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.

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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.

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Milling a V8 Motor from a Solid Block of Aluminum

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

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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.

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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."

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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."

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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."

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