The Algorithm threw this video at me and I had to watch it. Now you shall watch it too.
It’s not clear where the video was made…Pakistan? I liked the look of the truck to start, but then they haul the tire to a shop where they completely rebuild the wheel. I don’t think we could do any of that where I live. There’s a whole massive body of infrastructure in those communities to keep machinery running.
I don’t think “tariffs” will bring that back to the US.
Probably Pakistan or its near neighbors. I’ve seen a bunch of similar videos, and it is indeed impressive what they can do with machinery that seems old and worn. The shop here has a bit more sophisticated machinery than some of those shown, and I suspect there are not many places that do the same thing they do. A lot of those small shops seem to be specialists in some field of manufacture or repair. I saw one in which they were amazingly rebuilding engine blocks with huge chunks out of them. Another where they were making wheelbarrows, others making components for small engines and the like. Others involve often complex jobs like machining crankshafts and specialized industrial parts out of huge hunks of scrap, probably from ship breakers.
I’ve also seen a bunch of videos in which the most miserable and beat up old tires are repaired and rebuilt. It’s fun to see how skill and necessity combine to reconstitute tires that here would end up either in shreds, piles, or holding the tarps town on silage pits.
Whoever is doing these videos seems generally to be doing a very good job of editing, combining cuts with speedups to keep what is undoubtedly a much longer and more boring process into something addictively watchable.
About abilities of other countries, here is a character from the TV series Newsroom. (This guy is basically channeling PZ):
“Can you say why America is the Greatest Country in the World?”
.https://youtube.com/shorts/O_a7DV36hcw
Make America Great Again.
Like is was when it was pre-industrial.
Better learn how to subsistence farm again…
For a long time I’ve had the philosophy of “only own stuff that you can repair”, but American consumer culture has made that increasingly difficult, and in many cases, near impossible.
Maybe I need to get a 3D printer.
It’s all very basic metal machining workshop stuff, maybe you don’t have one in Morris but it’s not like some lost art or something
No way could this be done today in the US. A shop with the right materials and tools to perform this kind of work would need to charge multiples of the cost of a complete, new wheel. And I doubt you could find a shop willing to go retrieve the wheel, repair it, and then return it. Of course, it helps that these guys are probably being paid almost nothing.
For a while, Faceborg was often showing me videos like that — absolutely fascinating to watch, and sometimes I learned useful things. Then for some reason it changed to low-value crap. Anyways, I went cold turkey back in December, because it’s way too tempting to waste time on it when I could be doing something with more long-term personal payoff (see also: previous post). And I’m now going to get off this little bit of social media (which it is, even if the curation is better) and get on with my day….
It also struck me that here is a shop that repairs the interior of wheels that have cracked the plate where the holes for the lug nuts are located. Apparently, this must be a common problem in the local vicinity of the shop such that it supports the business. It wouldn’t surprise me that it’s due to the massive overloading of these trucks you can see in other videos, thus putting tremendous weight on the wheels.
There was an advertisement for an Asian owned repair business in the UK ” You’re sick and tired of the cowboys so give the Indians a try”.
The quality of these magic repairs is often appalling. Contamination in welds, wrong weld material and welding castings that really cannot be welded and survive
Cool video, but nothing that couldn’t be done here.
I’m an engineer who’s worked in R&D. And yeah, just about all the lathe work, drilling, tapping, and welding could be handled at most of the machine shops we’ve worked with. Off the top of my head, I can think of 3-4 quality machines (and a few more garage type shops) just in our own town of 100,000 people, even more with shops we’ve contracted with a bit further away. The biggest issue is those big hydraulic presses and the associated tooling for the press form step, but that’s still nothing super extravagant. After that would come the welding (welding done right is a difficult skill – a lot more than just a shade tree mechanic with an arc welder in the garage). But I know more than one welder in town I trust. Other than that, it’s just a lot of jigs to help things go faster.
OTOH, I’m sure the labor cost in the US would be a lot higher. If it was a one-off instead of the assembly line they’ve got going on there, it’d be at least a couple thousand dollars.