A. Frederick Collins

After you have formed a partnership or a company and have the coveted capital to go ahead with the business, you and your associates must consider two problems and the way you work them out will decide whether your venture will lose money or declare dividends.

The Problem of Manufacture.—These two problems are the manufacturing and the marketing of your product and in this chapter we will talk about manufacturing it first and then take up the marketing end of it in the next chapter, for while they are closely allied in a common cause they have to be treated as entirely separate things.

In this respect a manufacturing concern is very like a human being in that it has a brain and a body. You and those interested with you are the brains of the organization and those who work for you, to the end that profits may pile up for your benefit and behoof, form the body.

On your head, most likely, will fall the responsibility of turning out a high-grade product at the lowest possible cost and to do this the right way and to the best advantage you must begin at the beginning and think and scheme out how you can obtain the best results with the least outlay of time, labor and money.

There are many ways to start in manufacturing your product but the efficient way will depend on what you have to make, the number you are to make and the amount of capital you have to do it with.

Farming out the Work.—In the beginning you will often find it much cheaper, and hence more profitable, to give a contract to some manufacturer—who has a big factory fitted out with thousands of dollars worth of machine tools and a capable force of skilled mechanics—for a given number of the articles, or machines, you want to have made and delivered in and at a certain time.

By this arrangement there is no initial time, effort or money spent on buying machinery and getting a factory into running order, neither is there the work and worry of keeping a shop force going and besides you know exactly what each device will cost you when the lot is done and delivered. Still this scheme is not one that appeals to many inventors especially if they have, or think they have, a genius for mechanics and shop management.

Another way to start operations in an economical manner is to have some one or all of the parts of your invention done by outside manufacturers, or farm them out as it is called, and then assemble the parts in your own shop. Scattered all over the United States are shops and all sorts of factories where you can get a lower price quoted on a certain part or parts made of wood, brass, rubber or any other material than you could possibly make it or them for, in a shop of your own in the beginning.

Of course the larger the quantity of a given piece you can order at a time the lower will be the pro rata cost, that is the cost of each piece; for instance suppose a brass founder quoted you a price of $1 each on a certain casting in lots of ten, he might scale the price down to 50 or 60 cents each in lots of one hundred, and if you ordered a thousand at a time you might get the price down to 35 or 40 cents each. In figuring cost things like this must be taken into consideration.

In many cases it is not the mere material put into, and labor put on making a part that brings up the cost of the first lots but before the part can be turned out a special die, or jig, or fixture must be made for duplicating the part and very often a special machine must be designed and built for making a certain part. Such special tools and machines are very expensive and their cost must also be reckoned with.

Starting Your Own Shop.—In starting your own shop the question of what you are going to make and the quantity you intend to make will fix very largely the kind of machinery, the floor space and everything else you will need, nearly.

In this age of cheap electric power you can have an electric motor installed, to run your lathes, drill presses, shapers and other machines, almost anywhere you happen to be located. And besides it is better, as a rule, to start and operate your plant in your home town. For a shop on a small scale, wherever it may be, it is cleaner, less troublesome and cheaper to use electric power than it is to use gas or steam power.

Should you intend to operate on a very large scale it may then be to your advantage to look up a place where there is water power, or if your industry is one that calls for the large use of electricity you would then be justified in moving to Niagara Falls, or some other place where there are great hydro-electric plants.

The matter of being near to certain raw materials you need for manufacturing, or to a market for your product is not one that you will probably have to decide alone. Nor need the question of labor take up your time for the wages of skilled machinists, electricians and chemists are about the same throughout the United States, and while rents are higher in large cities than in the towns and villages still nearly one-half of the articles and machines made in the United States are turned out in 100 of the largest cities.

One of the advantages of manufacturing in a large city is that you can always get skilled labor and a great variety of materials on short notice. Should your product be in the nature of gas or steam engines, harvesting machines or automobiles you should locate your factory on some navigable river, on the Great Lakes, or on a railroad line (with a spur-track running alongside), in order to insure good and cheap transportation.

When you rent or build a shop the main thing is to have plenty of windows on every side and see to it that the ventilation is good and the heating system is adequate. There is no economy in making men work with poor light, bad air and in a cold place.

Buying Machine Tools.—Having secured by lease or by purchase a shop, or factory suitably located your next effort will be directed toward equipping it with the proper tools and machinery.

Besides the usual machinists’ hand tools you should buy (1) a gas furnace; (2) a grinder; (3) a plain lathe; (4) a screw cutting lathe; (5) a drill press; (6) a planer; (7) a shaper; (8) perhaps a milling machine, and (9) a buffer. Several of each of these kinds of machines may be needed.

A gas furnace, see Fig. 86, is useful for tempering tools and other operations where an intense heat is needed. A grinder, shown in Fig. 87, is used for grinding off rough parts of iron or brass castings and for smoothing up rough surfaces. It is formed of a mandrel which turns freely in a pair of bearings set in a headstock. A pulley is fixed to the middle of the mandrel and the latter is threaded on the ends; an emery, or a carborundum wheel is slipped over each end and these are held in place by washers and nuts. A swivel hand rest makes it easy to hold the work against the wheel.

