What We Learned Making a Plastic Injection Mold with a Chinese Mold Maker

Re:What We Learned Making a Plastic Injection Mold with a Ch... by mejutoco on Monday October 09, 2023 @08:25AM (#37819701)

> But we (software people), learned 20 years ago (from select Hardware companies) that this is backwards. > (See: Toyota Production System)

Ironically, Toyota is moving to gigacasting (large, single piece casting) to reduce costs [1]

[1]: https://insideevs.com/news/687481/toyota-new-ev-production-l...

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Re:What We Learned Making a Plastic Injection Mold with a Ch... by borissk on Monday October 09, 2023 @10:16AM (#37820678)

Very interesting.

I guess these giga casts are not very repairable.

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Re:What We Learned Making a Plastic Injection Mold with a Ch... by delfinom on Monday October 09, 2023 @11:34AM (#37821486)

Reparability hurts profit.

Every collision with body damage fixed by an autobody shop is stealing money from our overlords.

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Re:What We Learned Making a Plastic Injection Mold with a Ch... by Robotbeat on Monday October 09, 2023 @12:06PM (#37821828)

There are ways to repair, but even with more repairable methods, labor is so expensive that you likely totaled the car if you get to that level of damage.

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Re:What We Learned Making a Plastic Injection Mold with a Ch... by anymouse123456 on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @03:47AM (#37829516)

I love this, because of course there are specific opportunities when one must build many thousands of the same thing.

This doesn't detract at all from Toyota's ideal batch size of 1, or from the lessons they learned and shared on the way to such huge scale.

My claim is that we (the West) are failing to succeed in manufacturing (and have been for decades) because our focus is on quantity and the very people who could solve the core problems will be so busy planning out the next 2 years, they will not see the wave cresting above their heads.

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