I noted this in our chat and he says kids are simply not interested. The days of the traditional tool room are gone. It is all CAD and CNC stuff and largely you need some schooling for that. Modern methods also need fewer employees so the pool of talent is now small. Add in the cost of having an employee. I know of more than one biz that simply let all the workers go and carried on as a one man shop due to the overhead that comes with each warm body. No doubt the amount one is able to pay for each
position factors in too. The work is there but perhaps the profit margin is not.
What sort of jobs do young guys get these days that make tool room work unattractive?
To make it attractive to a young person, it has to be more like a computer game! There needs to be computer imaging and preparation in the process rather than machine set up and dirty hands. It also needs to be more immediate, from walking through the door to being a valued team member.
The age old approach to apprentices that involved 2 years of making the tea before being given any responsibility are over, today's generations will just walk.
Example, Andy Molnar has successfully drawn his son Richard into their business and Richard seems more excited by the CAD element, designing parts more than getting dirty and sore hands producing parts! I have no idea how he did that, but well done.
Take an example away from metal. I have recently been interested in how people make guitars, just that, how do they do it! I am amazed how many 'luthiers' there are out there in small workshops.
Seems pretty obvious that modern guitars are made by cnc machines, but now it can be done in the home/small workshop as much as a commercial factory. A young person getting into this is both absorbed and productive almost immediately, it has a direct feel of creativity that some of us of older generations would interpret as 'cheating', copying, etc.
Machine based wood shaping is repeatable and accurate, actually beyond the need of the part itself, the machine will self calibrate and register, and a guy who doesn't have years of practice with hand tools can produce a reasonable looking product, particularly if he has the finishing skills required to take piece parts through the steps required to deliver a completed product. He doesn't need to make many parts because baseline parts are all readily available, including preselected wood blanks, indeed he can start with precut and shaped wooden parts, even ready finished parts and progress to cutting more of his own over time. Setting up the instrument for use is another topic, but if the person has musical skills they will progress quite quickly if they want to make music with what they have produced.
Point is you can download CAD tools and starter files to get going, and to work the pieces of the sizes required a starter machine is more affordable than you might imagine, or the full machine effort can be limited to piece parts that fit the machine available. Swathes of kids educated in computer use envision themselves as designers, not 'mechanics', or 'toolmakers', something reinforced by school trips with idiot teachers as mentioned above, the hand and eye skills are not valued as much as being able to use computer software. The guitar making is simply an example of other outlets for the 'apprentice' that might otherwise get involved in a machine shop, and their mates will be more in thrall to a 'luthier' than an 'apprentice toolmaker'.
John Snead has pointed out it has become more economic to mill billet for cylinder barrels than cast them, but the machines he uses are pretty much prohibitive for the home workshop or start up company. To put guitars in the hands of musicians they have to feel right and work musically, to sell and make profit from cylinder barrels they have to fit 100% within thousands of an inch and last hundreds of thousands of miles or hundreds of races without coming back to you. And John won't need many 'apprentices' for his business, as opposed to 'graduates' able to further develop a product range.
3D printing takes us a step further down this line and the cost of 3D printing, like CNC machines, will drop much further in the next decade.
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