>>518553713
Pittsburgh, PA currently.
Used to live in northern VA but it was a miserable place to raise kids because schools are shit despite all the home prices being too high. And all the people I used to like there moved to other states to find different jobs.
>>518554250
>I don’t even trust engineers to design proper parts
Because too many of them have never had to actually make the parts they are designing themselves. So they don't know their ass from the elbow about machine operations or even the limitations of different machining methods/tools. I had to learn CAD and CAM in parallel and they're very complimentary skill sets, but most degree programs only do one or the other. Then half-ass all the practical components.
>>518554606
Doesn't surprise me much. Project Manager got laid off from my first job after a year because he was supposed to be documenting a proprietary process in order to train other people to perform it consistently. And when it came time for other people to use his notes none of them made any sense and he couldn't explain how he produced the parts he claimed were within spec.
Certified material reports make materials more expensive for a reason. And machining specimens for material property testing of various types (mostly tensile, but some charpy) was one of the earliest CNC programming tasks I was given.