for them. Their idea of what I was doing resembled that animated cartoon of a factory I used to watch on TV as a kid—the funny animals would put a block of steel on the machine, it would whirl around against a bunch of whirling tools and the chips would fly until there was nothing left. Then they’d put another block on the machine and repeat. A laff riot. And no trouble or effort whatsoever.

I couldn’t seem to explain to them that my attempts took much longer and the outcome was much chancier than if a pro was doing it. No problem, they would just steel themselves to endure the wait a little longer, they would reply, benevolently. I would tell them that I already had a job I loathed, doing uninteresting things for other people for money, and my hobby was therapy for this miserable condition of existence. I didn’t want to turn my hobby into another boring job. Might as well have said it in Mandarin for the comprehension they displayed.

These weren’t bad guys, but they were highly educated college graduates, and as such, had been trained to have nothing but patronizing contempt for those who actually make things. I might have wound up the same way, but a look through Colvin and Stanley’s books straightened me out toot de sweet; those guys are smart! It’s a shame that everybody in school isn’t forced to take a couple semesters of introductory machine tool trade courses, just so they can appreciate what actually doing something real entails. Much better use of their time than all these Victimology courses that are cluttering up the curricula now.

One old pal wanted a new extractor on a gun he had, as the old one didn’t always snap over the shell rim. I roughed out the part in spring steel, gave it to him and told him he could do a day and a half’s-worth of filing to fit (using the old one as a pattern) as well as I could. That was an hour and a half’s machine time wasted—he never touched the thing.

I can’t see how anybody makes a living doing this stuff. Or, as Omar Khayyam might put it, “I wonder often what the machinists buy, one-half so precious as the stuff they sell.” If I charged $1000/hour and turned out the work as fast as I could, I’d still starve to death in two weeks.

[owejia]

Old retired machine shop owner here. Retired from the machine shop in the early 90's, started a cattle and hay operation then. Back then we manufactured after market heavy equipment parts, sold through used parts dealers like salvage yards, had to have large inventory so a lot of money sitting on the shelves. Did repair for local farmers and other folks, charged $25.00 hr for shop labor back then, but all shop equipment was conventional shop tools some of it was gov. surplus. The money was made on bidding jobs and completing them quicker than the bid time. Still have a Bridgeport mill and Atlas 12" or 13" lathe for my own use. Still make my own stuff. Always made a good living but never got rich. When I retired the shop rate here had gone up to about $50 dollars and hour but most of the heavy equipment guys thought my shop rate was too high but charged $100 and hour for their dozer or trackhoe work. No body is ever satisfied. Deltanterprises your rates are a bargin at $30 an hour.

[kenton]

When I was going through school for machining I had a friend (now my brother in law) ask me to make a timing cover for his chevy big block. When I told him sure, just make me a print of what you want, he wanted he waved his arms around and said about this wide, this long, and this tall. When I asked where the bolt holes were to go he shrugged and said I don't know. I said that is why I need a print. Then all of a sudden in a stroke of brilliance he pointed to the engine block on a stand and said there is your print. I told him if he brought it into the school shop I'd do it.

He ended up getting me a old timing cover that I spent a fair amount of time mapping out all the bolt hole locations using an indicator on and the DRO on a bridgeport. I told him figure out what you want and to make sure not to loose that paper. I suggested possibly scanning it to have a digital copy. I saw that print a year later under his couch.

That project ended up scrap and that block never made it into any vehicle. It is now my rule that I don't make any parts that don't have some kind of drawing, even a sketch on a bar napkin with appropriate dimensions is sufficient. If they won't take the time to figure out what they want made, I'm not going to figure it out for them.