Interesting Chinese Moving Head Factory assembly video

[paulears]

Interesting to see how it's done.

 

[indyld]

And in many cases with certain professional level brands (mentioning no names) every screw is done up to the specific torque which requires a higher reverse torque to undo the first time than the cheap screws will bear!

Pretty sure I've never seen a factory fresh dichroic that has been fitted by someone not wearing gloves...

Edited December 12, 2023 by indyld

[ImagineerTom]

And to be even more picky - that’s not a moving head factory; that’s one of the 20,000 generic “happy good luck sunshine flower manufacturing co” rooms rented by the day in Chinese version of wework “factories” that today is assembling lights and tomorrow is assembling windchimes and the day after are assembling toasters. 
 

The complete lack of jigs, templates, holders, specific tools, etc makes me shudder because the variations and deviations that’s introducing are exponential.  We make one-off objects with more precision and control than this factory does. 
 

I appreciate this is how a chunk of things in the world are made now but it’s literally industry stepped back 200 years. 

[kerry davies]

It is the result of labour being cheaper than mechanisation. Using the "job shop" for batch production of short run items like this can only be cost-effective when you pay peanuts otherwise the investment in a production line or the use of transfer machines  becomes a no-brainer. 

[david.elsbury]

9 hours ago, ImagineerTom said:

And to be even more picky - that’s not a moving head factory; that’s one of the 20,000 generic “happy good luck sunshine flower manufacturing co” rooms rented by the day in Chinese version of wework “factories” that today is assembling lights and tomorrow is assembling windchimes and the day after are assembling toasters. 
 

 

No, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong. Have you actually watched the video? Or is this just a racist assumption? From the signage shown at the start of the video; to the demo area setup with lights; to the coloured flashes around the room (indicating the testing of lights off camera) I think there’s plenty to tell us this is a full time lighting producer.

[ImagineerTom]

Wow…

The standard business model for manufacturing in that part of the world is a fancy office / showroom that is owned by a lighting company, with fancy signs and demo areas. Then all the manufacturing / assembly contracted out to the generic manufacturing assembly co’s who rent out rooms and people for a day or two at a time to undertake specific manufacturing task based on their speciality (one company laser cut things, one company assemble motors and gearboxes, one company assemble lense units, etc) 

The footage shows many different assembly rooms yet look, there’s not one single piece of custom tooling, jigs etc. if you’re a manufacturer regularly assembling your own products you would have jigs and templates because it makes assembly much cheaper and more dependable in the long run. If you’re a generic manufacturing co you’d have rooms with large flat tables, absolutely no industry specific signs, posters or items on the walls / shelves and you’d be using adjustable spanner’s and generic pneumatic screwdrivers because tomorrow you’ve got to manufacture something completely different. 
if you’re a pro lighting manufacture you’d have cradles the partially assembled lights travel in (or at least trays) because in the long run that’s cheaper and more dependable, if you’re a manufacture for hire co you wrap delicate things in bits of tissue paper and have random piles of cardboard boxes all over the desk. 
if you’re a pro lighting manufacture you’d have a specific tester that plugs directly into each light to put it through its paces, or at the very least you’d have a dedicated DMX controller with a pre-programmed sequence designed to test every feature of each light identically and consistently. If you’re a generic manufacturing co then you’d have to go unit to unit scrolling through the on board controls and or a generic cheapo DMX desk that you manually wiggle the faders on to do a basic test to make sure that the units broadly speak have been assembled correctly. 

There are full service in-house manufacture companies in China but the bulk of products (especially those coming from the export / trade zones) are being made in exactly the way I’ve described and it is why off-brand products can be great value in a single purchase but (almost without fail) don’t offer any consistency across batches, have poor documentation and are almost impossible to get spares for since records were not kept of which were used in each batch manufacturing process. 

