How Products Are Made | Hacker News Reader

How Products Are Made

madehow.com

285 pointsrcarmo39 comments

[shamelessplug] I run a factory tours meetup group in the Bay Area. We've been to machine shops, injection molders, foundries (metal not semiconductor), among others: http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-Factory-Tours/

Another one just started in Boston: http://www.meetup.com/New-England-Factory-Tours-Meetup/

Attendance is free--just sign up to the tours you're interested in.

Let me know if you want to spin one up in your area/if you have an idea for a tour. [/shamelessplug]

Is that the Fremont Tesla plant featured on your frontpage?

http://photos4.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/b/b/6/e/highres...

That it is. I've toured the facility on my own, but haven't been able to convince them to have the group through unfortunately.

How do you convince these places to let you do tours?

Many (but not all) of the folks who go on the tours are design engineers who are potential customers for the factories. It's a win-win: the factories get a bunch of potential leads and the "tourists" get learn about manufacturing. One of the big tragedies of many hardware startups is that while many are talented when it comes to design, there are few who really know manufacturing. The goal of the group(s) is try to narrow the gap.

How did you start it? It would be great to have one in the Puget sound.

Would be happy to talk more about setting one up around there. Please email me and we can go over it in more detail. jmcalvay at gmail dot com.

FYI Boeing has a pretty interfering tour in your area.

Armin Maiwald produced hundreds of educational shorts, so called Sachgeschichten for the german TV show Sendung mit der Maus[1] with a target audience of 4 to 8 year olds.

Here is one from 1999 that explains the Internet, including dial-up and DNS-lookup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKLz4ufCuKk

---

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Sendung_mit_der_Maus#Educat...

inofficial youtube playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1875415EEB9204AC

official page at WDR [german]: http://www.wdrmaus.de/sachgeschichten/filme.php5

official page to order DVDs [german]: http://www.bibliothek-der-sachgeschichten.de/

There's an analogous Japanese program called "The Making". The entire series, 300 episodes of 15 minutes each, is available on Japan Science and Technology Agency's (their version of DARPA, minus the black projects) youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps_X1TqiJZQ&list=PLOEDIkStOh...

In the US I like to watch Canada's "How it's Made".

https://www.youtube.com/show/howitsmade

I'm not exactly sure but this looks like this is made by a company called Advameg, Inc. They've quite a few other sites that might be of interest to HN readers:

http://www.advameg.com/

Dear lord, that is a lot of wonderful reference material.

I'm not certain I get how they can afford so much (seemingly?) original material, yet be low-key enough that I haven't come across them before.

Some companies buy up the rights to old/out of print books that created this original material. Then they cut it up and automatically digitise it. There was a post on HN quite some time back about somebody describing his process to do exactly this for a repair-your-car book - and how he used it to make money via ads through SEO hits.

Do you remember about when this was? I've been searching for the post on HN and can't find anything.

I'm afraid not. I've been searching as well and couldn't find it. I recall his process to be

1. secure the rights to the book (he knew the author personally/through family)

2. cut the book open and run it through a high resolution scanner

3. use imagemagick to preprocess images

4. run OCR on the pages and convert them to markdown

5. have a compiler convert his markdown and images to HTML

EDIT: FOUND THE LINK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4974055

Thanks for tracking that down! Very interesting.

Holy moly. Quite possibly the greatest content company I'd never heard of. A lot of those sites I have pleasantly visited at one time or another. Brilliant mix of reference and entertainment and clearly presented with no fluff, scrolling images, multi-click pages or other tricks and BS. I mean, yeah, they've got ads, but how else would they make money?

I wonder what is their source for public schools [0] and neighborhoods [1] data. I once tried to get access to same kind of data from ACRIS but the annual bill was around $50k. May be I was doing something wrong or asking for too much.

Would be interested in knowing if someone has any insights.

0 - http://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Battery-Park-City-New-...

1 - http://www.city-data.com/school/edward-r-murrow-high-school-...

Wow, no more work will be getting done here today. Thanks, looks like a great collection of collections of information.

Wow. I had expected a series of youtube videos showing short sequences of machinery, but I was positively surprised. The explanations are really well written and quite detailed. Thanks for the link!

It's great for kids, too (might need some filtering, though).

This would be an excellent site to archive in book form to assist in recovering from some sort of catastrophic societal collapse. If I could take one thing back in time to the 1500s, it might be a paper copy of this site.

Just taking printed paper to the 1500s would be an achievement. Make sure you land around Florence, there's this guy called Leonardo that has some great ideas.

It's often not too difficult to find resources on how a piece of software works and is made. While you may not find line by line code of Google Search, you can find resources that explain most of fundamentals of a search engine and how to build a search engine.

But, if you want to figure out how a pice of hardware (e.g. Falcon 9, Oculus and a microchip) works and is made, it's not so easy. Hardware industry is not as collaborative or as open as software counterparts. The only resources to understand hardware are specialised books that only people in respective domains would have heard of. (Book discovery is another issue, e.g. it's taking me an awful lot of time to find a book on how digital electrical switches work)

Having a great resource like this to understand how a piece of hardware is made and how it works is incredibly valuable and reduces the barrier to understanding hardware a notch down, I look forward to more and better accessibility to understanding hardware.

The George Eastman House just released a informative and well produced series on photographic processes that might also be mentioned here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me5ke7agyOw&list=PL4F918844C...

I was hoping for a bit more depth. Here's what it has to say about camera shutters:

"The shutter functions like a curtain that opens and closes. It must operate exactly to expose the film for the correct length of time and to coordinate with other operations such as the flash. The shutter is made of different materials depending on the type of camera and manufacturer."

That's it. No diagram. Nothing at all about manufacturing processes. Nothing about cloth vs. metal, focal-plane vs. lens-mounted, etc. Wikipedia, on the other hand, has 2700 words on camera shutters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutter_%28photography%29

What were other people seeing on this site that was actually good?

Always wanted to know this one: http://www.madehow.com/knowledge/Seat_belt.html

Sadly, it's hard to grasp the mechanisms without pictures...

This video gives a good mechanical view of how the seat belt locking device works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCm4e10mG7A

The seatbelt article is just the Wikipedia article, used with attribution.

I haven't diff'ed them, but it feels like a straight copy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt

Off topic but does anyone know of a similar mechanism that brakes from centrifugal force instead of deceleration?

I'm curious to make a prototype brake for strollers and wheelchairs.

Interesting. There is a book along these lines (more how things work vs how they are made) and of course there is something like 10 seasons of 'How its Made' which the discovery channel runs.

This reminds me of the Encyclopedia of Science and Technology series. Excellent series for young minds.

I wish this was more specific. Take for example the page on stainless steel. I want to be told an exact recipe for how to make steel. Not a hand wavy general explanation.

Yes.

The balance here is what is accessible. Wanting to understand the making of steel itself is great, but it will also take a considerable investment by anyone to actualize.

Many things presented there have a lower bar.

My guess anyway...

How in the world did I never come across this all these years?! Amazingly informative. Got lost in it for hours.

someone should write a bot to merge this into wikipedia.

according to the top and bottom of this page, some of it comes from wikipedia http://www.madehow.com/knowledge/Seat_belt.html

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