Ask HN: How to go about understanding modern manufacturing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to go about understanding modern manufacturing?

I have always thought of modern manufacturing as a wonderful miracle whose impact is so pervasive in our lives that most of us take it for granted. Just like electricity. But it's hard to find good books/videos/tutorials/blogs which explain manufacturing processes, industrial machines, products in a simple, step by step way. for eg. how are things like conveyor belts or cracking furnace coils made. It's almost like there's a parallel universe of highly complex, durable products that are built, shipped and last for years with hardly anyone noticing that these things exist. The immense complexity is hidden and all we see is discussion of stuff like the pixels of the "next generation phone" camera.

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A related area of manufacturing: I recently started learning more about supply chain, and one of the research analysts I interviewed recommended the following news sources/newsletters:

https://www.supplychaindive.com/

https://www.freightwaves.com/

https://www.joc.com/

This (by me, from 1999) remains mostly aspirational, sadly: https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/ "The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products."

You may want to take a look at things related to "Open Manufacturing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_manufacturing

Or the maker movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_culture

I can also wonder if there is more such information out there on the web in Chinese these days than English?

I learned a fair bit about manufacturing by actually working at a factory. My second job was as a software engineer in the tooling department at a major hard disk manufacturer, basically programming machines that assembled hard disks. That job gave me an appreciation for how efficient - and how daunting - modern manufacturing processes really are.

I suspect a lot of this info (how the machines which power industrial automation are designed and built) is proprietary and closely guarded knowledge.

Software is kind of special in that everyone can relatively easily replicate everybody else's software (mostly because the trial and error cycle is short, so whatever secret sauce there is can be just figured out in finite time), while processes involving physical things are often based on knowledge accumulated over decades or centuries that a noob could never replicate for free in their basement.

If you have the Science Channel or Discovery Channel, there's a show called 'How It's Made'. I find it interesting and very informative.

As a one-volume introductory book, I’d suggest any of the last few editions of Groover’s Fundamentals of Modern Manufacturing: Materials, Processes, and Systems. The coverage is fairly broad, not just metalworking, and it’s written for advanced undergraduates—rigorous enough to be useful, but still accessible to non-specialists, with many figures and tables.

Sparkfun has a nice collection of Engineering Essentials tutorials: https://www.sparkfun.com/engineering_essentials

They explain the fundamental topics of electrical engineering like electricity, circuits, components, communication protocols, signalling and so on in a fun and engagning way. They also sell all of these components with helpful hookup guides. So think of a system you want to make (e.g. conveyor belt), order the components and start building it :)

Once you're comforable these fundamentals you might want to look into the design of control/embedded systems. There are quite a few books on these which you could search online for.

Obviously, manufacturing lines today are built with more robust and established components but the above would probably be a good entry point to help you start understanding how these things work.

This is the only good book I've found on the topic. A high school textbook from 2003: https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1590704843

The show "How It's Made" is helpful. Also if you live close to any brand names that have a factory, they will usually do a tour.

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