product shortages have become an unavoidable fact of life and whether
it's toilet paper or Playstation 5es it raises the question if you don't have
enough stock why don't you just build more of them except in this case I'm not
just mad about waiting 6 months from my AMD framework laptop I've got a
significant personal investment riding on the answer to that question and since
I happen to be in the neighborhood anyway I think it's time to pay them a
little visit and find out what the heck is going on
on this says it's a Bicycle Club did I
just get played no like any design firm framework
works with manufacturing Partners to build their products and I am so excited
to be here today compow is one of the largest odm laptop manufacturers in the
world and they were gracious enough to allow us on the production floor on
extremely short notice to shed some light on how laptop production works for
a small startup partner like framework
and to shed some light on our sponsor cable mod it's like a mod for your
cables because that is exactly what it is upgrade your GPU Cable Management
with our 12volt high power angled adapters learn more at the end of the
video the Journey Begins in the boardroom and I mean that in more ways
than one when we arrived framework was literally in the middle of a meeting to
negotiate an increase in production capacity but as you guys are about to
see Partnerships are hard work and this process isn't as simple as sure let's
just build some more who's going to be responsible for paying for the new line
who's going to get cut to make room on the production floor and where are all
the extra materials going to come from assuming they can answer all of those
questions framework will be adding more lines like the ones I'm standing on
right now this spot looks good can we add more
here what yeah obviously it's not as simple as Hing more production lines
let's take a look at why there are two different types of lines we'll be
looking at today this side is a subassembly line where framework
prebuilds the assemblies that will be used to integrate into finished machines
and we've got something really exciting to show you here this is currently
running a DVT one or design verification
one run of trackpads for the upcoming framework laptop 16 now I showed you
that machine already but the one you saw on the channel was a very early sample
with components from the stage before called EVT or engineering validation
stage that one would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to build which come
to think of it explains why Nar Rob was so squirely about me handling it anyway
the reason it cost so much is because there's practically no tooling which is
the fixtures molds and equipment that are needed to enable mass production so
nearly every piece of that machine was handbuilt by engineers and specialist
contractors due to the cost you would typically build only a few dozen main
boards and a handful of enclosures at that stage coming back to DVT though
mass production tooling is used to ramp things up significantly and right now
they're in the process of building hundreds of pre-production framework
laptop 16s now these are still very
expensive several times the cost of a production unit due to the expensive
engineering labor and and the immature production processes but this is so
important because it helps identify areas where both quality and efficiency
can be improved for example the keyboard cover assembly requires 80 screws all
perfectly torqued even though a human worker could do that that's really not
reasonable is it so they made a major investment into two of these automatic
screwing machines which I've been told as long as I wear these gloves I get to
play with
whoa okay that's
cool in mass production this would apparently run much faster than it is
right now and what you guys got to understand here is nothing about this
process is by accident it might seem like it's putting screws in random
locations but every part of the
manufacturing process is agonized over to make it as reliable and efficient as
possible with that said I mean it's not the screwdriver I would have built you
can find that one on LTT Store.com in all seriousness this saves them from
needing different processes and production lines for DIY and pre-built
and it increases quality assurance we're going to take a look at that later first
what's this pile I'm sitting on here the main store room is in a high security
area on another floor I'm not allowed to show you that but this is still
thousands of dollars worth of components for the day's production they get carded
here then over to the kitting stations where all of the components for each
machine like the screen assembly and the motherboard are serialized and organized
into a tray that follows the laptop down the assembly line to keep everything
within Arms Reach for the workers the reasons for this serialization are
twofold first is traceability let's say
your customer start to report a string of SSD failures if you have that
information it can be the difference between the s SD manufacturer footing
the bill for their faulty product or you having to swallow that pill yourself
because they blame your process second because of their modular design
framework has a lot of SKS for their size that means that compared to say an
apple who might have a permanent assembly line for each product framework
needs to be agile and this way they can swap their assembly lines between
products as needed look at all the
motherboards now things really get going the first step is to install the thermal
assembly on the motherboard then take the entire thing and put it into the
bottom housing they use a special ionizing fan to reduce ESD since the
main board is right there and you really don't want that dying and then at the
next station they screw in the SSD and add RAM all of the processes are
outlined on these sop or standard operating procedure sheets that are hung
at each individual station next the main board and Battery get screwed into place
then right behind me the entire LCD assembly which already includes the
hinge is screwed in and plugged in there's a couple of things that are
noteworthy here first of all this jig is kind of cool during the DVT stage they
determined that this was exactly the optimal angle for this installation and
there's all kinds of little details like that that we're going to see throughout
the line and second you'll probably note that all of the workers are wearing ESD
ankle straps but actually wearing them unlike what I used to say in all of my
PC build videos where I was not actually wearing
them something that didn't get caught in DVT for the framework laptop 13 is the
little bracket that holds the antennas onto the Wi-Fi card and there's a reason
for that you see trained operators have no problem with picky installations like
the old one used to be but customers had
a heck of a time with it so they redesigned the bracket to hold the
