How do automated production lines achieve such precise and efficient operations?

[Pengwuino]

Is it just me or is anyone else just fascinated by production lines, especially the ones that do things at speeds that just look like blurs. I saw modern marvels i think and they were showing the tootsy roll factory and they were showing the individual tootsie rolls being made and it was just a blur of speed! Are these systems as insanely complex as they seem to be. It looks like everything has to be timed out to do the same thing at like the exact same time in coordination with a hundred other things!

 

[TsunamiJoe]

im not positive, but you also might want to note, they could have just sped up the video

but automatic production lines are nice, just it allows us to fire a lot of people, which hurts the economy

 

[Pengwuino]

Why has our economy grown with one of hte lowest unemployment rates on Earth with one of hte highest per-capitas in the past few decades while automation has boomed?

They also didnt speed up the video because there were somethings in the shot moving at normal speed (like people).

 

[FredGarvin]

Some lines are indeed that fast. Production equipment can become incredibly complex. Not only in terms of speed and ability, but also in terms of operating life. A factory can not make money if it's machines go down. Therefore a lot of investment goes into making them bullet proof and able to go for very long periods of time between work.

Some of the ones I find fascinating are the machines that wrap the individual candies. Those indeed work extremely fast. At a rate of over a million candies a day in some places, they have to be that fast.

There are a lot of really cool production machines out there.

 

[exequor]

I love modern marvels (except for the ones with 85% of the show being pre-21st century history). I don't think that they speed up the videos though because I was watching one where a robot was doing some work on a circuit board really fast and there were other elements the background that hinted that it was in real-time.

 

[brewnog]

They can be pretty amazing things, production lines.

I went round a Jaguar car factory a few years ago. The complexity of engineering you could see on the cars just pales into insignificance compared with the machines used to actually build them.

I was stood watching a welding robot reach into the fuel filler neck, turn round a few corners, and do about 6 spot-welds in a circle, before retracting itself back out and starting on the next bodyshell. The whole process took about 2 seconds. It was mesmerising, I could have stood there all day.

 

[Integral]

Some lines are indeed that fast. Production equipment can become incredibly complex. Not only in terms of speed and ability, but also in terms of operating life. A factory can not make money if it's machines go down. Therefore a lot of investment goes into making them bullet proof and able to go for very long periods of time between work.

Some of the ones I find fascinating are the machines that wrap the individual candies. Those indeed work extremely fast. At a rate of over a million candies a day in some places, they have to be that fast.

There are a lot of really cool production machines out there.

And they have to hire people to fix them when they do break.

That's where I come in.

 

[Pengwuino]

How in the world do they do what they do so accurately and quickly... crazy stuff.