Hacker News Reader

Comment by gene-h | Hacker News Reader

High tech electronics can be quite sensitive to small contaminants in manufacturing equipment. A plant making HDDs accidentally lubricated some of the machinery with silicone which turned out to be very bad. This silicone got into the disks and as the head passed over the disk it got hot enough to decompose the silicone oil into silica. So effectively, the hard drive disk got covered in sand and caused the hard drives to fail much faster.

The worst part is that silicone oil will diffuse over surfaces so the whole plant got contaminated and needed to be scrapped.

I've also heard that some electronics plant had an issue where some metal tiles in the lobby of the plant were growing tiny whiskers of zinc, which got tracked in by workers and started shorting out the electronics.

View on HN

Reminds me of old stories about Intel - how, when they were taking a (chip fabrication) process which worked at plant X to (new or re-tooled) plant Y, they would duplicate EVERYTHING from X at Y. Right down to the exact brand / line / formulation of the paint on (say) the walls of the lobby, the type of toilet paper in the bathrooms, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_Exactly!

That process even has a name: "Copy Exactly!"

> The Copy Exactly! methodology focuses on matching the manufacturing site to the development site. Matching occurs at all levels for physical inputs and statistically-matched responses (outputs). This process enables continuous matching over time by using coordinated changes, audits, process control systems, and joint Fab management structures

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_Exactly!

sometimes called copy stupid in extreme circumstances

See: Target's botched move into Canada. They basically copied everything they did in the US. This was compounded by an optimistic purchase of another company's locations to expand into. They bombed the project's runway on that and couldn't afford to keep it going while they sorted out all the problems resulting from Canada revealing all the flaws in their US systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_Canada

That wiki article makes it sound like they did change something compared to the US stores; prices went up. Canadian customers knew that from previously crossing the border to US Target stores and subsequently stopped going pretty much immediately after launch.

As a Canadian whose partner was initially very excited about the Target launch, what killed it for her/us was primarily the logistics issues— you'd go into the store and like 20% of the shelves would be empty including everything that was supposed to be on markdown, and even some of the stuff that was there wouldn't scan properly at the till.

But apart from that, I think we got the impression that there were some market positioning issues too. Like, in the US, Wal-Mart has a reputation for being the absolute cheapest, so Target being the "step up" option is a pretty reasonable place to be. Whereas in Canada, Wal-Mart was already occupying that step-up space (relative to discount department stores like Giant Tiger and the old Zellers locations that Target Canada bought up), and those overseeing the Target push hadn't really committed on whether they wanted to fight Wal-Mart directly for that space, or try to go a level further up and take on the "nice" department stores like the Bay and Sears.

Neither option was great, given that Wal-Mart was well-entrenched and the nice department stores having been dying for decades anyway. But not choosing a path at all is often worse than either of two bad options might have been if they'd at least been fully committed-to.

I believe part of the reason is they completely changed their enterprise resource planning & supply chain software. There were a LOT of changes, and yet not enough - not accounting for Canadian price sensitivity and the distances/warehousing difference.

This is a fascinating read I bookmarked at the time :)

http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-cana...

I believe (but could be wrong) Home Depot did essentially the same thing - used Canadian market as test bed for SAP, except they already had an established stable presence here.

And here us software developers are still trying to do this and think we're the smartest people in the room for inventing it!

Back in the days of "classic" ASP pages, the usual model at the shop I worked in was that whenever we needed to add a page to the site we would copy a working page and then modify it. Sure it duplicated a lot of common code, but it wasn't without its advantages. You could be pretty certain that your page would not break anything else, and that later changes to a page would also be self-contained. It did suck when a change needed to be made to many pages, but if you knew about cygwin and grep, sed, and awk, those could often be automated.

So you got code reuse via copy and paste!

Docker for factories.

That general philosophy seems to be intact. A very recent example: a large machine at their Hillsboro research facility was dismantled and sent to production in Ireland, with the same model with a very slight upgrade shipped in to replace it at the R&D location.

Ignore the red herring title: https://semianalysis.com/is-intel-shipping-tools-out-of-us-f...

the original reproducible build in a way

I was watching a video about the gold coating on the JWST primary mirror segments and noticed a conspicuously placed sign warning employees not to bring anything containing silicone into the facility.[1] I had no idea it was such a problem contaminant! I wonder if they have issues with personnel using silicone based personal products at home.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgn7bKs042Q&t=211s

Siloxanes are serious contaminates in several industrial processes. Another big one is powder coating "paint". It can be bad even if only comes from a personal care product used by an employee at home.

And you called out their near-infinite ability to be spread around.

Very useful and interesting class of chemicals.

What is powder coating paint? Curious so as I can avoid it :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powder_coating

It's a common process used to coat all sorts of objects. But you don't buy "powder coating paint" and use it yourself, it is done in purpose built facilities.

I think the parent is referring to something else, given the part about personal care products.

Scrapped or scraped? Did they really need to abandon the plant or the equipment, or just clean it?

Silicone oil is one of the most stubborn contaminants I have ever encountered. I use trisodium phosphate to clean it up, and even then it sometimes persists. Try pouring epoxy over wood that has been polished with Pledge, and you'll see what I mean.

I can believe "scrapped."

Isn’t a silicone based oil used in oil diffusion vacuum pumps?

Seems like one should look for a different solution

Not a clean room, but reminds me when I was working in a partner's small datacenter and found an electrician in there using a chop saw on metal conduit.

Are there sources for both of your stories? I would be very curious to learn the details.

What, you mean it’s not spelled “silicone valley”?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com