dvcochran
Grandmaster
It is a challenge. These are Tier suppliers, not assembly facilities which require heavy orchestration and merge lines. A lot of it is facilitated by companies who have surplus/spare tooling, dies and webbing but no capacity to run them. Webbing lines and tooling for almost anything imaginable have many commonalities in regards to the presses, stranders, and equipment they run on. Plus the tooling is not too large so once it is installed in the presses/equipment (manually) they will not move again. No kind of quick change available.Something I've been wondering about those changeovers...
A shop that makes air filters I can see making a switch fairly easily; many of the materials are similar if not the same, just the way they're put together. Even there, though, I can see problems...
But for Ford, Chevy, Tesla, etc. to switch an assembly line from making cars to making ventilators... That seems a big change. Like if they've got robots designed to move car doors... how well are they going to handle the components for a ventilator? I have this image of me with my sausage fingers trying to handle the tiny Lego guns... I've seen one explanation of how they're supposedly switching an interior fan over to a portable filter set up... but even that seems like it's not a real simple changeover, especially as so much of the assembly line stuff today is automated.
There are quite a lot of conveyance, gauging, and robotic work we will have to do to get the two lines up and running at an acceptable level. It will also be fairly labor intensive. Some of the tooling is of a previous revision but is still N-95 rated so not an issue (slight appearance difference) in light of the need. There are some aesthetic things that will not done as well.