dvd recorders

On 12/22/03 8:08 PM,"Rachel Janzen"
posted:

Ellice wrote:

Ah, when my dad went to work for them - he actually interviewed with "the
old man" - they wanted someone to head up a new division, build a new
manufacturing plant in Miami - which dad did. I used to go work on the line
- clipping transisters - on my days off from school - when I was in about
7th, 8th grade. That, and he liked for me to hear what was going on - as my
Spanish was much better than his - and there were a lot of Spanish speakers
working in the plant. That said - I give him credit - he had many women as
supervisors - unusual in those days.

Ellice

Electronic manufacturing tends to be a female dominated field, at least
where I'm from. Our small muscle dexterity skills stands us in good
stead. In the electronic manufacturing firm I work for 5 out of 6 of the
manufacturing managers are women. And there's a young woman working
there now that if she stays with the company, has my bet for running the
place in the next 15 years or so.

True - the fine hand dexterity. And it seems that the women can sit still
for longer periods of time, with paying attention. I somehow remember some
things about this from the science POV when taking Manufacturing engineering
classes, and Ergonomics. Good for her - working her way up. I always like
being in the plants - even in my own career - but I'm more likely to be
doing heavy steel or some fancy fabrication stuff - not fine electronics.

Just that when my dad made all these women supervisors - it was 40 years ago
- and that was bucking tradition. Many plants had women working, but the
line supervisors were men. My dad had been a plant manager (he was an
electronics engineer), and I guess did well with the people that worked with
him - as he moved up the ladder he always tried to be fair. My favorite
plant - the place he worked before going to Fischer (it was a communications
electronics place, and also did injection molding plastics) - the plant was
so big that he and some of the others had scooters to dash around, and some
bicycles. The plastics side - those machines are big, and very high roofed -
very scary.

Ellice

On 12/22/03 10:00 PM,"animaux" posted:

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 01:08:44 GMT, Rachel Janzen
opined:

Electronic manufacturing tends to be a female dominated field, at least
where I'm from. Our small muscle dexterity skills stands us in good
stead. In the electronic manufacturing firm I work for 5 out of 6 of the
manufacturing managers are women. And there's a young woman working
there now that if she stays with the company, has my bet for running the
place in the next 15 years or so.

Rachel

I believe that started back during the war days when women had to manufacture
the military equipment while the men went to war.

Actually, women have been a vital part of the industrial revolution since
the 19th century. But, the growth of the electronics industry timewise
coincides with the mid-20th century, ergo - war times. And women indeed
worked in manufacturing - all across the board. However, in the electronics
industry - doing fine work - they continued working - where in more of the
"heavier" jobs the men came back and filled those again - with the women
shifting to work elsewhere.

For years before I became a grower in the horticulture industry, I was a
weapon
spec solderer. I built high temp pressure equipment for instrument panels in
Boeing jets. I did that for many years and love it. I would do it again need
be. It never got tedious to me. I made a great deal of money doing it. Way
back 20 years ago I made 18 dollars an hour. I also did quite a bit of mil
spec
454, as well. Those terms mean different inspection criteria.

