Unless they are going to make enough parts to keep a robot line busy for
a week or so, it is cheaper to just make them on NC machines as needed,
although often casting are kept in stock, especially if they are
produced by a subcontractor as is often the case.
Labor is a very small cost in robotic production. To give an example,
the last job I worked before becoming disabled was assembling a robot
production line to manufacture cel-phone repeaters. These were the then
new ones that could be mounted on telephone poles as need and had a
range of about 1 mile so they needed to put them up about one per square
mile in cities all over the country, they would continue to use the high
power units out in the country.
The company I was contracted to designed, assembled, tested, tore down,
moved to the buyers site, setup, retested, the machine; then collected
their money. What the machine did was take printed circuit boards, and
electronic components loaded into hoppers by a couple of employees,
drill the boards, put in the components, wave solder them, test the
board, discard the bad ones, and put the good ones in to boxes of, IIRC,
24. Another employee removed the boxes and stacked them on pallets. So 3
people was what it took to make 600 or so of these repeaters per hour.
In the old days it took that many people to produce 3 such boards per
day. And you wondered why electronics are so cheap these days.
To give an idea, such a machine takes about a year from final
specifications to up and running in the plant and cost about 1.5 mil.
That was in '98. Now something making mechanical parts would be much
more expensive because of the NC machine tools, but otherwise would be
about the same time frame to set up, and would have about the same
operational costs. That is for a dedicated robotic production line, a
general purpose robotic line would be much more expensive.
graywolf
http://www.graywolfphoto.com
"Idiot Proof" <==> "Expert Proof"
-----------------------------------
keith_w wrote:
P. J. Alling wrote:
The probably have the parts on hand and assemble them as needed.
Since labor is a large part of a product's cost, especially something
as precise as a multi-element lens assembly, that makes total sense.
Making and storing all the individual parts, post manufacture and
inspection, is a small task, all things considered.
Now, whether they actually *DO* it that way, who knows. ;-)
BTW. what DO 15mms cost these days?
keith
Tom Reese wrote:
I still don't know about this. In my mind, these lenses have too
many custom
parts for them to bother making a single lens. The lens barrels, the
focusing helixes, the diaphragm mechanisms etc have to be different.
I can't
see Pentax going to their supplier and ordering one of each to build a
single A 15mm lens. I can see them producing a batch of fifty or so
but I
don't think they'd bother for an older model that has been replaced
in the
lineup.
Like I said, it's an interesting idea.
The ain't shutting down no line to make your A15, Tom. They put them
together in a little job shop in the basement <grin>. In fact I would
not be suprised to find out that they grind the lens elements on a
numerically contolled grinder and polish them by hand. They probably
haven't made enough 15mm's since 1975 to keep a serious production
line
busy for one day.
