G,
I have no doubt you are right about more and more machine tasks on our guns. I keep thinking production engraving will someday be done on a CNC/DNC machine that will replicate the original craftsman's work to the thousandth of an inch and every cut, perfect or imperfect.

Some of the movie industry technology where a dancer/actor wears a target populated suit and targets are tracked by a computer and recreate an animation, sounds like it could be used for graver position/angle and an instrumented graver could record each blow from the chase hammer. Imagine a fully programmed multi-axis machine with each graver angle and blow programmed and how fast it could run. Each production engraving could be an exact replica of the original.