US Manufacturing - Tooling. The last 50 years.

[juergenwt]

Observations made in 50 years working as a Tool & Die Maker in the US.
Stay with me on this.
I am trying to put my observations of many years working in Europe and in the US in a short story. So let's get started. I had received my training in Germany.
Going back to the fifties I started working for a large machine manufacturer as a tool & die maker in Chicago.
My very first impression ( 2 weeks off the boat ) :" Holy smoke - this equipment is old!" But being 22 years old I was willing to learn. First problem: inches, pound and gallons!!! Three types of drill sets! Nobody used a caliper - 6" scale or micrometer only. After a few month I got the hang of it and things started to get better. Language was not a problem. Than one day: Greetings...... Uncle Sam called. OK 3 years US Army. Guess what? Instead of machinist it was machine gunner. Back to Chicago. After a while working with inches was not so bad. I started to like our old machines. They had character these old Hendey Lathes or Monarch or SB. Sure we had newer machines in Germany - thanks to the British who after the war decided to take all the old machinery to England (thank you for that) but the American machine were made to last a long time. It was good equipment and you could fall in love with it.
Being in Chicago it was policy in our company to send skilled people, foremen and engineers to the Chicago Machine Tool Show taking place on the lake front. In those days Companies like B & S, Warner & Swasey, Kerney Trecker. Bridgebort, Cinci - Millacron etc. took up most of the floor space. The American Machine Tool Industry was dominent. German, Swiss and Swedish Companies occupied small corners on the floor and Japanese and other far east manufacturers could be found in the basement.
SO WHAT HAPPENED!!!
This is where it gets ugly. First you would see European machines occupying more and more floor space. Quality was very good. Price reasonable and fast delivery. Machines, while being build in metric had been designed with inch leadscrews for the American market. The Japanese machines were still mostly copies of US machines (copied to the last screw) and cheaply made but with instant delivery. After some bad experience they started to work on the quality problem.
Along came Mr. Demmig. An American who had been preaching quality to Detroit but got nowhere. His idea of making it right the first time was adopted in Japan and put to use.The rest is history.
Next thing you know the Japanese are on the top floors. What happened to the US Machine Tool Industry? They decided to sell out and import. After all why spend all this time and effort designing and building when you can just open a box and put your name plate on a machine and sell it. Well, it did not take the other countries long to set up their own sales force.
Now before we decide what to do about this problem we must know how we got into this mess. One thing is for sure: we can not be a world leader without having a healthy manufacturing sector. We are way behind the eight ball but we can recover. So where did we go wrong?
Lets go back some years. During my years as an apprentice in Germany we made friends with young people from India. They were sent by their government to go to engineering training and an internship with some of the best Machinebuilders in Europe. Companies in these countries would have a steady supply of engineers ( five year contract after completion of training).
Many companies would set up special rooms and fill them with the best machines they could find. These would then become the so called "Masters"
They looked around and copied the best training programs used by other countries and today we see the results of all of this.In the US we decided to cut most of our training programs. It was everybody on his own.
First: The US must decide that we need a healthy manufacturing sector!
As a starting point we must have training programs under supervision of the US Government or the Chamber of Commerce. On the job training is like playing poker. Sometimes you are in luck and get a winner but mostly you loose. We must be sure that a certain level of training is provided and support this with good old greenbacks.To insure this there must be tests
and certifications. Otherwise the money will just fill somebody's pockets.

We must also and as fast as possible change this country to metric. Everybody at his own speed does not work. Schools should not waste time teaching the useless imperial system just as they should not waste time teaching ( or not ) Spanish. You can not design and build in metric if you use inches and feet in your everyday life. Watch any toolmaker or machinist work to a metric print. Spanish ( at least the few words you learn in high school ) will get you a job at tree removal company. Learn Chinese, Japanes, German, French, Russian or Swedish - those are the industrialized countries.

