EXPOSED
Building wooden foundry patterns and core boxes — laying out shrinkage and draft allowances, cutting, gluing, sanding, and fitting parts until the pattern pulls clean from sand — is hands-on bench work that language models cannot touch. The real pressure is not chatbots but CAD/CAM, CNC routing, and 3D-printed sand molds, which have already absorbed the layout math and much of the shaping, and have shrunk the occupation to roughly 220 US workers. No license protects the work, and the customer buys a pattern, not a relationship.
Nearly all of this fall was the 2020 shock. It has been climbing back since.
Median pay $64,880 → $49,630 -38.8% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
-5%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 220 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Exposed, and shrinking
Both signals point the same way: the tasks are largely automatable and the BLS projects -5% by 2034. This is the case where the score and the forecast agree, and it is the one worth taking seriously.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
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Mold MakerForm BuilderPatternmakerPattern MakerPattern WorkerWood Die MakerWoodshop WorkerPattern EngineerWood PatternmakerMold Forms BuilderWood Pattern MakerWood Shop MoldmakerProduction PatternmakerWood Experimental Mechanic
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier At 12 the layout arithmetic — shrink rule scaling, draft angles, parting-line placement, core print sizing — is already solved by CAD and cut by a 3-axis router, but hand-fitting loose pieces, filleting with wax or leather, sealing and finishing until the pattern draws clean from green sand, and repairing worn production patterns still keep a body at the bench, which is why this sits mixed rather than down at 5.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments 16 reflects a shop floor: table saw, band saw, lathe, shaper and belt sander, wood dust and lacquer fumes, clamping up glue joints on stock that moves with humidity, then carrying the pattern to the foundry to trial-pull it in sand and shim where it drags — none of it done sitting down.
No licence, no signature requirement 1 is right because nothing but a shop hire stands between you and the work: no state license, no journeyman card required, no stamp on the pattern, and if a casting comes out undersized the foundry eats the scrap and reorders the pattern.
Meaningful discretion 9 covers the calls that are genuinely yours — where to split the pattern, how much draft a deep pocket needs, whether a feature comes as a loose piece or a core, how much extra machining stock to leave on a critical face — decided from foundry practice rather than a spec sheet, with the ceiling being that the pattern is proved or rejected at the first pour, not years later on someone's safety.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (12/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (1/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (6/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (9/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 16 of this occupation's 44 points (36%).
Embodiment (16/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
Sheet Metal Workers SAFE
Riggers SAFE
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 57/100, still EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift: if CNC and 3D-printed sand absorb all new-build patterns, the residual job becomes repair, rework and reverse-engineering of legacy patterns with no CAD model — hand-fitting worn core boxes, correcting draft on patterns that stick, matching shrink on unrecorded alloys. That tier resists digitization because the input is a damaged physical object plus foundry-floor diagnosis. Visible already in jobbing foundries that keep one patternmaker for fixes rather than new work.
Defense and nuclear-component castings where DFARS/NAVSEA supplier qualification and Q-1 audits name a qualified patternmaker in the approved process — the buyer is paying for a certified human-built and human-verified tooling chain, not for craft aesthetics. Also restoration/heritage casting (antique machinery, bell and architectural work, museum foundries) where provenance of hand pattern work is priced.
If pattern shops formally own first-article and pull-test sign-off — deciding shrink factors, gating, and whether a pattern is releasable for a costly alloy pour — under a customer PPAP or AS9100 process, the consequential call under ambiguity sits with the patternmaker rather than the design engineer. Some captive aerospace foundries already assign tooling release this way.
Already near ceiling; only a further concentration into on-site pattern repair inside the foundry (dusty, hot, non-fixtured, one-off geometry) would nudge it, as opposed to shop-bench new-build that a router can do.
The limit. With 220 US workers there is no professional body large enough to win a licensure regime, so liability_shield has no realistic route and is omitted. The headroom here is a smaller, more specialized occupation, not a protected one — the score can rise while the headcount keeps falling.
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 44. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.