German windows, doors & conservatory sunrooms
I’ve been spending many hours looking out of the humongous front window of this fantastic futuristic looking tour bus. From my seat right at the front of the bus high on the upper level, I feel as though I’m on the bridge of a Star Cruiser as we pass through the many lovely small villages and towns in Bavaria and the surrounding Black Forest region. The factories that we have been visiting are spread out, many in tiny towns often nestled among a small residential cluster of homes!
We’ve visited small woodworking shops that produce a variety of items from wood windows to conservatories to furniture to cabinets using only a few machines and a small workforce. We’ve also visited several major manufacturing facilities with hundreds of workers. We’ve also spent time at the Homag plant and the Fritz plant near Stuttgart.
Interestingly enough, the machine manufacturing plants were some of the most useful visits for me. Because Homag and Friz produce a large percentage of their machines on a custom basis, their engineering design to manufacturing processes, though much larger in scale than Tanglewood Conservatories, had some real similarities.
I was intrigued to see them dealing with some of the same issues that are also on our plate and in fact I thought we had made more progress in some areas.
Last night there was dinner and great German beer at the famous Hofbrauhaus in Munich which is without a doubt, the largest beer hall I have ever seen! Three levels of raucous eating and drinking filled with many foreign tourists.
One of the facets of the plants that we visited which has impressed me was their regard for energy conservation. Costs of fuel are of course substantially higher here than in the US so they are forced to be more conservation minded. Most of the facilities made extensive use of day lighting- the use of large skylights and windows to illuminate their interior spaces. There was one building we went into that needed no artificial lights at all even though it was a fairly cloudy day. We can certainly learn a lesson from them on this subject.
Alan