My family owns a decent sized commercial millwork shop, which is a little different from furniture mass production, and the title of this post made the actual content look ridiculously silly. Cool demonstration for a home brew project, but a long long long way to go before any sort of threat to furniture builders like IKEA. Why that project received a grant when everything about that demo is available in any furniture manufacturer, beats me. We have a broad variety of crazy CNC machinery for production of architectural wood products, all 100% custom. We don’t bother with IKEA tables because everything else is far more profitable combined with that we don’t have a viable path to selling 1,000,0000 cheap tables to be an IKEA
The advantage of the computer is not mass-production but mass customization. How about putting something like this in the big-box hardware stores? They will cut wood for you, but they will not make anything but simple straight cuts, and the cost per cut is high. I like to try to make things from wood, but I am a little too clumsy and accident-prone to want to do anything with power tools. If there was idiot-proof CAD on-line at the hardware store site where I could mess around with designs, see that everything fit together and came out OK in 3D, and then order the pieces by credit card, I'm in.
This is my dream as well: I’d love to have a system where I could do something like a simple aided Sketchup plywood model, pop down to the home mega center, and watch as my chosen grade of plywood was CNC / Laser cut into the shapes I’m looking for. I could imagine people doing custom dimension kitchen cabinets by refining a 3d model with some initial defaults.
I'm a little surprised Home Depot and Lowes haven’t already piloted something like this. Maybe the return on R&D is projected to be too low?
I think push it a little more consumer-friendly and have made to order furniture that you pick up locally. Completely customized at a normal price.
I believe this is where fashion will go. Items made specifically for the person wearing it (perfect fit every time) but at a cost of mid-level fashion because of advances in manufacturing.
