CHAPTER V
FROM THE STORES TO THE RAILWAY DRAY
In writing a chapter on the production of bicycles under the above heading it is possible to describe each process in detail until one would have quite a large book on that subject alone. It will be readily understood that in a book of this size such microscopic attention is impossible. It is, therefore, my intention to take the reader a personally conducted tour round a large cycle factory, commencing at the stores and finishing at the loading bay of the packing department, and refer briefly to each process in passing. We will imagine, therefore, that the entree has been secured to look over a cycle factory where everything except saddles, handles, tyres, and toolbags, is produced on the premises and assembled to make a complete bicycle. Arrived at the rough stores we find bins on the floor and racks lining the walls right up to the roof. In the racks and bins are steel tubing in multiple lengths of several feet, ready for cutting up into frame tubes, bars of steel of various sizes for making into cups, cones, and spindles for hubs, castings and stampings for frame lugs, spokes in bundles, steel and wood rims of various sizes, and of course, the usual stock of steel and other stores required by the factory millwrights for engineering purposes other than the actual construction of the bicycles.
Each stores has its own storekeeper, a clerk who specializes in organizing his department so that there is not a superfluity of one article and a scarcity of another. The various articles as they are delivered are counted, weighed, or otherwise reckoned, and a
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