On Oct 12, 11:11 pm, "Tom Gardner" wrote:
So, after all that outrageous productivity, I took a little nap at my desk!

This is sort of related and I'm dying to share it with the group, so I
think I'll put it here. I just got back from a trip to the good old
Boston area and made it a specific goal of my trip to visit the
Starrett factory in Athol, MA when I was there. I went and devoted
about 3 hours to the place. In particular, I had called ahead and
found out that if you ask them, they will send down an apprentice to
give you a tour of the factory. I went on the tour and was amazed by
what I saw.
Basically, the Starrett approach to manufacturing is to use older
specialized machines and toolroom-built tooling and fixtures specific
to each type of component, rather than more expensive, newer,
multipurpose machines. There inventory rarely undergoes major changes
and so these make sense. This is not to say they don't use CNC, for
example, I saw a half dozen high capacity CNC milling centers
(Japanese, as it turns out, don't remember the exact company) turning
out parts dozens of times faster than manual equivalents. However,
they still use over a dozen automatic multi-spindle screw machines to
turn out all sorts of parts. Not CNC, changing the part requires
manipulating cams and gears inside the machine, they still have an
edge over a CNC turning center. In particular, they have 6 spindles
rather than just one. I saw machines with more than a 2" bar
capacity, dating back to the mid 1900's.
I found this system of specialization and custom tooling to be very
much suited for the kind of production they make.
ww88