i was watching How It’s made, and there was a dedicated machine for a particular part of the product something as little as a proprietary bottle cap. and it was a huge machine. Who got the time to sit and invent the machine for that little piece. think of the variety of such designs, so does that mean you need a different new machine for any other special design?
also machines that make machines like robot machines making robot machines.
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Process engineer here. As others have said most of those “specialized” machines are just Frankenstein’d versions of other machines.
I work for a medical supply company, when I design a machine for production the first thing I go look for is something similar we have done in the past. This gives me a basis and will usually have very good input from the operator on what works and what doesn’t work. We can then take sub assembly ideas from other machines and put them altogether to make something new.
When staring at a big machine it is all very daunting, once you dig deeper into it you see that there are only a few different methods of mechanical movement doing all the work. It kinda ruins the “magic” of how things work. Most of the time it’s oh they just used a pneumatic(or electric) actuator to move this.
For the majority of engineers it’s not completely designing and inventing every part from scratch it’s figuring out a way to manipulate an existing design to do what you want it to.
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