The Collaborative International Dictionary
machine shop \machine shop\ n. A small business or a room within a business establishment where metal is cut and shaped etc., by machine tools.
Wiktionary
n. A facility that has machine tool for working with metal or other relatively hard materials, such as some polymers. Various kinds of machine shops make and repair all types of metal objects, from machine tools, dies, and molds to mass-produced parts such as screws, pistons, or gears.
WordNet
n. workshop where metal is cut and shaped etc., by machine tools
Wikipedia
A machine shop is a room, building, or company where machining is done. In a machine shop, machinists use machine tools and cutting tools to make parts, usually of metal or plastic (but sometimes of other materials such as glass or wood). A machine shop can be a small business (such as a job shop) or a portion of a factory, whether a toolroom or a production area for manufacturing. The parts produced can be the end product of the factory, to be sold to customers in the machine industry, the car industry, the aircraft industry, or others. In other cases, companies in those fields have their own machine shops.
The production can consist of cutting, shaping, drilling, finishing, and other processes. The machine tools typically include metal lathes, milling machines, machining centers, multitasking machines, drill presses, or grinding machines, many controlled with CNC. Other processes, such as heat treating, electroplating, or painting of the parts before or after machining, are often done in a separate facility. A machine shop can contain some raw materials (such as bar stock for machining) and an inventory of finished parts. These items are often stored in a warehouse.
A machine shop can be a capital intensive business, because the purchase of equipment can require large investments. A machine shop can also be labour-intensive, especially if it is specialized in repairing machinery on a job production basis, but production machining (both batch production and mass production) is much more automated than it was before the development of CNC, PLC, microcomputers, and robotics. It no longer requires masses of workers, although the jobs that remain tend to require high talent and skill. Training and experience in a machine shop can both be scarce and valuable.
Usage examples of "machine shop".
Curious, we wandered around what was mostly a big, general purpose machine shop, equipped with some of the newest, biggest, and finest machinery available.
He has a big machine shop, and he might try to duplicate my tank if he knew how she was made inside.
Conceivably, they might have expected to be taken a degree less literally, but then unspecified exhortation, when translated into practice, is always liable to a certain amount of executive misdirection, which appeared to be what had happened in this case: this room, which took up nearly half the basement area of the church, was, in fact, a superbly equipped machine shop.
Often on his way to the machine shop, the imposing man could be seen to hesitate outside the kennel, long enough to draw a few puffs from his cigar or even longer.
But John had helped Heinrich find a job at a machine shop in town.