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Spence's avatar

An interesting precedent: The Monitors.

John Ericsson designed the Monitor so that Monitors could be built rapidly in any well equipped machine shop

The original Monitor was built in 100 days, despite being novel in almost every respect, from the freeboard so low (18 inches) that she made no target, to the never-before-attempted revolving turret, to the novel recoil mechanism on the guns.

A Monitor could be built in any well equipped machine shop, anywhere near water (including lakes and rivers). The turret of the original Monitor was built in a Manhattan iron works, the boiler and machinery in another Manhattan machine shop, then both were disassembled and reassembled on the hull in a Brooklyn yard.

Once the original Mionitor proved its worth, Ericsson turned them out like popcorn. Although they were not blue-water ships, they didn't need to be; they were for coastal defense and blockading.

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Ankur Podder's avatar

What stood out, to me:

1. "But they couldn’t avoid the fact that the shipbuilding process required doing large numbers of tasks at once, rather than in sequence like Knudsen’s auto assembly line."

2. "There three conveyor belts in each bay were set up to handle three deckhouses at a time. The belt was not a belt at all, but a three-foot-high concrete platform, on which were mounted trolley wheels at two-foot intervals—and on the wheels were the enormous mounted jigs carrying the deckhouse and pulled by a two-drum 10-horsepower hoist at the opposite end."

Similar takeaways from modular construction factories. These can serve as indicators why spatial design of a modular construction factory floor following traditional auto assembly line rules might not be the right approach. We are already learning from an ongoing project that the traditional site construction sequencing should not be followed as is for factory build sequencing. Example, shifting solar PV install steps upstream closer to roof build station on the factory floor (vs a downstream activity, after the roof has been set). Makes sense for cost, time, collaborative work. There is even more room to get creative with the sequencing.

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