How many of you guys are machinist? I’m talking about the people that do it full time.

I have been a machinist for about 5 years now and before that I was a designer/drafter, Pro-E, AutoCAD, etc. Most of my experience in machining is in prototype machining but I have done some production work too. My dilemma is I’m thinking about getting out of it completely.

Machining in the Madison, WI area blows!!! I don’t see very many job postings around Madison and the pay is not that great. If your making $18 an hour your about at top of the pay scale for the area. Frankly I think that sucks considering the work and knowledge machinist must have to be a good quality machinist.

So before I decide to just get out of the filed maybe my problem is the area I live in. So I’m wondering how the market is in other areas around the county. I'm hoping some of you guys can give me an idea how the machinist market is in your neck of the woods. Maybe all I need to do is move.

Thanks!!!

 

I do machining and so does my dad and 2 of his brothers as well... the machining market is going downhill because a lot of the work is being done in china. Im in milwaukee.

 

China is a big part of the problem why the machining market in the US is tanking so bad. The bad thing is I work for a company that has sent a lot of work to China.

 

me too. i have been mainly running cnc for the past 3 yrs. the first 2 yrs, i started out on manual machines though. cool to see some other true machinists on the board.

 

we definately aren't going downhill though. if anything, we are climbing like crazy the past 2 yrs. haven't stopped growing. we do alot of GM's work and oil and gas refinery stuff.

 

CRFA the reason YOUR business is growing is because so many others are going out of business... so the little amount of business they would still have locally needs to go somewhere and so it goes to you or other companies still alive. My dads work is the same way.. there still around so there taking all the work that would normally goto these other places going out of business!

 

The market in Madison is not that great, even when shops are busy. A lot of shops in the area are slow and machinist friends of mine want to move on to other shops but they have no place to go. People want to move to better shops, better pay but in Madison that is not as easy as it sounds. If you like walking into a shop and can handle being an operator/button pusher then finding a job is not a problem. If you want to do cool work, work on interesting projects, do more setups and programming then Madison is not for you. Manufacturing in this area sucks. I need to find a solution and I just don’t know what I should do.

 

Manufacturing is sucking nationwide. I've got about 19 years welding experience and havn't gotten a job offer for more than $15/hr since I've been officially unemployed, and that's been since before Thanksgiving.


Our politicians don't seem to understand that without manufacturing, we have no base for our economy. If you don't work behind a desk these days, pushing papers, they simply have no respect for you.

There's a train comming and they can't stop it. China is gearing up and this will be worse than the the economic slump that Japan's big rising caused us. Once China gets their own steel mills up, we're really going to be in a lot of trouble, as we will have to buy from them....since all our mills have been closing down for years. China is now doing what Japan did after WW2, but since they have many more people, it will be much bigger and more damaging to our economy.

 

damn good points man.

The only thing I can see that might counteract this, is the fact that most of the quality of product coming out of China is garbage. I used to work as a machinist, for 4 years, and since changed jobs, and I now work at a manufaturing facility that manufactures bolts, I had to go. i am the sole source of income for our family of 4, and this job pays better, although it is no where near as rewarding. Ok, back on topic here. The company I work manufactures alot of parts for the BIG 3, and we saw about 2 years ago, alot of product leaving anf going offshore. Much to our dismay at the time, as it meant layoffs and the like. Generally the atmosphere at work sucked, we entered bankruptcy protection, and everything. Now we are in the clear and a lot of our jobs have come back, as the quality of the product that was coming from offshore didn't meet requirements.

Now those of us in this industry can thank people like GM and Ford and Chryler, along with a slew of other auto manufacturers (no japanese manufacturers mind you) for creating the ISO, and QS standards. The newest one might just save a few jobs (ISO TS 16949).

So keep your chins up folks, we're not totally dead in the water yet. China might get their own steel mills, but we still have to givce them the iron ore for them to make anything. Maybe our gov't(s) will do something in the future.

Clayton

 

I agree, the quality of work coming out of China is garbage, but I have seen this turn around too. The company I work for started sending work to China 2 or 3 years ago. We were having all types for problems with the products we were having made in China. But that is not so much the case now. The shops in China that do our work are starting to understand what quality work we need and they are refining their manufacturing process and in turn are making much better quality products. It’s just a mater of time before shops in China start to find the “sweet spot” in their manufacturing processes and start producing as good, if not better work, at a much cheaper rate then shops in the US.

