Worthington is in the process of upgrading its pick and place machinery. In order to do that requires a long process of evaluating potential new suppliers. Chris walks us through what that journey is like, why a contract manufacturer may need to upgrade its equipment, his recent in-person visit to one of the suppliers they've narrowed down to, and more!
pickplacepodcast.com
Worthington is in the process of upgrading its pick and place machinery. In order to do that requires a long process of evaluating potential new suppliers. Chris walks us through what that journey is like, why a contract manufacturer may need to upgrade its equipment, his recent in-person visit to one of the suppliers they've narrowed down to, and more!
pickplacepodcast.com
We'll just crack on. We'll do it live.
Melissa:I'll keep that in there and see who gets the reference.
Chris:Oh, Lordy, Lordy. All right. Beautiful. I'm excited. Here we go. Welcome to the Pick, Place, Podcast, a show where we talk about electronics, This is Chris Denney with Worthington.
Melissa:And this is Melissa Hough with CircuitHub
Chris:Welcome back, Melissa.
Melissa:welcome back, Chris.
Chris:I like to mix up my my, my intro the
Melissa:I've noticed.
Chris:yeah, but you know why? Cause I listened to some shows and the, and the guy says it the same way. Every single time. It almost sounds recorded. And I like, I like people to know that we do that live. I don't know why
Melissa:Every time I'm editing it I'm like that was different. And I don't know if I like it. We're not being consistent.
Chris:I like the inconsistency. I like the spon spontaneity. I'm going to just going to start changing the words on you too.
Melissa:speaking of spontaneity
Chris:Yeah. This this entire episode is going to be spontaneous. All right. So let's level with you. We have more than full-time jobs. Melissa and I both work very, very hard at just what we do every day. So this is kind of a side project for us, and sometimes we
Melissa:Although to be fair, what we are going to be speaking about today,
Chris:That's right. That's right. Before we get into the topic of the day and how super prepared we are for it,
Melissa:Oh yeah, #fiducialsftw FTW
Chris:It warmed my little heart that everybody reached out to us so that I That was just, it was the best.
Melissa:the best
Chris:It was the best. it's because it's like, talk about pet peeve, right? Like improper fiduciary is, it might be my biggest pet peeve Oh, oh yeah. Oh, you just ask anybody who works with me, just they know, It's the worst. And so people reached out to us with pictures of their circuit boards, a screencap showing the design of the board with fiducials on them. That was just wonderful. It was so great to see. It just, it was great, especially because when I was getting these messages, which is such a stressful environment and it was just, it was delightful. It was delightful to see that. Ask me about my airport experience Melissa.
Melissa:Why were you in an airport, Chris?
Chris:So as part of, as part of the topic of the show today, so I, you was it two episodes ago now where we have, we get self-doubt right. And we wonder. You know, are we doing the right thing? Are we, are we making the right content? I'm peeling back the curtain a little bit here on the production of the You know, I always wonder that and, and everybody tells me yes, but you
Melissa:are they just being nice or
Chris:Are they just being nice? You know? But anyway, we're just going to go on the assumption that if we find it Someone will find it interesting. Besides my grandmother, somebody will find this interesting.
Melissa:who has been fast asleep for a long time now
Chris:yeah. Ever since she got through the opening and then she was like, Nope, that's enough. I heard my, I heard my grandson's voice. Yeah, I was traveling to visit a pick and place supplier and a potential, I should And I thought it might be interesting to talk about, like, not that the What exactly does it take to get a circuit board into the world? Well, this is something that has to get done. You have to buy machines oh yeah. Without the machines, no circuit boards. no circuit boards and you can make your own, but, you could also At a certain point, you're going to rely on suppliers. I just figured it might be an interesting thing to talk about
Melissa:yeah.
