I had a few spare days to explore the bolt making district south-west of Shanghai. Very interesting. Competition in China is extreme, making most businesses quite transparent – there is no time to play games.
Everything starts with huge spools of wire. Delivered by barge on canals, hundreds of tons of wire stacked on the banks everywhere. The wire is loaded into these enormous heat treatment tanks. (Pictured above) Only large factories will anneal the wire themselves, small factories buy it already softened.The wire is fed into machines that will cut to desired length and stamp the head of the bolt. Cool machines, video below.
This is a big machine, the machines for smaller screws will be the size of a stove. After stamping the head, the bolts are taken to a different machine to have the threads rolled. Small factories focus on these two steps, and outsource everything else.Heat treatment line, to harden the bolts / screws. Only the largest factories will be doing this, small operators outsource. I really enjoyed seeing the full range of companies, from a small family run business with a few machines (that will actually take a custom order from you) to giants like Eagle Metalware that operate their own retail storefronts all over China.
Circuit Board Assembly as a service is where Southern China excels. Automation, often supported by custom tooling is the norm, far above the typical automation levels seen when doing PCB assembly in Canada.
Rows and rows of machines placing components on circuit boards. 60 lines, 250 cell phones per hour per line, running 150 hours per week. Wave soldering
Routing circuit boards apart. I eventually eliminated this process, most small factories don’t own a machine like this. Which is a clue that their other customers have another solution…Custom fixtures for programming and testing, using spring loaded pins to make connections. This is a superior method to adding connectors that are only used once – standard practice in the west.
Food
Bought an entire Durian – let’s see if I get kicked out of the hotelCouldn’t find anyone to go for Sichuan, so I ate this boiled fish all by myself. Future me paid the priceAny excuse to go for BBQ
Never ending interesting fruit
Cities
Ningbo is all grown upHong Kong. Note the lady in the background soaking her cardboard recycling in water. Presumably a recycler pays her by weight…Not sure how this is calculated, but Shenzhen supposedly has more skyscrapers than the USA. Pictured is only a small corner of this massive city, and Shenzhen is only a small part of the Pearl River Delta.
A super-simple drilling rig, note the one-cylinder evaporatively cooled diesel. I think they are mapping the ground ahead of a subway extension.
Nature
Made me do a double takeLook at these awesome rocks on Yangtai Shan – a mountain in Shenzhen just behind my officeA little further down the trail, where the rocks are being made… Good old cement, building material of choiceAlso cementTrail building under way
These are the simplest, cheapest, little trucks. Single cylinder diesel, no radiator, just keep adding water.The farmers around Shenzhen rake and burn their leaves. This is (I think) the last major source of visible air pollutionVendors selling goodies on the mountainWutong Shan is the highest mountain in Shenzhen. This trail is horrifically steepIn the summer (monsoon season) Shenzhen is really clean. The last three trips, I went from this to brutal wildfire smoke in Calgary.Can hike for hours on the farmer trails without seeing anyone
Marta and Chester's Maleficent Adventures 