[Stoves] Safety of stoves and conflicts of interests

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Ken

I agree with you.  And I think the point is made.  I can punch, press, weld,
form, produce, inspect and pack a Vesto stove in about 10 man-minutes total.
And that is not even an assembly line where people typically do 'something'
for about 10 seconds.

Your point is how many 'somethings' are happening at a time.  I am not sure
about the cell phones so I will ask and find out. It is breathtakingly fast.
The Agilent robotic inspection machines can x-ray, analyse, compare to a
statistically perfect example and 'pass' soldered joints at something like
40,000 per 5 minutes.

Something I have seen in the manufacturing world is that products typically
hit the shelves at 10 times their marginal production cost.  Things sold on
TV as a flash in the pan are marked up a further 150% or so.

Low cost stoves are better: typically selling for 2.5 to 3.5 times the
factory door price.  It is amazing how cheaply quite complex things can be
made in a modern factory.  How on earth can they sell a laptop for $500?) It
will be interesting to see what the price is of improved stoves which are
starting to emerge from China. Their productivity is really good.

Regards
Crispin


-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Boak [mailto:kenboak at stirlingservice.freeserve.co.uk] 
Sent: September 1, 2007 7:37 PM
To: crispin at newdawn.sz; Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Safety of stoves and conflicts of interests

Crispin & List,

"My son says cell phones having millions of tiny components and circuits, 
are
produced at the hardware manufacturing stage in 8 seconds. An X-Box is made
in 11 seconds. That is the capacity to produce cheap, working products."

Not strictly true,  a new cell phone might fall off the production line 
every 8 seconds, but rest assured it took over an hour to travel down the 
entire line.

The machines that place the components onto the pcb can place about 50,000 
components per hour.

8 seconds sounds about right for a cell phone that contains 100 or more pcb 
soldered parts.

Some years ago, Renault said that they could build their Twingo car in just 
4 hours, but they have built 2.4 million of them since 1993 - so  they are 
coming off the production line every 3 minutes.



Ken







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