11 videos · 5 hr 55 minHow things are made
HN loves watching things being made, and these are the videos it recommends most often. The list starts with everyday objects, moves to the craft and machines behind precision and heavy metalwork, then tours car and circuit board factories, then the light source inside a chipmaking machine, and finishes inside two rocket factories. Each one leaves you a bit more amazed by ordinary manufactured things.
Play all on YouTube- 111:39
The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can
engineerguy · Picked by 9 · 2016–2026A welcoming eleven-minute start: Bill Hammack explains every detail of the humble soda can, and HN links it whenever cans or good design come up.
- 211:22
Thomas Thwaites: How I built a toaster -- from scratch
TED · Picked by 2 · 2019–2025A designer tries to make a toaster from mined ore and homemade plastic, a short lesson in how much industry a cheap object depends on.
- 337:50
The Art of Making a Nixie Tube
Dalibor Farný · Picked by 6 · 2017–2026A quiet, mesmerizing record of one craftsman hand-making a nixie tube from glassblowing to vacuum, the kind of detail commenters say you almost never get to see.
- 430:33
Origins of Precision
Machine Thinking · Picked by 11 · 2019–2025Where precision itself comes from: how flat surfaces, lathes and measuring tools were built up from nothing, which HN calls a half hour well spent.
- 5
12:48America's Iron Giants - The World's Most Powerful Metalworkers
Machine Thinking · Picked by 3 · 2019–2024From the same channel, the Cold War presses that forge aircraft and turbine parts, often cited in HN threads about gigacasting and huge machines.
- 6
59:12The Mind-Blowing Machines that Stamp Millions of Metal Parts - Smarter Every Day 288
SmarterEveryDay · Picked by 2 · 2023–2025Destin Sandlin tours a progressive stamping plant and the tooling behind it, part of his series on what US manufacturing has lost.
- 7
40:33BMW i3 Factory Production Tour
europeanautosource · Picked by 2 · 2016–2017A full tour of a car being built almost entirely by robots, with a carbon-fiber body that one commenter said looked like technology from the future.
- 8
26:49Inside a Huge PCB Factory
Strange Parts · Picked by 4 · 2018–2026Strange Parts walks through every step at JLCPCB, the factory behind many hobbyists' cheap circuit boards, and HN calls it the best look inside a modern PCB fab.
- 9
17:20The Extreme Engineering of ASML’s EUV Light Source
Asianometry · Picked by 11 · 2022–2025Then the hardest part of all: lasers firing twice at falling tin droplets to make the light for modern chips, explained in seventeen astonishing minutes.
- 10
54:16HOW ROCKETS ARE MADE (Rocket Factory Tour - United Launch Alliance) - Smarter Every Day 231
SmarterEveryDay · Picked by 5 · 2020–2025ULA's CEO walks Destin through friction stir welding and huge milled rocket skins, a rare look inside a working rocket plant.
- 11
![Video frame: Starbase Tour with Elon Musk [PART 1 // Summer 2021]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/t705r8ICkRw/hq2.jpg)
53:17Starbase Tour with Elon Musk [PART 1 // Summer 2021]
Everyday Astronaut · Picked by 11 · 2021–2024To finish, a walk around SpaceX's Starship factory, which HN quotes mainly for the engineering process Musk lays out, such as deleting requirements that should not exist.