Chris:So this has been a project that's been ongoing for, at least Other people can evaluate machines quickly. I can't not for our environment anyway. Right? So for our environment where we're taking orders from anybody around the And also we don't want to make a million dollar decision and make a poor one. I don't want to get into specific numbers, but to, for a company like us make a whole lot more than a million dollars to pay for it a whole lot more. You make a decision like this carefully. So it takes a lot of time. I have actually been working on this evaluation process at least since like the So over a year we've been working
Melissa:yeah. Around when we started the podcast, I think,
Chris:literally. yeah. literally. And why exactly did we need to look at new pickup place gear? The equipment we have has served us well and has done a fine job and has And a lot of customers are very happy with, but it takes a lot And we feel that new pick and place gear can get us to that point more easily. Less manual labor, less headaches, less rework you know, greater uptime, all these of the day, you're having to make less of an investment in the day to day operations Right? So in theory, if your day to day operations cost you X dollars with your a million dollars on new equipment, it should be, X minus, whatever. You're trying to reduce what it takes to do that. While also preparing for the future because we have, we have big plans and we Right. And, and we gotta prepare for the future. So how exactly does a company like Worthington or CircuitHub. Cause we're both working on this. It's a, to be clear, it's a joint project between the two of us. I have a counterpart at CircuitHub that's helping me with it. And yeah, it all starts out pretty simple. You got to reach out to a sales guy, right? You got to contact somebody who sells equipment and say, okay, what do you got? And I mean, that sounds simple enough, but there's so there's actually Oh, yeah, I like just, to name a few off the top of my head anybody, if anybody themselves are shopping for pick and place gear. Cause I do know that some circuit board manufacturers listen to this too, but Probably the three biggest name in this industry is a company called Fuji. They're a Japanese company. Probably the largest market share in the world for pick and place gear. Almost certainly, certainly by their metrics and by most metrics I've seen You have a company called ASM, which used to be called Siemens now, Massive company. They sold that division of their company to this company called ASM, which But largely all the engineering, everything is still done in Germany. And then you also have Panasonic which everybody knows Panasonic. Those are kind of the three, the three big gorillas in this industry, And of course it should be no surprise that a lot of those But they're all around the world. There's plenty of automotive manufacturers here in the United Then you start to get into what they call them like a tier two manufacturers. And there's a whole lot of them, a whole lot of them. You have a company called Juki, which they have a great brand. They have a great history of making machines, selling machines. They also sell sewing machines. It's interesting if you pay attention. Yeah. If you pay attention to like movies where they're like panning through watching a show where they're making clothes or something, you'll It's pretty funny. And like, because I see the logo all the time and from what I do, you Then you also have a company called maybe you've heard of them Yamaha. The, you know, it's like one of these, you know, they make everything Of course they do.
Melissa:just playing on one of their keyboards earlier today.
Chris:Exactly. Exactly. They make a lot of pick and place machines, nice machines. You've got you've got an American company, as far as I know the only There might be one more out of Connecticut, but I think they may have but the only American pick and place company I can think of that's left is right out of Binghamton, New York, they make, they make a nice machine, I used to I used to be a manufacturer's rep, a sales rep for them. Then you've got formerly Samsung may have heard of them. they used to make, pick And place machines, but then they They sold that division of their company to Hanwha. Which is a horrible American butchering of the Korean word, but I'm thinking of, there's also a company called Euro Placer. I think they're like a French slash UK. I'm not really sure where their headquarters is. Exactly, but they're a, you're obviously European pick and place machine company. Oh gosh, I could go on and on, but you see, here's what happens when you start really, really complicated, really, really quickly for somebody like us with If you are you know, somebody like Jabil or Sanmina or Apple will directly evaluate, pick and place machines for Foxconn. They're going to have a team of people. And all they do is evaluate, pick and place machine, right? Like they're going to get this done in like two weeks
Melissa:And here we have Chris.
Chris:here we have Chris who can spend like an hour a day, maybe, maybe an There's so much that goes into trying to figure out what your needs are. Literally just forget the features that these machines offer and You've got to figure out what you need
Melissa:Yeah. And not only that our needs change very quickly.
