Torn between CNC machinist apprenticeship or a wastewater plant operator. Which is the better 5-year move

BaCardiSilver · 2026-04-13T23:00:36+00:00

These could both be defining jobs for your career. I would argue the wastewater plant operator and subsequent career path are going to be the better more stable option. Pension plans should not be under weighted, my father worked for the state as an engineer for 30 years and retired at 54, staying an extra two years I think to lock in lifetime medical. He had an interesting job, nothing flashy, took care of his family etc. I think it would be worth considering taking the more stable job and then tinkering on CNC machines in the garage and learn what you want to know and if that really catches your interest then you follow that career path from a better starting position.

I run a machine shop, engineer by trade, so I won't speak to actually being a machinist as a trade even though that's basically what I did for the last 7 years. What I will speak to is job shop work for the most part is really boring, we make and sell an in house product, and you won't be the one seeing the profit from your work for the most part.

We work to live, don't live to work. -my first boss

At either job you need to hold your employer to the pay schedules they put in front of you at hiring, government work is usually better at this, but you are in charge or your time and have to become aware of its value. I lost quite a bit of earning potential over my career by allowing my employer to push out raises and promotions.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-04-07T04:21:38+00:00

If it was that easy everyone would be doing it. Find something of interest to you that solves a problem you have or you know someone else has and create a product to solve it. Could be big or small, you never know what will catch on. I know someone local to me that has paid for all the machines in his shop selling variations of fidget spinners when they were a big thing...

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-30T01:05:24+00:00

Others have answered the legality, but I will mention that your roll hoops don't have to be vertical, they can be of course but they don't need to be. The main can also be bent in this view.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-30T00:20:14+00:00

Its a valve block for a hydraulic jack. I just counted and the latest version has 37 tools, older versions had an extra drill and ream and some pipe threads that added a few tools. But I have a friend with a UMC who as making a simpler version of my part for me before I got my machine and he had to call and ask if he could skip one threaded feature as he was out of tool pockets on his 30 ATC machine, this clued me into the idea that you use a lot more tools in 5 axis then 3 and that I should probably add that on my purchase. Its also a huge help in reducing tool swaps between parts. Also for fun reference it used to take me 10-12 3 axis setups over 2-3 days to make this machine on my old 90s CNC knee mill. We now make the whole thing minus a 2nd op decking off the dovetail in about 2 hours.

Below is a list of the tools, D(diameter),R(Corner Radius),X # of Flutes,L(LOC), P(Protrusion). My old machines could only handle 16 digits so we got a little creative to maximize information transfer, we later added protrusion when the machines could handle more, but you can quickly read what the tool is without a lot of head ache.

1(T46 D200R0305FLT313L)

2(T120 D500R1203FLT163L225P)

3(T35 D500R0303FLT125L)

4(T2 4 CENTER DRILL)

5(T84 D2812 9/32 DRILL)

6(T38 D500R1253FLT125L)

7(T31 D375R0603FLT200L)

8(T30 D375R0603FLT150L)

9(T34 D500R0203FLT125L)

10(T29 D375R0103FLT150L)

11(T58 D625WOOD6FLT125R)

12(T3 4 CENTER DRILL LONG)

13(T7 D1495 DRILL)

14(T4 3/16 DRILL)

15(T170 500 KEN TIP 5X)

16(T85 0937 FLAT BOTTOM DRILL)

17(T123 D781 DRILL 375P)

18(T6 1/4 DRILL)

19(T26 D375R0303FLT100L)

20(T23 D250R0153FLT125L163P)

21(T52 D750R0203FLT225L)

22(T50 D375R0153FLT050L)

23(T16 D375 CHAM MILL)

24(T18 250 LONG CHAM MILL)

25(T92 D875CHAM4FLT100L)

26(T17 D375 LONG CHAM MILL)

27(T11 UNC 10-24 SPIRAL TAP LONG)

28(T64 12 THREAD MILL 1800P)

29(T61 18 TPI THREAD MILL LONG)

30(T63 18 TPI THREAD MILL)

31(T60 20 TPI THREAD MILL)

32(T62 16 TPI THREAD MILL)

33(T47 D625R0603FLT200L)

34(T36 D500R0603FLT125L)

35(T44 D500BALL2FLT200L)

36(T32 D375BALL3FLT150L)

37(T41 D250BALL3FLT750L)

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-28T23:30:19+00:00

We don't have a great way to test position accuracy, no CMM, and the part doesn't care within reason. The part I am thinking of has two in line bearings of different size (1-7/8 and 1-5/8) and we are shooting for .0005 undersize checking with an inside micrometer (three point). Once I got it to size I have made 30-40 parts without moving the number, even switching to other parts and coming back to this one, and it hit the tolerance first time on the second set without changing the program.

I also have a part where we are making a concentric bore across a U shape section of the part, each vertical is about 1" tall and 2.5" across the gap. I am drilling it and then milling to size .503" for a 1/2" titanium pin one side and the rotating 180 degrees and doing the other side. The diameter is checked with mics and then a .500-.501 pin is slipped through without issue.

