The US has become engineering/design while manufacturing is overseas. Broad stereotype, but I hope this is an opportunity for the US to recognize that manufacturing may actually be an issue of national sovereignty.

That's a problem. If a country doesn't have manufacturing capacity, other countries can use that as leverage in the geopolitical sphere. This is one example of where the interests of corporations and countries conflict.

That's Taiwan and Hong Kong in a nutshell.

Sadly, true.

The flip-side of globalization is there are unlikely to be any more large-scale conventional or NBC wars (only proxy, cyber and economic wars) because of extreme economic interdependency.

The US is the #2 manufacturer in the world [1] and will overtake China this year to become #1 [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_...

[2] https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/competitiveness/med...

I would bet this is only for final assembly. I seriously doubt there is any "Made in USA" product that isn't completely dependent on some tooling or components made overseas.

Couple of things:

- For products containing electronics: short of the electrical components themselves, there is a healthy amount of US electronics+mechanical manufacturing, but it's more geared for lower-volume higher-margin type stuff (think for energy / agriculture / etc.)

- IIRC having spoken to someone at Jabil a few years ago, vague recollection of being told that the US is the largest manufacturer of high volume plastic goods (as well as other products using automated processes). Not so much enclosures for consumer electronics, but rather stuff like shampoo bottles, and that sort of tooling is done here in the US.

- Just keep in mind that manufacturing has a broader scope than what it seems you're implying. Not all manufactured goods involve electronics or injection molding.

Shampoo bottles make little sense to make in China. The processes are highly automated, the feedstock is cheaper in the US (way more petrochemical inputs and cheaper energy) and it would be madness to ship empty shampoo bottles over long distances.

True on high volume plastic bottles, caps, etc. Those must be manufactured geographically near final distribution, too expensive to ship billions of empty plastic bottles half way around world.

And lots of the tooling for this high volume plastic bottles, lids, etc is made in Germany. Consensus is Germans make best tools for this volume (100’s of millions of parts per year)

Even US industrials like the metals industry is still chugging along, and some of it even ends up in Chinese products. It's just that the US has shifted to making more specialized metals and alloys, rather than cheap and basic metals.

Yes, but be careful with that conception. That exact same thing can be said of just about anything made anywhere. This is the nature of globalization of supply chains.

I mean it goes back long before the word “globalization” was used to mean “anything I don’t like that involved more than one country.” There was very long-distance trade thousands of years ago. Not every raw material you might want will exist in your immediate vicinity.

It would be hard to find any product these days that isn't dependent on the world-wide supply-chain, but I agree that how "manufacturing" is quantified and measured leaves a lot of room for tomfoolery.

Sure but most Chinese factories operate using manufacturing equipment made in the US or Germany.

This is absolutely and patently false for 99% of Chinese manufacturing. I suggest you watch Strange Parts videos to see what manufacturing in China is actually like before making a fool of yourself.

Final assembly only would be the last strategy applied in the US due to high labor costs. The competitiveness of US manufacturing is due to high levels of automation.

Counterpoint / However: A lot of the "made in China" products were developed and designed in the US.

I wouldn't trust a projection from 2015 (!) about relative US-vs-China manufacturing volume. Hell, I wouldn't trust a projection from 2 weeks ago.

Is this adjusted for PPP?

This wont change in a capitalist society. The only ways to fix this that have a chance to actually work that I can think off is 1) Americans work for as low wages as workers in China to compete or 2) non-capitalism. I would love to learn of any other ways but this has been discussed by people way smarter than me for ages and I have seen no other solutions that wouldn't sink the US economy or cause a revolution.

> would love to learn of any other ways but this has been discussed by people way smarter than me for ages and I have seen no other solutions that wouldn't sink the US economy or cause a revolution.

Yeah, here's one: protectionist tariffs. I once looked into what it would cost to make a pair of pants in the US instead of China. The difference isn't that large; something like an extra dollar goes to shareholders instead of workers. You can see it in the actual list prices of jeans made in China[1] versus USA[2]. They're .... about the same. This same calculation is done in lots of different places: MBA types want that extra dollar to go to shareholders. Well, if they're not allowed to do so, everything works just fine.

