One YouTuber’s Quest Reveals a Hidden Challenge and a Powerful Solution.
What does it take to build a product entirely in the United States in 2024? Destin Sandlin, the engineer and science communicator behind the massively popular YouTube channel “Smarter Every Day,” decided to find out. His goal was simple on the surface: create a high-quality BBQ grill scrubber, “The Smarter Scrubber,” with every single component sourced and manufactured in America. His journey, documented for millions to see, quickly became a fascinating case study on the challenges and triumphs of modern American manufacturing, and it uncovered a critical bottleneck that a company called Mantle is helping to solve.
The Sourcing Challenge: A Scavenger Hunt for American Parts
Destin’s initial optimism quickly met the hard reality of a globalized supply chain. His quest wasn’t just about finding factories; it was a nationwide scavenger hunt. He discovered that even basic raw materials, like the specific type of stainless steel chainmail for the scrubber head or the plastic components to hold it onto the handle, were incredibly difficult to source from domestic suppliers.
Why? For decades, manufacturing for many consumer goods has been offshored to countries with lower labor costs. This didn’t just move factories; it dismantled entire domestic supply chains. The small and mid-sized companies that once produced these fundamental components either went out of business or moved their operations. Destin’s journey proved that bringing manufacturing back isn’t as simple as just wanting to; you have to rebuild the entire ecosystem, piece by piece.
The Critical Bottleneck: The Art and Scarcity of Tool & Die Making
While sourcing raw materials was tough, Destin hit the biggest wall at the most critical stage of mass production: creating the injection mold.
An injection mold is a high-precision steel tool that acts as the master key for creating thousands or millions of identical plastic parts—in this case, the scrubber’s plastic grip. As anyone who has tried to manufacture a product knows—and I can relate from my past venture making Frisbees from hemp-filled polypropylene where we had to borrow a mold—this tool is everything.
The problem is that creating these molds is a highly specialized craft. It requires a “Tool and Die Maker,” a master artisan who combines engineering knowledge with hands-on skill to machine steel blocks to microscopic tolerances. This process is incredibly time-consuming, often taking months, and costs tens of thousands of dollars.
More importantly, it’s a trade facing a severe skilled labor shortage. The master craftsmen of this trade are retiring, and for years, not enough new apprentices have been trained to replace them. This creates a massive bottleneck that holds back American innovation. You can have a brilliant idea, but if you can’t get a mold made in a timely and cost-effective manner, your project is dead in the water.
A Transformative Solution: Mantle 3D Prints the Future of Manufacturing
This is where the story takes a turn towards transformative technology. In his video, Destin highlights a company called Mantle, which is revolutionizing this old-world craft.
Instead of painstakingly machining a block of steel over months, Mantle uses a proprietary metal 3D printing technology to create complex, high-precision injection molds in a matter of days.
Here’s how Mantle’s technology directly addresses the challenges:
1. Solves the Skilled Labor Gap: It automates the most complex and time-consuming parts of mold making, reducing the reliance on a shrinking pool of artisans and empowering a new generation of digital-savvy technicians.
2. Drastic Speed Increase: Lead times for complex molds are cut from months to weeks, or even days. This allows companies to iterate on designs faster and get products to market at a speed that was previously unimaginable.
3. Reshoring Critical Infrastructure: By making mold production faster and more affordable, Mantle makes it economically viable to bring this crucial step of the manufacturing process back to the USA. This strengthens the domestic supply chain and reduces dependence on overseas toolmakers.
Conclusion: Fueling a New American Industrial Revolution
Destin Sandlin’s journey with the Smarter Scrubber is more than just a story about a BBQ tool. It’s a powerful lesson on the state of American manufacturing. It highlights the real-world hurdles but also illuminates a path forward.
Innovations like Mantle’s 3D-printed molds are not just incremental improvements; they are game-changers. They are the kind of transformative technology that can help rebuild our industrial base, not by trying to replicate the past, but by building a smarter, faster, and more agile future. It’s a story of ingenuity and optimism, proving that the spirit of American making is alive and well—it’s just being powered by new tools.