For two years, Wyatt Curry has set his sights on the $100,000 prize in “Clash of Trades,” a YouTube reality show that features aspiring machinists and welders racing the clock, and each other, to fabricate complex mechanical parts.
It wasn’t really about the money.
“I wanted to prove something,” said Mr. Curry, a 22-year-old community college student. “I knew I was good at what I did, but I wanted something to show it.”
“Clash of Trades” uses sports-style competitions, big financial prizes and an addiction to reality TV to boost the appeal of the skilled trades at a time when American manufacturers consistently say one of their top challenges is finding capable workers.
At a time when popular shows celebrate bakers who make cakes that look like tennis balls and fashion designers who weep at their sewing machines, the producers of “Clash of Trades” believe that machinists and welders deserve to be celebrated too.
The show is the brainchild of Adele Ratcliff, former director of the Defense Department’s Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment program, who worried that the country was running dangerously low on workers who can build and maintain ships, submarines and planes.
After decades of sending factories overseas — and telling Americans that their role was to design products, while other countries would build them — “Clash of Trades” is part of a wider cultural and political shift focused on bringing manufacturing back to U.S. soil. But convincing young people to dream of being machinists and welders, and not just engineers, isn’t easy.
Ms. Ratcliff came up with the idea for the show in 2018, according to Ray Dick, a former federal contractor who used to brainstorm with her about work force development.
“She wanted a ‘Top Chef’-style competition for manufacturing,” he recalled. “She said, ‘I want to give them a list of ingredients and see what they can make.’”
In 2019, with Ms. Ratcliff’s help, Mr. Dick founded Project MFG, which hosts competitions in welding, machining and 3-D printing for students at community colleges and high schools across the country, and films them for the show. The U.S. military sponsors the project, alongside a foundation affiliated with Haas Automation, which makes computer numerical control machines for precise cutting and drilling and Mastercam, which sells the software that controls them.
This year, on the show’s fifth season, hundreds of students from 60 schools duked it out to get to regional competitions that produced four finalists. They went to the national championship, which will be aired on Friday. Teams had to produce components for an apparatus called a gimbal that could be used to help collect data in space. (Last year, they made a part for a racecar.)
Each team had 20 hours to manufacture the part. A panel of three judges scored teams on the accuracy of their parts, the time it took to make them, and cost of the materials and labor used. Teams started with metal blocks and were required to use special programmable machines to carve them and drill holes into them.
In some ways, “Clash of Trades” follows the formula of popular reality shows: tense music, a countdown clock and shots of competitors with their arms folded, looking formidable. But there’s far less intrigue, drama and back story to work with. There are a lot of scenes of stoic students in safety glasses peering through the bulletproof glass of computerized machines at robotic arms carving up blocks of metal. Moments of tension — a tool breaking, a machine crashing, erroneous code — are easy to miss, even with judges providing sports-bench style commentary.
“Our main goal is to broaden the audience,” said the executive producer, Mike Woodward, who landed the job after working with “America Ninja Warrior” and the “Amazing Race.”
They pitched the show to television executives, but so far none have acquired it. The season five trailer has about 11,000 views, yet some episodes have less than 1,000. It’s not clear that the show has managed to make manufacturing cool on campus.
“I have yet to find someone that knows that it exists,” said Mr. Curry, a student at Yuba College, in Marysville, Calif., about 40 miles north of Sacramento.
And yet, inside the subculture of people who are already obsessed with manufacturing, “Clash of Trades” offers validation, money and fame.
“If I walk into a school or a manufacturing trade show, it is eerie how some people know me and I don’t know them,” said Jesse Trinque, a Mastercam engineer who hosted the show this year.
The prize money is split among the schools and the individual team members, providing a significant draw for both students and their instructors.
Winning first place on “Clash of Trades” in 2022 helped Southwestern Illinois College in Belleville, Ill., boost enrollment and win support to construct a second building for its precision machining program. And in Washington State, there has been a waiting list for the Everett Community College Advanced Manufacturing Training & Education Center since its team placed fourth in “Clash of Trades” last year. The program had struggled with low enrollment.
Joe Bauer, a professor of manufacturing technology at Yuba College, described competing on the show this year as “the coolest thing we’ve ever done.” He said the show was important because it exposed students to well-paid jobs they could get with little student debt.
“Very few people know what a machinist is,” he said. But companies are always calling him looking for students to hire. “My phone rings constantly.”
The mean annual wage for a machinist was $56,150, according to 2023 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those working in certain industries, such as electric power generation, earned an average of $109,990. Mr. Bauer wanted the prize money to build up the program and repair broken machines, he said.
His star student, Mr. Curry, had another motivation: winning was a chance to show his father that his chosen career wasn’t a dead end. The elder Mr. Curry, a network manager at a financial institution, wanted his son to become an engineer. Mr. Curry didn’t want to sit behind a desk. After high school, he worked briefly as a roofer. Then he enrolled in a welding class at Yuba.
Last year, he participated in “Clash of Trades” as a welder and made it to regionals. But his teammate made a mistake programming a machine. It drilled a hole in the wrong place, ruining the part, and their chances at winning.
This year, Mr. Curry took no chances. He enrolled in an advanced manufacturing class, became the team’s leader and learned to program the machines himself. He was exceptional at it, Mr. Bauer said.
Mr. Curry raced through the curriculum, weeks ahead of schedule, and asked for extra work. When other beginning students were still programming their machines to cut aluminum, he had already moved onto cutting stainless steel alloys, which were far more difficult. As his classmates were still learning to program a 3-axis machine, he studied the manual for the school’s new 5-axis machine, which Mr. Bauer himself was still learning to use. In online forums, Mr. Curry learned about an advanced method of controlling the motion of the machine tools to make them run faster and more accurately.
On Friday nights, when other students were watching movies or headed to bars, Mr. Curry, Mr. Bauer and his two teammates, Adam Davis and Phoenix Farrell, stayed late in the lab, practicing. This year, Yuba blew away the competition.
Mr. Curry’s team finished so early that the show’s executive producer worried that they skipped a step and would have to be disqualified. But (spoiler alert) no other team came close. Central Alabama Community College won second place and $50,000 after a problem with a tool forced them to restart the same part twice. Autry Technology Center in Enid, Okla., took third place, and $25,000, after breaking a drill bit. Everett landed in fourth, and received $10,000, after running out of time to complete the part.
Mr. Curry’s father, Jason Curry, was proud of Yuba’s first-place win.
“I don’t want to downplay the achievements,” he said. Still, he said he hoped that his son “would be a great engineer one day.”
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