[TheForge] American tools?

[Andrew Vida]

On Wed, 24 Sep 2003 16:35:37 -0700, RIES NIEMI <Rniemi@fidalgo.net> wrote:

> I think some of the reasons there are fewer american machine tool 
> companies
> are a lot less mysterious and conspiracy oriented than you would like to
> think. Sure, greed and laziness play a part, but some of the companies 
> just
> plain arent working hard enough at offering what the market needs.

	This is partly so, but in general I find that manufacturers
	are pretty responsive to the market.  They have to be in order
	to stay in business.  Another side of this multi-faceted coin
	are the "needs" (or rather "demands") of the market.

	As an analogue, look at our culture in a more general sense.
	I hear people complaining about how stupid Americans have
	become.  In a very large number of cases, this is hard to
	argue against (just watch Jerry Springer and the news).  In
	the context of the lowatt contingent, many people blame the
	media.  I fully agree that "we're just giving the people what
	they want" is a lame bullshit copout.  By that reasoning I
	should be able to blow your brains out with my .45 because you
	have expressed your desire to have me do so.  Be that as it
	may, media cannot be held for all the blame here.  Let us not
	forget that the stupidity we find in the media is indeed there
	because people want it there.  If we were to stop consuming
	what they produce, they would either change their tune or
	go out of business.  Takes two to tango.

	My round about point here is that one is well advised to
	examine the demands of the market and judge just how sane
	and reasonable they are.  What to do with that, I am not
	smart enough to say, but bearing in mind that it takes two,
	we have to acknowledge that the market can be, and in many
	cases is, its own worst enemy.  If people want shyte quality
	equipment, the manufacturers will build it, of course.  Perhaps
	there is something to be said about those who demand crap.  I
	don't know.

	On the other side of that coin, building for eternity has its
	hazards as well.  If you build milling machines that will
	operate perfectly (with good care) for centuries (love those
	replaceable wear surfaces) one could be also shooting oneself
	in the foot because the we are begining to approach global
	carrying capacities.  People will need only so many mills
	and lathes and grinders, etc.  What does the manufacturer do
	when the market flattens out?

	The deeper question here, in case you have not seen it, is not
	with quality and demand per se, but with the fundamental structure
	of the world economy.  It is NOT designed for long term operation,
	here "long term" meaning many, many centuries.  It was designed to
	suck the life from a sector and then move on.  Stable markets are
	few and far between compared to transient markets.  Sure, in theory
	we will always need new machines, but if they are well built, that
	demand naturally decays with time.  The economy based upon perpetual
	growth cannot sustain markets such as heavy, well built machinery
	because when the growth stops, there is no way to make money there
	anymore.  But building shyte machinery is also a losing proposition
	from the standpoint of resource waste.

	The larger the population becomes and the more scarce resources
	become, the more apparent will be the untenable nature of current
	world economic design, and this in turn ties right back into
	population.  If the world were 5% its current size, we would not
	be having this discussion, I suspect.  People would live in mostly 	nice 
clean cities.  I don't believe there would be any such thing 	as a suburb, 
and the rest would be on farms or leading otherwise
	bucolic existences.  Resources would be plenty, and perhaps we would 	not 
shyte all over the earth, sparing no opportunity to defile and 	destroy 
everything we touch.  But we're not like that.  We live
	in squalor and mayhem and it gets worse by the minute.  Just how far
	we can take this mode of living is yet to be seen, but I would not
	be surprised if the current state of the economy was a harbinger
	of things to come.  I'm probably wrong, and certianly hope so,
	but this downturn has a different feel from the others I have
	lived through.  The economy is growing and so are the ranks of the
	unemployed.  This is unprecedented, as far as I know, in all US
	history.  That means that the gap between haves and have-nots is
	growing and that the set of have-nots is also growing.  That fewer
	people are given access to the pie is not a good sign in overall
	measure.  Put enough people into poverty and you will have to use 
	physical force to defend that which you claim as yours.  I cannot say
	we are there, nor that we're definitely heading that way, but there
	are indications to lead one to suspect that this may in fact be
	what is going on.  Time will tell, and hopefully prove me wrong.


> to make things with smaller tools, and a lot of the midwest machine tool
> companies just kept expecting to make and sell what they had always made,
> but manufacturers didnt need the same tools anymore.

	Very true.  Change can be a difficult thing.
>
> On a happy note-bridgeport, which went bankrupt this year, is back in
> production. Hardinge lathe company bought the remains, moved all the
> machines worth keeping to their plant in New York, (particularly all the
> specialised machines and tooling to make spare parts for older 
> bridgeports-

	I didn'tknow this.  How interesting.

> they will be supporting most of the older models) They then tooled up to
> make them on modern cnc tools, and what do you know-they cut the price by
> over a third. Last year, a bridgeport mill was creeping up on 20 grand. 
> Now
> they cost about 11 grand. Competitive with the higher end chinese and
> taiwanese mills. Of course, in the bankruptcy proceedings they dumped
> pension obligations,

	That is simply criminal.

> and probably a bunch of suppliers lost their accounts
> recievable, but it is still amazing they can make mills here in the us 
> for
> around what it costs for a chinese mill where the employees were paid a 
> buck
> an hour. You can still buy a cheapie chinese mill for 5 grand, but if you
> option one out to be equivalent, its in the same ballpark as the american
> made. And a lot of people say the chinese tools are artificially cheap 
> due
> to chinese government manipulation of the foreign exchange rates. So they
> probably really cost about the same, if the chinese government wasnt
> subsidising the economy over there to keep employment up.

	And we still make far better tools.
>
> Haas, in Ventura Ca, also makes a very high quality competitively priced
> line of CNC mills and lathes, right here in the USA. I think it has a lot
> more to do with creative thinking and low debt loads than you might 
> think.

	Nice machines, too, from what I've seen.

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