A plain lathe, see Fig. 88, is good for turning, drilling and facing metal parts and for many other operations. It consists of a bed supported on a frame which carries the driving pulleys; the latter in turn is belted to a cone pulley which is keyed to the mandrel and this runs in bearings in the headstock. The inner end of the mandrel projects beyond the bearing and this is threaded so that a chuck, that is a device with adjustable jaws for holding the work, can be screwed on it.

Besides the headstock which carries the rotating mandrel, and which is fixed on the left hand side of the bed, there is a tailstock with an adjustable mandrel which slides on the right hand end of the bed, and between the headstock and the tailstock there is an adjustable hand rest.

An engine lathe, as shown in Fig. 89, besides doing all an ordinary lathe can do can be used for accurately turning up cylinders, disks, etc., turning out cylinders and cutting screws of any size or pitch, within certain limits, and it does all these things with rapidity and precision.

A lathe of this kind has a guide-screw, a set of change wheels, that is a number of interchangeable gears, and a back-gear, and by means of these gears the guide-screw is revolved in any ratio to the speed of the gears which may be desired. For turning or cutting a slide-rest is used, that is an attachment sliding between the headstock and the tailstock, for holding the tools.

The slide-rest is made with two adjustable slides so that the tool can be held in any position. The slide-rest can be moved freely by hand or by means of the guide-screw which carries it along the bed at any desired speed.

A drill press makes drilling an easier and a more accurate operation than when a lathe is used for this purpose. A pillar type of power drill is shown in Fig. 90. It is so constructed that the drill can be rotated at any one of a number of speeds and by means of a guide-rod it is caused to advance into the metal automatically at the proper speed.

A planer, see Fig. 91, is a machine for turning up flat surfaces, cutting slots and the like in metal parts. A planer is made up of a bed, a table in which the work is clamped and which slides back and forth on the bed by means of a feed motion; a slide-rest, which carries the cutting tool, is held above the bed by an upright frame and this moves to and fro across the table.

There are several kinds of shapers made and Fig. 92 shows one of them. A shaper cannot only be used for planing, but for turning, boring and slotting. In a shaper the work is held in a fixed position on the table, which can be raised and lowered by a hoisting screw, and the tool is made to move across the table by a quick-acting return motion.

There is also an arbor on which the work is mounted where a circular cut is to be made. The cutter head has a vertical adjusting screw with a worm feed and an index plate so that it can be set to any ratio. In a shop where only small work is to be done a planer may be dispensed with and a shaper used instead.

A universal milling machine, see Fig. 93, is also a handy combination tool in that it can be used for drilling, cotter drilling, boring, profiling, key-seating, rack- and gear-cutting and other operations.

A buffing machine is made nearly like a grinder but leather, felt and rag wheels are used on the spindle and when either pumice-stone, crocus and rotten-stone is applied to them tool marks and scratches can be buffed out and the work polished when it is ready to be lacquered or nickle plated.

If you are buying new machines get them fitted with individual electric motors, as shown in Fig. 90, as this will save shafting, the time and cost of putting it up, the cost of belting, besides the time the machine is idle while the belt is broken and it is being laced again, the loss of power in transmission, when the machine is idle, etc., etc.; boiled down, these machines equipped with individual motors are the last word in modern shop practice and it is a good one for you to follow.

Whatever machines you order be sure to also order at the same time a full supply of tools to use with them for otherwise you may find when you have your machinery all set up and you think you are ready to start that you are minus the cutting tools and should this happen you will be in for another long delay.

Unless your product requires a lot of wood-work it will hardly pay you to add a woodworking shop to your plant, though sometimes a jig-saw, see Fig. 94, or a band-saw, as shown in Fig. 95, will often prove of service.

It is the same way with a foundry, for unless you need a large number of castings right along it is as a rule cheaper to farm the work out to some founder in your own town.

Buying the Stock.—I do not mean the stock of your company—let your friends and the public do that—but the raw materials, as the stock is sometimes called, which you are to convert into the finished product.

Before you order either machinery or stock, try to standardize your product, that is to say whatever it is you intend to manufacture have it in such shape that you are satisfied to market it without making any further changes in it, at least for some time to come. It is the after-changes, the constant changes that have kept many a manufacturer poor, aye, forced him to the wall.

Having a standardized article, object or machine, you and your associates should determine on the number to be built first and then you can go over the model in detail and figure out just how much of each kind of stock, such as brass rod, sheet hard rubber, screws, washers, nuts, etc., you will need, allowing of course for waste and breakage.

Now when you are ordering the tools and machines for your shop get prices on and order your stock at the same time and see to it you do not overlook any little thing and so have to wait for something you forgot.

Screws, nuts, washers, bolts and some other small supplies can be bought in wholesale lots cheaper than you could possibly make them in your own shop and it is false economy to make anything with ordinary machine tools that can be bought from some other manufacturer who does the work with automatic machinery.

