I worked in an auto parts store early on at the end of high school. We had an attached machine shop that turned rotors, machined heads, clutch plates, etc. I got pretty good at turning rotors so when the time came some older friends schooled me on machining heads. I later turned or machined most everything that came in. I turned a flywheel with no previous experience on that machine.
The old school tools were pretty easy to run in my opinion. Once you got familiar with a machine and learned it's quirks, it became easier. Years later I saw a lot of stuff running with some form of Autocad. I was interested but never got the chance to learn it. On my very last job I was assigned to run a water jet machine. It basically ran a premade program once selected, and you just hit the start button.
I worked as a carpenter most of my life and handled many different machines over the years. Everything from hand tools, to some of the biggest shop tools. We had a machine that made stringers for stairs for example. Large table saws like an imported sliding table version. I worked in a door factory too. Just high speed, repetitious duty making door jambs and assembling the finished doors as fast as we could.
I think this hobby can be interesting and we get to use many of the skills we have learned thru life. I just wish I had a better budget to equip my shop with more current stuff. I would have loved to build bridges or engines for people, or something similar that the hobby would need.
