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Worth Reading - Making it in America from the January/February Atlantic Magazine

AndyF

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Nov 3, 2003
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Phelps, NY, USA
This article is well worth reading - a balanced account from several perspectives of manufacturing in the US. The focal point is Standard Motor Products plant in Greenville SC. Standard Motor Products is a 3rd generation manufacturer of aftermarket auto parts with several plants in the US and around the world. The article does a nice job of discussing the issues related to being a successful manufacturer in the US and the calculus used by mid-sized companies when making a decision where to source individual products. There is also an interesting discussion of US employee opportunities and what is required in terms of skill sets for the US employees to be successful with thumbnail portraits of a CNC operator and an unskilled assembler.

I wasn't able to find a posting of the article on the web yet, but it would be worth a trip to the library.
 
Don will like the article because they talk about the company's Gildemeister VMCs. :)

I enjoyed reading the article (I have a subscription and it arrived about 5 days ago). The historical info about the aftermarket auto parts business was interesting, and it highlights the problems that the business (which seems to be run by good people who aren't out to screw their employees or customers) has to juggle. Do they want to stay in business? Then they've got to be pretty ruthless about driving labor costs down and/or eliminating labor by automation. It also gives the view of some of the employees. One is the VMC programmer who represents "skilled/technician" employees and he's got a future. The other is a young single mother who seems both sharp and a real go-getter, but who sees that her lack of education (and no way to get it while supporting her family) dooms her to being squeezed harder and harder by low-paying unskilled work.

It highlights how "luck of the draw" impacts people. The VMC programmer has family support that allowed him to get (and continue to get) technical schooling. The young woman (who could probably be a much more valuable employee if she had similar support during training) didn't have that support and had to take what she could find with the high school education she has.

I think their metric for automation is if the machine pays itself off in two years of the wages of the employee it replaces.

cheers,
Michael
 
Thanks for the link; NPR also did a two-day story based on the article.

And quoting from it:

"At Spartanburg, he studied math—a lot of math. “I’m very good at math,” he says. “I’m not going to lie to you. I got formulas written down in my head.” He studied algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. “If you know calculus, you definitely can be a machine operator or programmer.” He was quite good at the programming language commonly used in manufacturing machines all over the country, and had a facility for three-dimensional visualization—seeing, in your mind, what’s happening inside the machine—a skill, probably innate, that is required for any great operator. It was a two-year program, but Luke was the only student with no factory experience or vocational school, so he spent two summers taking extra classes to catch up."

How many of y'all think like this?

I know I do.

See a fastener in a difficult position, and a mental vision of a tool forms in your mind?
 
How many of y'all think like this?

I know I do.

See a fastener in a difficult position, and a mental vision of a tool forms in your mind?

I do that with any kind of stamped parts I see. I can have a strip layed out in my head in about three minutes, depending on compexity. Sometimes I have to go sketch it out so I can remember how to draw it out in autocad.

I'm constantly looking at cookware, (I love to cook) and it drives my wife nuts, 'cause I'm always telling her how they made this or that. I think metal spun pans are much better than stamped ones, BTW. But nothin' beats cast iron.:D
 
Probably most anyone that's good at making stuff can do this. I don't think it's all that special.

I used to think the same until I actually starting looking into it. Turns out most people *can't* think in spatial abstracts. Doesn't make one better than another, but it's certainly not as common as I thought it was.
 
Probably most anyone that's good at making stuff can do this. I don't think it's all that special.

I'd say you're correct that most anyone who's good at making stuff does have this ability, but I'd also say you underestimate the rarity of that skill.

For example, registered architects would be among the people where most folks would assume the ability to visualize in 3 dimensions is absolutely essential. Yet my experience in dealing with a lot of them over a number of years proved to me that no more than a fourth of them really have that ability.

The best all around machinist I've ever known was a guy I supervised at Michelin. Since we were the shop for the company's US R&D operations, we did some pretty complex stuff. It was all one-off's so there wasn't an option to refine over multiple iterations of a part, yet he never seemed to get stumped regardless of what he was working on. I asked him when we were discussing one of his annual evaluations how it was that he always seemed to be moving forward and almost never had to back up and regroup or remake a part. He said he just looked at the prints and visualized every step of making the part before he ever cut a piece of stock, and that kept him from working himself into a corner as the part progressed. In his opinion, all machine work was easy as long as he didn't put himself in a corner by doing the various operations in the wrong order and ending up with no practical means of setting up the part for the next op. He really never seemed to grasp just how difficult most people would think a lot of the work he did actually was, and the tougher and more complex the job was, the more he seemed to like it.
 
