Plan a complete pickup-bedliner line.

Sheet in. Accepted bedliner out.

This pilot scopes purchased thermoplastic sheet through a single defined bedliner product. HDPE is the existing Bolt reference material; the grade, gauge, finished dimensions and tool fit must be confirmed for your part. A tailgate liner or multi-piece kit is not automatically the same sellable unit.

PF1-Bolt’s published configuration includes the former, autoloader, gantry handling and final robot trim. ShearBot margin removal and controlled cooling are separately configured. The complete factory also needs material storage, approved fixtures, quality inspection, packing, scrap handling, guarding, utilities and commissioning. Their supply responsibility and costs must be agreed in the quotation.

1. Former occupancy: loading, heating, forming, on-tool hold and unloading that share the former; enter the combined occupied seconds per bedliner.
2. Shared transfer resource: add all gantry moves per bedliner; do not allocate the same gantry independently to each move.
3. Margin removal: optional separate resource. Excluding it is a scope decision, not proof that the product needs no edge preparation.
4. Cooling: total dwell per bedliner divided across independently usable cooling positions; confirm residence, support and buffering.
5. Final trim: the complete robot/fixture occupancy for one accepted-product equivalent, before final yield is applied.
6. Inspection, packing and stacking: enter combined resource occupancy; account for shared people and equipment.

What is outside this pilot

In-house sheet extrusion is a different factory configuration with its own capital, utilities, staffing and bottlenecks. It is not included. This model also excludes detailed transport/queue simulation, commissioning ramp, customer-award probabilities, inventory and collections, financing, tax, depreciation, cash flow and IRR.

The station-capacity calculation assumes independent parallel resources and sufficient buffers. It does not reproduce the serial-cell scheduling model or its private data. If resources overlap, aggregate their occupancy or request engineering simulation; adding nominal capacities can overstate actual throughput.

Staffing, utilities and site

Record people per shift, required electrical connection, compressed-air requirement and site area as planning context. These are visitor inputs, not Machinecraft machine ratings. Obtain electrical load, supply voltage, air/vacuum, lifting, guarding, ventilation, fire/safety and layout requirements from the scoped engineering design.

Enter payroll as a total monthly cash cost; do not add a second headcount-derived payroll charge. Enter energy cost per shipped bedliner using your consumption and tariff evidence. Material cost per shipped bedliner must already include the cost of rejected production and any genuinely usable scrap recovery—do not apply yield to that cost again.

Output is not an order book

A CEO or entrepreneur should validate the buyer, part drawing, net selling price, delivery terms, annual/monthly call-off and approval window. A supplier’s ability to form a part does not establish an OEM nomination or unmet regional demand.

Shipments are capped by both whole accepted-bedliner capacity and your entered qualified demand for the same month. This page does not supply regional demand or automatically recommend an investment.

Installed investment is not the machine price

Enter non-overlapping costs for the former, handling/cooling, trim and inspection, tooling, utility infrastructure, site adaptation, installation/freight/duties and commissioning/startup spares. If a bundled quotation covers multiple items, put the amount once and explicitly enter zero in the already-covered items.

The displayed sum is entered installed investment only—not total startup funding. Working capital, startup losses and liquidity reserves need a later monthly cash model. Recoverable taxes should not be mixed into net costs; use one chosen currency consistently and do not assume foreign-exchange conversions.

The calculation, in plain sight

Resource rate = parallel independent resources × 3,600 / occupied seconds per bedliner. The lowest included resource rate is the ideal line bottleneck. Available hours = working days × shifts/day × hours/shift − changeovers × hours/changeover.

Technical saleable capacity = floor(bottleneck rate × available hours × availability × speed performance × final yield). Percentages are applied once. Availability excludes scheduled changeovers; performance excludes downtime and rejects; final yield excludes losses already captured elsewhere.

Shipments = min(technical saleable capacity, qualified monthly demand). Revenue = shipments × net realized selling price. Contribution per unit = selling price − total variable cash cost per shipped bedliner. EBITDA = shipments × contribution − total fixed monthly cash operating costs.

Operating break-even = ceiling(fixed monthly cash costs / positive contribution per unit). With zero or negative contribution there is no finite break-even in this model. Break-even is an operating test, not repayment of capital. EBITDA is neither net profit nor distributable cash; this pilot does not calculate cash payback or IRR.

Engineering and acceptance gates

Procurement and engineering should agree material/gauge, draw geometry, wall distribution, surface requirements, cooling supports, trim fixtures, dimensional checks, scrap/regrind limits, traceability, tooling ownership, service and delivery scope. Required automotive/customer approvals follow the actual program; no certification is implied here.

FAT means factory acceptance test. Agree the part, material, trial conditions, acceptance criteria and scope before equipment acceptance. The existing Bolt footage and reference cycle are explicitly modelled or application demonstrations, not measurements of your selected configuration. A passing arithmetic scenario is not a production guarantee.

When to choose a different process—or less automation

Vacuum forming may be unsuitable where the specified geometry, detail, wall distribution, tolerances or material cannot be demonstrated. Evaluate alternative processes or part redesign with engineering rather than claiming thermoforming always wins.

Low qualified volume, frequent product changes or costly downstream work may favor shared flexible capacity or subcontracting. Dedicated automation only makes sense when its commercial and process assumptions stand up to validation.