Unless your product requires a lot of wood-work it will hardly pay you to add a woodworking shop to your plant, though sometimes a jig-saw, see Fig. 94, or a band-saw, as shown in Fig. 95, will often prove of service.
It is the same way with a foundry, for unless you need a large number of castings right along it is as a rule cheaper to farm the work out to some founder in your own town.
Buying the Stock.—I do not mean the stock of your company—let your friends and the public do that—but the raw materials, as the stock is sometimes called, which you are to convert into the finished product.
Before you order either machinery or stock, try to standardize your product, that is to say whatever it is you intend to manufacture have it in such shape that you are satisfied to market it without making any further changes in it, at least for some time to come. It is the after-changes, the constant changes that have kept many a manufacturer poor, aye, forced him to the wall.
Having a standardized article, object or machine, you and your associates should determine on the number to be built first and then you can go over the model in detail and figure out just how much of each kind of stock, such as brass rod, sheet hard rubber, screws, washers, nuts, etc., you will need, allowing of course for waste and breakage.
Now when you are ordering the tools and machines for your shop get prices on and order your stock at the same time and see to it you do not overlook any little thing and so have to wait for something you forgot.
Screws, nuts, washers, bolts and some other small supplies can be bought in wholesale lots cheaper than you could possibly make them in your own shop and it is false economy to make anything with ordinary machine tools that can be bought from some other manufacturer who does the work with automatic machinery.
Organizing a Shop Force.—I am taking it for granted that if you have enough ability to invent, design and make a working model of an invention and get an organization together to manufacture and market it you will certainly have enough ability left to build up and superintend the body of your enterprise and that is your shop force.
Your first effort in this direction should be to hire a good foreman; this, though, is not an easy thing to do for a foreman must be something more than a thorough machinist who can use any tool or run any machine. He must be able to get the best there is in them out of the other men under him and see that each one is put on the job which he is best adapted to do.