There is a flip side to all this. A lot of the people involved in the manufacturing industry are around the age of retirement. So a lot of the skill workers will be gone. Now over the past 10-15 years a lot of the younger generation has been focusing on computer related jobs. That results in a big hole in the number of skill workers needed in the manufacturing industry. So does an individual try and stick it out in this market and see if things pick up in the next few years and hope that better pay jobs will become available??

But then China comes back into play. Lack of skilled workers in the US to do the work, China is getter better at producing quality products, so no workers in US=ship work to China.

 

i am a Tool & Die maker for an international japanese company. all our tooling comes from japan. basically i do machining, welding, fitting, benchwork, CNC, CAD design with CATIA and Unigraphics.... i work with plastic injection moulds. sometimes it is boring doing pm work, but i enjoy the challenge of breakdowns and having the opportunity to be creative.

china has the fastest growing economy in the world right now. i think a drawback to getting tooling from china is that when there is a problem you have to have someone from NA to fix it.

 

I don't agree or disagree with any of the opinions here, but I just thought I'd mention a thought I had...

AFAIK, the Chinese economic share is growing (primarily) based on the fact that they can pay their workers so little. However, should China "rise up" and take over as the worlds leading economy, standards of living would improve, along with human rights. Thus, workers would begin to demand pay raises, and (over time) China would simply develop to a place where they couldn't sustain selling products at such low prices, and would need to increase prices as more of their population would gain higher education and demand better pay in all jobs. Remeber that old industrial revolution that we had here in the U.S. a little while back? It's sort of just a cycle, happening over centuries. Next, Africa would take over Chinas' "old" spot as the place where we get our dirt cheap products made. Then, after those 50 or 100 years, when Africa has taken it's place at the table, and we have nobody else to make cheap goods for us, we then just have the robot colony on the moon make all the worlds goods (until, they start making weapons to wipe out the earth and kill all humans, of course).

Thoughts??

 

would anybody be interested in making custom parts. I need an aluminum distributor cap.

 

I just don’t see how manufacturing industry in the US is going to stay alive or even boom again. Manufacturing will always be around but it will never be the same. I feel like if I stay in this line of work I’m just wasting more of my life. I’m only 30 years old and still have time to start over. I’m not happy about starting over but I’m not to going to stay in a industry were I have to worry about when the next lay off is going to hit. Then when you get laid off you end up having a hard time finding a job that pays more then $14 an hour. Hell with that, it’s time to move on.

 

you welders and machinists should move to the motor city (Detroit) if you want top pay in your field. The only problem is that our unemployment rate is over 7%...

I think machining and welding as a trade is very iffy to get into, it's generally shitty work and the pay cap is not that high unless you want to work mega over time somewhere.

I don't know how you guys do it, I've done machining when I was a machine builder years ago, and it literally bored me to sleep. I think a robot will do that job in the future, a human mind shouldn't be wasted sitting in front of a mill.

 

What type of welding are you speaking of?

Right now I am gearing up for my High Pressure Vessel test this Friday. Jobs seem a plenty here in NYC when it comes to skilled labor.

There are guys here that my company have moved from Texas. Skilled welders.

Next week I start TIG. Right now it is all SMAW on pipe.

I see welding as an opportunity to make some extra cash. The only thing that stinks about NYC is the cost of living is high.

 

Tool and die moldmaker here. Plastic injection molds to be specific. the company I work for dosent see any decline in work although we work hard for jobs.

China molds.. Ya Ive delt with fixing some of those "high quality tools". The ones ive seen are a joke but getting better. Ive actually disassembled one to fix it only to find out it was in such disrepair (keep in mind its a Brand new tool) that we told the customer we wouldnt touch it. We threw what we could back together and sent it back to the customer.


MadtownSi- If your intersted we could use a quality CNC machinist. We are in the Milwaukee area.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by cjohnson_2 &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Tool and die moldmaker here. Plastic injection molds to be specific. the company I work for dosent see any decline in work although we work hard for jobs.

China molds.. Ya Ive delt with fixing some of those "high quality tools". The ones ive seen are a joke but getting better. Ive actually disassembled one to fix it only to find out it was in such disrepair (keep in mind its a Brand new tool) that we told the customer we wouldnt touch it. We threw what we could back together and sent it back to the customer.
</TD></TR></TABLE>

