"Tom" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:
"Jim Stewart" wrote in message
.. .

Spehro Pefhany wrote:


Recently I was shown a ~40lb aerospace part that started off weighting
more than 20 times as much. Believe it or not, it made sense to do it
that way, given the constraints.

I worked with a machinist who claimed to have
made a part for the space shuttle landing gear.
He said he started with a 200 lb billet of AL
and ended up with a 3 lb part. I'm thinking
that mistakes would get real costly in that line
of work...


That kind of thing is fairly common now in aerospace and military work.
The ability of CNC milling to carve out delicate skeletons from large
chunks of metal is a cornerstone of a lot of extreme-performance designs.

I've seen helicopter parts made that way, and airplane sub-structures,
and parts for rockets and spacecraft. It's been going on at least since
the late '70s.

The cartoon I commented upon, though, was something else. That was just
about poor planning and a lack of caring about waste -- two
characteristics of the old Soviet Union.

--
Ed Huntress
Please explain further why the Russian scenario really differs from the US
scenario above?

Productivity in US manufacturing probably was at least 5 times higher than
Soviet productivity. Their entire standard was a typical socialist-based
system of manufacture. There was little motivation to keep costs under
control, and increasing volume, once quotas were met, was a prescription for
headaches. Managers avoided it at all costs.

In the US, even when the subject is government contract work, the standards
and the environment of expectations is based on private enterprise
industries.

It's not dissimilar to what China faced as it started replacing its
state-run manufacturing with private enterprise. Suddenly, roughly 90% of
the workforce in many of those old plants had no jobs, because their
manufacturing was featherbedded to beat hell. Our old friend Hamei, who has
managed several manufacturing operations in China, has confirmed this. He
told me in an article interview that he found roughly ten people doing every
job that one worker would do in the US. A family friend who managed
Caterpillar's manufacturing in China for ten years said the same thing to me
around five years ago. They're getting better, but they still have an
overhang of traditional socialist organization that hangs like an albatross
around many of their industries.

BTW, productivity in China, as of three years ago, was still estimated to be
10% of that of the US, overall, by independent analysts.

--
Ed Huntress