Petzval DSLR Lens Is A Portrait Hero

[Gavjenks]

the Petzvals were not popular

That only INCREASES the hipster appeal though!

 

[amolitor]

I think there might be a bit more to it than chopping brass pipe stock into specific lengths.

Manufacturing is a pretty amazing money sink. It's also surprisingly hard to explain to the layman where the hell all the money goes. But go it does.

 

[Gavjenks]

I was just focusing on one step...

Anyway, do you work in manufacturing? If so, what are some of the unexpected costs you mention for a small run of light manufacturing like this? I'm not picking a fight, I'm actually legit curious / might put the information to use sometime sooner rather than later.

 

[amolitor]

I have, but do not now.

It's really a death of 1000 cuts. It's not just one jig, it's dozens of them. There's jigs and processes and standards and tests for accepting (or rejecting) purchased materials, there's similar actually in building the thing, and then in testing subassemblies, and finally testing the final product for acceptance, scrapping, or reworking. There's packaging to be designed, then tested to ensure that the final product, in that packaging, will indeed survive typical shipping stresses.

Quick, design me a rig to test one of theses things to see that it does what it says on the tin. Be sure to include a manual which defines accept/reject/rework criteria, and training materials for the shop floor guy who will be running the rig. I've just burned a day or more of your time, and that's just the design! We haven't even built the rig, and then rebuilt it twice to cover the things you didn't think of! And that's just the final step of, I dunno, 20ish, maybe?

There's testing the design, and periodically testing samples, to ensure that they meet your standards for durability in normal usage. There's re-design and rework of the whole process when you find out that it doesn't.

There's inventory carrying costs for everything, and more for the one damn thing that's suddenly hard to get -- or you can re-design around a new component that's easy to get, but then you're back to square one on much of the previous steps.

It goes on and on, a couple hundred bucks here a couple thousand there, a dozen more man hours over there.

 

[Gavjenks]

Gotcha. Thanks.

 

[amolitor]

I have a 2 week old baby, so I am up a lot.

Here's a made-up scenario that illustrates the difference between manufacturing engineering and prototyping:

We accepted some brass tube stock that was 2 mils smaller on the interior diameter. There's enough cement or gasketing or whatever that the build went fine. Things were a little snugger, but no big deal. Then two pallets of lenses spent the night in an unheated warehouse at -20C (which is within our stated OK-to-store temperature range -- which we tested, with the bigger tube stock). The forklift operator jostled one of the pallets a bit. Now we have 793 customers with broken front elements, 23 of them had actual glass shards, and one of those is screaming at me about his two year old son, 70 stitches, and probably never getting full mobility back.

I dunno if Zenit works at this level -- not everyone does. Nikon almost certainly does.