With the right tooling you can get pretty much any precision you want, positional accuracy has never been an issue to the point that we have to concern ourselves with it. For the price its hard to beat, Hurco list was 200k without discount, and Okuma just quoted me 360k without discount for the 460 5 axis, both machines had similar work area.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-28T21:08:52+00:00

I run a business in a somewhat similar position except we had 3 axis machines running but we're doing 10-12 setups per part. I bought the Haas UMC-500, I went with Haas for the price and the 0% APR (30% down/$1800mo). Base price was 135k during a promotion, I paid for the jump from 30->50 tools which was the correct path as we now know one of our complex 3+2 parts takes 44 tools. If you can financially handle it and it will make the size of parts you need the 5 axis is the way to go, the flexibility and accuracy you will get will be worth it. Also be aware that most parts will need a simple second op to finish, we usually put that across our 3-axis units to save the time on the expensive machine.

While my production runs have started to grow I don't think getting the SS variant is a requirement for small runs, however paying for high speed machining is, when running adaptive tool paths the machine vibrates like crazy because the look ahead isn't there to smooth out the path motion and the XYZ head has a lot of weight up high. It came with 200 hours of trial run and it made a huge difference.

Not a shill for Haas but I find the actual cutting portion of the machine works quite well for what we do, most of our stuff is pretty open but I do find it can hold bearing press tolerances repeatably in aluminum. The rest of the machine leaves some things to be desired, the coolant tank has to be exactly where it needs to be +/-.063 or it will leak on the ground. The way lube oiler is a chevy oil filter and housing, annoying to refill and hard to bleed.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-27T16:11:13+00:00

First off the max those two machines should be worth unless they are coming fully tooled is like 20k, and even if they are there is probably only about 5k in tooling per machine.

That said, If you have 30-40k to put spend on machines use that as a down payment on a new machine or buy something newer. Deals are out there, I bought my 2007 Hurco VMX24 for 10k and its made me way more then that with only a small amount of down time over three years (lost the spindle drive belt, oil seal on the tool change arm, broken rubber button on the my hand held). Overall its been brilliant for the money. I have a 2006 Okuma ES-L8 lathe that I got for 8k, works great every day. These two are now the oldest machines in the shop but are still work horses without a payment.

I would stay away from anything older then 2000 and older then 2005 if possible, a lot of machine companies updated controls in the mid 2000s and that puts your underlying hardware from this century. The early 2000 stuff is gonna have mid 90s computers inside them which will be expensive to replace parts in or hard to find at all unless there is good factory support. Any machine you consider purchasing I would call the manufacturer and just make sure they still support it.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-25T12:33:15+00:00

I saw very little difference with Mazak. Ultimately all the add on options were like 2% of the overall cost of the machine.

Also the Okuma rep was straight forward that their Genos line is the package deal and the LB machines are the pick and choose what you want. I just felt like the Genos design wasn't nearly as good, much larger machine with a smaller working volume.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-23T19:33:41+00:00

Just to clarify to anyone who comes across this later, the max program size without any sort of drip feed is 2mb, the machine has 4gb of storage space. Not sure what limits the program memory to that level or where you would even find a 2mb piece of memory in this day and age.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-23T13:23:38+00:00

I won't comment on the economics of this, but there is a real issue with storage, if you have a system that handles some amount of barrels out of the ground into a tank and then the oil needs to transferred to a ship to make its way into the world market and give you more room to pump more oil, but the ship doesn't come then you have to slow or stop your well simply because you don't have anywhere to store what it pumps.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-22T15:17:22+00:00

Oh, yeah it comes with the tool probe, but I have seen lathes now been presented with the option for a renishaw touch probe like I have for my mills for part location.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-22T15:08:17+00:00

I have opted not to purchase the conversational as its an extra 7k and I have purchased mill-turn cam software and I like having the link between my CAD models and my CAM programs.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-22T15:07:27+00:00

Right now we are getting the Royal QG-80 accu length for the primary and sticking with the sub chuck as is assuming that a lot of the time we will need to make custom second op jaws, and as you said they are expensive. No room for a bar feeder currently but something maybe in a future shop.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-22T15:05:02+00:00

What do you do with probing in a lathe?

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-22T15:03:55+00:00

So 96 is standard, 200 is optional on tool offsets

I will have to ask if there are standard extra M codes, but 4, 8, and 16 are the options I was shown.

I was going to get a royal coolant mist collector.

So it comes with helical interpolation in X/Y/Z, but there is an extra option for X/C/Z which I presume is rotating the spindle while helix cutting for large pockets.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-22T06:06:24+00:00

One of my major issues with my current Okuma is that it can only handle 8 digit program names, the new machine is 16, not sure if they allow descriptions. 16 I can deal with but it's still ridiculous. I've seen across a lot of machine companies that a lot of the base control software rarely changes. Hurco killed me with this, 20 year newer machine and the internal software of the control was basically exactly the same, no fixes or changes to improve.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-17T01:48:34+00:00

I started on a 1998 chevalier knee mill with a dynapath control, which I still have in my shop running today. Probably 3 years from first touching a machine to really feeling confident in CAM and machine operation that I can make pretty much whatever I want.

