Como é fabricada a RÉGUA! #Boravê

How do we know that 1 cm on the ruler is actually 1 cm? And there’s more: Why isn’t the 30 cm ruler exactly 30 cm? There’s a niece here at the ends. And more: why does she have this hole? To discover all this, we even visit the MaxCrill factory in Diadema, in greater São Paulo. Today you will discover how a ruler is made. Do you want to see? Start with the material that is polystyrene. It arrives here at the factory in these 25 kg bags in the form of grains or pellets. Polystyrene is a plastic that is the same as Styrofoam. It is widely used in industry because it is very flexible and resistant. To become a ruler, the polystyrene enters this machine, which is an injection molding machine. Then the plastic goes down this funnel. It will be melted at a temperature of around 250ºC. Then a screw pushes the plastic into a mold. The injection molding machine can manufacture eight rulers at the same time. Once the plastic hardens, a robot uses a vacuum to remove it from the machine and restart the cycle. The process is very quick, lasts about 30 seconds and the ruler comes out hot, hot. We asked them to inject the plastic outside the mold. Look at this crazy thing. Here we can see that it comes out very hot. After stirring, it looks like gum. It takes a long time to cool down. And that’s why this machine has a whole cooling system, a kind of refrigerator that passes water through the mold so that we can quickly remove the ruler. So now that’s it, right? Just pack this ruler? No, it doesn’t have an appointment. And here comes a part that is not as simple as it seems. When the ruler comes out of the injector, it is hot and throughout the day it decreases, it becomes smaller and smaller. If you make the mark on the ruler now that it has just come out, the ruler will shrink and you will have the mark all wrong. 1 cm will be 0.9 more or less. So what they do here is leave the ruler resting for 24 hours and only mark it the next day. And that’s why the ruler isn’t exactly 30 cm. There’s always a little left over. It’s a margin of error. No one knows exactly what the final size of the ruler will be because it depends on the temperature of the day it was manufactured. This varies a little depending on the raw material. So, the safest thing is to print on the ruler after it has cooled down and leave a little left over. Another material they use here is recycled pet. Look how cool. You pick up this ruler and it’s hard to imagine that it was once a soda bottle. When it is a product that is not transparent, they mix the styrene with a little bit of dye in a concrete mixer. Each product has an exact amount of dye. And of course it’s not just a ruler. With the same technology, you can make a square, protractor, drawing kit, templates, letter box and even a drawing board. The amount of dye that goes into it is minimal. It’s difficult for you to look at what’s in my hand and imagine that a clipboard of this color will come out here. The interesting thing here in the material room is that there are several products that had some problems and such. They come here, get crushed and go back to the publisher again. Nothing wasted. The most important part to guarantee the quality of the ruler is this one. It’s the mold that goes inside the injection molding machine that was difficult to see in the machine, which they opened in the maintenance room. And we can see that the place where the plastic is injected is extremely smooth. And here there is a path that the hot plastic will follow until it reaches the hole, the space made to be filled by it and form the ruler. One of the reasons this part is so precise is that one goes in front of the other and then the plastic is injected with a lot of pressure and it cannot leak into the boundary between the two pieces and at the same time the mold cannot deform with the pressure. So this is pretty much massive. This entire piece here weighs about half a ton. But how are we going to mark it knowing that it is exactly 30 cm? To make a ruler, do we need another ruler? Yes, this one is the mother of them all. It is a calibrated steel ruler. Its measurement is even valid. And after a batch is made, it is brought here to see if the numbers match up. Do the numbers on the plastic ruler exactly match this? It’s perfect. Now, if this one is the mother ruler of all, who is her mother? Do you need a ruler to make all the other rulers? Yes, there is this mother of all rulers, but she is already retired. At the end of the 17th century, almost 1800, France decided that it needed to standardize the units of measurement. It was a mess, there were a lot of traders fighting because they didn’t understand each other. For example, there was a measurement that was the foot, but the Neapolitan foot measured 26.35 cm, while the British foot was 30.48 cm. The French foot 32.48. So let’s go there. Let’s make a measure that can be used internationally by everyone and that is based on nature. How about we take the distance from the North Pole to the Equator and divide it by 10 million? And that’s what they did. They measured very precisely. And in 1799 the meter was defined. If you take 10 million meters, you get from the Equator to the North Pole. And that’s when the first official ruler appeared. They cut a platinum bar and everyone who wanted to make a ruler had to go there and use that ruler. But it took a long time to convince other people to use this measure. To give you an idea, it was only in 1875 that the metro convention was held, where 17 countries signed a treaty that they would officially use the metro. As you may have imagined, right, our Brazil… You imagined it wrong! Brazil is one of the 17 countries that signed the metro convention. And it was also at that time that they made another platinum ruler, this time with a little iridium, which is another metal, which was much more precise, and they distributed copies to several countries. The problem is that measurements improved over time and people realized that having a physical ruler like that was not the best option. It dilates, if you look microscopically, it is not so perfect. Until in 1960 they decided that the meter was no longer that ruler, it was a fraction of the reaction of the chemical element krypton. It’s much more complicated, but also much more accurate. This lasted for a short time, only until 1986, when they decided that the meter would then be the distance covered by the speed of light in a vacuum during 1 second, divided by 299,792,458. It may seem very complicated, but I think it was much more complicated to measure the distance from the North Pole to the Equator in 1799. But anyway, this measure is the standard rule that we have today. We only find platinum bars in museums. Now we can mark the millimeters on the ruler. I imagined it was an inkjet printer, something like that, but no. It’s much cooler than that. The technique here is called pad printing. There is a metal on which markings are engraved, as if it were corrosion on steel. Then the machine applies paint over it, the paint will only stick to the place where the steel has been corroded. Then a giant eraser comes, takes that paint and takes it to the ruler. It’s all done automatically to ensure the accuracy of the millimeters that are being engraved there. It’s time to pack. Each one is placed individually in plastic with great care, because one thing that cannot happen here is scratching the ruler. It has to arrive perfect in the hands of whoever is going to use it. Here in Diadema, they produce up to 100,000 rulers per day. The hole needed to be explained. In the past, in a workshop it was normal to put a nail in the wooden wall and hang the ruler. In the World manual we did this for a long time and nowadays it is no longer used as much, but the little hole remained. Some more modern rulers, like this one, no longer have the hole. And it has another thing, it has a kind of groove, which we can put our finger in and hold the ruler more firmly. And I had never thought about it myself, I had always seen this thing on the ruler and imagined, I don’t know, that it was to make it stronger. If you also discovered this now, I think it’s worth a thumbs up, huh? If you’re in the mood for watching these school supplies videos, one of the coolest is how pencils are made. We went to the biggest pencil factory in the world. It turned out very cool. Y