The Fifty

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This is a strange one. The Fifty is a press for large manufacturing. It is six stories tall and can press down with 50k pounds of force pretty much in an instant. It creates parts of airplanes because it treats metal like putty.

And it turns me on.

I don’t know why, but there are two things. One, it is one of the reasons for the US’s technical dominance. Pretty much every large airplane in the sky has a part from this device. It forms light-weight metals into shapes in a single thing. It is powerful, unstoppable.

A small (very small part of me) would wonders what it would be like to be underneath it, to be inside. To know that if it came down, there was nothing in the world I could do about it. It would crush me into a fine paste or mist. Not even enough to find. Just the sheer power of it excites me, just for the potential.

They almost shut down this press, which I consider a shame, because it broke. Yes, it is expensive to build, but letting it go without a good replacement seems foolish. We still use it, it still helps our country. And people wonder why we are losing (or lost, depending on your view) our manufacturing edge… maybe because we’re giving up on it?

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