The episode tonight had a feature on how the seats are made in a MINI. They looked like ones for an 07 cooper. Its an interesting process. Check it out

 

Is it the one titled Wooden Barrels, Fire Hydrants and Automotive seats? Thats playing right now so I Tivo'd it.

 

Yup. It comes on after the fire hydrant part.

 

I just saw it and came on to search for this thread.

Definitely R56 seats being made in the program. Sweet catch, you fellas should check it out on Science Channel in HD if ya have it.

According to the show MINI does not make their seats. A separate company does that and ships them to MINI in a semi 60 sets at a time.

 

Well, considering the show is made in Canada, I imagine the seats are made somewhere on this side of the pond and shipped over to England.....

 

I love that show!

 

MINI parts are sourced from all over the world, not much is really made at the Oxford plant.

Mark

 

Yes more of an assembly point. I believe most manufacturer's do it this way in our modern world.

 

Almost all vehicles are made in "assembly plants" where parts are made by outsource vendors and are made utilizing "just in time" manufacturing. The How Its Made show made some references to it, but didn't get int to it too much. I worked for a Tier1 Tier2 suppler for 9 years and toured a lot of plants in the Midwest.
In fact in my city here there is a company (Johnson Controls) that makes seats for Ford Rangers. The Ranger plant is 30 minutes from here. In the seat factory they get orders and have 4 hours to build the seat and send it to the Ranger plant to be put into the trucks. If the Ranger plant goes down, the seat factory stops.
Most plants operate this way now. The outsource vendor can be a couple hours away, or even attached to the building and delivering via conveyors. They use a process called Just In Time manufacturing to minimize inventory.
Having outsource vendors build the parts of the car and hold the raw materials and labor costs helps keep the cost of the car down. I've seen everything from dashboards to the shell of the car coming into plants from an outsource. I general all they do in the plant is piece together all the parts that come from other locations. Rarely do plants build or create their own parts from raw anymore, although I think there are still one or two Ford Plants that may still be into this. I was more into DCX, Honda and Toyota plants with the exception of the Ford Ranger plant.

 

Any repeats any time soon?

 

Ya. 9:00 Eastern tonight i think.

 

6PM CDT today.


More times. http://science.discovery.com/tv-sche...541.x&start=20 Episode 19

 

I just happened to be sitting with the Science channel on in the background and thought, hey, those are mini seats. Google picked up this thread with a search of "how it's made mini seats." Damn, google indexes quickly.

Anyway, it's on now! (They're up to fire hydrants.)

 

how did i miss this! my wishlist should have found this as anything related to mini! oo well i'll search it out tonight.

 

Well, they don;t specificly say its for a MINI, but they're clearly mini seats....

 

Yup, and at the end of the segment you can make out the MINI logo on what I think is a shipping or product sticker.

I was hoping they'd show the seat in a finished vehicle

 

MINI has never made their own seats. These are manufactured by an outside vendor pretty much as the plethora of other vehicle components in the car.

 

There was also a show on an hd channel that did a show on sweeden. They had Getrag there with an all wheel drive mini. Pretty cool...they were testing to see how it handled on some ice track they have there.

Getrag is trying to get BMW to build it and is using this as a test vehicle..so they say.

 

I just watched that show on Sweden it's called Megaworld:Sweden, I think it was on Discovery HD Theater.

I would so buy an all wheel drive mini, no need for it, but it would be fun.

Just after that segment on Getrag they talk about Absolut Vodka, they do the same thing with the just in time manufacturing, they have a 3 hour supply of bottles and boxes at any one time, meaning they don't have to store a bunch of materials for a long time, it shows up and they use it.

 

Watched that segment last night. The Mini logo was on the seat bottom. Interesting how each work station has 88 seconds to complete the task and that it take 62 minutes to complete a seat set. Photographing seats prior to shipping was a smart CYI quality assurance process, since less than perfect seats were rejected.

 

There was an article in National Geographic a few years ago about how MINIs are made. Interesting read.

Mark

 

is this episode youtubed or otherwise hosted somewhere on the net? i wanna see it

 

each person has 88 seconds to complete their part of the seat

 

Ya, but its a simple step, like put the leather onto the foam... Attach the leather to the foam, etc... not too hard.

 

It will repeat tonight at 7:30 EST on the Sci Channel