Last year the Air Force took delivery of Boeing KC46 tanker aircraft and found garbage and tools left on the planes. As much as these aircraft cost you’d think Boeing could afford to thoroughly inspect them before delivery. This is just another example of the indifference shown by the average American factory worker. Good riddance!
Workers and management share blame. Not defending the line workers as I have many stories, but Boeing management should not allow this, and management is ultimately responsible for any junk leaving their factory.
Once you lose that kind of manufacturing it tends to be gone forever. We have to stop with "good riddance" type attitudes and instead change to "we must fix this," or else we are all going to be impoverished.
Anyone here ever work Quality Control?
I have.
Want to be hated by everyone? Work Quality Control.
Calling out people for shoddy work, doesn't bother me at all, as a matter of fact, I enjoy it, but I'm an a**hole that way.
I have. I’ve been in quality and production... now running both. If you cannot call people out for poor work, and hold people accountable, you have no business being in management.
I fortunately i think weak/poor management is the root of most issues with manufacturing today.
No one wants to have difficult conversations and no one has long-sighted vision.
Edit: Its not being an ass, its saving everyone else’s jobs. The ass is the guy who doesnt give a shit about what he does to put food on his family’s table, or help keep his fellow employees and local citizens employed.
Last edited by MegademiC; 06-02-20 at 12:57.
Oh I would agree, it actually saves both time and money. In the long run it saves from embarrassment and secures your reputation in the market place.
It's just there is always one guy who gets a bit excited when you call him out, even if you take him aside and explain carefully "Why". It's difficult for some people to accept that they made a mistake, it's even worse when they've been doing things wrong for years.
Your Boss has to have a keen understanding of the process and know why you are correct in sending it back.
That’s a poor attitude to have on their part. If someone tells me I’m not doing my job correctly and explains why it is important to do it a certain way to produce a specific result it’s on me to up my skills and meet that performance to the best of my abilities.
Then again I’m also the big meanie with one HR complaint under my belt for delivering a solid 9 hours of ass chewing to an indifferent coworker I had once. Apparently at my employer we are to treat shit bags that don’t want to learn, and don’t want to work with kid gloves. Lest their feels get hurt, and they quit.
This dude couldn’t figure out basic radio comms procedure or operational tasks etc.... but he figured out how to contact an attorney for a hostile work environment law suit. Everyone was chewing his ass off.
Shit bags are gonna shit bag instead of nutting up and correcting their shortcomings. No one likes to be told they suck, but a man steps up and does what he can to improve. Sometimes it takes a lot of effort, sometimes you might fall short, but for your own sake try!
I guess on topic I can relate the joys of operating brand new locomotives that still have new car smell in the cab. Often times they have issues, usually minor, doesn’t matter if it’s a GE or an EMD. Almost always electrical problems or a computer/radio/data issue. One look in the electrical cabinet of a 4400hp AC locomotive and I’m actually surprised there aren’t a lot more defects, that is a lot of stuff going on, a mind boggling amount of wiring, harnesses, relays etc. All of it ultimately controlled by a computer and sometimes those go bad, or there are software faults. More often than not dropping the breakers and hard rebooting will clear things up, but when it doesn’t you are in for a shit show.
The big medium speed diesels are shockingly durable and reliable considering what they do every day. If new ones do have issues it’s usually a loose connection in the high pressure side of the fuel lines. If you ever see one go by with damage to the long hood that has burned the paint off 99% of the time at some point the high pressure side of the fuel rail has sprung a leak back by the turbo and gotten hot enough to light off a fuel fire. Very rare to see a new motor have hard parts failures, but eventually things will break. I’ve had turbochargers blow up, rods let go, and once even had a rod bearing go bad and spin on the rod journal of a crank and grind it down until it split in two. Threw the rod out of the block at an access hatch and I got some good photos of it.
Electric traction motors are also a common point of failure, they’ll give you a bit of warning if you pay attention but often just suddenly give out. Worse yet is if the bearings in the pinion gear or armature go bad and lock up an axle. That is pretty much the end of your day, it will take hours to get that locomotive set out somewhere at walking speed. Destroys the wheels, last time we had maybe a 9” flat spot on the wheel by the time we got it set out. Otherwise they torch out the pinion so the wheel will turn freely but that is $30K bill to fix the damage from torching it vs turning the wheels down or slamming a new axle and wheels in.
I worked in Mexico / Maquilas for 15 years & made wire harnesses / electronic assemblies for every market you can think of be it medical, automotive, consumer, professional, white goods etc & for the most part worked well with the various QC departments & some were fortune 500 Co's. All mfg's (good ones anyway) strive for 0 ppm's but it's not gonna happen. Before Black & Decker moved their outdoor stuff overseas to bring the DeWALT tools in I was making a harness that was nothing more than a 1' 18awg cable w/ a .187 fast on terminal. You would think that would be fool proof on automated equipment but you can't inspect 50k-70k per week & it's random. Sure enough a tool would get built & not work from time to time & to have a $0.06 part cause it sucks & there's really not much a corrective action report can fix as B&D was not going to pay for 100% inspection. Only time we had problems w/ QC was when some inspectors were dirty & wanted to use the competition for personal gain.
"You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass."
Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, 1941
"A wise man's heart directs him toward the right, but a foolish man's heart directs him toward the left."
Ecclesiastes 10:2:
Learning personalities To get what you want is the best part. Some guys thrive off and respect aggression, others will ball up. Ive had 300lb bikers cry at the first sign disapproval, and ive had guys that come to agreement through shouting... its engineering, but with people.. haha.
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