Core77

Making an airplane, edited down to 2:30

By Rain Noe - April 27, 2010

in Object Culture

Here's footage of workers assembling a Boeing 737 airliner, inside and out, time-lapsed down into two minutes, thirty seconds. It's interesting--and a little terrifying--to see workers tightening some mechanical parts using actual hand tools; I don't like the thought of flying around in something that has parts that may have been over- or under-tightened because the coffee was off that day. In any case, ID modelmakers will find the latter part of the video familiar--it seems to take just as long to mask the thing off and paint it as it took to put it together in the first place.

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moe

14 years ago

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other than the obvious, stated by slippyfish, each nut comes along with safety wire, wrapped around it and secured to the airframe to counter the tendency of nuts and bolts to unfasten due to vibration, so under tightening is impossible and over tightening will just render the bolts and nuts unusable the next time the component is due for an overhaul, ur fears are misplaced my friend. but cool video,, really shows the level of craftsmanship involved, amazing
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AirShowFan

14 years ago

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Indeed, it's pretty easy to design hand tools that only tighten until a certain desired torque, and disengage after that.

A lot of airplane parts also use bolts where the nut is connected to a little piece of metal by a very thin ring that is designed to tear away at the right tightness. You attach your hand tool to the piece of metal, fire away, and the little right tears apart (thus disconnecting the little piece of metal - and your tool - from the bolt) when the bolt reaches the right tightness.

Boeing has 150,000 people to think about this kind of stuff for 8 hours a day, at least 5 days a week. On the other hand, stuff like this...

seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2008351743&zsection_id=2003750727&slug=boeing05&date=20081105

... does occasionally happen. On the OTHER other hand, it is caught by quality-control checks and promptly addressed.
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dan

14 years ago

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^^^^ What he said about torque wrenches.
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slippyfish

14 years ago

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Neat video. Those "actual hand tools" are actual torque wrenches, expensive pieces of hardware calibrated to tighten a bolt to an exact ft/lb, n/m, or whatever scale of "tightness" you want. So you don't have to think those awful thoughts about under-tightening.

The paint job is nuts, I bet those paint techs went home with headaches and raspy throats every day.
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