#the manifold grind never stops

[tobi-smp]

for the record, the other reason why I'll be bitter that the "dream torments tommy after escaping prison" plot line was left to fizzle and die for no good reason is because it was implied that jack and tommy were going to Finally get a reconciliation arc and I will never ever forgive them for what they took from me

[grimaussiewitch]

From what I’ve seen with the second ending hitting the dsmp Jack is a gambler and I love that. I don’t need anything else.

Clingduo live together and there’s a sheep (maybe??)? Nah, the manifold grind never stops at the casino.

Good for him.

[seat-safety-switch]

When you’re hungry, you shouldn’t force yourself to keep working. Our bodies have been tuned by millions of years of evolution to prioritize getting something to eat over whatever little weird thing we’re grinding out this evening in our ramshackle, corrugated-steel shed on the side of a major freeway. Don’t ignore it: go eat, and come back to the job refreshed.

I live my own advice, a habit which my attorney and parole officer suggest that I discard. When I was recently working on welding a Ford 9″ solid rear axle into the carcass of a 1968 Corvette birdhouse, so that it could accept the torque from a Triton V10 that “fell out of” a motorhome that got abandoned at the truck stop near my house, I felt hungry. And I stopped working, so I could go eat that food.

There is, of course, a problem. My ramshackle, corrugated-steel work shed is on the side of a major freeway. Although I live in a city that is becoming “walkable,” in practice that actually means that the bars nearby now serve craft beer. I still have to walk 35 minutes across two busy expressways and through a burned-out industrial yard to reach them, much less a Burger King. And let’s be honest, the car I used to get here is not taking me anywhere, until I finish working on it.

Sound familiar? I bet it does. Don’t worry. Where there’s opportunity, there’s an opportunity to make the problem worse. You see, in my shed, I have access to an old South Bend lathe. It spins really fast, and sometimes really slow, and it helps me to cut metal for, say, a replacement chunk of my control arm that fell off trying to merge onto Main Street the other day. What I don’t have access to, as I said previously, is food.

Or at least, not, like, good food. Sure, anyone can bang together a grilled cheese sandwich on a hot exhaust manifold. I was in the mood for something gourmet. Something exotic. Maybe donair, Canada’s favourite adopted food that is of indeterminate ethnic origin? The closest place for that is at my local mall, which was bulldozed into nothingness around 2018. No, I’m going to have to make it myself. From the garage deep freeze came a chunk of frozen, spiced ground beef, and I began to turn it on the lathe, slowly peeling off intricate, delicious shavings. Donair, at home: the impossible dream, and all it cost me was several thousand dollars of industrial equipment, which hopefully nobody notices is missing any time soon.

Now if only I had thought far enough ahead to buy some pitas, but hey - I’m pretty sure this sleeve of Wonder Bread from the 80s will never go bad.

[anachronistic-falsehood]

even if cellbit isn’t in ourgatory i will have won because jack fuckijg manifold is here THE JACK MANIFOLD GRIND NEVER STOPS

[vpofcookies]

I opened a jack manifold video by accident and my computer crashed but the audio is still playing. The jack manifold grind really never stops

[iminyourbookshelf]

I need to ask- What was the other six worst things to happen to those orphans?? D:

The first is obvious, the second was Techno, and if you were the ninth, there's six left-

Great question, the list is actually quite simple

1. The obvious, they weren't ALWAYS orphans

2. Technoblade

3. Mr. Technodad

4. The microwave. (Someone on reddit cooked them in there without the proper seasoning)

5. The fact that they're an orphan and still aren't batman smh

6. The endless expansive void ever approaching any orphanage, the fog is coming and no child can stop it the void is eternal-

7. That Jack Manifold Grind™

8. Philza Minecraft being forced to adopt them and giving them more parental issues

9. And then yours truly :D (they'll never take me alive)

[codecicle]

Voting for Jack Manifold in the sexyman tournament physically hurt me btw. Like im never going to recover from this day. I'm sorry niki, I love you, you're amazing, and probably going to win but he is just SO pathetic. Literal wet cat of a man. The Jack Manifold grind never stops what is a little guy to do in these trying times.

[mommaboyhalo]

I NEVER STOP THAT JACK MANIFOLD GRIND

[montgomeryzuma]

Hey! My job!

I'm a mould maker, out of Windsor Ontario!

That chair mold is a fairly simple one, no hydraulics, no ejection system, no water manifolds, even the injection looks like a cold sprue, which is an unheated tube, essentially.

The moulds I work on are almost exclusively for the auto industry, things like headlight assemblies, dashboard components, bits for the engine bay, etc.

The cost for these molds can be anywhere from $50,000 to $500,000, and for the larger molds for what we call fascias, which can get as big as 150,000 lbs, up to a million dollars.

There molds are complicated systems, with moving plates that have pins and lifters to push the finished plastic out for workers or robots to grab (these plates can be operated mechanically, using pistons in the press, or with hydraulic systems), sliding blocks to make up details in the plastic that have undercuts, and large, complex injection manifolds, with heating elements and hydraulic or pneumatic piston systems.

Some of these manifolds can inject multiple types of plastic! And multiple colours!

Some moulds can be even more complicated, with halves that rotate to make different details from different materials.

All of these components have to function flawlessly, and cannot allow plastic to leak anywhere during the moulding process. This involves spending days (for very small moulds), or weeks (for large ones), or even months (for huge ones, like fascias) grinding steel or aluminum or bronze to ensure a perfect fit. Lifters, slides, then the entire parting line (the outside edge where the plastic stops) all need to be spotted (the fitting process).

Once it's all fit together, then the handwork process can be done, which involves sanding, stoning, and polishing almost entirely by hand. Some mould shops have in-house polishers, many outsource the work to dedicated finishing shops.

