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    11 videos · 5 hr 56 min
    Playlists

    How things are made

    Curated by HackerTube · 11 videos · 5 hr 56 min

    HN loves watching things being made, and these are the videos it recommends most often. The list starts with everyday objects, moves to the craft and machines behind precision and heavy metalwork, then tours car and circuit board factories, then the light source inside a chipmaking machine, and finishes inside two rocket factories. Each one leaves you a bit more amazed by ordinary manufactured things.

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    1. 1
      11:39

      The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can

      engineerguy · 19M views · 11 years ago

      A welcoming eleven-minute start: Bill Hammack explains every detail of the humble soda can, and HN links it whenever cans or good design come up.

    2. 2
      11:22

      Thomas Thwaites: How I built a toaster -- from scratch

      TED · 282K views · 15 years ago

      A designer tries to make a toaster from mined ore and homemade plastic, a short lesson in how much industry a cheap object depends on.

    3. 3
      37:50

      The Art of Making a Nixie Tube

      Dalibor Farný · 6.3M views · 10 years ago

      A quiet, mesmerizing record of one craftsman hand-making a nixie tube from glassblowing to vacuum, the kind of detail commenters say you almost never get to see.

    4. 4
      30:33

      Origins of Precision

      Machine Thinking · 3M views · 8 years ago

      Where precision itself comes from: how flat surfaces, lathes and measuring tools were built up from nothing, which HN calls a half hour well spent.

    5. 5
      12:48

      America's Iron Giants - The World's Most Powerful Metalworkers

      Machine Thinking · 2.9M views · 8 years ago

      From the same channel, the Cold War presses that forge aircraft and turbine parts, often cited in HN threads about gigacasting and huge machines.

    6. 6
      59:12

      The Mind-Blowing Machines that Stamp Millions of Metal Parts - Smarter Every Day 288

      SmarterEveryDay · 2.9M views · 3 years ago

      Destin Sandlin tours a progressive stamping plant and the tooling behind it, part of his series on what US manufacturing has lost.

    7. 7
      40:33

      BMW i3 Factory Production Tour

      europeanautosource · 6.6M views · 12 years ago

      A full tour of a car being built almost entirely by robots, with a carbon-fiber body that one commenter said looked like technology from the future.

    8. 8
      26:49

      Inside a Huge PCB Factory

      Strange Parts · 3.7M views · 8 years ago

      Strange Parts walks through every step at JLCPCB, the factory behind many hobbyists' cheap circuit boards, and HN calls it the best look inside a modern PCB fab.

    9. 9
      17:20

      The Extreme Engineering of ASML’s EUV Light Source

      Asianometry · 698K views · 4 years ago

      Then the hardest part of all: lasers firing twice at falling tin droplets to make the light for modern chips, explained in seventeen astonishing minutes.

    10. 10
      54:16

      HOW ROCKETS ARE MADE (Rocket Factory Tour - United Launch Alliance) - Smarter Every Day 231

      SmarterEveryDay · 13M views · 6 years ago

      ULA's CEO walks Destin through friction stir welding and huge milled rocket skins, a rare look inside a working rocket plant.

    11. 11
      53:17

      Starbase Tour with Elon Musk [PART 1 // Summer 2021]

      Everyday Astronaut · 7.1M views · 5 years ago

      To finish, a walk around SpaceX's Starship factory, which HN quotes mainly for the engineering process Musk lays out, such as deleting requirements that should not exist.