hiring someone to sell equipment

A lot of scrap is remelted here by the likes of Nucor.

i

I could never get that much for any Bridgeport

Gunner Asch on Tue, 29 Dec 2015 02:11:14 -0800 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Had a friend buy an older Cincinnati mill. Cost about three times what he paid for it, to get it shipped to Seattle. Still "cheaper" than local options.

Same thing here - lots of businesses closing down (big business) but lots of small business strting up - lots of high tech - and quite a few "farm based businesses" - making things like bolts for Ford - - - and anything else you can imagine.

But the reasons are different for California and Canada. The Canadian automotive Tier 1 and Tier 2 manufacturers got caught in a double bind. Part of it was the recession and part was the bargains made with the unions here in the US. The US car makers had to bring some of their part-making and subassembly work back to the US to compensate for the unions' give-backs. So Canada is doing more Tier 3 work now. That's the smaller contract job shops.

That's all in general -- mostly GM, in fact. Ford is a little different. I have some research lined up to do on Ford this coming spring.

The problem in Canada was the switch from the Canada US Auto pact to "North American Free Trade" - and the "alliance between the elephant and the mouse". There is no way that is an equal partnership and the 'mericans pulled a LOT of jobs out of Canada just because they could.

Not jusdging from the last 10 or 15. You have to understand the "mennonite mafia" running these shops.

buy from a jew, sell to a scottsman, and make a profit

They put them there in the first place "because they could." There was little to recommend Canada as a big automotive component/assembly supplier to US OEMs in the first place except low price.

Then the Canadian Tier 1/Tier 2 manufacturers made big investments (we had Wasino turning machines in 24 Canadian plants when I was marketing manager there; that was more than we had in US top-tier suppliers) and they held on to that market for years. As the Canadian dollar rose against the US dollar, the writing was on the wall.

Canada's dependency on the US automotive suppliers was a mistake, as was California's dependency on military aerospace business.

I'm deeply disturbed by too many trends, so no rose tinted glasses for me.

I understand what you're saying, but your focus seems to be too tight. Are you not seeing the mass exodus of business from the USA? It's wholesale loss, not just a bit of redistribution.

I thought the figure was 90%.

Forbes agrees. 400k new biz/470k dying each year long term unemployment down to 32%

Wish I had Ig's glasses.

You're about 15 years behind the times, Larry. There is no mass exodus of "business." The exodus to offshoring really didn't last long. The exodus recently was of headquarters operations and the nominal base of the companies, not of the actual manufacturing. That was almost entirely a paper move, for tax purposes. And much of that was stopped with some tax-law changes about a year ago.

What Gunner is seeing is mostly the result of the segment of industry he deals with -- the absolute bottom feeders. Mismanaged, under-capitalized, dragging their feet technologically, they are declining and the business they did (which is still there) is being picked up by better, smarter companies.

You can't start a mold shop today with a Bridgeport and a Logan lathe in a garage. Technology has moved on. And if you try to run a business today the way you ran it 20 years ago, you're toast.

Then Gunner gets to help move the machines out and Iggy buys them for scrap. Welcome to the 21st century -- which you'll probably catch up with in a decade or two.

Some of the highest quality automobiles in North America come out of Canadian plants. Low price doesn't come into the equation - with health care and other benefits, and the highly unionized workforce, cars can be assembled for MUCH less in either Detroit, Flint, or Alabama.

And what of the $0.72 dollar???

Canada's automotive industry supplied more parts than vehicles for many years.

The auto pact ensured that close to the same number of vehicles a manufacturer sold in Canada were made here. We might make just Dodge Mini-vans and rear wheel drive full size Crown Vics and Camaros and GM pickups, but we exported as many of them as we imported all the other American cars built in the states. That equality went right out the window with "free trade"

Now we've lost the Camaro, and nothing has taken the place of the CV .

Lear seating has now closed their plant here in Kitchener. Budd Frame / Thiessen Krupp closed the frame plant almost 20 years ago. Numerous Canadian companies were bought by the Americans, given tax incentives to keep them here, and then closed down and moved south.

Even the steel industry. American Steel bought out Stelco, got millions of government help, and then shut the doors, in defiance of their agreement to maintain jobs in Canada..

