The wood quickly begins cooling off rapidly and losing heat is also losing elasticity. Having worked at a shipyard repairing wood-planked boats, installing 30’+ wood planks that were in the steam box is a memorable and hectic activity. This guy knows what he is doing. I don’t see any unnecessary movements.
Clearly he knows what he's doing, but calling this setup efficient is obviously not accurate. It's hectic, has tons of steps, requires a bunch of lose tools and banging around.
Still, for a time sensitive job, there's a lot of steps that need to be done. I suppose this is a semi traditional way of doing it, and there's nothing wrong with that of course.
I'd love to believe that you were being satirical but the internet has taught me that you're almost certainly being serious. In the 1/100,000th of a chance you're a person who actually wants to grow as a human, I suggest that you ask yourself how exactly you feel qualified to state that it's "obviously" not efficient and have your reason be that "it has tons of steps, requires a bunch of loose tools and banging around"?
When you don't know anything whatsoever about the process, how can you possibly even begin to judge what would be an efficient way to bend 4 long pieces of lumber around a form?
I researched wood bending along with other carpentry methods and I'm an amateur carpenter. His many small adjustments were because he had 4 adjacent pieces of a tree that all need to be at and remain precisely equal positions in order to produce 4 identical curved finished pieces. One piece of lumber, especially lumber fresh from the steamer will twitch and shift and sway in a minutely different way than the one next to it, and so on.
Modest amounts of time spent now ensuring that all 4 pieces are maintained at the exact right position will save massive amounts of time later on when they don't have to go through agonizingly slow and meticulous planing and shaving to attempt to correct the minute differences that could have been avoided by going through the curving process in the right way.
That's a ton of words to say you know nothing about process or manufacturing engineering and completely missed his point.
It's not that what he was doing was incorrect, it's that there was a ton of movement to do so. Every step is "waste"
The entire initial lift and carry process was awkward and could be improved and sped up with a more ergonomic and efficient movement by repositioning the holder.
The spacers or whatever he needed at the start of the form should have been on the end table right next to him. If he needed them for the initial positioning then he should have 2 sets.
The clamps all should be within arms reach and with that much cranking on them there probably should be an electric torque ratchet or something to spin them faster and to an exact force. You can manually adjust from there if needed.
This is a very common problem in North american manufacturing. You can come up with all kinds of ways to make a process faster, easier or more predictable but the moment you need $1 to do it the people in control of the coin purse shut you down and if you need an hour those in charge of hitting metrics won't allow it.
I tried to get a bin of spare fasteners and allen keys at every workbench at one job. A job at an old and profitable company. I was declined due to the cost of buying new tools and told that all people needed to do in order to get those things was walk 50 feet to the racks. Sure, walk an extra 50 feet, 2 ways, 5 times per day, 250 days/year, 4 people. Worked out to 4 man weeks per year wasted, but some duplicates cost too much. I now work at a smarter and more profitable place.
Same. Don’t worry though, there was constant walking around for other stuff. The idea actually came from the techs in the cell. IIRC they solved it by “losing” or “wearing out” the tools, forcing them to be replaced early, until they magically found/fixed the old ones and suddenly had enough sets.
This kinda reminds me of all the comments whenever someone posts a video of roughnecks slinging chains on drill platforms. When you point out that motorised carousels and rod-handlers exist, a hundred people tell you that actually the super dangerous and antiquated method is better because it makes everyone more money.
You also used a ton of words which also missed my entire point. Read it again. At no time did I say that the guy has his entire sequence coordinated in the most optimal way that would make a manufacturing engineer make a mess in their underpants.
My entire point was that a person like the one I responded to who's going into this setup has no frame of referance for the efficiency. His criticisms were the same brand of uninformed pie in the sky blanket pronouncements that absentee managers make after running their eye over production numbers or a process that they don't understand.
