Gadgetory

tempered-glass has found itself nearly entirely replacing acrylic side panels and it's all happened in just the last few years we visited the leading tempered glass factory for electronics while in China founded by a company that started with tempered glass for furniture and spawned an entire standalone new factory entirely dedicated to phones and computers although coolermaster brought us to this third-party Factory the same company makes the glass panels for thermaltake whose panels we saw lying around for the new asus cases and for the famous Lian Li 11 dynamic walking into the factory saw us immediately presented with the 11 dynamic but also with curved glass panels that are currently in prototype phases that might be used for future products these curved panels are considered trade secrets and are so difficult to make like the ones on the C 700 M by Coolermaster that the factory won't even let Coolermaster the client see how the panels are made if you've enjoyed our factory tours the absolute best way to make sure we can continue to afford these expensive international trips is to support us via the GN merch store you can pick up GPO artifact in shirt designs for $20 gnz critically-acclaimed mod mats now available in both large and medium GPU teardown sizes blue tinted beer glasses with gold rims and 3d laser etched glass statues with g ends anniversary teardown logo each containing a high detail design with mosfets fans and VRMs hidden within support these tours at store gamers Nexus dotnet or click the link below this Factory is widely used in the industry so it's commonplace to see glass made by competing case manufacturers all in the same place the factory produces about 5,000 pieces of tempered glass for electronics every eight hours often working two shifts for 12 hour days but also produces high volumes of glass for furniture next door the first step in the tempered glass factory is to move giant sheets of untempered glass made by another supplier to a station where the panel's can get cut to size each sheet weighs about 45 kilograms or nearly 100 pounds and has moved in large groups by ceiling mounted cranes operators secure the crane straps to each side of the glass bundle then relocate the glass to the cutting station the glass next needs to move into a cutting machine for safety reasons and because it's so heavy this is automated with a large machine that's on Rails the machine rolls toward the glass and uses about nine suction cups to grab the glass the glass is rotated to be horizontal then a series of wheels roll it into a conveyor belt which then moves it into the cutter a diamond saw is used to cut a small incision about halfway deep into the glass pane with the cuts pre-programmed depending on what's being made for each day oil is poured in front of the diamond blade as it moves helping cool down the tool and create a smoother cut the panel is slid down the table which has embedded air vents to help move and lift the glass it's exactly like an air hockey table in this way the glass is guided down to an operator who manually splits the glass into the respective squares and then shelves them for further movement down the line the factory was kind enough to allow us to try this process despite working with glass the diamond saw cuts may get trivial to break the glass into the final pieces so that the cuts are clean and any unintentional breaks are rare leftover glass from these cuts is thrown into a dumpster which can then either be brought to a third party that can dispose of it or recycle it depending on the use case the next step is a semi custom grinding machine that is modified by this factory the edges of the glass have to be ground down for safety and so they start by getting loaded bond ways into the machine as the glass is wheeled through the machine grinding wheels are used to soften the borders of the glass a chain rein under the machine is attached to a motor which is then connected to a chain that keeps the machine in constant motion water also constantly runs through this machine acting as both a coolant for the glass and the wheels and as a cleanser for glass powder and dust the water flows over the panels as they move through the machine pulley each panel and then flows out the back of the machine and sort of a river into a cleaning system the water is filled with glass powders and so it has to get filtered before it goes back into sewage it takes multiple grinding wheels to fully smooth the glass so after the machine the glasses brought out onto a green bungee cord and then automatically rotated onto a series of wheels this automation was made by the glass factory and although it looks sort of packed together is perfectly and efficiently able to rotate panels of all sizes the panels are then fed through another grinding machine this time configured for processing the other sides of the panel the panels are cleaned again with water and they progress through the end of the line as the panel's exit this machine human intervention is finally required for the first time in a few steps humans take the panels to a high rpm grinding wheel and manually grind down the corners as the machines can't do this efficiently or entirely independently at least most of them can't skilled workers can get through a single panel in a matter of seconds making the process efficient enough to not require automation as long as the factory keeps up with demand the next machine is another drill this time using a steel drill bit to bore holes into the glass the drill is programmed for each size of glass and must be set depending on the production run profiles exist for common sizes but they often need to be tweaked for each order this is the slowest process of the entire manufacturing conveyor belts as the machine moves with more precision and has limits on speed to maintain integrity of the glass it has to be kept at lower speeds and the factory also has fewer of these drill machines so out of all of the steps in the manufacturing process this is the bottleneck depending on the order CNCs can also be used instead of some of these manual processes corner grinding and custom shapes can be cut by CNC is like cooler masters mp5 30p custom shaped glass panels and this does eliminate the human corner grinding step we saw earlier the downside is that this is a slow expensive process remember that machine time is the biggest cost in any factory so the more time that a machine spends making a