| One thing that struck me is seeing his months long struggle, where the only injection mold designer he could find was near retirement age and wouldn't be doing it for too much longer, the tool & die expert he talked to died between when he interviewed him and when he made the video, he had to deal with suppliers lying about where their parts came from, and some American suppliers could only provide low quantities without him paying to upgrade their tooling. Then there's a comment from someone in China saying that over there, he'd be able to bring his product to mass production in about 5 days in whatever quantity he wanted, and at a higher quality (more corrosion resistant metal, more durable silicone, etc). |
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| ▲ | rented_mule 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I saw hints of this ~20 years ago. I was working on software for a consumer device. For manufacturing it, we chose Foxconn. One non-negotiable point from their end was that they had to write some of the software on the device. They didn't care which part or how small. The device had a physical keyboard with a micocontroller that managed it and they ended up writing the code that ran on that micro as it was largely independent of the code we were writing, and easy for us to test. The first versions were not great, but they got better quickly. As we talked amongst ourselves about why they were so emphatic about this, it became clear to us that they were taking a long term view of the importance of moving into the intellectual property side of things. Dustin points out that, in some areas, they are there. | |
| ▲ | fooker 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There are multiple interesting bits, worth watching the whole thing at some point. Something that stuck with me was that dude had an uncle that worked at a bolt factory down the road, and now there is literally no way to source domestically made bolts. And that they could find one retired guy after scouring multiple states who could help make an injection mold. I'm sure some of the larger defense contractors have a few guys who can do this, but that makes for a pretty low bus factor. | | |
| ▲ | quickthrowman a day ago | parent [-] | | > Something that stuck with me was that dude had an uncle that worked at a bolt factory down the road, and now there is literally no way to source domestically made bolts. US manufactured fasteners are available*, the Build America, Buy America Act created a market for them. You’re not going to find them at Home Depot or your local hardware store, professional supply houses will sell them to you. Waivers are available if no US supplier is available, but there usually is a US supplier. I assume bolt manufacturing is automated to the point where you load up a CNC machine with steel hex stock and get boxes of bolts on the other end, there’s not a ton of labor involved. The machine cuts the hex stock to length, then removes material to create a cylindrical shaft and then threads are cut. * By US manufactured, I mean ‘compliant with BABAA requirements’, which is something like 55% of the materials and manufactured here. | | |
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| ▲ | tim333 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That talks about how they couldn't find someone US side to make the injection moulding moulds. We used to have a manufacturing business in the UK and got quotes for some moulds in the 1980s. You could get it done in the UK but the cost to get it from China was 1/5 as much. I guess people just went with the cheaper option. | | |
| ▲ | nickff a day ago | parent [-] | | You can still get molds made in the USA, but they are indeed much more expensive than an equivalent one made in PRoC, and options/expertise are often more limited or specialized (depending on how you look at it). It is very difficult, but not impossible to make consumer products in the USA. | | |
| ▲ | fooker a day ago | parent [-] | | As an exercise, please try to do this at some point and report back! | | |
| ▲ | nickff 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’ve had them made and run in Canada (as well as the PRoC), and I’m speaking from experience. Getting molds made is not really something you'd do as an exercise, unless you've got a lot of time and money sitting around. A small mold might cost $20-30k in North America, or $5-10k in PRoC, and you need to run at least a few hundred parts (additional cost) to get any idea of the issues it might have. | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | What's the quality comparison between US/CA/PRoC? | | |
| ▲ | nickff 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | Depends on the specific product, the mold maker, and the plastic injection facility. In general, it seems like North America is able to produce the regulated products (i.e. medical & military) at a high quality level, but with some limits as to the specific media (plastic types), colors, and tool designs, and at a high cost. PRoC has a wide spread of providers, and quality is not well-correlated with price, so it really depends on who you know, but you can get very good parts of all types at very appealing prices, but communication is terrible, delays are common, and quality can drop sharply from one run to another. Overall, I've mostly given up on North American producers because I do pro-sumer products, and they're too expensive and inflexible for me, but we're also fairly low-volume, so it may just be that I don't haven't had access to the right providers. | | |
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| ▲ | slumberlust 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | No thanks. Watched the whole thing since its a great channel with great content. |
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