<story><title>America’s largest tool company couldn’t make a wrench in America</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/craftsman-america-wrench-stanley-black-decker-reshoring-factory-1125792f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s a video from Beta, a wrench manufacturer in Italy.[1] Think about what it would take to build a plant like that from a cold start. What you&amp;#x27;d need to know. All the ways you could screw up. How much it would cost to recover from a bad decision. Notice what they automated, and what they didn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;Who wants to be a millwright? Or a production engineer? To build a factory, you need both. Once you&amp;#x27;ve built the factory, you don&amp;#x27;t need most of them them any more. It&amp;#x27;s a job with high layoff potential. Top pay is maybe $125K.&lt;p&gt;You need people who&amp;#x27;ve built your kind of factory before. Here, they need people who&amp;#x27;ve built mechanized hot forging shops. Since few of those are built in the US each year, there&amp;#x27;s no pool of such people.&lt;p&gt;Stanley, the company, had forgotten how to build a plant like that. 
They relied on the equipment manufacturer, and perhaps some consultants. That didn&amp;#x27;t work out.&lt;p&gt;It takes a long time to get a good factory going from a cold start. It took Airbus 21 years before they made a good airplane. It took Tesla 15 years from start to significant production volume.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=azDUFQ-e0EM&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=azDUFQ-e0EM&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danielvf</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve worked in manufacturing, been adjacent to manufacturing for most of my life, and written software for custom factory floor machines.&lt;p&gt;That Beta wrench factory wouldn&amp;#x27;t be hard for someone in the industry to stand up. It&amp;#x27;s is fairly low tech, little automation, and 95% off the shelf machines. Even the two possibly custom machines I saw in that video are built out of off the shelf components.&lt;p&gt;This really isn&amp;#x27;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. If this is slower than your target time per part, you increase the number of machines on that operation (see all the tumblers in the wrench video).&lt;p&gt;The US has many cities with deep industrial expertise. The US and China are roughly manufacturing output peers, even though the US has 1&amp;#x2F;5 the population.&lt;p&gt;I know someone who stood up a production line in the US for some of the most complex pieces of metal ever made, involving hundreds of machine cells, (more many nations have made nuclear reactors than make this thing), and the production line side is something that&amp;#x27;s just isn&amp;#x27;t that hard. The planning is work sure, but it stuff that&amp;#x27;s been done before bazillions of times before.&lt;p&gt;Standing up a manufacturing line is far less risky than creating new software - assuming you&amp;#x27;ve got experienced people doing it.</text></comment>
<story><title>America’s largest tool company couldn’t make a wrench in America</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/craftsman-america-wrench-stanley-black-decker-reshoring-factory-1125792f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s a video from Beta, a wrench manufacturer in Italy.[1] Think about what it would take to build a plant like that from a cold start. What you&amp;#x27;d need to know. All the ways you could screw up. How much it would cost to recover from a bad decision. Notice what they automated, and what they didn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;Who wants to be a millwright? Or a production engineer? To build a factory, you need both. Once you&amp;#x27;ve built the factory, you don&amp;#x27;t need most of them them any more. It&amp;#x27;s a job with high layoff potential. Top pay is maybe $125K.&lt;p&gt;You need people who&amp;#x27;ve built your kind of factory before. Here, they need people who&amp;#x27;ve built mechanized hot forging shops. Since few of those are built in the US each year, there&amp;#x27;s no pool of such people.&lt;p&gt;Stanley, the company, had forgotten how to build a plant like that. 
They relied on the equipment manufacturer, and perhaps some consultants. That didn&amp;#x27;t work out.&lt;p&gt;It takes a long time to get a good factory going from a cold start. It took Airbus 21 years before they made a good airplane. It took Tesla 15 years from start to significant production volume.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=azDUFQ-e0EM&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=azDUFQ-e0EM&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>VectorLock</author><text>&amp;gt;Here&amp;#x27;s a video from Beta, a wrench manufacturer in Italy.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;It took Airbus 21 years before they made a good airplane. It took Tesla 15 years from start to significant production volume.&lt;p&gt;Extrapolating from complexity it would only take a few months at worse to make a factory producting drop forged box end wrenches.</text></comment>