- Joined
- Feb 9, 2017
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- 2,377
To understand a bit better were we are coming from, perhaps you'd be interested to see 2 short videos where Wayne Conrad (our chief scientist) talks at Ignite event where young enterpreneurs were given awards for their innovations:
Enabling Local Distributed Manufacturing
Knowledge economy and core manufacturing
We (Omachron) are working hard to make sure that all this is not just popular sound bites, but that there is an actual very affordable equipment available to people, this equipment can be installed in their garage. In 2019 we will be introducing small injection molding, plastic extrusion and small CNC equipment. It is going to be a long path, but hopefully worth it.
Watched them both and they were still very general and had some great sound bites. But if this is mostly about selling new equipment I'm going to be disappointed. I was hoping the first step was going to start laying out the vision of distributed manufacturing through seeing who on this site can or want to make parts for the machines in the affordable equipment you want to do the process with. There are literally 1,000's of members with all kinds of machines and levels of experience and varying expertise. I've always seen this as an unharnessed potential just waiting for an open source local distributed manufacturing opportunity. Not everybody will be able or want to participate but it would be an interesting way to utilize those who want to. As long as it doesn't turn into some kind of Uber race to the bottom with people undercutting each other.
This way of manufacturing is in no way new. Lots of big manufacturers like GM, Ford, Chrysler etc had small companies making parts for them. Toyota early on had small shops that contracted for certain things. I was fascinated by how the Allies couldn't knock out the manufacture of the FW 190 in WWII because Kurt Tank, the engineer, designed it to be made in small shops by craftsmen like cabinet shops, auto plants, metal shops etc then assembled elsewhere. Unlike Messerschmitt which was made in centralized plants which the bombers were able find and bomb easily.
This is an exciting thing in concept. It's all going to be about the execution.