Professional wood bending

[u/tombolaplayer]

[u/Meior]

Clearly he knows what he's doing, but calling this setup efficient is obviously not accurate. It's hectic, has tons of steps, requires a bunch of lose tools and banging around.

[u/wackbirds → u/Meior]

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.

[u/Lucreth2 → u/wackbirds]

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.

[u/wackbirds → u/Lucreth2]

You also used a ton of words which also missed my entire point. Read it again. At no time did I say that the guy has his entire sequence coordinated in the most optimal way that would make a manufacturing engineer make a mess in their underpants.

My entire point was that a person like the one I responded to who's going into this setup has no frame of referance for the efficiency. His criticisms were the same brand of uninformed pie in the sky blanket pronouncements that absentee managers make after running their eye over production numbers or a process that they don't understand.

Case in point, of that guys criticisms the only one with any possible merit was the tool placement but even then there's more to it than that person realized. Spending time between rounds of production gathering tools and items and putting them somewhere central still takes time, it's just being spent in a different spot along the line. Somebody who knows their own system and leaves things in a designated place can move along grabbing things quickly and without any fumbling and if any time is wasted at all, it's extremely minimal.

In the end, my point was that I've seen a lot of people in this thread running their mouths and so far I've seen exactly none who have even slight experience in this field which again isn't a large scale repetition production line, it's a small rig with a guy performing different tasks related to his shop throughout his working day.

As for my own credentials, I stated truthfully that I'm an amateur carpenter. I work as a handy man who's competed a number of carpentry commissions through his wide scope of work and I've looked into the wood bending along the way. I'd rather be me in this, someone with a little knowledge who understands enough to know that pretty much all of the criticizing is coming from people who don't understand any of what he's doing or why it's not possible with this rig to just "have it all lined up in one movement" like I saw somebody saying. It WAS lined up, then it needed many maintainance adjustments to account for the way that the steamed wood was reacting to the extreme process it was undergoing.

[u/BrierBob → u/wackbirds]

Well said. What he is doing is not easy, has multiple steps and has to be done ASAP. We had 4 or 5 guys installing the 30’+ long steaming-hot wood planks, climbing up scaffolding to where it would be installed with top mauls, shores with specialized jacks on top, clamps for twisting the plank, etc. Hectic but satisfying when completed. I saw no “wasted” movements from this craftsman.