If that area is ready for presses to be installed in July/August, how long does it ‘generally’ take from day 1 of install to actually producing production parts?
A million variables and you’ve given an entire month range for a start date.
What kind of press line? New? Used? How many pieces is it coming in? Who’s putting it together and how good are they? Do they run into any problems during assembly? (Hint: they always do.).
Roughing it out: it’s 4-6 months to install a press line I’d expect them to be using and get it ready for the first set of dies to go.
But the dies don’t just go in and voila. The presses have to be programmed and set up for each specific set, add in end of arm tooling, scrap set up, sensors, etc...
Then you get to try out each die in each individual press. But you don’t get to just turn them on, you have to manually jog that first hit, little by little, check clearance, bottoming out, cushion pressures blah, blah, blah, making program changes as needed. Then you get to see if the part formed proper, did it wrinkle, did it tear, did it draw deep enough, etc...
You don’t get to go to the next operation until you have a decent part from the first/previous operation. You have to perfect the end of arm tooling - that can be super tedious and time consuming. If you run into a die problem you might have to pull the whole set and put in a different set while the first gets worked on.
Setting up and trialing the dies is a weeks and/or months long process. How long it takes depends on how good the die designs are, the quality of the die workmanship, the complexity of the part, how talented the toolmaker doing the trial is, how good the press programmer is etc... It can sail along or it can be a real hair pulling clusterduck.
If they want to be making parts in any steady state quantity before year end, I’d say they better be installing that press line no later than June 1st and then sacrifice some chickens or goats to the Gods. Although, this is an exercise in copy and paste so not their first rodeo. We should be able to deduct some time.
And there’s work arounds if they aren’t quite that fast and lucky. The tool shop making the dies could run a bank of parts before sending the dies to Tesla. That way Tesla could make cars before they’ve fully completed die trials.
I think there are other areas more deserving of concern timing-wise than stamping simply based on the fact stamping has never been a bottleneck at Tesla - they seem to have a good grasp of that - but they still sure aren’t leaving a lot of leeway.
investor funding Mark b.s.?
