More Toast

Seems there is a healthy obsession with people re putting messages on toast. See here and here for previous posts re toast with messages... The final word on it has to be this very cool design. Link

CNCed Surfboards

Surfboard manufacturers have been leading the way in using CNC for some time. Carbon Art is pictured to the right.

Another interesting surfboard and CNC mix is being advanced by Mike Sheldrake, who makes a skeleton out of cardboard cut on a CNC. Gorgeous pictures of translucent fibreglass over beautifull cardboard honeycomb. Link

Inside the Lego Factory

Automation that makes my knees go weak! Link

The Prosumer

Expanding on the previous posts that discussed Individualized Status Stories garnered from Custom Mass Manufacturing, this article introduces a new term, the Prosumer:

Coined by futurist author Alvin Toffler in his 1991 book Third Wave, the term prosumer refers to a 22- to 42-year-old consumer activist. Specifically, a prosumer is a consumer who becomes involved in the design and manufacture of products and services so they can be made to individual specification. This term reveals that consumers are no longer a passive market upon which industry can dump consumer goods, but a viable part of the creative process.
Prosumers revel in options, and want to feel they are doing the smart thing. What's smart depends on the context and the individual, but typically means being well informed, knowing what's available and checking out the opinions of others. When it comes to consumption, prosumers regard low prices as smart, unless they're trumped by better value for a higher price, where value includes elements such as customer service, design and brand.

Link

Relevant ranking: CAM software market leaders named by CIMdata

Manufacturing Business Technology - Oak Brook,IL,USA
CNC Software was the leader on the basis of industrial seats shipped, and Planit Holdings was the leader on the basis of industrial seats installed. Link

Falling US Dollar Offers Modest Rise in Business - MFG.com

Ten Links (press release) - Novato,CA,USA
... of more than 300 manufacturing processes including CNC machining, metal stamping, forging, plastic molding, metal fabrication, and metal casting. Link

C-Shirt: T-Shirts, But Way Cooler With CC

Many thanks to Steve M for pointing this very cool posting on the CC blog about a Japanese t-shirt company taking mass customization to the next level!

From the post:

First, the conventional idea: users submit t-shirt designs which can be viewed online and ordered for printing. However, the twist is that since all the designs are placed under CC, Nota provides an interface with which to edit and reproduce these designs accordingly.

Even better, the service is outfitted to work with some enabled mobile devices, so if you see a shirt you like on the street, you can scan the Quick Response (QR) code included on each design with your phone, which will capture a unique address where you can load and edit the t-shirt before getting it yourself.
Link

The Meaning Of N = 1 And R = G

An interesting post on Mass Customization from Information Week

The power of digitization and imagination is enabling this evolution of new business models. It is not about a myopic cost-based argument for outsourcing to the Far East. It's about building clarity on what N = 1 and R = G mean for my business. Managers need to build internal capabilities in their business processes through social and IT architectures to progress in this New Age of Innovation.

I followed the thread and discovered an interesting site: New Age of Innovation, I'll be reading it more in depth and reporting back.

CNC Machining Ice

CNC machining ice may not seem like it makes much sense, because the stuff melts... But consider that flowers wilt, and we buy them for a whole host of reasons. Ice carving is a growing industry, and automation is helping build it. Disclaimer; the company I work for builds "Ice Bulldogs", a CNC router for carving ice sculptures.

Link to video
Link to photos of carved ice
Link to Companies that carve ice; Ice Culture, Frozen Memories, The Party Concierge, Golden Chefs

Chinese firms bargain hunting in U.S.

I'm building my case bit by bit; in Spring for Manufacturing in North America I posted an article that talked about how dimishing costs (lowering dollar, tax incentives, lots of spare infrastructure) in the US would bring back manufacturing. This post is more evidence for the brief.

Liu spent about $500,000 for seven acres in Spartanburg -- less than one-fourth what it would cost to buy the same amount of land in Dongguan, a city in southeast China where he runs three plants. U.S. electricity rates are about 75% lower, and in South Carolina, Liu doesn't have to put up with frequent blackouts.

Access to US markets, lower transportation costs, better educated workforce, better infrastructure (power, roads), better protection for investments (a stronger legal system), paired with costs in China that keep going up. All of these factors coupled with advances in CNC technology that level the "cheap labour cost" playing field (ie if your employee is 10x more productive than a counterpart in China, you can pay him/her 10x as much and still have a level playing field). Link

Printcrime

I'm a big fan of Cory Doctorow's work, one of his short stories is called "Printcrime" and it's about a future in which desktop 3D printers are illegal.

The coppers smashed my father’s printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da’s look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.

