Bret Ludwig wrote:
Scott wrote:

From your other post to this thread, if you've got all that experience
building production planes, why don't you start your own business and
become a "hired gun" and build homebuilts planes for others who don't
really want to build...



Then I would be running an aircraft factory....albeit a lousy one.

Good aircraft factories build good factory built airplanes, ones
designed for the strengths and such as they are, weaknesses of factory
production, with consistent tooling and the use of people with the
skills earned only in a factory setting. Most homebuilts would be lousy
factory built airplanes and vice versa. T

From what I've seen, most factory built airplanes are lousy factory
built airplanes. Lots of odd shaped, multiple component parts, that must
be assembled by hand.


"Driven one rivet, driven them all" is in fact the single goddamned
dumbest thing I have ever heard. And dangerous. You are not an aircraft
worker until you have driven ten or twenty thousand rivets, each
checked by an inspector and the failures flagged (and there will be
some) and you have to stand there hands in pockets watching the other
guy centerpunch, drill out and replace your bad rivet while half the
damn plant is watching you. (Been there done that!)

This sounds like childish hazing that you'd find in the factories of the
50's. An airplane properly designed to be built in a modern factory
wouldn't have you setting rivets. It would be done by a machine that
will set the rivet the same way every time, so that quality can be
measured and adjusted. Just cause you set some bad rivets in a factory
and got hazed for it, doesn't mean a typical builder can't set one,
check it, and cuss to high heaven all by his lonesome as he drills it
out and replaces it himself. The results will be the same. The factory
environment changes nothing.



--
This is by far the hardest lesson about freedom. It goes against
instinct, and morality, to just sit back and watch people make
mistakes. We want to help them, which means control them and their
decisions, but in doing so we actually hurt them (and ourselves)."