Chris:very quickly, very quickly, like for example. So we currently have mycronic that's another company I didn't talk about. I'm sure we've talked about them on the podcast before, but that's currently of Sweden and they have an American outfit here in the Boston region. That suited our needs very, very well for many years. I think we started with them about eight years ago. Maybe a little more than that could be closer to nine years now. Yeah, let's just call it eight years. I can't remember exactly. And at the time that upgrade was huge for us. We got all kinds of things. We didn't have the ability to program our machines offline before we got the skier. We couldn't reliably place 0402s before we got these, like we were kind of You know, but we were a small company back then a very different company than funny. You know, when, when you live in it, it feels the same, but if you, if you take And that was a huge leap forward for us. It really was a huge leap forward for us. And we, we considered sticking with them and just decided it wasn't the They make a fine machine and plenty of people are going to be happy with them. I don't want to say that they're not a fine supplier, but just for what we're No hard feelings just. Not really fitting our needs anymore. So we start to look at other suppliers. And so here you are looking at 6, 7, 8, 9 different suppliers. And how do you narrow all this down? You talk to everybody on the floor, who's actually using the equipment. You figure out their challenges, you figure out where you're losing time. For example, I can point to one specific example of a specific So when you load a pick and place machine you need to make sure that the components Now I know this sounds obvious, right? It's like, well, duh, of course you have to do that, but it's not as Depending on the style of machine, there's a few different ways this weeds a little bit here, but I think it'll help illustrate the point. You know, we can, we can use this as sort of a lens to focus in on one particular And then you, you know, you can use your imagination to But when you, when you plug a, Mycronic feeder into a machine you, you have a And what that means is your pick and place head is on one axis, a single axis. So in other words, it's only moving in one direction left and right. It is not moving forward and backward. The, the circuit board itself is on a separate access and So in order to pick up parts, you have to present those parts to the pick It has to be perfectly lined up because again, that pick and So that requires a process that we call trimming the feeders. In other words you, you, I don't know where the term trim comes That doesn't make any sense at all. Why would you use the word trim?
Melissa:You're not cutting anything, but yeah,
Chris:Yeah, it's like trim. What does that come from? I don't even know where that comes from. There's actually a phrase for where you say a word often enough I forgot what that's called. That's a thing it's legit a thing. Trim, trim, trim, and all of a sudden, you just don't even hear the word anymore. Isn't that fun? We'll leave that in. We'll leave that in for the folks at home. They're going to love that.
Melissa:If anyone knows, let us know.
Chris:Yeah. that'd be cool. Be cool to find out anyway. So, and what that requires is an operator standing in front of a machine, look monitor and the camera's pointing down at that feeder and they're pressing this tape until it lines up exactly with this this X axis of the pick and And it's especially time consuming because it's on a machine Like, ideally you want to do all that stuff offline. You don't want to have to do it. You like, you want your machine still running while you're Now, obviously there's certain things, you know, you can't change the width of You can only change it with the conveyor, you know, once So when you go from job a to job b you can change it with the conveyor. There's certain things you cannot change while you're still running, but as things and you want to prepare things offline off the machine, you know? So the machine is still running. So when we've been talking to these other pick a place And when I would ask them a question like, okay, so how what's, what's And they would, they, they kept talking about how you do it offline. I'm like, Yeah. But how do you do it on the machine? And they're like, why, why would you do it on the machine? Like, well, hold on a second, what do you mean? so show me, show me what you mean. So they they'll, you know, they'll we were doing a lot of this over zoom, so they up your feeder and you know, you advance it and you reverse it, blah, blah, blah. And until you get it exactly where you need it, and it was like an aha moment. It was like, Oh my goodness, you, you sometimes don't know what
Melissa:Yeah.
Chris:Right. I, I, I'm trying to think of what you experience, you know, in the real world. I'll give you an example. I'll give you an. Okay. So here I am living, living in, in new England and go, go to
Melissa:Oh my God. Is this going to be an Australia thing?
