Headed to Italy, so lets take a quick look at its manufacturing economy.

The country is famous for cars and fashion, but the real story is a dense network of specialized manufacturers that punch above their weight in food tech, robotics, and tool and die.

A thread🧵 Italy’s edge is the industrial district model.

Clusters of small and mid sized firms focus on narrow niches and collaborate

Fast custom engineering, short supply lines, and deep craft sit next to modern CNC and automation.

A mill cert is the birth certificate for steel.

It tells you which melt the plate came from, what it is made of, and how it performed in basic tests. Without it, you are guessing.

Time for a mf material traceability thread 🧵 Each plate is poured as part of a heat.

The cert lists the heat number, grade and spec, chemistry like carbon and manganese, and mechanicals such as yield, tensile, and elongation. Some jobs also call out toughness or hardness.

Let's talk steel grades! Steel is not one material but a family tree

Picking the right branch comes down to strength, weldability, wear life, and price... which can swing significantly due to macro factors

A quick guide to the major categories 🧵 Low carbon structural (A36, mild) - The everyday workhorse

Easy to cut, weld, and form, it feeds construction frames, tank shells, and simple machine bases when cost outranks strength.

System thinking is key to optimizing shop floor performance.

Factory problems look random until you view the plant as a system of stocks, flows, and buffers. Once you map those, the math starts to show where hours and dollars leak out.

A thread 🧵 A while back I read Thinking in Systems: a Primer

Shortly after I saw discourse on here saying it doesn't give you enough info to do anything with.

This is partially true: I knew the next step was to dig deeper into the practice

Next week @reindsummit meets in Detroit, and the setting is no accident

Lake Michigan and the rest of the Great Lakes have powered American industry for 150 years and they are still a quiet engine behind any new hard tech revival.

A history thread 🧵 Start with iron.

In 1844 surveyors struck rich ore in Michigan’s Marquette Iron Range. By the 1850s ore was moving by rail to Lake Superior docks and soon into the lower lakes.

The Midwest industrial supply chain was established.