There cannot be an equal partnership between an elephant and a mouse - no matter how good the mouse is.

Do you want fries with that?

The industry, manufacturing and other industries, will continue to do great.

The "average" people employed by them, will continue to do poorly.

The reason for this is technology and obsolescence of humans.

i

Really. Where was it that I saw that ... a robot mixed drink more accurately than a human bartender?

I don't doubt that, Clare, but we're mixing up two different periods. The Can./US Auto Pact was a deal to get volume up and costs down in Canada, so cars could be exported profitably to the US. It was declared illegal by the WTO in 2001. As far as I know, production cost for complete cars was never lower from Canada.

What happened after that was pretty much a straight cost and market decision, based on the free trade rules in NAFTA.

Again, be careful about which period you're talking about. Since the WTO action, the Canadian dollar gained twice and fell twice against the US dollar. When the C$ versus US$ was low, we did a lot of volume in parts -- even after the outlawing of the Auto Pact.

I assume you're speaking of the C$. As I said, part of it is a pulling back of car and car-parts production that resulted from the bailouts.

That's what I mean by the mistake of dependency. And free trade is likely to hurt someone, in all but imaginary, textbook cases. It hasn't done us a lot of favors in the US, either, coming up against high-volume, low-wage competition.

Free trade assumes a lot of things that don't exist in the real world. Canada built its manufacturing on HUGE infusions of US capital and ownership. That's a prescription for vulnerability.

And how many robots are mixing drinks? Look at what's happening in the real world, not at science-fiction speculation. Spend some time with economic data. It's a great antidote for mindless bullshit.

Yeah well, you have A Merry X-mas and a Happy New Year, too. Anyway, type in "robot bartender" in the "news" section of Google or Yahoo and look at all the reality you want.

First off, it appears you thought I was referring to you with the "mindless bullshit" remark. Actually, as I wrote that, what I had in mind was the technically incompetent reporters who write about new manufacturing technology, and who go over the top with unvarnished enthusiasm -- or pessimism. A little time studying what's actually happening would cure that. They don't usually bother.

Concerning what's happening with automation, that's much of what I spend my days studying. And the fact is that most of the robotization of metalworking manufacturing has already occurred. Practically all of the machining companies in the automotive supply chain, for example, are using robotic loading and unloading. Painting is fully robotized in that supply chain, and in many others. Welding is, too, in the higher-volume companies. What's happening there now is the implementation of small, pre-packaged welding cells for lower-volume shops. Overall, their effect on employment will be less than what we've experienced already.

There may be more robotization coming in press work, particularly manipulating sheet for press-brake work. Sheet loading and unloading is largely automated in those companies that have traditionally been the biggest employers. Plate and sheet cutting, if not bending, is fully CNC and usually automated. Beyond that, there isn't a lot of advantage to be gained in fabricating and press work.

So the predictions of fuller automation and, particularly, robotization have to be taken with a grain of salt. If you have followed automation for 40 years, as I have, you'll recognize that a robot is the last resort for automation. Robots excel at those tasks that require a lot of complex manipulation. The goal of companies that build automation equipment is to *avoid* complex manipulation.

Machine tools evolved around the idea that there would be a human operator. Now they're evolving around the idea that the "operator" is brain-dead and has a limited geometric range of movement. Most of the more advanced forms are pick-and-place or Cartesian movements, not polar movements, which is what robots are all about. Often, robots are the *first* approach to automation, when the engineers haven't yet figured out how to reconfigure a process to avoid polar movements.

Now, about your "robot bartender." It's YOU who should look at those Google listings, because none of them actually have replaced humans. They're gee-whiz demonstration projects, like the hamburger assembling robots that get Iggy excited. They aren't anybody's employment problem. Whether they ever will be is open to speculation.

And the reason for that is that the mechanics of automation are no longer the limiting factor in further implementation. The limiting factor now is coordinating vast amounts of data -- control data, monitoring data, optimizing data, ordering data -- it's a software problem. General-subject reporters see the robots. Manufacturing managers see the data piling up.

If you really want an insight into where manufacturing is going, and what factors will influence manufacturing employment in the immediate future, go back to Google and search for "Industry 4.0." That's what's really happening. And that's where the demand is for future employment.