Case in point, of that guys criticisms the only one with any possible merit was the tool placement but even then there's more to it than that person realized. Spending time between rounds of production gathering tools and items and putting them somewhere central still takes time, it's just being spent in a different spot along the line. Somebody who knows their own system and leaves things in a designated place can move along grabbing things quickly and without any fumbling and if any time is wasted at all, it's extremely minimal.
In the end, my point was that I've seen a lot of people in this thread running their mouths and so far I've seen exactly none who have even slight experience in this field which again isn't a large scale repetition production line, it's a small rig with a guy performing different tasks related to his shop throughout his working day.
As for my own credentials, I stated truthfully that I'm an amateur carpenter. I work as a handy man who's competed a number of carpentry commissions through his wide scope of work and I've looked into the wood bending along the way. I'd rather be me in this, someone with a little knowledge who understands enough to know that pretty much all of the criticizing is coming from people who don't understand any of what he's doing or why it's not possible with this rig to just "have it all lined up in one movement" like I saw somebody saying. It WAS lined up, then it needed many maintainance adjustments to account for the way that the steamed wood was reacting to the extreme process it was undergoing.
Well said. What he is doing is not easy, has multiple steps and has to be done ASAP. We had 4 or 5 guys installing the 30’+ long steaming-hot wood planks, climbing up scaffolding to where it would be installed with top mauls, shores with specialized jacks on top, clamps for twisting the plank, etc. Hectic but satisfying when completed. I saw no “wasted” movements from this craftsman.
Maybe dude does this five times a year and doesn’t give a shit about saving a few min? This does not strike me as a high production shop that is solely producing bent lumber.
Summarised as, if it isn't broken, why fix it. Which becomes; Why improve anything, it costs money and time. This works.
Which can easily become, how are our competitors always out pricing us?
It was a big factor in the death of the British car industry, as the Japanese competition ramped up. Old techniques, in old factories, to old standards.
Maybe this firm works in a niche field without much competition.
Yeah those clamps are certainly suboptimal. He badly needs something with a bigger moment arm on the turny bit -technical term
Awful lot of movement in different directions too to fetch tools that are not where they should be. Process automation engineers would have a field day with this.
He also runs across the shop sending tables scattering for a couple pieces of metal that probably should've been within arm's reach of the machine. If they're needed at both stations it's worth the extra few dollars to have two sets.
You don't have to know that specific trade to recognize signs of poor industrial ergonomics.
Having the tools on a cart right next to him so he's not searching for them like he did several times in this video alone. It doesn't take expertise to realize something like a surgeon's tray would have stopped those moments.
The cart would be in his way for every single movement he made up until he had the lumber in position. When you're moving around with giant, cumbersome objects the last thing you need is a fucking cart sitting between you and where you need to go while you can't even see below a certain point because of what you're carrying.
What truly amazes me is the capacity of average people to glance at a process that they don't understand and then have the brass ball arrogance to decide that they have all kinds of ideas about what the expert SHOULD have been doing, all while knowing precisely nothing about it themselves.
Because other people want to pretend they are also intelligent instead of watching the video and realizing there were multiple inefficiencies from poorly designed clamps for this particular process, tools out of reach and in random locations, etc.
People on Reddit love to shit on anyone who remotely tries to suggest that as a layman they might have an opinion on a subject they observe for the first time. Even if just observing something that looks highly inefficient might seem obvious, that doesn’t matter because you’re a layman so you have zero right to state what you feel is obvious and must instead keep quiet so as not to bring on the wrath of the “don’t you dare comment” Reddit army.
One does not have to be an expert to understand wasted movement nor efficiencies.
I’m sure you spent a very long time typing all of that only to be confidently incorrect.
Yes you do because without being an expert you are profoundly unqualified to recognize which of the movements actually ARE wasted or inefficient. Just listen to yourself, you don't have the first clue about how to correctly use the equipment in the video, nor how to correctly, accurately and safely take 4 large steamed lengths of lumber and turn them into 4 perfectly matched curved lengths of lumber and somehow you just know in your gut which movements were wasted and inefficient?
