In my experience the field is dominated by white guys. Granted I have been doing more precision work.
Our shop did aerospace parts. Plus or minus 5 tenths wasn't unusual and the occasional 1 tenth. The worst part was our contracts required us to QA 10% of the parts in a batch and management never let us do that. Only 1 part per batch and then they'd sign off that they checked 10%.
A thou isn't much to brag about. A tenth could be depending on the dimension. It sounds like your shop made mostly little widgets using the cheap labor.
Yeah, we almost never machined any part that was bigger than 18 inches. Mostly aerospace parts. We didn't get the full plans so I don't know what they went into, just that they were for clients like Rockwell, Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed, etc. Some of them were very expensive polymers like Dupont Vespel. Back then that shit cost almost as much as gold by weight. Not sure how much it costs today.
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