Chris:That would be great if it was no, it's not, it's not, but you, you go, you It is cold. It is cold. Like no, no way around it. It's cold. You get adjusted quick, but it is cold. And you're from California. I'm from New Jersey. New Jersey is not that much further from new England, but the ocean And the ocean in California is much, much warmer than New England than Southern California anyway. And if you've grown up in new England and all, you know, You don't know any better until all of a sudden you decide to visit Melissa And you're like, holy cow, I didn't realize an ocean could be this warm.
Melissa:or Australia
Chris:Or Australia,
Melissa:Even warmer
Chris:much warmer. Like, you don't know that something could be different or something could A very meta example of that. I didn't know how much easier Descript not sponsored, would make my life for editing Awesome. I'm so excited to hear that. Yeah. That's an example you don't know until you start to investigate and you go, wow. There is a much better way of doing this. And so that, that one experience sort of opened the flood gates to. Okay. What else are we missing out on? You know, like what, what other opportunities are there to improve our so that we can reduce the lead time, increase the yield, reduce the amount Can we go from running a pick and place line with five people to Like how can you, and when I say running a pick and place line, if a to this, please understand five people is not just pressing buttons It's everything it's setting up feeders it's stencil printing. It's reflowing, it's like, okay, it's a lot of people. All right. Anyway. Can you possibly reduce the amount of overhead? Can you increase the speed with which you get boards through the machine? In other words you know, if a typical board gets through a machine and And now what does that do to our operation? Can we, can we reduce the footprint on our floor so that we have more floor And I mean, I could just go on and on and on with all kinds of scenarios. So that's the kind of digging work you do and it's it's hours and hours zoom calls, phone calls, PowerPoint presentations, some good, some really And, and the truth is. Everybody's making really good gear nowadays. Like you can buy almost anything and you're going to be successful You know, that you're, you're gonna be successful with it. So now you're sort of getting into the, like, you know, the nitty-gritty details. Okay. Do you have this particular feature that we're looking for? For example, we one of the things we, we like to brag about because the ability to verify the values of components that do not have a marking. So for example, a lot of 0402 resistors and capacitors will pretty much A larger resistor might have a marking on it might say 1 0 1, But when you get really small resistors, they no longer print So how do you verify that you're definitely putting the right resistor supplier put the wrong component in a bag in late or labeled the bag wrong. Right? So they said they sent you a 10k resistor, but they How do you verify that that's not wrong? And this has happened to us often enough that it's something we have to check for. And because when it does happen, it's super, super painful, like really a reel of 10,000 parts and you put 10,000 of the wrong part down, but. It can be super painful. So having a pick and place machine that can automatically verify the In other words, if this machine could not do that and end of discussion, no So that quickly eliminated a few potential suppliers, right? And then you start to just kind of pick away at these various features. Oh, you don't have that. Okay. We have to eliminate you. You don't have this. Okay. We have to eliminate you. And it's taken us over a year to finally come down to basically two, And because I think I may have mentioned in the previous show, I I don't think I want to reveal who it is that we're looking And once we do decide and we place that order, I'm really, really excited about for our customers and what it means for supplying machines to, or supplying So we've narrowed it down to two people, so, okay. So now when you get to this point, you really start to dig deep, right? Like pretty much everything at this point, it's just kind of been a You know, okay. Maybe I'll sit through a remote demo with your lab and show me with your camera, And now that we've narrowed it down to two, it's a matter of. Literally visiting these manufacturers. So there's one particular manufacturer that I visited last week. They're in Chicago. Hence why I was on a plane, which we'll get to in the pet There's so much wrong with the airplane process, it's it's Oh boy... We'll
Melissa:Save it for later.
