Oh what a feeling...

Today I was up before the sun! Now I know how Chris must feel when he
works with the balloons... dead. Anyways, I had a good reason to be up
and about early, I was going with some students from Swinburne to visit
Toyota's car assembly plant in Altona. The tour was very comprehensive,
and I was quite surprised at the level of accuracy used during
construction. Much of the production is done by hand, and the plant
employs aver 4000 people. The plant pumps out a car every 2 minuets, and
over 60% of the cars get exported to the arab states. Quite impressive
that we do that kind of thing here in Melbourne. Every task performed on
the car must be complete in 1min 45secs!
The other thing I did today was I visited the Melbourne exhibition
center. This week is "manufacturing week" and they had a huge trade show
set up. Can you imagine the entirety of Jeff's shed filled with C&C
mills, rapid prototyping machines and a vast array of new and
experimental techniques of manufacture. The show was quite interesting,
but was focused on metals, I want to deal mainly in plastics, so I was
interested to see the rapid prototyping machines, as well as the 3d
scanner machines. They had some people demonstrating different design
software packages as well, and I managed to pick up a free trial of
Autodesk's Inventor program, which seems like a good knock off of
Solidworks. (perhaps Solidworks knocked off inventor??) Anyway, the day
was quite fun, and I plan to goto church council tonight. I am sure that
will be a thrilling meeting.