
How Products Are Made - rcarmo
http://www.madehow.com/
======
jmcalvay
[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/](http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-Factory-Tours/)

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

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

~~~
jmcalvay
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.

------
mxfh
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKLz4ufCuKk)

\---

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

inofficial youtube playlist
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1875415EEB9204AC](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1875415EEB9204AC)

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

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

~~~
desdiv
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...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps_X1TqiJZQ&list=PLOEDIkStOhJftis3UgRt3_v6VezLwxKod&index=1)

------
xbryanx
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/](http://www.advameg.com/)

~~~
Geimfari
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.

~~~
wxm
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.

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

~~~
wxm
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4974055)

~~~
jnbiche
Thanks for tracking that down! Very interesting.

------
jglauche
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!

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

------
wyager
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.

~~~
JetSpiegel
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.

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sravfeyn
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.

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Logmix
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...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me5ke7agyOw&list=PL4F918844C147182A)

------
kragen
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutter_%28photography%29)

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

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MrJagil
Always wanted to know this one:
[http://www.madehow.com/knowledge/Seat_belt.html](http://www.madehow.com/knowledge/Seat_belt.html)

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

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

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ChuckMcM
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.

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

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sjtrny
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.

~~~
ddingus
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...

------
known
Similar to
[http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/](http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/)

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

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hnriot
someone should write a bot to merge this into wikipedia.

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

