I Machined a 50 Million Dollar Part

Spoiler warning: They never show so much as a single frame of the part they machined. It's just a story combined with B-roll of different projects. If you wanted to see the machining of a $50m part I guess you shouldn't have clicked on a video about machining a $50m part, like some kind of fool.

Machinist of dead tree carcass here. The most expensive mistake ive ever made happened when i machined a kitchen counter top. Customer and boss stood next to me when my CNC moved to its parking position and i went to check the fit of the metal sink in the hole i just cut. Fell clean thru, always check for your tool radius correction folks or your holes will end up exactly one tool diameter bigger than programmed. Lesson learned.

NOBODY STARTS BY MACHINING HUNDRED MILLION DOLLAR PARTS I thought the career advice - LIFE advice you gave in this video was utterly BRILLIANT. I started my hobby by making a paperboy cap that didn't fit - 4 years later I make £5000 bespoke historical men's suits and I have a 4 year waiting list.

It was only a $50k piece of titanium about 20 years ago and the company before us had scrapped the part. We were only a small jobbing shop but did a lot of aerospace work and parts for reactors. We actually ran a test part on a block of aluminum to check our program. The software back then wasn't anywhere as good as today and we weren't taking any chances. The lead time was 3 months to get a new piece of material. I've worked on models and dies that were over $1M but a single part in the assembly was no where near $1M. I can't imagine the stress of machining a, $50M part. 😮

The parts I make aren't expensive, but they are mission critical to saving lives everyday. I got to see parts that I made enter a human heart in a valve replacement procedure.

I don’t think they actually machined a 50 million part. But he sure talked about it until he was out of breath.😮

I remember when I scrap my first part. Boss came up to me, ask me if it will happen again. I said no I saw my mistake and I fixed it. He then showed me the price of that part finished. I then told myself to check 18 times before I hit the button 😅.

I just started machining Titanium for the first time last week. It's been interesting on how different it is from 6061. I'm in my second year of CnC programing and machining at an aerospace company. Its been OJT experience the entire time. Got lucky that they wanted someone with zero experience in machining so they could train me with only good habits from the start. Great channel and get into.

I served on a Los Angeles class submarine. Watching this video was cool as hell. I’ve touched every valve on my old boat and touched every machined surface and was super impressed with its craftsmanship

I’m only 17 but I’ve already cut a nerve racking part myself. I am apart of my high school robotics team and I am the main operator for the cnc router. For our design we wanted to build a 27” diameter turret made of polycarbonate. It tools a lot of prep work in order to get this done. We first cut test pieces out of pressboard in order to ensure everything would work together. But one problem we had was that the material would flex and an edge on the side of the part would be way out of spec. We managed to fix this by putting screw throughout drill holes we made beforehand to secure the part. Next we also tested out feeds and speeds for cutting polycarbonate on a scrap piece of it. We only had one sheet of polycarbonate big enough for the turret pieces so we made sure everything was right. It was nerve racking for the first part getting cut out. Once it finished I pulled it off and check every dimension and they were all perfect. After that I kept getting more and more confident with each piece, until I could almost just let it run without even watching it. In the end every piece fitted together perfectly and the robot we had made qualified us for the world championship.

I worked for years machining parts for the aerospace and defense industries. Many huge jobs. It was always a challenge but very satisfying when outside inspectors would come in to verify it when it was finished. I retired three years ago.

I'm a welder and the company I work for has contracts for the carriers and Columbia contracts, always cool to see another company helping put this whole thing together.

During Covid my company was installing a new 650 million dollar machine that I became responsible for the automation checkout and commissioning as the foreign install team was ordered to go home (all foreigners) took 6 months. I previously only ever did service and upgrades and had never done a whole machine such as that. Shouldn't have taken that long however the company our customer hired to complete all the wire pull drawings royally screwed up and 85%+ of the IO was wrong.. That was fun!!!

Watching this video , even though I’m not a machinist or CNC tech, I feel pride and this sense of greatness I had back in the 80’s when as a kid I watched videos of this beautiful and amazing nation. I’m puertorican and growing up outside the main land made me always feel like a regular immigrant who didn’t born with a social security number. And till this day I have engraved in my mind the day the Berlin Wall went down. The speeches of the presidents and the classic videos of the big industries and those amazing Popular Mechanic magazines at the doctor office with the future of technology. I’m an airplane mechanic now. A combat veteran and proud to be part of the world of fixing and creating things. Watching the gentleman explaining the process of planning and how they feel working on such a work and the magnitude of the responsibility is just mesmerizing. Thank you to all that works in the different aspects of keeping not only US moving but the entire world. Wish you all the best

Not a machinist, but I was a mechanic in a somewhat rural shop. I had to fix a radiator on a Dodge Viper that bottomed out and bent the nipple using a Jack, cone, and hammer. After that, I was trusted to lift up a 1936 Cord model 810 for a check over. Lifting rare antique luxury cars gives me anxiety. As a superintendent for a general contractor now, I’m currently tasked with remodeling a medical manufacturing facility while keeping dust and VOC’s contained. One metal shaving on the container of their product will trigger the rejection of millions of dollars in products. No pressure

Love your teams attitude to this sort of challenge. There’s a lot to be learned here even if you don’t do machining. 👍

I needed to see this video. I usually make small alum parts, so a scraped part is a few bucks. I recently did 50 pieces of delrin at a material cost of $40/each. Messed up like 7 of them… you feel it for sure

Having been in the Navy and served on 3 different warships, the stuff that people like your team does is beyond impressive! KEEP IT UP!

Measure twice, cut once. Theres a pucker-factor for sure doing the high priced parts. I always have somebody double check my game plan or set-up before its run. Sometimes another set of eyes can pick out mistakes or give better approaches to doing things. Teamwork.

I am not in the field, but this clip is great, the way you talked about building yourself up, learn, sharing and if you stuff know what you did to go forward, inspirational, never expected it.