Here is the link to the WTO page on the dispute, where you can choose various downloads of their findings WTO CHINA TYRES
While there are many ways that this “win” will be presented to us as “news”- the fact that we think will be ignored by all is that it is the continued “do nothing about the Chinese currency undervaluation” that is keeping us disadvantaged economically.
This WTO victory shows us that when the administration has the will to pursue relief from unfair trading practices, the system can result in such relief being recognized as lawful.
So while some pundits will characterize this current WTO decision as a “Victory for Obama,” Victory for America,” or Victory for Unions”- the fact is that the real damage to America’s economy is the ongoing, continued predation caused by the Chinese currency peg to the US Dollar. China devalues the yuan by 40%, making Chinese goods artifically inexpensive, stealing US manufacturing jobs.
We congratulate the Obama Administration for their work on the dumping of cheap Chinese tires. How about getting to work on the dumping of manufactured goods through the use of the undervalued yuan?
Facts for Fairness: Neither the current (Obama) nor prior (Bush) administrations have done anything about the Chinese currency manipulation and its mercantilist consequences except talk. And for the record, the Chinese joined the WTO under the auspices and consent of the Clinton administration.
It’s never good to be unemployed, but the irony of being unemployed on Labor Day is particularly frustrating.
Happy Labor Day???
What frustrates me, and many of the small business owners in the precision machining industry that I know, is that there are job openings for people with skills.
Listen for the following from a shop owner in the video link below:
“It is so difficult to find skilled toolmakers and machinists, whether we had an opening or not, we would take them.”
If you have math and problem solving skills, can gain understanding by doing, watching and thinking, and want to have the satisfaction of making things that make a difference on people’s lives- like anti lock brake parts, or medical device components, or critical pieces for “Anything that goes”- I respectfully suggest that you check out the precision machining program at your local community college.
We need skilled people to operate todays advanced manufacturing equipment-get trained!
If you do I sincerely believe that you will be celebrating Labor Day differently next year.
To find a Machinist Training Program near you just type in the phrase ” Precision Machining Community Colleges” or “Machinist Training” and the state you live in to get started on your way to celebrating Labor Day next year.
Disclaimer: I have personal experience with a certificate program from Lorain County Community College– I know this pathway works because it worked for me! (I was in Quality Control Program.)
This is why yield strength doesn’t correlate well to hardness…
These samples sure yielded...
Cold drawing of steel bars changes the mechanical properties of the hot roll bar feedstock. With standard draft:
Tensile strength increases by 25-30%;
Yield strength increases 60 to 80%;
Brinell Hardness increases about 15%;
Ductility DECREASES 25-30% typically with standard draft.
As can be seen by the yield strength increase compared to hardness increase by cold drawing, the yield strength picks up about a 4 times multiple compared to hardness. Poor correlation.
Hardness correlates well with tensile strength in most steels.
In fact, my rule of thumb for estimating either tensile strength or hardness is that
Tensile Strength divided by 500= Brinell Hardness
for most low and medium carbon steels. Or
Brinell Hardness multiplied by 500= Tensile Strength.
Early in my career at US Steel I was given the following advice, typewritten, from my first mentor.
It was attributed to Cason J. Callaway, who was the first ‘Southerner’ to be elected to the board of directors of the company.
I caught the lines for the ore boat named for him when I was a dockhand back in the late 1970's.
I have not seen this available anywhere else, and am sharing this advice today to help preserve it. I hope that it helps you as much as it helped me:
What is an executive?
Of course, he has to have absolute integrity, or it does not matter what else he has.
Of course he has to be willing and able to work, or it does not matter what else he has.
Of course, he has to be objective. If an executive could be described in one word, this would be it.
Of course, he has to have leadership, which is hard to define, but may be described as that quality in a man which makes other men want to do what he wants them to do.
