Recent events are very dire for research at US universities, and I will write further about those, but first a quick unrelated survey for those at such institutions. Back in the day, it was common for physics and some other (mechanical engineering?) departments to have machine shops with professional staff. In the last 15-20 years, there has been a huge growth in maker-spaces on campuses to modernize and augment those capabilities, though often maker-spaces are aimed at undergraduate design courses rather than doing work to support sponsored research projects (and grad students, postdocs, etc.). At the same time, it is now easier than ever (modulo tariffs) to upload CAD drawings to a website and get a shop in another country to ship finished parts to you.
Quick questions: Does your university have a traditional or maker-space-augmented machine shop available to support sponsored research? If so, who administers this - a department, a college/school, the office of research? Does the shop charge competitive rates relative to outside vendors? Are grad students trained to do work themselves, and are there professional machinists - how does that mix work?
Thanks for your responses. Feel free to email me if you'd prefer to discuss offline.
My current R1 institution has a physics machine shop and engineering machine shop. The physics shop has a roughly 1 week turnaround for routine parts and it's easy to go back and forth with the machinist to get the design right. They have CNC systems to go with the traditional manual shop tools. My previous R1 institution was the same for a physics shop and had some tools available for students (mill and drill press primarily).
ReplyDeleteBoth institutions also have maker spaces for undergrads, but that hasn't had an impact on our research.
By all accounts, my R1 institution has "reimagined" the general machine shop as a maker space. There are training requirements but some professional staff. The whole thing is run at the divisional level (as it is part of engineering.)
ReplyDeleteThere are still small machine shops as well for certain departments, but small is like 1 FTE.
And, yea, it is pretty amazing that you can just post a CAD model to a web site and get like six quotes.....