[paulears]

Interesting reactions. I suppose it’s just what buyers want that they produce for. Five hundred or five grand? It’s consumer driven. I’ve bought Chinese products for years now and the thing really is that you take the cheaper prices and take the consequences. When things fail they’re often not repairable. Power supplies being a common one. Sometimes they’re fixable as the parts can be genetic  but often they’re not economic to fix. A new one has screw holes in different places and different output terminals and cables wont reach. However the fancy very expensive robes and Martins don’t seem to be much more reliable but have spares. The Chinese I buy from I deal with on whatsapp now and they’re driving electric vehicles and live in nice apartments. 
the model they use with an office and workroom is very efficient, and yes, they do move from product to product but that’s how they do it. The cooperative nature works so well. Standardised parts so if you want an extra lens rather than a gobo you can have it! Not just lights. I buy microphones and radios. I mentioned I couldn’t find any ribbon mics and next day they’d sourced in the building  done motor assemblies and a housing and built me two as one offs. My view is it’s a great way of producing cost effective kit. Another thing in the radio world is that there really are no brands as we know them in europe. Well known brands are just labels. One firm I buy from also makes a very well known Japanese brand and the Chinese version I buy shares so much with the more expensive one. Reliability is really very good too. I’ve had getting on for 150lights. My graveyard currently has less than ten non workers and they’ve been robbed for parts. Some of the washes are 15 years old and owe me nothing and still in use.

I suppose it’s just a buying decision. Like all the others? But don’t knock their methods because clearly they work. Jigs and big batch production make little sense with limited quantity runs.

[alistermorton]

It reminds me so much of a company I worked at in 1980 as a bench assembler - it truly was an electronics "cottage industry". Just like that video - large tables, bins of parts, open dispensers of adhesives, no jigs aids etc.

[indyld]

I enjoyed the video, but it definitely doesn't quite sit right in many aspects so take the story being told with a pinch of salt. 

As mentioned, this is the kind of thing we do for short run home built 'specials'. 

[ImagineerTom]

5 hours ago, paulears said:

Interesting reactions. I suppose it’s just what buyers want that they produce for. Five hundred or five grand? It’s consumer driven. I’ve bought Chinese products for years now and the thing really is that you take the cheaper prices and take the consequences. When things fail they’re often not repairable. Power supplies being a common one. Sometimes they’re fixable as the parts can be genetic  but often they’re not economic to fix. A new one has screw holes in different places and different output terminals and cables wont reach. However the fancy very expensive robes and Martins don’t seem to be much more reliable but have spares. The Chinese I buy from I deal with on whatsapp now and they’re driving electric vehicles and live in nice apartments. 
the model they use with an office and workroom is very efficient, and yes, they do move from product to product but that’s how they do it. The cooperative nature works so well. Standardised parts so if you want an extra lens rather than a gobo you can have it! Not just lights. I buy microphones and radios. I mentioned I couldn’t find any ribbon mics and next day they’d sourced in the building  done motor assemblies and a housing and built me two as one offs. My view is it’s a great way of producing cost effective kit. Another thing in the radio world is that there really are no brands as we know them in europe. Well known brands are just labels. One firm I buy from also makes a very well known Japanese brand and the Chinese version I buy shares so much with the more expensive one. Reliability is really very good too. I’ve had getting on for 150lights. My graveyard currently has less than ten non workers and they’ve been robbed for parts. Some of the washes are 15 years old and owe me nothing and still in use.

I suppose it’s just a buying decision. Like all the others? But don’t knock their methods because clearly they work. Jigs and big batch production make little sense with limited quantity runs.

I keep flipping between whether I like or loath this manufacturing style - There are things its good for and it's a system I've used a few times for things that could be broken down easily into simple components that could be batch manufactured like this. What always makes me flip to loathing it is when ever we manufacture something in house it becomes quickly clear how design/development, sales, specification, manufacturing and shipping are always much better when fully integrated and working together; seeing someone assemble something and noticing how they have had to come up with little work arounds for fiddly parts informs a better redesign of the product to make it more manufacturable, finding out that making this piece 3mm smaller means they can cut an extra 20 out of a sheet of material thus saving money, finding out that the specific knobs mean that once packaged up the whole item is 40cm3 bigger in volume than if we had smaller knobs or a touchscreen are all things a designer doesn't discover unless they're integral to the manufacture / assembly process which can make huge cost savings to manufacturing costs. BUT then you also need someone to spot that those parts are fiddly because its a onetime install and reduces the weight overall, making the part 3mm smaller means it now has non-standard sizing so other connectors (or gobos) won't easily fit into it so you (or your customer) will have to purchase more expensive bespoke parts forever, that those knobs are chunky because they will have to be accessed by riggers wearing gloves hanging from the roof of an arena in the rain / or if you've gone with a touchscreen the operator will have to take their eyes off the stage to look to see what they are operating when before it was touch alone. 
 

