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2010-04-15 10:01:38 (4390 views) All day at the rubber factory amidst toxic and quite possibly carcinogenic vapors. Head and throat aren't happy. Writing from a bus heading back, but not quite to the right place because it's too late and the right bus has already left. This bus will stop half an hour away but there's a connecting bus or a subway or something. Shouldn't be a problem. Just glad to breathe some fresh air. Compared to the burned rubber, the odor of mold in this old bus is a heavenly scent. There was one thing though which smelled worse than the rubber at the factory and that was Mr Tang's breath. That didn't help with communication as the safe distance was about 2-3 feet. Sonia was there to translate from broken mandarin to Hunan dialect. The lights today were pretty much off for some reason - perhaps the rain caused a black out and they were on a generator. Quite gloomy in there with some neon tubes hanging from the ceiling and bright clouds of burned rubber coming out of the machines.
What's up with the surprise? - ask all of those who have already prepared with beer bottles, popcorn and TV dinners and are eagerly awaiting in front of the screen for the awaited DreamLover 2000 last-before-launch super feature. Some of you may even have summoned friends and relatives and you may all be sitting on the sofa with the projector hooked up and the children put to bed.
Sorry folks. Not today, quite possibly tomorrow. Here's the full report.
Early rise, and the usual taxi and bus ride an hour south. Grabbed an early KFC (the lesser evil out there) but regretted it. Set out with the specific plan to eat and find a restroom before arriving at the factory because the restroom at the factory is dirtier and smellier than any far off gas stations you've ever stopped at and is truly impossible to even approach. Tried a few places, eventually found a hospital. Hospitals should have western style toilets right? Wrong. What if you have a broken leg, how are you supposed to... anyway let's change subject. Made do with the hospital restrooms totally ignoring and zooming past a nurse at the entrance who seemed intent on delaying and having forms filled out.
Then, the driver forgot how to get to his own factory and we were caught in rain and traffic for over half an hour as he figured it out.
Finally got to the factory. Inspected the cables. The new cables are very odd! They feel very soft to the touch. Weird and cute. There aren't many cables out there made of this material. The important part though, is that the overmolded part sticks to their surface. Very cool.
However, as you can probably guess from the lack of videos, there have been inconveniences. This time we weren't able to achieve even one working prototype of the surprise component. The cable connection initially broke off in 100% of the trials. Also, the overmolded rubber sometimes seemed to come out all messed up. It was still molten at some points and you could just break it by pulling. Kind of like a Kyoshinhei summoned prematurely.
At any rate, the day was spent trying to figure out why the cable connector always broke off. Temperature? Pressure? Strain? Mold shape? Unfortunately Mr Tang went out for a few hours after a very very heated phone conversation (or rather monologue). He must be having some bigger fish to fry... so we were left with a guy who's been there only 3 months and though he claims he worked at a similar place for over 20 years working with him was more about hoping than anything else. He was not responsive to verbal queries probably because he gave up trying to understand our accent. He kept looking at the machine and thinking and messing up more and more parts.
He even decided after a while that the doors had to be closed because the huge machine melting rubber at 200 degrees with internal temperature sensors was affected by the breeze. That of course didn't help so we managed to get him to open the large factory doors again, this way the lung cancer we're getting in a decade or so should be benign.
In the process of trying to figure out the breakage we obtained a few NICE looking (albeit not working) samples of what the final product will look like. Very, very nice and professional. When the rubber comes out of the mold it has all kinds of crap material attached to the parting line. The results look yucky initially, but then you just pull the film and protrusions off with your fingers and they come off cleanly, leaving a perfect part, showing only a normally unnoticeable parting line in the middle just like any product out there. All right... so we got some good looking parts and some that came out very messy - why??? After inquiring for over 20 minutes and getting many evasive answers from the guy it finally transpired that he was using 10 days old silicone. Quite aggravated at this we sent him to get some good material for us. The fresh silicone was much softer. Of course the part is breaking, he's using hardened old silicone! Oh my...
But unfortunately that still didn't work. After a few hours Mr Tang came back. He immediately found that the guy was using too much rubber which in turn created too much pressure which then pushed on the cable and destroyed the soft flex pcb connection. The guy denied using too much but we started to connect the dots - hey he never weighed the rubber this time. Last time he was measuring the grams needed and this time he was just putting the stuff in the mold without measuring.
