Behind the scenes in China

[Tormach]

People seem interested in what goes on to bring you this sort of equipment, so I thought I'd toss out a few tidbits. The attached photos and dialog represent about 0.1% of the scope and depth, but may give a bit of the flavor of it all.

I'll also apologize in advance, if this thread generates a lot of chatter I may not have time to get back to everyone. Also, I've never tried photo attachments before. If it doesn't work I'll start a photo gallery and reference that.

finish table. jpg: Questions came up on the table. Here's a fuzzy shot of one finished in the machine shop.

base1, base2 : A few bases with rough machining operations finished. This is before the final surface grind.

waygrinder.jpg: This is the backside, the ugly side of this. It's digital but not CNC. This beast, or some operator, was responsible for us having to replace someone's Z axis column a couple years back. Something had gone wrong and there was a 0.002" taper from top to bottom. You can see a bunch of lathe beds stacked up, ready to grind. I'm very happy to say that this is no longer used on our machines. I don't have a shot of it, but about 30 feet from this is a new, fully CNC, dedicated way grinder. Surfaces look great and no screw ups (knock on wood).

QC meeting.jpg: Typical meeting, where we go over everything of interest, which pretty much means everything. Flick's photo will be shown in such a meeting. Far left end of the table is me (gray hair), my interpreter, and Shen Yen (aka Ivy Shen), our quality auditor at the time. She has since been promoted to Shen Jing Li (Manager Shen) and runs our full time office in Nanjing. If you have an older machine you will find her signature on your QC sheet. Now Frank does most of the audits.

Tormach and Friends.jpg: Standard Operating Procedure in China is that the factory boss takes you and other senior managers to a big banquet where, over the course of 2 hours, there is an obscene amount of food and drink and everyone makes toasts. Sounds like fun but after 10 days in a row it gets tedious, really tedious. This photo is very different. On the first day we have to go through the obligatory banquet. On the second night, I insist on a banquet that Tormach hosts. The big boss is not invited. People you see here are middle managers, engineers, factory floor workers, QC inspectors, designers, and others who have direct personal involvement in making your CNC mill. It's a similar banquet (obscene amount of food and drink) but it's for a cross section of the workers. Many of these people don't make much money and never get to this kind of dinner. It's informal and we all have a lot of fun. The two old gray western guys are myself and John Prentice, primary author of your manual.

Final_assembly.jpg and NOT-Tormach.jpg : The final assembly shows a bunch of machines in the final stages of assembly. We couldn't show all the machines. At the moment we took this photo there were 36 machines in the clean final assembly area, another 36 machines in the early assembly area in the next room, and lots more pieces in the machine shop getting machined. Note the clean room, clean floor, and bright windows. We take special precautions to protect the ballscrews during assembly. In the first year the final assembly was done in the same room as all the other machinery and we had a few problems with grit on the ballscrews. This room is reserved for CNC assembly of Tormach machines and some bigger VMCs that are sold domestically in China. NOT-Tormach is a photo of a typical machine factory in China. Dirty, dark, and questionable practices. We visit a lot of factories before finding the type that we like. We didn't like this one.

Reishauer 2300mm: One thing that is pretty uncommon about how Tormach does things is the extent to which we get involved in the process. Where it seems important, we may get involved with the factory's suppliers. This shot was taking from one of the visits we did to a ballscrew manufacturer. This is a very nice German made ballscrew grinder, capable of making extremely precise ballscrews up to 2.3 meters long and 120mm in diameter. It can make screws as good as ISO grade P1, which is an absurdly precise and expensive screw. We get involved in sourcing of lots of items. The motors and electronics are purchased by Tormach and delivered directly to the factory. I've been in lots of motor factories.

Prototype Foundry.jpg: This is not a typical foundry. This is a small scale foundry for making things in small volumes. This is where they make the castings for prototypes.

Rotary table mfgr.jpg: The place that makes our 4th axis makes a wide variety of rotary products. All of them are commercial and many of them are CNC. I think the rotary table shown here probably weighs in around 5000 lbs.

Poking around CNC Zone you'll come across quite a few postings where people try to explain how things work with Chinese suppliers. Lots of chatter about how it's all junk and the manufacturers will screw you in an instant. Some of it is conjecture, some of it is a fair description of conventional procedure, and little of it applies to how we operate. Very early on we realized that the standard way of doing things yielded the standard level of quality. That was something we were not willing to accept. The way we work is very expensive, time consuming, often exhausting, and frequently frustrating. Never less, we see it as essential to meeting our mission.

Enough philosophy. What do you guys want to see? Anything in particular that you want to know about how the machines are made?

Greg

[justgary]

Greg -

Thanks for taking the time to post the photos and descriptions. It really does bring a new perspective to the machine getting to see how and where it was made.

I really don't know how much time you spend lurking on the forum, but you can tell that we all like seeing lots of pictures of projects. In your case, the project takes on a new twist, but I can imagine how posting as much as you have time for will boost your sales. Just like the reading your design trade-off reports, we enjoy knowing that you strive for perfections. Everything you can find time to post will be greedily consumed, I'm sure.