Chris:We'll save it. We'll save it. It's just building up. But it's quite an experience. It really is quite an interesting experience to visit We're making a significant investment of my time to go out there, certainly, the hotel and the rental car, but also the time away from the factory, right? There's value added things I could be doing. There's people I could be helping there's answers, that I could be making that It's not just the fact that I'm not physically present, but it's also Right. I have to stay focused on this. And if people have questions, like somebody sends you a slack message, well, I'm not going to see it until eight o'clock at night, So I can't answer questions. So there is a major investment to a company like Worthington or CircuitHub So you don't take that responsibility lightly. This is not just an opportunity to go like yuck it up and have No, you gotta, you gotta do some due diligence here. And it was a great experience. I had a chance to meet the executive vice president of the company. He's responsible for all of the Americas, north and south America for this company. Good sized company, too. This is not a small company. So he was very gracious with his time and I appreciated him spending time with me. You have, of course your local sales rep, your regional sales rep, and then engineers, people from their service department, people responsible for They're also making a significant investment of their time and their and CircuitHub that they have the right solution for our needs. It takes a lot of work and it's like so overwhelming, because you're like, you feel the pressure of I'm spending X amount of dollars of my company's money. They're spending X amount of dollars of their company's money. Let's make sure we're not wasting each other's time here That's why you don't go to visit nine different manufacturers. You try to narrow it down to one or two before you go to It was a great, great, excellent, excellent visit. I learned so much, and it's funny, when we sat down together and you know, my job here is for the next two days to eliminate you as a potential supplier, And they made it very challenging. They had some excellent solutions to every problem I threw at them, you know, maybe not everything perfectly, but really darn close. The best thing you can experience as an engineer is going to evaluate their engineers thought about the problem and came up with a solution. And if they thought about it the same way you. It's like, oh, this is great. It's so exciting to see like, okay, somebody else understood this pain that So for example, back to our earlier example about trimming feeders, they You just want to put the feeders in the machine and start running. And they thought about that and the best way to handle that. It was just, it was delightful. It was so refreshing to see other engineers think about problems, the exact It was, it was quite a nice experience. You know, I've heard stories about sort of back in the day, the nineties And it was nothing but like. You know, I, I don't think they were all like this, but a lot of times it they'd, they'd get there and they'd be like, they'd talk about a few things. And they're like, all right, let's go out drinking. And if they liked you, they buy your machines. It was like, oh man, Nope, not anymore. Not at all. It is so intense. And if you have time for dinner afterward, you might go, you know, but a lot of And that's the other thing. Talk about an investment made. These folks, they live there in the Chicago area. They have families to get home to and, you know, it's, they're not staying there until seven o'clock at night and sticking with me. I'm very grateful and appreciative of, people willing to do that because It's going to take an enormous amount of revenue to pay for And it's the kind of purchase you make once in a decade well, it's the decade you might make that purchase multiple times because you add a second But once you've made that decision and you're confident in it and it's So it's really, it's like a decades long decision. And Yeah. so it's, it's, it's wonderful that there are people who are
Melissa:Do you have something scheduled for the other supplier
Chris:Yup. Yup. That's a potentially the week of November 8th. oh, I didn't even touch on. So, so you you'll, you'll go to visit the manufacturer. Certainly. So like, I went to this one in Chicago last week and I'm going And when you, when you're doing this, you're also taking the
Melissa:oh,
Chris:Right. So, yeah. So like you want to buy a car, you're going to talk to other people. Who've bought that car, not just the dealership, right. It's like, oh, Hey, you know, I wanna, I want to buy a Camry share. You're going to, you're going to go to Toyota, talk to Toyota. And you're going to go to your friend who has a Camry. Huh? How do you like your Camry? You know, it's that's what you do. So, we're probably going to be visiting one of their customers this That gets really tricky though, because a lot of times they don't want you like
Melissa:Yeah. Yeah.
Chris:So. And they're like a competitor with a podcast. No, you're not coming in here. So that gets really tricky. You have to kind of two types of businesses that buy this gear. You have businesses that make things for other people and you have businesses And so, unfortunately, you know, we want to see, we wanna see people who We don't want to see necessarily people making things for themselves. However, unfortunately, a lot of times that's, that's
Melissa:They don't want to reveal their own processes. And of course,
Chris:or there people, right. Sometimes like they're worried that you're trying to poach their people It's it's they they're like, Nope, Nope, Nope, no competitors in the building, and let's be honest, not many people have a whole lot of magic sauce when it I appreciate it. I can understand why people feel that way. Worthington does not feel that way. We are. We are quite comfortable with competitors coming to visit But you know,
Melissa:CircuitHub CircuitHub definitely not.
