The trouble with building a business around selling low-margin widgets is that you have to find a way to make a lot of them to make it worth your while. And if the widget in question is labor-intensive to make, you’ve got to find ways to reduce your inputs. That sounds like a job for industrial automation, a solution that’s often out of reach of small shops, for all the obvious reasons. Not if you’re clever about things, though, as this fully automated CNC lathe work cell shows.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://hackaday.com/2024/01/23/autofeeding-cnc-lathe-cranks-out-parts-all-by-itself/