Date: Wed, 10 May 2000 10:03:52 -0400
Reply-To: David Beierl <dbeierl@IBM.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: David Beierl <dbeierl@IBM.NET>
Subject: Re: BusDepot Fuel Tank, have you installed one?
In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.20000509215658.007a2470@rockisland.com>
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<Rant on>
At 00:56 5/10/2000, Doktor Tim wrote:
>something specious. If you hold them to a serious specification the
>Japanese can do very good work. I haven't yet received a Mercedes box with
If you hold them to a serious specification (if you can, which is another
subject) you will get a part as good as your spec.
If give them a functional spec and let them do it their way, you will most
likely end up with a part far superior to your best expectations. The
Japanese are the absolute best in the world at refining a design for both
function and reliability. They have no equal (I think I just said
that). Show me a German VCR -- you can't, there aren't any. The design
has essentially reached perfection in Japanese hands and it is pointless to
try to improve on it further. I was (very) peripherally involved once in
the 1981 design of a German VCR, and it was a *joke.* The great German
engineers designed a cassette that ran at 72 inches per second past a fixed
head, with a duration of three minutes. At the end of the three minutes,
it reversed and stepped to the next track for another three minutes. By
brute force, they had gotten the turnaround time to two tenths of a second,
and considered that this would be acceptable for viewing. I think somebody
bought one.
I helped build a German 5 1/4" floppy disk drive (names suppressed to
protect the guilty, but it was the same outfit that did the VCR -- an
extremely prominent and famous company). At the time, such drives were
built in US, Japan, Germany. None of them were very good, but ours was
terrible, and very expensive. It was mostly expensive because the Germans
used an extremely expensive and wonderful ironless drive motor, with an
expensive (and unobtainable) French control amplifier chip with built-in
heat sink. It (the motor) would burn a hole in your finger if you tried
to stop it. It used back-emf feedback for speed control, and achieved a
control of +/- 5% (barely adequate at the time) at a cost of about
$32.50. The Americans used a $3.50 motor designed for Motorola 8-track car
stereos. It had a tachometer winding and was controlled by a $1 Cherry
Semiconductor chip with no heat sink (and no need for one). You could stop
it turning without breaking a sweat. It achieved +/- 2%. Nobody cared
what the Japanese used because they were just getting started.
All of these drives routinely went out of alignment and needed adjusting --
maybe 20 minutes work with an oscilloscope and a special alignment diskette.
Three years later the outfit I worked for was buying TEAC Japanese drives
with four times the capacity and one quarter the price of the ones I worked
on. They used a printed-circuit motor that drove the spindle directly at
300 RPM, and had +/- 0.1% speed control. They never needed aligning. There
were no American or German drives.
Phillips in the Netherlands built a dictating machine in 1957, using a
novel tape format called a cassette. In order to stimulate demand, they
very wisely kept rights to the design, but let anyone use it and build
machines for it, with the specification that a Phillips cassette recorded
on any machine must be readable on any other. The Japanese took this
convenient but very much dictation-quality design and turned it into a
hi-fi recording medium that completely replaced the reel-to-reel format for
consumer use (they had some help, primarily from Ray Dolby).
<Rant off>
david
David Beierl - Providence, RI
http://pws.prserv.net/synergy/Vanagon/
'84 Westy "Dutiful Passage"
'85 GL "Poor Relation"
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