USA out of recession?

At this time, after so many years of low inflation and low interest rates, and now with some real GDP growth, I'm having a hard time figuring out how you translate that pattern into one of getting poorer through inflation.

What is it that you see happening?

Inventories being increased are a result of many more market pressures than anticipation of future sales. Currently many things a company buys are only available in larger lots. Before the recession, components and material could be purchased as needed, in smaller quantities. Remember "just in time" inventory control. That isn't working anymore.

My electronic assembly company now has to buy reels of 1000 components if we want even one component. A year ago we could buy 100 or 200 crystals to build a circuit board for a customer. Recently, we had to buy an entire reel of 1000 and had to get ones made with leaded solder when we really wanted 100 with lead-free solder. We bought the last reel available anywhere. The correct crystals won't be available until June. The customer can't wait till June/July.

Last year we had to buy 2000 hand held push button switches with a custom plastic housing in order to get the 300 we needed for a custom product build. Since I don't do the purchasing and only hear about the horror stories, I am sure there are many more components that the minimum purchase quantity has gone out of sight.

I am sure the same problem is present in all types of manufacturing. So, do not put much weight in the increased inventory figures.

Paul

You ever heard of Mini-Reel?

Of course. Use them quite often. In a lot of cases, they are not available. Mini-reels are a result of someone paying for re-reeling components so they can buy a smaller quantity. Not cost effective in the case of the crystals, and the distributor wouldn't do it because they would probably be left holding the remainder for ever. We will eventually use all the crystals, but may take a few years!.

By the way, did you ever live in the Portland, Oregon area and have a brother Patrick?

Paul

What frequency? The company should put up a list of excess inventory in case someone else needs a couple hundred. R. L. Drake used to do this, till they liquidated their older inventory.

For a while there were a lot of partial reels on Ebay. I haven't even looked in about two years. I lost the use of my good eye in 2008 for most of the year due to Bell's Palsy and I don't bother to look, anymore.

No, I've never been to Oregon :). Mostly the midwest and southeast. I did land in california twice, but was only there about 18 hours while on my way to and from Alaska

The reason I asked is back in the 1970's there were two brothers, Michael and Patrick Terrell who opened a micro-computer store in Portland. The name was "The Byte Shop". I visited regularly and sometimes even bought something. I think that was the first real computer store in Oregon, perhaps elsewhere. They lasted a couple of years.

A few years ago, my son went to work as a salesman for a company owned by one of the brothers, I forget which. I think the economy also took that company down.

My company only purchases material from existing distributors. This is in case of a problem the material stream can be traced back to the source. This has proved it's worth several times. As an electronic assembly service, we buy material from whomever the customer specifies. Mostly from Digi-Key, Mouser, some smaller distributors and some directly from a factory.

Paul

I had a commercial sound & industrial electronics business in Ohio in the '70s & 80s, and a computer business in Florida in the '90s.

I worked for Microdyne in Ocala for four years. We did our on board stuffing since there were so many variations on the base designs. I know what you mean about buying from known vendors. My official title was 'production test tech' but the only places I didn't work was accounting and HR. I qualified new parts, and removed some vendors from our Approved Vendor List. One was Beckman, and a series of problems with their surface mount pots. They were replaced with Bourns, and the failure rate dropped to zero. I also wrote test procedures, and took our biggest product design from engineering to full production. The worst was maintaining software that was never finished, for a test fixture that was not fully documented. :(

I retired from 34 years in programming and data communications. Then bought into a small electronic assembly service. That will be 10 years ago next month.

Since this is a metal working news group, I will tell you about one product we build for a customer that entails some metal working.

We build a small number of humidity sensor units for a company in Portland. They do the final testing and calibration. The box uses an external humidity sensor with internal electronics on a printed circuit board. We purchase the external sensor from a company in Finland for about $95 per. The sensor is in a machined brass housing that included shielding for three pins that go to a custom connector. The box does not have room for a connector, so the design engineer used "dikes", still a good work, even if not PC, to trim away the brass surround and gain access to the pins. Wires from the circuit board are soldered to the pins.

At $95 per sensor, we were not about to use dikes to trim the brass. The brass tube fits nicely into a collet in the little Prazi lathe we have at work. We use a 0.060 piece of metal to set the lathe tool away from a shoulder on the sensor and trim the brass away from the pins. Leaves a much nicer looking product. My general manager now does the setup and cutting.

There, metal content!

Paul

I worked in two way radio, broadcast, and my last RF job was building Telemetry equipment for the aerospace industry. The only metalworking I did there was building test fixtures. I was involved in improving our reflow soldering process as they moved from 1206 to 0805 and smaller components. That included getting a new Heller reflow oven, and a finer grain of paste solder for the 288 pin processors we used. The two older ovens were the typical 'pizza oven' design with poor zone control of the separate zones.

Sounds like the microwave VCO modules used in our tuners. They were mounded in a milled aluminum block with several other small boards, and connected together with short stubs. Most of them were about 1" square.

That, and the solder. :)