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.
Yeah, I get pushed these things in my feed. I admit they can be fun to watch, but as has been said, it’s pretty basic machine shop work. But I can’t believe nobody has mentioned the appalling lack of safety practices in these vids. From the guy squatting under the truck frame to jack it, to the guy starting the weld on re-connecting the new front plate to the wheel body wearing only impact-resistant clear glasses, nobody with closed footwear, etc. etc. etc. Spot them all with your shop safety officer! It’s really appalling. I get that this is how things work in some parts of the world, and the workers seem competent and have a set of skills. But where is the video that goes along with it with the workers who have lost fingers and toes, gone blind from welding without eye protection, and worse? I think one of the ones that turned me off from this genre was watching people re-smelt scrap metal in a small workshop, and all the minor children involved in stoking the furnace and loading in metal.
Blueprints? We don’t need no stinkin’ blueprints… OTOH I call fake on the frame plot. I think they started with good shots of the machine shop(s) where they make truck wheels, that’s all good. But at the end, the “repaired” wheel is not the shiny clean metal that we see being shaped and welded. It’s still rusty red and yellow. So I think that framing was staged for dramatic effect.
Many of those Pakistan metal machining videos are faked. The end product is often not the repaired part, and in some cases where it actually is the repaired part, its service life will be measured in hours or even minutes, not days, weeks, or years. Nonconcentric parts “welded” using tack welds, with poor welding penetration, leading to very weak welds. Rebuilding a hardened and ground spiral bevel differential gear with a broken off tooth, which gets rebuilt entirely out of weld. Which never undergoes hardening and precision grinding because the welding rod is the wrong type of steel, and of course they don’t have the required precision gear grinder. And then using hand held angle grinder to reshape that crappy weld into a spiral tooth like shape. The original teeth were hardened and precision ground for a good mesh and a long service life, while the rebuilt gear many not even be capable of one full rotation without binding. And if continuous rotation is actually possible, the soft metal, lousy built-up tack welding, lack of hardening, and no precision meshing also means that it’s service life is very likely to be just out of camera view range.
While these are obviously very poor people, the videos are clickbait for the naive and they often have glowing titles like “Master Machinist Does Precision Work”, etc. The reality is just the opposite, a neighborhood novice cobbles junk together, over and over, etc. They are obviously doing what they have to just to survive. Barefoot around hot metal castings and welding, zero regard for safety equipment, etc. Pounding on metal to shape it at room temperature without ever annealing it regularly leads to brittleness and early failure, depending on the alloy (precisely why blacksmiths heat the steel before pounding on it). There are times that you can even see a lot of lathe runout on parts being joined that should be concentric to within a mil (0.001″) or better. I have yet to see anyone using a dial indicator to get a part accurately centered in a lathe chuck. And hand punching holes in a rotating part like a steel wheel for a truck means vibration at human running speeds or faster ,since the holes are unlikely to be exactly equally spaced. Ever forget to balance your centrifuge before running it?
For a point of comparison that you can likely relate to, many videos of perpetual motion machines on eBay come from India and Pakistan. There are hundreds of free energy machines there, some pitching for investors or “buy our plans”. Read the comments to see either shills or profoundly scientifically illiterates, thanking the presenters for solving the world’s energy crisis or asking where they can buy such a wonderful machine. Motors running generators which in turn power the motors are very common. Sometimes with embellishments like bed springs, etc. Or how about generating electricity by winding wire around a toroidal permanent magnet (most often from a microwave magnetron), and magically getting electricity with no motion between the windings and the magnet. Some perpetual motion machines are built with hot glue, wire, wood, and spark plugs, etc.
And to be even closer to your corner: How impressed would you be with someone using a department store microscope with the objective missing, claiming to show individual bacteria or even a virus? Many of the YouTube videos are faked, or are even outright scams. Like much of the gun restoration work, where the gun being restored starts out being essentially new, and they paint it to make it look rusty and dirty, remove parts, etc. to create “before” pictures, and then show their restoration “progress” in reverse order.
If you complain sufficiently to YouTube about the obvious frauds, you will simply get permanently banned. They do not care, since the advertisers pay the bills and they want viewers for their fake archeology, pseudo-science in general, and every other fraud being peddled there. The masses are often unaware of how bad the situation is, because of their terminally poor science literacy.. If you upload a video to YouTube they become the owner and you lose all rights to it.
In contrast to the continual enshitification, there are legitimate machining, restoration, archeology, etc. videos, you just have to be discriminant, which will be difficult for those non-versed in the relevant topics. When viewing YouTube videos, view many as “Reality TV” because they are at that level or even worse. Here is a link to one legitimate large part machining video (I have no relationship with him, his wife, or his dog). The latter is likely the most spoiled dog on Earth, some viewers even send him doggie toys and treats.
For some reason login issues tonight. Anyway, I agree that many of those videos are questionable, and the quality of the work is often questionable as well. We don’t do that kind of thing in the US generally, but not just because we couldn’t but because we shouldn’t. Lack of safety in both workplace and results is obvious. It’s still fun to watch some of this stuff, and I imagine at least some of it is legit. I did see one instance where what looked like a pretty demanding bronze worm gear was reproduced using basically aluminum scrap, and though it might have been actually done, I doubt it worked very well. That said, though, some of those videos are fun to watch, and there’s a good bit of ingenuity involved in some of that work.
I like the Australian outfit. I think that’s the same one that also does machining for mining and drilling equipment, using enormous lathes. Quite fun too, and clearly more high tech.
@3. Robbo : “Make America Great Again. Like it was when it was pre-industrial. Better learn how to subsistence farm again…”
Except with Global Overheating and ever more frequent & severe Climate related disasters – extreme drought, storm, floods, heatwaves, fires that’s gunna be VERY much harder than it ever used to be – quite possibly impossible.
Also not just the direct climate impact but all thsoe refugees and the likely wars and carnage that willresult as entire nations become uninhabitable and their people then flee and their govts then fight, well, ..
@ ^ See among other things British Climatologist Simon Clark’s YT Short linked here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-4/#comment-2291738