Is there a need for machined parts for any brand?

Paul McEvoy · From: Baltimore, USA

Hello all

Just wondering...

My friend makes classical wooden flutes. There's a fair amount of machining involved and he's a superb machinist. He just invested in a huge CNC milling machine and built an addition on his shop. He's hoping to streamline the metal parts of the flute which can be pretty labor intensive.

Anyway, the machine will likely be sitting idle for long periods. It's some $40k Austrian job.

I mentioned there might be an orphaned pedal steel brand that might need a parts supplier. But I'm not sure about that. Are parts readily available for everyone who needs them? Is there a demand for something in particular?

He was interested in the prospect, I wasn't sure if there is a demand for anything in particular.

Thanks
Paul

David Ball · From: North Carolina High Country

I have a pretty decent small shop CNC setup myself, with a fairly big CNC router setup and several smaller mills and lathes. There are also companies like EMachineshop out there looking at the small scale parts market.

There's definitely demand, but most of the work when you're in the CNC world is in the CAD modeling arena. It costs the same in labor to design one widget as it does to do a thousand. If you're doing big runs of a single part, CNC makes a lot of sense since the cost per part decreases as volume increases.

But for small, one off stuff, I still find manual machining to be more cost effective than spending the time to do the CAD work required for CNC milling. Sometimes the simpler approach makes more sense, but it's when you're looking at larger scale production that CNC really comes into the picture as a practical production tool.

Dave

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