I Tried To Make Something In America (The Smarter Scrubber Experiment) - Smarter Every Day 308

Is it possible to make something in America and be competitive in the marketplace? This video documents an experiment that lasted over four years. The goal was simple, to manufacture a product here in America. The challenge is that almost every single market force pushes manufacturing to make things overseas. What happens if you ignore those pressures and you just make something here anyways? This channel is supported by the patrons of Smarter Every Day. Their financial contributions are what allowed to do this experiment, and I think it's very important. The global economic forces that have shaped the world since World War II are changing, and I believe people in your community who understand how to manufacture things are going to be even more critical in the coming years. My home is here in America, but this video's lessons doesn't just apply to America. It's wherever you live. If you can manufacture things locally, then that ensures your self-reliance, your stability, and ultimately, your freedom. Let's explore this topic and go get Smarter Every Day. I started this process with the goal of making everything you see here in America. All of these components go together to make one thing, and that thing is a grill scrubber. This is called the Smarter Scrubber, and we'll talk more about that later. But for now, I want to tell you how we're going to lay this video out. There's three parts to this video. The first part is why I wanted to do it. Why did I want to perform this experiment? Secondly, how it happened. Every component there has a story. I want to tell you the story of each of those components. And finally, I want to pitch you on buying that product. I want you to buy it, not because you're watching some YouTube video, but is it actually competitive in the market? Is this a thing that can exist on its own in the marketplace? I'm going to give you that pitch and we'll see. Part one, why? Both my mom and my dad were union auto workers. United Auto Workers, 2195, here locally in North Alabama. They made steering components for vehicles. My mom worked on the assembly line. My dad was in tool and gage. When they would come home, they would smell like cutting fluid, and that smelled like work to me. It smelled like productivity. They made things. And everybody that I knew, their parents made things. Middle class America. The American dream was alive and well. And then things changed. With NAFTA and CAFTA, it wasn't one political party. It was everybody. Globally, things were changing so that it made more sense economically to move manufacturing facilities out of the United States. And that's exactly what happened. This is more than Destin is upset because NAFTA took mommy and daddy's job. I don't even know that NAFTA did take mommy and daddy's job. I think things were changing before that. So the global economy is so complicated. I could make a whole channel on it, but what I want to do is just take 60 seconds to demonstrate that I understand this is a complex topic, and I just want to throw some ideas out there and let you think about it, and then we're going to move on with this video. But it's just a really interesting thing to think about. Okay, so a long time ago, things were better, right? That's called golden age thinking. Every civilization has done that. The idea that if we could just to return to the way the things were, things would be better. That's a powerful, nostalgic thing, but it's not really accurate. Because if you think about it, we went from this type of shipping to in 150 years. And that is analogous to the complexities of global trade, because wars were fought when we were using wooden boats. Imagine how complex the economics are when you go to boats like this with containerized shipping. In World War II, the Bretton Woods Accords in New Hampshire, America decided they were going to guarantee the shipping lanes would be open so global trade and global prosperity could happen. We started doing that. Everybody started doing good things. And then people started exploiting cheap labor in developing nations, and then profit became king. And so now we have billionaires, and we have a wage gap, and it's very complicated. And so people are pushing factories overseas, and it's good for local communities overseas, but sometimes it's not. Okay, so that was impossible. I didn't even mention unions, collective bargaining agreements, all that stuff. It's a very complicated issue. And I'm not like, America is dominant and must be. No, that's not what I care about. I care about people. I love people. And I think these issues are more than something that can be distilled down to a one-line that you can use to dunk on people who differ with your views politically. This is complicated. And we, as people have to solve it because we're not agrarian anymore. We have industrialization that can make food, so we must produce things as people, not just in America, everywhere. I just don't want people to be exploited in the process. My answer to all of this is Jesus, the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But we have to figure this out. Let's move on with the video. I remember this period of time not understanding how important these global

shifts, literally, were changing the town around me. I become an engineer. I learned how to draft and draw parts that hopefully would be manufactured sometime in America. But then when I got out of school, there were not many plants to go work at. Fast forward a lot of stuff, and then you'll get to the 2020 global pandemic. The 2020 pandemic made a lot of people mad for a lot of reasons. It made me mad. I don't get mad very often, but it did make me mad because of manufacturing capacity in America. So when everything went down, Everybody wanted N95 masks and face shields, and they couldn't get it. When the President starts talking about airplane shipments from China, because that's the only place we can get these N95 masks, I realized this is a big deal. We can't make the things we need. And I'm not talking about the mask debate. Imagine, if we're talking about individual airplanes coming from China, do you think Alabama is on the priority list of where those things get distributed? No, we weren't. And so as a local community, we decided we're going to 3D print masks for our medical workers the N95 masks, the face shields, and stuff like that. A guy in California had developed this system to do this safely, so we did. We