Bringing industry home

Manufacturing may be coming back, but it’s unlikely to look like what it used to

Britain has led the world in de-industrialising, and the US is not far behind. The two symbols of industrial/social decay – empty factories and 1960s tower blocks inhabited by ‘the least among ye’ – have become low-cost primary venues for the makers of TV crime dramas. For years it appeared that the stand-off between labour and management – once given the grand portmanteau name ‘stagflation’– could never end.

But it has, either by automating production or by moving jobs overseas.

Before the 1950 season Norton were in the soup, their 1930s ‘garden gate’ racing chassis vulnerable to ‘snapping like a carrot, and having little grip. But the Irish McCandless brothers, Rex and Cromie, through the 1940s had built prototype chassis of stiffer construction, with supple hydraulic damping in place of the ‘sticking pillar’ suspension adopted in desperation after Stanley Wood’s sensational 1935 Senior TT win on a Guzzi twin with swing-arm suspension. At this point, even Donald Heather (who seemingly opposed all change on principle) was prepared to try something new. After much testing the McCandless twin-loop chassis with telefork and swing-arm was adopted for the race team.

McCandless had to make the team’s chassis himself, as the factory had only one means of joining chassis tubes – the time-honoured method of furnace brazing, with cast or forged lugs bored to receive tubes, each joint wiped with ‘spelter’ – a mixture of metal-cleaning flux and finely divided brazing alloy. McCandless used a technique developed in aviation (Rex worked for Short Brothers in Belfast) – low-temperature silver brazing, which could form nicely radiused fillets without having to heat the tubing enough to destroy its strength.

The Senior that year was a Norton sweep – 1-23, with the great Geoff Duke at their head. The innovative chassis would carry Norton to a last world 500 title the next year.

Since that time, older motorcyclists have revered the name of Ken Sprayson, who constructed a great many successful racing chassis in the manner set forth by McCandless. The chassis worked well, but their production was slow and skill-intensive. This ran counter to the industrial force that had created plenty for the world’s expanding middle classes – cost-controlled mass production. Cars, furniture and houses built by hand can be owned only by those who can afford the labour of many. But as the labour content of products was reduced by the techniques of mass production, their sales expanded, creating a mass market.

When political leaders today speak of ‘bringing jobs home’ we imagine our grandparents, then men in flat caps and women (mainly in wartime) in smocks, crowding through factory gates to take their places at hundreds of production machines, driven by overhead line shafting and belts. When a recent movie script called for such a Kaiser War scene, it could be found only in East Europe. That flat cap world is gone.

When I visited Kawasaki’s H1 chassis production line in 1972, I saw a miniature train of coupled wagons. Atop each was a set of lever clamps, holding bent tubes in place. As a wagon arrived at a worker’s station, he stepped on to its running-board with cables over one shoulder, and began a series of welds. When finished, he stepped down and returned to await the next wagon.

When Japanese industry automated aluminium chassis welding around 1986, there were still many inches of weld required in each chassis, and there remained difficult areas requiring completion by a skilled human.

Through each iteration of design, parts have arrived on the line closer to net shape and requiring perhaps three to five welds. No longer are motorcycle chassis assembled from cast or machined steering-head and swing-arm pivot, joined by pressed or extruded beams. All parts are cast.

In the early days of automated machining, workers known as ‘stagers’ loaded unfinished parts on to ‘tombstone tooling’. Each tombstone had four indexable faces, each face covered with parts to be machined. Once the stager had finished loading, the machine cycle began – the machine using one tool for all the operations for which it was appropriate, then changing to another tool from its rotary tool carousel, continuing to completion.

We were assured in the 1950s and 60s that automation would create rather than destroy jobs, as each machine would require a corps of ‘minders’ to keep it operating. Think about that: business has to watch every penny, and could therefore not adopt a production system that increased costs.

The ideal of the present is the ‘lights-out’ plant, in which no human is present, and production manages itself. Stagers are gone, replaced wherever volume allows with automatic transfer. Machines lubricate themselves, and monitor tool condition (rising motor wattage reveals dull tools).

Today, manufacturing depends less than ever before on a skilled workforce. All that is really needed is social stability, shelter, and power into which to wire the machines.