I have looked at stuff in the drop box but I don't know how to put stuff in there or the protocols for using it. Please fill me in as I would like to post a picture of a machine that should be finished in a week or so and I have spent more than a year building, between phone calls and fire extinguishing. There are a lot of cool subsystems that are "out of the box" and not much "off the shelf". Every bit of my know-how went into it and I had to learn some more. One BIG load of metalworking!!! Lots of kludges because I designed around what stock I had in the bins rather than buying a lot of stuff. I probably spent less than $1k for new stuff and scrounged the rest. It's based on a commercial brush machine frame and will make a very heavy duty "Butcher's Block" brush using flat wire. This will replace a current machine that is over 100 years old, (except anything that moves) and produce over twice the output without the highly skilled operator, it will eliminate 3 operations and cut costs by over 20% not including the overhead load. It will also cut 1.5 people that will be absorbed by other departments. We figure that it will hit the fiscal at over $40k per year! Cha-CHING!!! In retrospect, I should have done the whole project differently. I should have done the system designs with no-holds-barred, farmed out the machining, hired techs and had it on-line in less time. I ran the project like a hobby...Duhhhh. The next project starts in...a week or so. Most of the design work is done and I will do it way different. It will produce wire wheel brushes that will be higher speed rated and higher quality and cheaper and faster to make.
- posted
19 years ago