profsnuggles

5 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Well CNC technology has come a long way. The 5-axis machine we purchased was actually cheaper in absolute $ than the 20 year old 3-axis machine we were replacing it with.

But yes vacuum clamping is still annoying. There are of course strategies like onion skinning, leaving tabs. On nesting machines I often cover the table with laminate if I'm running small parts and need to prevent vacuum loss through the spoil board.

Most people that I talk to that brought CNC into a shop haven't seem to have laid anyone off but instead seem to be able to retrain people and grow sales because of the new capacity it brought.

Although if there are people who are actually button pushers and legitimately bring nothing else to the table I think their time is limited. I wish I could find the video but last year our CNC vendor sent me a video of a concept manufacturing cell using an autonomous guided vehicle. It blew my mind. There was no operators or conveyors just robots cutting a whole lot of different sized parts of of different material at the same time. The parts got stacked on a pallets which the AGV drove around to the different operations. They were even showing off handling non rectangular parts with no problem.

Probably not that expensive either I was thinking maybe $2 million based on the prices of machines I knew and... wildly guessing at the price of the robotics. Expensive but imagine 15 more years?

profsnuggles

5 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

That is also something people don't think about. Solid wood is great because it's easy to fix, but it's heavy and hard to move. Also it's less stable than a plywood and has to be taken care of.

We had a customer with a reception desk that had solid wood 5-piece raised panels in it. One of the panels cracked, so we sent them a new one under warranty and over 3-4 years it cracked more times. We finally sent someone to try to figure out the issue.

It was winter and the building was unusually warm and humid. The desk was positioned in front of the front door in a way that whenever it was opened the panel would get hit with an large blast of dry cold air. After convincing them to replace it with a more stable plywood raised panel simulacrum we haven't heard of an issue since.

profsnuggles

5 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

I don't know anything about spiral staircases or masonry I build commercial furniture offices, libraries, courtrooms, etc.

Wondering how finances come out ahead is silly. Take for example take a CNC beamsaw. It does one thing cut straight lines. A person stands in front of it (or a robot but smaller shops it's a person) and puts a board on the machine. The machine grabs and executes a series of cuts. Then you take the parts it spits out rotate them feed them back in the machine to cut the other way. A person standing at a cabinet saw can do the same thing, faster even, with a nicer finish... for the first 10-20 cuts. The machine gives the same 95% quality cut every time in the same amount of time from cut 1 to cut 10,000.

When my shop first got one I by myself cut twice as much material in 1/5th of the time as it took 3 workers on cabinet table saws. And I actually had enough downtime while the machine was running to also put the parts through an edgebander to put a finished veneer edge on the cut parts at the same time.

The 3 CNC machines I run now don't screw up often and waste time or material. Even when there is a problem it's actually often due to user error. I just had to spend some time fixing our 5-axis machine because the operator accidentally left some loose material in it which a sensor on the machine detected to prevent the machine being damaged. The emergency stop it triggered ruined the part and the machine stopped so fast that the machine racked and I needed to re-calibrate it. But that is fairly unusual. Maybe instead of crappy tech they should have bought quality machines? Or maybe the machines were fine and someone should have invested in software instead of a crappy vb script? Or maybe the operators just needed more training?

A master craftsman can use a machine to create the same quality of work in less time if that is the goal. You can steam bend a board and then 5-axis machine it to create a very complicated edge detail that would be tedious to do by hand. Or you can glue blocks up with different grain directions and materials so the completed railing has an interesting design that would be impossible to create otherwise. Or even spend some more effort gluing up those blocks to make a better grain match.

The reason they are gluing up blocks and machining them is because it is cheaper and faster for an okay quality. Almost no one buying the "McMansion" staircase was going to buy your bespoke custom master craftsman spiral staircase. I work in a shop that makes all custom-built to order furniture. Sometimes potential clients call and have sticker shock when they hear the price or sometimes they need to furniture sooner than we can build something custom. They just go and buy something they can live with from a larger company that mass produces a furniture line where they will have inventory.

I don't see an issue with making something affordable for people who want it. I'm not even sure anything is lost, there are still people who will want the high quality product and someone will be there to supply that.

There is whole world between button pusher and master craftsman. Master craftsmen that embrace the technology can expand what is possible. And a button pusher cannot exist unless there is a master craftsmen to do the setup work.

profsnuggles

10 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

This is what I came up with over lunch. I'm going to try keeping all my dotfiles in one org file. I have an init hook that runs org-bable-tangle to re-export all the dotfiles after saving.

  ** Meta
     If you place the following code into your emacs init when saving the
     ~/.dotfiles.org file the dotfiles will all be exported.

     #+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp :tangle yes
       (defun dotfiles-hook ()
         "If the current buffer is '~/.dotfiles.org' the code-blocks are
       tangled."
         (when (equal (buffer-file-name)
                      (expand-file-name (concat (getenv "HOME")
                                        "/.dotfiles.org")))
           (org-babel-tangle)))

       (add-hook 'after-save-hook 'dotfiles-hook)
     #+END_SRC

  ** bashrc
    #+BEGIN_SRC conf :tangle ~/.bashrc
      export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
    #+END_SRC

  ** tmux
    #+BEGIN_SRC conf :tangle ~/.tmux.conf
      unbind C-b
      set -g prefix C-t
      bind C-t send-prefix
    #+END_SRC

profsnuggles

10 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

This is the most interesting system I've heard about for dotfiles. How do you organize the org files? Having a single org file with all my dotfiles in it could be interesting but probably unwieldy. It could be interesting to use code block expansion for keeping secrets out of the dotfile source.

I keep my emacs init in org and I can't believe I've never thought of this.

profsnuggles

10 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Git and Xstow. I have a small shell script that parses the xstow.ini file and creates all the directories I have listed under the [keep-dirs] directive in order to prevent it from deleting empty directories or replacing them with links.

  #!/usr/bin/env bash
  
  #Read the keep directories from xstow.ini
  ini="$(<'xstow.ini')"
  IFS=$'\n' && ini=( ${ini} )
  ini=( ${ini[*]/\    =/=} )  # remove tabs before =
  ini=( ${ini[*]/=\   /=} )   # remove tabs after =
  ini=( ${ini[*]/\ =\ /=} )   # remove anything with a space around =
  
  #for each keep dir make sure it exists in the home dir
  for i in ${ini[@]}
  do
        if [[ $i =~ ^\ *dir ]]
        then
                eval $i
                mkdir $dir
        fi
  done

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