Originally Posted by
ATC Watcher
I think I was the poster WHBM was refereing to.. Anyway I can confirm it was as described . When I was in Renton it was taking delivery of a 757 ,which were built by lots of people in overalls with quite some noise and lots of debris in the floor.At the same time in Toulouse Airbus was already in the laser aligned business using robots in a hall with an immaculatle white floor. But that 20 years ago..
757 fuselages were built in Renton - 737s never were. Also, 757s were built at a relatively low production rate compared to the 737 (the 757 never exceeded 7/month - one every 3 days - and most of the production was much less than that). 737s have been above 42 a month (2/day) at times. Boeing did a lot of work on process improvement in the late '90s/early 2000s that dramatically improved the working environment.
BTW, Boeing spent a boatload of money on developing an automated system for assembling 777 fuselages for the 777X program.
After several years and many millions of dollars, they admitted defeat and canned the whole project - they simply could not get the required level of quality without spending more on 'rework' than it currently costs to built 777 fuselages.
Granted, the tooling that was developed for the 777 fuselage is pretty advanced - including a large gig that rotates 360 degrees so that assembly work can be done from a comfortable working position.
As I noted previously, the 737 fuselages are built by Spirit in Wichita - it's up to Spirit what sort of mechanization and tooling they use - as long as the meet the required level of quality.