Take a wild guess how those Shinkansen noses are made...

This is news to me, but apparently the nose of the Shinkansen, a symbol of technological pride of the Japanese, is shaped by nothing more than a hammer! I would have guessed a sheet stamping machine... I wonder how many other non-shinkansen prototypes are formed this way, especially considering the low volumes that trains are produced in...

Featured in Infrastructurist, from Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/27/AR2010032702868.html

Wow that's sounds like an interesting job. 

I would have never thought.  Now I am wondering whether all high speed train noses are made this way too!

When I was a kid, I visited the shop of a guy who restored (or re-created) vintage race-car bodies by hand with nothing but sheet metal, a hammer, and a hand-sized block of wood. Took me a long time to appreciate just how much more difficult that was than it looked.

EDIT: So I wonder how these guys like the E5 and E6. :-)

This does not surprise me in the least.

This doesn't really surprise me, as Japan's industrial structure has always had outsourcing to small, family-run subcontractors as a key aspect. And something like a Shinkansen nose, both complex in shape and low-volume in terms of production rate, is more suited to a guy with a hammer than a CNC machine or an assembly-line robot.

That said, I'm wondering why they haven't developed a hammer-swinging robot after 45 years of banging out Shinkansen. The only thing the Japanese like more than family businesses are robots, after all. 

Glad that qwertyaardvark caught that and posted it, thanks! i totally spaced posting it here (embarrassing when its my home town newspaper...)! i thought it funny it was in the post!

was a wonderful story, great to see something simple and human for the solution!

also caught part of a show on polishing the other night and part of it was the japanese metal polishers and how hand polishing of the leading edges of jet wings is still the best to get the smoothest surface for best air flow.

cheers

jeff

That video really brings it home, doesn't it!

I'm actually quite surprised. I used to work in a small research factory (http://www.ae.msstate.edu/raspet/index.php) that looked into techniques for producing aircraft shells with composite materials (like fibreglass). Honda actually built a facility adjacent to ours to take advantage of our resources to apply the same techniques to automobile production (by building an airplane of their own, go figure, http://www.ae.msstate.edu/rfrl/pages/hondajet.html). Composites are favored for most modern aircraft because they are, durable, easy to make into complex shapes, and inexpensive (aside from the tooling, which looks no more expensive than what the hammerers are using for forms). I'm really shocked that shinkansen aren't these days at least built with composites, especially considering other HSTs are (e.g. the Acela) for this very reason.

http://www.compositesworld.com/articles/composites-aboard-high-speed-trains

Thanks for finding that video.  It really bangs home how they make it.

Hey, they're built the same way as my samurai armour =)

Excellent, thanks fat al!

jeff

And yet, i bet they churn out more shinkansen than any other country builds trains, even with automation.

Great find al!

I wonder whether the aluminum is preferred over fiberglass because of its crash worthiness or reuseability.

I'll bet the hammerer is deaf

If they ever gave a tour of this place I don't think I could resist going up to one of those guys and being like

STOP!

Hammertime!

This is news to me, but apparently the nose of the Shinkansen, a symbol of technological pride of the Japanese, is shaped by nothing more than a hammer! I would have guessed a sheet stamping machine... I wonder how many other non-shinkansen prototypes are formed this way

Probably quite a lot. I wasn't surprised by this, but then I have spent a fair bit of my career in workshops nailing trains together. 

Cheers,

Mark.

I wasnt too surprised because if yuou look at them up close, the noses are never really as smooth as they look.