On the more human side, it's good to see that you host events for the workers, too. I'm sure that having you come and visit makes them very nervous, so putting them at ease is a big plus. No telling what their bosses tell them before you come...

Regards,

- Just Gary

P.S. You are pretty easy to spot in the photos, and not only because you are in many of your printed ads!

[zephyr9900]

Greg, I also much appreciate your posting the photos and descriptions. It was a good gesture that you hosted the dinner for the workers, and I'm sure that contributes as much to the quality as any production procedure.

What I'm actually interested in, is how actively Tormach as a company monitors this board and the Yahoo group. I made a possibly rash statement over on Yahoo (based possibly on selective memory ) that the only Tormach input lately seems to be new product announcements. So now I can :blush: (oops, that's not an emoticon here--should really be)

Certainly there have been vociferous complaints/discussions/arguments over various aspects of the machine (one thread in particular here involving a shop rag), some of which might have been defused by just a little input from Tormach.

Or little things--like the current thread about the lack of a drawbar washer on at least some people's machines. Or just monitoring how people use and mod their machines with an eye toward tweaking the design ongoing.

Is there a Tormach policy for when or when not to join a discussion?

Randy

[sharpshooter90]

[QUOTE=Tormach;597274]
Standard Operating Procedure in China is that the factory boss takes you and other senior managers to a big banquet where, over the course of 2 hours, there is an obscene amount of food and drink and everyone makes toasts.

/QUOTE]

Yeah- back in the day the SOP was the factory boss would invite you to a banquet with all sorts of "exotic" local dishes and a multitude of toasts with something called Mao Tai- a sort of white lightning that tastes like kerosene. Of course each manager would propose a toast to which you would respond with a shot of this stuff, so you were drinking at a rate of 5-1. Once you were sufficiently lubricated, they would hand you the bill for the banquet marked in US dollars. Then they would pay the restaurant in Chinese local currency, pocketing about 80% of your money. Your Chinese helper would always insist that the banquet was a Chinese custom, but in reality it was just a way for the factory guys to live it up on your dime and walk away with a couple months salary in their pockets.

[philbur]

So a bit like the NY Stock Exchange then.

Phil

Originally Posted by sharpshooter90 Yeah- back in the day the SOP was the factory boss would invite you to a banquet with all sorts of "exotic" local dishes and a multitude of toasts with something called Mao Tai- a sort of white lightning that tastes like kerosene. Of course each manager would propose a toast to which you would respond with a shot of this stuff, so you were drinking at a rate of 5-1. Once you were sufficiently lubricated, they would hand you the bill for the banquet marked in US dollars. Then they would pay the restaurant in Chinese local currency, pocketing about 80% of your money. Your Chinese helper would always insist that the banquet was a Chinese custom, but in reality it was just a way for the factory guys to live it up on your dime and walk away with a couple months salary in their pockets.

[Tormach]

Randy,

I don't monitor everything myself, but others at Tormach do and sometimes suggest I get involved. We also have had some customers write to us directly, essentially saying "Do you know what they're saying about you? You better get in there.". One thing that probably doesn't work is to assume that I personally read everything.

The general philosophy I have is that the public discussion groups are for the community, they're not a place for Tormach to dominate the discussion. I usually prefer to lay low and only get involved when there is some misinformation leading people the wrong way. I feel that the interaction among the community of owners is more beneficial to everyone as a whole. We recognize that the interaction within the user community aids our mission. We're trying to help people make things and also deliver exceptional value. When people are helping each other, that means we don't have to answer every question ourselves and it helps keeps our costs low. The discussions here provide a lot of confidence to new users and are a great aid to people using their machines, or trying to make a decision as to whether or not to buy.

The networking that goes on here is also a great place for new ideas. Recently there was some discussion of using an indicator as a master tool. I'm not sure if that was Yahoo or CNC Zone. Don Clement posted details of his. This was inspiration for a new TTS tool. With Don's permission, we're thinking about offering a version of that. I'll be in the factory where they make TTS in a couple weeks, inspecting a prototype of our interpretation of Don's idea.

Greg

Originally Posted by zephyr9900 Greg, I also much appreciate your posting the photos and descriptions. It was a good gesture that you hosted the dinner for the workers, and I'm sure that contributes as much to the quality as any production procedure. What I'm actually interested in, is how actively Tormach as a company monitors this board and the Yahoo group. I made a possibly rash statement over on Yahoo (based possibly on selective memory ) that the only Tormach input lately seems to be new product announcements. So now I can :blush: (oops, that's not an emoticon here--should really be) Certainly there have been vociferous complaints/discussions/arguments over various aspects of the machine (one thread in particular here involving a shop rag), some of which might have been defused by just a little input from Tormach. Or little things--like the current thread about the lack of a drawbar washer on at least some people's machines. Or just monitoring how people use and mod their machines with an eye toward tweaking the design ongoing. Is there a Tormach policy for when or when not to join a discussion? Randy