I worked in an industry where US innovation was the basis. Believe it or not,, a lot of early electronic pc board assembly machines were derivatives of old Massachusetts shoe riveting machines. The old rivet heads were modified to insert resistors and capacitors that were taped prepped to feed to these machines. As the demands grew, XY positioning systems were added to locate the board under the head for insertion. Early computers and motors were added to automatically do the positioning .....and so on. Long story short, in the 90s things started to shift towards Asia and gradually Asian manufacturers either licensed our technology or when the patents expired, they flat out copied it. I once spent three days in Suwon Korea giving their Mirror Engineering group (that was on the door) a seminar on robotic assembly and design for automation. They gave me a tour of their shop, where I saw three dead ringer copies of our proprietary machines, copies, "mirrors" that did not work. They made the parts, they put them together, but they could not make them run.
Not my favorite story and the topic was China. In the 80's I designed a particular machine for inserting radial lead (not axial) components. Philips came to accept it and after a very long hard weekend of acceptance I was given the approval (by Philips) to ship it. The machine was built in three major pieces. The front, a positioning system, the next piece, a "cutter" and test station to remove the feed paper from the next sections, a sequencer with 80 input heads. The components on this machine were carried on a very special molded clip. I had a small powdered metal insert molded into the front edge of my clips. This version of our machine used a clip locator at the insertion head. The insert was there to limit wear and insure perfect clip positioning, necessary for high speed handling. When I tore the machine apart to ship it, I was worried about the exact relationship between the modules so on the cutter station. I installed two pieces of scrap metal to help establish the fit when it was put back together eventually in Brugge.
Long story short, in about 2005 ish I was at a China trade show. By the 2,000s, others had started to try and copy our machines. I was shocked find a Chinese made copy of our "radial" machine. When I looked it over, I realized that it was such an exact copy that there were exact replicas of the two scrap metal indexes i had thrown on my machine however many years before. I also saw that they were making their clips exactly like mine, even though that version of the machine did not use the clip locator I had designed it for. It was mind numbing to see that someone had gone to that effort to do something that was aa total waste of time and also a big expense. molding those close with a steel insert was a very hard process to do well since opening the mold to position the inserts affected the temperature of the walls and the flow of the nylon... Did I mention that this machine ran at half the speed of the one I had made so many years before?
I have many years of Aisa manufacturing stories to share.. I would not suggest trying to make tacks there unless you want to take up residence.
So houses and canoes, sounds good to me. Who else has and uses a Stanley 45?
