Nice hammer. Eventually I'm going to make a lightweight version with screw-in faces - steel, brass, nylon... There's some nice designs out there.
Some personal trivia. When I was still in high school (full admission, mid-70's) I took a SAIT evening machining class. The project was a brass cannon. Hand filed bar stock rails & notched cross members, maybe 1" dia x 8" long tapered barrel, brass spoked wheels, steel rims, some rudimentary decorative features here & there. Its still at my dad's place, I'll have to polish it up & take a pic one day. I think those were Southbend lathes in the original shops before they tore them down & relocated to new buildings. I remember it was a pretty brisk pace, you didn't want to mess up many parts. You had to grind your own HSS cutters for various profiles & sign out tools from this dude behind a counter using numbered tokens. That course was something like $50 or $75. Makes me laugh even to say that. Pretty sure the brass for the barrel alone would be more than that now. Later on when I tool Mechanical Engineering Technology at SAIT, we also had a basic machining course just so students would understand fabricated parts didn't grow from the dirt LOL. We made a knurled plumb bob from 12L14, Then you were on your own with an O1 tool steel center punch which was measured & graded, which I still have & use today.
It would be a shame if they pulled the manual lathes. Hopefully they mean replace/upgrade them. But it also wouldn't surprise me, programming & button pushing is the only way to be competitive, at least for production.