I totally disagree. Planned obsolence is the theory of the past that we are living with the consequences of today. Look at Hyudai (and our own brands) cars- their cars were cheap, and low quality. Cheap is great until you get to walk away from your dead car down the side of a busy freeway. Its taken them years to recover from the low quality stigma, to the point where even tho they are actually making good cars, their sales suffer from their old rep. There's also the theory that you sell one bad product, you lose ten customers when your initial customer tells his friends your products suck. The opposite is true if he buys something cheap and it wears extremely well - you get nine extra customers for that. Given our leadership in software and robotics, we should be building plants that turn out cheap high quality products that kill the competion.

You hit the nail on the head with the "band-aid" comparison.
I think that was/is Boeings problem. They touted the program, but weren't able, or weren't willing, to replace the people and systems 100% that didn't meet the requirements. I haven't been in the Boeing "loop" for a few years now, so maybe they have eventually gotten there. I suppose it does take time to make such drastic changes in a big company that big.
I really bought into the whole thing back then though. It obviously is a great idea. I read a book about TQM written by some Japanese fella who I can't recall right now. I seem to remember he was one of the guys taught by Demming, and took Demmings system a step further. Very good stuff!! But the problem is we have such a different culture in this country, it's hard to adopt their approach to TQM. We're too much into "me", whereas they're big in "us". I see Japan having a problem arising with the young generation now though. So maybe the playing field will be level sometime soon;)
But then there's China, Korea, Tiawan......

Which is why we have to change over to totally automated systems. The advantage of the Asians is in cheap manpower. A computer is the only thing that can compete with that. Instead we get a million management gimmicks trying to lower manpower costs within a given existing system. If that doesn't work, we ship the process over seas. We need to change our thinking or our tax laws to encourage developing automated systems here that negate the labor advantage. Are you seeing much of an impact in automated systems in the machine shop area?

Not so much for us. Although I can see where we could implement it on a small scale. We have the rare privelage of having a group of parts that we run pretty much constantly. That doesn't happen to often in a small contract job shop. Usually you'll run a particular part for a day or 2, maybe a week tops, then tear down and run something different. But we make some of the main chassis frames for Synrad Laser, and have one machine that makes the same parts day in and day out. Same thing for a couple of the other major componants. Very constant. If we had the resources, we could conceivably automate these parts. We may get there eventually. You're right though. If tax laws ect were to be restructured so a small company like us isn't so penalized for making a profit, we could advance much faster. That last shop I worked at did finally buy a big unit called a "machine cell" after I left, which is pretty advanced and automated. But I'm guessing it was a major investment, and it took many years to get there. The owner talked about it for almost the whole 8 years I worked there. He was one who was very afraid of the trend of outsourcing going on in this country. I can see where we are in jepordy of that right here. Synrad Laser has some major customers in China. Who knows what connections they're making over there right now.:eek:

I see a lot of demand for CNC programmers. Are you using any of those machines? I might add that to the list of things I study.

I'm currently watching a realtive of mine go thru the pain of being automated out of work. He's a metal building draftsman. Each buidling site had to be detailed by hand for years. Now you input a few lot details and the computer does what took him a moth in a few minutes. Sad, but necessary if we are going to remain competive.

Yes, we are almost totally CNC. I'm the programmer, which is why I get to sit at a computer:D But CNC's have advanced alot, if you have the $$, such as my last employer finally achieved. We have some fairly basic CNC machines. We did buy one last year which has what's called a "pallet changer". That's basically a machine which has 2 work tables. One is inside the machine, where the parts are being machined, while the other is out side where the operator is changing parts. Cuts down on dead time, where nothing is being machined. The "product" we sell is machine time. When a machines' cutting spindle isn't turning, it's costing us money, about 1$ a minute. So it's an advancement for us to buy a machine like that. It's the one that runs the laser chassis all day every day. The down side is that it's a U.S. built machine and has it's moments. Too much down-time. so we just bought what we hope will be a better machine, one built in tiawan. If it works out, we'll slowly start reeplacing all the others.
We upgraded our programming software a couple years ago too. The old one required alot of manual input, but this new one has a lot of built-in features that does things automatically. Very fast and very nice:cool: (http://www.gibbscam.com/) I'm lucky I jumped into a programmers role when I did. Alot of machinists of my age are falling behind the times, and still do things the "old way" with manual equipment, and are finding it harder to fit in. I had a boss (that passed away last year of a brain tumer) who was just a year younger than me, and never learned how to run CNC's. He always had to consult with me or one of a couple other guys here when he was looking at quoting a job.

