Japanese manhole mass production process [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
For the last couple of months, I’ve been watching a lot of these videos. It’s interesting to see how products are manufactured today. The processes range from fully automated and robotized to skilled handiwork, with most being semiautomated and including a surprising (to me) amount of what looks like low-skill hand labor.
The YouTube channels themselves are a mystery to me. It’s not clear who is making the videos or what the financial relationship is between the video producers and the factories covered. When I started watching Process X, I thought the channel might be backed by a Japanese government or industrial organization that wants to promote understanding of skilled manufacturing (monozukuri in Japanese). But normally such backing would be declared openly. Now I wondering if it’s just a small group of YouTubers doing it for the ad revenue, with the factories participating for the publicity. If anybody knows, please let us know.
In any case, the videos are very well made and fascinating to watch.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChZgikssAJkmiQOv_sO-ngQ
[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSNIT8Z40XgB4RKk9Vhf1eA
[3] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoah0FMpaTxHpZlF09kqQmg
I took a bunch of photos of these back when I was a kid on an exchange trip, the artistry on them was really notable. Very beautiful stuff.
For example, here's an article by a company that collaborated with Process X: https://www2.niigata-nippo.co.jp/ibuki/11453/
You nailed it. They shoot for free. There's no sponsorship, other than linking to the companies site or instagram.
Straight from the dawn of mass manufacturing. No material handing at all-- you just pay some guy ten cents an hour to pick up a part and walk it from one station to another. Each workstation is 1920s-style full manual lathes and mills with hard fixturing. You could ask for material traceability documentation if you wanted to hear a chorus of laughter: the metal on those sprockets appears to be random scrap sheet fresh from the side of the road.
The sprockets in particular could be done with a single progressive stamping press. It would replace the jobs of what appears to be 20 separate people and would cost 100x what they would make in their entire life.
More like, if you want to get a fake document. That happened all the time to my dad. He needed a certain grade of steel that was rated for use in nuclear reactors, and would get completely unqualified materials that had been stamped with whatever grade he’d requested.
In the sprocket manufacturing shop, I kept thinking of ways those processes could go wrong. In particular that first press with the foot pedal made me cringe. Yet the shop seemed successful, and they produced sprockets. I wouldn't care to guess how many sprockets per finger that place averages though.
Either way, finding a process that can be repeated for profit seems magical. It's a far cry from the uncertainty that seems so widespread right now.
What I've seen is that lots of these videos are uploaded to many YouTube channels (ripped from one to the other, or having the same people behind, I don't know). They don't even have that many views, and don't post super frequently, I'm not sure they're making a living through ad revenue. I would love to read a piece on who's behind these videos, it's very intriguing.
They are living almost entirely off Western clicks, since Asian traffic counts for nothing in YT algo.
A classmate of mine once made an amateur documentary about Pakistani heavy industry few years ago, and then it oddly took off.
I just knew those notoriously greedy Japanese manhole manufacturing YouTubers were in it for the money
The recent video on lightbulbs really shows how music can really alter the mood and how you feel when watching a video. I walked away from that video feeling how beautiful and majestic the whole process was but after thinking about it, the music really had a lot to do with that feeling, after all they are just making lightbulbs...
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-manhole-cover...
> Typically, a designed manhole cover, which weighs more than 80 pounds, excluding the frame, costs approximately $585—a five percent premium over the cost of a plain cover. The color, however, is applied carefully by hand, and nearly doubles the price of a manhole to more than $900.
Not much more to add except that I felt cities in general were very good at self-awareness, branding and collectiveness at a face value level.
https://fanwear.no/products/the-dogs-kumlokk?variant=1360021...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqMUuBHChxk
This guy has videos in China walking into electronics factories where they just showed him around and explained everything and then these people in India inside very precarious facilities think he is going to steal their IP.
I worked temporarily in several factories in England one summer, and in general everyone used the safety equipment. When you can hear how loud it is through the ear defenders, why would you remove them?
For me, it would be remarkable if masks or respirators weren’t worn.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/fastest-manm...
Did you have the captions turned off during your view? I don't know how captions were turned on (is that now a default thing for YT), but there's a line that says it is scrap metal.
Also, do manhole covers really need to be replaced that often? That's a lot of manhole covers. Surely they don't make that many every day.
Japan has around 14x as many people and is substantially more urbanized, so it's not inconceivable that they run production daily, especially if they're selling to other markets.
I would imagine they do that a lot. They seem to have YKK'd the manufacturing of manhole covers and I can't imagine that anyone else could do it better or cheaper.
Edit: if anyone didn't get the YKK reference, look at any zipper you own. Chances are it says 'YKK' on it. YKK of Japan has perfected zipper-making and dominates the market.
Also, since they seem to have the concept of painted manhole covers, I would imagine that they would replace slightly more often than we do to commemorate special events.
Manhole cover theft is a problem too (as part of general scrap metal theft as the cost of iron and other metals has risen) but I would imagine it's less of a problem in a society like Japan.
Edit: this link says this company makes 200 a day: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/street-art-japanese-manhole-cov...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucible [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractory
If you can chip stone tools you can use them to shape and finish soft metal.
Metal has the wonderful property that you can change it's properies with just heat, chemicals and a hammer. So you can work it when soft and then harden it to take an edge sharp enough to cut other metal.
With basic metal working in a forge, casting, filing, hammering, riveting or grinding with stone, you can make a lathe.
The lathe is known as at the king of machine tools for a reason. With a lathe you can you can do turning, facing, boring, threading and milling operations on metal.
Et voilà! You have a machine that can make other more specialised machines from "nothing".
Making workshop tools yourself that you get to use later is both really both really fun and a great way to learn things along the way ...even if it seems you can almost always buy the tool cheaper online.
There should be some kind of makefile for all the bits you need to make a lathe.
Disclaimer: while I've owned the lathe book for decades, I've been too intimidated by the "go to a junk yard and pick through for scrap meeting these criteria", including a couple diesel piston heads as I recall, to ever start.
Yes, for the same reason that software development methodologies like agile/scrum/whatever are better than waterfall development. You can't know what to automate until you're actually doing the thing that needs automation.
What’s not getting better is iOS accessibility! Am I missing something, or does iOS 16 still not support closed captions on full screen videos?
That sounds like pie in the sky (wishful thinking). Usually the benefit of automation goes only to owners; the poor get job losses and an increasing wealth gap.
If this is state-owned then it's not so bad, but still the brunt of job losses would seem to be for low-skilled workers.
Distributing the benefit of increased automation to me is a good argument for things like 4-day week and universal basic income (UBI).
- From other shots in the video later in the process, it looks like the majority of the manholes produced don't have colouring applied
-- The volume of manholes requiring colouring might be too low to justify the expense of automation
- Automated control of a fluid with high viscosity and a tendency to dry/accumulate would be much more difficult than, say, the grinding operation shown earlier. At the very least, the nozzles would require more maintenance
I fully agree though, that it is quite interesting that that step is being done manually. I find most videos of this kind to have the same type of surprise - steps which, to a layman, at least, appear like they could be automated, but are not, despite other steps in the process being automated. I imagine a manufacturing engineer's curse is being able to see a perfectible process but not being able to justify the expense.
Versus a CNC which could probably do the paint job in 2 minutes, resulting in a total time of 120 hours.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/street-art-japanese-manhole-cov...
I get it for brand names etc, but I can't see there being many Coke or Nike logos in a foundry?