Industrial collapse, under the radar

Systematized irrationality brings little frustrations. They add up.

Some months ago, I reported on a $5,600 repair bill for a taillight on a Ford F150, and did my best to understand the opaque economic forces and design considerations that could lead to such an absurdity. The general problem is more or less the same as that which appears to have caused last week’s globe-spanning computer meltdown that halted air travel, disrupted hospital emergency rooms, shut down banks and much else: complexity and interconnection cause gremlins to propagate across systems, and the resulting cascade of failures reveals a fragility that encompasses everything.

I followed that post with a deep dive into the history of “accelerated vehicle retirement” or “cash for clunkers” programs in the 1990s, to provide some historical context for the re-appearance of such programs today with the push for electric vehicles. In both decades, the rush to scrap serviceable cars turns out to be more than a little perverse from an environmental perspective, to say nothing of the massive economic inefficiencies it represents.

Today I want to relate a recurring personal experience that is adjacent to these big issues. I start writing little missives like this all the time but quickly abandon them because I get too worked up, too angry, and start to doubt my capacity for thinking clearly. If you work in the material economy, or are seriously engaged in some hobby that brings you into the world of industrial supply houses, machine shops and the like, I expect this will resonate. If not, consider this a report from a stratum of our shared world that you depend on, but probably don’t pay much attention to. The news is not good.

This morning I drove to my local Grainger, an industrial supply house with over 300 outlets across the country. I needed a new “indicator base.” This is a simple device for holding a dial indicator, which is a tool used by machinists for precisely measuring small movements, usually with a resolution of .0005 or .001 inches. The base consists of a strong magnet and a rigid or articulated arm, allowing you to position the dial indicator on the moving part.

Indicator on a base from Harbor Freight Tools.

The base I wanted to replace is a cheap Chinese one from Harbor Freight Tools, and I have had to fight it every time I use it: the clamp that holds the indicator shaft doesn’t fully close against it, so I have to shim the shaft using aluminum foil. But every time I move the indicator within its clamp, I have to re-shim it. This is typical of Chinese tools.¹ Using them involves constant interruption; you have to turn your attention from the task at hand to the tool itself. What you are buying when you buy a Chinese tool is the idea of a tool; something that has the outer form and appearance of a tool. It is then up to you to do some shade-tree engineering to make it functional: shimming, de-burring, gusseting, honing, truing, chasing threads with a tap or die… in extreme cases, you may end up using the purchased tool as a mere template or conceptual inspiration for the fabrication of your own, from scratch. This only makes sense (if it makes sense at all) if you have more time than money. Ultimately, it is a fool’s thrift.

But hope springs eternal and, like many people, I keep getting tempted back into Harbor Freight Tools by the prospect of paying 25% of what the thing should cost, like Charlie Brown charging at the football held by Lucy. The house brands sold by HFT have names like Chicago Pneumatic and Central Machinery, sarcastically invoking the heartland and the bygone era of American industrial vigor.

Someone more paranoid than I might suppose that HFT is an ongoing Chinese psyop, intended to demoralize the American spirit of DIY. If you permit yourself such paranoia, you may come out the other side into hope: What the Chinese don’t understand is that, though they may have discouraged the majority, they are forcing a small subset of Americans to a whole new level of resourcefulness, tied to deep skepticism about appearances. (There is probably a metaphor for our political moment in there.)

Anyhow, I have a lot of measuring to do this week as I mock up an engine, so I decided to get a decent indicator base. Hence the trip to Grainger. The lady behind the counter had never heard of an indicator base, but I expected this. It is a common enough tool, but in a big, publicly-traded company, people who know things don’t sit behind counters or answer phones.² The less someone knows, the cheaper they are. So she got on her computer and looked it up. The one that came up had a price of $465. I told her that can’t be right; a decent one costs about $50 and a good one about $100 (the HFT one I am replacing currently sells for $13). There must have been a misplaced decimal point. Trying again, she hit a few key strokes that brought her to a screen with a series of search filters. The first filter asked me to choose the holding strength of the magnet, from a list of options. These were listed in a hodgepodge of different units. One such unit was Newtons, which is a legitimate unit for specifying force, but one that most people in the US (certainly machinists) don’t use, unless they are the type who also get into Esperanto. I briefly considered pulling up a conversion calculator on my phone. But there was a line behind me at the counter – people in the trades for whom “time is money.” Other options for the magnet-pull strength were listed in “lbf”. I had never seen this unit before, and assumed it was some computer jockey’s alternative abbreviation for “lbs-ft.” But this interpretation didn’t help much, because lbs-ft are a unit of torque, not linear force. What I was looking for was simply pounds, or lbs.³

My point is that the desk lady and I were dealing with a bunch of random shit on a screen that had little connection to reality as I understood it, and we couldn’t get past this screen without pretending otherwise. The inventory system was surely built by a web designer, someone who has probably never used any of the tools listed in the vast Grainger catalogue. Or rather, it was likely built by a whole team of such people, unknown to one another, speaking several different languages and dispersed across the globe. As I stared at the screen, trying to refer it to tangible things that fit into categories native to the world of machinists, the effect was like reading Borges’ report of a certain Chinese encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,

2. embalmed ones,

3. those that are trained,

4. suckling pigs,

5. mermaids,

6. fabulous ones,

7. stray dogs,

8. those included in the present classification,

9. those that tremble as if they were mad,

10. innumerable ones,

11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,

12. others,

13. those that have just broken a flower vase,

14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

Michel Foucault said he had a groovy experience of epistemic rupture upon reading this list, but at the moment I wasn’t in a postmodern frame of mind. I had a camshaft I needed to get dialed in, and some valve train geometry to set up.