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Originally Posted by blackshire
Luke, you just sired an idea, of which I am happy to be the dam (figuratively speaking):
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Ok, ANOTHER image I didn't need in my head... can't sleep and I check in and find THIS...
Is it any wonder I can't sleep??
LOL
At any rate, as a rancher, there are some examples I just don't use... this is one of them... LOL
Changing the channel so to speak, my six year old LOVES "How it's made". I could see your suggestion being successful, to a degree, BUT I think it's probably more involved than they'd want to get to support it.
On the other hand, it might be an interesting segment on a show like "How it's made" or "Factory made"... maybe even get some nondescript footage of the Mabels in action, "and in another part of the factory..." then switch to showing them making up kits...
That'd be kind of neat...
Don't know if the "Big E" would agree to it. I know some motor stuff is proprietary... I once toured the John Deere Works at Ankeny, IA... (just NW of Des Moines). I've always wanted to see the cotton picker plants since I've ridden and run the things since I was 2 years old... I was led on the personalized tour by a retired engineer who worked decades at the Ankeny plant... he told me "this area is supposed to be off-limits-- so don't take any pics in here (I had my 35mm around my neck) and if someone says something, we wandered in here by mistake-- this is proprietary tooling". He then proceeded to show me the automated machinery that line bores, cross-bores, threads, and then installs the drive gears and picker spindles into the picker bars. That was really cool. I also saw some forging machines making cultivator spring-steel shanks, and we went down the picker assembly line, which was inactive at the time, but the sprayer line next over was running. I wanted to see the IH cotton picker works in Moline, but they moved them to Nebraska IIRC a few months before. I did tour the Deere combine plant in Moline and saw combines go from sheet steel to driven out the door, which was WAY cool! Deere has a "Golden Key" program where if you buy a new combine (got a spare quarter million on ya??) you can fly up to Moline, get the star treatment and a personalized tour of the plants, go to lunch with some company folks, and then watch your combine come down the line being assembled, and when the time comes to start it up for the first time, they give you a 'golden key' and you can climb into the cab and fire her up for the first time... That's a pretty sweet deal!
Anyway, if you're ever in Moline and your interested in how stuff is made, it's a cool tour... I wanted to tour the Saturn plant in Columbia City, TN in the months after I got married when I was living in Nashville (hour or so north) but never got around to it... ended up in some little town in northern Alabama called HUNTSVILLE for some reason...
That's ANOTHER thing that thoroughly sucks-- when I was there about ten years ago, you could take a BUS TOUR through part of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Redstone Arsenal-- go past the S-IC test stand, the ISS prep lab (clean room prepping ISS modules for launch-- got pics of some modules around here somewhere I took on the tour from the glassed-in balcony) the vibration test stand where they stacked the Saturn V and did vibration testing on it to determine the harmonic frequencies of the structure... all sorts of neat stuff...
Now you can't leave the Visitor Center... thoroughly sucks...
Later! OL JR