I thought I'd share this video from Brainpickings at the kickoff of the Labor Day weekend - seems appropriate to see where manufacturing has come from. It is from the Raleigh Bicycle company in England in 1945. For those unfamiliar with Brainpickings, it is a very cool site full of all sorts of generally worthless, but fascinating information - a lot like me I suppose.
Lots of impressions from the video ... from a lean perspective, of course, the amount of work in process inventoryand the size of the batches is striking ... from a production perspecctive, the labor intensity and the gains in productivity are even more striking.
I like the fact that it demonstrates the importance of the bicycle industry in manufacturing evolution. They were making bikes for the mass market long before they were making cars. Henry Ford owes his assembly line and interchangeable parts, in large measure, to the modern machine tool era which arose from the late 1800's bicycle industry. After seeing this, you will understand why it was natural for aviation to spring from the Wright Brothers bicycle shop. Bike makers were very skilled manufacturers in 1903 - the year Orville and Wilbur flew (and incidentally the same year the Ford Motor Company was formed). When the Wright boys went to Kitty Hawk Model T's and the assembly lines that made them were not even a dream.
Have a great holiday weekend!
Original: http://idatix.com/manufacturing-leadership/happy-labor-day/
Evolving Excellence
As a long-time cycling enthusiast and former framebuilder, it is interesting to see Raleigh's component designs in 1945 were still showing up in mass market bicycles into the late 1970s. This, unfortunately, contributed to Raleigh's demise as Italian and especially Japanese competition rendered their component designs and bicycles obsolete. In the early 1970s, many makers of high-end competition frames apprenticed in the U.K. before opening up their shop here in the U.S. Also, the competition between UK and Italian seamless steel frame tubing was fierce. My first career was as a metallurgist, during which time I wrote numerous articles on the metallurgy of steel frame tubing and brazing for various cycling publications (ca. 1981-1986).
Posted by: Bob Emiliani | 01 September 2012 at 06:02 AM
One of my favorite books is Hounshell's _From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932_. He writes extensively about bike (and gun) manufacturing and how it led to refinements in everything from sewing machines to automobiles. The book is more interesting than the tile would lead one to believe.
Posted by: Kathleen | 01 September 2012 at 11:04 AM