came together. It was a really good community moment. We 3D printed these things, but we realized very quickly this is slow and very difficult. We need to be able to manufacture things. And so I started trying to find where I could manufacture these things. And this revealed to me how anemic our manufacturing capacity in America has become, because I was waiting on some billionaire to come save us, and it didn't happen. You know what happened? I went and found a guy here locally in Alabama. His name is Chris Robeson. He knew how to make an injection mold, and he did. We worked together and we created an injection mold here in Alabama. This is the model number Huntsville 02 made in Alabama face shield. This is what was distributed here in Alabama to our medical workers. You put a little piece of plastic over there, and we used this in hospitals all over the state and even in adjacent states. So this whole pandemic made me realize that our manufacturing capacity in America has been gutted. If Chris had decided to retire before I needed that mold made, we would not have been able to make an injection mold in my area. And this made me mad. I realized the knowledge chain almost broke, so I made this tweet asking about how I would find local manufacturers in order to make things in America. That's what I realized had to happen, and so I started on the journey. All right, I'm going to pause here and introduce you to the last, probably most important person of the story that you need to know before we get going, John Youngblood. John owns a small business named JJ George that sells grill products. There's a ton of problems with grill brushes on the market. We'll get into those later. But John had a very clever idea to solve these problems with chain mail. Now, I got excited about his idea, and I wanted to get involved as an engineer and just help him in general, so we decided to work together. I tagged along as John presented his idea at a roundtable discussion of local business owners. The problem is that every product out there that's a grill scraper is mediocre at best. I know I'm buying a disposable product, maybe one a season. John got to start by making wooden grill tables right here in the USA, but he's also worked with people overseas to make other grill accessories. John was experiencing pain because of that. I don't know if you realize this, but as a small business, if you have an idea and you get it made overseas, that's cool, but they have all the tooling to make the thing that you wanted made. So at night, they can literally just crank up the machine, make more of them less high-quality products, and they can just counter-sell against you on Amazon, and you have no recourse. There's nothing you could do. This is one of John's best-selling products on Amazon, at least it used to be, because look at all of these knock-offs. They're everywhere. The interesting thing about this is John has a patent, and he's tried to get these other things taken down off of Amazon, but he's found it almost impossible to get Amazon to respond in a timely manner. It's like playing Whac-a-Mole. Look at all these letters he had to get lawers to write. That's a lot of money. The interesting thing is, Amazon almost tells these manufacturers overseas what to knock off. If you go to the product page, you can see how many were sold in the last month, and all they have to do is say, Oh, look, that one sells 3,000 units a month. That's clearly what I want to pirate. So these product pirates go and they'll take a really good product like his grill torch, and they'll just knock it off. And parts of it are exactly the same. Other a little different because they want to make it cheaper. Like, for example, on John's unit, there is a removable screw that allows you to take the tube off in the event that a dirt dover gets in there or something. Not on the other unit, there's nothing like that. It's glued in position. You just have to throw it away. It's weird because they're selling this for half the price, but at the same time, they're taking all the business and they're making lower-quality products. Not only does this mean counterfeit goods for buyers, look at what sellers are saying in Amazon's own seller forum. Amazon's inability to police this, or at worst, unwillingness to prioritize it, that's destroying small businesses and manufacturers in America who depend on the very idea of intellectual property to protect them from fraud.

So this is one of the main reasons why John wanted to work with me. I him because I wanted to make something, and he knows the business side, but he wanted to work with me so we could use the YouTube channel to tell people about the product and not have to sell it on Amazon. So again, Amazon, do on to others as you would have them do on to you. Let's get to part two of the video. How did we build this thing? To understand why we have all these parts, let's think about the problem we're trying to solve. We have grill grates, and we're trying to scrub it with chain mail, right? So in order to do that, we need the chain mail to be compliant around those bars. So we want to apply downward pressure. To do that, we need something squishy behind the chain mail that when we push it down, it wraps those chain mail links around those grates. So I figured out that in order to attach the chain mail and the rubber part to a handle, we were going to have a problem because the Squishy part would break. So what we need is some type of adapter that could go between the Squishy and the handle, and then that way you could move the whole thing and it would all work as one. So that's how we did all this. And I learned from the pandemic that the key to making things fast is injection molding. I covered injection molding in the MVP Disk Golf disk video. You have two parts of a metal mold, and you clamp them together so that they have a cavity in the center, the shape of the part you want. You then inject molten plastic into that void and let it solidify, and then you open the mold and you kick out the part. That's injection molding. So I started the design process. And for an engineer, you just start in CAD and you start drawing stuff. I started making things and started figuring out how to get a rubbery backing, and I ended up with a really nice history of all the designs right here. It's kinda fun to look at. I knew that I had to design it so that it could be molded and made and then ultimately assembled. I'm a little embarrassed showing you all this stuff. In some of the earlier designs, I