[1]https://www.levi.com/US/en_US/sale/c/levi_clothing_sale_us

[2] https://www.allamericanclothing.com/made-in-usa/jeans.html

You seemed to have missed the option that has been driving economic growth for centuries: improved worker productivity through improved technology and methods. A machine can work cheaper and faster than any Chinese worker. Eliminating work is even more efficient than that.

So basically work smarter than harder or cheaper. The way to compete with the Chinese is through better ideas.

That's the theory we heard since 1980s: then Japanese robots will run over everyone. In practice however, you have Chinese workers instead. Outside some very high volume, certain simplicity manufacturing processes it's still mostly manual labor on assembly line.

Yes manual labor is used when it makes economic sense and automation is the same. Robots did indeed take over many tasks, but people still exist and still want to work so they do stuff too.

The idea that automation means people can't or don't work is a fallicy.

Communist China never should have been granted MFN status. That was our mistake. No one in the U.S. feels threatened if Germany, France, England, or any other Western liberal democracy manufactures something. (I make an exception for some goods critical to national security, which we should always have know-how for.) But China is a hostile nation.

When Woodrow Wilson talked about making the world safe for democracy, the flip side of that is that democracy requires safety and security. We liberal democratic nations are capable of playing nice with one another. We will have normal rivalries. But China cannot play nice.

We need to transition away from trade with China, under MFN status.

> no other solutions that wouldn't sink the US economy

After this pandemics is over I think we'll know better what "no other solutions that wouldn't sink the US economy" actually means. I suspect that behind the typical talk about sinking "the US economy" is not what it appears to be, especially if one talks about "capitalism" versus others.

Namely, since a some decades ago both China and Russia are technically capitalistic societies. Therefore I interpret the statements only as "will our empire continue to be the empire." The empire is kept primarily with the arms, and they aren't going away, whatever changes.

Very easy to change with laws. Similar to how laws were passed after 2008 to force banks to be less profitable (they can't trade any more, need more reserve capital, etc.). Very easy, all you need is political will. Trump was going in the right direction with trade war with China (possibly for the wrong reasons), I'm really happy because I predict it will be a political suicide for the Democratic candidate to propose the opposite policy now, so it will become the policy regardless of who wins the election.

This a thousand times. Developing a robust manufacturable product, even a simple one, is HARD. It takes multiple spins and loads of testing, not to mention a huge amount of work to make it manufacturable.

Why are we trying to reinvent the wheel. We should be finding simple, battle proven designs and throwing the manufacturing efficiency machine at them. Developing new products on this timeline is exceedingly naive.

I'd like to add that most media professionals and journalists have no clue about manufacturing engineering and how difficult it is to produce something at mass scale.

But they inccessantly write about 3D printing for more buzzword invoked clicks.

From the second sentence of the abstract: "This ventilator is an electro-mechanical equivalent of the old, reliable Manley Ventilator. "

I don't know enough about the manufacturing process to say if it's faster to spin up a new simpler design from scratch, or expand existing lines. But it's worth evaluating.

Yes, and the rest of abstract strongly indicates they're still in preliminary collaboration stages, bringing on subject matter experts to figure out the details. I'm not saying it's not worth evaluating, but it isn't going to solve the current bottleneck. Take a look at the link I provided. Their products are literally tailor made for these exact types of situations. Throw all the resources you can at helping them scale production. If necessary use the DPA to force them to open their designs to other manufacturers that can retool their factories to make even more. Sure, by all means have parallel efforts to evaluate designs that can be cheap & scaled even more effectively, but recognize that such solutions will solve the next crisis, not this one (unless we're still in this one a year from now, which, hell I hope not but it doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility.)

"Open Ventilator Project

Half the world's population lives on an income of less than $300 usd/month. Who will make ventilators for them?

