There's an obsession to own your own factory - which certainly is sexy, but this plan is pretty naive to anyone in manufacturing. If you want to prototype something - there are hackerspaces* and even TechShop - the later investing $8M and they definitely couldn't make all the systems for a car.
You can't ignore poor process fit - I.e. have fun using a MIG machine to weld your car together from sheet metal cheaper than GM can stamp it out. And you can't ignore raw materials - have fun casting your engine block from metal cans without any alloying tools / testing.
In reality, local production of many things (cars) won't work with today's tools, and a real mix of general purpose local shops and standardized / accessible large ones is the real "Industry 2.0" path.
>In reality, local production of many things (cars) won't work with today's tools, and a real mix of general purpose local shops and standardized / accessible large ones is the real "Industry 2.0" path.
Assuming I won/t the same car GM is stamping out, they can beat me.
But what I want is a flying car and an 10.1 inch Android tablet, both of which are things nobody currently produces.
And tools only improve, so at some point we can defeat the empty leftovers of the industrialized age.
I'm not arguing against building unique things industry doesn't / won't make. I'm saying that it's more realistic to better coordinate existing production than try to invent some small scale / limited way of doing so. Have fun making a capacitive screen with that equipment list... ;-)
I don't want to be able to make my own '83 Pinto, or to have the success or failure of my general purpose manufacturing tools to be judged on whether it's capable of producing an identical copy of an Aston Martin DB9.
I wonder how far away from being able to produce all the custom components needed to build a vehicle that'd run me round my neighbourhood in reasonable safety running off biodeisel with reasonable efficiency?
I've been playing around in robotics for 25 years, and one of the things that is just as true today as it was in 1985 is that for some mechanical parts, motors, gears, and other linkages, there isn't any 'there' there. And so the ability to manufacture small lots of things is appealing on a variety of scales. That being said, I suspect this particular effort, like those before it, won't come to fruition. The reason is that manufacturing, while easy to comprehend, is insanely complex at the nuts and bolts level.
That being said I would love to see this be successful, I've got a simple idea for a widget and if I could get some time in a factory to make a few thousand of the structural bits to keep the costs down, I think I'd have a nice little niche product. While I'm sure I could get it done in China, I'm not interested in spending the time to learn the way to correctly bribe the necessary people to get the product I want.
Another risk of this capability is weapons production. Making guns is actually pretty easy (the California prison population displays great creativity in this area). So if you create a capability to make small quantities of 'hard metal' products I would expect that you would be visited often by folks who would want to insure you're not tempted to become profitable the 'easy' way.
I hope it works though, it would be great to have a field of small factories bloom.
As for the idea, ehhhh. Obviously, companies have powerful incentives to reduce the price of manufacturing facilities, and yet they still cost millions of dollars.
Poor nations are not poor because the tools aren't cheap enough, but because of official corruption, or uncontrolled nationalization, or because the state can't maintain a monopoly on violence.
If they actually pull it off, it would be great, and might have some actual commercial applications, (like how the OLPC project resulted in the creation of the netbook concept, despite the OLPC itself being quite useless) but the stated use case just doesn't exist.
The kids in Paraguay don't seem to think the OLPC is useless; although obviously the OLPC project has failed to achieve anything like its original goals, it's still producing things people want.
Side note but: I've always thought that this kind of technology rather than rockets/spacecraft is the limiting factor preventing us from being able to realistically colonize another planet.
When you got to Mars, the Moon, etc., you'd have to be able to unpack and set up a reliable self-sustaining industrial infrastructure.
Yea, I think you're right. You need a real version of a GECK* really. A lot of this is a material science problem I think - making the Martian soil into some type of metal / ceramic building material using just solar / nuclear energy.
Their claim, "described best by Jane Jacobs, who claims that the highest level of evolution (like Maslow’s Pyramid) for cities - is for those cities to return to local production (import substitution)." is false. Jane Jacobs described import replacing as a stage from importing to exporting. It keeps capital in the city by not using as much of it for imports, while developing manufacturing skills suitable for producing exports. Also, as she points out, it just changes the makeup of imports, you import the raw materials instead of the finished items.
Microfactories are a neat idea for several reasons, there is no need to misrepresent their benefits. I have been playing around with the idea since the late 1980s, the technology still has a good ways to go before it is practical though.
I think Marcin and his crew are doing fantastic work, and their simple, low-cost designs could make a real difference, especially in the case of places that are poorly served by current mass manufacturing.
One thing that some may not appreciate is that a local micro-factory doesn't have to run cheaper than, say, GM's body panel stamping machines in order to be economically beneficial.
To be concrete, consider the case where you need a certain screw. The screw that holds the left wheel of your push lawnmower on, which fell out in the grass somewhere. It needs to be a countersunk head to fit, and it has a much narrower thread pitch than most screws that size. None of the hardware stores in your area carry any screws in the right diameter and thread pitch, let alone a countersunk head. What do you do?
Well, at the time, I lived in Dayton, Ohio, one of the machining centers of the world. So I went across town to a company that manufactured screws and spent about US$5 to buy a pound of the right kind of screw (I think it was about half an inch diameter and half an inch long, with a humongous countersunk head). Here in Buenos Aires, I imagine I'd just be screwed.
Now, I don't know what kind of process you use to manufacture a big machine screw like that. Do you cold-roll the threads, or do you cut them with a die from a cold-forged blank cut from bar stock, or what? I'm sure that, whatever it is, it isn't cutting it out on a lathe, or they'd be sold by the screw, not by the pound.
But you can cut one on a lathe, except for the slot in the head, of course. If my local hardware store had had a fully automatic CNC lathe and the appropriate software, they could have punched in the numbers and cut me the correct screw in about five minutes. Maybe it would cost me US$10, but it would have saved me hours of shopping and driving.
