“The bank caved; well, mostly anyway.” Sarah went on to explain the deal she had reached with the bank, which bored Brent almost to tears. The important point was that they would get paid for the sewing machines when they sold them. That meant they could hire people to do the assembly and make and finish the parts so he and Trent wouldn’t have to do it anymore. Figuring out how to make a sewing machine was great fun, even making the first one was fun, but by the time you have made several it’s just plain work and boring work at that.
November 23, 1631: Higgins’ Sewing Machine Factory
“Look, Sir,” said Brent excitedly to Samuel Abrabanel, “the neat thing about a sewing machine, well, one of the neat things, is that it’s all structured around a two stitch cycle. One complete rotation of the power wheel is two stitches. At any point around in the spin of the power wheel the other parts are all in the same place they would be at the same point in the next rotation. Pretty much all that’s in there are cams, levers and a few gears. Then a set of parts that actually do the sewing based on the position of the levers.
“The parts we make ourselves are the parts that would be really hard to make with standard seventeenth-century tools. The other parts we contract out to people like that guy Johan got in the fight with the other day.”
“It wasn’t a fight, Master Brent,” Johan said severely. “It was bargaining.” Looking at Samuel Abrabanel: “Begging your pardon, sir, these up-timers have no notion of bargaining. If they weren’t so rich they’d all be penniless by now.”
Johan shook his head. “It isn’t just the kids. All the up-timers are like children in a way.”
“Trent and I,” said Sarah, with a look at Johan, “have worked it out as well as we could. We figure that making a sewing machine with seventeenth-century techniques could probably be done, but it’s just barely within the techniques the very best of your craftsmen have. It would take, we guess, something over five thousand man hours.”
“I know that’s a lot,” Trent interrupted, “but imagine just two parts, each part has dozens of places where they have to fit with the other in exactly the right way. Now add another part and another and they all have to fit together. It’s a lot of delicate filing and shaping, and you can’t separate the work having one master make one part and another make another. No matter how good they are the parts won’t fit.
“With our machines doing the tricky time-consuming parts, we have that down to, we think, around two hundred man hours. The reason it’s ‘we think’ and not ‘we know,’ is because we really don’t know for sure how long it takes the contractors to make the parts we farm out. All we know for sure is how much we are being charged, and we’re guessing the hours from that. When you figure labor at eight dollars an hour and add in the cost of materials, it costs us about four thousand dollars to make a sewing machine. Three thousand of that is contracted parts and blanks, another two hundred or so is putting all pieces together and testing the machine. The rest, the key to producing them at something approaching an affordable price, is the machines you see around you.”
“It’s very interesting,” said Samuel Abrabanel “but why did you ask me to come here? Are you looking for a loan or an investor?”
“No, Sir, not really,” said Sarah. “We do sell stock and if you would like to buy some we’ll be happy to sell you some, but that’s not why we wanted to show you this. What we are really looking for is a distributor. We can sell a few hundred sewing machines locally. To people that come here to buy them, but as production increases we will need to establish markets in other places. To do that we need stores where people can see our sewing machines and try them out before they buy one. We’re not quite ready to do that yet but we wanted to offer you the option while you were in town.”