Why it’s so difficult to manufacture something entirely in America, and what happens if you try anyway. The Smarter Scrubber Grill Brush Destin Sandlin’s YouTube Channel: Smarter Every Day Support Search Engine To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the problem with manufacturing in America?
Okay, so we're going to start at the problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, but first of all, can you introduce yourself? Can you say your name and what you do?
Chapter 2: Who is Destin Sandlin and what is his background?
Yeah, my name is Destin Sandlin. I'm an engineer. I have a YouTube channel called Smarter Every Day, but I identify as an engineer, and I don't really like being called a YouTuber. How come? I don't know. I think... When I was in school, people wanted to be, I don't know, engineers, baseball players, pilots. Yes. And there's this new generation of people that want to be YouTubers. Yes.
And I feel so sad about that. I really am because... There was this whole generation of, I say generation, it's like little g, there's this whole wave of YouTubers that became YouTubers as a result of they did something before. Like they had a life, they had a job, they had a thing, and this was just, oh, by the way, I'm going to upload this thing.
Yes.
Yeah.
And we are, like, appropriately, the thing that I wanted to talk to you about today mainly is an engineering problem that you were trying to solve. Is it fair to characterize it that way? Absolutely, yes. The engineering problem would be this. Destin and a collaborator would invent something, an innovative new kind of barbecue scrubber.
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Chapter 3: What innovative grill scrubber is being developed?
They'd take that invention, and instead of doing the normal thing, sending their design to be manufactured outside of America, they'd attempt to make it here with American workers. How hard could that be? I mean, it wasn't an iPhone or a laptop. It was a barbecue scrubber. But Destin, of course, would run into all kinds of interesting problems.
And he'd start to understand the deeper reasons why it's so hard these days to build new things in America. Before we get to the interesting problems Destin would encounter, I actually want to start the story before those problems ever existed. I want Destin to tell the story of how he learned to make stuff.
What it was like growing up in Morgan County, Alabama, where that just seemed to be what everybody did.
I'm the son of blue collar workers. Both of my parents worked in auto manufacturing. They made rack and pinion gears. And I can remember going to see my mom work and she pushed CV joints into rubber boots at a plant. What's a CV joint? You know, on a wheel, you have a wheel that's touching the asphalt. Yes. But your drive train's way up in the middle of the car.
So there's this joint in between the drive train and the wheel that has to transmit that torque and that power down to the wheel. And my mom, she's small, I can remember seeing her pick up these seven-pound huge hunks of metal and push it into this rubber boot. And I remember thinking, my mom does this every day on third shift? This is incredible. And I just had no, you're a kid, you don't know.
Your parents go to work and they come home and you don't realize how many sacrifices they're making. But my mom's hands like literally hurt. She didn't do that all day, every day. That was just, it was so physically taxing. They would only let people do that for a short period of time. But anyway, my parents worked like that. And your feeling as a kid watching her was just like, wow.
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Chapter 4: Why is it difficult to make products entirely in America?
Oh, I thought, so my parents would come home and their clothes would smell like cutting oil. And it smelled like work. It smelled like this is how you earn a living for your family. And so fast forward, I didn't understand anything that was happening with global politics and economics and all this stuff, but NAFTA happened and CAFTA. Central American Free Trade Agreement.
All these things happened slowly and we watched it from afar. And I can remember my parents like, hey, we're shutting the plant down. My mom and dad just barely got out, but they were able to get a retirement from General Motors. So I remember thinking manufacturing is important. People I knew, their parents made stuff. Yeah. And slowly all that went away. and I didn't understand why.
How and why that all went away, that's not actually today's story, but nobody really argues that it did. When Destin was growing up in the 80s, there were about 19 million American manufacturing jobs. Millions of those jobs began evaporating in the 2000s, around when Destin's parents retired. They hit a low of 11 million in 2010. Destin watched that sharp downhill graph in his hometown.
He watched jobs go away and not come back. But he knew he wanted to make stuff, and so he aimed himself at the place where jobs still did exist, engineering.
I went to school to learn mechanical engineering. I had two manufacturing internships. One was in Mississippi. I worked at a place called Eaton Aerospace. We made jet fuel pumps for aircraft.
What does an intern do at a place that makes jet fuel pumps for aircraft? Like, what do they let the intern do?
That's, that's, you're really good at asking questions. The answer is every engineering intern is in their mentor's way at all times. Yeah. So you learn pretty quick if you have a good intern or a bad one, if they go find their own jobs. So I had a really good mentor who taught me how to interface with people. He said, hey, if you need a print, print it out.
You can go stand in line and get it, or you can go to the Coke machine and you can get the favorite drink of the lady that runs the printer and you go slide that across the window and she'll give you the print early. And so he taught me people skills, but I wasn't learning engineering.
So I slid to the back of the plant there in Jackson, Mississippi, and I found my love, which was called the test engineering test cell. What was that? Imagine a room, not much bigger than the little studio we're in right now, And you have a huge motor running a jet fuel pump. And you have a lot of pipes all over the room mocking up a fighter jet wing.
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Chapter 5: How did the pandemic inspire a project for face shields?
Yeah.
I sat in on meetings and they were discussing the topping distribution on the brownie line. And I was sitting there and I was like, man, are they talking about statistical stuff for sprinkle? What? What are we doing? So first of all, that's how my whole summer felt. Also, I would say there are no smart interns. But yeah, a lot of times you just did trial and error.
So really, you're an extension of the engineer that's teaching you.