Our Government must finally realize that in order to survive as a great nation we must take some drastic steps and our politicians must understand how serious this situation is and fully support skilled labor and the manufacturing sector in the US. In todays market with the cheap dollar we should be selling everything and the kitchen sink to the world, but we can not even sell the sink because it is build to inch dim's and would not fit anywhere in the world except In Burma.
Well - thats enough for today. I can look at the pictures and admire the great job done in restoring some of these great old machines. Great work!!
Ps.: I love this site. Juergen

 

[Michael Moore]

Don't forget that other "inch standard" industrial powerhouse Liberia.

cheers,
Michael

 

[SeymourDumore]

Juergen, Great post. A Really great post!

Virtual, can you please describe the benefits of the Imperial system and the dumbness of the metric system?
I really wanna know why 3 feet is a yard, why 12 inches is a foot and why is how many feet to a mile?
Also why is fahrenheit 32 is the freezepoint of water, and to exactly what standard is temperature calibrated to?
What is the scientific definition of a quart and why does it take 4 of it to make a gallon, which is the equivalent of what exactly?
What is an ounce and why is it used in 2 different measurements?

And since you despise the metric system, would you prefer if 42 cents would be a dollar and 60 dollars would be a thousand?

Well, impressively dumb comment you've managed there, thank you!

 

[jim rozen]

"we must take some drastic steps and our politicians must understand how serious this situation is..."

Oh dear. I am beginning to realize you don't have a clue about how we got into this
mess in the first place.

1) they cannot understand this.

2) they are not smart enough.

3) we keep voting folks like that into office.

You might say we are receiving exactly what we deserve in this regard.

As for the metric system, you are also quite misinformed. Much of the US operates
with these units in the manufacturing world. To say that we need to convert the
US manufacturing operations to metric is to admit you don't really understand
the manufacturing that is there right now.

Jim

 

[Norman Atkinson]

The Last 50 years

Juergen and I are much of an age and have gone through and seen changes which most of you did not experience. I'm a bit older but so what?

Whilst in Germany he had metric whilst I had Imperial. Let's tell you what Imperial means!
It dates back to when Britain had and Empire and this was dying or changed when Juergen got on the boat. The concept goes back to birth of industrialism and when people worked in feet and inches and pounds and ounces and gallons and gills which were either half or a quarter of a gallon and depended on where one lived!
The feet and and inches thing came from biblical times and men measured with their fingers and hands and forearms. We still measure horses in 'hands' We have miles- two sorts.we have them on roads and from nautical miles from 'knots' which are from lengths of ropes.
Mark Twain- your bloke- is from a rope with bits fastened on to see how deep oe shallow the Mississipipi was. 'By the Mark Twain or Two' and if someone got it wrong the boat was stuck.
The linear measure of feet and inches was halving and quartering and eighthing(?) and sixteenthing and sixtyfourthing an archaic unit.Fine but once we were capable of making micrometers and Verniers, we were getting close to talking in tenths and hundreds.
That's the story. Now education is so bad that we have to rush out and use a solar powered calculator to do our math( maths, to Brits)
Angles were an already crunched 360 because we couldn't get our heads around 365 and a bit days in the year. The Swedes who made the most compasses wanted 400 degrees!

I have had only a bit of comment. Now it is time to have yours.
So get to that keyboard and write your reply

With TEN fingers?

Err Cheers

Norm

 

[TAG]

Virtual, could you answer the question: Why is Imperial better?

So far you've just called people names.

I'm open to both and work in both, but would like to know why you think one is superior to the other. I think you must know as you seem to feel very strongly about it.

Mark

 

[Blue Steel]

I can say something about this. In Australia we went metric officially in the 1970's. We had decimal currency before that. I was in grade 5 and we began learning the new system without having been taught the old one. My Teacher told us that we were lucky because we did not have to learn the old one.

