Are we Luddites?

There are those - like me - who do not have the manual skills to be able to do the sorts of things they want to do on a lathe. I want to make - amongst other things - pens with graceful curves, ones with multi faceted engraving on the outside, multi start threads etc etc. These are things that are possible, but fiendishly difficult with a conventional non cnc setup. That's why I want to do cnc and why I feel it has a place in my workshop. It will be used for one-offs as well as several-offs. If I can write the correct software tools, it will take me much less time, many fewer errors and a lot more accurately than if I were to do it without cnc, even for one-off's. Cnc will help me work around my limitations to create what I want while using to the skills I have, rather than wasting time because of the skills I don't have.

Regards,

Richard

Martin, your quote we don’t have millions of unemployed so they must have up skilled or moved on to other jobs will seem rather hollow to those living in the former coalfields where unemployment is a serious issue with its accompanying poverty.

Dave W

According to a display board in a mining museum I visited recently they had to give up when they couldn't meet a target of 50 cwt per man shift. That seems pathetically low to me, it can't make sense to pay people to scrabble about in the depths of the earth in a dangerous occupation when you can buy the coal a lot cheaper elsewhere, even from opencast mines in this country. Where the government of the day went wrong was to keep it going too long, and then close it all in a rush without retraining people so they could work elsewhere in a more productive environment.

Hi Samsaranda

2 points.

1 The miners strike was 30 something years ago so your 'will seem rather hollow' comment is probably a little out of date. That said I do think that the whole thing was very badly handled and much more should have been done at the time to create other industries. Given that today the UK is moving competely away from coal for power generation it was always going to happen at some stage.

2. The population is higher now than in the 80's and there is less unemployment so logically there must be more jobs in total now than then. On a large timescale job growth and advancement in technology can and have gone in the same direction. It's the transitions that hurt which to my mind is the task of government to ensure new growth, retraining and recocation.

So I stand by what I said which was industry need to keep up with the times in order osurvive let alone thrive.

regards Martin

I know this is off-topic but in my defence I am following the thread...

I *think* it was Adam Smith who (and I paraphrase) it is madness to produce something that can be bought cheaper elsewhere

I do think Norman Tebbit had a point about moving to where the work is, but I also accept there may be reasons why not everyone can do so

Which kinda gets me back on-topic - skills can be developed and people can retrain sometimes in short timeframes, as an example, I am hiring window fitters but there is a dearth of appropriately skilled people with the right attitude about, and the current construction boom is causing rates to sky rocket

Just read Micks post.

I agree with you in general. It was a truly shamefull affair.

I do think that essentially what the miners were fighting for was the survival of their communities and not the survival of mining but thats all they had. I doubt if there were any miners who wished to see their children down the pit and would want to see new industries created locally. Labour shut more pits than Margaret Thatcher the difference was she was looking for a fight rather than trying to re-invigorate mining communities.

You are right that in order to re-skill and move on you need opportunities and that can only really be done by state investment.

regards Martin

People have been moving to where the work is.

That is why so many EU nationals have moved to the UK. The work is here, in spades (and pipes, and plumbing and fruit picking and farming and.. millions of jobs). The Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks, Bulgarians & Romanians I have met work at an effort level and rate that puts the UK born to shame. They do the jobs that many of our own unemployed will not do, and do not do. As I sit here typing I am facing a social housing estate where there is 90% unemployment and 90% UK birth. In the town there is 4% unemployment, but there has been about 15% immigration from Europe in the last 10 years, and virtually none of the immigrants are unemployed. The unemployed seem - from the 90 household sink estate in front of me - to be unwilling to get up to take their kids to school, unwilling to get dressed, and unwilling to do anything other than procreate. They may have problems, medical or otherwise, but little of it is evident from the outside. After commuting on foot through the estate for 5 years, I can identify 50% of the adults and a majority could work if they could be bothered to get up, wash, dress, take some exercise and behave like a human being with some pretensions to civilisation.

The issues in mining communities are different, but 30 years is quite a time for someone with get-up-and-go to get-up-and-be-gone.

Regards,

Richard.

If model engineers all believed that, we'd just be buying ready-to-run models rather than setting up our own home machine-shops. I think we do it because we like the work itself and because we enjoy the increase of our understanding of the design choices that go into making a mechanical device.

If you live in an area where there's effectively only one main industry for tens of miles around, and whole communities have been based on that industry for a century or more, there are actually vanishingly few people in that area who can take Tebbit's advice - least of all on a bike! If a government decides to delete huge numbers of livelihoods in such an area, it should clearly put in serious work locally to replace such livelihoods.

When I left school, I joined the Merchant Navy and thought that if I wanted to remain afloat, there would be a job for life for me (and others who joined up at the time). What a shock it was to the system to find that the British Merchant Navy was almost defunct by the time of the Falkands war - that the country was struggling to find not only the vessels, but the (British) manpower for them.

Today, the only vessels visiting UK ports on a regular basis are a few ferries and some specialist vessels. All others are foreign registered and crewed.

Fortunately, I got out of the MN at my time of choosing before being made redundant.

Dave
The Emerald Isle

My comment refers to commercial activity such as coal mining and not to producing "things of beauty" in our spare time which we can rightly be proud of, perhaps I could have made my comment clearer

Mick,

I grew up in N Devon. I am a professional mechanical engineer, current industry - boxes (fancy metal ones). I have spent a few years as a stress engineer on aircraft interiors. No jobs in N Devon, so I moved to Kent where there were jobs. I literally got on my (motor)bike and went after a job. Did it in 1987. Pension prospect is negligible as it's a contribution one, not salary linked. When I joined the company there was a final salary scheme, but that went down the tube in 1990.

Regards,

Richard.

Sorry Mick, I don't see the relevance of your comment, in no way am I looking down on anyone

Edit - Ahh I see, you have equated my paraphrase of Adam Smith as demeaning in some way to coal miners - not true, was more a reflection of Duncan's post. If coal can be bought cheaper than "we" can mine locally, why would it make sense to persist with mining?, it's an economic argument, not a slight against coal miners

Edited By Andy Carruthers on 30/05/2018 16:51:00

Can we let the mine closure issue lie, please.

Feelings run very deep on both sides, and it's rather sad if we allows this episode of our history to continue to divide us, rather than learning from it and accepting our differences.

Neil

I'd agree with that for the present or even in Beeching's time, but that would never've got 'em built in the first place. They weren't put in by philanthropists.

So we have a resource, created for economic reasons, which we now think should be sustained for political ones that would've been unguessable at the start.

That might mean that human technical progress - such as it is - is a much more random affair than we like to believe, and we're not as bright as we think we are.