The whole technology is really cool. Right now I'm getting into some cool technology, called the "Basic Stamp" from Microtron. Its a prgrammable Eprom chip that inculdes its own Basic language compiler so you don't have to learn some proprietary dialect or code in C. On one side of the chip you have pinouts that directly interface to serial or paralell ports, or you can wire your own card slot. On the other side of the chip its got various voltage outputs you can use for switching, relays or to power low voltage devices. With this little jewel, you can write VB.NET code that will run in a browser that will talk to a particular eprom on a particular computer or a million computers for that matter, which means you can control mechanical devices via the Internet, and actually reporgram the chip via the Internet based on program logic as well. Right now I'm trying to get my lawn sprinklers to turn off when I click a button in a browser - it pisses me off whenever it starts raining and I'm thinking of that stupid thing pooring good water on the ground. If this works, I can kill those *****es from my hotel room in Tuscon.

That is cool!:cool: I started my working career in electronics way back. I worked for a small industrial electronics company as an assembler, then moved up to repair tech, and eventually was working as I guess what you'd call an engineers aid, or something. Was a lot of fun. I called it being paid to play:D One of the products we were developing was a self contained graphics camera. Had a light table with a mylar cover sheet and vacuum pump, a camera box with a big 'ol Nikon lens, and a built-in developing system. It was mainly for prototyping printed circuit boards. You'd make your master positive tape-overlay 2x actual size, then make a photographic negative that you'd use for making the circuit board. Anyhow, it was all controlled by an EPROM that we programmed ourselves with this clunky programming box. Had to manually input each line of command with a set of switches. (this was in about 1980) The old fella I worked for was a great teacher. I only had a electronics tech degree, but he took me in and taught me alot. But I kinda faded away from electronics after that company fell apart in the recession of the early 80's, and ended up as a machinist. Always wished I had gotten more schooling and finished my EE degree. I could be playing with cool stuff like you are:D

Knew a guy years ago that put together a nice little buisness. When CNC machines started getting popular machine shops were dumping Brown and Sharpe screw machines for nothing. He went in and bought about a dozen of these things and set up shop doing real simple parts, a big one was firing pins for guns. He told me he got a couple machines for free just for moving them.

I worked for him one summer and kept in touch for about 7 years until he passed. I know next to nothing about machining but was amazed that these machines were 40-50 years old and chugging out parts 16 hours a day. Toughest part was finding the ol timers who knew how to do set up on them.

Yeah, the old stuff is still good for limited production. And yes, very cheap too. I had a chance at a free lathe a few years ago, but couldn't find a place to put it, or a way to move it. It was a good 12 feet long:eek: There's still alot of guys with that old stuff in their garages, making a decent living with little or no overhead.

If you're still looking for quality, it's in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

http://bonigv.tripod.com/toc.htm

Isn't that the book you get for free if you save up enough Zig-Zag wrappers? That's a whole different kind of quality.

Jeez - speak of the devil. This lawyer's stupid computers got Hyundai Ram chips in it. I've been working on it all weekend, the POS. F***kers working now. I didn't even know those bastards made ram chips. I've got a guy who says computer part quality goes in this order: Japan, Tawainese, US, Chinese, Malaysian and last and least, Korean. I'm going to go tell ten people their RAM chips suck too.

Have you read the book? There are neither stems nor seeds within its pages, just an exploration of the metaphysics of quality and values. Worthwhile reading in my estimation.

No. I just remember when I was in college back in the 70s, you had to have that one and some other book by some Indian Mystic on your bookshelf so women would think you were cool. If you were really hip, you had a copy of Jim Morrison's lousy poems. For some reason I associate it with pot smoking. I have no idea why - whatever happened, I didn't inhale.