had these little posts because I had to hold the chain mail around the rubber. My thought was to hold the chain mail with these posts, but the posts started breaking off. So I was making more problems than I was solving in the early days. But pretty quickly, I figured out that I was going to need multiple components. I needed something on bottom that I would adapt a squishy to. I also needed a top cover, and I needed to be able to assemble those. Now, mechanical engineers know from reading books by Toyota folks that it's better to click things together, then bolt them together. If you can. It makes the manufacturing process fast. So this is the early days of how I started trying to figure that out. I said, well, maybe if I had these two parts and I have a slot and I could put them together like this and I could push them and they just click together, then that would be my assembly process. And so these posts ultimately were foolish. And so I ended up with something that looked like this. So I had a rubber component that I molded with a 3D printed mold that I made. I really enjoyed that process, but ultimately it's too complicated for making the squishy component of this. I did finalize the rigid components. I had the cover, I had the adapter, and they clicked together. After I finished the design, I decided I wanted to be able to take this scrubber head off and hold it with my hand. I measured my fingers and I put these little grooves on there so I could hold it and really get in and scrub really hard. At this point, I got serious about the squishy part. I knew that over molding took too long, so I moved away from that geometry so things could pour through there, and I went to a pad design. So if this was my adapter, I said, what if I had a little pad that goes underneath that was just compliant, and the chain mail itself would keep it in place. So I started designing these little rigid pads, and then my 3D printer, which is a Formlabs Form 3, I had different materials. One was called Elastic. So I started printing Squishy geometries in an attempt to try to figure out what would work best on the grill. So I even tried some linear designs. I tried some hex patterns, and I ended up with something roughly like this. I had all the components, and John took it all to the hardware store and put it together with a wire, and this was our very first prototype. And at this point, we could only get chain mail out of China, so John started testing the different types, and he came up with some very interesting information. When you go against the grain, It'll catch. It puts a lot of tension on the individual rings, and they're coming apart, and we're losing some. But that's a good thing. This is a good thing because we haven't ordered thousands of these pieces of chain mail yet, and we can get a welded version. It's going to cost us a little more money, but we can get a welded version that is going to be stronger, and it's going to make our product better. The supply chain for chain is a big deal to me right now.

So John's test revealed that we could not use the most common thing that's on the market, which is this type of chain mail with a radial pattern with a central ring in the middle. We found that doesn't adapt well to the grate. So we want this rectangular pattern, and John did a lot of testing, and he arrived at not a square like this, but if we got an octagonal pattern of the rectangular grid, this will do what we need. It's really fun to play with, by the way. So this is what we need, and we could only find it in China. That goes against the thesis statement for what we're trying to do. So we worked and worked, and we eventually found a supplier in the US that can make it. However, they can't make the quantities that we need for a price that makes sense. So what we did is we created a contract where we could buy all that we could afford at the rate they have. And we're getting about 2,000 units a month of this stuff right here. And it's incredibly expensive. It is so expensive. That is by far the most expensive part of the whole thing. But we realized these quantities that we're able to get aren't enough. And so we have supplemented that with an Indian supplier. We said, hey, we don't want to do this in China, but we contacted our Indian supplier. We said, we need a stash of chain mail that is the quantities we need in the event that we sell any kind of numbers of the scrubbers. So we ended up buying some Indian chain mail that would augment the quantities that we could get from the American supplier because that's all they could produce. And that's where we're at. So, yeah, that's where we're at on chain mail. One inch long stainless steel, 1/4-20 bolt. This was so difficult. I know it sounds like an industrial commodity, seems like a simple thing. But if you want to buy this made in the USA, and you stipulate that, that changes everything. Foreign bolt like this, nine cents a piece. In the US, average, 38 cents a piece. Here's a quote right here. If I buy 10,000 of these, 42 cents a piece, that's pretty standard. Most machine shops I talk to directly, they said, Yeah, we can't even get the material for the price of the finished bolts that you're getting from a foreign supplier. Finding people to get quotes for you, very difficult. I emailed a lot of people. I sent out this tweet. It helped, and it's a very fascinating thing. Eventually, after literally months of emailing people back and forth, John picked a supplier that got him for 35. 5 cents a piece, which we then verified were made in Massachusetts. So instead of a dime to get our bolts from a foreign supplier, we're doing roughly this because we think it's important to have manufacturing capacity for stainless steel bolts in Massachusetts, which is weird because my uncle used to work down the road at a bolt factory that closed. But now I'm going to Massachusetts to get this bolt, which is interesting, right? Very interesting. After we bought our bolts, quote came in for 19 cents a piece. Other salesmen told me, There's no way that's American. I couldn't verify. It got sketchy. I don't know. I have no idea what to do with that. I thought it would be simpler. They're on the shelf, they're made in the USA. Buy them, they're this price. Very difficult. The next part of this story is very interesting. I had my parts and it was time to injection mold, and I went to a facility that does injection molding, and I said, Can you make these parts? And they said, Yes, we can make the parts. And I said, That's great. I would also