Extruding and Drawing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders, Metal and Plastic

Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Threading a new die, setting up cross-heads and correcting a drifting draw are still hand-and-judgment work, but the steady-state half of the shift — watching gauge readouts, logging thickness, nudging zone temperatures and screw speed — is already done by closed-loop control and inline laser gauging on newer lines, which is why this lands at 11 rather than up with millwrights.

Hands-on in uncontrolled environments. You are at the machine: loading billets or resin into hoppers, pulling hot extrudate, handling puller and take-up reels, working around 400–600°F barrels and heated dies, cleaning purge material, and measuring samples with calipers and micrometers — the environment is noisy, hot and variable enough to put it at 15, held below the top band only because it's an indoor plant floor with fixed equipment rather than a jobsite.

No licence, no signature requirement. No state licence gates extruder operation; a forklift card or lockout/tagout and OSHA training may be required by the plant, but nothing personal attaches to you if a coil of tube goes out of spec — the company's QA sign-off and the customer's incoming inspection carry it.

Anonymous artifact production. The output is footage of tube, wire, rod or profile identified by lot number, and the buyer never learns who ran the line; the only relationship that matters is with the shift supervisor and the maintenance tech, which is what keeps this at 2 rather than 0.

Executes defined procedures on defined inputs. Decisions are bounded by the job ticket and the spec sheet — set zone temps to the recipe, hold OD within tolerance, scrap the run and flag it when gauging drifts — and real calls about tooling changes, resin substitution or accepting borderline lots go to the process engineer or QA, so the discretion sits at recognising a problem rather than owning the resolution.