I would agree but an VFD that is unnecessary is a current draw that is not needed.
Like any system, one needs to plan a workshop as a whole.
At this point, I could go single phase, 3 phase or DC motors on on all my machines. One of the reasons why I started this discussion was to make that decision based partially on the experiences of others who have hopefully gone before me.
TMT
Thanks for your posting.
Your discussion is one of the major reasons for me starting this thread. As I soon discovered when I started research into the design of an AHP workshop...that the continuing progression of technology (especially that of inverter design) changes the approach that one should take in implementing a AHP system today.
While the lure to go "no power" is strong, I am no Luddite. Power tools, both portable and stationary, have their place in a AHP workshop. The opportunity to leverage consumer offerings allows one to use conventional tools with minimal hassles. I also have a large collection of older metal and wood working tools that would be awkward to convert to something other than AC. In the past, I have always had a policy of trying to do as little a modification as possible to a tool since it is never a simple as it first seems. Machine tools were designed with certain speed and torque requirements in mind and when one departs from these, the tool's performance suffers.
Thanks for your input and please always feel welcome to contribute to any of my discussions.
TMT
You wouldn't be in a position to know, you top posting loon.
mike
Free trade. There are highly regarded experts from both ends of the political spectrum who say it's necessary.
They all have jobs in the service sector and are relatively immune from foreign competition themselves.
-- Ed Huntress
Uh, no. It means that we have two billion dollars worth of their crap, and they have our two billion dollars.
This is not necessarily a bad deal in itself. But that's the way it is.
-- Ed Huntress
Found a live one, eh? One day they will demand their VALUE back ...... as promised by that paper ....
Then those taxes will ......
I'm not looking forward to it. I have a feeling we're about to try, once again, to follow the pea under the shells, with Milton Friedman moderating.
-- Ed Huntress
============================== Our buzzwords are "maximizing sharholder value" with "free market" for the rondo.
People go out and drink too much even though they know they will have a hang over the next day. The major difference in this case is that the people who are enjoying the party are not the ones who will suffer the hangover (and have to pay the bar tab).
============================================ This may have been true at the higher levels at one time but with telecommuting service sector jobs are also rapidly disappearing. For example many low to mid level accounting jobs such as tax returns are now done overseas. Where the jobs cannot be done externally H1B visas allow worker importation.
I didn't intend to lead that point to a discussion of how vulnerable service sector jobs are, because, as you say, that situation in general is changing fast.
With tongue in cheek, I was suggesting that US government economists, so far, aren't showing much worry about having their *own* jobs outsourced to India.
However, given that the ideological posture of our current administration seems to have no throttle and a seemingly unlimited fuel tank, they may give that one a try, as well.
-- Ed Huntress
Perhaps, but half of my customers are in Europe and Asia. My feeling is that the value you add is what customers are interested in. It goes right to their bottom line.
That's fine in your business, John. It's not so fine if you're making injection moldings for consumer products or assembling car engines in Detroit or Windsor.
-- Ed Huntress
============================ Big problem is that you can't tell what also comes off the bottom line as a result because is concealed as higher taxes, and/or quality of life issues such as higher crime rates with increased insurance and alarm costs. It is also displaced in time, in that you may see an immediate benefit now, but much higher costs later. Think about changing the oil in your car. Don't change it now, save a little money now, pay a lot more later or do without a car.
Ed, When I owned half of an injection molder we never lost a job we wanted to Asia, not once. In fact, the first big tooling/molding package we nailed down was something running in Malaysia. One project that was bid around the world was commercial binary syringe assemblies for tooth whitening gel. The quantities were 20 million units per month to start. You probably know the company we did this for. If you have a Hot Springs Spa, 90 percent of the molded parts are from my tools running in the United States. Carlsbad to be precise. I could go on here at some length as 100 million dollars per year in molded product is a lot of product. That isn't my point. In each and every case the costs of making product were lower when customers did business with us than if they made there purchase overseas. We were shipping parts on several jobs to China as a matter of fact.
This is the important part - in no year between 1991 and 2002 did the company's net after tax margin fall below 18 percent of gross revenues - never, not once, period. It was almost embarrassing and we did not have a single product of our own. If Detroit or Windsor can't stay busy or if GM files it won't be because they couldn't get the answer right. It will be because they kept asking the wrong damned question.
This isn't a problem at all. Calculating the value in manufacturing is a reasonable precise and very doable exercise. It is not much of an art but does require a thougough understanding of every element involved.
And are you talking about a solution for 10% of the market, or are you claiming you have a general question and a general solution for it?
Because we can always make a positive anecdote of the virtues of 10%, if we neglect the fact that an economy is all 100%, and that the consequences of what happens to the other 90% eventually catches up with all of us.
Sooner or later, you have to answer the question of how you compete with 80 cents/hour wages, when technology and business expertise can be packaged into shipping containers and sent to Bangalore or Shanghai just as easily as to Cleveland, and that clever ideas, hard work, and insight are distributed quite evenly around the world.
-- Ed Huntress
It isn't a claim Ed, it is a proven philosophy and business model. It will work wherever you choose to run it if the infrastructure is in place.
distributed
Focusing on wages is exactly the wrong thing to do. I paid the tool room guys a five dollar premium to the market, provided excellent medical benefits, paid time off, and contributed the legal maximum to our 401K for every employee at the time that was 4 to 1. You are closer to the mark with the clever ideas part however and I agree that no one group has a lock on that.
If you think that GM is tanking because of their labor contracts or pension obligations you are just plain wrong. They suck hind tit because their business model if for shit.
Proven for what percentage of the economy? Are you suggesting this is a general model that will sustain our economy as a whole? If so, how would you apply it to, say, the manufacturing of shirts? What philosophy and business model will let you make shirts at a price/quality tradeoff that competes with rural China or Bangladesh? Child labor could help, I suppose...
Your $5 premium probably was around 20% of 40% of your costs: as a round approximation, perhaps 8% of your cost of production, based on tooling-industry rules of thumb.
When you're up against 80 cents/hour, how do you account for the 96% disadvantage? Do you think that improved efficiencies in general (not just yours, but those of the economy as a whole) can cover 96% differences? Any model that I know of, that points in that possible direction, is based on getting rid of all of those people you employ and adopting the values and standards of the Third World.
And then business in general winds up hoist on its own petard.
So you're saying they can absorb $1,500/car just by having a better business model than Toyota or Hyundai? And then, after gaining a $1,500/car advantage over them simply through smarter organization, that they can maintain that advantage in a viciously competitive global market?
These are all fine assertions, John, but I'd like to see the specifics. Frankly, I don't believe you can "business-model" your way to success when you have the kind of legacy overhead that GM has. That is, unless your business model is based on moving all of your manufacturing offshore and abandoning your legacy entitlements to the federal government.
-- Ed Huntress
They're doing better as banks.
What's your SPECIFIC suggestion, George?
-- Ed Huntress
============= Right on!!!!! You also need to include Ford. A major contributing factor is that they can't decide if they are banks or car companies. They also seem to have forgotten than you can't milk a "cash cow" if it is dead.....
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