The linked video is on a Japanese YouTube channel called Process X [1]. A couple of similar Korean channels are All Process of the World [2] and 프로세스 케이 Process K [3].
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.
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.
> You could ask for material traceability documentation if you wanted to hear a chorus of laughter
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.
I'm in total awe of manufacturing processes both automated and manual. When watching the Japanese factory I could tell that safety was a high priority. I've heard stories about metal pouring gone wrong, and could see that that process was well controlled.
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.
I'm totally hooked on these (pakistani?) videos. It's sort of relaxing, and cheap edutainment.
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.
These do look like from Pakistan. There is a story (no idea how true) that goes around about expertise of some of these mechanics that one of the nuclear scientists (Abdul Qadeer probably) needed a cylinder part but the manufacturing plant wasn't getting it right. He eventually hired one of these expert local mechanics to make it for him and that guy made it perfectly for him.
I tried searching to see what I could find, and it seems like the channels are run by a Korean living in Japan. (I suppose it could be multiple individuals)
Ah I see the Youtube algorithm has been recommending it to my fellow HN readers. I felt this channel was a hidden gem that I stumbled upon by accident.
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...
"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."
You nailed it. They shoot for free. There's no sponsorship, other than linking to the companies site or instagram.
I guess manufactories are just proud of what they are doing and want to show the world how it is done.
That's what I got from going to factory tours myself when I have the opportunity.
They are really ubiquitous in some cities, and travelling there I took pictures of one from each city I visted. It felt like collecting challenge coins or something.
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.
Thanks, that answered a bunch of questions that popped to my mind while watching the video. One of those being just how much these cost.
> 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.
The achingly heartbreaking noble dignity of human industry is epitomized by this video of Japanese manhole cover creation accompanied by "sad Autumn walk through the city park" music. If someone had done an interview with one of the workers where he talks about his simple work, daily struggles and hopes for his family, I'm sure I would have burst out crying and been inconsolable for a half hour at least. Somehow analogically contained within this video microcosm is a narrative of a whole nation.
In the Strange Parts Youtube Channel (the guy who made an iphone in China), the presenter goes to India to make a manhole cover and they kick him out of a factory because he is an industrial spy. I found it hilarious.
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.
Just like someone else wasn’t particularly amazed of the process how lightbulbs were being made in the 21st century, I’m pretty de-sensitized when it comes to the wearing of masks or respirators in Japan.
For me, it would be remarkable if masks or respirators weren’t worn.
take in to account that they know that they are filmed. this is not a secret camera. also this video is obviosly checked by company afterwards, because some parts of it is blured.
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?
It's not the fastest anymore! That manhole cover topped out at around 55 km/s, while the Parker solar probe achieves up to 700 km/s at the point in its orbit closest to the Sun. Also, depending on how you define "object" the clumps of particles we assemble and shoot around the ring in the Large Hadron Collider at 0.99c are much faster than both.
Sorry if I missed it, but is the color material some sort of epoxy type product? When I've seen these in the past I sort of assumed it was either epoxy, plastic, or some sort of ceramic that was put through a kiln. But I didn't see any curing or finishing process. Anybody happen to know?
Is this factory dedicated to just making manhole covers? Are they using scrap metal? Why are certain parts of the video blurred out? So many questions…
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.
The company https://hinodesuido.co.jp makes a whole bunch of cast iron things, e.g. bridge panels, bridge expansion joints. The fire hydrants (manhole covers) are quite nice with a much more ergonomic removal tool than I've seen elsewhere (See green box on home page for a video).
NYC alone buys about 3,000 manhole covers a year (from the NYT article linked downthread) for just electricity and steam operations (not including sewer, gas, or water).
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.
Some of these seem to be new installs since they're also making the mating ring that goes around it. That mating ring is embedded in concrete.
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.
I always think about what machine made the machine, because if you're melting metal inside a metal bowl... then what metal cast the metal bowl? Or is that where the sand comes into play? Or... Turtles all the way down!
As others have pointed outed out, casting is often done with wooden blanks, sand and ceramic crucibles even today.
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.
Sand is common for casting, but containers (crucibles[1]) for heating and holding molten metal are often ceramic (historically, clay) or at least lined with a refractory[2] material. Refractory materials may include sand, but I don't think sand alone (even compressed, as when used for molds) is strong enough for a crucible.
I have to say this is a very clean process. You can watch any video of a person trying sand casting and see how they fail most of the time trying to get it right. These guys do it brilliantly and with very few hands touching the product. Not many facilities have this much attention to their process, especially when they produce something as crude as a manhole cover.
Iteresting mix of manual and automated. Some things look like they haven't changed at all the last 50-100 years and others are highly automated. I always thought that automation is not a continuous process because you can't easily mix humans and robots and therefore have to design the whole process around the robots. Am I wrong an automation is actually a continuous process where task after task get's more automated? Do they have a yearly budget they can invest in automation?
> Am I wrong an automation is actually a continuous process where task after task get's more automated?
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.
"Heute zeige ich Ihnen die Herstellung von Mannlöchern" (subtitle in German of the first scene). I am being childish here, but that is not how that is to be translated.
Fascinating how few people are involved. It would be nice to get a sense of the number of employees who work at the control software company and the semi-automatic steel smelting robot companies too. It’s so exciting to see real human progress like this in my lifetime — jobs getting better for everyone, we hope.
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?
> It’s so exciting to see real human progress like this in my lifetime — jobs getting better for everyone, we hope.
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).
I thought the same thing. A couple of things that might account for that
- 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.
Looks like they are using an Andromat manipulator [0] to handle the hot forged castings. Operates via skilled manual controls not automation, I believe.
I noticed one of the workers was consulting a color map on how to paint it. Maybe there are a significant number of different designs where it is easier to have a flexible human than bother with programming robots.
I've previously worked around automation in an automotive assembly plant, and the thing that stuck out to me was the grinding being done in a robot cell. Grinding aggregate is very destructive of precision machinery (which is ironic when you consider that the highest precision machinery produced with grinding processes).
So that's what happened to Bender! Next March when we're visiting Tokyo, I'm gonna look for him by taking a picture of all the covers I see. I wonder what district I'll find him in? :)
What is your alternate proposal? Other services don't deliver as high a quality, and not all content on youtube is available elsewhere, in my experience.
1. Ads are great because they allow anyone to watch videos around the world. Video delivery at this scale obviously can't be wholly free, and if you charge for it then you are pricing out low income people all over the world. Speaking of charging for it...
2. You can pay for YouTube Premium if you dislike ads this much. If you pay for Premium, they don't show you ads.
3. Do you have an alternative platform in mind that has an equivalent experience to YouTube, but without ads and is free?
4. I don't actually see any ads on YouTube because I use Brave.
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