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Comment by NegativeK

14 hours ago

> 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.