like to make the molds here because I want to learn more about molds. And they said, Oh, no, we don't make molds here. And I said, Why not? They said, We don't do that. We ship the part, the CAD file to China, and they make the mold, and they send it back, and then we injection mold. I said, no, that's not what I want to do. I don't want intellectual property in China, I want to make it here. And they said, Good luck. And this is the moment where this whole experiment came into focus for me. I realized at that moment we're screwed. I think we're screwed as a nation if we can't do the intelligent work of tool and die, making the tools that make the things. It used to be that America did the smart thing, and then we would send the machine that we made to another country, and the country would operate the machine in the developing world. We have flipped it. We are now to the point where the smart stuff is done somewhere else, and they send us the machines, and we push the buttons to operate the machines. I need you to understand this because I realize we have lost something very, very important, and we did it by lulling ourselves to sleep, by pushing money around and doing the intellectual property work, but not doing the manufacturing work. I think it was best put simply by the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, while sitting in China when he was asked a question about tooling. There's a confusion about China. Let me at least give you my opinion. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost

country many years ago. That is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill and the type of skill it is. The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have in tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. The tooling skill is very deep here. In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields. So Tim Cook said that in 2017 at the Fortune Global Forum. Now, there's two ways of looking at this. One way is, well, Tim Cook is, of course, going to say that. He's incentivized because his business is tied up in China. He's not going to cross the Communist Party because he needs his stuff to be made there. The other way to look at it is, well, maybe that's right. Maybe the tooling and advancement is somewhere way beyond what Americans can do. So here's what I want to do. I know a man that is specifically unique in the world that can answer this question. He's a friend of mine named Jeremy Fielding. He has a YouTube channel. He's an engineer. He speaks Chinese. He spent a significant amount of time exploring these topics in China, and he's right there beside you. Let's just ask him. All right, Jeremy. What do you think about what Tim Cook said about labor and about the tooling industry in China? [J] Well, it'd be hard for me to comment on tooling specifically, but I do think that we do have a common misconception, including myself before I went, that in China, that their product is inferior. I mean, the quality of manufacturing is surprisingly good. When I started comparing that mentally to all the places I've visited, because I've been to many shops here and over there, if it wasn't for the fact that they were speaking a different language, I would feel like I was in the same place. I was really impressed. I think I would say it's at least equivalent to what we can make here. In some cases, things that used to be available in America aren't available anymore. It's like you have to go to China to get it because we just don't do it here some more. [D] Oh, that's scary. Okay, this is a tangent we could talk about for hours just on this topic. I just want to encourage you to go watch Jeremy's channel because it's awesome. You do engineering videos, and there's also content there about your time in China, right? [J] Yeah, absolutely. [D] How do I say thank you in Chinese? you? [J] Xiè xie [D] Xiè xie So that gives you a peek into the world of Chinese manufacturing, but on the American side, it's very different. We talked about this when I was a guest on a podcast called Search Engine. Shruthi and PJ invited me on to talk about what it was like to try to find a mold maker to make this thing. This was a light bulb moment for me in the conversation. The problem is not just that we've forgotten a lot about how to make things in America, it's that we're also forgetting how to make the things that make the things. We go deep into the topic of the tool and die trades in America. It's fascinating. Check that out. I called Chris Robeson, the guy that made the mold during the pandemic, and I asked for help. And not only did he agree to help me, he decided to mentor me. The first thing I did is send him my CAD files of the drawings, and he told me everything that was wrong about them. I had to redesign things because there were things I didn't understand about injection molding. For example, you don't want some areas to be too thick, you want draft angles, all these things. Chris walked me through the process and taught me the proper way to design an object for injection molding. There were three parts to my prototype, so Chris designed three molds, and we wanted to try a new technique. So this isn't a thing that you can do for thousands of parts, but for a few dozen parts, you can 3D print the mold cavities with Formlabs' Rigid 10K solution. So that's what we did. And these are those parts right here. These are 3D printed inserts that we could run in Chris's injection molding machines to verify that the geometry is correct. It actually worked. We got a few dozen working parts, and this let us see how the plastic would flow in the mold, and we made mold design changes. So it's Chris's vast knowledge of tool making and injection molding that allowed us to create molds that would work. It's now time to make the production tool out of metal. You can send this off and get it done in a machine shop. They're not going to have the knowledge of the tool and die making, but they can just make a metal part if you send them a CAD file. I wanted to learn how to CNC machine. I've always do that. So me and the younger engineer named Trent, we started learning how to machine. I was able to pick up two used CNC machines. Thank you again, patrons. It started out pretty rough. Wow. But then we figured it out. This process was incredibly enjoyable. I thought it would be intimidating, but I called friends like Shane from Stuff Made Here and local machinists and Chris himself. They taught me what speeds and feeds I needed to use, and this process was awesome.