Times have changed, and “he” is no longer the only personal pronoun that can be selected when discussing executives, but Mr. Callaway’s thoughts on leadership are otherwise just as relevant today as they were when he shared them, and when my first mentor handed them to me freshly typed.
What is an executive?
More importantly, are you executive material? At work? At home? In your community?
I think the world is desperately short of executive talent right now. How about you?
Yield strength determination no longer requires tensile machines and expensive specimen preparation
The use of a cylindrical flat tip penetrator’s load per unit surface area, at increased speed, has been shown to correlate to the load per surface area at which material starts flowing when in tension. See the report for the correlation studies on a variety of materials and details of the calculation of Yield Strength.
The Nanovea technology can determine the Yield Strength in less than a minute and in an area as small as 5 microns.
This gives smaller companies a way to more afforably chaaracterize materials without the expense of outside lab services for sample prep and testing.
Two caveats:
Because this test covers a very small area, it truly characterizes the base material itself, and not necessarily how it will behave in bulk form due to casting, forging, voids or other imperfections.
For the same reason, test results from this technology may be slightly higher than those by traditional tensile test / extensometer readings.
But the inverse of these statements is probably more valid: the tensile test results will always be less than the materials actual or ideal Yield Strength because its larger scale includes a greater volume and selection of various internal imperfections and macro defects.
We see this new Nanovea Technology as an exciting development for our field that will give engineers, product developers, and manufacturing companies better tools they can use to characterize materials at scale of use.
We can also see this being used by some bright engineers to determine Yield Strength of coatings! and films being used in today’s latest solar and fuel cell technologies.
July orders for autos and auto parts experienced their largest increase in eight years at 11.5%, according to Commerce Department data.
Automakers have also added about 90,000 manufacturing jobs in the past two years, and dealerships have reported increases in sales and hiring.
Precision Machining Shops we talk with are full and the average first shift scheduled for our industry is over 44 hours.
I spoke with a shop last week scheduling 60 hours- one day off a week.
The U.S. auto industry employs about 1.7 million workers and supports an additional 6.3 million private-sector jobs, according to the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. The center said those positions represent more than $500 billion in annual compensation. [p]
The Precision Machining Industry typically reports 25% of its shipments as “automotive.” There are 3,296 companies and just under 100,000 employees in our NAICS code 332721.
According to John Bruner:” In 2010, American manufacturers added value of $1.7 trillion to the U.S. economy, up 6.6% over the previous year after accounting for inflation. By the same measure, the rest of the economy grew by 2.2%.
You might not know it from public commentary, but the United States manufactures more than any other country (including China), and U.S. factories are within reach of their all-time greatest output.”
In 2007, the last year for which we were able to find Census Data, 3,296 companies in NAICS 332721, Precision Machining, produced over $15,054,173,000 in shipments.
PMPA’s Business Trends Index for July (historically a seasonally slow month) is 111, justone point off from the average for 2007 our peak year before the recession.
So when you hear all that steamy doom and gloom on those TV shows, well
Instead of listening to the guy behind all that steam and smoke
Courtesy of Lifehacker blog. And my daughter the EE computer whiz.
Courtesy the geeks at lifehacker
I have been pounding out some data sorts in Excel for the PMPA’s Administrative and Clerical Salary Survey, about 9 different sorts of a 38, 000 cell data table…
My hands hurt- must learn new keyboard shortcuts!
And then I have to write the forward material.
So when I spoke with my Computer Science EE graduate daughter via Skype the other day, I asked her if she could give me a cheat sheet of some of those crazy keyboard shortcut commands that I know she uses. I currently use ctrl-c to copy, ctrl-v to paste, ctrl-m to move margin, ctrl-x to cut- I use a few.
So today she sent me the link to Lifehacker blog which I get in my email but look at at home.
Hidden variation is what increases your costs. Permanently eliminating the causes of variation is the only way to truly reduce your costs.
Been there? Done that? Get the T-Shirt!
