How much does it cost to invest in a screw production line? Why is the cost of screws so high? Today, let's continue to explore the screw industry.
Since Elon Musk released the humanoid robotOptimus
Let's get straight to the point: why are screws so expensive? First of all, discussing screws without considering their manufacturing process is misleading. Let's analyze the mainstream manufacturing process in the industry - grinding. To understand grinding, we must first talk about grinding machines.
Grinding machines are among the highest and most expensive equipment in the industry. They belong to precision processing equipment, which means grinding can produce screws with at least C5-level precision or higher. Therefore, the machine itself must be equipped with screws of C0, C1, C3 levels. You can't produce higher precision screws with less precise equipment, right? These industrial machines using C0 or C1 quality screws are themselves quite expensive. Foreign grinding machines typically cost between 5 to 10 million yuan, with a delivery time of about a year. If you can get a foreign supplier to deliver within six months through connections, you're pretty impressive.
Let's do a simple calculation: assuming a 5 million yuan grinding machine is depreciated over 10 years, that's 500,000 yuan per year, over 40,000 yuan per month. Add 20,000 yuan per month for interest and 10,000 yuan per month for labor. That's a total monthly cost of 70,000 yuan, and we haven't even included utilities, oil, grinding wheels, tools, testing, and other consumables. A rough estimate would be around 100,000 yuan per month. So how many screws can we produce in a month? Wait, that's just for external threads, not internal threads. Add another 5 million yuan for that.
According to incomplete statistics, some companies can complete a nut in one hour, producing 24 nuts in a 24-hour day. But to do that, you must also complete 24 sets of screws - one main screw and five small rollers per set, totaling 144 screws per day. Now here's the tough question: can 144 screws be ground in a day? If not, what do you do? Buy another 10 million yuan worth of equipment! It's not a simple math problem; you just need deep pockets. Some might suggest grinding faster, but here's a technical issue: faster grinding generates heat, which causes thermal decay. I used to work as a grinder operator, and when I first started, I often burned the workpieces, leaving black marks.
Others might suggest buying domestic equipment. That's true, domestic equipment can be 70% cheaper, costing around a million yuan. But the problem is they don't grind as fast as foreign equipment. When I mentioned grinding a set in an hour, that's with foreign equipment, not domestic ones. So while domestic equipment is cheaper, it's slower, and in the end, the cost doesn't decrease that much.
I won't break down all the simple math here. Screws are expensive for a reason - you get what you pay for. Foreign equipment produces extremely sophisticated products with very high precision. They can definitely meet the screw precision requirements for Tesla's linear joints. What we need to focus on now is how to reduce costs and make our domestic equipment more efficient to meet production demands. One day, our domestic equipment will definitely be able to grind screws both quickly and with high quality. That's the core pain point of the industry right now. What else would you like to hear about? Leave a comment, and I'll share more. Brothers, please like and follow!
