First of all, I applaud all of the manufacturers that are producing products that give Canadians a made here, NR option. Many people are fans or critics of the various designs and executions of each, but we can all agree to disagree on the finer points. Also I have no knowledge of each manufacturers order of operations, processes or how many machines they possess.
Manufacturing is an interesting challenge, with many ways to get to a finished product. A lot of people are not quite aware of how you go from raw material to a finished product and the steps involved. Quite often when people see our machines, they think that you feed in a blueprint and out pops a finished part, it is very far from that!
When you make something, you have to think it through from start to finish. The order of operations have to be correct, you may need a certain fixture to hold something a specific way in order to properly index the part, or hold it rigidly enough to ensure precision. The biggest challenging is fixturing. Jigs that are fast to refill and ideally able to be refilled outside of the machine while the machine is cutting a part on another jig in the machine. What is referred to as 'door open time' is lost machining time. If you have to have the machine stopped for a long period to reload, it's not making chips.
Two different scenarios can play out in how you make parts. Dependent on how many operations you have, and how large the table is on your mill for instance. Lets say your part requires six different steps and 6 different fixtures. Lets say you have an order for 100 parts and you have a smaller machine. You can fit a couple fixtures on your mill, so you run all 100 parts through the first two steps, lets say this takes a couple weeks. You do a fixture change, and perhaps add a change a few tools in the tool changer. This takes you half a day to get everything cleaned up and dialed in, then you get back up and running. Now repeat steps three and four with the same two weeks and change over to steps five and six. You've now taken 6 plus weeks to get out 100 parts.
If you have three machines, obviously you can do the above in two weeks, and not lose the changeover times. If you have a bigger machine such that you can fixture all six operations on the table at once, you can advance the part through all the stations. The advantage of this is that every time you open the door, you get a completed part. In the above scenario of 100 parts in 6 weeks, based on 5 days a week and 8 hours a day, lets say there was a total of 2.4 hours per part of machining. So if you had your machine doing six consecutive operations on staged parts, you would get three cycles a day, but....You have a 2.4 hour cycle, that can run unattended, you could theoretically load another batch before the end of the shift and get 4 parts out a day. Doing four parts a day would cut your total run down to five weeks.
You can now see that if you 'batch', you are six weeks out on your 100 parts. Well you actually start getting parts at week 5, but you have gone for a month with nothing. If you have outside work such as anodizing, this time is added onto the month that went by. If you run more machines, or a bigger machine, you are getting parts sooner, then your outside services can be completed while you are running. I'm a big fan of getting a trickle of parts every day instead of long runs of nothing, then a flood of completed stuff. We have been manufacturing rifles since 1997 with our first titanium hunting rifle, the Timberwolf has been around since 2001! We started out with one CNC mill, and now we have many. We've gone through a lot of different strategies and learned a few things along the way.
The manufacturers of our 'toys' are trying hard, learning, fighting an anti-gun government and bureaucracy all the while trying to make a good product and grow a business. Parts don't fall off machines. Machines break. Sometimes you make crap and have to throw away some time and money in materials and catch up. Family members get ill, you may get ill, life happens. It's still people working hard and not trying to lose their home because they invested in something and the government could flip flop and make their livelihood the end of them.
