Why It’s “Impossible” To Manufacture In America

…all this and yet I know a small company that sent ten working examples of finished components to several Chinese companies. A few responded. Zero were able to precisley duplicate the working, simple component which was made of metal. MADE IN CHINA HAS ALWAYS BEEN A SABOTAGE TRAP TRICK WASTE OF TIME. Nixon and ilk designed it that way.

I’m a product design engineer (15 YOE) at Apple. Everything in this video is spot on. Now imagine something like a smartphone, or a laptop, that has many thousands of discrete, engineered components, with vendor lists stretching into the thousands of vendors (and nothing is single-sourced if it can be avoided), insanely more complex supply chains, more stringent timeline requirements, etc

Mate, the US, Australia (where I’m from) and many other countries destroyed their home manufacturing industries many years ago when the global trade thing went ballistic. Greedy manufacturers learned that they could outsource to countries with slave-like labour costs, and still sell their products for the same price as before. We killed our industries through greed. Pure and simple.

And I bet that engraving laser machine wasn’t made in America and that’s another rabbit hole ….

One of the most massive advantages shenzhen china has is that everything you need to make a product prototype exists in a 30 min radius. There are malls of just stores with industrial parts. you go there and find a dozen options. Then you head back next door and there are thousands of places with high speed 3D printing. Next to that is custom circuit fabrication. Over in the offices at the end of the block are all the molding designers, graphics designers, CAD operators, etc. People walk in with work and in what usually takes us 3-5 business days in the United States is done in 30-50 minutes in Shenzhen. And then once you are ready to move into production, well you walk into a mall full of hardware manufacturing representatives, go by 5-10 booths, walk out in 2 hours with a stack full of quotes of options and suppliers ready to do production on the drop of a dime.

As someone that works in the firearms industry, which is very heavily regulated via ITAR – this perspective is kind of crazy to me. Every part that goes into our firearms is made and manufactured within the U.S., and all of our material is domestically milled steel/stainless/aluminum. Even the vast majority of the machine tools we use are manufactured in the U.S., although we do use some German and Swiss tooling. Surely some of the parts going into our machine tools are foreign manufactured, but a large percentage of the parts are domestically manufactured – some even as close as down the street. All of our post-processing (anodizing, heat treatment, oxide coatings, etc) are done domestically. All of our fixturing is made domestically. Within the first two minutes, two different stories about the inability to get molds made in America are brought up. The first one is likely that the injection molding company simply does not have the machinery to make molds (which is to be expected for many large injection molding companies, as production and development are two separate worlds), and they likely only outsource foreign work because that gives them the greatest margins. In the case of the compression molding, likely a similar story – either the companies contacted do not have large enough machines to fit the stock material to run the parts, or they simply don’t want to do it for one reason or another. The compression molding needed specifically appears incredibly simple and would be a late afternoon job in any meagerly equipped job shop with a CNC Mill and decent tooling. It may prove easier to find someone in China that will do what you want, and it may be cheaper, but there are certainly manufacturers within the US that are capable, if you’re talking to the right people. By no means is it impossible – and the 25 million firearms sold per year are a testament to that.