ever watch How It's Made on the Science Channel...

..and just want to yell at that narrator guy?

they have a series of How It's Made that shows how super cars are made... was just watching one about the Ginetta G40 (which i had never heard of until seeing it on tv)...

they showed them putting the engine together.. says "technician installs roller bearings on the ends of the camshaft tubes" as the guy is putting an end seal on... then "technician precision torques fasteners on camshaft hold downs" as the guy is snugging them down with a cordless impact driver.. "technician installs exhaust manifold" as guy bolts up intake manifold with individual throttle bodies and injectors... and on and on and on..

and that's just the stuff that the narrator got wrong, i noticed a couple of pretty glaring safety concerns in the car itself.. the biggest being that they put the rally car style gussets on the roll cage tubes of the chassis when it was just tacked together, so there were large parts of the joints that were only tacked under the gusset, which was itself merely tacked to the cage.. i figured it was just something they did for the camera, but nope, you could see the same tacks after the rest of the chassis was fully welded.

I was watching the same thing and keeping my rage inside. I don't know how much more of my yelling about technicalities on TV my wife can take. The "torque force" comment for yet more impact driver precision really got me.

Yeah, the ultimate factories for the Ferrari 458 and Corvette C6 got me the same way. Narration didn't match the footage more than a few times and there were a couple other things I rememeber being annoyed about.

I enjoyed the ones of the Caterham and Morgan 3 wheeler.

i'd probably enjoy those shows more if i was their target demo: people that never actually get to see how things are actually made in their day to day lives..

the thing that annoys me the most is when he says someone doing something is a "technician"... that's a word that i have never heard in my 20 years as part of the work force.

Dude, chill. It's a show that normally shows how wooden spoons, cardboard boxes and panty hose are made in a 7 minute clip. Can't expect them to get technically accurate in building a super car. At least they didn't call the engine a transmission.

I have to admit that one night a few years back I was really sick and couldn't sleep. There was nothing on TV at 2am and I wound up watching 3 or 4 episodes of the show. Now I know how thumb drives are made...so if I ever get on Jeopardy I may have one more piece of useless information I can answer.

The narrator just reads a script into a microphone. The editors splice the b-roll footage into a segment and pair it with audio snippets. Lots of opportunity for errors because no one on the production staff is an expert in everything they cover.

It's better than the crap my wife wants me to watch with her; Property Brothers, House Hunters, Ina Gardner Cooking.....

I had a friend that had a Ginetta. Passing on a double yellow, over the crest of hill - or so the story goes - head on into an Impala. My friend is no more.

I noticed the errors in Ginetta episode too, pretty embarrassing. They could have at least shown a rough cut to the Ginetta people for corrections. For the Caterham, Morgan and Pagani episodes they did pretty well. I just wish they'd lay off the cheesy metal music. I ended up watching most of the other one's on mute just because of it.

I really like the regular episodes. I watch them pretty regularly with my 4 year old daughter, she asks to see it! It makes me proud.

nderwater wrote: The narrator just reads a script into a microphone. The editors splice the b-roll footage into a segment and pair it with audio snippets. Lots of opportunity for errors because no one on the production staff is an expert in everything they cover.

it's the Science Channel, they are supposed to be factual.. it aint too hard to get this stuff right- maybe show the rough cut to the people at the company that they were at to make sure they had things mostly right. or ask the "car guy" on the production team to watch it and look for any glaring errors... someone should have caught the intake manifold thing when they showed them putting the airbox with an air cleaner element- complete with narration- onto the "exhaust manifold" that they had just showed getting installed 10 seconds earlier..

I have a friend who used to be a producer for the Science Channel. He and many people who work with him didn't have a very high opinion of "How It's Made". The Science Channel does not produce the show, they buy it from the producers. It costs ~1/2 what other shows do and it also gets fairly decent ratings so it has remained around long past the time it should have been dropped.