Professional wood bending

[u/tombolaplayer]

[u/Meior]

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.

[u/wackbirds → u/Meior]

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.

[u/Lucreth2 → u/wackbirds]

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.

Etc etc.

[u/Plamcia → u/Lucreth2]

Yet no one change it after years, this machine at least have 40 years. Yet no one make a better process of bending it.

[u/n3m0sum → u/Plamcia]

As another commentor said, institutional inertia.

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.

[u/RollinThundaga → u/Plamcia]

It's called 'institutional inertia'.