cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/41318971
Destin Sandlin examines the systemic engineering and economic hurdles involved in manufacturing a grill scrubber entirely in America. Through a deep dive into sourcing components like injection-molded knobs and specialized chain mail, the project highlights the complexities of maintaining domestic supply chains and preserving vital technical trade skills in a competitive global market.
His last few years of videos has been a deep dive on manufacturing learning everything he can. Basically he’s independently come to the conclusion that chasing profit and maximizing it at the expense of product quality and treating people right is the problem we face and no amount of engineering knowhow is going to fix that the system does not prioritize people or quality.
Him having a YouTube audience already definitely helps a lot but hes also not exactly explicitly advertising it, and even talks about how he doesn’t want his science communication channel to become a scrubber advertising channel.
Edit forgor some words
I have been saying this for awhile. Often times the us is mentioned as being very efficient. Its a dollar cost efficiency though. Basically a race to the bottom. What germany and japan was known for at one time was efficiently making a high quality product. Its the highest quality that we are missing.
The missing piece is that countries like Germany have VERY strong union presence which has a hand in managing the companies. This prevents the race to the bottom since they are specifically accounting for the societal impact, worker impact, and long-term reputation of the product and company (i.e. emphasis on quality).
Then why does his website sell them. Don’t fucking trust Christians, they can lie their whole lives and get a Mulligan from God in the end.
Because his website is not his YouTube channel…? I get being angry at Christians, but be angry at them for things they’re actually doing instead of pulling the Conservative move and get angry at some nonsense you made up to justify your dislike of them.
I’ll gladly say fuck the Catholic church and the man who baptized me for protecting the pedo who was supposed to be the principal of my high school. And fuck the Bishop of my diocese for covering up the child rape crimes for decades. I wont be pissed because you think Destin lied about not turning his youtube channel into an advertising channel.
Absolutely. The interesting thing to me was the lack of institutional knowledge remaining in the US. For example, finding a machinist based in the US was one of his biggest challenges as most of them have retired. I think he was only able to locate one still in operation that could make the parts he needed.
uh…because parts like that are not made by machinists any more, they are made by techs running automated CNC machines. Faster, cheaper, better.
Not always better. In his video about stamping, his host illustrates the difference between a one piece stamping die from China compared to the ones made in house. Basically when the single piece one starts to wear out, you have to replace the whole thing. However; with the ones designed and manufactured in house, all of the wear surfaces are replaceable.
So the CNC option may be faster and cheaper up front, but in the long run investing in the tooling to last long-term is more cost effective.
You can have both.
There’s no reason why you couldn’t have a well designed, CNC made part.
And that person just retired and he ended up buying all his equipment so he didn’t have to look for a new supplier.
That’s wild I didn’t know that!
It was in the latest video. They also brought the laser etching in house.