story backwards

Sometimes it is faster to outsource.

Makes a lot of sense. Ventech doesn't "manufacture" ventilators so much as assemble them. I would venture an educated guess that mabee 10 to 15% of the actual devices are "manufactured" in house. They are assembled from a combination of off-the-shelf and custom manufactured "components" soursed from arounf the world. Same with GM's cars. GM could manufacture many "components" for the ventilators and they could access parts from their supply chain that would not ordinarily be accessable to Ventec. They could also offer assembly capacity. The tool and die makers that make the moulds for GM's injecteon moulded and die cast parts could produce duplicate dies to expand part production, and the machines that make GM's injection molded and die cast oarts could make many more of those parts than Ventec's current suppliers can supply. SOME ofthat capability is in-house at GM -and much of it is outsourced (sub-contracted) to loacal third party "jobber shops" across North America (and beyond).

Ramping up for GM to build the ventilators entirely from scratch would be a HUGE undertaking. Having GM help triple or quadruple Ventec's domestic production would be relatively trivial.

The CEO of Ventech was saying they have 100 vendors in 14 countries to supply the parts. Some were shut down for the virus.

Even if special tooling is involved, most would just have to crank up to make more parts per day. If no special tooling it may be easy to find another source quickly.

As for injection molded parts, typical cycles are 10 to 15 seconds. No reason they can't crank up and make everything needed as long as material is available.

If we were a supplier to them with existing numbers we would have run their tool part of one day in a month so you can see how ramping up production is pretty simple on some stuff. However, if the tool is overseas it may be better to ship and run it here to cut freight time.

No worries, Trump says that very soon we will have more ventilators than we need and will be sending them to help Italy and Spain. Meanwhile he says that the national stockpile of most critical items, including ventilators is now empty. Talk about mixed messages.

Again, with all these critical items, if Trump showed leadership and took control of the situation, determined what the total demand is, what the total supply is today, what the gap is, which companies can make them and placed ORDERS and then allocated them, we wouldn't be having a cluster f***. There are likely a lot of companies that could help IF they had actual orders. The feds should be placing those guaranteed orders, not leaving it to mass confusion. If a company knows that the govt will buy a million masks, guaranteed at a certain price, it's a real target. Retooling to make them on the chance that someone will buy them 30 days or 60 days from now is another story.

I can't see Ventech being a high volume purchaser. I think you are correct that it was a very short run on demand for most of the parts. I wonder where the bottleneck is?

with rapid prototyping the tool can usually be reproduced here faster and cheaper than shipping the tool here. Produce several of every fie or mold required and get a few machines producing parts. The big issue will be the control boards, and even that is trivial in the grand scheme. As long as we can get the components. If custom ASICs are involved they will be harfer to second source

There is a GOOD chance several parts are made in Northern Italy, which has been shut down. They have run out of their last order of 500 or 1000 parts which were supposed to last until August and the production line for the part is still making parts for Fiat or Lamborgini - their parts are scheduled for when Modena shuts down auto production for a week.

A lot of this "specialized" stuff is "batch contracted" too. One company supplies the initial run of parts, and before they run out Ventec tenders for another run. The parts made in Italy last year may be made in Turkey or Belarus next time - or Thailand or the Phillipines. They may have a projected requirement of 10,000 parts in the next 5 years - and be 4 years into the cycle with one year's supply left - then the brown stuff hits the fan and they run out in 3 months. Now they are scrambling for a supplier. Another part may have had 100,000 made because the cost per unit drops from $2 each at

Very good explanation.

There used to be a store in Bushwick, Brooklyn, of all places, that sold surplus parts from making TVs, when they had say enough to make 10,000 of one model, but had bought 12000 of some part. Or more likely they bought 10,000 of the part but only managed to sell 9000 tvs of a given model.

Many parts went for 10, 20 cents, a tenth of retail.

Interior parts, like capacitors and switches and semiconductors, and handles and a few other case parts.

I bought a lot and it was really good to have something at 10PM and not have to go to the store.

The sign said you had to be in the industry to shop there, and I saw him refuse to let people in. For a dollar, I had business cards printed that said something like Gates Sales and Service and that was good enough for him.

It's been 37 years, I don't think it's still there.

The best story I heard about 20 years ago for Government waste. There was a radar that needed a diode replaced. You could go to almost any electronic supply store and get them for less than one dollar.

The military supply depots did not have any. As then were specified as meeting a certain standard the military had to go the the manufactor of the radar. They did not have any extra parts, so had to go to the maker of the diode. As they are produced in a batch, just one could not be made. They had to make thousands. So that diode wound up costing several thousand dollars and thousands of extras left over to probably be sent to the surplus place there they were probably sold for a penny each.

It seems to me a big waste that the so called 50 and 30 caliber ammo cans are on the market. I guess the military only uses them once and then they are sold on the surplus market. Looks like they could be reused.

I suppose that depends on how they get their ammo. On the ship (60s) we got our WWII 50 cal in 275 round wooden crates (the whole 9 yards) and we clipped it into 100 round belts to fit in the cans. We reused them. If it is sourced in 100 round cans for the ground pounders I can see them not having a way to send the old cans back.

Back when a lot of things were actually PRODUCED here there were surplus stores with bins and bins of all kinds of components ranging from electronics to auto parts to casters, latches,and handles. Also all kinds of "seconds" and "scratch and dent" items, gallons of paint, bins of fasteners, etc.

Now the surplus stores are full of cheap chinese junk - some of it "prime" and some of it "for parts or repair only". Shelves of cheap "single use" tools, and more shelves of 3 year old spices and office supplies.

The old "military surplus" places have small amounts of Nato and Russian military clothing and the odd shovel or myultitool with a military backround - the rest of it is just more "Cheap Chinese Crap"

In other countries in time of war I can see dropping the cans where ever. However with all the new looking cans on the market someone is picking them up. I have several of the so called 50 cal cans that are labled 860 rounds of 556 which is the M-16 (ar-16/15) rifle type ammo and one is labled something about a fuse.

Most likely the cans are just the used ones in the states. Probably from training.

The price seems to be going up. They used to be $ 5 and maybe under, now they are $ 10 and up. I don't know if the military has switched to plastic or not, but see lots of the 30 and 50 caliber size ones sold new in stores that are plastic and are made just for the public. I think some places make the metel ones just to be sold in stores.

Not being produced here may be the reason there are not any military surplus stores around here. There used to be one in town many years ago and 2 towns about 15 miles away each had one. They went out of business over 40 years ago.

I don't think there has been any real US government surplus since Vietnam, We have a policy of leaving our surplus on the ground when we left since then. The only real surplus I have seen was coming from the Soviets. I suspect these ammo cans are new manufacture or dumpster dived from a training base.

BINGO. saw a cardboard box labeled 50 cal ammo boxes - made in China at the local surplus store.