Ernest Christley wrote:
snip


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.

To some extent this is true. But the most successful ones had the most
fixturing and were the most consistent. Consider: a J-3/PA-18 is
probably representative of a tube and rag design one might homebuild, a
little more detailed than most perhaps. Well, Piper openly stated that
labor costs on a Cherokee were maybe a sixth of what they were on a Cub
in terms of the basic airframe. This tells us several things, one
being direct labor on a Cherokee is probably about that of a production
automobile. You could set up in some country somewhere and crank out
Cherokees very cheaply indeed, not counting instruments and engines,
which you could also crank out pretty cheaply in the right places if
you got some volume going. Product liability???? NONE. Do it overseas
and DO NOT purchase liability insurance and you won't get sued. Product
Liability is a crock of **** they brought on themselves as you well
know. Certification? Let's say a million dollars. Build ten thousand
and it's a hundred each, triple that on sale for entrepreneurial
profit. I bet you could sell ten thousand.




"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.


The 1950s were the zenith of manufacturing _that worked_ in the US.
Part of the decline has been the blind adoption of Japanese/pnone
company monopoly tactics that work well over there because of
conditions very different from those here and now.

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.

What changes is the experience, age, adaptibility of the workforce as
well as the fact they do it every day and in an environment where you
learn and maintain the skills quickly and efficiently. Most people who
want to fly should not be building their own airplane any more than
most car or boat owners should build their own. Certainly, a few
should. But if even one percent of cars on the road were homebuilt it
would be pretty bizarre, wouldn't it?