Any materiel (correct spelling) built for the military had different
standards than commericial applications (Mil Specifications a.k.a. Mil
Specs). Has a lot to do with environment of use, frequency of repair that
can be handled, or even the acceptable risk of repair, and the locale of the
repair. It's always interesting when a company that doesn't normally do mil
spec work gets a contract - and then they have to deal with the QA and
certs. My contracts guy convinced me to have some specialty steel work done
as a Small Business Set Aside - fine. We could only find 2 companies in the
US that were seemingly qualified to do it, one was in Seattle and did work
for some airplane companies. We had an interesting time - they had to get me
welder certs, and the like. When I made my first visit out there to check
out the facility, work on some project details I fortunately took with me
one of my support contractors from Boston - he and I had designed these
things that were to be built (essentially, kind of like vertical airplane
wings, with knife edges, made of steel - to hold instrumentation in a
vertical array in a very bad environment). We saw the plant, the folks were
very nice - and then as I'm starting to get a bit nervous - in the back on
one of the grinders is a guy doing metal work - no goggles. Not good - to
say the least. Then we come back to the front room and they're showing me
the huge roller table and cutting machine - and how they're going to handle
the very large, heavy sheets of metal. They now bring out a couple of
forklifts, and start to do a kind of duet with them - my 1st problem being
that "pops" - the nice, elderly, father of the owner - is one of the guys
doing this - wearing his little canvas/rope slip-ons - no safety stuff, and
I'm pretty sure, well, quite sure - this is way beyond the lifting limits of
the forklifts being used, and the whole way this is going isn't good. Well,
as there is one slip, then they're all -"no problem - we can do this -and it
continues" - I actually walked out of the plant. I called my contractor
friend to come out - he was just kind of shaking his head - told him to go
tell them to stop - because they were so far out of any OSHA, or safety
compliance I could not even be in there. He went in and spoke with them. We
made arrangements, had a good meeting the next day. It's hard - they're nice
folks, want to be happy, do a good job - but it hadn't dawned on them at all
that some of their casualness was totally unacceptable. Plus, they had to
get more precise in what they were going to do. Eventually, they did make
the items, and they were great. But what an experience. It was the only time
I've ever actually walked out - I had told them to stop - but just being in
there while they did such unsafe things - horrid. And it's not that I'm a
very prissy person - far from it.

Well, back to wrapping stuff!
ellice

Victoria

On 12/23/03 9:00 AM, in article ,
"animaux" wrote:

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 12:24:40 GMT, Cheryl Isaak
opined:


Victoria,
I'd have committed mayhem to get one decent inspector when I was running a
test line. I would get these things with huge solder blobs and stamped
tickets (nickel sized or bigger). I'd stop my line and get the bosses from
solder and inspection and point out flaws for ten minutes - about a 100
units that never should have made it out of inspection.


Cheryl

At the Weapon Spec level, the military is right there in the offices and they
do
the inspection under a microscope. These solder joints I speak of must be
perfect. Any pit or abrasion could lead to equipment failure.

Many times I'd solder with silver. That was very hard. Not much alloy.

QC inspectors must be very alert. They are not an easy bunch to find. You
know
that, I know that. Have you ever opened a commercially soldered piece of
electronics at home? I had a cow. Big globs, air holes, pin holes,
corrosion.
That's acceptable in commercial soldering. Things like that are built to
break.
Very unfair.

V

Like I said - I'd have committed mayhem!

We were subject to snap inspections and tear downs (I did missile work). And
the military wandering in just to look around every few months.
I would get so mad, these women and men making more an hour than I did and
they just didn't give a rat's a**. The next level would catch it (my test
line). The amount of $$$ that could have been saved would give you
nightmares. I believe the protection given to these people by their union
(no disciplinary action, no warning in files) ultimately cost hundreds of
people their jobs. Why pay union wages in MA when you can move to Southwest
and pay nonunion wages and get a better result. I spoke to an old friend who
moved with the production line; that kind of failure dropped by 80%.

Cheryl

On 12/23/03 9:30 AM,"Cheryl Isaak" posted:

On 12/23/03 9:00 AM, in article ,
"animaux" wrote:


At the Weapon Spec level, the military is right there in the offices and they
do
the inspection under a microscope. These solder joints I speak of must be
perfect. Any pit or abrasion could lead to equipment failure.

Many times I'd solder with silver. That was very hard. Not much alloy.

QC inspectors must be very alert. They are not an easy bunch to find. You

There's actually an agency which monitors contracts for all the DOD. They
generally are the folks who have on-site inspectors. In special cases (like
me) - we would only allow them to inspect very basic stuff. Usually for my
projects we reserved final inspection for my QA guy, and myself. When I had
a couple of years of prototypes being made in Northern Mass, especially when
critical putting together stages were happening, I and my QA guy were in the
plant - 5 days. Some weeks maybe he'd schedule to come up for 2 days, then
the next week the entire time. While for the most part the on-site guys are
great - when you're doing anything unique - you want trained eyes. And
unfortunately, since the on-site guys, are indeed on-site- it's easy for
them to fall into a bit too much comfort with the plant - or for the plant
guys to bamboozle them at times.

