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Sorry, but this just isn't true. It was far more difficult to manufacture an M1 Garand in 1940 than it is an N95 mask in 2020. There was a huge amount of custom

Sorry, but this just isn't true. It was far more difficult to manufacture an M1 Garand in 1940 than it is an N95 mask in 2020. There was a huge amount of custom Pratt & Whitney machinery built just to produce the rifle, some of which is still used today to produce other things btw!

Consultant32452 6y ago
What is your hypothesis on why the UK, Germany, France, Norway, Russia, China, etc. have all been relatively unable to dictate sufficient capacity into existence? Even if the US is uniquely sucking, why can't we just buy it from all these other countries which should hypothetically have been able to create production also?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  They have been able to, and Chinese respirator masks in particular are abundantly available in the US. But they use different industrial standards, so the Chinese masks are KN95s, and some health organizations don't want to use them.
  - carabiner 6y ago
    For good reason: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/09/22/covid-kn-95-masks-imported-china-dont-meet-standards-ecri/5806327002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/09/22/covid-...
Ancapistani 6y ago
I strongly disagree. I have a small lathe and mill sitting in my office right now. With those, I have everything technically necessary to build a Garand. Don't get me wrong - it would take a long time, and I would have to make substantial improvements to my tooling - I'd need to build a button rifling machine, for instance - but I have everything necessary to bootstrap production of M1 Garands in my office. No amount of time or hacking would let me produce the fabric necessary for disposable N95 masks. I'm quite confident of this - I worked on the issue for quite a while, as I was unemployed at the beginning of this pandemic. The best solution I found was making filter cartridges for existing reusable respirators from HEPA furnace filters and 3D printed parts.
- jk700 6y ago
  You won't be able to produce materials neither for M1 Garand nor for masks. But at least for N95 masks there are plenty of substitute materials available in abundance if any of the commonly used ones isn't available and complicated stuff is only testing filtration properties of the material with cheap test equipment (you can even make test equipment yourself, it's relatively simple for such purposes, "dust sensor" kind of stuff). Everything else is way more primitive than lathe and mill.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    > at least for N95 masks there are plenty of substitute materials available in abundance Can you name any? That would literally be world changing right now. As far as my research has revealed it is literally only melt-blown fabric that can meet N95 standards and the vast, vast majority of melt-blown fabric does not (we use tons of the stuff in sofas and mattresses but that stuff isn't anywhere near N95). And no, your dust sensor will not meet lab requirements for N95 testing unless it had a very large price tag.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  You can make a M1 Garand, maybe, assuming that you don’t get the heat treat wrong and it wears out or blows up. What you are nowhere close to doing is manufacturing the 5.5 million M1 Garands that were ultimately produced. Nor any of the other firearms used, nor the literal mountains of ammunition required to train and equip all of the men who would eventually carry just that one rifle into combat. The US effort for WW2 consumed damn near the entire manufacturing capability of the United States, required that civilians ration almost all consumer goods to make the war possible, created record breaking debt, and involved the mass training of heretofore economically excluded demographic groups in order to keep it going. Individual sub components of that war effort might have been “simple”, but at scale they are not simple at all. Comparatively the effort it would take to spin up half a dozen factories to produce PPE doesn’t come anywhere close to the mass efforts this country has sustained within living memory.
  - Ancapistani 6y ago

Consultant32452 6y ago

What is your hypothesis on why the UK, Germany, France, Norway, Russia, China, etc. have all been relatively unable to dictate sufficient capacity into existence? Even if the US is uniquely sucking, why can't we just buy it from all these other countries which should hypothetically have been able to create production also?

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
They have been able to, and Chinese respirator masks in particular are abundantly available in the US. But they use different industrial standards, so the Chinese masks are KN95s, and some health organizations don't want to use them.
- carabiner 6y ago
  For good reason: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/09/22/covid-kn-95-masks-imported-china-dont-meet-standards-ecri/5806327002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/09/22/covid-...

Ancapistani 6y ago

I strongly disagree. I have a small lathe and mill sitting in my office right now. With those, I have everything technically necessary to build a Garand. Don't get me wrong - it would take a long time, and I would have to make substantial improvements to my tooling - I'd need to build a button rifling machine, for instance - but I have everything necessary to bootstrap production of M1 Garands in my office. No amount of time or hacking would let me produce the fabric necessary for disposable N95 masks. I'm quite confident of this - I worked on the issue for quite a while, as I was unemployed at the beginning of this pandemic. The best solution I found was making filter cartridges for existing reusable respirators from HEPA furnace filters and 3D printed parts.

jk700 6y ago
You won't be able to produce materials neither for M1 Garand nor for masks. But at least for N95 masks there are plenty of substitute materials available in abundance if any of the commonly used ones isn't available and complicated stuff is only testing filtration properties of the material with cheap test equipment (you can even make test equipment yourself, it's relatively simple for such purposes, "dust sensor" kind of stuff). Everything else is way more primitive than lathe and mill.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  > at least for N95 masks there are plenty of substitute materials available in abundance Can you name any? That would literally be world changing right now. As far as my research has revealed it is literally only melt-blown fabric that can meet N95 standards and the vast, vast majority of melt-blown fabric does not (we use tons of the stuff in sofas and mattresses but that stuff isn't anywhere near N95). And no, your dust sensor will not meet lab requirements for N95 testing unless it had a very large price tag.
ashtonkem 6y ago
You can make a M1 Garand, maybe, assuming that you don’t get the heat treat wrong and it wears out or blows up. What you are nowhere close to doing is manufacturing the 5.5 million M1 Garands that were ultimately produced. Nor any of the other firearms used, nor the literal mountains of ammunition required to train and equip all of the men who would eventually carry just that one rifle into combat. The US effort for WW2 consumed damn near the entire manufacturing capability of the United States, required that civilians ration almost all consumer goods to make the war possible, created record breaking debt, and involved the mass training of heretofore economically excluded demographic groups in order to keep it going. Individual sub components of that war effort might have been “simple”, but at scale they are not simple at all. Comparatively the effort it would take to spin up half a dozen factories to produce PPE doesn’t come anywhere close to the mass efforts this country has sustained within living memory.
- Ancapistani 6y ago