This week in shop talk, we manufactured a run of 8" copper conductors using one of our CNC lathes. For those of you unfamiliar with a lathe, the material rotates while the drill is stationary. This enables the operator to cut round or cylindrical parts and add threads or grooves. This particular part created a challenge. Not only was the material very expensive copper ($8 a pound and cuts like chewing gum) a 3/4 inch hole was drilled 7 inches deep into the 8 inch part. Do the math! I was sweating bullets every time I had to drill a hole because the copper chips could gum up the hole and break the drill - which by the way was expensive too!
I'm #sweatingbullets just looking at that thing. Wow, nice work!