Comment by nvader
1 day ago
This is fascinating. I really don't know much about the world you're describing, so thank you for sharing your perspective.
Don't customer needs change over time? How would one adapt to shifting demand, or new materials becoming available, or old materials going out of supply.
It depends on the item. Let's take this screw pitch gage: https://www.starrett.com/details?cat-no=155
Starrett doesn't really compete on price, as evidenced by the fact that this is a $95 item whereas the cheap alternatives go for closer to $10 on Amazon. So they're probably not making or selling very many of them. But they sell enough to make it worth keeping them in stock, and eventually they'll run out so they'll need to make new parts. Assuming low volume (I say this just in case I've accidentally picked the one weird thing that does sell like hotcakes), they're not going to spend any engineering time evolving that design. The input materials aren't going to stop being made. It is what it is, it does what it does, some people buy it, and so the name of the game becomes how do you make that specific thing they want with the least overhead? You use the same tooling you've used for the last 50 years. When you need a new batch of parts, you pull out that tooling, stamp out a bunch of leaves, and put the tooling away until you need it again.
There are many many manufactured items that fall into this category.
For those not familiar, Starrett has a reputation of quality. If you want the best you buy Starrett and pay the price. Often those Amazon alternatives are good enough, but often they have minor usability issues such that they are not as nice. Sometimes those Amazon alternatives are wrong in ways that matter and they can't be used at all.
I have a couple of Starrett items only because I lucked out at machine shop auctions and they came in boxes with other stuff that the auction house couldn't be bothered to sort.
I'm not a professional, I'm a metalworking hobbyist and the cheap imported electronic tools are more than good enough for me. However, my Starrett Dial Test Indicator is like jewelry, it's so beautifully well made. My cheap Chinese mechanical DTI is probably almost as accurate, but one is obviously far better made than the other.
> How would one adapt to shifting demand, or new materials becoming available, or old materials going out of supply.
That's very unlikely. New materials would require the company requesting the part to reengineer it, recertify it, or at least retest it. But even still we're not coming up with materials that are a significant improvement in most fields. Aerospace, sure. It can be worth it to iterate and improve. Most things, a part that's worked for 50 years will keep working and will be happily profitable in maintenance mode. Those customers want reliability, not to test some improvement on a part that has negligible impact in the overall system.
And the common metals (gears are typically steel, maybe a yellow metal) are made in such large amounts that new materials are going to cost a heck of a lot more. So the customer is going to wreck their profit while the machine shop probably isn't going to have to change their process that much.
There definitely is innovation in machining. New processes are making tighter tolerances more achievable or material removal faster. But to the top commentor's point (who showed me how to use a benchtop lathe over a decade ago), the capital investment for a new machine plus the labor of duplicating all of your work plus the unknown maintenance costs, etc etc etc just don't make sense when Moore's law doesn't apply.