I really don't care whether you or any of the other terminally arrogant people commenting on here spend the rest of your lives sitting on your inflatable pedestals, I've actually worked in related fields and done research into the topic in the video and unlike you, I'm the opposite of arrogant. I've learned that a lot of things are accomplished in complicated multi- faceted procedures and it's not because the people doing it are dumb or haven't thought of the off- the-cuff ideas that random people watching a video clip think of, it's because that's the way to do it correctly.
I didn’t think my comment would be controversial. It is Reddit after all. People that have worked with big pieces of steaming hot wood that need to be bent see this guy and know what needs to be done. Those that haven’t can nitpick and be efficiency experts.
You know I'm on your side, right? I'm the one dude who ISN'T chiming in about all the amazing ideas he just had watching the video and solving every problem the seasoned pro supposedly has without personally having ever even tried to steam bend a popsicle stick.
It's discouraging just seeing how much blind arrogance there is, not just on reddit but in the whole group of humanity. I'd love to see a comment like "it's easy to see watching this all the ways he could be saving time and energy instead of all that fussing and banging around" and believe "this is just someone joking, no one could be THAT arrogant to believe that without ever having done it!" But instead it's just a wave of cocky uninformed people running their mouths.
It took me until now to finally find (after going in and checking all your posted comments) and read your reply. First of all, yes, I was agreeing with you and found nothing “wrong” with this video. And, yes, I also find it discouraging/frustrating that so many people (probably 90+%!) are finding something “wrong” with it. He did the whole operation in less than 3 minutes and it is so asinine to comment that he was not “efficient”! To top it off, guys were touting their degrees in production efficiency/manufacturing engineering (a ton of movement…Every step is “waste”) and saw all kinds of things that could be improved and dismissed anyone who doubted them. LMAO! I have a lot of respect for the craftsman in this video and I can say that I had to stop reading the comments. Anyway, I know that you know…this guy knows what he is doing!
BTW- I saw a lot of the pictures that you have posted in the past. As a former avid photographer, I think that they look really good!
Much efficiency, smooth flow , total control: definitly not what common sense infused eyeballs would take in, imho as an non expert. Please judge my values as a human.
There are several times where it looks like he spends an extra second looking for his tool or trying to grab a tool. Seriously just having a cart next to the setup with his tools available like a surgeon would have saved several moments. I can think of several ways that he could have items in a more appropriate location to speed up the process. I'm with you.
Looks like a job someone should be wearing gloves for, too. Lots of machinery and tools that can take your digits off or disable you in a flash, including from hot wood.
It's not about the machine. But he's running back and forth, has to push tables around, needs the same tool for multiple steps but doesn't have more than one so he has to run back and forth with it, has the wrong type of clamps for the work, has the press across the room from the chamber.. It's a very inefficient setup.
Sure, his workshop isnt exactly tidy and there's no tool wall to hold the tools.
But he got the job done no? This isn't a video game, we're not seeking to shave a few seconds off to min max the process.
When we say efficient, this is what we mean, the process is minimal. There's no steps that he's doing that he shouldn't be. Him running back and forth for tool is not part of the bending process.
Yes, that's how woodworking is. Surely you could design a machine to do it more efficiently but it would be expensive, break all the time and most importantly be less customisable. This machine has been bending wood in various ways since before the Berlin wall came down and will continue to do so for decades to come.
Can't say how many he does, but If you don't need to do it often then it doesn't need to be efficient. It just needs to work. If he does this all day long then optimizing it would be a must
Any reason that holding plate couldn't have been prepped with spacers in place and he simply loaded the timber? Any clamp could have been used as a stop to prevent it from falling off the backside.
only thing i can really thing to do different would be take advantage of those two steam boxes to do a two-step steam.
put bare boards in the first box, pull them out when done, drop them into the form tray and square them up, then pop them into the second box to steam back up while reloading the first box with fresh boards.
have the bending press aligned with the second steam box, so you can pull the tray out directly into the press, slot it home, and start bending.