Consider Egypt, 100m people living on a thin strip of land by the Nile, the Philippines, rural Ukraine, India. A yearly salary may not cover a Chinese ventilator."

openvent.org

Invite discussion.

We are testing our centrifugal compressor for pressure/flow tomorrow, driven by $5 quadcopter motor.

Any turbomachinary engineers in the house? :-)

>> Why do we need more designs?

The goal is to design a low-cost, simple, easy-to-use and easy-to-build ventilator that can serve the COVID patients, in an emergency timeframe. It should be easy to build locally, its functionality must be easy to verify, and must meet the design requirements.

Also : cheap

Manufacturers have the world by the balls in a crisis like this, and throwing money at them as they increase their costs is not something a government can do forever.

I'm glad scientists are taking over the means of production here.

And not kill patients

I agree and actually find it a bit insulting/arrogant that so many people think that they can build a better ventilator/mask in days without any knowledge in the fields.

I am appalled to see tv news showing people making home 3d printed masks for use in local hospitals out of PLA and cut up HEPA filters. This is as effective as holding a tissue paper to your face, plus your breath the glass fibers from the HEPA filter you cut up and the bacteria that is trapped in the PLA layers.

No one's claiming to build better versions of these things, but instead reasonable alternatives that are not unobtainium. PLA masks probably are in the category of doing more harm than good though.

But the things ARE the better versions already; they are ubiquitous, the process for mass-production (think of face masks atm) have been developed decades ago. It's a logistical problem caused by a sudden and unexpected surge in demand.

There is no shortage of toilet paper, there's warehouses full of them (https://youtu.be/wA4KS546rZo), it's just a matter of getting them to the shops. Nobody's out there making a better version of toilet paper.

There is actually a shortage of masks though. Companies that didn't even make masks before are now producing masks. That's not happening with toilet paper because everyone knows that toilet paper use has not actually gone up and demand will crash quickly.

I've seen people swear off toilet paper in favour of the bidet. Perhaps this crisis will wean us off a couple of unnecessary consumer habits.

In general, yes.

However, in this particular case we have a paper with 26 authors, mostly physicists and engineers, humbly asking for feedback from the scientific and medical community. Not a group of people arrogantly thinking they have The Solution to our problems.

I suspect existing designs require parts that are hard to manufacture or acquire at this scale.

So reevaluating the design might be out of necessity to work with what is available in terms of materials, skills and equipment.

That’s just my theory, I’ve no evidence to support that.

The abstract includes this rationale: "Our design is optimized to permit large sale [sic] production in short time and at a limited cost, relying on off-the-shelf components, readily available worldwide from hardware suppliers"

The researchers believe that these could be quickly slapped together in substantial quantities in many parts of the world.

I assume ventilator manufacturers are currently working overtime to expand production?

Yeah, Resmed here in Australia are doubling/tripling manufacturing capacity. https://www.businessnewsaus.com.au/articles/resmed-ramps-up-...

I know that Dräger in Germany got an order of 10,000 ventilators by the German government.

Why wouldn’t we want people to continue iterating on designs? Should all the world’s designers just start trying to become manufacturing planners? Of course not. This would be a terrible use of their skill set. But more than that, why in the world are you criticizing people who are just trying to help? At a minimum these people are helping to inspire hope.

Can my factory manufacture these designs?

I don't know anything about your factory. But if you mean, can they do it from the perspective of IP/proprietary data etc., then that's the bottleneck to solve. The DPA could easily cut through that bottleneck if existing factories could quickly be retooled to manufacture existing, proven & approved designs. The alternative is to retool to produce novel, unproven, unapproved designs. If you have a factory, great! You'll need to retool it though. Which design would you rather target? A simple, proven, approved design tailor made for this sort of situation? Or the simple, tailor made, but unproven new ones that are being thrown together in a few weeks?

"Which design would you rather target? A simple, proven, approved design tailor made for this sort of situation? Or the simple, tailor made, but unproven new ones that are being thrown together in a few weeks?"

