Yeah I don't care about the specific technology. Hydraulic is fine by me because my needs are relatively speaking low volume. One piece a minute is plenty for the foreseeable future and that isn't challenging in the slightest.

I'm also partial to having a couple of machines instead of just one because of the reliability. If I spend $250k upfront (which I don't have) I get one machine that's going to be extremely reliable but if it does break I'm losing you know $500 an hour or whatever it is.

If I spend $20k on one machine and $30k on another and $50k on a third I end up with no single point of failure. Yeah they will break more but I'll (probably) never be stuck with no ability to make parts. It's easier capex too since revenue from the first finances the second and revenue from those two finance the third.

What kind of stuff do you do? I don't interact with many people on here who have mechanical aptitude. Obviously products of some kind. Can you talk about it? I'm intrigued.

Mostly small volume electronics devices. Generally with decent margins ($500+). So, large NRE expenditures absolutely kill me at the same time that I'm willing to pay quite high per-unit costs.

And my problem is always the mechanical side--and has been since 2000.

In a former life, I'm an electrical engineer. However, I've had to deal with thermal and packaging back at a big company I worked for. I eventually got so tired of all the NRE problems that I went to the community college and took their CNC milling and CAD classes to see where the problems were (don't get me started on that--the classes were excellent but the whole idea of an error prone person rather than a computer converting my 3D Solidworks to a 2D MasterCAM CAD surface appalled me). I also had clamp problems--the manufacturer suddenly couldn't hold the clamp in round (we're talking visibly egg-shaped--almost 160mils on an 8inch diameter clamp). Being originally from Western Pennsylvania, this drove me CRAZY. This is the kind of stuff that men used to do in their garage for crying out loud. Local machinists could hand this kind of stuff back to you the same day back in the 70's.

The thing that drove it all home was touring Sullins Connector Corp (whom I recommend HIGHLY). They had their own machine shop and injection molding machines. Their average run on the machines is about 150! They are constantly swapping molds. That was good, but wasn't the big thing.

I needed a custom connector. Described roughly what I wanted and gave them some drawings. Figured we'd talk about it some more and get a quote. About a week and a half later--I get 5 connectors in the mail made out of high temp plastic with gold contacts. They had looked in their future runs, found one with the correct opening and pin spacing, injected a couple of extra, milled the dimensions down by hand, populated the pins and bent them by hand so it was right angle, and sent them to me FOR FREE. And then quoted me for both the hand work (only a little more than a Molex connector that wasn't really right) on the smaller volume, as well as a changeover point when they would cut me a mold.

That's when I realized that US companies can compete. Most of them just suck. It's also when I realized that product companies need machine shops even if they are idle 99% of the time. The 1% is what gets you the business. This is a hard sell to the executives and beancounters. Fortunately, the CEO I'm currently working with has been brainwashed. He personally had to add holes to a bunch of plastic cases--and discovered that his milling machine saved him $5,000.

Although, to be fair, I have this same problem at the electrical engineering side on a different level--VLSI design. There are lots of design I can do on a chip, but I can't afford the NRE to build one.

I see the same kinds of things myself. It takes execs with vision and talented people in the shop. But if someone's got it, man is it nice to work with them.