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The world’s largest tool company couldn’t figure out how to make a wrench. Stanley Black & Decker built a $90 million factory on the edge of Fort Worth, Texas, intending to burnish the Made-in-the-U.S.A. luster of the Craftsman brand by forging mechanics’ tools with unprecedented efficiency. But the automated system was a bust, and the tools that were supposed to be pumped out by the million are so hard to find that some consider them collector’s items.

I'm not sure why I didn't like your comment but I think its because you're just hand waving the article away without responding to it at all?

You take that list and turn into machines, and time it takes to do each operation.

The article states they had trouble getting the expensive machines running, how do you respond to that? I mean, if the USA does posses all this expert manufacturing knowledge, then sure this wouldn't have been an insurmountable problem?

To be fair, maybe the articles title would be better off "The USA couldn't workout how to build wrenches at an affordable price?", it sounds like the bean counters at Stanley had enough?

Anyway, what's sad IMO is that when I was younger, I remember everyones disappointment that all the Stanley tools, and similar brands started making tools in China and it just seemed horrible and it kind of was, the tools sucked. Now, many Chinese tools seem quite good. Kind of idiotic that needs to be thrown away again and the USA has to figure out how to make good tools again...

Old craftsman tools and various other tools from 30-40 yrs ago have no competition with the current market as far as I'm aware. We sold excellence and reliability to the lowest bidder in almost every single industry. I'm under no illusions, america used to make some terrible products in the past too, but now days half this stuff,even the high end stuff, is designed to go into the trash in 1-6 months... Current lifetime warranties aren't offered because the tools are that good, it's because market research shows you won't even want another one...

Some Chinese tools are fine, but many of them are awful. I talk regularly with manufacturer types, even the raw materials(like steel or aluminum) that come from china can be super suspect.

It's basic economic warfare. China said "screw you, we will make okay enough things at a cheap price so your country loses all of its actual expertise and trades people work at call centers while manufacturing becomes entirely controlled by another country. We will do this at the cost of millions of our citizens for the greater good. Every design sent to us will be replicated and sold for less. Meanwhile we will send our young to your schools to get educated on how to do this better than you, half of PhD students are foreign nationals, and even if they stayed in the US there's no jobs".

Paying the piper in this regard is inevitable. As a country we encouraged everyone to take quick cost saving measures for decades. Germany and many other countries have not Basically our hope is we can cheaply wiggle free by "AI", and not hiring trained experts to do jobs with care and lower the costs by cutting regulations.

We sold every part of everything that mattered to get ahead short term not paying attention to the debt accrued.

i dont get all these chinese finger pointing- they did not force US businesses into non-competes or exclusivity contracts.

businesses shifted to china in the name of pure profit. they closed their local factories and laid off their expert staffs due to short sightedness.

I do to the extent that the Chinese will often substitute inferior materials and processes if they think they can get away with it. Documented cases of bait-and-switch between prototypes and early runs on the component, sub assembly and sometimes entire products abound. That's not the way the West normally does business so a whole pile of QC needs to be added to make sure that contractual obligations are fulfilled rather than that non-functional similar shaped and colored stuff gets substituted for the real thing.

This is a massive problem, especially in industries where there isn't a whole lot of margin for error (say, aviation).

Well let's be real, that same thing happens in the US and would happen more in the US if we owned the means of manufacture. Infact, I bet a lot of money it'd be more prevalent until new laws were drafted protecting things. Plot twist our current laws are eroding at a rapid rate...

> that same thing happens in the US and would happen more in the US if we owned the means of manufacture

I doubt that very much.

Have you ever worked in an American industry that makes physical products? Let me give you a hint, it's got the same pressures as software engineering but it's often harder, the environments can be twenty degrees above room temp, and the people get paid a hardly liveable wage.

You can doubt it all you want, but people are out there cutting corners like no tomorrow in pretty much every industry you can Imagine. Usually it's not the employees idea, but rather middle/upper management.

Some of the products people buy have basically never been tested. Yep. Even high end expensive equipment.

I'd say more but I'd rather not...

I have zero intention of villianizing china. The point was to say, they were smart and employed long term strategies for survival and success. Now they have us pretty much rapped around their finger like how cloud vendors have us locked in. It's not bad, or evil, it's business we accept every day and are too divided to correct.

Yea take a look at Thousand Currents Programme, now called the National Front Work Programme and you will see the villainy that China undertakes at the govts behest.

I think the difference in what danielvf is saying and what the article is trying to say lies in some higher level phenomenon. Reading between the lines, every issue outlined in the article can be traced back to an abject failure of management to understand what they were making, and why they were making it.