I know I dont have a lot of manual machining experience, and almost 99% of my knowledge comes from the cnc CAD/CAM side of things. but as far as visualizing things...
Thats my cup of tea. I do that for every single job thats given to me. But its automatic. I dont intentionaly do it. It just happens.
 
There's another thread going on asking if machinists are born or made. I didn't add to that thread, but at least over the first couple days no one had noted the role of spatial visualization. As far as I can tell, the ability is partly genetic and partly learned at any early age, while the brain is still more "plastic" than the adult brain.

Great engineers, architects etc. often talk about playing with stuff like blocks, erector sets, tinker toys, and Legos as kids. Or, just wandering around their Dads' shops or workspaces.
 
i call it "getting small" i agree with John, common among people that make stuff- it`s people that make stuff that are becoming uncommon.

edit- to see it all you have to do is hand a seasoned pro a complex part and ask- "how would you make this?"
he`ll stare at it and you can tell he`s inside that part. a very cool thing.
 
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“If you know calculus, you definitely can be a machine operator or programmer.”

Obviously I haven't seen everything or met everybody, but I don't think I've ever run into an operator or programmer that claimed a knowledge of calculus was helpful.
 
One other thing that wasn't really discussed in that article that I always wonder about was the following;

When talking about the founder of Standard Motor Products they said the following;
Larry was born into Standard Motor Products. The company was founded by his grandfather, Elias Fife, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania who knew nothing about cars but saw an opportunity, in 1919, when he learned that many people were frustrated with Ford and the other car manufacturers because they never made enough replacement parts, since all the money was in building new cars. The tiny aftermarket auto-parts industry was a mess: countless mechanics and hobbyists made parts by hand in their garages, and many of these parts didn’t fit or would break. Fife decided to build a trustworthy, reliable brand whose products met or exceeded the quality of the original parts.

I always love reading about the stories of people who came from nothing and started companies they could really be proud of. What I can't help but wonder though is how will those companies of the future be formed by guys who would like to be like Larry when the barrier to entry entails buying 1/2 million dollar Gildemeisters and competing in markets that demand ultra low margin, high volume manufacturing? My suspicions were when the Larry of the story above got started his shop probably initially focused on one part. Perhaps the shop had a B&S screw machine, maybe a hand screw machine and a drill press, or possibly just a Southbend lathe or something. While sure those machines cost more back then I doubt in inflation corrected $$ they were equal to the machines of Standard's factories today.

Perhaps one day I should figure out the secret on this one somehow on my own but in the meantime I still can't help but wonder as mfg gets higher and higher tech if it will really become a very exclusive club.
 
Obviously I haven't seen everything or met everybody, but I don't think I've ever run into an operator or programmer that claimed a knowledge of calculus was helpful.

I've met a few who like to brag and make the job seem more complex than it is to the FNG or an english major.

More fairly to the person being interviewed, my take away from his interview was more positive, he was trying to convey to the interviewer that his job was more than pushing buttons and looking for a way to describe what he is doing in a way that would communicate that math was involved and that the math was more than just addition and subtraction.
 
I've met a few who like to brag and make the job seem more complex than it is to the FNG or an english major.

Yeah, the calculus thing surprised me too. I don't even bother with trig 99.9% of the time. I *think* what he was trying to say was two things: (A)"this ain't just punching buttons" and (B) the mindset you get into in higher math is the useful bit. Nevermind actual calculus, it's the habits of thought that help you solve those problems that help you in dealing with the beasts.

I learned computer programming back in the dark days of assembly. Compared to that, GCode is positively verbose. The habits of thinking through a program line by line, action by action that I learned then have saved my tail over and over again now.

Make sense?
Brian

PS-->I agree that most folks that make things can visualize in 3D without trying, but most of us hang out with people that can do it too, so we don't realize how rare it is in the rest of the world.

PPS--> I know you can't save 'em all, but I hope somebody down there helps that poor kid out, and gives her a chance to move forward. Yeah, she's only one of millions, but you have to start somewhere.
 








 
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