I was watching “How It’s Made” for background noise while I worked on a presentation (bad idea, I know, but I had hours to burn), and as usual, I noticed that tons of the things they make are done almost entirely by hand. The episode I saw today was on scales and thermometers. The latter were totally assembled by hand–the card was slid into the plastic backing, the glas front was slid in, and the bulb was properly encased, all by hand. Ditto for the grocery-store scale.
I realise the way they’re showing it is slower than usual for demonstration purposes, but it still seems really slow and inefficient. Is this actually how these things are done? I know it’d be boring to watch assembly lines do everything, but I also want to know how things are actually made!
I’ve noticed that How It’s Made is a Canadian show, and the products depicted are made in Canada and occasionally in England. It looks like they try to showcase higher quality stuff, so you may see more hand-assembled things on this show than if it were filmed in the U.S. or other places.
Well, sure, and they show the molds etc., but it takes them about 10 minutes to show someone assembling and testing a single grocery-store scale. That feels like a long time. Maybe I just overestimate the magic of modern production.
Something like assembling a grocery store scale isn’t well suited for a machine to do. A lot of parts in that scale may be made by passing a roll of sheet metal into a machine and having a bins full of parts come out the other end, but assembly tasks are still something humans excel at.
Simpler tasks like bread making are completely handled by machines. There are machines where you load flour, yeast, water, and some other stuff into one end, along with a roll of plastic bags and little close-y things. Baked, sliced, and packaged loaves of bread will come out the other end.
“It’s made by injection-molding plastic into the final shape of the product faster than you can follow with your eye” doesn’t make for a very compelling episode, so there’s a selection bias here.
There was a story on NPR this morning about companies in the US making brushes. They mentioned that mass produced brushes are made in China, and the US companies can’t compete with them. But custom work, and more flexible work, can be done with human interaction, and we have a few companies doing that.
If “How It’s Made” did something about brushes, they’d probably focus on the US version of the story.
My first job was in a factory that made various products for the chemical industry. I remember being amazed at the number of things that were done by hand that I had always assumed to be done by machine.
There was not a single conveyor belt in the entire plant. Those items that were made in multiple steps were carried/carted from station to station.
I imagine that there are huge numbers of small shops out there making their wares with the help of a few machine tools and a bunch of minimum-wage hired help.
My first jobs in high school were at places that did printed circuit board design and manufacture, a relatively high-tech industry.
I remember doing short assembly runs where we would put together fifty or a hundred boards, with twenty or thirty components each. Big industry was using robots and wave soldering to build computers while I was sitting there with a soldering iron stuffing boards by hand and trying not to make a “cold solder joint”
In the circuit board manufacturing side, I would cut out the individual boards with a sheet metal shear (stomp, chop), use a router to finish the sides, and then sand the sharp edges by swiping them against a torn piece of industrial sanding belt material.
In the same shop, the silkscreening was all done by hand.
All of these processes are normally done by fancy machinery in larger scale shops, but how many small facilities can afford all of the tooling?
This was certainly my experience when I first started visiting factories in Taiwan and China - unless you’re talking about stuff produced on a truly large scale then hand labor is simply cheaper and easier.
It is a Canadian show but they definitely show things being made in the US. Two in particular were filmed within 20 miles of my small South Georgia home town, Maule aircraft and ‘peanuts’.
They did do paint brushes! Here is the segment I saw in the US but dubbed over in a British accent.
In my experience, there is a lot of Canadian (especially Québécois) content, but also soy sauce made in Kentucky (yep), cheese made in Switzerland, and (IIRC) pewter teapots made in the U.K.
But they don’t show anything from Asia, where the really massive manufacturing takes place. Probably from lack of budget, or difficulty in getting permission to film. Everybody would love to see how they assemble an iPad, but it’s unlikely Apple would allow it. The work conditions in those factories may be acceptable for the people working there (cue debate), but look odd to us in the West. Here’s an interesting one (from another source) involving small appliances.
They must have gone on a road trip this year. Not only do they have a segment on assembling Western Digital external hard drives (s21e4), but they have had segments on several traditional crafts in Asia, such as Thai rice boxes and paper umbrellas.
I have noticed that they do tend to go with top-drawer products that might not have the same level of automation as consumer-grade stuff.
Once I saw a segment on neat music boxes with singing birds, then I looked up the prices and found that they go for tens of thousands of dollars.
Likewise, Instead of showing a ten dollar safety razor, they did a segment on a fancy German safety razor that costs closer to a hundred.
I can provide knowledge; I do a lot of work in industry and manufacturing and my life is an ongoing series of live action “How It’s Made” shows.
What you are describing is assembly. Yes, practically speaking such things are heavily manual, because there is usually no more affordable or practical way to do it.
To be interesting, “How It’s Made” deliberately focuses on how they make things that tend to involve a lot of steps and manual interventions. Things that are less manual are simpler, and wouldn’t fill a show, but perhaps more pertinently, much of the manufacturing is not done at the same place the assembly is done.
Take, for example, the steel furniture you find in labs. That’s a very manual final assembly process; you have to screw stuff together, put on the casters, crap like that. But the parts themselves are made in a highly automated environment; they’re sheets of metal that are almost certainly being picked, laser cut, and bent by robots, then sent to guys who spot-weld them together in foolproof jigs. Then they’re painted by a robotic painting line. Final assembly can be very complicated but the creation of the basic parts is actually most of the work and isn’t very manual.
On this show, I once I watched workers hand-assembling some very well-made, durable-looking umbrellas, and I coveted one. I noted the brand and looked them up online. They were a London firm manufacturing top-of-the-line, very British black umbrellas, and they cost a fortune. No doubt they sold mostly to the bowler-wearing carriage trade of finance-sector London.
I couldn’t afford one, but I still want one.
ETA: I took another look online just now. I don’t remember the company’s name, but thismight very well be them.