"In my area, there are four machine shops that have CNC mills."
In 1998, ONE of my customers in a town of 75k people had 12 CNC mills and was steadily buying more as expansion permitted.
As he explained it - the more he had, the more readily they were instantly available for (lucrative) contract work - and when they weren't doing contract work they were loaded up with 50mm stainless steel rod, profitably turning out automotive towballs if they only did that 6 hours per day, let alone running 24*7*365 less downtime for maintenance.
On the one hand a full blown 3 axis CNC mill is overkill for making towballs. On the other hand that's only what they were doing when they weren't otherwise occupied.
I'll warrant there are a lot more shops like that around the world now than there were 20 years ago.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