Chris:Definitely not comfortable. No, no, but again, as we talk about many, many times CircuitHub Very different operation than Worthington. So that's where we're going to visit. We're going to visit a company that makes things for themselves And that'll be interesting then, then you can, a lot of times contract So, I know a lot of contract manufacturers from my previous work And yeah, so you just call them up and you say, Hey, are you using so-and-so's gear? What do you think of it? You know, how's it working? How's their service? How much maintenance does it require? What breaks on it all the time? What are you constantly having to repair? How do the nozzles hold up? You just start to ask them all of these sorts of questions to try to Just like, you'd ask somebody, does it go through breaks all the time? Is the air conditioning still holding up? Are you having to replace the tires every 10,000 miles? How does it work? So, it's a, it's an in-depth process and you go through all this I don't like disappointing customers. Right. And you, as you grow, if, if you're growing with your existing equipment handle, you know, I'm not, I'm not saying these are not our numbers, but equipment was, we bought it when we were doing $2 million in revenue, and And when you bought that equipment and you thought, okay, we could probably And all of a sudden you're doing 10 million and you're like, how this is nuts. You know, you're breaking the system at a certain point. And it becomes it becomes painful. That's kind of where we're at. We've been growing and selling more than ever and pleasing a lot of customers. We bought this platform for X number of dollars and capacity, There's just, there's no other way to describe it. We're exceeding the expected capacity of this equipment, And now, now we got to do something about it because I want customers to be happy. I want them, I want them to get their boards on time. I want them to get it with the quality they expect and the The only way to get there is to continue to make investments in your company. And Yeah, we're just doing the best we can with it.
Melissa:Yeah, it'll be really interesting to see this journey. And even for me to find out what you choose seem like a
Chris:It will be, it'll be a big reveal episode. That'll be fun. Maybe that'll be our first video episode. What do you think
Melissa:Oh yeah. That'd be cool.
Chris:that would be cool. to kind of like show off like the equipment we bought. It's going to be many months from now because I don't know if
Melissa:Really
Chris:It's, it's interesting. I was talking to them and I said I said, you know, if we, you know, whoever we back to us and they say, Hey, look, we can't get you a machine for six months. Then that's going to be, maybe not a deal breaker, but we're going to either look faster or is it depending on how close the evaluation is obviously, or we'll just Like, cause everybody's buying up used machines to. And the interesting thing is they said they said, well, look, What we have been doing for our customers is if they really want the equipment and like Ford and their F-150 is they're shipping them to customers without So like, they'll do the whole machine, the wire harness and everything. They'll put all the test circuit boards inside of it so that they can, they blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, verify the accuracy and everything. And then once they verify that it all works, then they pull out the You'd have to agree to it, obviously Worthington would have to say that it in your building and you'd line it up and get it in line to get power. You get air, you get all ready. And then finally, you know, they ship the board to you and one that's literally what we're talking about at this point.
Melissa:that's such an ironic problem.
Chris:Isn't it?
Melissa:We can't build circuit boards cause we don't have the parts to build the
Chris:It's like the most meta problem ever. It's unbelievable.
Melissa:So, would the machine work if they were to do that? No, right.
Chris:If they were to do what, if they were to install it without circuit boards?
Melissa:Yeah.
Chris:No, not at all.
Melissa:I'm assuming most factories don't just have extra Like you can't really get rid of your existing equipment.
