Louis A. Poche' writes:
> > I'd like to bring up a subject I've not seen on the list before. I
> >would like to know if anyone else has an interest in the engineering
> >drawings of our cars?
*** A year or two ago, I saw a calendar of which each month showed some
marvellous thing one could do with a Macintosh computer. Now I'm as far
as one can get from a Mac fan, but one month caught my eye: There was a
picture of a machined part, with the explanation that somebody had drawn
this part on his mac with a cad tool, and converted it with something or
other to a control file for a CNC machine, and sent it down to the
company machine shop, which had input this file into a milling machine
and made the part, exactly as the Mac guy had doodled it, in steel,
in about 45 minutes.
Friends, my imagination has been fired with a vision of the
machine shop of the future. Totally or mostly roboticized, able
to deliver you any part your heart desires for the cost of shop
time and materials.
You would send these guys a data file; they would send you your
part. To make it really economical, you might be able to specify
that they skip certain finishing procedures; and polish or bevel
the thing yourself.
Of course, technology will have to advance far indeed before an
automated factory could make you, say, a crankshaft for minimal
cost. But nothing is impossible. Could you imagine a CNC controlled
crankshaft machine that starts with a solid steel billet? Do such
beasties already exist? And what about automated heat treating
equipment?
Some day, such automation could literally save our cars. What happens
when all the junk cars are gone, all the N.O.S. parts are gone, the
stock of running cars dwindles to where the market can't support
companies like TRF or Moss?
Automated machine shops could save the day, because its easy to store
data files for stuff you hardly ever sell. An example is the
car cover industry. I can order a cover for literally any car ever
made, for cars I never heard of, for cars that can no way support
enough volume for anybody to stock and store covers for them. That's
because the cover maker doesn't have to store an actual *cover* for
my strange car: he just needs to keep its *pattern* around.
There would still be a place for british car parts companies:
I don't have any drawings for my car: but companies with BMH
ties do. I could either buy drawings from them, or order the
parts through them. I send the british car parts place my order;
they shoot the data to their favorite machine shop, get the
part back, inspect it, and send it to me.
- Jerry
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Jerry Kaidor jerry@tr2.com, jkaidor@synoptics.com *
* KF6VB *
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