EXPOSED
The hands-on core — laying out, machining, fitting, and hand-finishing wood, metal, and plastic patterns and core boxes to shrinkage and draft allowances — is skilled physical work that AI and current robotics cannot replicate. The exposure is upstream and structural: pattern geometry, shrink factors, and gating layout increasingly come out of CAD/CAM and solidification simulation, and additive manufacturing plus printed sand molds bypass the physical pattern entirely. This occupation isn't being automated task-by-task so much as engineered around, and at 1,470 US jobs the shrinkage is already far along.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. At 12 the split is real: CAD-driven CNC and 3D-printed cores have taken over the layout math, shrink scaling, and roughing that used to be your bench work, but chaplet placement, matchplate fitting, draft correction after a foundry rejects a casting, and hand-rubbing a pattern to a finish still need someone at the bench with a rasp and a straightedge — that's why it isn't 6, and why it isn't 16 either.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments. 16 reflects that you work inside a foundry pattern shop: mill and lathe setups, band saw and router work, lifting and clamping half-patterns and core boxes, checking parting lines against a plate by feel, and troubleshooting on the foundry floor where sand, heat, and a live mold line are the environment — not a fixture-controlled cell a robot can be taught once.
No licence, no signature requirement. 1 because nothing in the pattern shop requires a licence — no state board, no stamped drawing, no certification a customer must see; the foundry's engineer or the casting buyer's spec owns the consequences if a shrink allowance is wrong, and your protection is your reputation and your journeyman background, neither of which is a legal barrier to anyone replacing you.
Anonymous artifact production. 5 because the pattern ships to a foundry and the casting is what the customer sees — a purchasing agent choosing between your shop and a printed-sand vendor is comparing lead time, tolerance, and price, and while a long-running foundry relationship earns you the tricky jobs and repeat rigging work, it does not survive the customer deciding not to buy a pattern at all.
Meaningful discretion. 8 fits because you make consequential calls that aren't in a procedure — how much extra stock to leave for machining, where to break a pattern for draw, whether a section will trap sand — but you make them against established shrink tables, industry allowances, and a print someone else approved, so the ambiguity is bounded and the expensive decisions about alloy and casting design sit upstream of your bench.
Maintenance Workers, Machinery EXPOSED
Has AI actually changed your work?