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Jeff Porter

Jeff Porter

Elio Addict
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Location
Norton, KS; halfway between Kansas City and Denver
John Texas said:
My reservation is in the 25,000 range (Aug. 15, 2014). I hope I can get one the first year. I would imagine the regulatory headaches with a new car AND car company must be enormous!!! Keep at it Paul, we want our P4's!!!!!
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Welcome John, from Kansas. Congrats on your reservation.
 
Jeff Porter

Jeff Porter

Elio Addict
Joined
May 20, 2014
Messages
2,086
Reaction score
5,343
Location
Norton, KS; halfway between Kansas City and Denver
Ty said:
I was there before the hummer. We made S-10s and Isuzu Hombres... but, the line hasn't changed much. There are more advanced autonomous machines to improve accuracy but, the length and such would still be the same. There wouldn't be much of a way to change where the line went. About your question, the simple answer is no. Frame welding is still frame welding, transacted installation is still transacted installation. Where they COULD make a change... and follow me here... is to run the line faster. Take a work station like steering column installation for instance it takes (a made up number that would be close to 54 seconds) about 54 seconds to do this operation. Now, if you ran the line at 54 seconds, that operation would only be able to take 54 seconds but it would also take up a certain number of feet on the line. Say the station was 20' long. Anyway, if you ran the line faster, the vehicle would travel further than the given 20' while you performed your operation. You can't do that. You'd be in the next station trying to finish. You can't really make a 54 second job take less time. So, how do you get more production from that one line?

Here's the answer. In order to keep the line e moving at the right place, one vehicle enters your station every 54 seconds. You have that amount of time to finish your install and prep for the next vehicle which is 20' behind the one you just finished. Now, I'm in charge... I'm shortening the distance between vehicles from 20' to 10'. "What?" you say, "I won't be done with the first vehicle and there is already another one in my station. What gives?" Well, I'll assign two teams (or single people depending on the complexity of the station. In your case, I'll just give you another person). 27 seconds after you start your vehicle, the 2nd person starts the next one. You'd effectively build every other steering column. An Elio would come off the line every 27 seconds. Actually, because of the number of parts needed at the line to do this, the line would have to be slowed down just a bit to take into account the slightly longer distance people would have to travel to get parts.

This would require all the handling equipment to be doubled. However, it would allow the main line that carries the vehicles (pulls, actually) to be left alone. There would just be a lot more cars on it.

I hope that is clear and more than that, helpful.

You were right in that I was there. My job as an industrial engineer was officially as a material line balance engineer. My job was to figure out how to get the right parts in the right quantity to the line at the right time. What I ended up spending most of my time doing was working on individual work stations making sure they were balanced to 52 seconds. They ran the line at 54 seconds but we had to make sure each job took less than 52 seconds so the line never had to stop. Now, most stations were much under that but even the ones that were at 52 seconds were easily done faster by experienced operators. We had GM standard tables of operations that we had to use... reaching for a washer, 24" away, outside of normal vision (12" diameter at 24" for instance) takes .xxx seconds... we used these tables to set standard times. It was important, of course. People tended to make their job seem more complicated than it was whenever the "efficiency guys" were around.

I hope that helps. I'm sorry if I bored you but it's stuck in your brain now! I'm more than willing to answer any questions and I promise to try to keep the answers shorter than this.
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I find this stuff fascinating Ty, so I very much appreciate your insight and explanations. I watched an old documentary recently on Henry Ford (Cliff Robertson played him), so I got to see the early days of an assembly line, and some changes that were made to improve output, etc.

Anyway, thanks Ty for the info.
 
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