In todays world of automation, has anyone ever seen any factories, or videos on fishing rods that have had the guides machine wrapped, rather than hand wrapped?

Roger

I haven't but I once visited the Daiwa plant in CA (no longer in operation) and watched their women wrapping guides. I can't imagine that a machine could be any faster.

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No

Freddwhy (Rapt-Ryte)

Don't really see how you could automate wrapping guides.

Matthew,
With todays advances in robotics, I would put nothing past mans ability to innovate, if there is a financial incentive.

I would imagine that in a production environment, that rods are being wrapped in about 15 minutes. If the labor is being paid $5 per day for a 10 hour day, That is a rate of 50 cents per hour. So, that would mean that the rod is being wrapped for about 12 cents.

I am guessing that the 12 cent savings is not enough to warrent the development costs for an automated system.

Roger



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/22/2011 02:25PM by roger wilson.

I don’t think 15 minutes is even close to the time it takes Chinese women to wrap a rod, they could probably have 5 rods done in that time.

The ladies I saw, each wrapping one specific guide per rod, would do an entire rod in about 3 or 4 minutes.

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Tom - did the ladies you saw have fancy wrappers or were they holding the spool in hand?

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And people complain about why rods are not built in America

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Bill - willierods.com

Bill,
The problem is that jobs are being done around the world.
Companies are taking their jobs to the locations in the world where a quality job can be done for the least overhead.
Like it or not, American workers have to compete with other workers of the world.

This is exactly why the current rate of unemployment in the US is so high. The average American worker is not willing to work for the wage that a person in another part of the world will do the same job for.

But, custom rod building will continue to have a strong following, because the average reader of this forum is not making the "typical" production rod that are being sold in the big box stores.

Be safe and good wraps.

Roger

A lot of the rods built in the U.S. are wrapped by people like me. I have been outwrapping for about twenty years. Most of the outwrappers I have seen put the 4 oz. spool on the floor in front of them and run the thread through their fingers. Most of the power wrappers we use have the chuck connected directly to the motor shaft, no pulleys. When most people see me wrap they are amazed at how fast it can be done. I used to do 100 to 150 rods a week but now I'm semi-retired and only wrap for C.F. Burkheimer. In the past I have wrapped Loomis, Lamiglas, Sage, and too many more to remember. I for one wouldn't like to see a cheap automated wrapping machine.

Thomas,
When you did the outwraps, did you do the gude placement and the rod finish, or did you just do the wraps on the rods that already had the guides in place?
The reason that I ask the question is that there are several rod shops in town that use outwrappers. In all cases, the shop places the guides and the outwrappers do only the wrapping.
Then, the shop double checks the alignment and does the rod finish.

Roger



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/22/2011 09:58PM by roger wilson.

Thomas, I wish you would come to the ICRBE and put on a demonstration. I'd really like to watch somebody work that can wrap rods like that. Good question Roger, I was going to ask exactly what all he did on the rods as an outwrapper.

Roger

When I got the rods the they had the tip tops on and were marked with a china marker where the guides went. I taped the quides on wrapped them and aligned them then they went into the factory for finish. One company had me doing crosswraps on all their rods and I also got very fast at doing simple chevrons.

Les

The ICRBE is on the wrong side of the country for me. I love outwrapping but you aren't going to make a lot of money doing it.

Thomas F. Thornhill

Roger,
I mean no offense but, where do you come up with this stuff?

At that time, large plastic trash barrels were set up to the left of each lady wrapper. Each lady sat behind the lady in front and each of them was positioned slightly to the right of the one in front. So, each one would wrap a specific guide onto the blank. For instance, wrapping lady #1 wrapped the butt guide and only the butt guide, then she took the rod and placed it over her shoulder to the right in the trash barrel of the lady sitting behind her. That lady would then wrap the next guide and then pass the rod into the barrel behind her. So on and so forth. So each guide on the rod was wrapped by a different person. It was very efficient and very fast.

There were no wrapping machines or lathes. The ladies just held the rod in their hands and pulled thread from a tensioned spool on the table in front of them.

I would find that to be very tedious work, but as has been proven many times, women can do such repetitive tasks far better than most men.

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As far as where the ICRBE is located - it's not a regional event. It's international and from that standpoint we're smack in the middle of the world - it's the same distance if you travel west to east as if you travel east to west. That's the best we can do. We're in the same boat as DisneyWorld.

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Matthew,
I have always had an inquiring mind.

Tom,
When I worked in the electronics industry we had factories where lots of small things were assembled and soldered together. Virtually 100% of the assemblers were women.
The factory folks had tried using male assemblers from time to time, but had always found that the nimble fingers of women and their ability to do the same task again and again with no loss in quality far surpassed their male counterparts.
I am not picking on either men or women, but it just seems that some folks are better suited to do certain things than other things.

Good wrapping.
Roger

The idea of gluing guides to a rod blank is being revisited lately. In the past attempts to glue guides to the blank was done in such a way that there was little to no time savings. But a new method (and an idea that should have been obvious) is being perfected now. It involves gluing the blank to the guides instead of the other way around. Guides are simply set in a fixture in exact locations, the feet coated with adhesive, and then the rod blank is set onto the upturned guide feet in the fixture. If this method were to be adopted by major rod manufacturers, the time savings would be enormous. Aesthetics would be a totally different issue, although the proper ad campaign might convince the consumer that this sort of thing actually looks better or adds some other type of benefit than just a tremendous cost savings to the manufacturer.

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roger wilson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Thomas,
> When you did the outwraps, did you do the gude
> placement and the rod finish, or did you just do
> the wraps on the rods that already had the guides
> in place?
> The reason that I ask the question is that there
> are several rod shops in town that use
> outwrappers. In all cases, the shop places the
> guides and the outwrappers do only the wrapping.
> Then, the shop double checks the alignment and
> does the rod finish.
>
> Roger

Which town in MN is this?

_________________________________________
"Angling is extremely time consuming.
That's sort of the whole point." - Thomas McGuane

The process that Tom is describing would lend itself to very nicely to advanced automation. You could have a robot place the guides in the fixture, apply the adhesive to the feet, and then place the blank in the fixture. It could be further automated to make the fixture adjustable for different guides and spacing, a bar code on the blank would let the system know what rod it was supposed to build and use that information to setup the fixture. After the guides were glued on machine vision would be used to make sure everything was installed correctly. If you were going to this point in automation it would make sense to rethink the entire design of rod guides and optimize them to work with the automated assembly process. All it would take is $$$$$$$.

I can tell you in the automotive world, and electronics like Roger was talking about there is a strong bias towards using automation not just for speed but also for quality. When we build a turbo production line it is never acceptable to have a human operation without using some kind of automated inspection procedure to make sure the job was done right before it moves to the next step.