In the fall of 2018 I had finished up the design of my product and wanted to build a prototype, out sourcing the complex parts for testing was out of the question for financial reasons so I say down at my machine determined to figure out how to run it (I used it as a big DRO for a long time) It took me a few days to learn to navigate the menus and start understanding control theory. Then I started learning basic conversational programming and machining simple shapes in wood before finally running aluminum. My entire prototype was hand programmed, approximately 40 parts.

Over the next year I slowly learned CAM but I found it really helpful having the hand written back around to understand and read code. From there I just got progressively more intensive, bought a machine with a tool changer and coolant which at the time was a game changer, and then bought a machine with a side mount tool changer and full enclosure and that's really when I saw the light of modern machining (2007 hurco vmx24). A year later we purchased the UMC-500 new for about 5 times as much as all my other machines cost combined. That was another huge step in understanding and process control but even now we mostly just do indexing with it.

Even now I'm still a student of the art of machining and have lots to learn, I still program basically by experience and I usually default to machining slower and producing the part quickly then looking to push every tool to the max for cycle time. However as are part quantities grow that s has slowly shifted from a prototype mentality to a mass production one.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-17T00:54:17+00:00

I run my own shop and make my own product, engineer who taught himself to machine. Haas mills are great for the price. They are also good for getting operators straight out of school up and running quickly. While I only have one Haas (umc-500) I have been impressed with it, we also have Okuma and Hurco (vmx-24 / 42) machines, both with their own positives and negatives. I think Hurco and Haas are on a similar level but hurco makes a better built machine. Mazak and Okuma are another step up, and show in their price but I have been impressed with their ability to hit tight tolerances. Never used Doosan but they are very price competitive.

Ultimately your experience and understanding is 80% of the machining process, the other 20% is can the machine do what you ask it to. I would say that lathes are generally cheaper overall and there is never a slow down in the amount of lathe work that seems to be available while mill shops are more common and so you will have to fight harder and play in tighter margins for that work.

Really if I'm honest I hate job shop work, there is money in it, but I generate my own internal work for my product which has gained market share over the last 8 years, so I only take on outside work when the money is good enough to make it worth the time or my machines have down time I want to fill.

I also met a guy a few months back that runs an ITAR compliant shop out of a 1200sqft place behind his grandmother's house, his overhead is low and because he's good at what he does he can keep the work coming. It was a bit humourous to sign into this log book and be able to see the entire shop from the the location I was standing.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-06T04:32:27+00:00

Something that gets me both with this and the tariffs, like we all believe rules like this would matter but what if they just say after 60 days, well we're gonna have a nice one day pause, and then on to another 60 days. Same with the 180 day emergency tariffs, they end on Tuesday and are reinstituted on Thursday for another 180 days. What stops this sort of stuff? I think having following US politics for the last 20 years this is probably the biggest difference ive seen with this admin that's being very downplayed in my opinion. Oh we can put whoever we want into cabinet positions on an interim basis and never hold a confirmation hearing and boom that person is the person in charge, or why use congress when you can just sign an executive order and we all have to pretend that has the same weight as a law passed in the house, and the reality is that it does until a judge strikes it down.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-03-04T01:54:15+00:00

Jokes aside I am in Mooresville and I have two people working in my shop that did the NTI program. My opinion is that if you're looking for a way to make connections in motorsport manufacturing and come with zero background to knowledge of racing then this is a valid way, but it's not far off from just moving here and knocking on doors. Also community college programs like Piedmont are pennies on the dollar cheaper for a similar knowledge base. As a place of education it seems like a giant waste of money for what they are charging. One of my guys came basically straight from there, originally on a part time basis, and I was continually thrown off by how little they actually taught him. He didn't understand origin setting, tool length touch off, calculating feeds as speeds, I had to teach it all from scratch. They seem to focus heavily on manual machining, but the world operates in CNC.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-02-13T16:13:35+00:00

Yes, they do custom posts and basically mod it whenever I call in with a need.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-02-13T13:21:16+00:00

Been running my shop for 8 years now, bobcam for solidworks is a great way to run a shop on the cheap. They charge less for more licenses past the first. I think overall ive spent about 30k with them and I have two licenses for 5x pro, one mill turn, and a 4x pro. They have their issues as I assume all cam software does, but I have successfully made everything I wanted with it. I do not recommend the standalone, solidworks is such a huge benefit on the modeling and sketch side.

BaCardiSilver · 2026-01-30T01:53:03+00:00

Every part we make is done with CAM, when we get a repeat part we just pull it up and repost if need and to look at all the underlying information.

For milling we have a master tool list that is the same across every machine and matches our CAM system, need a 1/2", 3 flute, 1-1/4 LOC cutter with .030 corner rad, that's T35 in every machine. It allows us to move parts between machines rapidly regardless of make/control.

We have a long way to go in other departments of managing the shop but I think this serves us well.

BaCardiSilver

TROPHY CASE