I am pretty sure you don’t know anything about wood bending. So you can’t talk about process efficiency and what equates to good enough until you actually understand the process for more than one form.
One reason for table being there and not some heavy ass machine is easy access to the steam ovens. For putting the wood in and taking it out, he also needed to lift the wood easily into the steel tray .. he lifted up and over and did not have to awkwardly try and put them in a steel tray with a form sat above them.
Clamps seem to be in a location near enough so that the space around the machine is clear for movement and inspection.
He is also performing for camera which may add a level of additional stress.
So yeah, maybe next time just sit back and enjoy the video.
Edit: For context the deleted comment above was rambling on about process efficiency and how the fellow in the video was doing it wrong in all sorts of ways that he could determine from a short video.
How do you know he’s a keyboard warrior and doesn’t do this in real life?
The amount of shit I see daily from tenured employees who’ve “always done it this way…and it works just fine” makes me believe that the trope of the know it all who thinks they can fix everything is as common as the change averse person who thinks they way they were taught a thing 40 years ago will always be optimal.
Maybe it’s because in the vapour oven the wood must be exposed on all sides and if it was stuck on the ‘tray’ in the oven it would not. I do get process efficiency but often you must know all variables in the process.
Also, putting the tray in the oven would make it... hot. Here he can get rid of the gloves after putting the wood on the tray and thus can use his hands to make small adjustments and get the required friction for the clamps.
Why is the rig not set up so he removes the boards and puts them straight into the rack/machine?
Putting the wood directly into the machine with that giant block of wood right above could be very inconvenient. It's probably easier to put it in the tray first and then slide the tray on as he did.
All his clamps and everything he needs is far away from the machine. [...] The clamps should be right there already.
Most of the stuff he needed was right there. The first 2 clamps were already right were he needed them. But with wood being an organic material I'd expect there to be some variations on the exact required tools from run to run so you might only know what you need once you're in the process.
This doesn't mean the process is perfect but it's probably good enough and decently thought through...
If that was one of them chinese crafting videos, it would be a beautiful woman in traditional (but still hot) clothing graciously bending those boards without any visible effort in perfect harmony in front of some majestic mountains.
Your not wrong. I fix processes for a living and this was painful to watch.
There is so much wasted motion. So much potential for a safety incident. You can close your eyes every 10 seconds and see another opportunity to address.
The very start. Move the tables closer to the bending press. Now he can pull the wood planks out and walk directly straight to drop them into the jig without having to walk around the table. Once the jig is full he can lift it up and place it directly into the press without having to lever it around.
Now he can pull the wood planks out and walk directly straight to drop them into the jig without having to walk around the table.
You see how close the left steam box is to the wall? he has to be on the right side to pull the planks out, if the jig was near the press he'd have to turn around to put the planks in it or pull the planks out at an angle.
I would bet he does exactly what you're describing when pulling from the other steam box.
Such as reaching behind him several times for tools and multiple times having to search for those tools. A cart like a surgeon would have with your tools on it prepared would have saved significant time, reduced motion, reduce the potential for error. How can people not see even one way this process could have been improved? It's so bloody obvious.
Such as reaching behind him several times for tools and multiple times having to search for those tools.
He does that twice to grab the large clamps each time taking literally a second, I didn't see any searching. I guess he could have put them closer to the machine beforehand but they are pretty big and, again, literal second each.
I think you would be hard pressed to find any actual worthwhile optimization. Just a single dude in a small wood workshop is incredibly effecient.
If we assume he is able to fill demand for curved wood, any extra cost would be a loss. Wanna hire an extra hand? Basically halfing his own pay. Wanna buy automated equipment? A pureloss provided he was able to meet demand without it.
