Why Did Toyota Send Back Soichiro Honda's Piston Rings?

David Senra, reading Sol Sanders, says Toyota sent back 47 of about 50 piston rings because Soichiro Honda's first manufacturing was done by hand and could not hold a consistent quality. Honda had pushed the repair shop toward manufacturing piston rings, then moved into the factory. He lived and worked there day and night. When he could not stay awake he lay down on a straw mat on the floor. Senra sets that beside James Dyson's line that anyone can become an expert in anything in six months, and that Dyson's first cyclonic vacuum was built from cereal packets and masking tape before he understood how it worked.

The rejected rings made Honda a disciple of interchangeability and automation. He disliked the lack of precision in hand work and built automatic equipment for the rings. As Senra reads the book, that equipment arrived in the 1930s and could be run as the wartime male manpower pool dried up. Much of the experience later went into the production of Honda's motorcycles after World War II.