Destin saw himself as joining this chain that stretched way back, where young people had learned by becoming apprentices to the older people who already knew things, who would maybe tolerate the young if the young were graceful enough to navigate a bunch of grumpy old egos, to ply them with the right sodas from the vending machine, each successful apprentice then one day becoming themselves an old grump, extending the chain.
Of course, not everybody wants to or should work in a factory, but Destin's an evangelist for the idea that it's good for people to learn how to make things, fix things, for everyone to have a little bit of the MacGyver thinking that engineers make the focus of their professional lives. Destin really believes that this kind of problem-solving is something anybody can get better at.
Once you get over the hurdle of, I'm scared of this, you would be surprised how many things you can fix on your own.
That's a very encouraging thought. Lately, I've been a little more... Physical problem solving curious. What have you fixed? I'm so embarrassed to even share this with you. Lately, I've gotten really into just building fires. Okay. Like just fire in a fireplace fires. I used to, if you stuck me in front of a fireplace three years ago, five years ago, I would have been like, I don't know.
And then like four years ago, I could have done it with Firestarter, but like copious amounts of Firestarter. And then sometimes I'd be trying to do it and there'd be a more masculine person in the room and they'd be like, how much Firestarter do you need? And I'm like, I don't want to do this. You're ruining this for me.
And then something happened about a year ago where all of a sudden I was like, oh... The way you build a fire is completely about oxygen. And what you're trying to do is build a really efficient structure that lets in lots of oxygen. But then once the fire is built, you want to make sure that not too much oxygen is coming in.
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Chapter 6: What challenges did Destin face in manufacturing?
Lovely. The following is for informational purposes only.
Don't be idiots like we are. Whoa. I kid you not. And so at work, my engineering job, we were testing rockets. That's what I did. Hey, it's me, Destin.
Mechanical engineer, University of Alabama. Big loser. Likes to play with rockets. This is my buddy, Steven.
We needed something going really, really fast and we needed it to be in a very specific location. And I got this special reloadable rocket and I put a special thing on the front of it that reflected certain radar frequencies called a corner reflector at a certain size. I designed it all. And I shot these rockets down this wire to train radars for the military.
And I was at work one day and I was like, man, this is cool. I was like, I could do this at home and light my bonfire with rockets. This would be awesome. So I went and bought fireworks and I taped a straw to the rocket and hung it on a string and pulled the string down to my Christmas tree and put gas on the fire, duh. And lit the rockets with electric matches.
Three, two, one, fire.
My point is, you're not crazy.
This is really funny.
And that was actually the first YouTube video I ever uploaded.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of the chain mail grill scrubber?
Hey, it's me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. I'm alone, so I can take this off.
In this video from April 2020, Destin's in an empty warehouse removing his face mask, explaining his plan to start 3D printing face shields to give to local doctors and nurses.
We have just spent the whole day tooling up a line to disinfect and sanitize 3D printed materials. Those are 3D printed materials that come in from the community.
I'm sure I don't have to remind you, in the beginning of the pandemic, how hard it was to find PPE. In Huntsville, Alabama, Destin was trying to solve that problem for his community.
At that time, the thing that was worth more than its weight in gold was an N95 mask. And the specific fabric that made the N95, turns out a lot of it was being shipped over from China, and we couldn't tool up plants fast enough. So what we focused on here in North Alabama is a face shield. That little piece of plastic visor, that was hard to make.
And we wanted to injection mold those, but nobody knew how to make a mold really, really fast. And so we 3D printed them here in North Alabama. The whole community got involved.
They collected thousands of face shields at their drive-through drop-off. And in his video, Destin explains how other people in other towns could follow their process. It was like an internet version of those chains of knowledge he'd been learning from his whole life.
This is something you can do for your city right now. The key is that you got to work together. Now go find your team. Remember, your city fighting COVID. I'm Destin. You're getting smarter every day. Go wash your hands. Have a good one. Bye.
As successful as the project was, hundreds of people in Alabama joining forces to make all these shields, it also, weirdly, left Destin somewhat frustrated. 3D printing, relative to most kinds of production, is just slower. It's more expensive. If you want to make something quickly at scale, you'd normally go another route, like injection molding.
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Chapter 8: How does Destin approach the design process?
It's just like, I don't know, he just, John just feels like American is baseball and apple pie.
Dustin and John hit it off. And John told him there's this invention he dreamed up, a new kind of barbecue grill accessory.
He said, hey, I've got this idea for a grill scrubber. A lot of people don't know this, but when you clean your grill, a lot of people use these metal brushes. Yeah. And he explained, there's this problem that happens. They'll tell you they've had people come in the door that have this problem. The metal bristles on a grill scrubber.
Yeah, this is the thing where the barbecue scrubbers that look like, it's like a toilet brush scrubber, but it's more coarse and metal.
Yeah.
So those bristles, the little bristles.
Wires. Wire bristles will come off on the grill. and then they'll go into the food that people are grilling and then people eat the burger or whatever they're cooking. And then those bristles will get caught in their throat or go down to their stomach, their colon or whatever. So these metal wires get in people's mouths and they get seriously injured.
And it's not something you can just, oh, let me just get the wire out. You have to go to the doctor and you have to get it out. And one of the hardest things to do is even figure out that's what it is. So they have to do x-rays and a lot of times they'll do CT scans to figure out like, oh, there's a wire in this person. And so he said, hey, what if we invented one that didn't do that?
And he didn't really tell me his full idea at first. He was like, I just have this idea. And then later on, as we kind of gained trust with each other, he revealed to me he wants to make a chain mail grill scrubber. So instead of like brushes, like little wire brushes, he's got little links. You know, like a knight in shining armor wears chain mail. You know what I'm talking about, right?
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