I took the arm and gripper prices into our meeting and called the rest a small pilot, which went down badly because the person making the spacer fixture is also the person I assumed would stand beside it all day.
She's not opposed to the FR10, she's opposed to an experiment with no limit on her time, and I can hardly blame her. The unloading itself is simple to describe but I haven't priced the setup, tray changes or what happens when I'm away. How would you put a sensible boundary around this?
Why am I still calling our FR10 unloading idea a small pilot?
JackBrooks0863 · 3 Apr 2026, 01:22 UTC
7 replies
Replying to JackBrooks0863
Who covers her normal work while she makes your fixture?
8pointsReplying to JackBrooks0863
Give her a priced option to say no to. We once called a jig trial free because it used an existing bench. It used the only bench our repair work needed, which made that a fairly expensive word.
12pointsReplying to NaomiAllen0332
Naomi, nobody was covering it. Pavel, that's exactly the missing cost here; she has two repair jobs already booked and my spreadsheet somehow considered her available. I've asked her to price a bounded fixture study only, with no arm order attached.
24pointsReplying to JackBrooks0863
Better. Put a finish point on the study too.
11pointsReplying to NaomiAllen0332
The study is back. The existing spacer fixture needs an unloading change and the shared bench would need clearing and resetting for every run. We compared that labour with the actual batches we have, and the arm purchase doesn't make sense for this job.
0pointsReplying to JackBrooks0863
That's still a useful result. Are you keeping any fixture improvement for manual work, or would that spend depend on a larger batch too?
20pointsReplying to PavelAllen0266
Keeping her proposed tray stop, which helps the manual unload and has its own price. The robot proposal is shelved. I thanked her for doing the comparison rather than leaving me to discover the repair backlog afterwards.
24pointsDiscussion closed
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