Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/232

 Fifty Thousand Operations to Miake a Car

How they are performed on the minute by means of the wonderful "Control Board"

By Reginald Trautschold, M. E.

��THE automobile is now so familiar to us that we have ceased to realize how complex a machine it really is. Fifty thousand or more manufacturing operations are required on a car, and each operation must be performed at exactly the right time.

As a guide for the issuance of orders, and as a standing record of progress made in the shops. Major George D. Babcock, production manager of a great automo- bile company, has devised the "control board." Vertical boards are covered with a curtain of horizontal metal strips, some ten feet long and about six feet in depth. These curtains can be raised or lowered, and strips can be inserted or removed. Each strip is devoted to the graphic depiction of the progress made on some particular one of the numerous parts manufactured. There are about one hundred such strips onteach control board.

The horizontal distances along the strips represent work days, so that a vertical line at the extreme right of the control boards may be taken as represent- ing the date at which the car must be completed. A distance to the left of such a completion or zero line on any strip will then measure a definite number of work days prior to the date at which the

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��car should be ready to leave the factory. At the proper locations on each strip are small square blocks, known as "cages," each representing a specific operation in the manufacture of a particular part. The distance of each cage from the zero line indicates the date at which work on each operation should be commenced. For instance, take the strip devoted to Fart B, in the illustration below. This part is required thirty days before the automobile is completed, but no earlier, and, of course, no later. A cage is there- fore mounted on the Part B strip, thirty work days to the left of the zero line, to indicate that thirty days before the car's completion Part B must be finished.

Two mechanical operations are re- quired to complete Part B, each one of which requires a work day. A cage indicating the second operation is then mounted on the Part B strip to the left of the "finish" cage, separated from the latter by a space representing one work- ing day, and another cage for the first operation is mounted the same distance to the left of the cage for the second operation. The distance between cages represents the time required for the operation immediately to the left; the space occupied by the cages themselves denotes the time allotted to examining

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Diagram giving a close view of the control board. Schedule tape at top is moved one have been completed to date. Part A, and the other strips, show progress on the parts of

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