James, the color was carefully selected to match the color of the highly polished slack adjusters and differential as well as the wheel well color and the color of the tires. I could have asked for Volunteer Orange to match the trim on JDUB's plane.
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James, the color was carefully selected to match the color of the highly polished slack adjusters and differential as well as the wheel well color and the color of the tires. I could have asked for Volunteer Orange to match the trim on JDUB's plane.
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Jon, The check (with a creative spelling of your name) for my stands should arrive shortly. Please hold them in Knoxville for my pickup there around the end of October. More coordination later.
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Manufacturing The Stands
The beginning of the stands starts with getting the pieces ready for welding. The tubes are cut in a saw, the other pieces go through other processes including shearing, or punching or bending.
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The next step is to weld the stands. In the photos below Nick is welding a stand using a MIG welder.
The photos are out of order, but in the center photo Nick has tack welded the base and gussets and is beginning the finish welding. He will weld every joint.
The first photo shows a pallet of stands staged for powder coating, along with pallets of charcoal grilles and fire rings in the background. Powder coating is taking place today so I did not get photos. The coating line used to put the finish on the stands happens to be the same powder coating line that was used in Detroit at one time to powder coat our Diesel engines.
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While Nicks was welding bus stands, in another department of the factory Bonnie, Mimi and Renee were assembling electrical power outlets such as you might plug into in a campground.
Bus Stands and Po&#.jpgBus Stands and Po&#.jpgBus Stands and Po&#.jpg
The photos are out of order, but the top photo shows Renee putting the outer panels on an outlet, this one being a metered pedestal outlet, center photo shows Mimi packing a completed power outlet, the bottom photo shows Bonnie installing the internals.
The outlet being made is a Jamestown branded outlet (notice the door), but the company builds and also private labels outlets for other companies which are sold through electric supply houses and big box stores.
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Good stuff Jon. Thanks for your efforts.
My partners and I have been involved in lots of business - mostly successful (thankfully), some not so much. Manufacturing was one endeavor in which we got a spanking. When we sold our FRP plant after 2 years in the red, I had a new appreciation for the process of profitable manufacturing.
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Ron Walker, I will have your stands in Knoxville. They will be available any time after the Kerrville rally.
To those who will not pick up stands in Kerrville or Knoxville there are two options. The first is to ask a friend who can pick them up at either place to carry them to you. The second is we can ship them UPS in four boxes direct from the factory in Jamestown. To get an idea of the costs to FL the cost will be $65 (to Orlando as an example) or to LA in CA will cost $96. The price will vary depending on the zip code. Let me know.
To Gordon......I have restored three bankrupt businesses and created one from scratch. All were manufacturing. I love doing that kind of work and at this point would do one now just for kicks, but I don't want to be stuck with one. I suspect trying to sell even a successful one in today's economy would be tough. For a time I helped a few lenders try to get their borrowers out of a hole, but found unless I had the power to control the borrowers they were going to continue doing whatever they did that got them in trouble in the first place.
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Mine are coming in Mauve with embedded Rubies and Diamonds, right?
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We bought our plant with a plan brought to us by guys with a strong background in the design and engineering side of FRP products. What we learned the hard way is that custom built projects with high markups can quickly go upside down if there are mistakes in manufacturing or specs aren't met perfectly. This leads to the manufacturer (us) correcting the problem at our cost to build a reputation as a high quality, dependable company. This is critical when the custoimer base is largely volatile type industries (petrochemical, etc).Originally Posted by Jon Wehrenberg
There was a market for the products but they were rarely repeatable, and building one off vessels or other complex custom fabs required perfection that our folks and existing systems where unable to deliver reliably. We could have gotten there by making a big step up in an added layer of QC personnel, higher qualtity CAD capabilities, automated layouts, etc, but just lost that loving feeling.
I ended up selling it to another FRP manufacturer who was geared up to make a limited range of vessels and could run the same dimension vessel on all shifts for a week or month at a time. Lower margins, but much less variability and thus cost overrun on customer satisfaction. To mimick his model would have required investment in bulk product and trying to penetrate a market already dominated by a couple of brands (his included) - read lower pricing, thus not attractive returns for some time to come.
Could have bought a nice XLII with what I "learned" on that investment!
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Welcome to my world Gordon. An education at the most expensive college is chump change compared to the mistakes we pay for in the real world.
The factory is geared for custom production and the key to success in my opinion is building from a database of custom products that has been perfected over time. With the exception of certain operations such as the cutting of tubes and welding of the stands, most production is run on computer controlled equipment run by programs in the engineering database. Not every production facility has such capability, but then again not every company is expected to deliver a truckload of special products within 3 days of receiving the order. That turnaround time is routine, and a truckload of steel is received and shipped in finished product within a 3 to 5 day window. At that speed of production we cannot afford errors, and when I sold the company we were experiencing one return for every 10,000 products shipped. As a footnote more than 50% of the production was brought back from Korea, China, Malaysia, etc. so obviously with tight margins there is no room for mistakes.
The stands took 2 days from the release to the plant until staging for coating. NO QC, no factory floor supervisors, but a bonus for productivity and severe loss of bonus if a product is wrong.
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