Producing small lots of an extraordinarily diversified range
of bolts in a town known for producing knives.

Seki City, Gifu Prefecture, has been known for Seki blacksmithing since the Kamakura era and remains famous today as a place where knives are produced. Meira’s Seki plant and the No. 2 Seki plant are both located in a corner of an industrial park on the outskirts of Seki City. The company’s No. 3 Seki plant is also in Seki City, such that the city is home to a cluster of the company’s production lines.

Each plant is clearly divided into two zones. A number of very long automated manufacturing lines have been set up on the site where bolts for automobiles are manufactured. At one end of each line is a large site for the storage of materials. Wire rods supplied from this site are automatically processed on a line, and completed bolts are spit out from the opposite side of the line without stopping. Lines of trucks formed for just-in-time deliveries are parked outside the plant buildings, ready to ship freshly made bolts immediately upon loading to an automobile assembly plant.

At the same time, the site for the manufacturing of bolts for aeronautics and space applications is set in a separate part of the building where many artisans operate dedicated machine tools. A small materials storage site resembling part of a home hardware store carries not only steel items, but also aluminum alloys, titanium alloys, heat-resistant nickel alloys, and other special materials. Workers manufacture bolts by picking out the required materials on their own according to work instructions, setting them in the machines by hand, visually checking each individual unit, and checking units by tactile means.

About 100,000 bolts for aeronautics and space applications are produced monthly, a figure that is less by far than that for bolts produced for automobiles, 200,000,000 bolts per month. At the same time, many bolts for aeronautics and space applications are subject to a specialized design process to accommodate their use for a given part of a given model, such that there are over 6,000 different items produced. The harnessing of craftsmanship is the most rational means by which small lots of an extraordinarily diversified range of bolts can be produced.

The quality of screws is a function of both the materials used and the processing technologies applied. To date, Japan has produced high-grade bolts through collaborations between the steel and metal industry, which ships high-grade materials, and manufacturers like Meira of parts made possible by the harnessing of a high level of technology. However, the use of off-the-shelf general-purpose goods sourced from low-cost, mass-production overseas manufacturers even in the field of aeronautics has become common. Meira thus seeks to differentiate itself by building a framework for stably providing high-quality, highly unique products.