Forward to when I did my apprenticeship everything was in inches. Now there is a certain logic to working in fractions from a practical viewpoint. Going really small everything was in thousands so we had conversion tables from fractions to decimal. For this reason I don't think there is any tradesman who would struggle one bit with doing things in metric if he has a grip on imperial.

Where I work now we make parts in metric but we have some funny sizes to conform with the American standard, stuff that has imperial threads and so on. All our drawings are in metric though I think it might be better if the imperial stuff was left with imperial dimensions. I can work happily in either. Many times I have had to combine both like a big part I did recently with a metric drawing but the only thing big enough to cover the measuring of it was a 36 inch vernier. There have been other times when I have made metric parts on imperial machines but just convert in my head. One millimetre is 40 thou and so on. I am sure other tradies do the same and more it is no big deal. The imperial system still hangs around in our trade largely because there are old machines. Machine tools that are made with imperial threads. Machines that were made in imperial measurements and when they need parts the new parts must be made to suit imperial dimensions and so on.

It is no big deal really and from what I have read here there are plenty of tradesmen in America who are allready very comfortable with doing stuff in metric when called on to do so. CNC machines for instance you can use as inch or metric machines just with a G code. I am sure there are plenty out there who do just that.

Stephen

 

[Douglas Martins]

Juergen, Great post. A Really great post!

Virtual, can you please describe the benefits of the Imperial system and the dumbness of the metric system?
I really wanna know why 3 feet is a yard, why 12 inches is a foot and why is how many feet to a mile?
Also why is fahrenheit 32 is the freezepoint of water, and to exactly what standard is temperature calibrated to?
What is the scientific definition of a quart and why does it take 4 of it to make a gallon, which is the equivalent of what exactly?
What is an ounce and why is it used in 2 different measurements?

And since you despise the metric system, would you prefer if 42 cents would be a dollar and 60 dollars would be a thousand?

Well, impressively dumb comment you've managed there, thank you!

There is a good reason why there are 12" in a foot and 3' in a yard.
In the REAL world one often desires to divide by three which the imperial system handles well.
All the imperial measurements are also of sizes that are more natural to use in the REAL world.
The metric system is a monstrosity that was developed by a Frenchmen who falsified his data to make it match what he wanted and was forced upon the French by the government, and now the rest of the world.
The US is the market the whole world wants to get into and therefore I feel that the WORLD, like it used to, should adapt to OUR market.
In spite of the politically correct fashion to denigrate the US when the US economy goes down so does the world.
I hate the metric system and always will.
It is like too many things we suffer from today: dumbed down to make it easier for idiots to screw things up and blame someone else....


regards,
TheLiz

 

[Blue Steel]

There is a beautiful simplicity with the metric system as works entirely in 10's. I wouldn't say it is dumbing things down at all. Ask any scientist what is easier to work in they will say metric everytime. It makes complex calculations much more straightforward.

Metric was based upon a supposed measurement from the equator to the North Pole being equal to so many metres. Some argue that the measurement was no good so the system is no good. Really it means nothing. Today they use a measurement based upon a certain wavelength of some isotope or whatever that can be reproduced in any lab with the equipment. It is just a system and a perfectly good on at that. Does that make the Imperial system worthless? Of course not it is just a different system. There are many attractive things about the Imperial system. It also has it's complexities but then metric can throw you as well. I was given a recipe that had it's measurements in decilitres, basically units of 100 ml. I couldn't get my head around it as we normally just use millitres and litres here. All the milli's centi's deci's and so on can get confusing sometimes if they are over used especially alongside each other.

Stephen

 

[morsetaper2]

My opinion as an American, born and raised in USA, only foreign country I've been to is Canada...about 3X.

The inch divided into 1000 parts is of a much more convenient size vs the rough equivalent of .02mm (.0007 inch).

Other than that, the metric system is superior in MOST every way. Slugs...about the stupidest unit I ever heard of...64ths?? you gotta be kidding me. Units divisible by 12 & 16 vs 10?? Get real.

