Manufacturing Power Strips in Korea

SCANALYZER Tracking with Closeups
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There is no narration. Turn on subtitles for English descriptions of the manufacturing steps.

South Korea uses the German “Schuko“ (Type F, CEE 7/5) power socket for grounded outlets and the “Europlug” (Type C, CEE 7/16) socket for non-grounded outlets. An ungrounded Europlug-equipped power cord may be plugged into either socket type. Mains power in South Korea is 220 volt, 60 Hz.

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I have had generally good experiences with “Made in Korea” products.

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I don’t think I’d last very long at an assembly line job, or leave it with all my fingers

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That is the first ball-peen hammer I have seen used in earnest in a long time. Seems like there is the potential for a much higher degree of automation, when compared with the extensive automated processes used in much more complicated automobile manufacturing.

On the other hand, automobiles don’t cost $9.99. Maybe automation is inefficient for relatively low-cost limited production items?

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The manual assembly steps mostly involved oddly-shaped components such as the individual sockets, bus bars feeding them, and the terminals on the sockets and switches to which they are connected. In automated assembly operations, one major challenge is to properly orient components so the machines that place them can grasp and insert them correctly, and then maintain the orientation of the assembly until the next step. This can be and is done, but it has a set-up charge which is very steep and probably not economical except when making a large run of identical products. From the display at the end of the video, it looks like this small factory makes a variety of outlet strips in different configurations, each of which would require its own custom set-up for automated assembly. I did notice that operations where component orientation can be controlled, such as crimping terminals on the ends of wires or moulding plugs on cords were performed by machines, with the operator simply placing the wires in the correct orientation.

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There was a good interview with the founder of Belkin - and he spoke about the need to move manufacturing offshore in the 90s:

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