If I had to guess what the root cause was, the talent is there, but due to the current class structure of the US, nobody wanted to listen to the line machinists, grey-beards, and engineers (because they're dirty poors who didn't make it big via psychopathy so they must be dumb) so instead they listened to McKinsey or whoever they hired to actually run the project.

I remember stories from my father about being an engineer at a big manufacturing facility. The culture was engineers were the people who did math all day, but if you actually wanted something done, ultimately you took your drawings down to the floor and found the longest, grayest beard you could and bent the knee until they agreed to make everything actually work.

Fast forward to my first manufacturing job, I was tasked to improve a process, so I went out on the shop floor, started talking to the line guys, and then was promptly scolded by another engineer who told me, and I quote, "they're just manufacturing guys, don't give them enough rope to hang themselves with".

>but if you actually wanted something done, ultimately you took your drawings down to the floor and found the longest, grayest beard you could and bent the knee until they agreed to make everything actually work.

>Fast forward to my first manufacturing job, I was tasked to improve a process, so I went out on the shop floor, started talking to the line guys, and then was promptly scolded by another engineer who told me, and I quote, "they're just manufacturing guys, don't give them enough rope to hang themselves with".

That is a bad way to view things, from both directions.

The line guys definitely have good insights on how to improve things but sometimes their idea of improvement is to "make my job better at the expense of others" and they also often lack the overarching view so they will aim for a local maximum.

Saying that engineers are just doing math all day just relegate the job to a glorified excel data entry job. Engineers should be doing a lot more from documenting current conditions to looking at how to use new technology to improve the process.

That said, I agree that it looks like management did not listen to anyone in the factory.

The engineers know the materials from a numerical point of view, and can calculate to some degree what those materials will do given their dimensions, material grade and so on. But the line guys work with the actual material and know it from an entirely different perspective, how it can be worked into those shapes and what kind of operations will weaken or strengthen an otherwise identical looking part. Forged tools are especially tricky because forging steel is almost as much an art as it is a science due to all kinds of transient effects, you're working the steel into its final shape while it is hot enough to be ductile but not so hot that it loses shape. The difference between a bad forging and a good forging can be hard to tell when the part is done without destructive testing of some sort.

For tools this is critical. The amount of force I can put on a wrench is such that a bad forging will break which will likely lead me to injure myself. But with a good quality wrench I will know I'm safe and will be confident to apply force close to the maximum of what such a wrench will be able to provide (limited by my strength and the length of the wrench as a multiplier resulting in substantial torque on the bolt or nut). Typically the way the bolt would fail is that it becomes semi liquid and this is a slow process so you have some warning to reduce pressure. But a forging that breaks will just snap and all of that force is released at once. Great way to hurt yourself.

So the quality of these forgings is very important and I'd much rather entrust my safety to the people that actually touch the metal than just to the engineers, who may be able to optimize for cost but who don't actually have much (sometimes no) shop experience.

Knowing how to make something in theory and actually making it in practice can be quite far apart, even on something as mundane as what ultimately is a chunk of metal.

I don't believe there is a strong difference between engineering and management when it comes to an operation like this. I'd say there is a dependency on the two?

If America doesn't have the management capabilities, experience and maturity to get a plant going, it doesn't matter about the tech or the engineers, it's not going to workout. This includes having managers of a certain caliber which a large firm would trust with hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on getting factories running.

I completely understand what you mean by the way and sympathize with your view.

I've spent considerable amount of time in Japan and other parts of Asia for business, they have plenty of people with plant management experience who would be able to organize an operation like this. Japan, for example, has off shored a lot, but not everything. Not by a long shot.

The funniest part about Japanese industry is... It was revitalized by an American post WWII by a dude named Deming, who was pretty much hated/ignored by American industry. So he went overthere and made them a powerhouse. Years later American companies were scratching their heads doing anything to hire the guy but not foster the skillset he asked for in his education programs or actually listen beyond being able to market that they took the advice for a few months.

America has triple downed on ignoring experts to maintain order, pay people less, and saving money short term.

When an American company hires 10,000 people it's to bolster numbers or slow competition. When an Japanese company does it's because they need workers long term. When an American company lays off 10,000 people it's because their profitability has changed or the dream wasn't realized. Meanwhile a German company doesn't lay off it's people because it plans to succeed long term and it knows it can't replace it's people, and long term it's more expensive to retrain them.

US employment laws are partially to blame, but most of American industry is a pump and dump...

I think Deming deserves a lot of credit, but don't forget to credit the Japanese as well: to be the recipient of information and that listen to it and act on it is the harder part. Deming didn't single-handedly transform Japanese industry, he gave them a set of principles and ways of working and they absolutely ran with it. Without the second part nobody would have heard about Deming.