antennas onto the Wi-Fi card then installed together rather than have it
so you have to hold the whole thing together and screw it down hey there we go next comes the input cover so this
varies wildly depending on which keyboard you get what is it nine
languages now more more than nine languages so we have nine countries that
we're in but there's actually more languages than countries and we have a
few of the keyboards available for countries we're going to be shipping in soon so it's literally we're adding a
few new keyboards every quarter at this point ah anywh who there's this fancy
acrylic fixture that helps ensure that the screws and the driver are straight
and to help prevent the screwdriver from accidentally scratching any of the metal
Parts this might seem a little bit confusing because we put the keyboard on
the top then we flip it over to screw it in but that's how the framework laptop
works and that's basically it finished laptops so then why is there still so
much ahead of us on the assembly line ah quality control starting with stru or
what they would call inprocess Quality Control this this is a visual QA station
where they'll uh find things like oh where'd it go this one come on andtie
see this little guy right here they'll use a DOT gauge on that to determine
whether it should be considered a pass and is acceptable to send to a customer
or whether it's a fail which raises some interesting questions given that
framework is positioning themselves as an environmentally conscious brand does
it really make sense to throw this whole assembly away over that tiny dot it's a
tough question to answer because obvious viously they don't want to do that but
from a customer standpoint do you want to be the one with the blemish or the
one with the scratch I asked them if they've considered doing something like
a like a fail book where there's you know little scratches and you get a
slight discount and they said yeah they' love to be able to take pictures and
price and list those things in the future but for now this kind of thing is
pretty rare and the better approach is to improve the process and handling to
ensure they get as little waste as possible then it's time for software I
have no idea if this song is going to get us dmca but apparently they do a
media test on it um but not until the
test program has been loaded on the laptops using these cool test harness
like type-c dongles that I mean because their framework laptops end up sticking
into the laptop under the side there then we move into the function tests
where everything type- C wireless Bluetooth every Hardware function of the
laptop gets tested and their software will check the serial
number of the laptop and ensure that all the correct things are inside it now
they're ready to ship right nope just kidding first they go into these fancy
little protective padded bags and then they go into burning land where they'll
sit for anywhere from 10 to 12 hours at
the beginning of production and then maybe 4 to six hours after you've
shipped thousands and thousands of units and you have a pretty good idea of what
you're working with also at this stage they get the latest firmware flashed and
the OS loaded including the latest drivers then we move to the funniest
station this only applies to DIY Frameworks but um they take everything
that all the people over there just did and Undo It Yep they're taking them
apart so that you can build it yourself at home cool now because they're doing
DIY production right now this next stage wouldn't happen because um it wouldn't
have a keyboard but this is the AI test or automatic
Optical inspection test to ensure that the keyboard is in the right language
for the order and maybe more importantly
that there are no errors in the legend I asked about this and yes the step of
verifying that the legend is correct does exist because there have been times
when it wasn't and the reality of it is that you can't have the operator check
to make sure all the keys are in the right place because even if they did
speak the language I mean it be an easy thing to miss there are a few more
stations that the machines pass through before shipping they wipe down the
screen add certification labels and that sort of stuff but I actually think this
non-descript green rack is a little bit more interesting framework targets a
first run yield of in the high 90% range
but obviously High 90% would still mean
that a few per of the units are coming off the line not in a shippable state
that's what you're looking at right here but but these will be inspected and
assuming that they pass individually will go back into the line giving
framework what they say is a nearly 100%
overall yield which is pretty awesome
that Target is really well aligned with framework's philosophy though not all of
them are necessarily anything to do with sustainability for example they were
willing to tell us that this line currently targets anywhere from 35 to 50
units per hour that means what about 35
to 40 seconds per station or something like that man that is really cool and it
can be scaled this is just one line it could be two lines or a 100 lines I mean
a girl can dream right they won't tell me exactly how many lines they have
because then I could pretty much calculate the revenue on my phone which
for some reason I'm not allowed to know even though I'm an investor I guess that makes perfect sense uh anyway it's time
for us to do something really fun now narv and I are going to be picking five
random framework laptops off of the line here and we're going to be signing them
if you get one and you send us a picture
how on Earth are they going to do that you know what we're going to have details in the description we are going
to send you a framework shirt and an LTT screwdriver wait why am I doing a
screwdriver that cost so much more the shirts on my shirt really high quality
heavy weight cotton all right fine let's
do it and I can just sign them anywhere right yeah screen battery any of the
sensitive components feel free yeah okay how about here probably right
there
fine these are DIYs right so these are all DIYs they could go to any of the
countries we're shipping in no keyboard already Associated all right so it's
going to be completely random guys it's kind of ironic that you guys don't ship
in Taiwan where you're producing these things we are opening ordering soon
really oh actually specifically for that reason I mean Taiwan is an important
market for PCs but also it's ridiculous that we're building them here and not
selling yeah okay cool good job I think
the last thing is to write a little message in
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below if you guys enjoyed this video you might enjoy the one where I build a
framework laptop on the computech show floor under the watchful eye of narv who
says I did a great job without the instructions I I did say that I I don't
think you did I don't think I did no