The German originals,
British flimsies
US made inferior copies
Faithful British copies.
Why the US made copy was sub standard
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Note that the thumbnail for the video is AI-generated â look at the US fuel can on the right, and it doesnât have any way to fill or empty it â thereâs no filler cap. The video glosses over some of the details of the evolution â Pleiss was a manager for ABP, the company that was making the Wehrmacht-Einheitskanisteren, and left Germany with a German friend who was also an engineer at the company; the friend scavenged several of the Jerry cans from where they were in storage so they would have something to keep emergency water in (and supposedly gave Pleiss detailed documents regarding the specifications of the Jerry can) and together they drove to India before Göring sent a plane to bring the German engineer back. Pleiss continued to Calcutta, put the car into storage, and returned to the US; after being unable to interest the War Department in the plans he had, he arranged to have his car shipped back to the US, still with the cans inside, and went around, first to the US War Department, then to the British equivalent, getting ânot invented hereâ attitudes from both, even though at the time British troops were eagerly scavenging all the Jerry cans they could get from captured German equipment because they were so much more durable than their own âflimsiesâ.
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Ah yes, everything was better until the Americans ruined it. 
Pig-headedness explains everything, always. Thereâs no need to consider the various manufacturing methods available in different countries, the need to change designs to utilize available manufacturing capacities, shipping space for a global war, material scarcity during wartime, or anything else.
By the way, did you know German tanks were much better than the American Sherman? If it wasnât for the Americans making so many of them and making them so reliable, Germany wouldâve won the war.
Did you know that the Americans spent millions of dollars developing pressurized ink pens for use in space? The Soviets were so much smarter because they just used pencils! Now, the Americans used pencils originally, but found that in zero gravity the graphite particles from writing and erasing floated into the electronics and caused short circuits, but if the Americans didnât have so much money and technical capability to spare to make ink pens the Russians wouldâve gotten to the moon first. Americans are so dumb . . .
Sigh.
Itâs interesting to note that the American design for metal fuel and water cans - despite being so obviously and demonstrably awful - was kept the same with welded seams all the way up until the 1970s when they were replaced by plastic cans. One would think that if the design was so bad they wouldâve changed it, if not during the war but in the 1950s or 1960s.
âWell, they didnât change it because Americans are so dumb. Everybody knows that.â
KL
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Which manufacturing methods would that be in this case?
Shippping space would be equal.
Material scarcity would be more or less equal, the internal lining might be an issue.
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The equipment that can roll the peripheral seam that the Germans used may not be available in the quantities required over here, but a seam welding capability might. Then just get more machines! Considering that machine production was prioritized and rationed, and the machine tools used to make the production machines was prioritized and rationed, it was not at all easy.
Shipping space would be the same for a finished can, but not for flat steel stock to make cans. Much steel was sent to the UK. Now whether they made their design or ours was unknown to me, but sorting out the capabilities on two continents also affected the design. It wasnât just a matter of telling the UK manufacturers, âHereâs some steel. Please make three times you current capacity immediately. Thank you.â There likely had to be new suppliers developed.
The steel optimized for stamping and that optimized for welding are different alloys. The different alloys may be made at different plants and require different alloying materials and possibly different steel-making processes.
People today cannot comprehend how massive an undertaking it was to organize the US economy into a productive (if not efficient) system on a war footing. Every decision affected everything else. All manner of new equipment was abandoned because no metal or machines or workers or natural gas was available to make it. Proven designs were abandoned because they could not be made in the quantities needed. Itâs quite easy to âMonday Morning Quarterbackâ 50 or 80 years after the fact, though.
I come back to this: If the design was so awful - resulting in gasoline leaking all over everything, in every place, all the time, why wasnât it changed for 30 years? Practically every other piece of WW II equipment was replaced by 1960, but not this. I suspect that some cans made during the production ramp up or by some of the suppliers brought in to increase production had problems, but the problems were solved or the companies dropped and things turned out OK.
Thereâs a parallel tale about how American Bailey bridges were so badly made that they wouldnât fit with British ones and had to be kept separate. Stupid Americans.
Huh. The first step to examine this is to ask, If the US bridges were so poorly dimensioned and built, how were they able to assemble with each other and work? Wouldnât mislocated and mis-sized holes prevent the US bridges from being assembled altogether? Maybe there is more to the story . . .
KL
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Umm, I think you lost me there.
The German cans were two stamped halves that were welded together, the weld seam was recessed to make the sides âsmoothâ.
Would the tools to bend the edges into a curve for welding be the problem?
British documentary showing the production of US style cans in Britain.
Sheet stock was turned into cans by rolling AND welding.
I wonder how official that nickname, Ameri-cans, was?
Production machinery shipped in from the US
The welding method looks very efficient. The cans were pressure tested afterwards.
I presume that those made in Britain were intended for the European theater and those destined for the Pacific were produced in the US.
Britain also made copies of the German design:
Post nr 3 in this discussion contains some interesting statements:
https://www.warrelics.eu/forum/attic-old-barn-finds/ww2-u-s-willys-gas-can-16506/
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Is that Matthew McConaughey? in that opening shot? ⊠I just canât with all the AI slop content taking over youtube and other places.
Just wait until it gets so good that it is hard to detect âŠ