Depends on where you live. I recommend just going around and meeting machinists. Look into local meetings...Society of Manufacturing and such. Typically there are things like shop tours put on monthly (non-pandemic times). Talk to local machine shop instructors and/or metal suppliers and see who might be interested in hiring...they usually know everyone.
My area has many very, very large machine shops but it has a larger number of small "mom and pop" shops which just run a few machines. I have found that the people who run either type are equally as approachable...it is hit and miss if they are willing to even let you in the shop at all without NDAs and such...then there are others who have no issues with it.
Most of the really difficult to learn stuff in the field is fixturing and CAM setup. Once that is layed out it is mostly just changing parts and watching the machine run...but there is a lot to be learned while that is going on.
I've never moonlighted, but I agree about the approachability.
Some time ago I lived in an industrial city with lots of small machine shops and especially lots of Screw Machine shops. I found that they really appreciated that I was interested in what they did and were willing to show me around.
Fast forward to about a year or two ago and I had to call on a prospective customer with a sales person. I didn't know until I got there that they were a branch of a well known workholding manufacturer and our contact offered to give me a tour of their machine shop. Pure heaven: I've never seen such a collection of modern, massive machine tools. The toolchanger alone on one of these machines was bigger than most VMC's I had ever seen. Their pallets were multiple feet long (not even sure if you call them pallets at that point) and ran on external tracks from machine to machine. Easily the biggest lights-out shop I've ever seen.
That was by far the most fun part of the sales call :-)
Thanks for the reply. When / if the pandemic ends I have to move and I am seriously considering taking a few machining courses at a community college and changing careers.
At the start of COVID, I walked in, and told them I was interested. Coincidently, they needed some networking help. We ended up trading some skills, and then I just kept coming in. I didn't take no for an answer, and they liked it. YMMV.
I wrote an email to friends years ago about a side job I got at a machine shop while working in tech, it was quite well received. email in my profile, contact me and I'll send it to you.