Yea it would hurt to change, but once the change would be done the benefit would pay back. one of those things where you'd say, I shoulda done it sooner. Good ole stubborn American laziness, sorry, but the world no longer revolves around us.

(Flame proof undies secured & in place )

 

[Norman Atkinson]

The last 50 years

Unfortunately, Douglas, hasn't a clue about the origins of measurement.
As far as we know, measurement existed in Megalithic Times or earlier.
Man was measuring using the planet Venus way back 7000 years ago.
We simply lost our way! Don't believe me? Check the spaces for railway lines. They are 4foot 8 and a half inches. The origin is not George Stephenson who lived a mile from my home but from the Roman Wall and remaining artefacts and gateways. The spaces repeat all over what was the Roman Empire. The deduction is a question. How did they get it some 2000 years ago? After all, it was Henry Ford and the development of guns and ammunition in something which you now call mass production which brought back the same sort of accuracy. Metrication and whether it was founded on inaccuracies is American baloney.
We, that is the geysers who live in Europe, had archaic coinage until it became 'dismal' whilst the Good Old US of A went 'metric' immediately. Your history, fellas, and a Limey Bastard to tell you about it. Dear me! Back to counting in dozens and Baker's Dozens counted in 13's. And Grosses?

So you Imperialists are doing the American drop of interest rates in fractions or decimals.
One thing, it is not working.

Yes?





Norm

 

[Blue Steel]

Something I can say about the metric system is that they mucked up the threads. They made too many thread forms when they should have kept it simple.

Imperial meant there was Whitworth BSF BSP and so on. Plus the American threads. Then came standard coarse standard fine and so on to help fight the war. It was a problem they could have sorted with metric but didn't.

Well you get that don't you?

Stephen

 

[Norman Atkinson]

50 years on

Metric threads? I still have my Machinery Handbook which was written before the US realised that it would have to get it's fingers out in 1941.

Has anyone seen the variety of threads- before metrication?

For once being around at the time of the Dodo, helps.

Ooops- fell out of Zimmer frame

Norm

 

[richardcranium]

metric is the std.

I hate to tell you , but the the standard of measure is the meter in this country. This dates back to 1866. In 1866, congress passed a law recognizing the metric length. the measurement of a yard was defined as 3600/3937 of a meter. So, even though we still use inches, our "std" of measure is based on the meter. I've grown up with both so I know both well and find most people dont like metric because they are so used to inch fractions. 10's are easy, some people just find the metric mics and other tools hard (different) to read.......i think.....oh yeah, think about it, we as machinists dont really use 32nds, or 64's very often. We are using 10ths, even if it's of an inch, it is still using a system of 10's..

 

[VirtualMachinist]

The inch standard is/was crated to be very exacting! Vs the metric system which is just an approximation, it’s like well .2mm, ya well that’s close enough right? What does that mean in our inch system? Well to be exact it means .007874 inches! What a mess.
Traditionally in this country we work in tolerances of + or- .005 what does that mean in metrics?? .1270002mm. When was the last time you heard someone tell you your tolerances would be .1270002mm? I cant recall ever anybody saying this to me…… Even in the defense work I've done over the years.

 

[HuFlungDung]

I think the US is stuck in Imperial because the US quart is smaller than the liter, and "there ain't no damn way we're gonna pay more for the same thing in metric", at least that's what it would seem to the average person comparing a one liter carton to a 1 US quart carton or can.

In Canada, of course, the switch to metric was much more readily made because business recognized that "we'll charge 'em the same thing for a liter as we used to for an Imperial quart" which made them a tidy profit.

 

[Peter Neill]

The inch standard is/was crated to be very exacting! Vs the metric system which is just an approximation, it’s like well .2mm, ya well that’s close enough right? What does that mean in our inch system? Well to be exact it means .007874 inches! What a mess.
Traditionally in this country we work in tolerances of + or- .005 what does that mean in metrics?? .1270002mm. When was the last time you heard someone tell you your tolerances would be .1270002mm? I cant recall ever anybody saying this to me…… Even in the defense work I've done over the years.

