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Just hope they can do a quality build --without all the current issues they've recently had...

Retired Boeing here, now consulting @ Collins Aero Structures,
Whenever I travelled to Everett from SoCal I would always tour the Everett plant on 2nd shift after dinner. Watching landing gear testing after install for 767 & 747 was cool stuff.
The guys from Everett liked to tour the C-17 plant in SoCal.

Quote:

Originally Posted by stevej37 (Post 11679249)

^^^ Thanks....I didn't realize how big they were until I started looking closer. I think there are a couple guys on a railing looking at #2?

I was thinking that all that drilling and riveting was still done manually.
Would be an awesome factory tour.

Jeff explained it all. These machines (made in Germany) would drill a hole, measure the diameter of the hole, insert a fastener with sealant from the outside and swage it with a collar from the inside. Then measure the surface of the fastener in relation to the skin. Eight cameras to watch everything. It was amazing that a machine could do this.

We had three or four of them back then and they were a bottleneck in the production in the 19 building. They needed more. They are huge.

I can remember on the day of a Super Bowl, the entire complex was empty except for us operators running the machines. They couldn’t afford to lose a day of production with them.

Edit, The outside portion of the machine barely skims over the surface. It was not good when the machine hit one of the barrels. Most of the time, the barrels were OK but a few times, the barrel costing millions of dollars, had to be trashed. One guy did it twice. He was moved the floor after the second one.

Those trashed barrels were pure gold to AOG - we cut more than one of them up over the years to provide repair panels, which we would mechanically fasten to the damaged aircraft. More than once, however, none were available and we had to pull a perfectly good one from production just to cut out the portion needed for the repair.

The original concept we were presented had us replacing any damaged section in its entirety. As you know, body sections are delivered "fully stuffed" - all systems, insulation, interiors installed - to final assembly. They were sold to us as "plug and play". Ahem...

Suffice to say, we never replaced an entire body section in the field. Logistically impossible. So we repaired localized damage, just like on aluminum aircraft. Except we could not get just the panels represented by the damaged area. They had to "wind" (filament wind, like for the most part single strand over a mandrel) an entire body section, then cut out the piece we needed and scrap the rest. Yikes... $$$$$$...