One night, I was machining in the garage, and my friend Daylan came over to hang out, and we started talking about the importance of making things in America and how it affects local communities. [Daylan] All the opportunities to have education and so on went away. What's happening? [D] I'm filming you. Talk about manufacturing in America. [Daylan] When those jobs went away in those communities, all those economic prospects and ultimately educational prospects and quality of life prospects went away. So manufacturing, coming back to America is really important to me because of what it's meant historically for communities in terms of opportunities for kids. So figuring out a way to do that is something I spend a lot of time thinking about. [D] We took all the metal parts to Chris and the guy that works with him named Jeremy, and they assemble the molds, and they explain that there's a couple of things that weren't quite right. They then took the time to fix it, and then they put them all together. And this is what was interesting to me. I realized that a machinist is not enough to be an injection mold designer and maker. They're two different things. You have one set of skills that feeds into the other, but ultimately that tool and dye creation is its own thing. But here we are. We have these beautiful molds, and we're ready to make parts. It felt so good to watch parts pop out of these injection molding machines, knowing how much work went into the molds, it was awesome. Out of the three injection molded parts, it was the Squishy part that I was most concerned about. Now, this is made out of a thermoplastic polyurethane called Santoprene, and it's only heat resistant up to a few hundred degrees Fahrenheit. John did a test. Yeah, it definitely got some melt in there. So obviously, we were going to have to change that material, and silicone is the best option. Now, the problem is we can't inject silicone with the same molds that we made. It's a whole different process. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anybody in my area. They just weren't here. So I had to reach out to a guy in Virginia called Commonwealth Manufacturing. Kevin hooked us up. He made a nine cavity mold so the silicone process could work. So by switching from the santoprene to the food-grade silicone, we bought ourselves another couple of hundred degrees Fahrenheit. However, it's not meant to be used on a fiery furnace, blazing hot grill. It's meant to be used on a cold to warm grill. The handle has its own story, and there was a ton that went into this. The first thing I did is I found a metal tool that I liked, and I just went over to an Anvil and I just beat a little flat edge on the end of the thing, and then I cut out the end on a band saw and drilled a hole in it, and we put that on the prototype and gave it to John's mom to test. This is great. Since it passed that test, it was time to design it for manufacturability. So I went back to CAD and realized if I was going to be bending up sheet metal, I might as well put a flat scraper on the front so that you could get into the corners and stuff like that. I put a little bitty curve on the edge of the scraper so that you could get around the grill grates, and that was our design. I made I'm making a video on Smarter Every Day about sheet metal stamping, and the reason is because I was doing research into how to manufacture this handle. Sheet metal stamping is a process that involves using tooling to cut and bend metal into the shape you want. When we made that video at TNC Stamping, I spoke to a tool and die expert named Roger, who taught me some critical concepts about tool and die. It was pretty clear to me that Roger had forgotten more about tool and die than most people will ever know. In the time between filming that video about metal stamping and filming this video, Roger passed on. He's no longer with us, and that's a big deal. Obviously, his family and friends and coworkers are going to miss him. Roger seemed like a great guy. Probably takes years just to learn the vocabulary of the trade, right? You hear that? It takes years to learn to speak like I speak. But there's another loss here for the community that's not as obvious, but it's very important. And that's all of the experience and tool and die wisdom that Roger has acquired over the years, he can no longer pass that along. We only have what he gave us while he was here. Furthermore, all the experience of the person that taught Roger, all that has stopped now. All we have is what he passed on before he left. So that makes what you were about to see very, very important. You're about to witness the birth of a tool and die worker in America. When I first visited TNC Stamping, Weston explained that they had a tool and die shop, and they invest heavily in their tool and die apprenticeship program, which is becoming increasingly rare among American manufacturers. They showed us the progressive stamping dies that they made, but John and I couldn't afford one of those, so Weston agreed to give us a price to make what's called station tooling. A tooling engineer named Joey worked with a young man named Logan. Logan used to be a press operator, but he's entered into the apprenticeship program for Tool & Die. The tool that made our handle is the first tool that Logan ever made. [D] Is this the first one you've made? [L] Yes, sir. [D] And how long did it take you? [L] About six weeks. [D] So are you been training him?

