Needless to say, working with aluminum is not the same as working with steel.
"I think I lost a large portion of my hair trying to make that [first aluminum] job work. I must have spent weeks fighting splits and wrinkles. It wasn't long before I came to the conclusion that drawing and stretching aluminum were not as easy as I had thought," wrote Art Hedrick, STAMPING Journal's tool and die expert, in a 2007 column.
Will Ford's manufacturing operations experience the same frustration? (more...)
For years economic growth has been stuck in neutral. Economists are lowering their already low GDP growth projections for 2012. Regarding this, Julia Coronado, chief economist at BNP Paribas, gave Bloomberg an intriguing insight. “Things are so lean and mean, there aren’t a lot of excesses that need to be reduced.” Although such efficiency hasn’t been able to pull the economy into high gear, it also has insulated the economy from a dramatic downturn.
That’s good news--sort of. Neutral is better than reverse, I suppose. But it does mean that the economy probably won’t be pleasant for companies that aren’t lean and mean. The good news: Plenty of fabricators I’ve seen are lean.
In my e-mail inbox this morning was the latest installment of "Rice's World Famous, Randomly Sent, Unsolicited VetLetter." Authored and distributed by Marty Rice, a veteran, welder, and educator who has contributed many articles to thefabricator.com, the VetLetter always takes me on an emotional journey from laughter to tears and back.
As Memorial Day approaches in the U.S., I can think of nothing more appropriate for my blog post this week than Marty's newsletter. So, with the author's permission, I am sharing his delightful, insightful, and heartfelt thoughts about our veterans exactly has he has written them. Feel free to add comments at the end of the post. I've already told Marty how I feel. (more...)
Put two metal fabricators in the same room, and you might find a scene reminiscent of the Hatfields and McCoys. Those two individuals don't want anything to do with each other because one only wants to steal the other one's customers.
Thankfully, all metal fabricators don't feel that way. It's one of the reasons that The FABRICATOR's Leadership Summit has evolved into such a great learning experience for company leaders and managers in this industry. The metal fabricators in attendance aren't afraid to share winning strategies and difficult challenges with their counterparts from all over the U.S. because, more than likely, they aren't competing for the same customers and they actually can learn from the interchange. It's one of the reasons that some of these fabricators have formed formal groups—the Precision Sheet Metal User Groups (PSMUG), as the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association (FMA) has officially labeled these small groups. They know that they can learn the best lessons from others that may have been in similar situations. The FABRICATOR's Tim Heston covered the PSMUGs in December, and when reading it, you realize why those groups are so important. (more...)
I started this year with a spurt of shop visits-- a sorry excuse for my lack of blogging, but there it is. One high-mix, low-volume job shop is beginning the process of reorganizing its machines into cells: a sheet metal cutting machine next to a brake, next to hardware insertion. In a bold move, the company has eliminated its cutting, bending, and hardware insertion departments. Managers made sure that workers are cross trained, so they can follow piece parts through all three processes before sending a batch--a small one, as close to single-piece-part-flow as practical--to operations downstream.
Here’s the kicker: The shop did it all with no holiday shutdown.
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A few weeks ago at the FABTECH trade show in Chicago, I ran into (almost literally, in fact) Nathan McMasters, president of Diversified Metal Products, an Idaho Falls, Idaho-based contract fabricator specializing in products for the energy, transportation, and nuclear fields. Our five-minute chat told a lot about what’s going on with this confounded economy that, for many, refuses to break out of its funk. McMasters said company sales were up 20 percent from 2010, and after talking with a few dozen shop managers at the show, I discovered that wasn’t an unusual number.
The worst of the financial crisis of the 2008-2009 time frame is history, and as the recovery progresses, I think it’s fair to say that we’re all wondering when everything will get back to the way it was … when will we have a low unemployment rate, a thriving manufacturing sector, a healthy construction industry, and so on? When will things get back to normal?
I really like my job--but not in a corny sense. I don’t wake up and immediately whistle away in gleeful anticipation of the workday. Some days I feel I can’t write another word, while other days I type several pages before I realize that what I just wrote is either unintelligible or just plain awful.
What keeps me typing away is a sense of ownership. It’s my job to call contacts, develop story ideas, research technical information, interview experts, and write the story. I don’t work alone, of course. Throughout the process I work with editors, copy editors, and graphic artists--and one thing we share is a sense of ownership. The FABRICATOR and its sister publications represent our brand, our identity.
It’s not practical for all of us to shepherd products from beginning to end, of course. We would be at a loss trying to run a printing press, for instance. But we do monitor product quality through multiple stages of production, and it’s that sense of ownership that makes me happy about going to work.
Last week I got my first taste of a new kind of manufacturing cell, and immediately I saw how ownership played a role. Milwaukee-based Phoenix Products makes lighting fixtures for a variety of commercial customers. It’s a high-mix, low-volume environment. SKUs number in the thousands.
An Indiana man was arrested June 22 for sending lewd messages to a minor via cell phone. Considering all the recent publicity surrounding former Rep. Anthony Weiner and the photo he broadcast via Twitter, it’s not a big surprise that a man used a phone for such a purpose. However, the story about the Indiana man did come with a big surprise: He is a member of an Amish community. (more...)
Did you happen to see the mentalfloss.com article posted May 31 on cnn.com about 10 interesting numbers in the U.S.? Among the numbers listed were 2.3 (milligrams of B1, the amount recommended during World War II for very active men after the Selective Service discovered that about one in seven armed forces candidates suffered from "disabilities directly or indirectly connected with nutrition"); $435 (the absurdly priced hammer that came to symbolize wasteful Pentagon spending in the 1980s); and 100-proof (the measurement that gets you drunk—interesting story how this came about).
Perhaps more interesting to those in manufacturing were the statistics released the same day by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) . The Monday Economic Report featured a chart showing the manufacturing sectors with the largest percentage of employment growth from December 2009 to April 2011. (more...)