With real 3D printers dropping in price drastically it's only a matter of time before we all have one. Desktop Factory sells one for $5000, about what high-end laser printers went for four or five years ago and now sell for $1000 (about my buy in point unless I had a business reason). Several companies already offer "3D print on demand"; you send them your CAD file, they send you back your object in the mail. Gamers are signing up in droves to get their personlized online game figurines 3D printed at FigurePrints. This technology brings a personal factory into every home. What's over the horizon? 3D printing metal objects, which currently requires expensive lasers to "Selective Laser Sinter" parts. Another ten years will see that process drop to the same price levels...

Palo Alto and Mass Customization

Exciting times when the famed minds over at Xerox's Palo Alto start applying themselves to Mass Customization.

Xerox itself has had more than 55,000 patents in its history and still gets 10 a day, said Sophie Vandebroek, Xerox’s chief technolog officer. But the research isn’t scattered. It zeroes in on environmental technology, mass customization, and smart documents. Xerox invests $1.5 billion a year in R&D and it has more than 800 researchers. Over the last three decades, PARC’s technology has spawned 40 spin-offs.

Link

Mar's and "Made to Order" Candy

An interesting article regarding a product as mass produced as they get, candy, going custom, and offering customers the "Status Story" mentioned in the previous post.

We visited the M&M’S production facility in Hackettstown, N.J., where manufacturing follows the divergent paths of old and new. On the one hand is the continued commitment to the dedicated mass-production lines that have served Mars and its powerhouse stable of brands for decades. On the other is a newfound excitement about extremely short-run, rapid-changeover production of personalized, made-to-order “special occasion” products.

Link

A shift from mass branding to individual stories

Here's a facinating post from cooltownstudios.com regarding a shift from a brand conferring status on a consumer to "status stories" becoming more and more important.

Thus, as national brands are increasingly unable to tell a one-size-fits-all story to the masses, it is then up to the customer to tell those stories to sell that brand... Trendwatching.com calls these personal accounts status stories.

This idea has been around for some time regarding such things as vacations (exclusive destinations, adventure travel, unique destinations), but more and more products themselves will need to convey stories. The implications for manufacturers are vast. The traditional product life cycle will lose importance as a whole range of products will be small-run, individualized products, made by nimble manufacturers with a wide range of capabilities who are able to quickly and easily fabricate designs from napkin sketches to CAD models.

The infrastructure behind these abilities is here, it's cheaper and easier to run than ever before; $15,000 gets you an easy to run cabinet laser and you can fabricate just about anything over at Ponoko.com.

From Trendwatching.com

Interesting side effect: consumers moving away from familiar, trusted mass brands may soon find themselves truly addicted to everything niche. Consider this statement by the ever-inspiring Chris Anderson: “We equate mass market with quality and demand, when in fact it often just represents familiarity, savvy advertising and broad if somewhat shallow appeal. What do we really want? We're only just discovering, but it clearly starts with more.”

Link to cooltownstudios.com
Link to trendwatching.com page on status stories.

Ponoko

Continuing on the previous post re Custom Mass Manufacturing, I present Ponoko. This company has embraced distributed design as well as distributed manufacturing. This is Cottage Industry meets CNC which then meets the Internet.
From Technology Review published by MIT, Michael Gibson writes

"To be fair," Piller adds, "the offering Ponoko provides has been around for many years in the form of small workshops. But those came at the high cost of placing an order, negotiating a price, and also processing the order. At Ponoko, the system is much more stabilized."

For most companies, product design and development is a long process of trial and error, involving, among other things, in-house designers, committees, timed product releases, and, ultimately, customer feedback. Until a product sells, or if it doesn't sell, it takes up costly shelf space in either stores or warehouses.

But by letting individuals dream up, make, and then sell unique products on demand, Ponoko is attempting to eliminate the product-development wing. Ultimately, it hopes to eliminate the need for a centralized manufacturing plant as well, by recruiting a large enough community of digital manufacturers--people scattered around the world who have 3-D printers, CNC routers, and laser cutters. Link

Ponoko is almost the company I dream of starting, all it misses is a parametric element, meaning the ability to re-size products dynamically, or change materials dynamically, and have prices change in lock step.

Custom Mass Manufacturing

We collectively have the impression that there are two kinds of products; "mass-produced", and "custom produced". With advances in CNC (bringing their cost down, and their ease of use up) a whole host of Custom Mass Manufactured products are becoming available as more and more companies build business models around Custom Mass Manufacturing. I'll profile more of them in this space as time goes by.

