Some of the men will shine as bench hands, others will show an aptitude in running machine tools and yet again others will be naturally clever in assembling your device; he must be able to pick out these good qualities and put the men where they will do the best work in the shortest time.
By all means get a foreman, if you can, who has worked on something like, or nearly like, your own product. He should be a man of shop ideas with enough initiative to put them into use. To get all these things rolled into one human being for $25, $30 or $35 dollars a week is asking a good deal but there are boss machinists in almost every city who can fill the bill.
Your foreman can usually get all the mechanics you need but don’t make the mistake of starting in and letting him hire the men. After he has found a man and wants to take him on, then you talk to the prospective employee, and you do the hiring. Hiring and firing the men should be your prerogative. This will make all of them respect you without respecting their foreman the less and they will do more and better work by knowing that you are the real boss of the works.
The Stock Room.—The tools that belong to the shop and the stock, or raw materials, should be kept under lock and key in the stock-room and a stock-clerk should be put in charge of and made responsible for them.
Have slips printed and whenever the foreman, or anybody else, including yourself, wants a drill, or a piece of brass, or a machine screw, insist that the stock-clerk get a slip signed for it. By this method you will know exactly where your tools and stock went to; and when a man returns a tool credit him with it.
You should also have a record kept of the time spent on each job by the man who did the work and the easiest way to do this is to use a time-stamp as shown in Fig. 96. If your shop is a small one your stock-clerk can take care of the time-slips. By doing things in this systematized way you will be able to keep pretty close tab on tools, stock and labor and these are three factors where a great deal of waste usually occurs in small shops and factories.
Fig. 96. THOMPSON TIME STAMP
The Finished Product.—Whatever you are manufacturing, the finished product must be made as attractive as can be with the littlest extra cost and this applies alike to a toaster for a gas-stove or a threshing-machine. It’s the finish the buyer sees and he will gladly pay for the paint and the gloss that covers up the defects, if the thing looks nice.
Where a number of different materials enter into the make-up of a device it is always well to give some thought not only to the design,[5] but also to the color effect.