While I respect your work as shown in this forum it is hard to let that pass without comment. Workmanship and pride in what a worker is doing has nothing to do with whether he or she is "on the clock." Early in my aerospace career working in production as a union member of District 9 IAM I never met a aircraft production worker that was not proud of his or her work or was exempt from standards and controls to assure acceptable quality regardless of individual worker deficiencies. The level of quality and reliability in individual homebuilt airplanes are generally good but there tends to be peaks and valleys with in each airplane consistent with the builder's education, experience and interest. Some are perfect specimens and some are shoddy examples of workmanship that would never pass production inspection or testing. The idea that quality can be assured by an independent assessment after final assembly is simply not valid. Bob Axsom
Bob, you can be sure I am in complete agreement with your observation. Certainly, any of us can cherry pick an exceptional homebuilt example, compare it to any given production plane and by direct comparison decree it better in overall quality of fit and finish and be right but you and I know this very well.....that is
not the real world norm by any stretch of the imagination. As you know from your own production experience with constant government and military oversight, virtually every task that any worker does on any airplane must first pass certification. This usually means the worker must complete classroom and lab training of some sort and some of it on a periodic basis just to make sure no bad habits are developed. If you drill any hole, you are first trained to maintain very close tolerances. If you shoot any rivet, you are trained first, if you install a hi-loc, huck bolt, taper loc or cold work holes....you are trained. Even though I was extremely familiar with proseal, I still had to attend 3 full days of proseal classroom and lab training simply because the customer demanded all personnel working on the C-17 program be retrained. The Navy and Air Force both have their own autonomous offices nearby and constantly review what is done on the shop floor. In the production world you and I came from, things like clenched rivets, undershot, overshot rivets, smilies, short e.d, gaps, scratches, etc. were NEVER tolerated. To tell any supervisor that you did not want to drill out that bad rivet because you would cause more damage to a structure by removing and replacing it was laughable and to invite being escorted off company property permanently. That is why the motto displayed everywhere has always been..."DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME"....and I'm sure you remember
that one. Compare that motto to the famous one hear here so often and is almost always encouraged by those who have been trained in nothing........."
BUILD ON!" I am reasonably sure that any manufacturer who assembles a "certified" airplane must meet very similiar standards covering all the basics from training, tooling, materials and methods and must employ a quality control department that in itself must include (but is not limited to) a calibration lab for periodic inspection of all precision equipment and of course floor inspectors not subject to the influence of production foremen. People being only human, such a tension is quite necessary. Certainly, not much of this stuff is seen in your average residential garage where the majority of homebuilt aircraft are born.