Chris:That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So. you, you you, you either have a situation where that's acceptable You know, or you find some hybrid, maybe you maybe you ask them to hold it Right. So for example there's companies from all over the world, like I said, in your warehouse there in Chicago to take the delivery and hold it for Okay. And then it's just a two day truck drive. Right. Then you get it to us pretty quick versus wait for it to You know, and then it's like, okay, well that's going be a while. You could rent a short-term storage facility, right? You, you know, if you find a big enough one, you could put it in a And there's ways of doing things like that. But there's also the potential where maybe it's a non-critical component, right? Maybe this is a circuit board that's designed to automate the And it's like, well, w w we can manually install the pin supports for now. So then you can still run. Right. So it could be a situation like that. If it's a motor control card. No, you're not. you're Yeah. You're not going to be able to run, but it may be at some accessory you can Yeah. It's it's wild, man. It's just, it's nuts. I've never seen anything like this. Never. And I've, I've been in this industry for at least 20 years now. I was trying to do the math. Pretty sure. I started when I was 16. So Yeah. going on going on 21 years now, and I've never seen anything like has been shortages in the past for like, there was a tantalum capacitor There was a multilayer chip capacitor shortage a few years back every now microchip maybe or NXP, or, you know, somebody kind of a product line run a bunch of ventilators or something and they use all these tools, you know, Just some, something just chews up the supply. This is there's never, this is, this is across the board. This is every manufacturer. This is every, It's everything it's.
Melissa:bad.
Chris:It's bad. And what makes it worse is when, when people like Melissa and Chris nervous and they start hoarding everything, and it makes it worse. It's unfortunate, but you know, we'll get through it. Hopefully you're listening to this in the year 2023. And you're like, what's shortage, no shortage as that's such a thing It, these things always correct. You know, what'll happen is the people that were hoarding for so long, And so now all these accessory parts that supported this certain So a broker comes in and says, Hey, I'll buy all that up from you because you You know, there's, there's ways of getting it to level out. It's just a matter of money and time. It'll happen. I'm convinced it'll happen, but it sounds like it's not going to be soon. I'm not sure. Do you remember which episode we had with Digi-Key on the show? If you haven't listened to it, that's one it's still relevant. It is still relevant. That episode. That was, gosh, That
Melissa:That was a while
Chris:April, may, something like that, but yeah, still relevant, still, Right? So people can't even get spares. Oh, here's, here's an interesting thing while I was there, we're warehouse and they have all these machines gutted, nice looking machines. Right? Well, they, they definitely showed some age, but they're all gutted. Like everything's removed from them and I'm like, what's going on with these? He goes, we can't make spare parts for our customers. So we're buying old equipment and gutting the equipment to get them spares
Melissa:wow.
Chris:Talk about compounding problems, right?
Melissa:Yeah,
Chris:Crazy.
Melissa:that's funny. That's that's like almost the opposite of your, your pet peeve
Chris:Yes. About not recycling machines. I actually talked to this vendor about that, about that exact topic. And I said, you know, this is something that like bugs me is, why go in and you know, so you're on version three of your machine. Well, why not? You know, when a version one or version two pops up, take that in and Why, you know, why isn't this something that you do? They made a good point. They said we could never sell that as a version three, because , we We had to reinforce the frame and here and there, because it was, fast We could never brand that as a version three. And so if we tried to brand it as like a version one still, So it is a tricky situation. It's like, okay, I do understand their perspective and why it gets complicated. But yeah, I have, I have far more thoughts on that. We'll save that for another day though. Let's talk about pet peeves, Melissa.
Melissa:let's talk about pet peeves and you've already
Chris:Now , there are process engineers that work at airplane companies. There are people that their only job is to figure out how to more efficiently Cause just airplanes are just pick and place machines. They really are. You pick people out of an airport and you place them back into an airport. You're trying to do that changeover as quickly as possible. Airlines, they talk about this all the time. Changeover is critical. The faster they can change a plane over the better from a marketing standpoint. I understand why they do certain things that they do, right. The human in me goes, okay. Yes. This makes sense. Because from a pure unadulterated engineering standpoint, there's a lot of Like if I was to put on my Spock hat for a moment, right. Spock is famous for, for like, not considering the human factor and things. He just talks about. He's very clinical about things. The way you should load an airplane is from the very back Because if you load it from the front first and everybody's in your way, and yada yada, you know, whereas if you, if you take everybody who seats are in the you know, you could kind of backfill, as people are getting settled in and you but they don't do that. Right. And, and for, for very good reasons, People who people who perhaps served People who have disabilities get to get to get in the airplane first they're in first class, they get to get in the airplane first, personally, Like I would much rather be in this beautiful airport with the, with Right. Like why, why is it a benefit to get loaded first? I don't understand.
