Twenty-four seconds of a fibre laser cutting parts for wind turbines. Filmed on a phone, no music, nothing staged and nobody explaining anything. If you have ever wondered what “we make it ourselves” actually looks like on a Tuesday morning, it looks like this.
The whole clip. It is shorter than the time it takes to read this page.
What you are looking at, in order.
The first shot is a screen, not a machine, and that is where every part actually starts. The red and yellow shapes are the parts, laid out on a sheet. Arranging them so that as little steel as possible is left over is called nesting, and it is the least glamorous cost saving in manufacturing: the same parts, the same machine, the same minutes, and a smaller bill for material because somebody spent ten minutes packing the drawing tighter.
Then the bed. The black ridged strips the sheet rests on are slats, and they are consumable — the beam cuts into them a little every time, and eventually they get replaced. The sheet sits on top and does not move. The head moves.
Then the part that is worth watching twice: the sheet after the cut, with the parts still sitting in their own outlines, and the slats underneath glowing orange. That glow is the heat that went into the steel and did not leave with the part. It is also the reason the shot exists — a cut edge photographs as an ordinary line five minutes later, and looks like this for about thirty seconds.
The next bench along. Parts cut on that machine end up inside these.
The boring part is the whole point.
Nothing in that clip is dramatic, and that is the argument. When somebody else cuts your parts you pay for four things: the part, their margin, the freight, and the wait. You also accept their minimum order, which is how you end up buying five hundred of something because that is the smallest run they will start, and carrying the other four hundred and twenty on a shelf until you need them.
Cutting them here removes the margin, removes the freight, removes the minimum order, and shortens the wait from weeks to that afternoon. It is not a clever strategy, it is arithmetic, and it is most of the reason a home wind turbine from us costs what it does. The longer version of that argument, including the parts we still buy from people who make them better than we would, is in what buying a machine actually buys you.
A machine that runs is an asset. A machine that runs one day a week is a more expensive way of buying the part.
What the video does not show you.
It does not show the invoice, the maintenance contract, the extraction filters, the compressed air, or the operator who had to be trained before any of it produced a usable part. It does not show the days the machine sits still. A laser only beats outsourcing at volume, and the honest version of this post says so: we buy machines when the work is already there, not to have something impressive to film.
It also does not show quality control, which is the half of the job that happens after the cutting. A part being the right shape on the day it was made proves very little. Somebody has to keep proving it, on their own equipment, on a routine, at a cost nobody enjoys paying.
The short version.
Same footage, cut for a phone, if that is where you would rather watch it.
The vertical cut, for anyone reading this on a phone.
In a year that machine will be an unremarkable thing in the corner of a workshop, covered in swarf, with somebody’s coffee on the control cabinet.
The only trace of it will be a price that did not go up.
The footage is our own, filmed at our own factory on an ordinary production run, and is unedited apart from trimming, stabilisation and colour correction. The machine is a BODOR fibre laser that has been in service for about two years. No customer is named here and no order details are published. We have given no figure for what the machine cost or what it saves, because we could not show you the calculation — and a number you cannot check is worth nothing. Turbine specifications referenced are our own published data and are checkable on the product page.