Then, the dimensions are double-checked through a process called CMM, which I've never been involved with and can't really inform on, beyond it uses tiny probes (or lasers) and computer programs.

Then tryouts, to make sure the mould functions correctly, no leaks, no defects in the plastic, no issues with the injection manifold, etc. Most jobs need two or three tryouts, tops, to get all the kinks out, but we've had a couple jobs that had more than ten. I hated that customer. Constant engineering changes.

Sometimes, the part being made requires a texture like a pebbling or gritty kind of texture. This happens after everything else has been done, including polishing, and can be done through sandblasting or acid etching.

None of this could be done without our beloved (accursed) CNC machinist, manual mill operators, and designers, all of which do months of work getting the metal to the mould makers.

The ejection system, with it's plates, pins, and lifters, is on the left. The injection system, which you can't really see, is on the right.

This is the core, with the ejection etc. Those four small blocks with the brass pieces on either side are slides.

The cavity, with the injection system! The moulding surface is polished to a mirror finish, what's called an A1 finish. You can't really tell, because there's a protective spray on it. High polishes like this can be scratched by your fingernails, paper towel, or dust.

These jobs are complex, occasionally delicate, and expensive. But they make almost everything we use as a civilization.

Even metal pieces! They usually use dies and stamping presses, but these are made as similar mechanisms, though with way less work involved, as there's rarely concern for leaks.

I think a lot about manufacturing processes because they’re the most impressive things humanity has ever done and injection moulding wacks me out the most. I was looking at the toy keyboard I bought a while back and it got me thinking about how much of what we consider to be the look of The Modern Era is down to injection moulding.

I hold that injection moulding is one of the pillars of modern society and technology. Can you imagine a world where you couldn’t use injection moulding. It’d look completely foreign. Like looking into an alien world. When you consider it you have to conclude that injection moulding has shaped our culture as much as the development of the camera or the invention of the piano or the creation of glassblowing. If archaeologists had to name our culture in the style of the Corded Ware culture or the Funnel Beaker culture, we’d be the Injection Moulded Plastic culture.

Injection moulding is how we get, oh, almost every plastic thing you’ve ever seen. The keys on your keyboard are injection moulded. Your phone case is injection moulded. Unless you’ve got a fancy milled metal laptop like a macbook then your laptop’s chassis is mostly injection moulded plastic. Your lightswitches are injection moulded. Plastic water bottles are injection moulded. Injection moulding is how we can produce extremely similar objects at breakneck pace for almost no money.

Now it’s important to rememeber that injection moulding isn’t cheap, or, well, injection moulding is only cheap for mass production. Every single unique piece of plastic needs a mould, and each mould will cost somewhere around thousands to tens of thousands of dollars EACH, depending on how tight the tolerances are and how complex the geometry is. Look at how many unique plastic pieces there are on that keyboard. Each one represents an investment of like $7000 into making this toy that gets sold for about $20, so there’s no way this would get made unless the company had plans to sell literally hundreds of thousands of these things.

(This mould can spit out one chair every 30 seconds and it probably cost twenty thousand dollars to make)

Once you learn to see injection moulding you can’t unsee it. It’s like learning about kerning, or musical intervals, or disability compliant designs, or the pantone colours, or about how many insulator disks are needed on different voltage power lines. You start to see it everywhere, you realise that everything in your life relies upon our ability to jam plastic through a heated screw and into a mould reliably, hundreds of times per day, all day, every day.

Unless you’re wandering alone in the wilderness (and even then, maybe: check your clothing), look around and see if there’s something injection moulded near you. I can tell you the answer, there definitely is. It’s inescapable.

What would a world without injection moulded parts look like? It’d be weird. Everything we think of as cheap and easy to make is suddenly expensive. Complex curves and slopes like you’d find on a one dollar potato peeler now require hours of work to form. Every budget consumer item would be like those cheap sheet metal PC cases that have drawn blood from everyone who build a PC in them. Everything now has the aesthetics of a Sun 3/280 system:

Heck, even this sheet steel cube has a dozen injection moulded parts visible.

All the chunky plastic housing of the 90′s and 2000′s, all the sleek curves of the 2010′s, all the cheap plastic knick-knacks, the plastic toy horses, the snugly-fitting appliance chassis, the stacking plastic chairs. All these things now cost ten times as much and have to be formed from heavy steel, or milled out of chunks of cast plastic, or replaced with formed sheet metal.

Our culture, artistic sensibilities, and sense of value has been irrevocably shaped by our ability to squeeze liquid plastic into a metal die.

[ghosted-jazz]

I will be known as fear

[helpicant-stop]

fun fact when frozen came out there was a halloween contest at a mall near us and i wanted to go as elsa. my mom was like "no, everyone else will go as elsa and you won't win. go as anna instead" but i insisted so she was like UGH FINE and bought the costume (that shit was itchy as hell btw). so the day comes and when we roll up to the venue there are like. i fucking kid you not . 4 or 5 annas there, and i was the only elsa. i ended up winning 1st place. there's some kind of moral or symbolism here i think but i'm not smart enough for that. also the prize was like a single bar of chocolate and it tasted fucking awesome

[tobi-smp]

JACK MANIFOLD MY LIFE IS YOURS

Tobi c!tommy lore in 2024

there's Huh ?????

[bronzetomatoes]

My stomach hurts so bad that I feel like I'm gonna throw up but at least tommy is live

[conmansart]

Jack manifold

Jack maniwig!!!!!!???

[cinaminrolll]

i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again: jack manifold is criminally underrated

[quillcalamity]

THAT’S MY FUCKING STREAMER GUYS!

Jack is live!

He tweeted about it!