F-35's Costs Climb Along With Concerns

In article , Ricardo
wrote:

Harry Andreas wrote:


PS: now that the Hobbit's (Rooney) out, what will England do?

Try and win some football without a spoilt brat throwing tantrums on the
pitch and verbally abusing the match officials when, rightly, he is
called to task.

LOL!

Well, Ashley Cole looked all right today anyway.

--
Harry Andreas
Engineering raconteur

(Harry Andreas) wrote:

:In article , "Keith W"
wrote:
:
: "Harry Andreas" wrote in message
: ...
: In article ,
: wrote:
:
: Note that this is sort of the same approach that lost Germany the war.
: Everything was hand-finished to very high standards, while us sloppy
: folks cranked out ten times as many tanks as they could because we let
: the tolerances be looser and eliminated a lot of the skilled
: 'touch-labor' in the finishing stages.
:
: Hmmm. I wouldn't ride that horse too far.
:
: Ever see a 1944 built Walther P-38, or Waffenfabrik Mauser?
: They didn't spend nearly any time finishing them as compared to
: the early war versions.
:
:
: The German record was very mixed
:
:Keith, I hear ya, and the other posters who have said similar things,
:but I still object to Mr McCall's statement that, in Germany,
:"Everything was hand-finished to very high standards".
:That's just not true. As you point out, it was very selective,

Yes. The big ticket items (which was what I meant by "everything",
since that is what wars are actually fought and won with) got all the
hand finishing. Small stuff and aircraft designed specifically to be
cheap and 'throw away' generally weren't.

So object and be damned to you.


and as
:I pointed out, there are definite examples of German industry
:reducing their quality standards to meet production demands.
:
:cheers
:
:PS: now that the Hobbit's (Rooney) out, what will England do?

--
"So many women. So little charm."
-- Donna, to Josh; The West Wing

In article ,
wrote:

(Harry Andreas) wrote:

:In article , "Keith W"
wrote:
:
: "Harry Andreas" wrote in message
: ...
: In article ,
: wrote:
:
: Note that this is sort of the same approach that lost Germany the war.
: Everything was hand-finished to very high standards, while us sloppy
: folks cranked out ten times as many tanks as they could because we let
: the tolerances be looser and eliminated a lot of the skilled
: 'touch-labor' in the finishing stages.
:
: Hmmm. I wouldn't ride that horse too far.
:
: Ever see a 1944 built Walther P-38, or Waffenfabrik Mauser?
: They didn't spend nearly any time finishing them as compared to
: the early war versions.
:
:
: The German record was very mixed
:
:Keith, I hear ya, and the other posters who have said similar things,
:but I still object to Mr McCall's statement that, in Germany,
:"Everything was hand-finished to very high standards".
:That's just not true. As you point out, it was very selective,

Yes. The big ticket items (which was what I meant by "everything",
since that is what wars are actually fought and won with) got all the
hand finishing. Small stuff and aircraft designed specifically to be
cheap and 'throw away' generally weren't.

So object and be damned to you.

Dude, you can't say "Everything" and then get mad when someone
disagrees with you. Everything means everything, not some things...
And I'll bet the Wehrmacht infantry would disagree with you about
big ticket items winning the war. As we know so well, boots on the
ground win the war, and boots on the ground are armed with rifles
and other "small" arms, the quality of which, as I pointed out in my
initial post, degraded substantially as the war progressed.
But I'm just an engineer who builds military equipment; what do I know.

--
Harry Andreas
Engineering raconteur

In sci.military.naval Keith W twisted the electrons to say:
The Panther and Tiger tanks were examples of technically advanced
weapons that simply couldnt be cranked out in the numbers needed due
to the complexity of their manufacture.

The closest to "cheap and nasty" that I can think of on the tank front
for Germany would be the Panzer IV/L70 - due mainly to them no changing
the glacis plate like their did for the Jagdpanzer IV.
--
These opinions might not even be mine ...
Let alone connected with my employer ...

"Alistair Gunn" wrote in message
. ..
In sci.military.naval Keith W twisted the electrons to say:
The Panther and Tiger tanks were examples of technically advanced
weapons that simply couldnt be cranked out in the numbers needed due
to the complexity of their manufacture.

The closest to "cheap and nasty" that I can think of on the tank front
for Germany would be the Panzer IV/L70 - due mainly to them no changing
the glacis plate like their did for the Jagdpanzer IV.
--


I've seen estimates that put the price of a Tiger tank as $100,000 (US 1941)
as against $40,000 for a Panzer IV/L70, $ 50,000 for a Sherman M4A3(76) wet
and $80,000 for an M-26 Pershing

Keith



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On Fri, 5 May 2006 17:14:06 +0100, "Keith W"
wrote:


"Alistair Gunn" wrote in message
...
In sci.military.naval Keith W twisted the electrons to say:
The Panther and Tiger tanks were examples of technically advanced
weapons that simply couldnt be cranked out in the numbers needed due
to the complexity of their manufacture.

