Is machining a trade or a technology? This question keeps rearing its head for me. It stems from the work that I have been doing at the high school level, and I am tired of sitting on the fence about the answer to it.

For years we been calling machining a trade. A trade is a skill, and you learn a skill through on-the-job or classroom training. It is something that I associate with repetitive work. By that, I mean it is the way we do things today, and the way we will do them for the foreseeable future. I guess that held true for machining at the beginning of the industrial revolution, but that is no longer true today. This may not be the case for all…
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