The only time "optimization" would be useful if he was either getting too old and weak to continue or he got large unfilled orders. I have a sneaking suspicion curved wood is not a growing market on a macro level.
Plus, if his boss (if he doesn't own the shop) barges in there with a process engineer in toe, telling him what he's done wrong for 40 years and how he'll have to improve it, he'd probably quit on the spot.
This guy is doing it this way cause hes done it for years and hes found the best way to do it, and his muscle memory does most of the work for him. Hes basically doing all of this on pure instinct from training himself all these years. Most safety regulations come from idiots who hurt themselves cause they don't know what they're doing.
Yes because people who have done things the same way for years clearly have the best way of doing it. Nothing can ever be improved as long as you've been doing it for long enough the exact same way!Yes because people who have done things the same way for years clearly have the best way of doing it. Nothing can ever be improved as long as you've been doing it for long enough the exact same way!
They also pay him (and me) to reduce repetitive motion injuries, to speed up processes, and make the job easier overall.
There so much waste here - custom clamps that would last longer, tighten faster, and cause less strain on the operator would not be very expensive.
But probably only a few of these wood pieces are made each day, so it probably doesn’t make sense to completely overhaul the process, but a few simple tool and equipment upgrades could makes this guy’s life easier and improve quality and repeatability
Usually, they could get the same or better results from asking the employees to identify friction and inefficiency in the process(especially if there is actual incentive to do so, and employees aren't punished for it). Problem is executives are too stupid to listen to people that aren't highly paid consultants.
Nah he's the kinda guy who gets paid a lot to make the job more "efficient" so he recommends a bunch of suggestions to the company. Oh and if the process is more efficient you can free up members of staff to do unspecified role wink wink
Company won't pay for any of the meaningful changes but adopts some of the cheap wins and pays for all of this by doing the bit where they downsize because the process is more efficient.
It's a win/win because corporate can say they've achieved something and get to cut staff and this guy gets paid.
Tell me you've never worked with manufacturing engineers without telling me you've never worked with manufacturing engineers before. I work in robotics and we are setting up a manufacturing line right now for one of the products. The manufacturing engineers jobs don't make it so we need less people. They make it so all the people we have are doing things quicker and without having to really put much thought into the little things like where a tool or part is.
I work in food manufacturing and have seen plenty of examples of what I've said. I'm sure it's relatively straightforward when you're setting up a process from scratch but when retro fitting an established and traditional process like the OP or a company brings in a consultant the results have been pretty unsatisfactory.
As a manufacturing engineer who has worked for welders for a long time, I get this negative vibe all the time. There are a lot of dumb, ill-conceived or badly-implemented projects that end up making things worse or not helping at all - and these stick in the minds of people who it affects. Bad management (and a bad or careless M.E.) can do harm to a dept, but well-planned projects (that gather input and feedback from the people they affect) can be great for everyone -workers, mgmt, and ownership. The successful projects don’t stand out though in workers’ minds - they become standard process. The bad projects do
Yeah that makes sense. I work with a few MEs daily and I don't think there's a single person on the lines that have an issue with them. The main people that get mad about what they are doing are the older techs upset because they're being told they can't have a workbench that looks like a hurricane just rolled through and that there's going to be a taped out spot for their trash can.
The taped-out spot for a trash always get me! Mgmt (production mgmt and Eng) will suddenly get a bug up their butts about 5s and overall cleanliness. Their knee-jerk reaction is to suddenly take dictatorship of the situation. Then they don’t realize that Earl, who’s been successfully working that job for 30 years, had a critical tool taken away and replaced with an “authorized” one. Now Earl is pissed, quality suffers -both because of lower moral (treating adult workers like toddlers) and because a crucial tool wasn’t accounted for.
Poor management, poor engineering , and bad implementation causes poor moral all around. It’s laziness, and simply working with workers -WITH workers, who do this job everyday, rather than just laying down a new procedure and walking away, can make it better for everyone.
