I spent a long summer work placement totally mesmerized by a progressive stamping machine, not unlike what's shown here. Sheer magic. Almost made me want to get into manufacturing engineering.

Progressive die stamping

Steve

What even more impressive is watching wire forming machines. It's kind of intriguing watching the automatic wire bending and forming machines since all the stock that goes in comes out just that it's now some completely different shape, but there is NO scrape whatsoever. And the movement of the parts of the machine are not confine to just one direction, they can move in almost any direction with many different parts moving at once.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Digital Factory
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Are they old Open University films or something?

As a fairly young kid I'd sometimes be up in the morning long before everyone else and there wasn't much on TV except for OU shows and I'd watch some.