Makes sense.

This is him:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

There is a an international TQM award named after him:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deming_Prize

Many Japanese people have won the individual award.

Some people and organisations from other countries have won the individual and application awards, too, including from the USA and India.

Oh for sure. I didn't mean to under cut the efforts of the Japanese people! Infact I meant to raise them up, the US has had every opportunity to do the same and most places have done everything they can to ignore reality in favor of off the cuff thinking by people who have never seen ground truth.

> I don't believe there is a strong difference between engineering and management when it comes to an operation like this.

There can be massive gulfs between the shop floor, engineering and management. In good companies those are bridgeable, in bad companies they are islands that exchange email.

If engineers and management can't be regularly found on the floor and if they don't know the names of at least the foremen then that's a good indication that a company is run in a way that is not compatible with top quality. I've worked with an architect in NL that made a ton of metal structures and he was also the best shop guy they had when they were still small. He came up with the basic ways to build the structures, built all the prototypes and then stepped back and let the real experts take over to scale it up. He knew his limits, as well as their strengths and the end result was a company that really went places. They use a combination of forgings and steel stock cut to length and the work they do is very complex. I don't think they would have been in business for long without managing this relationship between management, engineering and shop as well as they did.

I've seen one other company like that, more recently and they too did this to the best of their abilities. The pride at the quality of their work radiated out from everybody that worked there. It also makes me happy to work with such companies because the alternatives are nearly always painful to watch.

There are many companies in America that are doing this though, and they are successful. Thus it isn't America that can't, but corporate culture at Stanley. This fits my experience at a number of companies, some are much better managed than others.

I was just talking to friend regarding Vacuum robots. It was the first we discussed the issue but we both were surprised how inferior roombas were compared to Roborock.

When I started my research I thought for sure iRobot would be the best. They weren’t they were bested by RoboRock a chineese company.

I’m sure if given the choice B&D would have chosen spending $90 million on a working factory vs. a non producing factory.

Yeah, I second this. If anything, the process in the video is painfully under-optimized. It's not that hard to get to the point where you have a few machines in a lights out warehouse with a skeleton staff somewhere spitting these things out like a machine gun.

I am curious what this legendary machined part referring to is though....?

> If anything, the process in the video is painfully under-optimized. It's not that hard to get to the point where you have a few machines in a lights out warehouse with a skeleton staff somewhere spitting these things out like a machine gun.

This may very well be the trap that they fell into though - at $90 million that implies that they went head-first into scale and automation where actually it can sometimes be better to aim for something less automated as a version 1.0 (humans are more flexible than machinery)

>I am curious what this legendary machined part referring to is though....?

Ultra silent propellers for submarines most probably.

> submarines

which makes all the difference.

The military is willing to pay at a rate that civilians will not.

Some civilians paid a lot for their submarine experience.

Meanwhile there was that scandal about the steel being sold and used for us submarines was suboptimal. Erosion of standards at pretty much every level...

> This really isn't rocket science. You have a list of operations needed to make the product. You take that list and turn into machines, and time it takes to do each operation.

This is like saying "all you need for an AI startup is to buy a load of graphics cards": there's some details in there which matter and require specialists to get right in surprising non-obvious ways.

I agree with the comment below about this being mismanagement, though. Undoubtedly there are people who understand how to do this properly in the US, but they may not have found them or listened to them.

I don't think I agree.

AI is still a problem under very active development, where the theory is still underdeveloped and the way forward is uncertain. You can throw a lot of money at it and it still may not work well enough.

Wrench manufacturing is a solved problem. We know what to make it from, how to design the parts, what tolerances are needed, how to make chunks of metal in that shape, etc. It's within the reach of a single decently successful youtuber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FK-0zximxo

The problem is less making the thing and more the commercial side of the operation: will it be cheap enough to compete? Will you be able to convince hardware stores to carry it?

Ops professional here. The parent is basically correct, and I'm not sure this is a fair take on what they're saying.

To wit, the challenge isn't at the functional level, it's at the integration level. The individual elements are well understood, thoroughly developed and available at scale, but the integration for every factory is, on some level, going to have uniquely differentiated elements.

The scoping and management of that is where the challenge tends to sit.

There are plenty of the needed specialists in the US. We do a lot of manufacturing, and so we have those people.

Most of them aren't working those jobs man. And the next generation of them is not educated for it because they couldn't get a job with their degree to learn the trade and had to jump into tech or whoever could help them pay off their loans.

Maybe that person you know did that 20 years ago. USA right now has very little manufacturing plants like it used to have in the 50s to 80s. A lot got shifted out during Bush Jr time. I know a dozen machinists ended with Amazon after they lost their plant jobs around Obama's time.