Line balance looks perfect in the spreadsheet until the first station has a 12-second variation and the last station is starving half the time.
Measure real cycle time distribution, not the average.
#LineBalance#Takt#IE
Tesla has just officially announced that select customers are now being invited to purchase Cybercab for personal use!
• Price: $29,990
• $1,000 non-refundable order fee
• $299/month autonomy subscription required. one mont included
• Deliveries start Dec 2026
It's happening!
Extra kanban cards feel safe. They're just inventory with a label.
Once an EV harness loop runs stable, pull one card. If nothing starves, you found waste. If something does, you found the real problem to fix.
How often do you resize your loops?
#Kanban#Lean#IE
Daily #34 of Shop Floor Showdown, a game I built: 1806 of 2,000 at Senior Engineer, 5/5 in 19.4 s. Gear hobbing, blue-light scans and an over-constrained BIW part all showed up.
Your move: https://t.co/28J7sWE3yr
Daily shop-floor tips at @EngineerSalcido
Shop Floor Academy just got rebuilt mobile-first. Short vertical videos you can watch on the floor, in the break room, or between gemba walks. https://t.co/pUbspITniY 🧵
The PPAP sample proves a supplier can make one good part. It doesn't prove they can make 10,000.
Before launch on an EV suspension casting, ask for a run-at-rate: production tooling, production speed, production crew. Then measure those parts.
#PPAP#SupplierQuality
Tesla’s Robstown, TX lithium refinery converts spodumene ore into battery-grade lithium hydroxide—the first industrial-scale acid-free plant in North America. It supplies Giga Texas for 4680 cells used in Cybertruck, Cybercab, Semi, and more, cutting reliance on foreign refining. It runs 24/7.
@SawyerMerritt Dropping a trim does more for a plant than it looks. Fewer variants means simpler sequencing, fewer part numbers at the line side, and less changeover risk. Complexity is a cost you pay on every shift, not just on the order page.
@alex_avoigt Adding battery production next to a running plant is mostly a material flow problem. Plan dock doors, WIP buffers and forklift routes before the equipment lands, or the new area spends its first year fighting the old one for floor space.
@CyberRobooo 20 seconds at 99.5% sounds great until you do the math: that's one miss every 200 cycles, about one an hour. The real question is the recovery. If a person has to walk over and reset it every time, that walk is part of your true cycle time.
A tonnage monitor tells you about the die before the parts do.
When peak tonnage on an EV body-side die creeps up a few percent, check lube, pad pressure and slug buildup before splits show up in the rack.
Trend it every shift, not after the crack.
#Stamping#Quality#IE
Containment isn't a fix. It's rent you pay until the fix lands.
A 100% sort catches bad drive unit housings, but it costs labor every shift and still misses some.
Put a date on every containment and track the root-cause action against it.
#Quality#IE
Tesla has just officially announced that their Robotaxi service now operates 24-hours a day in every city that rides are available!
��� Austin
• San Antonio
• Houston
• Fort Worth
• Dallas
• Miami
• Orlando
• Tampa
Big milestone!
@SawyerMerritt Nine identical buildings is a gift for planning. Treat building one as the pilot, log every snag, and lock in standard work before building two starts. Each repeat should go faster, but only if the lessons get written down.
@Tyler_Plummer Fill and pour is the easy part. The shots that hurt are the first few after a die change, before the die is up to temp. Count warm-up shots as planned scrap and your yield numbers stop lying to you.
Planning a cell to 100% utilization guarantees a queue.
With real variation, wait time climbs steeply past ~85% load. Going from 85% to 95% can triple it.
Leave slack on purpose, then cut variation to earn it back.
What utilization do you plan your cells to?
#Capacity#IE