The metric system is just an approximation?
Well just be sure to let all those millions of engineers in the rest of the world know that, and I'm sure they'll change to imperial immediately once they realise their mistake.

And 0.2mm? Well that would be 200 microns exactly, if you want to split hairs down to the really small numbers ( and 1 micron = 0.00003936996" if you really want riduculous numbers).
Same goes for tolerances, I have moulded plastic parts to a repeatable +/-0.05mm, and that would sound just silly as a drawing tolerance of 0.001968498" now wouldn't it?

So it works both ways. And both systems work equally as well for those that use them, whatever the preference. As for me, well I grew up using both in the UK, and I'm happy to admit a preference for metric. I dont use 1/8", 1/4", or 3/8" at all really, but rather 3mm. 6mm, and 10mm. However, when I am trying to adjust a mould tool or machine a part to a very close final size, I still talk in thou's and half-thou's and work to those sizes.

Odd I know, but there are many others in the UK like me who grew up with both and use dual systems, even on the same part.
Still dislike fractions though.

Peter

 

[Hollistergc]

The inch standard is/was crated to be very exacting! Vs the metric system which is just an approximation, it’s like well .2mm, ya well that’s close enough right? What does that mean in our inch system? Well to be exact it means .007874 inches! What a mess.
Traditionally in this country we work in tolerances of + or- .005 what does that mean in metrics?? .1270002mm. When was the last time you heard someone tell you your tolerances would be .1270002mm? I cant recall ever anybody saying this to me…… Even in the defense work I've done over the years.

No but I've heard them say your tolerance is .005mm... Lets see, in inch that's .00019685. to me .005 is a much easier number to work with.

It's all in what you are used to. For measurements I personally use inch for everything, unless it's less than an inch. Then I prefer metric, it's simply more accurate and easier to work in. Inch is only easier for you because thats what you think in. If you think in metric, metric becomes much easier.

It's correct that if you want to sell your products overseas, you need to create a product based on their standard. If you're going to sell tape measures in England they had better be in Metric... If you're selling cars they had better have the steering wheel on the right and use metric fasteners. Personally I don't care what system you use to measure the parts that go into the item...

Course, I still use Miles vs KM, Lbs vs KG, ounces vs grams, and quarts vs liters etc.
Threads, now thats a whole nother ballgame

 

[morsetaper2]

The inch standard is/was crated to be very exacting! Vs the metric system which is just an approximation, it’s like well .2mm, ya well that’s close enough right? What does that mean in our inch system? Well to be exact it means .007874 inches! What a mess.

I think you've missed the point entirely. The point is to move away from inches. You measure .20 mm on your caliper, and thats what it is. .2mm is .20mm, and its .200000 mm depending on how many decimals your precision requires.

Who cares what it is in inches if you use the metric system... LIKE EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD! You're print would come metric, you'd have no need for inches as time went on. If the US converted everyone would be moving away. Eventually you'd get away from inches entirely.

You wouldn't care what .20mm is in inches, it would be a moot point. Sure there would be times you'd have to convert back and forth.

The excuse for not changing to metric is the same as running a deficit today. Why change when we can keep borrowing.

But the longer the US waits, the more difficult AND COSTLY it will be to change. Most people don't want to change just because it puts them outside of their comfort zone...for a short period of time until they get familiar w/ the units.

 

[richardcranium]

inch-is part of the prob.

I keep hearing "whats that in inches"?....who cares! Unless you have to convert your mics because you dont have metric, it doesnt matter what is in inches. when our print is metric, I use the metric mic/indicators unless we dont have it.As far as accuracy goes, come on its as accurate as you make it. Look at my first reply. You'll notice that the imperial is set from the standard, which is a meter.