These are products that are chosen from a virtual catalog, then ordered with custom specifications (within parameters), made just-in-time with CNC equipment and shipped very quickly to the end customer. Greater still is this idea coupled with the ability to submit one's own product designs, and have them manufactured for the same costs as mass manufactured versions. A great example is online t-shirt companies like Wordans. This business model will gradually push outwards to encompass more of what we buy, from tables to toys, from clothing to shoes, from eye glasses to jewelry, from carpet designs to wall paper.

The following article defames the word "manufacturing" a bit, it assigns it all the properties of mass-manufacturing, but it does talk at length about the concept of efficient small-run fabrication.

If anything, we’re talking about a kind of materialization of ideas. Slick connections between ... your imagination, a circuit board and a 3D printer. It’s artful for its scale and personalization. Small-scale, passionate, individual ideas made material.

What we are talking about are emerging “materialization” - not manufacturing - processes. What makes it worth talking about is that it is the power of creation that manufacturing is able to achieve, but done at an entirely different scale - quicker, cheaper, individually, with fewer intermediaries and fewer incumberances.

Link

CNC Lathe Making a Chess Pawn

A milled chess set! Bada bing.

Low US Dollar Helping Manufacturers

This executive spins some positives out of how a low US dollar is helping US manufacturers rebuild after years of decline. The flip side of this is Canadian manufacturers, who have done well until recently selling to the US with a weak Canadian dollar. Now at par with the US greenback, they'd all love to have it back at 70 or 80 cents.

Sandy Cutler, the diversified manufacturer's chief executive and chairman, also said the dollar's weakness was a boon to the U.S. economy, boosting exports and more than offsetting the negative effects of the housing downturn.
He said high oil prices, while inflationary, were also "causing a massive expansion and investment in both oil and gas and alternative energy" that was further boosting the business of U.S. manufacturers like Eaton.

Link

Milling a V8 Motor from a Solid Block of Aluminum

This mesmerizing video really gets dancing at around 6:40min.
Link

More Fancy Toast

Following on a previous post...

Haas Automation Logs Another Record Year with 10% growth in production

More evidence that CNC is penetrating deeper into all corners of the manufacturing industry as its costs come down, as the software gets better, as a critical mass of CNC operators has emerged, as the business case for it gets easier and easier to rationalize.

Haas Automation, Inc., of Oxnard, California, reports that 2007 was the most productive year in the company's history, with CNC machine tool production exceeding 13,755 units – up 10 percent over 2006 – and a 19-percent increase in revenues to more than $880 million. The 2007 numbers – which exceeded previous records set in 2006 – reinforce Haas Automation's position as the world's leading CNC machine tool builder.

Link

Using CNC to Teach Math

I love outside the box thinking. A High School math teacher got together with the shop class and now teaches math via CNC CAD/CAM concepts.

Jonathan Schwartz has found a way to turn math concepts into real problems. ... “I have always loved math, but the biggest disconnect is the application of math skills,” he said. ... Schwartz proposed having the students design projects on computers with AutoCAD in one room and then build them in the refurbished woodshop next door. ... “With the help of a much appreciated grant, we were able to afford a new CNC router for the woodshop as well as the Mastercam software that it came with,” explained Emmanuel Orozco, a senior who first took the class last year.

Link

Printing Out Buildings

Using CNC to chop out 2.5m x 7m "slices" (that's 8.2' x 23') that stack up and serve as the structural system.

"Roche turned to a large-scale CNC facility run by the company Ducret-Orges, near Lausanne. Here, he found a five-axis machine originally developed to create components to restore the region’s medieval buildings. With a working area measuring 40 meters long and 5 meters wide, the machine could fabricate not just a model of the building, or small parts of it, but full-scale structural slices."

Link

Fancy Pancy Toast

The guys over at Evil Mad Scientist have wowed me in the past with their Rapid Prototype machine that uses ordinary sugar. Now they're branching into fancy toast, I see adds on toast at your local breakfast spot soon.

"We've now mounted the hot air gun to a computer-controlled X-Y control system so that we can use it to print arbitrary images on toast."

Link

Spring for Manufacturing in North America

Barrie McKenna from the Globe and Mail's Report on Business makes a case for the US economy that often gets forgotten in the mess of doom and gloom reporting;

"Amid the financial gyrations of the past few weeks, it's comforting to know that the foundation of the next growth phase is already being laid. And it could come from the most unlikely of places: the dirty business of manufacturing, and trade.

You can thank the remarkable resilience of the American economy, the largest, most diverse and open economy on the planet.

It isn't easy to keep the United States down for long. The same, often reckless, dynamism that causes this country to repetitively binge — on real estate, technology stocks or some other bauble du jour — is precisely what will pull the economy out the other side.

It's far too early to write an obituary for the U.S. economy.

Just remember: This isn't Japan, which suffered three recessions during its "lost decade" of the 1990s."

Link