SmarterEveryDay
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2025–2026
48:53 · 4.6M views · Jun 8, 2025
Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day tries to manufacture a grill scrubber entirely in the United States. Along the way he runs into missing supply chains, tooling and institutional manufacturing knowledge.
HN cites it constantly in US manufacturing debates as a vivid demonstration of how much domestic industrial capability has been lost.
20 comments from Hacker News
Here's a great video by Smarter Every Day that came out a few months ago: this video . It's about his experience with the atrophying US industrial skillset while he tries to make a grill scrubber entirely in the United States. He brings up a few good points about manufacturing that I personally found compelling: 1. During Covid, medical supplies were in short supply, to the point where the US government was flying in individual airplanes from China full of N95 masks and face shields. The guy making the video knew that Alabama (where he lives) wouldn't be on the priority list for where the masks and face shields would get distributed. His community's initial response was to 3D print face shields and donate them to healthcare facilities, but they knew that they had to step up to actual manufacturing to produce the face shields in necessary volumes. He was only able to find a single aging technician in Alabama capable of producing injection molding tooling, which he then was able to use to mass produce enough face shields to supply Alabama and neighboring states. If that one guy had chosen to retire before Covid, they would have not been able to make the injection mold locally. At a time where global supply chains were massively disrupted, they would have been screwed. 2. When an American company gets their products made overseas, the factory overseas that manufactures the product owns the tooling. This means that they're able to fill your order during the day, then at night make e
That guy from smarter every day had a great youtube video about why that's basically impossible in the US right now: this video I'm not a fan of big coorps either, but these changes happened gradually over time, starting way back in probably the 50/60s. The blame is with the companies and the US government back then for allowing this critical knowledge to be lost. But Roomba didn't exist back then, and the problem is bigger than a single company. The only real solution is for the US government to invest heavily in regaining this capability for the coming 25 years. But doge and trump axed any chance of this happening so though luck i guess.
Agreed. Maybe you’ve seen this, but Destin Sandlin’s recent video on this topic does a good job of demonstrating the institutional knowledge gap [0]. He also was a guest on the Search Engine podcast to discuss the same topic earlier this year [1]. I enjoyed this more than the video. I think there’s some nuance and slight nationalism to take with a grain of salt, but the point is extremely well demonstrated. [0] this video [1] [LINK]
> We make plenty of stuff at scale Maybe this video of a rather famous YouTuber trying to manufacture something as simple as a grill scrubber with a US supply chain would help you understand how bad it is? this video
SmarterEveryday is trying this right now too. He details all the challenges, and it's a pretty good watch. The grill brush they made is a bit on the expensive side, but I bought one. this video