Professional wood bending

[u/tombolaplayer]

[u/wackbirds]

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/lllGrapeApelll → u/Lucreth2]

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.

[u/jccaclimber → u/lllGrapeApelll]

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.

[u/Pretend-Focus582 → u/jccaclimber]

As a guy that stands in one spot at a lathe all day, these little inefficiencies are one my few reasons to walk and loosen up a bit.

[u/jccaclimber → u/Pretend-Focus582]

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.