3 ms·

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

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
  > What you are nowhere close to doing is manufacturing the 5.5 million M1 Garands that were ultimately produced. Correct - reasonably, I could produce one in about six months of work with subsequent ones coming faster after having built up the tooling and knowledge. My point is that there are millions of people like me and that the tools required to do that are common. More to the point I could produce a working, reasonably polished firearm in a couple of weeks or less if I were doing so full time and were not restricted by US federal law. If I were basing my design off of something like a Sten submachinegun, now we're talking days at most and rapidly ramping up production speed after that. There are no alternate designs for N95 masks that will meet the needs of healthcare workers. There are no alternate materials that are "good enough" for expedient use. This is not a product that can be reasonably manufactured in a distributed fashion.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    The question is not “who is capable of doing this”. The question is “what percentage of society’s resources must be focused on this task in order to fix it”. It’s kind of obvious that there’s a difference between making a firearm and a n95 mask, but that was never my point. Yes, making an M1 Garand is simpler than making PPE. But the process of training tens of thousands of machinists, many of whom had never had an industrial job before in their lives, in order to make millions of firearms in a short order is a huge undertaking that literally changed the entire fabric of American society. And that is only one tiny sub portion of a gargantuan effort that saw entire industrial centers dismantled in order to feed the war effort. As another example, the Swiss are only “famous” for watches because American watch factories were dismantled in order to make bomber components, giving the neutral Swiss an opportunity to take over from what had historically been an American lead industry. The level of societal change that WW2 created was so massive that there are literally country bars in Chicago to serve the former residents of Appalachian states who were moved around due to the war and decided to not return to their original states; just the industrial aspect of that war deeply changed who we were as a society, and affected everything. Compared to the gargantuan effort required to do all of that, creating a few factories required to make PPE on shore is nothing. All that needs to be done is rebuild a few factories to recreate a product that until 2000 or so was almost entirely made in the US. Yes, it’s more complicated than making a small number of firearms, but in the scope of resources that America has poured into other problems, recreating a factory or two doesn’t even register on the scale. Also, whatever happened to American optimism? This is not a hard problem to solve. We invented the damn N95 mask in the first place, why is everyone so down on our ability to redo something that we did without even thinking about 20 years ago. This is not a problem of capability, this is a problem of public will.

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
> What you are nowhere close to doing is manufacturing the 5.5 million M1 Garands that were ultimately produced. Correct - reasonably, I could produce one in about six months of work with subsequent ones coming faster after having built up the tooling and knowledge. My point is that there are millions of people like me and that the tools required to do that are common. More to the point I could produce a working, reasonably polished firearm in a couple of weeks or less if I were doing so full time and were not restricted by US federal law. If I were basing my design off of something like a Sten submachinegun, now we're talking days at most and rapidly ramping up production speed after that. There are no alternate designs for N95 masks that will meet the needs of healthcare workers. There are no alternate materials that are "good enough" for expedient use. This is not a product that can be reasonably manufactured in a distributed fashion.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  The question is not “who is capable of doing this”. The question is “what percentage of society’s resources must be focused on this task in order to fix it”. It’s kind of obvious that there’s a difference between making a firearm and a n95 mask, but that was never my point. Yes, making an M1 Garand is simpler than making PPE. But the process of training tens of thousands of machinists, many of whom had never had an industrial job before in their lives, in order to make millions of firearms in a short order is a huge undertaking that literally changed the entire fabric of American society. And that is only one tiny sub portion of a gargantuan effort that saw entire industrial centers dismantled in order to feed the war effort. As another example, the Swiss are only “famous” for watches because American watch factories were dismantled in order to make bomber components, giving the neutral Swiss an opportunity to take over from what had historically been an American lead industry. The level of societal change that WW2 created was so massive that there are literally country bars in Chicago to serve the former residents of Appalachian states who were moved around due to the war and decided to not return to their original states; just the industrial aspect of that war deeply changed who we were as a society, and affected everything. Compared to the gargantuan effort required to do all of that, creating a few factories required to make PPE on shore is nothing. All that needs to be done is rebuild a few factories to recreate a product that until 2000 or so was almost entirely made in the US. Yes, it’s more complicated than making a small number of firearms, but in the scope of resources that America has poured into other problems, recreating a factory or two doesn’t even register on the scale. Also, whatever happened to American optimism? This is not a hard problem to solve. We invented the damn N95 mask in the first place, why is everyone so down on our ability to redo something that we did without even thinking about 20 years ago. This is not a problem of capability, this is a problem of public will.