John has been with ASSEMBLY magazine since February 1997. John was formerly with a national medical news magazine, and has written for Pathology Today and the Green Bay Press-Gazette. John holds a B.A. in journalism from Northwestern University, Medill School of Journalism.
Back in July 2008, we were thrilled when Volkswagen announced it was building a new assembly plant in Chattanooga, TN. Of course, any new assembly plant is big news to us, but a new automotive plant? Well, that’s peaches and cream, as a British friend likes to say.
A recent wordworking project has given me a greater appreciation of assembly line challenges. Has a home project ever informed your work in the assembly plant?
Servo-driven presses may have gained market share in recent years, but there’s still plenty of work for pneumatic and hydropneumatic presses on assembly lines.
When David J. Zabrosky, North American sales manager for Schmidt Technology, gets a call from a customer asking for a servo-driven assembly press, the first question he asks is, “Why?”
In April, electronics assembler Mack Technologies completed work on a substantial installation of money-saving technology at its factory in Westford, MA. The company didn’t get a new paste printer, reflow oven or pick-and-place machine. In fact, the plant’s slick new technology had nothing to do with assembly.
It has become fashionable lately for some U.S. companies to tout how they’ve reshored production from overseas. Baldor Electric Co. isn’t one of them—it never left. The company has been manufacturing electric motors, drives, bearings and other motion control products in the United States for decades.
Each year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration logs some 100,000 reports of adverse events related to medical devices. More than a third of those are due to human error.