single panel the more expensive that panel is that's time that could be spent on making higher volumes of simpler products CNCs are only used for complex designs that need precision as each panel takes a long time to cut one panel can take at least 60 seconds but they tend to go up to 90 seconds for the big CNC much and so these are reserved for complex shapes there are six CNC machines total in this Factory which means that a highly complex panel with a 90 second cutting time could be made at a maximum volume of only 240 units per hour assuming flawless operation with no load times and no QC failure in reality it would be a lot fewer than this this is why it's better for a human to do the edge grinds but better to use the CNC for something like the mp5 30p or it might be a weird trapezoidal shape that a human can't quite do consistently quality checks happen before temperance reduced time wasted on bad panels the glass is wheeled through a final water cleaning process out of the cutting and grinding machines then - - quality assurance technicians this area uses multiple bright 5,600 K fluorescent lights to easily illuminate any minor scratches or damage in the glass the technicians use a template to check hole spacing for the panel screws and then move the panels to carts based upon passage or failure of inspection the next step is the furnace the furnace is the most expensive part of the entire process and for multiple reasons it takes one to two days just to heat the oven and because the factory shuts down entirely every Sunday the furnace isn't in full operation again until late Monday or early Tuesday the slowest production but for cost and safety reasons it's better to turn the furnace off when the factory is completely unmanned between work days the furnace is left running as it's more cost-effective to spend on the electricity than it is to shut it down entirely and restart it burning more electricity in the process of heating it back up as for the furnace itself it's about 30 meters long and costs 800 thousand RMB or about 120 thousand US dollars as of March 2019 unseen costs include the cost of the square footage used by the factory for this furnace the cost of maintenance and the cost of electricity the upside is that minimal human oversight is required as it's just a lawn oven that cycles the glass through each panel spends about two minutes in the 30 meter long oven the oven is heated to 700 degrees Celsius ultimately tempering the glass into the panels that we're all familiar with the factory was kind enough to open the furnace for us to see inside but we open it momentarily as the heat rapidly escapes and can cause slowdowns in production wheels turn internally to pull the glass through and if you're looking closely you can see that they reverse directions multiple times to keep the glass in the furnace for longer shattered glass can be found on the floor beneath the furnace this is from glass panels that might have had micro fractures internally and so they could not survive the tempering process the result is effectively a safety glass similar to what's made for windshields as the glass shatters into at least 52 pieces for every 5 by 5 square for the spec we were looking at this reduces risk to the user in the event of a break and is why it's called safety glass we were allowed an opportunity to use a breaking tool to intentionally destroy a glass panel this tool is used on randomly selected panel to try and destroy them and check for the amount of fractures it took us a few tries to break the panel but with enough force the needle is able to shatter the glass you'd use a similar tool to destroy windshields for example or windows in a car if it were maybe submerged as they apply targeted force to the glass and can easily shatter it when blunt-force wouldn't the glass is supposed to shatter here as part of a quality check and ensures tempering works properly the number of pieces per 5x5 area must comply with various safety guidelines to be considered safety glass the next quality test is to drop a 505 gram steel ball from a 1.5 meter high pole and onto the center of the panel if the randomly selected panels survive this test the batch is considered good after this stickers are applied to panels when necessary and those appealable sheets of plastic gets stuck to the panel's the tape is applied by a machine then cut down by a human operator on the other side the glass is next sat upon a custom-made set of four soldering irons spaced according to each model of glass which are then used to burn through the plastic in the screw and standoff holes in the glass panels some additional steps might include silk-screening logos onto the glass like some of these companies do if that's the case a manual silk-screening process is used for single color designs where the screens are placed and cleaned regularly the glass must then go through an oven at 200 degrees Celsius to the ink if the manufacturer uses multiple colors for its logo the glass is instead sent through an automated silk screening machine which is capable of producing 3000 pieces per day this is more expensive to configure and is only used for multicolor designs finally the end step starts a buff and polish the units some defects like minor scratches can be buffed out of the glass so that the glass doesn't go to waste machines will move the glass onto conveyer belts and clean the pieces one final time and QC operators can do a final inspection and polishing as needed the defect rate will depend entirely on the company buying the panel Coolermaster has strict quality control requirements for some of his panels which results in about a 5 to 10% rejection rate for panels used on its mainstream cases some of those panels can be fixed in the buffing steps but the rest must be thrown away other cases or companies with fewer QC requirements would have a lower defect rate it depends entirely upon how strict the companies are and stricter requirements of course result in higher costs because there's more waste this factory is working on prototyping new designs like printing inside of tempered glass and bending the glass despite glass work being an ancient trade it's still regularly advancing to fit the needs of new computer and mobile phone products all of which this factory makes that's it for this tour as always you can support our factory tours directly by going to store dock gamers Nexus 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