The goal of management is to achieve certain objectives. The way of smart managers is to intelligently manage risk. The means of intelligently managing risk is through reduction in variation in the processes in your control.
Variation increases your costs. Think about a chucker with a worker loading and unloading it. The greater the variation of time of the worker, the fewer parts will be produced at the end of the shift. The closer that the worker’s ‘cycle time’ matches that of the machine, the greater number of parts at the end of the shift.
Variation affects more than just direct costs. Variation in yield can affect order patterns and thus scheduling. Variation in scheduling affects lead times, thus causing order quantities and frequencies to vary. Variability in quality, yield, scheduling and releases all cause more variability which causes risk to all parties to increase. Eliminating variability is the key to reducing risk and reducing the complexity of all the issues that we have to manage in our businesses. Here are 4 tips for reducing variability in your operations:
Standardize materials and sourcing,
Standardize work,
Standardize gaging,
Do not be seduced by ‘Low cost’ or ‘Magic Solutions,’
Standardize materials and sourcing was the first lesson that I documented as a Quality Manager in the steel industry. Our VP of Purchasing was convinced that he could chase low prices to get profitability. However those low prices brought us non conforming material, huge in process rejections, and suspicion about the status of material that passed inspection. Not to mention short or late deliveries, or heroics to expedite replacement material, which increased costs. Failure to standardize sourcing exposes your processes to the full range of global variation. Lock in on a supplier and reduce your variation, risk, and costs.
Standardize work to reduce in process variation. I was involved in an investigation at an automotive supplier who blamed the steel for ‘poor machinability.’ This was truckload, round the clock, running on multiple machines business. And the fact that our steel ran above rate on five of the machines was conveniently ignored by the customer, who was fixated on the four machines that were running below plan. A quick look at control charts, tool replacement records and drill grinds on the four underperforming machines vs. the ones achieving plan showed major differences- variations that cost the customer a production shortfall on four machines times three shifts. It wasn’t the Steel!
Standardize gaging. Actually this is a subset of standardize work. Let’s go back to that chucker job. If there are multiple ways to gage the part on the bench- say an assortment of mikes and calipers- the decision over which to use could cost the operator a second or two with each part to be gaged. That means fewer parts per shift. Increasing cost per part.
Do not be seduced by ‘Low cost’ or ‘Magic Solutions.’ Remember consistency is the goal. How does throwing more variation into your operations improve consistency? Alternative materials, tools , or methods should be proven by testing before being adopted in the shop. Failure to control the self inflicted variability of ‘New,’ ‘Cheaper,’ or ‘Magic’ improvements have increased shops costs far more than the routine normal variability of your existing source. Careful experiments can be an important way to discover better processes, but reckless adoption of unproven inputs will assure increased variation, increased costs, and missed deliveries.
Variation is a synonym for risk, increased cost, missed deliveries, and loss of customer confidence. Variation can require you or your customer to increase order quantities, increase order frequencies, only to dramatically cause orders to be cancelled.
How do you intelligently manage risk? By intelligently reducing variation.
Seasonal adjustment from last months record high...
PMPA’s Index of Sales of Precision Machined Products in July came in at 111, down substantially from the 126 adjusted value for June, with 86 shops reporting. The July 2011 value was up 11% over that for July 2010, and also over the 2010 average for the year.
While sentiment for Sales Outlook has softened somewhat with this report, that sentiment is still overwhelmingly “Same or Better” according to 85% of our respondents. The precision machined products industry continues to be buoyed by demand for our critical parts in the face of low to no inventory at our customers.
One consequence of “lean thinking” is that the lack of rational inventories at customers often requires “overtime” from the supply chain to provide critical parts ‘just in time.’
Why we’re still bullish about Manufacturing Outlook over the next three months:
Average length of first shift in July was reported to be 44 hours, down just 0.2 hours from June’s report.
Our data indicates continued strength for demand for our products in the near term.
PMPA members can get the full Business Trends Report here.
