I love watching How It’s Made. Though I wish they would go one level deeper. They show all of these manufacturing processes with gigantic proprietary custom engineered machines that spit out 4 billion Cheetos at once. I want to see how those are made. I want to see a show called How They Make the Things That Make Things.
That is truly some of the most creative engineering I’ve ever seen. Like, my brother designs airplane wings for fighter jets. Which is cool… but wings haven’t changed much in decades. He’s kind of a… re-engineer. (Sorry, bro.)
Whereas a custom built machine that sharpens dozens of pencils at once must have had some interesting trial and error problem-solving. How did they settle on this design and what other designs did they try?
Or how did they make this ice cream sandwich masturbation mechanism.
I want to see the messy test footage of ice cream going everywhere on the beta version.
Who engineers these things? How are they built? How much do they cost?
I might have to go on a YouTube hunt.
Having worked in a factory, a lot of machines are *extremely* specific. Like, there is no generic Pencil Making Machine company or Shingle Stamper you can order.
Sometimes it’s a hybrid: Electric guitar manufacturing might use CNC routing to do major first-step carving/shaping of bodies and necks from blanks, but then there’s a lot of hand operations with traditional woodworking tools: bandsaws, table saws, planers, rasps / chisels, drill presses, belt sanders, table routers, glue and clamps for laminates, etc.
Some things look custom but in fact are made by many different companies, like industrial rug drying centrifuges for the carpet cleaning business.
In the case of things for fine manufacturing and food, almost everything is made custom.
Often, the company themselves will have a full machine shop where they keep big billets of stainless steel and aluminum, TIG welding setups, and industrial lathes and punches to make replacement parts from scratch.
And there is lore about the machines and how they work and the factory employees need to be trained on them by people who in turn were trained by someone else, sometimes going back over a hundred years for factories that have been continuously running since the 1800s.
