i was watching How It’s made, and there was a dedicated machine for a particular part of the product something as little as a proprietary bottle cap. and it was a huge machine. Who got the time to sit and invent the machine for that little piece. think of the variety of such designs, so does that mean you need a different new machine for any other special design?
also machines that make machines like robot machines making robot machines.
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These machines are expensive, but usually designed to last. The cost of bespoke designs is spread over a huge number of products.
The machines can also be adjustable to do different designs – so for instance a machine to make a bottle cap might make different bottle caps with a change of mould or head. This allows using one machine to make different bottle caps to reduce downtime (because you want to run your factory at as high capacity as possible to spread out your fixed costs) and reduces engineering costs on duplicating designs.
Example of how a seemingly large cost of machines is actually pretty small:
If a machine makes 20 a minute (very slow), that’s 20 million a year. If they last only 10 years (short time), that’s 200 million bottle caps total
If you spend $200,000 on the machine, that’s 1/10 of a cent per bottle cap on the machine, and that is with very conservative numbers for speed and lifetime of the machine.
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