My first two Harleys were AMF bikes and they were OK, but nothing great. I had one break down in all the time that I owned these two bikes, and it was really odd. The battery cable lead broke in two! Later I bought a Kawasaki and it did exactly the samething! (I must be jinxed).
In my field of work I was in, I would often get access to many factories that it took an act of congress to get into. In turn we would allow their guys to come into our plants for a tour (not like a regular business tour but a indepth look see). I was up in Milwaukee back in the mid eighties for a machine run off at K&T, and got the tour of the Harley engine plant from a guy in their engineering staff. They were right in the middle of a run of XR750 stuff as well as the regular stuff we would be buying. I wasn't at all impressed. They were doing everything with late 1950's and early 1960's technology, and everything was done by hand assembly with no serious checks along the way till they actually fired up the engine!! Yet I looked over in the racks and some some serious state of the art tooling and a couple Cross transfer machines just setting there unused (new?). Asked the guy about the fixtures and the Cross Transfer machines, and the engineer was stunned as I was the only person that'd every noticed them; let alone asked him about them. Said they spent several million dollars on the stuff, but had never used any of it as they were actually scared of it. I found out why after looking at the tooling closely (nice stuff by the way). It was a completely different modular engine design. Won't go much deeper as it's their secrets. I told him they could stull cut the cases on the Cross machines for about 1/4 the cost involved, but most all the parts would assemble much easier and faster. About six months later I get a phone call from that same guy asking for a tour, and the boss had me take on a walk thru. First thing he asked me about was those transfer machines (we had about a two dozen different ones at the time) so I took him out to an older area that had been tooled up in the mid 1970's. He looked at this one Lamb Transfer that was "U" shaped and bout 250 feet long cutting automatic transmission cases (one comming out every three minutes and forty seconds). Then I took him over to a couple Cross transfers similar to what he had. They were cutting valve bodies and tail shaft housings. Later in the day I took him over to see some state of the art stuff that had been tooled up in the last 36 months in an FMS system. There were eight K&T MM2200 machine centers being loaded off of robotic cars with no operators around. Told him we could run that area with the lights out! Then I took him on a tour thru two assembly areas. One was old, but still much more modern than what he was used to. And the other was state of the art. They were doing more automatic transmissions in a day that Harley was building engines in a week. A week or so later he calls me up to ask me if we did any precision welding, and had him came back. This time he brought his boss and two other engineers. They thanked us for the tours and said that they might be asking for help as they were wanting to tool up the transfer machines, and maybe later setup an FMS system. Told him by the time they would be ready this stuff would be out dated, and they just need to go accross town to K&T for the latest stuff. I did tell him that I would have loved to taken him accross the street into the military side, but they would not let him in there. In there he'd have seen machine centers everywhere, and the best tooling money could buy.
So how does this effect Remington? They operated only slightly better than Harley did! Had they done it right they'd have about $150 in a Model 700 going out the door (the metal parts), and the whole package would be with less than .003" error in it period.
gary
