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andyjohnson0 3 hours ago

I enjoyed reading this. As others have said, it's both interesting and good marketing communication.

I'm a dev and for the last year I've been working for a company that manufactures pretty complex and advanced machines. I work with proper engineers - electronic, electrical, control, mechanical - and actual scientists. One of the things I've come to appreciate from this is the hidden depts of detail and complexity in so many aspects of the objects that surround us. People work hard on small details that hide in the background but are vital to making things work. And there's often code in everything, all the way down.

And now I can add plastic injection moulding to that. The rabbit hole goes very deep.

Edit to add:

My dad worked forty-plus years as an engineering pattern maker. He made, by hand, the high-tolerance wooden "negatives" that were used to form moulds made from sand and resin. The moulds were used to cast parts for industrial valves: molten brass and gunmetal was poured into them, in a foundry, and left to cool. I think he would have deeply appreciated what this article was saying about craft and engineering and patience.

nolok 2 hours ago | parent [-]

When it comes to industrial manufacturing, a think of lot of people are not realizing (by lack of education on the matter in general knowledge or schooling) the difference between levels of manufacturing, the precision required for some things, and how the hard part is having the full chain (making the tool that can make the tool that can make the tool that ...) because you can't jump from nothing to milimeter precision.

Also known as "why did China who already owned world manufacturing insisted and struggled on making ballpoint pen until 2017", "why are car manufacturers not making random cheap cars that have the curbs of beloved sports cars", "why are barely 5-6 countries able to make decent jet engines" and all that.

Manufacturing is hard. It's built upon layers and layers of deep knowledge and abilities. And when don't have it or you lose it, just knowing how to make the last layer is not enough, you need to rebuild the entire stack.

Which in this case becomes "painting something black is easy, making a fan black is easy, making a high quality high precision fan black from the starting point of the same fan in another color is an industrial challenge".

We are so used to high quality high precision manufacturing, we have a bazillion factories pumping out millions of very high tech things for random usages or tools now and we stopped noticing it ... And then someone makes a small mistake and you get a "Samsung Note 7 explodes randomly" because of a margin of error small than what our brain can easily comprehend.

(I did a couple months of industrial engineering in university and while it wasn't for me, I loved what I learned about the field)

cucumber3732842 an hour ago | parent [-]

This analysis is missing price though.

A lot of times it's cheaper to just full send it than produce a full run at a given quality with a low rejection rate.

The "old" way of making a black fan is you just QC check them, send the good ones to Noctua, send the crappy ones to someone who DGAF because they're putting them some sort of industrial appliance that needs airflow through the box.

Everyone "wins" this way because Noctua gets their fan to spec cheaper and the people building plasma cutters or control units for chemical washers or ATMs get a fan that's "fundamentally good" if sloppily executed and the manufacturer gets less waste. Ain't no different than how the pork belly that doesn't become your bacon becomes dog food and die lubricant.

I suspect this is where a lot of the "X compatible" power tool stuff on Amazon comes from. That and/or the repurposing of "worn out" dies.