Back in 97 I worked for a resistance welding company, the largest in the southern hemisphere. In 96 the company turnover was about 3/4 Million. In 97 they got a 13 million contract from Nissan and a 9 million contract from BMW. The 13 million contract was handled by my boss and the majority of the design group. I was more or less left on my own to handle the BMW contract which we had to largely build to print. But there were a few details like the X guns used standard SMC pneumatic cylinders, whereas we had to develop the 2 position Pneumatic cylinders for the C guns from scratch. And we had to make patterns for all the castings, make the castings and machine them with no internal capacity. Same for the pneumatic cylinders. No castings, no patterns, they would be machined in house, I had to work out all the seal details, the hard chromed cylinder shaft made from hard drawn chrome copper and the insulated caps since the cylinder rod had to pass something like 50k amps when welding... One of the issues we faced was a shortage of hard drawn chrome copper bar stock. The solution was to buy about 3 tons of the bar stock in the right combination of diameters from Australia and then have it flown, air freight from Australia to ZA. If one understands the value of copper from a theft point of view in Africa, we then had another major challenge which was that I had to get the 3 tons of material cut into the correct blank lengths for the project, then transported by road about 750 miles to a specialist supplier with gun drilling equipment so that the bar stock could be drilled from end to end with a 0.433" hole. Many of the bars were in the 4-6' length range, this sort of drilling could never be done economically on a lathe... The bar stock was transported by private contractors in unmarked pickup trucks. I never knew the exact value of the bar stock but it was at least 1/3 of the total contact value so 3 million. Pretty sure those contractors who handled the transport of that material were sweating bullets and packing heat because if anyone found out they would be big bullseyes for every criminal gang in existence.
Anyway, it was a hell of a project. I had to work day and night like a madman. The entire assembly line was going to be set up and run off in Giesen Germany. Giesen is the center of medical expertise in Germany, where all the doctors of myriad disciplines train and practice. A town of 30k population housing another 10-12k medical students. Actually quite a fun place.. In the graveyard in town were the graves of the Curies who discovered radium gas (and a great many more important names that I have forgotten). The team from BMW selected about 25% of the total weld guns for the project to be sent to Giesen for the tryout of the line. It was something like 20 weld guns crated 4 to a crate thus 5 crates. We shipped them off and a few days later got the phone call. The crew, in loading the crates onto the airplane had managed to drop 2 of the crates from the height of the cargo door onto the ground... Lovely.. I got to fly to Johannesburg to examine the remains of the crates. Amazingly they had not broken any castings or copper parts, so we made new crates in one of the hangars, re-packaged everything and got it on its way. It helped that at that time BMW was the single largest cargo customer for Lufthansa and South African Airways, since the leather seats for all the BMW models were made in ZA and shipped out by air all over the world.