Can America Still Make Things?
Topics worth your time: what a grill scrubber reveals about the incentives needed to seed reindustrialization, using metal 3D printing to make tooling for high-volume production, building an intuition for energy conversion, an archive of annual report covers, and more.
Interesting Video: The Grill Scrubber Test
For all the talk around reindustrialization and rebuilding skilled trades infrastructure, the simplest question to ask is perhaps the most revealing: can you make a component in your country and remain competitive in the market?
Destin from Smarter Every Day released a second video in his pursuit of the question through the production lifecycle of a grill scrubber. It’s a simple mechanical commodity (a stamped handle, injection-molded knob, threaded insert, and patch of chainmail), but each component exposes a different thread of the domestic manufacturing base.
The video, well worth watching in full, is a fascinating story about the long-term effects of offshoring manufacturing and the implications of globalization.
TL;DR: offshoring can (and did) erode decades of accumulated tools, suppliers, and knowledge.
Some engineering details worth noting:
On tooling. While 3D printing isn’t a viable substitute for mass production, there is a useful inversion in using it to make the tooling for a high-volume process like injection molding. Companies like Mantle can metal 3D print and machine mold cavities, and for the scrubber’s knob, the turnaround was just around a week. Almost all tool-and-die work is now cut overseas, then shipped to run on machines domestically.
Automating process bottlenecks. Purpose-built automation can still be designed and built domestically, provided the equipment exists. To automate laser engraving of the handle, Modern Machine Integrators turned their initial prototype into a production-ready indexing machine (32:08).
Dual-sourcing the threaded insert was also an interesting thread on the capabilities of Swiss CNC lathes (14:34), which can turn, mill, tap, and deburr a part in one automated cycle.
More From Around The Web
Acquired’s episode on Nest is a fun listen on raising capital and how Google framed the acquisition around the premise of the ‘home’ as the next computing interface.
An automatic linkage design tool - define an output path and the tool generates a mechanism to trace it.
Divide by zero on a mechanical calculator.
Build logs for a fingerprint reader that handles Mac login and sudo commands.
A searchable archive of 3,000+ annual report covers dating back to the 1940s.
A reader submission from SC: an homage to vintage computers, in an era of distinct aesthetics and an elegance in writing compact code.
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Interesting Table: An Intuition for Energy
Construction Physics’ energy cheatsheet.
Manufacturing & Startup News
Castelion raised $1B in Series C funding to scale production of its low-cost hypersonic missile.
Grounded raised $5M in seed funding to expand its Detroit factory for modular commercial-van conversions. End uses include mobile clinics, camper vans, and more.
BlocPower is shutting down and liquidating assets after raising more than $200M to finance building-electrification projects.
Blueprint raised a $1M pre-seed for software that turns text prompts into hardware build plans.
Sebastian Thrun is building a new stealth robotics startup. Details are light, but the company says it is developing foundation models for hardware design.
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