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Gathered in Maple Lake at last week's ASME
meeting were (front) John Rivers of Product Technologies
Inc., Brett Lance of Tec Ease Inc., Jerry Smith of
Caterpillar Inc., (back) Jerry Kaminski of Woodward Governor
Company, David Jakstis of Boeing, Don Day of Tec Ease Inc.,
Maurice Meyer of General Motors Powertrain, Charles Husum of
Boeing, Robert Hoyt of Le Sueur Incorporated and David
Honsinger. |
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Decisions were being made in Maple
Lake last week that will have an impact on manufacturing across
the country and throughout the world.
Those decisions are the result of a meeting hosted by John
Rivers of Product Technologies Inc. for an American Society of
Mechanical Engineers committee which sets the standards for
casted, forged and molded parts.
In attendance were industry experts from across the country
representing such manufacturing giants as Boeing, General Motors
and Caterpillar Inc. |
"The ASME committee meets twice each
year and is chaired by Don Day, a-former community college
professor who is now a business owner in New York.
Day said the committee is the result of a voluntary national
effort that was initiated when the lack of uniform manufacturing
standards caused headaches for engineers.
The problem arose back in the '50s
and '60s when large corporations were writing their own
standards and the military had their own standard," Day said.
"If you were a supplier making parts, the rules were different,
depending on which drawing you were looking at."
Day said that now, the ASME committees not only fine-tune
national manufacturing standards, but also work to address the
changes that have occurred through advances in technology.
"Technology is changing and we're demanding more and more from
the parts we manufacture," Day said. "As we make more demands on
our products to be of higher quality, we expect more out of the
plants that produce the parts, so we have to do a better job of
defining these parts," he said. As an example of that
ever-improving quality, Day said the margin for variability
between parts, or tolerance, used to be the thickness of a human
hair, which is ;002 of an inch. "Now we're talking about
tolerances at 20 millionths of an inch," Day said. "Customers'
expectations are always increasing so products have to get
better. And we're bringing in concepts that were never discussed
in the past." One of those concepts is a universal language for
engineering.
"It's a world economy now," Day said. "We're coming up with
standards based on symbols that can be recognized no matter what
your native language."
Although there are no universal world standards, Day said the
U.S. standards have considerable influence. "We impact the
world," Day said. "There is an international organization and
the U.S. has led the world in this area.
"We monitor international standards to be compatible and help
guide those standards. It would be nice if there were one world
standard. "But you eat an elephant one bite at a time."
Day said the experts on the ASME committees are all volunteers,
with some companies footing the bill for their travel or others
paying for expenses out of their own pockets.
"Any time you can take dirt–raw materials– and add value to it,
it builds wealth," Day said. "What we're doing here is to
improve the wealth-building of our nation.
"We all feel that we are doing something that is good for the
nation." |
