I put in 35 years in the machinist trade, much of this as a modelmaker. For a good number of those years I made my living doing "One-Off" jobs on First NC & then CNC equipment of which the general consensus was it was ecconomicaly efficient only for Mass Production. Sure, the parts we made were Expensive, but not near as much so & of far closer tolerances than we had ever produced prior to the changeover. I have put in a lot of hours on conventional Bridgeports, 3D tracer Bridgeports & NC Bridgeports which read a punched tape. I wrote many of my own programs, first on a "Flexi-Writer" which punched a tape simultaneous with printing out a readout. Later I moved up to a more sophisticated machine with a built-in basic computer & which as well as being programed there, could also read in computer generated data from a disc. Many later machines are of course simply run directly from a computer.
In all honesty I do not think I ever saw a Bridgeport which would consistently hold accuracy to ±.0005". To hold this tolerance required very careful manipulation by an experienced machinist, it could not automatically be maintained by an Operator.
As I see it the only holdback to this type of equipment being able to bring back a reasonably priced good quality double is "Lack of Demand". In spite of low bag limits etc, etc, the vast majority of the shooting public still demands "Firepower" & looks askance at any gun which is capable of holding "Only" two shells.
