1st Gen Lunchtable Thread - General Discussion

Says the guy with multiple personalities

 

I thought they were a little wild when they came out but the blue gauge dials are neat

 

I don’t mind there truck, prettty nice, idk if this is the 2.7 or 3.5 but I don’t hate it.

 

@Wulf

Because we talk garage stuff, and since you fabricate more often than I do.

I don't know what you use to square things up, at least for tacking shit but I found these wood working (they're aluminum, anodized) squares to be useful.



Specifically because you can clamp them down to shit with the knurled handles.

 

Shit, looks better than stuff I've seen!

 

@Abeyancer

I know you guys try to do most all your stuff in-house, but are there specialty brackets/etc that you guys often find yourselves buying?

Just more of a reason to get that laser or cnc setup we talked about.

 

I like those, squaring stuff up is a pain. Do those have a name?

 

I'm all for a laser or cnc setup, that with a bender capable of giving crisp 90 bends in 3/8 mild steel and I'd be able to make damn near everything in house. But the owner doesn't want us "fabricating" he wants us assembling :/ he wants all the brackets made by someone else so we're just slapping it all together.

I think that's a bad business model personally... and if he doesn't realize all the money he's losing I might just have to start my own competing equipment company, that way all his lost sales when people are buying my shit would teach him a lesson

 

Thanks! I need to make a jig and get a coping saw so I'm not filling an air gap around the pipe radius.. that would help alot in making it look cleaner.

I was just amazed I could get it to glue together with the wrong gas and wire lol

 

At a former job I worked for a company that was dead set on building absolutely everything in house that they could. It seemed like a real mixed bag. Custom stuff was so easy that everything was custom, and so we had a zillion part numbers. Quality control was interesting because instead of just saying “this is wrong, go figure it out better or we aren’t buying”, it became “well the shop made 4000 of these slightly wrong items, how can we use them anyway?”

I dunno, the idea of in house manufacture on a lot of stuff sounds good, but it’s something to approach very carefully

 

Unless you're a machine shop, if that's not already your business model then something when horribly wrong haha

 

https://sacramento.craigslist.org/pts/d/sacramento-selling-whole-car-toyota/7511233197.html

found this in the auto parts section. sounds complicated, but cheap.
thought I'd share in case anyone in the Sac area is looking for a 2nd gen 4runner or a good project to flip.

 

$39 W B D WEIBIDA 90 Degree Clamps For Woodworking, Positioning Squares Right Angle Clamps 2 Pack, 5.5" X 5.5" (140 x 140mm) Aluminum Alloy Corner Clamps Tools For Cabinets, Picture Frame, Drawers

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08XH8JX8Q

Though those aren't exactly it, but you'll see all the 'similar' items with it.

 

No one likes 2nd Gen 4R's

 

@0xDEADBEEF

To piggy-back on my own post, they were especially useful when I tacked this thing up.







I do wish I had welded it all up with those squares in place, but I rushed the whole job within a few hours (including grinding).

Still came out OK I think.

 

Man, bending 3/8" steel that's got to be big and heavy duty as fuck.

Maybe, draw up a business plan covering specific details like -

Down time of a new unit, or unit in for repair based on availability of parts and/or backordered/discontinued parts.

Cost of these parts to make, maybe broken down to 1 month for the machines you specifically touch and have to assemble using said parts purchased.

Specialty parts, that are made per your request (customer request) that are not readily available off the shelf. That's a premium in itself.

Include a generic plan of how much material, and how much time it'll take to make these parts. You need to include the cost of your raw material here and applied time to figure true cost to manufacture.

At this point, the parts made in-house should come out to be cheaper though you will need some overhead for keeping raw material in-house.

Look at the profit margins (basically, how expensive you're retailing those parts) and how much you can make by selling your own parts for the same price.

Now do a forecast of 6 months, and 12 months, and show the owner how quickly he'll have a return on investment.

Look into the benefits as a business/shop for purchasing said equipment to manufacture the parts in-house; tax write off, credits, etc.

This is what I did for myself when I requested that I be promoted at the dealership - I brought in what I made for the store, what I was paid as an employee, as well as what I can do for the company, how much more I could make the company, and how much more I should get paid.

They need to see it on paper for them to understand; I bet your boss is one of those old-timers that's just set in his ways.

 

The boss' problem is exactly what you described but on a much smaller scale. Because damn near all of his designs are based around off the shelf parts, we run into issues where (for example) we may use a specific tank cause he found them for a good price or they were a good size. He'll then have one of us in the shop fabricate a bracket to make it work and he'll order 20 of those brackets from a machine shop. Now we can't get that tank anymore so we have to get a different one, now a brand new tank bracket and attaching hardware needs fabricated and we've got a bunch of the old style on the shelf we can't easily use. BUT because he spent money on those and he refuses to "waste money" we'll have to cut em up and reweld em to maybe work for something else and he doesn't understand that shop time isn't free and he's losing money having to go that route.

And because we're such a small specialty shop, machine shops charge us a premium cause we're only ever ordering small quantities on a PO.

I'd like to think I'm uniquely qualified in this instance as I've now worked in every facet of industrial equipment.. from a foundry, to machine shop, to sales and maintenance and now assembly. Since we're so prone to onesie twosies it would be cheaper in the long run to higher a fulltime fabricator and just have him make 5 frames at a time. That way should we no longer be able to get certain items and have to sub them out, we're not sitting on alot of hard to use items that's essentially wastes dollars.

 

Man, I need to run my own business.

I'd hire me