Working with Machines

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Does anyone else like to work with machines or find watching them perform their tasks somehow calming or unusually interesting?

I never get tired of watching, programming, or using them. I've been a CNC machinist for 13 years now.

Is that a Mori Seiki lathe in your avatar? I can't really tell.

You would probably enjoy the following YouTube channel. It's all manual machining, but very interesting to watch, nonetheless. http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDmxnPem-pPfJQATIkfgY2Q

YES!

I do a lot of machine work for my projects. I mainly use a lathe and a milling machine. I usually catch myself just staring at the metal being cut when the automatic feed is engaged.


To me, watching this is better than sex!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWn8gQ9Ykpk[/youtube]

I mainly mess with Dremels and drill presses at home, but I have access to a lathe and mill. When I'm turning a piece I like to try to make the swarf 1 long continuous piece. I always have a feeling as though I was sculpting, to watch the work as I cut it

I drove semi-trucks for a few years. I guess operating a commercial vehicle that big is like dealing with a machine. Sometimes traffic was a pain, but when I was in a large warehouse environment or on the highway it could be fun sometimes. I enjoyed hearing the whine from the turbo.

Yes, I love watching them. When I worked at an engineering company I would spend as long as I could in the machine shop, just watching bars of metal turn into components. As long as it wasn't too loud. Don't like presses.

YES!! !! ! Since I was too little to ask what the machines did. Anything from the street sweeper to bulldozers to clocks. If it had moving parts, I had to watch how it worked ..... And I still do!

Charles

And I had to take it apart to see how it worked.

Yes. Mori Seiki SL303 I work with them and the SL250, SL25A and CL200.
I also like to use the old school lathes as well. Good because they can't find enough people who want to manually repair parts at work and I actually ask if I can work over and do it.
I don't know why but watching the workpiece being turned and the turret (for CNC lathe of course) rotating to the next insert to cut with is very calming for me.

That was me when I was little. I gave my poor mum fits.

[quote="Drehmaschine]
That was me when I was little. I gave my poor mum fits.[/quote]

Yes I tried SO hard to be good, but they didn't understand, the desperation to get in there and see how it was working - more than one present ended up in small pieces. It was so much more interesting than actually 'playing' with the toy.

I got a flatbed Rollo Elf

Thought so! The colors gave it away. At my current place, I work with two HAAS SL20 (one with a bar feeder), and two Omni-Turn GT50 gang tool lathes.

I'm the same way when it comes to watching. Even if it's a large job, it never gets old watching each part. When I get really bored I'll even watch machining videos on YouTube, lol.

Taking things apart, yup. Today I spent most of the day turning things on the lathe and I almost went nuclear on someone who interrupted me

Machines have a steady rhythm. Watching a repetitious machine work can be mesmerizing and calming at the same time.

Yeah, I like 'em all right.

I don't work with them at the moment, but have had jobs where I've either worked directly or indirectly with various manufacturing/production machinery. Sometimes I thinking being a machinist or a millwright might be neat, or even an operator of a rather interesting machine. But I think if I do work with machines in a professional capacity again, it might be in the more indirect sense of analyzing them from a productivity/qc/theory of constraints/industrial engineering perspective. I'd like to own/build more machines for some hobby ideas in the future.