(I probably could also have mail-ordered it from McMaster-Carr, although that still leaves me without a lawnmower for a few days.)
Custom automated manufacturing isn't competing economically just with mass production, even for clearly mass-producible goods like machine screws. It's competing with mass production, plus the costs of its supply-chain management and its wholesale and retail channels, plus the delays implicit in the same.
Now lets be clear, this is a horrible little heap of Chinese junk. Its about as rigid as wet toast, the gears are plastic and the motor is about as strong as a cordless drill. But it was $500 and I can pick it up and stash it under my workbench when I'm not using it. In short its not as bad as it was cheap.
The upside is that I get super powers.
I've made everything from car parts to pluming fixtures. I no longer even bother going in to the auto parts store or hardware store to be laughed at by the $7/hour flunky as they incredulously ask why I'd even want a part like the one I'm looking for. I just grab some round-stock and whip one up.
I found out after I bought it that this design as been rolling out of china for nearly 20 years under hundreds of different names. There's a giant community built up around modifying this thing (and its cousin the mini-mill) in order to get decent results.
Yea, I think yours is a more realistic view of the micro-factory concept. Screws are certainly made as cheap as they are because they use specialized equipment.
However, I'm unsure of how much tooling / material blanks your hardware store would need to have the ability to produce even a small subset of replacement parts.
It's probably going to happen more when 3D printing and similar tooling-free technologies become much more mature in there ability to make precision parts from a variety of materials. You can print a stainless nut sized / shaped object right now for about $10, but the quality isn't quite their yet - but give it time...
I'm no machinist, but I think you can cut a pretty wide variety of shapes from a simple round steel or brass bar on a lathe.
Specialized raw materials are a problem, but I have the impression that a remarkably large fraction of everyday items could be cut out of a sort of general-use steel or brass with only a marginal increase in size. There are lots of different steels and brasses (and of course a huge variety of other materials) but you don't really need them for most things.
It's actually the opposite - even a mundane part like the lug bolt you describe will go through several hardening processes, and post-processing for corrosion resistance. If not, you're asking for a huge failure on a critical part. This is an easy example - it's amazing the diversity in processes and materials needed to manufacture products from base materials.
Even in a ballpoint pen, there a good 5-10 dies needed to make the body and cartridge holder, pretty exotic processes to make the tip, a non-trivial pad-printing for color, and many other post-processing needs. Yes, we could reengineer products to not need this, but you're going to see increased costs and decreased performance - I.e. No one will buy it...
I don't think the screw that held my lawnmower wheel on went through several hardening processes. It might have been heat-treated to strengthen it, but I think typically you don't harden machine screws. Corrosion resistance, sure, it might have been galvanized or something. (But I doubt it.) The lawnmower wheel falling off as I pushed the mower did not constitute a "huge failure."
I think I adequately addressed the "increased costs and decreased performance, so no one will buy it" objection in my original comment. :)
"It's actually the opposite - even a mundane part like the lug bolt you describe will go through several hardening processes, and post-processing for corrosion resistance. If not, you're asking for a huge failure on a critical part."
That's at least party due to the different design requirements and constraints that mass-produced for-profit engineers work under. That lawnmower wheel screw was specified not purely on the engineering requirements to "hold the wheel on", but on various other important-to-the-company-designing-them-for-sale requirements, probably including things like: use the cheapest fastener that we already keep in stock that'll do the job, use a fastener that will reliably last the length of the warranty period at the lowest cost, use a fastener that's compatible with out existing automated manufacturing tools. On top of that there will have been other decisions already made like "use an existing wheel assembly" and "ensure the mowers packaged size and weight fit in with existing supply chain logistics".
Once designers are freed from existing manufacturing industry constraints, I like to hope that one day we'll download a push-mower design from somewhere like Google Sketchup, where the designers were perfectly happy to "over engineer" critical components and where the design requirements might include ideas like "should last long enough to pass on to your grandchildren", and "will still be able to be repaired at the side of the road with a flatblade screwdriver and a rock".
If you're arguing against standardization in parts - that's an uphill battle - sure once we have replicators it doesn't matter, but that's futurism.
I'm actively fighting for open source hardware and standards, but a big part of this is finding off the shelf components - look at Http://octopart.com for a good example of what this looks like.
"If you're arguing against standardization in parts"
Oh, very much not.
I'm more commenting on unnecessary overspecialisation instead.
Unnecessary for non-commercial applications anyway - I understand why Apple chooses to put difficult-to-use fasteners in their products, if for no other reason than to minimise fraudulent warrant claims, but there's a whole different set of motivations if designers are going to use the equivalent of "open source" for digitally reproducible home-fab ready "object" files.
While I think I understand the localization goals of this project, I find it interesting that the project makes use of contributors from all over the world.
Like it or not, we are a diverse global community and we all benefit from each others skills and abilities.
Food, energy, replacement parts, etc., are all good localization goals. Locomotives, aircraft, sea vessels, automobiles, farm and construction equipment, and such, are a different matter.
One of the problems with this project is that it has too many names. Open Source Ecology, Openfarmtech, the Global Village Construction Set, RepLab, Open Source Micro-Factory...
You can't ignore poor process fit - I.e. have fun using a MIG machine to weld your car together from sheet metal cheaper than GM can stamp it out. And you can't ignore raw materials - have fun casting your engine block from metal cans without any alloying tools / testing.
In reality, local production of many things (cars) won't work with today's tools, and a real mix of general purpose local shops and standardized / accessible large ones is the real "Industry 2.0" path.
* http://hackerspaces.org
Disclosure: I run CloudFab, a cloud-based manufacturing company.