I've helped. [L] He's a lot of help. [D] So do you feel like you know how to do the next one now? [L] As long as I got prints to go by, I could build it, yes, sir. [D] Really? Did you ever think you would have this skill? [L] I never knew anything like this really existed. During high school, with everything, I didn't know what I was going to do. I started out up here as just a press operator, actually running these presses and got the opportunity to move over as an apprentice, and I've enjoyed it ever since. All the hands-on stuff, learning stuff every day. I've really enjoyed it ever since I've been over to it. [D] It is really fun to watch the tool Logan made an action. Flat blanks that have been cut out with a laser are loaded onto the tool, where as the press comes down, it gets bent into a specific shape along the way. It's called station tooling because the part is then moved from one station to the other, and progressively, the different bends and shapes are put into the part. I think the side action that bends the handle around into a tube is my favorite. After that, we put them in a box and we take them back to Chris's place, where he lasers a logo on the handle, which is really cool. This is currently the bottleneck in the process. It's a little slow. We're trying to automate this, but my favorite part, we get to put Made in the USA on the handle. How cool. All of these parts down here go together to make the scrubber head, and the scrubber head is put together with a piece of stainless steel wire, which we have confirmed is made in Pennsylvania. Now, the rope, however, is harder to confirm the manufacturer's location. We haven't been able to verify it's made in the USA, which brings us to the knob. This is an off-the-shelf item that we ordered, and when we ordered it, we were told it was made in America. We have a problem, right? That's right. We thought they were made in America, but when they got here, they're not. They're made in Costa Rica. So we've got to fix that. So that's what we get. So the first 20,000 lucky customers are going to have their scrubbers with Costa Rican knobs. Yeah. It's probably going to be more than that because it's going to take me a while to figure out how to make a mold for this. Chris and I are already working on this mold, but we want to reach out to this new company that's got this new technology we think could be disruptive to the mold making industry. Nice to meet you, Ted. How are you doing, man? [T] Good. How are you doing? [D] So you own Mantle. [T] That's correct. [D] So I found your company because the injection molder that I know Chris Robeson, he's been wanting to work with your machines for years. My understanding is that you are a 3D printing company that can print metal. Is that right? [T] That's correct. That's all we do. We invented a new process to print metal, and we specifically use it to make injection molds and other type of hard tooling like that. [D] What I've seen with some of the powder bed fusion laser sintering type methods is that it's very difficult to get a good surface finish. How are you doing metal with a surface finish that's acceptable for injection molding? [T] Most of the other processes that do metal printing melt metal powders with a laser, and they end up with a surface finish that's like 80 grit sandpaper, and it's just not near smooth enough for injection mold tools. Our process is actually a hybrid process, which means it uses additive plus subtractive. So we actually put down this metal paste, we dry it so it firms up. But then after a few layers of that, we come in and actually cut it with a CNC. So we get a CNC-like finish out of this material. And then as a secondary step, we put them in a furnace and densify the metal into a solid metal part. But we can do things that you could never do traditionally. This medical tool right here looks pretty simple, but these deep grooves you see here have to be done with electric discharge machining. You can't CNC cut those because no one makes an end mill that's skinny enough and long enough that won't break when cutting steel. Our technology allows us to shape, refine, or cut that material as we build up the part. And so we get a part that can get any of those really unique geometries you need for tools. [D] So your technology is aimed at improving the tool and die industry. What are your thoughts on tool and die makers in general in the US? [T] I think we need more of them. I think the incentives to go into tool and die have gone downhill. So I saw a New York Times article that showed a graph that in the '80s, '90s, tool and die makers were above the average by about 20 % in terms of income in the United States. That's dropped today to 15 % below the standard income level. And so it's tough to justify going into tool and die. [D] I think that's changing. I've noticed that people really like making things in America. I'm excited about it, and other people I talk to are excited about it. And your technologies like yours are very interesting. I think it's coming back. [T] There's no question that there's a huge demand for this, right? So I talk to companies every day. They're like, I've got tool and die makers, but they're about to retire. They have open jobs today. There are tons of positions available. So I think that it's looking up for tool and die, especially when you combine it with new technology. [D] I think the time to get into a thing is not when everybody else is doing it. It's before the wave happens. So if I was a young person, I would be looking into this right now. [T] Let's just say that AI is taking software coding jobs left and right, but it's not taking tool and die jobs. [D] Interesting. Yeah.

Mechanical, physical things are where it's at, isn't it? [T] We're not there yet. Optimist robot can barely serve a drink at a party for Elon Musk. It's not going to make a tool and die anytime soon. [D] It's a great point, Ted. I hadn't thought about that? The reason I wanted to reach out to you is I'm trying to make this product in America, and we're doing everything we can to make everything in America. And my understanding is we were told that this right here was made in America, but when we got it, the box said made in Costa Rica, and so obviously, I have to make it in America. And so I've learned the hard way. I'm not saying the hard way, but I've learned the right way or the traditional way to make a mold insert. And I was wondering if you'd be willing to work with me to make another mold using your technology for this knob. [T] That'd be great. We print stuff like that all the time. We can do all types of geometries. That would be a shoe in for our technology, and we could do it a lot faster than you would normally as well. [D] Will you please help me? [T] I will do my best. I'll do my best. Anything to keep grill brush bristles from ending up in people's throats is definitely something I'm on board with. [D] That's right. I saw your email on your reply to this. So maybe we could talk about that in the pitch in the last part of this video. [T] For sure. I've experienced the problem firsthand. It's funny you said in your email like, People know someone that knows someone that's had this problem. Like, no, that's me. I've had this problem. I'm the guy. [D] That's great. We'll talk about that later. So that's the story of how we made the Smarter Scrubber. But there's one more thing you need to know about. You remember I told you that we had this American chain mail and we wanted to get some more chain mail, and we had to go to India to get the quantities we need in the event that we sell out of everything we have from the American chain mail. Well, I'm in the middle of making this video, and a couple of days ago, I thought it would be good to go show you a palette of the American chain mail and Indian chain mail to show you that they're two separate things. While I was filming that, something crazy happened, and the camera happened to be rolling. Okay, so this is chain mail that we haven't used in any assembly yet. This is from India. Dude, look at that. That's not from India. That's Chinese. Is that- Is that Chinese? I didn't even notice that. That's your seller's name. He's Indian. I bet they're just shipping it from China to India. I bet