The closest to "cheap and nasty" that I can think of on the tank front
for Germany would be the Panzer IV/L70 - due mainly to them no changing
the glacis plate like their did for the Jagdpanzer IV.
--


I've seen estimates that put the price of a Tiger tank as $100,000 (US 1941)
as against $40,000 for a Panzer IV/L70, $ 50,000 for a Sherman M4A3(76) wet
and $80,000 for an M-26 Pershing

So...a Tiger was probably comparable to a P-38 ($115k 1945) to compare
apples and cantaloupes, or to give a technology figure of merit. And
nearing 10000 P-38s were built as opposed to 2000 Tigers...another of
those dumbfounders as to why were the Germans so hard to beat?



Keith



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Paul J. Adam wrote:
Packard cleaned up the castings, milled the mating faces approximately
flat (at least, compared to a metal-metal seal) and put a gasket between
them. I don't recall hearing tales of P-51s routinely or regularly
falling from the skies when their engines failed, nor of the Packard
Spitfires being execrated for unreliability (or, for that matter, lack
of horsepower).

Uh, I don't know about "regularly falling," but here is the best
reference I could find (skip down to the Mk XVI part):

http://www.spitfire.dk/chapter3.htm

I always figured this happened because of the difference between British
manufacturing (production tolerances designed for hand-fitted assembly,
ie. not all pistons will fit well in all cylinders) vs American
manufacturing (production tolerances matched for mass production, ie.
all pistons will fit well enough in all cylinders).

Then again, the article I cited suggests it may have been a problem
limited to just one batch rather than the different industrial
philosophies between Henry T. and Henry Royce.

Was this thread about the F-35?

"Paul J. Adam" wrote:

In message , Ricardo
writes
Incidentally, a few sources have claimed that the Packard built Merlin,
whilst a superb engine, lacked the power levels of the Rolls Royce
version. This, it is claimed, was because the British kept secret the
composition of the phosphor-bronze bearings that they used in the
engine. No, I can't quote a source/s.

On the other hand, I heard - from "old factory hands" lecturing on
manufacturing technique at Highbury College in 1988 - that a big
difference between Packard and Rolls-Royce was in fitting the cylinder
head.

Rolls-Royce used a precision hand-scraped metal-to-metal fit. Very
effective, though extremely demanding in scarce skilled labour.
(Attempting to 'file flat' is a useful exercise for a trainee mechanical
engineer; it teaches a certain humility in demanding surface finishes)

Packard cleaned up the castings, milled the mating faces approximately
flat (at least, compared to a metal-metal seal) and put a gasket between
them. I don't recall hearing tales of P-51s routinely or regularly
falling from the skies when their engines failed, nor of the Packard
Spitfires being execrated for unreliability (or, for that matter, lack
of horsepower).

I think it's fair to say that Packard 'productionised' the design of the
Merlin which made it easier and quicker to build, possibly more reliable
too.

Graham

Paul J. Adam wrote:
Packard cleaned up the castings, milled the mating faces approximately
flat (at least, compared to a metal-metal seal) and put a gasket between
them. I don't recall hearing tales of P-51s routinely or regularly falling
from the skies when their engines failed, nor of the Packard Spitfires
being execrated for unreliability (or, for that matter, lack of
horsepower).

A family friend, now departed, was a wrench-turner on (American)
Merlins during the war. He always said the Packard was easier to
work on, but did not take damage as well as, the RR version. His
reasoning was that, where RR might use (arbitrarily, as I can't recall
his exact words) 30 bolts spaced closely to attach an exhaust manifold,
Packard would use 20 spaced farther apart. He said that he saw
cases where Packard and Rolls-Royce engines would come back
with near-identical damage and the genuine article could still produce
power.


Jeff

My father-in-law had a similiar experience here in Canada. In circa
1942 he was an apprentice machinist for a new factory tasked with
manufacturing a British 4.5" naval gun design. IIRC, the original
British procedure for any shaft/bushing was to machine the shaft with
0.020 in interference and the hand file the shaft to fit. As he said,
there wasn't one in a hundred in their labour pool that could do this.
Part of his job was developing new dimensions and tolerances to allow
parts to be manufactured independently, inspected for dimensions, and
then assembled without further machining.