It's very hard to find good QA people. It got to be kind of a popular thing
for Industrial Engineers in the 80s, but who knows.

know
that, I know that. Have you ever opened a commercially soldered piece of
electronics at home? I had a cow. Big globs, air holes, pin holes,
corrosion.
That's acceptable in commercial soldering. Things like that are built to
break.

Although in the last 10 years a lot more commercial soldering is done with
newer techniques, and with robots - which eventually brings cost down.

Like I said - I'd have committed mayhem!

We were subject to snap inspections and tear downs (I did missile work). And
the military wandering in just to look around every few months.
I would get so mad, these women and men making more an hour than I did and
they just didn't give a rat's a**. The next level would catch it (my test
line). The amount of $$$ that could have been saved would give you
nightmares. I believe the protection given to these people by their union
(no disciplinary action, no warning in files) ultimately cost hundreds of
people their jobs. Why pay union wages in MA when you can move to Southwest
and pay nonunion wages and get a better result. I spoke to an old friend who
moved with the production line; that kind of failure dropped by 80%.

I know your pain. When the company building for us moved from their old
plant (in an old mill building) in Lawrence to the nice new facility in
Amesbury - it drove the guys on the floor nuts. They couldn't hide stuff
anymore - had to be "cleaner" .

We had our really heavy steel work done by a big company in Salt Lake City
(I'm talking about 800 tons of moving parts for one thing, and several 6'
Diameter, 150'-200' specialty tubes - made of steel normally used in
submarines.) They were very good to work with, but we had to get a lot in
order for the weld inspections, who was allowed to weld on these parts, etc.
My favorite time was one of the nice older guys going over some joints with
me in the first 3' length done - I picked up some little thing - we looked
at the scans, got it fixed. One of the physicists with me - very neurotic,
but smart - was going nuts - because he didn't understand what we were doing
in the midst of all these tons of steel, and what did the ultra-sonic tests
really mean - how did they work. I hated having to be the one to go in there
to do pop inspections - beyond the on-site guy (let's say I don't practice
doing welding inspections very frequently). But they were good about it. The
most fun - we had to find a way to check straightness inside the tubes -
over the internal weld, as a very large, pricey hydraulic plug would be
moving in them in their final configuration. We built a sled with a disk of
the plug size, and I had to get in the tube, with the couple of plant guys,
and we pushed it the whole length (had to take pix and measurements - mark
any problems for grinding). That was fun - running down a 200+' long tube of
steel. The hardest part - getting into the tube - sliding down thru the
nozzle!

With the steel guys in Seattle, I let the local QA/govt area guy do regular
progress checks, then we flew someone in for critical inspections. You just
do what you have to do.

ellice

On 12/23/03 11:48 AM, in article ,
"animaux" wrote:

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 14:30:23 GMT, Cheryl Isaak
opined:

We were subject to snap inspections and tear downs (I did missile work). And
the military wandering in just to look around every few months.
I would get so mad, these women and men making more an hour than I did and
they just didn't give a rat's a**. The next level would catch it (my test
line). The amount of $$$ that could have been saved would give you
nightmares. I believe the protection given to these people by their union
(no disciplinary action, no warning in files) ultimately cost hundreds of
people their jobs. Why pay union wages in MA when you can move to Southwest
and pay nonunion wages and get a better result. I spoke to an old friend who
moved with the production line; that kind of failure dropped by 80%.

Cheryl

Oh, well, working for Aerospace Avionics was full time, on site military
inspectors. The idiots of the lot were the "methods" engineers. Not one of
them ever picked up a soldering iron, or hand bent a resistor. They barely
knew
the specs. But, they'd give you method sheets which took three times longer
to
build in that way, than if each person were allowed to build the units in
their
fastest way.

I was like that. If it could be done faster, I found it. I was an expert.
When
the boss needed something today, I was the person who got the kit. And I
always
finished "today."