that's what they're doing. Is that Chinese? It looks like Chinese. Get Google Translate out. We got this drop ship from India, but I think he just boomeranged it. I do, too. I think a person in India told us it was from India, but it was actually from China, is what I'm thinking. It's got Chinese writing on it. Pu Qi Han Haipai. Man, that looks Chinese. What is that? Says, Haipai refers to East meets West culture from Shanghai in the 20th and 21st centuries. It's part of the culture of Shanghai. That's what it is. Haipai. I don't know what that means. I don't know if that means, but it's definitely not English. Okay. This is so hard. It's the supply chain. Jack. It always goes back to China. Yeah. Everybody wants to make a dime, so it's worth it. I'm shocked. It's pretty weird to set out to try to make a thing completely in America and to find out towards the end of the process that you made something in China anyways. That's really hard to swallow. So this is a big, big problem. And I have like 100 things I want to say because I've learned so much in this process and I did a lot of things wrong. Obviously, we But I'll limit myself to saying this one thing. If you are ever, ever in a position to make a decision about where your thing is manufactured. Take a second and consider making a little less profit maybe in order to invest in your local community. Because these are people you know and love, and they need jobs, and they need to be able to feed their families. And you need a person in your hometown that can injection mold. You need to be able to do that locally. So that's what I would say. I feel a lot of things right now. I'm not going to say all of them. It's time for the pitch. And before I give you the pitch, I want to say this. I don't think it's right that I had to have a YouTube channel in order to take this risk. I hope that we will invest in manufacturing in America and other places in the West so that it will make sense for people who have a really good idea that will help people. It'll make sense for them to make these types of things in their hometown and take them to market. I don't like the fact that having a YouTube channel was a big part of the calculus in order for me to do this. So I just wanted to say that. So here we go. I'm going to give you a pitch on the Smarter Scrubber, and we will see if you want to buy one. All right. My name's Destin, and I would like to tell you about a product called the Smarter Scrubber. I genuinely believe this is the smartest way to clean your grill.

If you go to a store right now and you look at the shelves, you're going to see a ton of options for steel, bristle, wire grill scrubbers. And they're interesting. I mean, there's a lot of different designs. You can tell that this is a very difficult problem because of all the different solutions people are throwing out there for trying to solve it. And these wire bristles are a problem. I don't know if you know this, but those bristles can come off on your grill, and then when you're drilling, they can get in your food and you can ingest that. And that's very, very bad. If you have ever talked to somebody that this has happened to, it's a big deal. And chances are you know somebody that knows somebody that this has happened to because this happens way more than you think. So this is Ted. Ted, my understanding is you had something happen to you with a grill brush. What happened? I was out barbecuing, and I went to eat my salmon that night, and a bristle brush that had gotten on my grill got into my salmon and impaled it myself at the back of my throat. And with some skilled work by my wife and a pair of forceps, I was able to get it out, or she out of my throat. When it stuck in you, where was it? What did it feel like? All the way at the back, I could barely see it, halfway impaled. And I thought it was a fishbone, but it pretty clearly wasn't once we started to look at it. And it was painful. It's hard to talk. I was lucky that we were able to get it out without having to go to the emergency room. My brother is an ear, nose, and throat doctor, and he says every summer, he's got someone coming in with this problem, and it can be easy in the case of what mine was. It's like, Oh, just see if you can pull it out. I went, Okay. Or it can go all the way down your throat, and now you're talking about a semi-surgical procedure to get that thing So it's not safe, and it's only a matter of time if you keep using those bristle brushes. Ted's situation ended up okay, but there is a worse situation that can happen. John and I have a mutual friend that's a doctor, and when we gave him a smarter scrubber, he told us a story about his partner. He had to do an exploratory surgery to find a grill brush bristle in the bowel of one of his patients. Apparently, this is way more common than I realized. Tyler goes on to explain that he hasn't owned a grill brush with bristles since residency. I've debated on whether or not to show you pictures of that, and I've decided to do it this way. I'm going to show you a picture for one second on the screen, and you have the option of closing your eyes. But this is from a medical paper of a person that had to go under exploratory surgery, and they found the bristle sticking out of the gut inside the body. So I'm going to show you that picture. Close your eyes if you want to. In three, two, one. There it is. Yeah, that's bad. It's bad. You don't want to do that. That was the thrust behind wanting to build the Smarter Scrubber. But the more I get to thinking about why this needs to exist, the more I realize there are other reasons why we should make a product like this. This is made in America. All of the components are not currently made in America, but we're moving that way. We're trying very hard to do that. I have noticed that a lot of products on the market right now are cheap. They're made poorly. I understand why you would be tempted to buy the cheaper product because it feels like you're spending less money, right? Let's look at a graph and let me show you why even if the Smarter Scrubber is four times the cost of this, it's in your best interest. Check this out. If we look at this graph, when you first purchase, it feels like this. It feels like the cheap one cost about one-fourth as much, and you've spent that much money. It feels like you've wasted money, right? This literally says on a sticker to buy a new one every year. If we play this out over time, look at what happens. You are buying a new one of the cheap ones every year instead of just buying one good one that lasts. So you are saving money by buying the more expensive scrubber over time. It's very important. This has actually got a name. This is called the Boots Theory of socioeconomic unfairness. The theory is if you buy a cheaper product, you're going to spend more money over time because you have to keep replacing it. So it makes more sense to get a higher quality item. So one of the things we wanted to do with the Smarter Scrubber is we wanted to make something that was strong that you would have for a long time. One thing I don't apologize for, I've actually heard this feedback, I do not apologize for this feeling like a medieval weapon. We actually talked to a person that handles grill products for a big company. You would recognize the name if I told you. And we put it in his hand. The first thing he said was, well, this feels like an American made product. And I was like, What does that mean? And he said, It's very strong. And I don't apologize for that. That's what I was going for. Another thing I want to tell you about is the fact that I designed it so that you can pull the head off the top and you can clean things by hand. So even if you don't use it on your grill, you can use just the head at your sink and you can clean your cast iron pots and pans with that. It works really, really well. Another thing is you can take this and just throw it in the dishwasher. We've made it out of materials that can handle the dishwasher no problem, so you can clean this thing and get the gunk off of it really easily. The Smarter Scrubber is a problem that I wanted to solve. I've been wanting to design something and build it in America for a really, really long time, and this is my first go at it.