So Mr Tang asked for another 2 assembled parts to overmold. Fine. He said we must lower the rubber hardness and reduce the amount of rubber inserted into the mold. This time the cable didn't break but the part was still non-functional after coming out of the mold. How is this possible!!! Opened and destroyed the part to inspect - no rubber inside. So... but... what??? It was working before going into the mold... :(
As this was happening we had to run back to the bus station as we were expecting Sonia's driver to take us home in the evening but it turned out he had "something to do". So we went with another driver. He almost had two accidents on the road due to the rain. First he almost ran into a little hill of concrete and bricks, right through a metallic sign which he didn't see at all. These things are actually common on the street in that part of town. Can you imagine? You're driving or turning and all of a sudden there's a pile of bricks in the middle of the road. Normal. You're supposed to avoid them lest you be judged a total n00b.
We all screamed at the last moment which made him do something even more dangerous, suddenly pull to the right into the other lane. Fortunately there weren't any cars. Ten minutes later he almost hit some guy walking on the side of the road and did the same last minute sudden lane change which sent even Sonia screaming. Despite that she was bold enough to suggest he may drive us home if we missed the bus. Are you serious? We'll be dead before we get there. No thank you.
In the end we managed to hop on the almost right bus - it's not going home but close enough.
We left a bunch of stuff with Mr Tang - soldering iron, parts, cables... he's still working on it and it's now 9pm. He knows we're going back tomorrow with our toothbrushes and we're not leaving until they get it right. It's actually quite odd to be walking in there with a big smile and really excited and talking a whole lot when everyone else is slowly withering away at some desk handling rubber in dim light without any hope and not talking very much unless absolutely necessary.
They have no clue what they are building - and that's the way we want to keep things unless we want a Chinese Golden Dragon brand DreamBuddy 2000 coming out next week. Mr Tang's best guess is that this is a device to massage feet during foot baths. All right, that's what it is. Seems like a decent opportunity to open another market for the DL2000. They do not know there are over 2000 people waiting at home for good news on this! Truth be told we've gone close to showing them this blog just to put a bit of pressure on them to do things right and show them how many appreciate their work. However - no... bad idea.
So they are still working on it, our feeling is that since the rubber inflow problem has been fixed, and the cable problem has been fixed, and the breakoff problem has been fixed, this is just a matter of adjusting temperature at this point to make sure things don't break irreversibly... there is a 30% chance they'll get it to work perfectly tonight and a 99% chance we'll get it done tomorrow. Got to buy a gas mask though... can't spend another day in there.
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Update: now at a McDonalds (healthy diet today). Still trying to get home, waiting for the 3rd bus, guy peeing in the street in front of 10 people at the bus stop but it's so dark nobody noticed or they pretend not to. More stuff coming to the surface as we shoot SMS messages back and forth with Mr Tang (at least this way we can communicate without accents getting in the way). He finally admits the low melting point material has "expired". Ha - that wasn't disclosed to us until the 5th time we inquired about it. That's why they can't lower the temperature. They don't have low melting point rubber! Thanks for letting us know after a day of mystery and attempts!
So that's it, tomorrow he's buying more low-temp rubber and we're lowering the temperature and retrying. This should definitely work - it worked last time... The only addition we're making today is the cable and THAT works, so... Please creator of the universe and atoms, can you make regular melting point cable sleeves stick to low melting point rubber? Even mildly? Please????? If not we have to call back the cable people and tell them that their special material inside and special material outside cable also needs to have a special melting point. Not a polite thing to have to say to someone - plus, they will take another 5 days to create samples.
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Update, now 11:20, Mr Tang just called it quits, he was able to make the part work inside low melting point silicone but because it's expired the outside stays molten or doesn't solidify homogeneously. Once again we were right. It's the temperature. Tomorrow he'll buy some shore 30 and shore 50 low melting point silicone and re-test, if that's perfect then we'll increase hardness (yes, forgot - hardness is also a parameter, and intuition tells the way the hardness changes with age of the material and exposure to air is non-deterministic and non-linear).
He also has another trick up his sleeve, a different thermoplastic substance. He's fiercely confident that both the low melting point silicone and the thermoplastic will stick to the cable's sleeve.
Let's face it; he's never done something like this before. But, thumbs up for staying up until 11:30pm to solve the problem!!
What a day. Splitting headache. Must be the rubber. Tomorrow we shall finally be victorious. The days of surprise-less Male Management Systems are counted.
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Sounds like a heck of a day.
Good luck tomorrow!