Update 2012 Mar 11
So I was supposed to come get my first 6 production frames from Wooten on Monday but they had to count the parts and had bits of paper work to finish up. They were finished Wednesday so 4:00 A.M. Thursday morning Darren and I took off to pick them up. Showed up around noon so we could spend some time (almost 2 hours) with the head engineer Glen. Turns out Glen was an engineer with Ford for 15 years before moving to Dallas and so we went over some design ideas and different uses for the assorted equipment they have up there. Tubing edge radiuses profiles, K factor processing, CAD software preference, CMM usage, QC techniques, sheet metal tricks, tolerance in their equipment, how to compensate for it and much much more. After that we spent another hour with the project manager figuring out the best way to calculate cutting price and how to simplify cuts to reduce cutting cost for future projects.
So around 3:00-3:30 P.M. we loaded up the truck and took off. 1 long bed Chevy pickup fit 5 frames easily with several boxes in the back seat of the truck. I could have probably restacked the pallets and fit 10 frames in the truck pretty easily. You can see several of their lasers in the back ground and a few shots of the 1.8 million dollar tubing laser going to town in one of the shots.
This looks impressive to me and I shiver to think what it would have taken to do this all by hand, CNC mill or with a traditional flat laser. It takes them around 7 hours to cut everything on one frame and with the auto loading rig they load up the tubing and let it do its thing until it cuts up 6-7 full tubes. Darren and I spent 10 minutes (probably more) just watching it cut a job before we both realizes what we were doing.
This is the frame all laid out. I'm still work on exactly how to package them so this let me Feng-Shui it. Ideally you'll open one package and put that group together then move on to the next package. When you have all those sub assemblies together then you'll move onto the taking those and putting them together into the bigger assembly. It will also keep everything water tight until you can get around to working on it if you're doing it at home in your spare time.
