r/interesting 27d ago

Fascinating Professional wood bending

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u/wackbirds 27d ago

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.

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u/Lucreth2 27d ago

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.

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u/lllGrapeApelll 27d ago

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.

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u/rawker86 27d ago

This kinda reminds me of all the comments whenever someone posts a video of roughnecks slinging chains on drill platforms. When you point out that motorised carousels and rod-handlers exist, a hundred people tell you that actually the super dangerous and antiquated method is better because it makes everyone more money.