The batch/piecemeal manufacturing industries eliminate virtually all the opportunity for genuine improvements and innovation (or at least slow them down dramatically) sacrificing it all for a convenient (or cheap) one time manufacturing process.

[musht]

CAD feeding into CNC,laser cutting, 3D printing have made short runs of items lot more feasible.Don't need to amortise tooling over long runs.

Disagree that batch manufacturing loses opportunity for improvement, it encourages it , as it's a change of gcode and process and the next part is the new design. Not a debate on wether need £30K on a redesign of a tool.

It's not got volume of car or domestic appliance manufacture, it's also especially at moment, a very fast moving market. What was production life of Pat 23,  30 odd years? Those very expensive moulds paid for themselves. Now an LED fixture over 5 years old looks a bit antique.

Here's a look at another end of Chinese manufacturing, flex PCBs, now that's what I call investment

 

Edited December 13, 2023 by musht

[musht]

A look at Christmas light makers

 

[ImagineerTom]

Worth noting how the factories in this later video have posters and signs up, have jigs, moulds, custom trays, custom tooling, actual manufacturing devices in the room. Proper building rigs, proper testing rigs, visible “production line” setup - it’s clear that these companies have their own production line (or at the very least rent specialist, experienced manufacturing teams / facilities for this sector) rather than the generic rent-a-room setup in the first video.  
 

also worth noting the fleeting trip to one of the injection moulding suppliers - showing how individual parts are sourced from small business / family business that are often a single tool or skill supplier who today are making buttons for their connectors and tomorrow are making buttons for something else. 
 

@musht - the problem is that’s not how it works (mostly) out there. There is zero communication or feedback between the suppliers and construction elements in the chain - generic lighting co get “a design” from a designer that they sell; once the order is in they contract generic assembly co to actually make it to the specification they state (often with neither party having any real world understanding or experience of /what/ they are making) with the assembly co buying in assemblies from other assembly co (we need 10,000 green LED’s, some of those DMX interface things, some casings roughly this size/shape, 500 power supplies) often with price as their primary concern but also with no direct understanding of how the product will be used. They then assemble all the units and hand them over to the generic packaging co (or, shudder, flight case “manufacturer”) to be packed up and then handed to another shipping co who will export them. 
 

there are products it works just fine fore but anything that needs a long lifespan/support/replicability it’s not appropriate for and for technical products it introduces a lot of variables in the process (6 or 7 buyers each making judgement calls about the suitability of parts without any industry relevant knowledge) that make it something of a lottery. 
 

Because of how generic and interchangeable the whole ecosystem is people and companies regularly change completely. One sales person who supplied us with some specialist RF stuff later moved to a golf club company and still spams us trying to get us to become a golf importer. A company that previously manufactured 12,000 theatre seats for us is now a nuts / bolts manufacturer. 

Edited December 13, 2023 by ImagineerTom

[marktownend]

And from the Wikipedia page about Peugeot...

"quickly started manufacturing saws; then other hand tools and, circa 1840 to 1842, coffee grinders; then, in 1874, pepper grinders; and then, circa 1880, bicycles.^[10] The company's entry into the vehicle market was by means of crinoline dresses"

And do I recall press articles about early manufacturing of Roboscans by Martin, I'm not sure the early units weren't constructed in a similar fashion, although admittedly the company would have had full control of the process. I certainly recall them proudly proclaiming reaching the milestone of making their 100,000th Roboscan. Several products down the line too. 

Edited December 17, 2023 by marktownend

[Bryson]

Peugeot still make excellent pepper grinders.  Some of the best available, in fact.