Word: mold
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...meantime, men will continue to mold themselves to fit the ideal of the moment. Witness Al Gore. In his quest to attract the women's vote, he has tried everything from empathy to aggression, sports jackets to polo shirts. Poor thing. By trying to look strong, he risks appearing weak--a mistake I made once myself. I'm wiser now. Whatever it is that women want in men, they'll want something different next year, with one exception. They'll always prefer guys who use deodorant...
Since the entire unit is virtually self-contained, it can be assembled and running anywhere in a matter of days. If the market in baths dries up, you can switch the mold skins to make another product within an hour. Labor? O.K., you have to add hardware or electrical wiring to the finished product. But the VEC cell requires three people and very little technical expertise--as long as there is a link to the mother node...
...That's when he and his engineering chief, Bob McCollum, devised a software program to control each step in the manufacturing process. A company offered them a lucrative contract to build storm drains, but Pyramid didn't have the $2 million needed to fashion or tool the proper steel mold to shape the pipe. That's when McCollum came up with a startlingly simple--and cheap--idea. Instead of a metal mold, why not fashion two pieces of composite in the shape of the product, inject the resin into the cell and brace the flimsy mold with pressurized water...
...took months of hair-pulling setbacks, but they figured out how to digitally control the chemicals, water pressure and the mold itself, and began fabricating larger and larger products, from pipe to custom boat hulls. The average cost to tool a mold: a mere $25,000, nearly a 99% cost reduction. "Once we had the floating mold," says McCollum, recalling their excitement, "we wanted a whole factory...
Every 35 min., each cell produces a new hull; next door it takes eight hours and at least twice as many people to finish one. Each completely recyclable plastic mold produces a dozen boats; next door it takes a mold per boat, and each year thousands of used molds have to be buried in landfills. Each VEC hull is so strong that Genmar has announced a lifetime warranty instead of the normal five years...