Organizing a Shop Force.—I am taking it for granted that if you have enough ability to invent, design and make a working model of an invention and get an organization together to manufacture and market it you will certainly have enough ability left to build up and superintend the body of your enterprise and that is your shop force.

Your first effort in this direction should be to hire a good foreman; this, though, is not an easy thing to do for a foreman must be something more than a thorough machinist who can use any tool or run any machine. He must be able to get the best there is in them out of the other men under him and see that each one is put on the job which he is best adapted to do.

Some of the men will shine as bench hands, others will show an aptitude in running machine tools and yet again others will be naturally clever in assembling your device; he must be able to pick out these good qualities and put the men where they will do the best work in the shortest time.

By all means get a foreman, if you can, who has worked on something like, or nearly like, your own product. He should be a man of shop ideas with enough initiative to put them into use. To get all these things rolled into one human being for $25, $30 or $35 dollars a week is asking a good deal but there are boss machinists in almost every city who can fill the bill.

Your foreman can usually get all the mechanics you need but don’t make the mistake of starting in and letting him hire the men. After he has found a man and wants to take him on, then you talk to the prospective employee, and you do the hiring. Hiring and firing the men should be your prerogative. This will make all of them respect you without respecting their foreman the less and they will do more and better work by knowing that you are the real boss of the works.

The Stock Room.—The tools that belong to the shop and the stock, or raw materials, should be kept under lock and key in the stock-room and a stock-clerk should be put in charge of and made responsible for them.

Have slips printed and whenever the foreman, or anybody else, including yourself, wants a drill, or a piece of brass, or a machine screw, insist that the stock-clerk get a slip signed for it. By this method you will know exactly where your tools and stock went to; and when a man returns a tool credit him with it.

You should also have a record kept of the time spent on each job by the man who did the work and the easiest way to do this is to use a time-stamp as shown in Fig. 96. If your shop is a small one your stock-clerk can take care of the time-slips. By doing things in this systematized way you will be able to keep pretty close tab on tools, stock and labor and these are three factors where a great deal of waste usually occurs in small shops and factories.

The Finished Product.—Whatever you are manufacturing, the finished product must be made as attractive as can be with the littlest extra cost and this applies alike to a toaster for a gas-stove or a threshing-machine. It’s the finish the buyer sees and he will gladly pay for the paint and the gloss that covers up the defects, if the thing looks nice.

Where a number of different materials enter into the make-up of a device it is always well to give some thought not only to the design,[5] but also to the color effect.

Figure 97 shows a high frequency (violet ray) electric machine designed by the author in which this idea is carried out. The stand is of iron, nickle-plated; the base of the apparatus proper is of wood, japanned black; the rim is of brass, nickle-plated; the plate-base, on which the visible part of the apparatus is mounted, is made of slate and japanned black; the metal parts of the interruptor are nickle-plated, and the coil and insulating standards are of hard rubber as is also the handle. The cover shade and the violet ray vacuum tube are of glass, while red or green flexible silk cords are used to make the connections, and finally the lamp socket is of a composition called electrose.

Thus the color scheme is polished ebony, the wood base, the slate plate base, hard rubber fittings and electrose socket all appearing precisely alike; the blue-white nickle-plated parts alternate with the black, the glass lends an added touch of beauty while the red, or green, cords give it a dash of color that relieves and sets off the other parts.

Iron work can be japanned black, enameled any color, or nickle-plated; brass can be lacquered or nickle-plated, and wood can be enameled. After the device or machine is assembled it should be rubbed up to remove all finger marks and to brighten it, then wrapped in tissue paper and packed carefully in a box if it is small enough so that this can be done, or it must be crated in such a way that it can be transported without marring or breakage.

Overhead Charges.—In figuring on the cost of a completed device, machine or product so that a selling price may be put on it which will insure a handsome profit the cost of the stock, of the breakage of tools, of the labor, or production, and of the power—gas, electricity, water or coal—are all easy to keep track of.

But there are other costs that must be taken into account which, while they do not stick out so plainly must also be reckoned with, or your venture will be a money losing one. These are the overhead charges, such as the depreciation of your machinery, that is the wear and tear of it; the rental of your factory, or the taxes if you own the building; the insurance on the building and the machinery; transportation costs such as teams and teamsters or automobile trucks and drivers; telephone calls and the other little and big items of expense—all of these must be carefully thought up and worked out for the year and charged against the number of machines you are going to make in that year.

To these fixed and variable charges must be added the salaries of yourself and your associates and the office staff together with the printing bills, advertising accounts and all the incidental expenses of maintaining an executive office. Divide the total running expenses for the year by the number of machines you have turned out in a year and you will have the net cost of each article or machine you have produced.

Where Your Profits Come In.—Add 33? per cent., 100 per cent., or 500 per cent. to the cost of production and let that be your selling price to consumers, agents, jobbers or wholesalers, less the usual small discount for cash. And the difference between the cost of production and your selling price will be your profits less certain losses on accounts which even an agency can’t collect.