I had one or two people I could depend on. Sounds like you did the tiny
stuff, most of my stuff wasn't all the large.


Much of the industry now uses solder flow machines and touch-up techs. People
who wire harnesses, etc...that's on the commercial end. I would imagine mil
spec and weapon spec still rigid. We couldn't have anything out of place on
our
bench at any time or we'd be written up. Now, I was a contract employee, so
things since then have most likely changed. A lot.
I hear occasionally from some former co-workers - specs are changing, some
tighter, some looser. Some for the good, some not so good!


Now I miss soldering! Maybe I can pick up stained glass. Of course, a blob
of
solder to hold glass together is not what we mean by soldering, but it's still
a
melty thing!
Snicker! But a craft I have always wanted to try!
Cheryl

On 12/23/03 11:51 AM, in article ,
"animaux" wrote:

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 10:32:11 -0500, Ellice opined:

There's actually an agency which monitors contracts for all the DOD. They
generally are the folks who have on-site inspectors.

(...)

Yes, where I worked they had a regular office. D-CAS, I believe they were
called. Boy, we are a tough bunch of broads! I wish we could have worked
together. I love competence. Not much of that around these days.

V



That¹s the acronym I've been trying to remember. I'd bet we'd have had a
ball!
Cheryl

On 12/23/03 11:51 AM,"animaux" posted:

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 10:32:11 -0500, Ellice opined:

There's actually an agency which monitors contracts for all the DOD. They
generally are the folks who have on-site inspectors.

(...)

Yes, where I worked they had a regular office. D-CAS, I believe they were
called. Boy, we are a tough bunch of broads! I wish we could have worked
together. I love competence. Not much of that around these days.

Yup - well, it depends on what years - at one time DCASMA, then something
else. But, that's them. Some places they're on site full time - big
companies. Others are covered by an area office which for smaller jobs,
companies - come to the plant as needed. I was lucky - my lab had a QA/ILS
group. After the firing from my project the first QA guy - okay, but he had
a little alcohol problem, and he got quite belligerent with the contractors
- as opposed to being part of the team. A problem in that being drunk in
public kind of undermined his credibility. But the next guy was awesome -
he'd just retired out of the army on a medical (very severe diabetes), and
we were of similar age. Only thing - I was warned by his boss to be sure we
always had fruit, etc with us - as he was wont to work thru when he needed
to take a shot. Only a couple of times did we have the "oh, crap - he's
talking nonsense - get him some juice - here eat an apple" event. The plant
guys were great about it - he and I had our own little cubicles in the
front, and just did what we needed. The wonders of matrix management - I
had a great team on this long-term project. Was able to weed out the couple
of incompetents, or nut-cases - and the rest of us really worked hard. At
one point - when the contractor had effed up some bonding - with dire
consequences in a field test - the next prototypes -we took over a huge
room, made it a clean room - brought in these large pieces of equipment -
and did the specialty bonding ourselves. Had my materials guy come up, we
brought our 2 high-school interns, our QA guy, and took 2 plant labor guys.
Also used their project engineer, and my counterpart dropping in (chief
engineer). The Materials guy took video during this week-long operation (we
were doing aircraft type bonding) - the video is riotous - I'm clambering
around on top - about 15' in the air, or leaning over upside down to either
paint goo, or putting in the special huge rivet/bolt things. What fun. The
kids had a blast - and it all worked.

We'd have had fun. I'm a big fan of competence - but with age have learned
to be more patient, and help people to achieve it. Makes for happier teams -
getting people to work to their strengths. You don't want to know about my
conversation with the former VP of this company - let's just say when he
tried giving my guff -early on - we had one of those talks which ended with
my explaining what would be decorating the walls of my office - if he ever
tried it again! My boss was hysterical when I told him. But the Chief
engineer, and the project guys - they liked it - the VP was kind of a macho
jerk - smart enough - but just not in tune with doing it right - wanting to
cut corners. Didn't appreciate the higher requirements of our specific
program.

Oh, well - I'm still wrapping stuff - back to the other room!
ellice