Is this possible?????

[Combwork]

Ok, I give in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aghz...eature=related

It's either a con of some kind or something different. Very different.

Or is it? Some 20 years ago I saw a fully automated high precision machine tool in action, a kind of mix between a very high precision lathe and milling machine.

The operator drew a picture on a TV screen of what was wanted, loaded the chuck, pressed the button and it did what was asked of it. Internal threads, external threads, facet cuts, whatever......... The machine I saw wasn't big; from memory the useable table length was no more than 3 ft or so but it still cost £500,000+. The next model up had an engraving tool that could write both externally and internally on a piece of hollow tube. Accuracy was somewhere in the region of "if you need to ask you won't understand the answer".

The one I saw had to be programmed manually so the operator needed to know what they were doing, but there's no reason to believe that nowadays measurements could not be taken automatically from a pattern.