Model Airplanes

The guiding principle of this reporting will be the one we developed—city by city, story by story, question by question, surprise by surprise—through our preceding years of travel. The central premise is that the most positive and practical developments in this stage of American life are happening at the local and regional level—but that most Americans have barely heard of those developments except in the communities where they themselves live.

This past February, an extensive nationwide survey from the American Enterprise Institute provided data that matched what we’d heard in interviews. By nearly a 2-to-1 ratio, the survey’s directors (Sam Abrams, Karlyn Bowman, and Ryan Streeter) found, Americans were very pessimistic when asked about the prospects for the country as a whole. But by nearly a 3-to-1 ratio, people in different parts of the country, and of different races and economic groups, said they felt that their own communities were moving in the right direction. It was like the radio host Garrison Keillor’s ancient joke about Lake Wobegon, where “the children were all above average,” but with a real-world edge. People recognized the possibility of progress, despite obstacles and injustices, in their own part of America, but assumed the rest of the country must be doing much worse.

Of course the paralysis

Article source: https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2019/05/when-libraries-are-second-responders/590098/

Bending and welding are two main fabrication processes at Alert Tubing Fabricators Inc., Loves Park, Ill. The company augments these with end forming and machining on-site and laser cutting, which it outsources.

“You wouldn’t believe how this place looked when I took it over,” said Kevin Coffey, owner of Alert Tubing Fabricators (ATF) Inc., Loves Park, Ill. Coffey found that a certain territorial mentality and a rigid bureaucracy had established itself in the company, which his father had owned and managed from a distance for many years. The shop had been subdivided by wooden walls (“They had put up buildings inside the building!” Coffey exclaimed), old and corroded raw material was stacked to the ceiling in the inventory area, and the office was overflowing with obsolete paperwork. In the shop, one of the work tables was a sheet of plywood supported by two saw horses. The year was 2013, and merely navigating the front office was a chore considering the number of drafting tables (!) in the engineering area.

“This place was cluttered with equipment,” he said.

Article source: https://www.thefabricator.com/article/finishing/a-low-volume-high-mix-job-shop-modernizes-its-operations-1