Perhaps both paths will prove necessary and valued?

What capabilities does it have?

What capabilities does it need?

GP's point was why do we need new designs when company X already has a proven design. Well I can't access that design; it isn't published. My factory has cleanrooms, CNC tools, presses, waterjet cutters, testing equipment, and more, and a lot of flexibility and is presently running well below capacity. But I can't even assess whether that tooling is sufficient to make that design.

The open source designs do at least solve this problem.

Injection molding - The TOP thing we need to get mass manufacturing going. I just watched NYTimes front page video of Georgia Tech students trying to 3D print their way - it is unbelievably naive to use 3D printing in a situation that needs thousands and hundreds of thousands of parts. It defies common sense and elevates 3D printing to a new buzzwordy things by the media.

Do you have injection molding tools and mold making expertise?

While it is very obviously suboptimal, I don't see why 3D printing should be dismissed entirely in situations like the current one.

The point is that we have thousands of these 3d printing machines distributed around the world, with a good amount of source material. At this point, we can afford to brute-force our way to producing hundreds of thousands of items, don't we?

This is not going to solve all our manufacturing needs, not even by a long shot, but it seems it could fill very specific critical and unexpected needs.

It's an opportunity cost. If we allocate resources that can otherwise be put to a better use, why not? Efficiency is king in mass production.

By all means, use 3D printing at hospital level to get things made that's needed. A parts of the face shield (such as the head band) can be locally manufacturered using 3d printers.

But it is boggling to me that the media keeps wanting to get 3D printing buzzword clicks than actually asking manufacturing engineers.

3D printing becomes more viable as people use it. Right now it is pretty niche, but many groups are doing it on an industrial scale.

If every household or building had one, the parts could be crowdsourced from every machine that could make them.

The difference between where 3D printing and injection molding technology is right now is that 3D printers have scaled down in size and cost to the point of consumers being regular folks.

As for right now, 3D printing can help but it won’t be the savior of mankind.

Yet

Is there no such thing as a chain of custody for parts manufacturing? Crowd sourcing plastic parts from printers seems beyond naive. Do you know what goes into design of plastic molds or the repeatability and tolerances required? How do you quality control parts created from layers of hot glue? Plastic molded parts can rely on fundamental chemical understanding and tuned parameters of a molding machine.

> Well I can't access that design; it isn't published.

Apparently thats not true:

"I really don't get this DIY respirator hype. I get the idea, but why does everyone seem to reinvent the wheel using their "fancy" 3D printers and arduinos?!

This is 70s 80s tec, all patents expired. There are literally pages of exploded view drawings: http://www.frankshospitalworkshop.com/equipment/ventilators_...

Source: https://twitter.com/FauthNiklas/status/1242064388300947456

Patents and service manuals are not designs. They are just symbolic representations to illustrate the principles of operation. For manufacturing you need exact dimensions and tolerances for every part.

And the tolerance stackup is what makes it both expensive and reliable.

A whole lot of people are going to get a simple introduction into why some things are expensive.

Exactly. This is like handing someone a published API and asking why they can't just compile and run it.

Patents and service manuals are most of what you need to start reinventing the wheel. They're what you hand your R&D staff as you start reverse-engineering something, learning along the way all the little tricks that make it harder than it looks. They're not what you hand your machine shop and start producing.

Designs haven't kept up with the recent advancement in production technologies

Maybe if a bit of money would be provided from the $6T, that would help. But at this point I don't see any money being thrown to these projects by the US government, which is just crazy.

>Why do we need more designs? We have designs.

because a cheaper, ubiquitous, and open design could have lead to us having more than enough ventilators at this point in time had we been considering the need earlier. An open design that was prevalent now could allow manufacturers to spin up production without the fear of IP legal repercussions.

Why are people interested in designing such things now? Because the problem has been elucidated and maybe the shortage can be prevented next time.

Something majorly bad for fast production : capitalism-oriented-design(read: profit) high tech machines with heavily unique firmwares and lots of high-cost IP in use inside the mechanism.