1960s WORK
0101 BTR moulding shop
In some respects the general moulding shop at BTR should have been the least of my worries. It represented the history of production operations at BTR, not the future of them. Following the business dictum that you should support the winners, I should have been looking elsewhere to spend my time. But, like so much of British industry, the day-to-day problems caused by this historical black hole absorbed ever more of my time. Again like so much of industry, it made no net profit. In fact it made a net loss but, again like so much of industry, it paid for a massive proportion of the overheads; so I couldn't ignore it.
As I have said, it was job shop. This meant that our customers asked us to quote for producing their rubber parts from the presses we had. This meant the generation of the products we manufactured were largely out of our hands, and the business we got was very price sensitive. The moulding shop was, therefore, stuffed full with as many presses as we could get. But these were, unfortunately, almost all antediluvian. We only had six relatively new presses. The others went back to the 19th-century. This was a problem faced by an industry which just didn't generate enough margin for new equipment. The only new equipment I bought, for this type of work, was a calendar -- since our existing one was falling apart -- and the one I bought to replace it was second-hand and had originally been made in 1890!
The whole process started with the production of the rubber. The first stage was weighing out all the ingredients; sulphur to vulcanise, carbon to strengthen, and fillers and various other chemicals to add specific properties. Of course, the main ingredient was rubber; though there was a vast range of rubbers, from artificial to natural latex. For the larger runs we used a mixer called a Banbury. This was the size of a small house, and had rotating screws inside which mixed the product. Having mixed the products for the requisite time, and at the same time heated it to help it mix better, the load was dropped down to a bin on wheels which was then taken to where it was to be used. The only time I had problems with this was during the electricity blackout which resulted from the industrial disputes in 1970. Only once, though that was enough, the electricity went off the middle of the mixing cycle. I found myself, in my best suit along with the departmental managers in their overalls, hacking lumps of raw rubber out of the bowels of the machine before they could set solid and write off the whole machine.
The other method of mixing, which predated the Banbury and which was used for smaller amounts, was hand mixing on ‘twin bowls’. These were massive cylinders rotating with a small gap between them. The rubber was thrown into that gap and churned around until it coated the bowls (cylinders). At that stage the manual operator used a knife to cut the rubber off and throw it back between the bowls, so it was mixed even further. At the time when I was there these machines were at least protected by safety stops. The very real danger was that the rubber cut in this process could drag the operator into the bowls. As soon as his body touched the safety bar, however, the machine would stop. In a previous era, however, there was no such luxury and many mixing operatives lost their arms. This was the reason that rubber company head offices always had their lifts run by attendants; this was the job that was reserved for operatives who had had lost their arms to the mixers! A similar accident occurred while I was there, in that an operative managed to get his hand caught in a calendar -- which was messy enough.
The only other big accident was when an operative tossed a bag of sulphur into one of the skips, and it turned out the pack was mislabelled. It wasn't (as it was labelled) antistatic and, as the dust went down the shoot, the sparks from the static caused the sulphur to explode in the face of the operative. This happened while I was hosting an international meeting of BTR managers from around Europe. I sat there, with fire engines roaring around the building, not knowing what on earth was happening. Fortunately, apart from some serious injuries to the operative, the factory didn't burn down. Rubber factories are a considerable fire hazard. Even a small fire can rapidly wipe out the whole plant. Accordingly, whenever a fire alarm went off in the factory, fire engines started out towards us from up to 20 miles around; and we would attract perhaps ten or a dozen fire engines within a matter of minutes.
Back again to the moulding floor, the presses stretched out into the distance in what would have been neat rows if there hadn't been so many different types of presses. This was not because they were fulfilling a different job, though some did, but was mainly because they had been bought second-hand as job lots. As I said earlier, much of the industry was like this. Largely this was set by the machinations of the car companies. They deliberately held down the margins by playing games with their suppliers. When I was there, one of the car companies booked around half a million items to be called off over six months. Needless to say, it was cheaper for us to make the half million in one big run. They were then called off, by the car manufacturer, a month at a time. After three months they came to us and said the whole thing was cancelled. In essence it was blackmail, since they knew we had a warehouse full of parts. They told us that they would only take what we had in the warehouse if we offered it at half the price! This was a cut-throat business, but it could have been said that at least it got very low prices for the motor industry. The real problem, which killed the motor industry in the UK, was that none of its suppliers was ever able to get enough money to invest in new equipment. This meant that we were all competing with old equipment, and this was inefficient equipment which was much more costly to run. Thus the short-term gains by the car industry resulted in long-term higher costs -- which its continental competitors didn't suffer.
Our one genuinely new bit of equipment was used for finishing products. It was a cryogenic tumbler in which the rubber parts were also frozen with carbon dioxide. In it the rubber turned very hard, and the flashing -- which oozed out between the press plates -- broke off easily, to leave us with a finished product simply by tumbling the components.
Then products went through quality control. This was something of a disaster, since most of the quality control was quite simply visual inspection. If product didn't have a big hole in it, it would get through inspection. We did use AQL on some products. This was where a sample of the product was taken and tested, sometimes to destruction and always extensively. AQLs were Acceptable Quality Levels. Hence, the idea was that a certain percentage of failure was acceptable. The corollary was that the smaller the percentage failure you wanted then the higher the cost in achieving that. Certainly our quality levels were very low, as were those of most rubber moulding job shops. This concept ruled the roost until, later in decade, the Japanese simply decided it was an irrelevant concept and went for zero defects instead. It turned out that if you put in sufficient effort into the design and quality standards, you could actually produce almost nil defects -- and this actually saved large quantities of money rather than adding to costs.
hits