By golly, troopy, the way you are carrying on gives the impression that all tradies are perfect. Fact of the matter is that there are a substantial few that are incompetent, lazy, take shortcuts, and even cheat. Some have no pride and don't go back and check their work regularly. Here are a few examples of tradies I had to sack:
- one was bracing a stud wall with a plywood sheet. He used a nail gun - when I saw the result the next day, 90% of the nails missed the studs.
- a bricklayer set up the string line for a wall - at one end it was on the left side of the wall, at the other end it was on the right side. The result was a wall 120mm out of square.
- a bricklayer built a an external staircase - about 2.5m long. It was bowed by about 5 cm.
- in the building I live in (which won an award!!!), in about 30 apartments the access panel to the ERV unit in the ceiling is offset such that the ERV unit cannot be serviced. The clowns who put in the ceiling didn't take into account the location of the ERV unit.
- I see continuously problems with many buildings that leak - everywhere: ceilings, walls, basements.
At the very least, when the HX learns to do something it will do it the same way forever - it will never suffer from "human" mistakes.
The point you made once about fitting in windows reminds me of a story I heard (surely was a joke, but relevant nevertheless): Once Mr Honda was visiting an aussie car factory, and our aussie CEO was proudly displaying the innovation here to use door hinges which had elongated screw holes, so that the door can easily be adjusted for a perfect fit once the door is installed. Mr Honda replied - yes that's very interesting, but we prefer to drill the holes in the right place.
And that is the point - whilst things are done manually they will never be 100% accurate, unless one expends an inordinate amount of time and money.
Btw, why did the car manufacturers here have to close down? Cheap labour in Japan? Nahhhh! The ozzie factories were producing about 5 cars per year per employee, Toyota was doing 49. The whole point of import tariffs was to allow our local manufacturers to get a good start - but after 5 decades they never upgraded their factories - instead the sucked on the public teat and forced every car buyer in australia to pay $5000-10000 extra for EVERY new car sold in australia. We all paid for that!
Automation is going to happen regardless.
FBR Price at posting:
3.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)