Resources

Expertise

Manufacturing
Construction and Fabrication

MANUFACTURING

It is essential to distinguish between manufacturing and construction since the demands on skill levels are different.

For the manufacturing sector, ie. mass production in factories, as often as not a technician will work on the shopfloor, attending to a task on a workbench. It is more a question of skill than scale.

Training in precision engineering is thus required as well as the ‘sixth sense’ required for the heat treatment of metals, eg. annealing and tempering machine parts.

Technicians need to absorb a great deal of academic knowledge too and should not be lumped together with unskilled workers, more commonly known as ‘labour’. It is essential that technical staff are given the respect they deserve and are protected from political and trade union demands for strikes and lockouts etc..

CONSTRUCTION AND FABRICATION

Constructing a bridge, ship, aircraft or high-speed train is clearly not the same as working on a bench. The word fabrication is appropriate and is used in the name of this organisation, Engineering Dynamics and Metal Fabrication Technologies.

It is in these four areas – bridge, ship, aircraft and rolling stock – that India’s expertise is perhaps most limited and is thus one of ED&MFT’s raison d’etres.

The planners and investors who are so keen to augment the mining and metal production sectors have not declared anything about the downstream uses of engineering alloys. Here the subjects of analysis, design and fabrication must be integrated. Fabrication equipment can be used for more than one thing, thus creating continual employment yet being cost-effective at the same time.

Harland and Wolff of Northern Ireland builds both bridge and ship components in the same yard. Bombardier of Quebec, Canada, owns both aircraft and rolling stock factories.