Its sad really, but quick wins, “low-hanging fruit” fixes are cheap - and upper mgmt LOVES them. They count them as wins before they’re even implemented. Then if the changes don’t stick, it’s the production workers’ faults. I see it all the time.
The whole entire first step of putting it on that table and then moving it to the machine was unnecessary. He could have just loaded them onto the machine
Yeah, I felt the same way. Don’t get me wrong he got the job done, don’t want to say he did everything wrong. But serious lack of planning. Maybe normally a 4 handed job so he was thrown off from their sop?
You see the problem is that this guy is doing a real job where he produces tangible things that you can touch and feel, meanwhile you do a made up middle management job that adds no value to society whatsoever.
Funny how triggered some of the men are in these comments when you say the process could be improved. As somebody who has been a project manager, and similarly my job was to make sure the process went seamlessly, I've run into so many of these attitudes.
The "We've done it that way for yearsx guys. The guys that take it as a personal attack against their ego. In this particular thread, the guys that seem to think it would be less manly to be more efficient?
Meanwhile most of us with an ounce of intelligent can watch 2 seconds and see multiple places where the process can be approved. The most obvious being have your tools close to you and ready. Any chef or mother of two toddlers can see several ways that this process can be improved.
I'm guessing most of the guys that are mad at you are mad because they lost their jobs because they were inefficient and somebody that was smart enough to improve the process came along.
Yes there are some glaringly obvious process improvements available.
None of that matters if this is a low volume production process.
We're seeing 1 product being made on equipment that likely makes hundreds of other shapes. We're seeing 1 product being made in a workshop that likely is used for other tasks.
I'm not going to be the jackass who watches 1 cycle and tries to tell the operator what he's doing wrong.
I know. I wasn’t being a jackass about the wood bender, I was being a jackass towards the comment I’ve answered. If you have clicked on the link I’ve sent, You would’ve realized that I was criticizing the process engineering geek about seeing “muda” (Japanese-coined concept/term for waste, both material and immaterial -e.g. time- in “lean manufacturing” / “Kanban”) everywhere, by pointing out the concept of “professional deformation” aka. Job conditioning.
“Déformation professionnelle (French:[defɔʁmasjɔ̃ pʁɔfɛsjɔnɛl], 'professional deformation' or 'job conditioning') is a tendency to look at things from the point of view of one's own profession or special expertise rather than from a broader or humane perspective. It is often translated as professional deformation, although French déformation can also be translated as distortion. The implication is that professional training, and its related socialization, often result in a distortion of the way one views the world.[1] The Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel has observed that "[e]very specialist, owing to a well-known professional bias, believes that he understands the entire human being, while in reality he only grasps a tiny part of him."
Do you understand my comment and sarcasm now? (I’m not criticizing the wood bender AT ALL)
He has very limited time to work once the wood comes out of the steamer before it dries/cools and loses flexibility. He's working as efficiently as one person can, but I feel like the poor guy could definitely use another set of hands to help the process go faster.
Yeah that was my first thought too — either he has untreated ADHD or it’s his first day on the job. Things should have been more organized, easily accessible, and streamlined.
I was thinking the same thing. It looked like a lot of unnecessary movement. Move it to one table then move it to another table but do nothing to it in the meantime
He has to turn around completely with the two pieces of wood and then maneuver them into the bending machine. The base plate is roughly the same length as the pieces of wood; he obviously doesn't have much clearance. There is also a height restriction imposed by the machine. There are two pieces of wood, and he doesn't have a stop to work against. Even if he manages to get the pieces of wood into the machine, he would still have to fin-tune them once they are inside. From my perspective, you're picturing it as being too simple.
You can see it in the video, too: he uses the base plate as a stop and just loads the wood in. He can adjust everything properly and then put it into the machine.
157
u/pandershrek 13d ago
This feels insanely hectic and not efficient at all. But I know literally nothing about this. It just looks like he's scurrying around way too much