And like I said, how the eff does 1.5 million new cars get built without leasing companies. We need new cars every year. How do cars get built if someone doesn’t fork over the money to get it built.
I ask you how new cars get built. You reply your friend in Arkansas has already a used car! Do I have to walk you through everything?
OK, I’ll explain how cars get built too.
Or at least how a large car part was made. Let’s travel to 6375 North Paramount Boulevard, Long Beach CA and visit TABC. Back in the day, TABC primarily made truck beds for Tacoma pickups. If you drove I-5 to NorCal in those days there was a 100% chance you’d see one of the special made trailers that shipped these beds 24/365 to the now closed NUMI plant in Hayward.
The truck beds were stamped in one operation from large sheets of sheet metal in one of about a dozen 2000 ton production presses. The working area in these machines is large enough to play 9-handed hold’em inside. Of course, if such a game was going on, and the press was operated, you’d have 10 icky pools of liquefied guts that used to be the players and the dealers. To help keep that from happening, there were electrically interlocked safety fences surrounding these huge production presses.
TABC had Amada brand presses that were about the size of the pictured 600 ton travelling press.
However, tools need periodic maintenance, and when such was needed, a big old (Toyota brand) fork-lift would move the production tooling over to the adjacent tool & die shop building. There the the tooling was installed on one of two 50 ton presses called “spotting presses”. The spotting presses weren’t powerful enough to do production on, so they bent cardboard instead of sheet metal. To do maintenance on the tooling, the tool & die folks necessarily need to be constantly enter & exit the working area. For this reason, and the fact they were never used for production, and only used by the small numbers of specially trained tool & die folks, there was no safety equipment on these two machines. Unlike the production presses which had a fixed control stand outside the safety fence, the spotting presses were controlled by a little box that hung from the ceiling on a long cable. Think of the end of that Terminator movie.
Tragically people get sloppy, and this is what happened. These presses don’t operate fast. So the tool & die folk would bring the box on the cable into the work area, so they could save a few seconds, and start the press operating as they stepped out. That worked fine until a poor soul got his clothing snagged on the tooling.
This is a press which would commonly be used for “spotting”. TABCs were much larger, of course.
After that death, the industrial engineering company I worked for were called in design and install safety equipment on these spotting presses. The first person who greeted us on the factory floor was the shop steward. He said the day after the death he called a meeting with management. The first thing he said was: “This should never happen again”. The company president responded: “Hell no! Not on my watch it won’t”. Because of the nature of tool & die work, we didn’t install a safety fence, but we did make it physically impossible to operate the press from inside the press.
Moral of the story: Safety first is always job #1. That, and no car leasing companies are involved in manufacturing cars.
