A third assembly bay entered service at the JIAXIN workshop this month, laid out for units up to 50 m² of shelf area. The change is about queue time rather than build time, and that distinction is worth explaining.
What was the bottleneck
Electrical assembly. On a 20 m² machine it takes around 90 hours and cannot be parallelised without quality loss, because two people working in the same cabinet interfere with each other and with the inspection points.
With two bays, a third machine waiting for electrical work either sat idle or pushed everything behind it. That is where the queue came from.
What the new bay changes
The bay is set up as an electrical and controls station rather than a full build station. Chamber and skid work still happen in the first two bays; the new bay takes finished frames and does wiring, controller programming and pre-test checks.
Because the station is dedicated, its tooling, drawings and test equipment stay in place. Time lost to setting up and clearing down a shared bay was a small but repeatable cost per unit.
What it does not change
Testing. Every unit still runs vacuum decay, pull-down, shelf mapping and a full product cycle, and that takes three to four working days in the test bay. Nothing about the new arrangement shortens it, and we would not want it to.
Chamber fabrication. A 50 m² chamber still takes about three weeks, and that remains the longest single stage for large units.
Effect on lead time
For a standard 20 m² machine, the queue before a build starts has reduced from roughly three weeks to under two. Total lead time remains ten to twelve weeks from deposit and approved drawings, but more of that time is now productive rather than waiting.
For 50 m² units the improvement is smaller, because chamber fabrication dominates.
What customers should still do
Approve drawings early. Drawing approval remains the single largest controllable delay in any project, and it sits with the customer. A deposit paid quickly and drawings approved slowly does not start any earlier.
Next step
A fourth bay is planned for the first quarter, contingent on order intake. We would rather add capacity in response to confirmed orders than build a hall and fill it with stock.
