Come on Edelbrock. Get your act together.

Rat Bastid said
Your son is going to find it’s near impossible to find a machinist any more. Every shop I know could hire at least one guy and a couple of shops could hire 3 or 4. They just can’t find them.

Everyone says find a kid, hire and train him. That would be great IF you could find a kid that was interested enough to even think about it and then motivated enough to learn it.

And…most of these kids coming in with zero experience expect to be paid like they can run every piece of equipment in the shop, know every procedure and know when to use what valve job and stuff like that.

Go to a non automotive machine shop and most of those places could hire 5 or more machinists right now. IF they could find them.

The schools are putting out kids who can write a CNC program and put stock in the machine but if they have to walk up to a manual lathe or mill they don’t have a clue.

Its bad out there for skilled labor. I feel bad for your son. Hopefully he can find someone.

First of all don’t think cnc operator’s or programers have no skill. Your just not in the right machine shop. I ran a 150 and 120mm horizontal boring bars for 27 years and various verticals as well after transitioning from 15 years of manual machining. I can manual program at the machine control. I can run cam programs and can stop if the program is cutting the wrong shape before it gets fucked up. Complex programs are run through a graphics program before material is cut to spot errors, you have to know what you are doing. The 100 other operators I worked with also knew what they were doing. I will agree there is a shortage of skilled labor but we are out there. Money is our motivation. Anything you can do on a manual machine, I can do on a cnc more accurately in half the time including fudging things in.