Melissa:well, I mean, if you're not in first class, I think the benefit is that
Chris:I think that's it. I think that is it. I'm pretty sure that's why. That's the other thing. I've tried as much as possible with my pet peeves to get more into like But I got to get into a personal pet peeve here. For a moment you load your baggage in the long way. When you load your bag into an airplane, into the overhead bin, you should have the long view, and then the poor flight attendants have to go in and they grab If you ever notice.
Melissa:Yeah, there's signs up there that say how to load it.
Chris:Nobody reads them. Come on, are you kidding me signs, please. Nobody's looking at that. And nobody ever does. And so it's like, okay, well, why doesn't why as a, as a company policy, why don't Like, do you, do you want me to load your overhead bag for you? I mean, do you imagine how like ripped these flight attendants would be if, Let's be honest. They're all, you're like, cause they're doing this all the day, all side benefit. I mean, here's the other thing. The poor flight attendents must, they must have like super deodorant, right? Cause like it's a stressful environment to be on a plane. And, but their arms have to be up all the time to kind of balance themselves, turbulence in there and they're having to walk back to the seats or something. Never once I have never once have I ever seen a flight attendant Like they are on point man. Like they know what they're doing when it comes to that. I, you know, hands off to them, they're doing a good job
Melissa:it's like a special formulated deodorant just for flight attendants
Chris:must be. And I want to know what it is and I want to, I want to, I want to buy stock in it. So anyway, that's my pet peeve. Figure out your loading procedure of an airplane. Remind people that it's better to hang out in a beautiful airport than And so if you're in first class, you know, you should be loaded last because stupid tube, staring at all the plebs as we walk by you because you know, we Right. That's also uncomfortable. Like you sit there and everybody's staring at you and they're like looking, You know. what I mean? I think you don't want to, like, how was that a pleasant experience? It's not, It's not Except for Southwest airlines because they have a totally If I'm getting on an airplane, I do not wait for my group. I wait until the very last to get on the plane. And I typically only have a small backpack. So if it doesn't fit overhead, it easily fits in front of my feet. And I don't have a problem.
Melissa:I definitely remember watching some YouTube video
Chris:I can't be the only one who's had this pet peeve. There's no way. There's no way. And like I said. there are people like it's, they're only like there's probably not There's probably like 50 people in American airlines that the And you know, there's probably 50 people at United and 50 people I'm sure there's a team of people working on this. And every time I sit down, I go, why, why is this still a problem? I don't know. I, it, it baffles me. It baffles me. I'm sure they've got all the statistics and all the numbers and But Yeah. no, I don't. I don't think it's right. Spock Spock says no. No, thank you. But thank you to everybody who tweeted at us or emailed us with That was super cool. Thank you for doing that. And don't stop. You know, if you got more fiducials FTW, we'll make it a trend every week.
Melissa:It was definitely trending last week.
Chris:It definitely was trending. It was definitely trending right up there with you know, some world news It was, it was, it was world disaster fiducials, FTW. I saw it 1, 2, 1 and two. Yep. Thank you people. Thank you everybody. As always. I hope you found this. Interesting. I don't know it was super meta, but I just thought it would be interesting to talk I mean, what does it take to get an electronics circuit board into the world? It takes companies like us figuring out what we need for equipment And I hope you found it interesting. And if you have questions about it, like. I'd love to talk about it. I, this is like one of my favorite things to do is to evaluate I love talking about it. We have had some people we had a listener in Canada, reach out to And yeah, it was, it was nice. So if you have thoughts on it or questions on it, do not We, our contact@pickplacepodcast.com and you can tweet at us. Melissa, you are at CircuitHub and me, this is Chris I'm at w assembly.
Melissa:Thanks for listening to the pick place podcast. If you liked what you heard, consider following us in your favorite us a review on apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Chris:Thanks everybody.