And I would encourage you to try it because I genuinely think you will love it. You can go check out the reviews on the website. We're selling this at SmarterScrubber. com I think it's a great thing. You're going to pay a little more for it, and that's because we made it well. We didn't make it to just throw away. If you go into the store and you buy any one of these, I want you to think about the person that made it for you. They don't care about you like I care about you. When they put a sticker on here, it says something like, Stop using if bristles are found on the grill, replace after one year of use is recommended. That person is just trying to sell you a grill scrubber. I'm not. I'm trying to make your life better, and it in America because I want people here locally to have jobs. I care about you. I care about your health. And I want you to try out the smarter scrubber to see if this is something that would work for you and your family. Ultimately, it's about playing the long game. You can buy nice or you can buy twice. I think if you buy this, it'll last for a really, really long time. If you buy those other things, I'm worried that you might get hurt. I would really like for you to try the Smarter Scrubber at SmarterScrubber. com. If you don't buy the smarter scrubber, do me a favor. Don't use any of these wire bristle grill brushes anymore. I don't think it's safe for you or your family. All right, how did the pitch go? I hope it worked. We'll see. I guess we'll find out. So I hope after this whole thing was done, that you recognize what I was going for. I was trying to get the right mixture of intellectual humility because I had no idea what I was doing, but also just sheer determination to make it happen. So that's the balance I was trying to strike. And I would love to know your comments on the experiment as a whole. It took a lot of time, but clearly I did some stuff wrong. I could have done better. I'd love some feedback. With that, I got some things that I want to say that's important to tell you. So enjoy the footage while I say this stuff. First of all, John has been working with the team to stockpile these scrubbers. We've got thousands of them stockpiled and ready to go, but we don't know how many orders we're going to get as a result of the video. So if you go to the website and it says pre-order, that means the grill scrubber you're buying hasn't been made yet. So you can go ahead and purchase it, and we'll get it to you as soon as it's built. We're hoping to get a surge of orders from this video, so if that happens, please be patient with us. John's a little scared, which is fun. Our plan is to use the profits we get from these initial sales and put it right back into the process and tooling. For example, right now, our bottleneck is the laser marking process. We're going to try to build a conveyor belt system to do that automatically. That's going to be a tremendous investment. But one of the lessons I learned from this experiment, as well as the manufacturing series, is that it's smart to invest in your process and tooling. Which leads me to the fact that a couple of these components may or may not be made in a different country, depending on when you buy it. I'm working on making everything 100% in America. However, if you buy it and it has something from somewhere else, we're going to make sure that the quality is top-notch. So we're working on that. Thank you for your patience. A huge thank you to patrons and people who tested early prototypes. We listened to everything you said and we made changes, and that made the product better. Thank you. Currently, we can ship to the US and Canada. We figured all that out. We have some partners in Europe. We're trying to get there, and we'll expand to worldwide as we can. When you get this thing, if for any reason you're not happy, reach out to us and we'll make it right. That being said, don't put this on a crazy hot surface. You can melt it if you're not thoughtful, so be smart about it. Last thing, if you are interested in being a wholesaler for the Smarter Scrubber, as we get more efficient and we're able to bring the cost down, maybe we get more tooling that's more efficient, then we would love to have the Smarter Scrubber in your store. So if you're interested in selling this thing, I've got a link down in the video description. If you'll reach out, we'll be in touch, and maybe we can work something out as we get more efficient at building this thing. All right, that's it. I hope you enjoyed this. Thank you so much for watching this video. I'm grateful. I'm Destin. You're getting Smarter Every Day. Have a good one. Bye.