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MakerBot Industries Brings Manufacturing Back To Brooklyn
pacopico writes "A few decades ago, Brooklyn was filled with manufacturing companies. Today? Er, not so much. It's mostly restaurants and condos. That is, except for MakerBot Industries, which is assembling 3D printers for consumers by hand at a real, live factory. Businessweek profiled the MakerBot founder Bre Pettis and his goal of revitalizing manufacturing in New York, describing him as a weird 'throwback who lives in the future.'"
robots with brooklyn accents. ;-)
Lots of people are already doing this at least in part RepRap is capable of replicating about 50% of its own parts
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
"condos and restaurants...Except for MakerBot Industries"
Nope...you know, aside from three operating breweries, and hundreds of machine shops that dot my neighborhood. Or the medical instruments manufacturers, or the concrete and cement factories, or the furniture companies...
Just because it's not electronics, doesn't mean there's no manufacturing. A simple google search shows at least hundreds of companies.
PS - you must not go outside the gentrified parts of Brooklyn because the majority of the borough is still non-condo and sparsely restauranted.
"Already 13 lawsuits have been filed to block expansion of the factory until environmental studies are published, 7 politicians are trying to get elected slamming the company because '3D printers cost jobs from normal manufacturing', and the city has upped the abandoned building's taxes from $200 a year to $27,000,000 a year."
"Corporate officials could not be contacted in time for this story since they are currently in China."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
There was an interesting documentary on BBC the other night.
It was about a cushion manufacturer who was finding making things in China too expensive and was trying to bring back manufacturing to the UK.
I would guess that other smaller scale business who have moved their manuafcturing overseas (esp to China) might well be finding the same problem. Also, the Chinese workers are typically employed on a 1year contract. Every Feb they all go walkabout and get new jobs.
One chinese worker in the documentary wanted a 50% raise or she would leave.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
I know at least one (large, multinational, sorta-conglomerate) company that makes more money manufacturing things in the U.S. that overseas. The things in question include great big cast-iron valves for refineries, with little bitty electronic sensors and steppers. The insides and valve seats are automatically ground to tight specs, the electronics are added on an automated line, and lift truck carry them around. The humans are qa inspectors, set-up guys and the lowest-skilled job is the lift-truck driver. Shipping costs are high (these things weigh a lot!) so it makes sense to do as much as possible in America, on the same continent as the customers.
That also applies to major appliances, power tools, electrical distribution panes, air conditioners and a whole wodge of other things.
Manufacturing is back! (and I buy their power tools for the cottage)
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
thanks to manufacturing from 100 years ago. Whole Foods and jetBlue are just two of the businesses that have had delays in building because almost every site is contaminated with toxic waste
Cubify makes a damn good profit on their "cartridges", which seem to cost atleast twice at much as normal PLA filament used in 3D printers.
Also, the 1.8k price doesn't come from raw materials. Less then half of that is material/production costs. The rest is for everything else, "overhead" like paying people for support, keeping stock, sending out replacement parts for DOA bits. "Mass producing" electronics would cut only $50-100 of the price.
Replacing all the quality parts with cheap plastic bits, and have a 100% markup on printer filament, that's how you can cut the price. For normal printers, take a look at the HP-Deskjet line, which are build to last as long as a single cartridge.
Note, I have an Ultimaker, which is another semi-open source 3D printer, I know the people behind Ultimaker. They are great people and stand behind the whole open idea. IMHO it's a better printer then MakerBot is currently selling, but I am biased.
stop saying throwback. throwback is a marketing term coined by cola companies and snack food conglomerates to gin up their respective markets and attract new customers to the same unhealthy vapid product theyve sold for 50 years. you can use big boy words like "homage" and no one will think the lesser of you on slashdot
second, until makerbots start employing millions of people in well paid, safe factory conditions with competitive pay and honest retirement options, theres absolutely zero equivalent measure between a CnC factory that gets a building permit and a tax break from the city of brooklyn and the 1960's manufacturing explosion that dominated the northeast and ushered in american prosperity for hundreds of millions of people.
makerbot is cool technology in its own right, but to even mention it in the same context as the industrial era that spawned an entire middle class america is almost an insult.
Good people go to bed earlier.
In the long term, jobs are not what's needed. Jobs don't create value, production does. Eventually there will only be a handful of jobs needed to support the whole human race, as automation will have taken over almost every job. What's needed is for production to increase enough and to become cheap enough that everyone can get what they need (and a chunk of what they want) for free. That will require some major changes in thinking, as people with a lust for power tend to take control and then hoard both power and wealth even if there's more than enough to go around.
"3D printing techniques that can do metal, such as laser sintering"
Can we please stop lending credence to "3d printing" by associating it with legitimate, decades-old manufacturing processes? If it's called laser sintering, CALL IT LASER SINTERING. IT'S NOT 3D PRINTING.
Laser 3D sintering printing. Gotcha.