Moldmaker by trade here, too. I've seen the "cheap" molds from Japan. They didn't stay that way after the Japanese raised their standard of living. I've seen the molds from Portugal, S. Korea, Indonesia, Canada, Mexico and now China. At a risk of being flamed or called racist, the Japanese and Canadians make some very high quality tools. The rest are disposable IMO!
Don't know about your molders, but the ones I used to deal with seem to be willing to accept lower quality for an import that they would accept from a domestic tool. I'm sure it is all a paper trail with trade agreements etc.
Don't build or design molds anymore, got tired of the hassle! Now I work in a small CNC jobshop. We have 8 vertical machining centers and 2 horizontal and 4 turning centers. We do mostly aerospace machining of aluminum. I do not miss molds! I do tool design, CNC programming, training, Quality, whatever needs attention. Oh yeah, started my apprenticeship in '68 journeyman Moldmaker by 72, so yeah, guess I am a machinist too. Now if I can just learn to weld......
chris

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by Engloid &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Manufacturing is sucking nationwide. I've got about 19 years welding experience and havn't gotten a job offer for more than $15/hr since I've been officially unemployed, and that's been since before Thanksgiving.


Our politicians don't seem to understand that without manufacturing, we have no base for our economy. If you don't work behind a desk these days, pushing papers, they simply have no respect for you.

There's a train comming and they can't stop it. China is gearing up and this will be worse than the the economic slump that Japan's big rising caused us. Once China gets their own steel mills up, we're really going to be in a lot of trouble, as we will have to buy from them....since all our mills have been closing down for years. China is now doing what Japan did after WW2, but since they have many more people, it will be much bigger and more damaging to our economy.

</TD></TR></TABLE>

I absolutely agree. It sucks big time. My girlfriend's dad just started a steel manufacturing plant there a while back. I have to find out if he's actually making money off that.

 

Yeah I worked as a machinist for about 4 years, started off doing tooling for plastic extrusion (medical tubing stuff) then moved over to a tool and die shop (injection molds/blow molds) where I learned to program in Mastercam and did mostly 2D work at first but was starting to move into 3D surfaces and such. I was advancing pretty fast but working 60+ hours a week (2nd shift 3pm-2am and then saturday 9am to whenever) and I figured out that the top guys were only making $18-25/hour and they had been there for 8+ years. So I quit and changed directions with my career plans. It was fun work for me but not worth it IMO.

 

i took 2 years of machine tool tech in high school.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by Boondock Saint &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">you welders and machinists should move to the motor city (Detroit) if you want top pay in your field. The only problem is that our unemployment rate is over 7%...

I think machining and welding as a trade is very iffy to get into, it's generally shitty work and the pay cap is not that high unless you want to work mega over time somewhere.

I don't know how you guys do it, I've done machining when I was a machine builder years ago, and it literally bored me to sleep. I think a robot will do that job in the future, a human mind shouldn't be wasted sitting in front of a mill.</TD></TR></TABLE>

I agree with you but there is no way I’m moving to Detroit or any place close to Detroit!!! Back when I was in school a teacher told all the students the same thing. He said if you want to make the big bucks move to Detroit. Sorry, no thanks.

When I was in tech school I loved everything about machining. But it was not until I got out of school that I realized all the teachers were just sugar coating everything about the industry. We spent a great deal programming on MasterCAM and were given the impression that once we got out of school, that everyone would be do their own programming and it would be done on MasterCAM. That would have been sweet but that is far from the truth. There are not many general machine shops/jog shops in the Madison area that use MasterCAM. Most shops just program with straight G-code and usually it’s one guy in the shop that makes all the programs. So if you don’t have 10-15 years experience you will not be programming and will only get to setup and run the machine. Depending on the job you might end up being a machine operator for a few days, sitting in front of a CNC machine board out of your skull.

The other problem in the Madison area is not many shops are willing to let you get your Journeyman card. There is one shop that offers apprenticeships but their top people only make $15.00 an hour. Why put all the time in to only make $15.00 after 8 or 10 years? Again, no thanks. Also not many shops are willing to put anything into their employees. They spend no time on training, you have no opportunity for advancement and they expect you to learn everything on your own. I’m a big believer in keeping up on tanning for employees. You need to show your employees that you’re willing to help them improve their skills and you just don’t see shops doing this.

I think it is very said that the pay is so low in the Madison area. Madison is a great place to live and I love it but it’s not a place to live if you’re a machinist. I know some machinist that worked in Minnesota and they are shocked with how low the pay is in Madison. One guy said after 1 year of machining he was making $19-$20 an hour and that the top pay in the area he was working was around $28-$35 an hour. Last time I talked with him he said once is wife is done with school they are moving back because he will not put up this crap.

I think I’m at the point were I’m just going to call it quits. I think this will be my last summer as a machinist and come fall I hope to be going back to school for something new.



Modified by MadtownSi at 7:03 AM 4/28/2005