Our town's big shop laughs at manual offsets, but I find them faster for prototypes.

Mason Garcia · 2026-02-25T22:10:41.501396+00:00

Hand-setting tools saves me time on small batches, no matter what the CNC purists say.

Yeah, exactly. But where does that pushback even come from? Is it just old habits, or is there a real efficiency cutoff where manual stops making sense, even for one-offs?

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the_simon6mo ago

Ngl, the whole "CNC purists" thing feels like a silly hill to die on. It's just making parts. If setting tools by hand gets your small batch done and out the door, who cares what the big shop thinks. Sometimes these debates make a simple job sound way more serious than it is.

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verawalker6mo ago

Seriously! For one-offs, I'm with you. I'll hand-set a drill for five holes in an aluminum plate way faster than I'd program and prove out the CNC cycle. That's where the real time save is (and @patricia167, that's the efficiency cutoff for me: when the programming time beats the hands-on time). The big shops just have a different math problem with their high overhead.

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